Loan of child, without grub 0s. 9d.
Two ditto 1s. 2d.
Ditto, with grub and Godfreys Cordial 1s. 9d.
If out after twelve at night for each child, extra 0s. 2d.
For a school of children, say half a dozen 2s. 6d.
Loan of any garment, per day 0s. 6d.
Going as a pal to vindicate any statement 1s. 0d.
Extortion stories, tales of self-mutilation and child-hiring, serial dramas of beggars hiding vast quantities of money, growing rich and sailing for Jamaica; some running gangs, stashing hundreds, and throwing colossal, gin-sodden orgies for all their begging pals and their molls: it was all part of the smoggy legend of Victorian London. And that smog, long-since vanished from other quarters, has never quite unfurled from around the ankles of the British beggar.
I sat on a bleached-out walkway near London Bridge, staring into a gigantic billboard: ‘Pepsi Max: Max the Taste, Axe the Sugar’. The concrete walkway sloped down from a modern block of offices labelled Colechurch House. It was the middle of the morning, cold, with hardly anyone around. I sat cross-legged with a torn piece of cardboard in front of me covered with loose change. Passers-by caught sight of me as they came round the bend; most would cross over to the other side of the slope, aiming to give me a wide berth. After an hour or so of being avoided, an elderly man came near. When I asked him if he had any spare change he fixed me with a look of boiling contempt. Almost everything he had on was tan-coloured. His shoes, his jacket, his scarf – all tan. He came right up to me. ‘You should do something about this,’ he said, digging a hand into trousers that were slightly darker than the rest. He pulled out three coins, tutted, and threw them on the card. ‘Sitting there!’ he muttered as he walked away, ‘Sitting there like that!’
The tan man’s 42p was what I made all morning. I was, by that time, stiff with sitting, so I walked over London Bridge, stopping here and there to look into the river. It was choppy, the air was choppy, with sirens and horns going off everywhere. I was about to start begging when I noticed a guy sitting on the other side. He looked over: this was clearly his pitch. It turned out that he was seventeen, from Leeds, and had begged around town every other day for a month. Today was bad, he was saying, only 60p the whole morning. When I said 42p, he laughed. He’d come to London looking for family he’d never seen and now couldn’t find. He was a bag of nerves; and wearing a T-shirt without a jacket, clearly very cold: he’d left some clothes with someone somewhere and, he insisted, would get them soon.
I walked into the City and begged through lunch-time outside a building on the corner of Cannon Street and Friday Street, in the shadow of St Paul’s. A lot of suits went past, a lot of bad looks, seemingly hundreds of them, perhaps thousands of shoes, all clicking, all nipping off somewhere. None of them gave. Tourist buses kept stopping at the lights across from me. I felt their eyes. I laughed, imagining the guy in the bus with the microphone, the tour operator, pointing to Sir Christopher Wren’s construction, on the left, and on the right, pointing to me, Baroness Thatcher’s. I felt edgy at that corner, though; it was too open; I was getting a lot of looks and the City is notoriously tight with beggars, indeed with everyone. I pulled my hood up and waited. It came at about 2.40. A lone policeman carrying a raincoat.
‘Are you begging, sir?’ he asked.
‘No, just looking,’ I said, pulling the zip up further.
‘I must ask you to move on … on you go, go on.’ I went back across the bridge, noticing that the guy from Leeds had moved on too, though he’d left his cardboard behind.
There are around thirty-five drop-in centres for the homeless in London. Mostly run by volunteers, they each have their own target groups and range of facilities. They aim to serve not only those living on the streets (not all beggars are homeless, just as not all homeless are beggars) but those living in unstable, temporary accommodation such as night shelters, hostels and DSS-funded bed-and-breakfast places. Almost every beggar you speak to has just come from or is just on his way to one of these places. Day centres, soup runs and night shelters give some structure to the average vagrant’s day: a simple version of the structure (morning mail, breakfast, car, office, phone, lunch, shopping, dinner, date, telly, bed) those with possessions take for granted, even on days when nothing’s going on.
