I got 20p off a couple holding hands on a bench down the South Bank. They sat near a slab of grey paving onto which were engraved Wordsworth’s lines about the Thames:
O Glide, fair stream, forever so.
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,
Till all our minds forever flow
As thy deep waters now are flowing.
Further on, along the side of the Royal Festival Hall, I was moved on; not by the police this time, but by a burly beggar twice my size who owned the pitch, or so he said. I sat down on one of the concrete connecting paths on the way to Waterloo underground station and put a handkerchief on the ground covered with coppers. People passed by. I pulled my hood up and leaned back against the wall. Battalions of suits became like one suit – the skin of an armoured multipede slithering past. I tried to imagine the levels of anxiety involved in having to beg like this almost every day. The handkerchief, for the longest hour, remained undisturbed. Then I got two pound coins in quick succession.
St Martin-in-the-Fields day centre, at Trafalgar Square, was due to open at 6.30 the evening I went. I arrived there just after five and already there were two dozen people waiting around outside. An elderly man in a grey coat, with white hair and beard and no teeth, argued furiously with a stocky woman in front of the church. They pushed each other and swore like mad, each of them looking like they were just about to start throwing punches. Beside me was a teenage guy with a pony-tail, his head pulled down so his chin touched his chest; his arms were inside his jacket, the sleeves hanging baggy and empty. Eventually he tapped me for a cigarette. The waiting crowd continued to swell; old ladies wearing numerous coats stood beside women less than a third their age. A boy dropped a puppy and the stocky woman got angry again, saying he wasn’t taking good enough care of it. The centre was in the church crypt and by now there was a fat queue of people all the way down to the door.
They opened up at twenty past six. The crowd burst through, some chatting in groups, others very much by themselves. Once inside, we took our places on plastic seats lining the walls of a long corridor with a concrete floor. There was something about that subterranean corridor that made it seem very familiar, as if I’d been there many times before, with the same sort of crowd, not in life but in novels – novels written eighty or ninety years ago. I wondered about the modern journey that brought these people here; the rites of passage from the world of carpets, central heating and pedal bins – of families and furniture and everything-you-know – to the familiarity of this damp, Victorian chamber filled with ugliness and dismay and unknowable sadness.
A volunteer came round with cloakroom tickets, talking briskly with those he recognised. He started down the other end with the first ticket. I was number 76. We stood up and formed a queue down the middle of the corridor. The air was filled with the noises of scraping chair legs and shouting voices. I got to the door, handed over my ticket and gave my name as requested. Once inside, we were offered mugs of tea and a couple of biscuits: quick sugar for those who needed it. When I walked into the main room the first thing I noticed was how the place stank of piss. It was a cavernous space filled with rows of burst armchairs, most of which had people in them, eating soup or steak pie with boiled carrots. A few of them sat on a table at the back, shouting to an old geezer at the front to turn the telly over. Some were shouting for football and others for a Harrison Ford movie. The telly gave out most of the light in the room.
In the toilet, a blethering Mancunian with no socks tried to wash his feet in the sink next to me as I shaved with a razor and soap given to me by the ticket collector at the door. Other people had showers and some tried to wash out some clothes. I asked one of the volunteers if he knew of a place I could get into for the night. He told me to go up St Martin’s Lane, down a certain alley, and to knock on the only blue door. I stepped out of the crypt, passing a dozen or so people on the steps: one of them was allowed in as I got out.
There was a scuffle going on in front of the blue door. The stocky woman from before was now fighting with a guy she said stole a fiver from her. ‘It was all I had,’ she said. ‘You don’t steal from your own kind. It’s not right.’ I followed her inside and sat by a table, across from a guy who was pulling on a pair of trousers that were way too small. The woman told me she slept on the Strand, had done for ten months, and was constantly trying to avoid plain-clothes policemen, who were always, she said, picking on beggars. She said she could not get money from the dole because she had no address. Without missing a beat, she told me she was a lesbian who’d been raped five times before she was eighteen. ‘The Jesus Army always get you,’ she said, ‘and I say, “I’m a lesbian, how about it?” and they say, “No, God doesn’t like that,” and I say, “God doesn’t like that? Well, God liked for me to be raped five times and abused as a kid so fuck Him!”’
