Sentence:  ‘Children crawled over each other like little grey <WSD>worms</WSD> in the gutters,' he said. ‘The only red things about them were their buttocks and they were raw. Their faces looked as if snails had slimed on them and their mothers were like great sick beasts whose byres had never been cleared. […]' 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A generally tubular invertebrate of the annelid phylum; an earthworm.