Over the 11 years of its existence, The Passage, a day centre for over twenty-fives in Carlisle Place, near Victoria, has provided hundreds of (mainly) vagrant men – many with alcohol or mental health problems – with access to food, toilets, showers, washing tubs and driers. Other in-house services include specialist advice on DSS and housing matters as well as the offer of help from detox and drug rehabilitation projects. The London Connection in Westminster tries to attract young people aged between sixteen and twenty-six; it has television, a pool table, provides free razors and cheap lunches. The Kaleidoscope Project in Kingston upon Thames aims to serve heroin users in need of treatment. They house a medical team who run a methadone programme and needle exchange. A few of the existing drop-in centres grew out of Victorian soup kitchens or Christian missions of the 1930s, but most sprang up in the 1980s to meet a sudden need.
I stood for a bit outside the Southwark drop-in centre in Paradise Street. There were Christian posters on Day-Glo paper behind the windows, behind wire. It looked like the youth clubs I remembered from Ayrshire, like free-standing public toilets or an old-style dole office stranded at the end of a street full of small houses. It was one of the poorer centres: really just a charity hall run by a few people who believed in God. It wasn’t full of driers and free condoms like some of the others. I walked in, returning the nods of some men playing dominoes at a folding table by the door. A man with red hair beckoned me over to a table in the corner, behind which he stood fixing sandwiches and sorting mugs. A giant tea urn sat on the table, drips falling rapidly from the nozzle. A bucket on the floor caught them as they dropped; the milk had been added in the urn and there was about three inches of milky – almost white – tea quivering in the bucket. I took a mug and sat down.
The sandwich-maker came over and started telling me about the mission, how it was used by a lot of unemployed people just looking for somewhere to sit down. They do two meals a week, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, just simple things. The tea was as sweet as it was white. While we talked, a guy over by the window – a skinhead wearing a hooded sweater, with a bangle on his wrist – kept looking up as if he wanted to come into the conversation. I asked the boss if they say prayers. ‘There are services,’ he said, ‘but only for those who want it.’ Then the skinhead got up. ‘You from Glasgow?’ he asked, with a Glaswegian accent. ‘I thought that as soon as I heard you talking.’ He sat across from me and went on about how he used to live on the street. Homeless, but not a beggar, he insisted: ‘No, I could never hack that. If you’re hungry later, there’s this place in New Cross that gives out dinners, sandwiches and that, from the stuff the supermarkets don’t sell. I still go up there myself sometimes, sling a few in a carrier bag, you know, does me a couple of days.’
He’d been resettled, as they say, out of Spur House, an all-male DSS hostel in Lewisham. He’d been there six months when he was given a local-authority flat. He said it was great at Spur, ‘brilliant … a magic laugh … bevvying, smoking hash and fucking about. It was a party.’ I asked him what it was like having his own place. ‘Shite,’ he said, ‘the rent’s only two quid a week, cause I’m on the broo, but I don’t even pay that. To me it’s just a squat. It’s a right fuckin’ dump.’ He tells me to go to Spur House: ‘You’ll get in there, no sweat.’ The boss goes back to tend the sandwiches and the dripping urn.
On my way out I stopped to talk to a guy with a radio held to his ear; there was shouting and booing coming out of it. He asked for a cigarette, placing the radio on the step. We squatted down.
‘Some mess,’ he said. The booing had crackled into a report: ‘Leaders of the main political parties joined forces today in denouncing
last night’s victory’ – it was the day after the Isle of Dogs council election – ‘Derek Beackon of the BNP won the seat, opponents say, by appealing to outrage among the local white community over the allocation of council … Dr George Carey, the Archbish …’ The owner of the radio was shaking his head, twisting the aerial. ‘This’ll be the start of it,’ he said. ‘They’ll all be at each other’s throats.’ We sat smoking, listening to the reaction of the Archbishop and the news of how Home Secretary Michael Howard deplores the event.