A social worker came and took me to a tiny room with two chairs and a small desk that looked like a police interview cell, except for the mysterious presence of a step-ladder and an oil painting in a gilt frame. She told me what to do to get income support if I was begging, and how to see a housing officer if homeless. I could speak to the DSS about short-term accommodation. But tonight would be difficult. She gave me a map showing how to get to an emergency night shelter in Camden and brought me out of the room. Through an open door down the hall I could see an old man propped against the wall. He was in the middle of asking someone for gloves and ‘maybe a jacket’.
*
Over the last two decades, thousands of psychiatric beds have been lost in Britain. The former patients, now decanted into ‘the community’, can be seen on the streets every day in a state of profound confusion, often despair; left like the members of some schizophrenic tribe to wander aimlessly about, without treatment or support. In the first twenty-eight days after discharge from hospital mentally ill men are over 200 times more likely to commit suicide than the ordinary population.
At Bondway’s night shelter in Vauxhall 50 per cent of the residents are alcoholic and 20 per cent have psychiatric problems. The dormitories I was shown around were crammed with mattresses and sleeping bags, on which men – all of them seemingly over fifty-five – lay sleeping or coughing or just staring into space. Many such people, ejected from bed and breakfast accommodation first thing in the morning, will eventually just drop out of sight. Having no connections, no family, and no medical support or supervision, they will simply amble into the stew of the great urban unknown.
On Friday, 2 July this year, a man walking down Cheyne Walk, beside Chelsea Marina, noticed something bobbing in the water. The dead man was thirty; 5 feet 8 inches tall, slightly built, with brown eyes and dark-brown collar-length hair. He was clean shaven, with irregular teeth which were otherwise in fairly good nick. He had no tattoos. His face and upper body were discoloured and bloated, but he was nowhere near the point at which he would have been difficult to recognise by those who had known him. An odontologist at the Department of Forensic Medicine, Guy’s Hospital, prepared a report on the special features of the teeth, for comparison with the dental records of missing persons. When found, he was wearing a navy anorak with a zipper front and distinctive purple buttons, a black T-shirt, blue jeans and black trainers. He wore odd socks. The trainers had the words ‘Royal Mail’ stamped on them in red, surrounded by a miniature Union Jack. He had no money, cards or means of identification on him whatsoever. His pockets contained only one thing: a tiny book of Biblical quotes, two inches by one, entitled Golden Words.
Without a name, the dead man is referred to by Wapping River Police as ‘DB23’: the twenty-third dead body pulled from the Thames this year. Drawings are made of him, posters put up, newspaper reports and advertisements are published. The Post Office records are trawled to check if a pair of company shoes were ever issued to such a man. Yet nothing: nobody seems to know of him, nobody comes forward. Thought to have been a vagrant, a travelling pauper of unstable personality and no fixed address, he remains unidentified, de
stined, if no one who knows this man can be traced, to be be buried at the expense of the local council, and laid in an unmarked grave. As if he’d never existed.
A woman was recovered from the river near Embankment in September; on her middle finger she wore a gold ring with three white stones set in the centre. The tide had probably carried her downriver, since bruising on the body suggested she’d bumped against bollards and bridges before being found. She was DB30. Seventy-two missing persons matched her description and, as he talked to me about her, the identification officer began to feel that she might turn out to be a young woman who went missing after being discharged from a psychiatric ward at University College Hospital. I left him in his office at Wapping, surrounded by paper and photographs and dead people’s clothes, looking for the name of an attractive, thirty-year-old woman whom nobody seemed to know. There are certain kinds of vanishing which will never attract much interest; disappearances unlikely to stimulate much in the way of shock or curiosity; the by-products of a society not a society, of a time not of its time, of a country spinning hellishly backwards.
