“I seemed to meet no one in Caliz except the blind and the crippled, the diseased, the deaf and dumb, whose condition was so helpless they scarcely bothered to complain but treated it all as a twisted joke. They told me tittering tales of others even more wretched than themselves - the homeless who lived in the Arab drains, who lay down at night among rats and excrement and were washed out to sea twice a year by the floods. They told me of families who scraped the tavern floors for shellfish and took it home to boil for soup, and of others who lived by trapping cats and dogs and roasting on fires of driftwood. They even took me one night to a tenement near the cathedral and pointed out a howling man on the rooftop, who was pretending to be a ghost in order to terrorise the landlord and thereby reduce the rent’.” - from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
See original: "I seemed to meet no one in Caliz except the blind and the crippled, the diseased, the deaf and dumb,..."