The tube to Victoria cost more than double what I had made all day. There was a girl at the top of the stairs when I got there. The place was packed: it was a good spot. After talking to me warily a while, she told me she’d made a tenner begging over the last three hours. She looked very pale. From Bradford, she’d come to London with nothing but a pair of tights, some knickers, and a couple of CDs in a polythene bag that she hoped to sell. She was pregnant to a guy she hated; her parents hated her and she them. She was five months gone. ‘I’ve been here five weeks and still no dole money,’ she said. Sleeping in a B&B in Holborn – rent paid by the DSS – she had to be out by 9.30 in the morning. She had started begging ‘to pass the time’.
Victoria is full of police; blue shirts flitting past on every side. I stood with a group of dossers outside the station, at a bus-stop across from the theatre where the musical Starlight Express plays. The group was constantly separating and coming together, splitting and gathering, like a flock of pigeons, each man going off to beg and returning, moments later, with nothing in the expression to indicate success or failure. We sat on a low wall, two cans of Special Brew circulating. Some kept hold of their own; drinking, as it were, privately. One of them – younger than the rest – was drunk and agitated and kept spinning around and hassling passers-by in a loud voice. A couple of coppers walked up to him. They began to argue. As it hotted up, the others got up off the wall, pointing and shouting. I stepped around them, at this point, switching on the tape recorder in my pocket. ‘Don’t start all that,’ says one of the cops to the jumpy one, who’s trying to pull away from his grasp.
‘I’ve been here longer than you, mate, I live around here. Piss off.’
They got on either side of him and pushed him towards a police van parked outside the station. They then came back, moving quickly through the group, prodding and shouting. ‘Beat it. Move on. Get.’ A very fat woman, her face painfully red and bloated with drink, sat on the ground beside the wall, bawling. She’d no socks or shoes on and the soles of her feet were filthy. She held on to a can of lager, crying her head off, while everyone around her dispersed. One of the cops flicked her arm, trying to get her attention. ‘On your feet, on your feet,’ he tells her over and over again. Her face stays crumpled and red, she’s gripping the can, she doesn’t move.
I walked towards Vincent’s Square, speaking, on the way, to a girl at the corner, selling copies of the Big Issue. She’d sold twenty copies all day; it was late afternoon. ‘Everybody’s in such a big rush, you know. I haven’t had any lunch,’ she said. In London for four months, she’d come from Canada and just couldn’t get back. ‘I’m here now,’ she said, ‘and I’ve been trying to get a regular job. Sometimes I sleep in a hostel and other times I just crash down somewhere or with people I meet. I don’t do very well. Some of them selling this are, like, experienced hustlers but I’m not that good.’
Round the corner, on a door of Westminster Cathedral, someone had put up a poster warning people not to give to beggars: ‘If you want to give, please donate to a recognised charity.’ A security guard had been taken on to keep beggars away. I folded my jacket over my arm, flattened down my hair and walked in. The smell of incense and candle wax hit me immediately, making me feel sick. I could hear the sound of a communion bell, a bell I used to ring myself, coming from an altar at the far end of the church. I almost swooned. I swiped a copy of the Catholic Herald and made back for the door; I dipped my hand in the holy-water font and looked out at the square. A man was lying, full-stretch, beside a bench where a number of drinkers had gathered. I stepped out with the stolen paper and unfolded it in the square, glad to have stolen something and vaguely wondering if there would be a queue for the confessionals. On the front page there was an article headlined ‘Cardinal Attacks Western Values’. It was a report on Cardinal Hume’s address to a Prague symposium entitled ‘Living the Gospel in Liberty and Solidarity’. The Cardinal warned against ‘the consumer culture’ of Europe and suggested that ‘the key tasks facing the Church are the need for economic justice, the moral imperative to help migrants and refugees, and the importance of combating nationalist pressures.’ I dried the remaining moisture in my fingers by mussing up my hair.
*
Laurie McGlone lay in a doorway in Victoria Street, next to Oddbins off-licence. His face was coarse as sack-cloth and his eyes were puffy and wet, blinking eagerly over the passing crowds like a pair of old salmon struggling to shoot the rapids. The bristles on his face were grey and around his hairline ran an angry red rash. He spoke with a strong but soft Irish accent: ‘I make very, very little money, just enough for a …’ He nods to Oddbins. ‘How long have you been from Scotland, then … all your life you say, all your life. Well it’s a wild, wild life.’ I asked him if they gave him dole money.