*
Ray Dickinson does a Salvation Army soup-run twice a week. I met him – as a helper rather than a customer – after dark, at the Regent Hall in Oxford Street, on a cold Thursday in September. He was stocking the van with soup, hot drinks and sandwiches. Also in the van was Allan, an ex-homeless guy who helps out from time to time. While Ray was sorting out the hot water, Allan talked of the trouble he was having finding a job. He had worked, years ago, in catering, and he regularly went round to the Jobcentre in Mortimer Street (which specialises in kitchen work) to see what there was. ‘They sent me down for an interview to a place in Cannon Street,’ he said. ‘I went into this kitchen, a right mess it was, and the guy tells me to start right away. So I gutted the place, scrubbed the floor, washed up and got the place looking immaculate. Then the guy, he says, “I don’t think there’s much more to do, why don’t you go home?” And I says, “Well, when should I come back?” The guy says, “Look, mate, don’t bother coming back, there’s no job for you here.”’ He said he was used to it, that it happened all the time.
We called at the Canadian Muffin Co. in Soho, regular donors to the soup-run of unsold stock. The rain was coming down fairly hard when we stopped in some narrow streets by Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where a few people lay in doorways and in alcoves by the road. We brought them soup and sandwiches and cakes, whatever we had that they fancied. They were mostly covered in blankets or cardboard and didn’t seem to me far in enough to be out of the rain. We drove on. An Indian woman appeared when we stopped in the square, asking for tea and soup and orange juice if we had it. Further up the road an old man was sipping at empty cups and sorting through wet rubbish lying in the road. He pulled his head down as we came near, putting one hand over his eyes and waving us away with the other.
After a conversation about the various strengths of tea, I asked two guys – one very young, one very old – if they begged during the day. They were lying with blankets under the arches of the Royal Courts of Justice. The older one said there wasn’t much in it, it wasn’t too safe, but when you had nothing else it sometimes did the trick. They both laughed, telling the story of how, one night, as they lay here, the TV games-show host Henry Kelly jumped out of a taxi and gave them a tenner. We left some muffins they could eat in the morning and drove round to Waterloo Bridge. Three men and a woman lay on a raised platform under the bridge. They had sleeping bags, and cardboard boxes to protect their heads. A lamp attached to one of the pillars lit up the area where they lay as well as a fair strip of the river beside them.
On the Strand, an old woman with whiskers came up. She called herself Mel and slept sometimes on the steps of the Adelphi Theatre. I asked her where she came from. ‘Oh, the East End, I think,’ she said, ‘I’ve got asthma, it’s the damp.’
‘Couldn’t you get into a hostel somewhere?’
‘I tried being in a place. I just couldn’t get on with it.’ While we spoke, a youngish woman with long, straight hair drank cup after cup of hot chocolate. She had tears running down her face and screamed intermittently into the middle distance – something hard to make out about husbands and communists.
There are many soup vans in Central London. In some places, like the Strand, they very nearly queue up to serve people. But the need is astonishing and people depend on them. Everyone I saw needed what they were given, and most needed more than that. I recognised many beggars I’d spoken to, some of whom I’d sat beside in the street, but none of them recognised me. Or none of them let on. I left Ray and Allan in the rain at Euston station. It was 2.30 a.m. and they were nearing the end of the run. I turned round before I got to the corner, and saw Ray walking down a darkened slope clutching a cup of hot something or other.
*
The night I left the advice centre with the mystery step-ladder and the oil painting in a gilt frame, I went to Camden as the woman had suggested. The night shelter is secreted on St Pancras Way, across the road from the Tropical Diseases Hospital. It was cloudy and inky-dark as I walked up the road. The pavement was thick with dust, as if there’d been drilling going on near by. Nine men stood outside the shelter, all very different-looking, most of them familiar to each other. The building is three storeys tall; a light flickered erratically on the second floor.
