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some Bohemians, the distinction between borrowing and downright dishonesty became blurred.Cheques were bounced, shops lifted, hotel bills left unpaid by fleeing guests.Constantine Fitzgibbon expended considerable ingenuity in cheating the gas company.He inserted twenty-five centime pieces into the meter, which worked if you gave it a sharp tap at the same time.He also discovered to his joy that if he placed a sixpence on the railway line which ran a few hundred yards from his tumbledown cottage near Buntingford, the train would squash it to the size of a shilling, and the gas meter would not differentiate.
    There were those who took the view that possessions were bad, so it was all right to take them off people.Philip O’Connor broke open his sister’s gas meter and went off with the proceeds without any compunction.In the thirties, the critic Geoffrey Grigson and his wife took pity on the indigent Fitzrovian poet Ruthven Todd, ‘an unhealthy-looking grey oddity’.Grigson had often wondered how this Bohemian kept alive – he seemed to have no visible means of support.Eventually he fathomed that Ruthven supported himself by stealing.
    [He was] a thief, an innocent, honest literary thief.He wouldn’t have picked your pocket or burgled.Books and manuscripts were his game, not from shops, but from friends or those who befriended him.
    Unaware, the Grigsons let Ruthven a room in their house for ten shillings a week in the belief that a job he then had reviewing books would cover this paltry sum.
    One day Grigson was chatting to a bookseller acquaintance in his shop off the Charing Cross Road.The bookseller mentioned that he had bought for ten shillings a batch of second-hand books, one of which happened to contain a letter to Grigson.A few weeks later, the bookseller pointed out another strangely familiar batch of books which he had bought from thesame seller.It was Ruthven Todd.Grigson paid ten shillings and bought them back.This arrangement persisted for some time; Todd filching his landlord’s books from the top shelf where he was least likely to notice their absence, selling them and paying his rent back out of the proceeds; Grigson then retrieving his possessions for payment of the same sum.
    We never taxed the Innocent Thief with his theft, this generous creature who seldom came to see us without some present, paid for God knows how, for the children.
    Thus by shifts and expedients and the generosity of friends the Bohemian ekes out a dependent survival; Grigson’s patient collusion in what the bourgeois world would undoubtedly see as a reprehensible offence, his warm-hearted appreciation of Ruthven’s essential honesty and niceness, leaves one feeling the world to be a better place.
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    One of the most noticeable and cheering things of all as one delves into accounts of Bohemia is the ready assumption among the better-off that if you had money you were honour-bound to help those who had none.And even if you had no money at all – like Dylan and Caitlin Thomas – you despised bourgeois tight-fistedness:
    Avarice, meanness, stinginess were the worst of all crimes for us… We ourselves were never mean.We bought drinks liberally round the house, on tick… It is easy not to be mean when there is nothing in the kitty to be mean with.The more that is in the kitty, the more difficult it is, apparently, not to be mean.
    It was of course an attitude that reduced them speedily to a state of utter dependency.
    Friends’ open-handedness must have saved many an impoverished artist from despair.Take Augustus John; it was he who spotted Kathleen Hale’s talent and gave her the post as his secretary, at two pounds a week, so that she could give up scratching a living doing odd jobs and find more time for her own work.Or take Maynard Keynes, who tactfully subsidised two of his best friends, both in money difficulties, the painter Duncan Grant and the writer David Garnett.Keynes insisted that a deed of covenant made out to Grant