If I puts roots down, but I don’t, you see, I just keep going from place to place. I’ve been on the trawlers now, I’ve been in Iceland, and in Germany, all over the fuckin’ world. I’m very, very bad. I just drift from place to place. You see, I’ve got a drink problem, and sometimes I get nothing for a drink. Now, I’ve worked with Gypsies and everything … One day a tall, a very tall man comes walking down here – down Victoria Street there – and hit me right on the head with an umbrella. He got me right here, cut me, and called me a bastard, a lazy-fuckin’-bastard-cunt. This is a dangerous, dangerous job.
He had tattoos all the way up his arm which he’d got, he said, in Trieste in 1946.
I worked with me brother, we worked with horses. We ran them and we took bets. I did that, and then I drank. A wee girl in The Passage, from Roscommon, she said if I wanted to get off the drink she’d put me in a place, a house in Clapham for drinkers. If I came back tomorrow she’d help me. She was talking to me just like you’re talking to me now. What did I do? I met a guy from Liverpool round the back of the church, the cathedral there, and he gave me a couple of cans. So I was fucked, I couldn’t go to her.
Two women came past wearing fancy hats like they were going to a wedding. Laurie grinned: ‘Which one’s yours?’ We laughed.
‘Where will you sleep tonight?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t care less, Jock. I really couldn’t care less.’
Begging is a criminal offence in Britain. Ears are no longer cut off for it: the usual penalty is a £50 fine or three days’ imprisonment. In the Charing Cross area of London, between January and June this year, 708 people were arrested for suspected begging offences. Over the same period last year, 487 were arrested. Of those arrested this year, 205 were charged and 477 were let off with a caution. In 1991 there was an energetic campaign, known as Operation Taurus, to rid the area of beggars. PC Brent Hyatt, a member of the Homeless Unit based at Charing Cross police station, seems pretty certain that the younger beggars, at least, often live on the street by choice; that arresting beggars stops them from reoffending,
A beggar I met in Leicester Square told of being arrested three times. Twice he’d been fined. Each time, he said, he had spent a few days begging in order to make up the fine. In one month this year (May) the number of begging arrests tripled. The protestations of those who oppose begging, those – including many churches, newspapers and charity organisations – who believe it has nothing to do with poverty and the ways of the economy, have had an extremely significant effect on the public perception of begging as a criminal activity. Most of those arrested in Charing Cross were between seventeen and twenty-nine. Many more under-sixteens are arrested than
over-sixties. A majority of the younger ones, say the police, have come from ‘a bad background’: from borstals, split families, ‘abuse situations’ or some form of council care. On arrest, this year, the largest proportion of beggars (210) in the Charing Cross area had between £1 and £5 on them; 160 carried between £10 and £50; 130 had between £5 and £10; 95 had less than 99p; and only ten had more than £50. In other words, a substantial majority had less than £10 to their name.
A man with an acoustic guitar kept climbing on top of the parapet on Westminster Bridge the morning I went down there to beg. As l walked up, I could hear him strumming and singing the Stones song ‘Start Me Up’. He strummed on as a pleasure-boat, the Chevering, passed underneath him, going downriver. The people on the boat looked up, many through their cameras. The high-wire guitarist was coloured red; he looked like a well-weathered Highlander or someone who’d just finished buzzing a bag of glue. He looked mad and indignant. I closed in just as two coppers did the same. ‘It’s beautiful, the water,’ he said to one of the cops, while shaking his head, refusing to hand over the guitar or be helped down. Someone took a picture as the police brought him down and booked him.
I stood at the opposite end of the bridge, beside St Thomas’s Hospital, asking for money. Almost right away, even before the crowd had fully dispersed from around the minstrel-jumper, a man in a red anorak gave me £1.20. He stuck his hand in his pocket, laughed as he handed the coins over; sniggered, shuffled and whispered ‘good luck’. I tried the technique of walking up to people and moving along with them, asking on the trot. They seemed to hate that, to be more than usually offended. I made another 70p before the clock struck one, then I headed off towards Waterloo.
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