Pablo, the Talker, was telling the others about his day and laying out his plans for the future. I’d noticed it before: in groups like this there’s always a stable collection of types: the avid Talker, the eager Listener, the Contradictor (who’s sometimes the Talker), the Loner and the Oldie (who’s sometimes the Loner). Pablo was the Talker. The Listener was keen to hear the details of some fruit-picking work the Talker had heard of in Kent. ‘Thirty quid a day plus food; no bed, just sleeping bags on the kitchen floor. I have blankets – many, many blankets – every time you see the Salvation Army, it’s blankets. You’ll be OK for blankets if you’re coming with the fruit.’ The Listener’s eyebrows were knitted.
‘How do you get on it?’ he asked.
‘They have a list at The Passage,’ said Pablo. There’s much talk of dole money: its coming, its going or its being refused. The Loner’s never had a giro. A couple of the others say they can’t get by on it. The Oldie sniggers. Someone, the Talker, says that Friday’s the best day to beg if you can do it. If you can do it, you can make a couple of quid. The Contradictor draws his mouth into a frown. ‘That depends,’ he says.
The door is opened – we are now about fifteen strong. The two men on duty try, not altogether successfully, to be kind. The one standing in the door holds a clipboard. Those who were in last night get in first. You’re allowed to stay for three consecutive nights. About ten men go through the door. The guy with the clipboard then closes it and we wait another fifteen minutes. The Oldie – who’s obviously been a bit of a Talker in his time – introduces some disquiet by wondering aloud how likely we are to be let in. The clipboard opens the door and asks for those who’ve never stayed before to step up. Four of us file in. We are asked to wait in the corridor so that he can speak to us. The second guy on duty comes out of his office and joins the clipboard at the door to help explain to the old man why he’s not getting in. It’s clear that it’s not a matter of space but of some not-forgotten incident. There’s a second’s disputation in the corridor about whether someone should intervene on the Oldie’s behalf. No one moves. The door is closed on the old man and we hear the rules: ‘No drinking or using drugs … leave at 8 a. m …. be back by 10 p.m. tomorrow night … must complete a Housing Benefit Form … go on downstairs and have some soup and toast and tea if you want it.’
Down in the kitchen, there is a non-drip tea urn, plenty of bread to make toast with and a pot of lime-green soup. The chairs round the tables are the same colour as the soup. The room smells of over-boiled veg and Domestos. Except for the Talker, few talk. Most, like the guy sat next to me, quietly eat the soup in great, overflowing spoonfuls
. Rolling cigarettes and staring at the table, a couple of the first-timers speak of the ‘liberty’ taken with the Oldie. Back upstairs, I completed the Housing Benefit Form. The clipboard told me that – at twenty-five – I was on the border age-wise, so could I show him ID? No, well I should bring it next time. They then assigned bed numbers. I was 5B.
When I got up to the dormitory 5A was already in bed. The room had two beds, was semi-partitioned, with a small closet beside each bed. There wasn’t much to it. A massive lamp attached to the wall, like something used to light the pitch in a football stadium, flooded the room. I took my shoes off and lay on the bed’s plastic undersheet, listening to the noise of taxis and sirens outside. It was 11.20. You couldn’t put the light out: it was controlled, I guessed, by the clipboard. The room felt damp. The other guy was snoring and coughing, sometimes together. I stared at the ceiling and wondered where the taxis were going. Everything went quiet. I turned to face the wall and, just there, written in shaky block letters, was the single word ‘GHOSTS’.
I left the night shelter at eight in the morning, nearly tripping over ten loaves and ten pints of milk sat on the doorstep. I got the tube to Bank and lost myself in the station’s connecting tunnels. I carried a card on which I’d written ‘Hungry, please help’. I squatted in one of the tunnels with my hood up and the sign balanced on my knees. People immediately started turning their heads, in seeming astonishment. Some stop a few feet from me and stare – I can’t tell whether their faces show pity or the dull stirrings of verbal abuse. I sat for an hour, and made around £3.50. Then two Underground employees came up – twin flashes of blue trousers and orange bibs – telling me to beat it. I went to Moorgate and pitched myself at the bottom of some stairs leading to the platforms. The air was cool and the ground hard and cold. Hordes of clacking shoes went by, birling and squeaking on the newly renovated floor.
The Atlantic Ocean Page 32
