'Honouring the expeditions of Jack London and George Orwell into hidden zones of poverty and homelessness, Charlie Carroll contrives a startling narrative of a nightworld most of us would choose to avoid. He is perverse, obstinate, brave about his own strategic cowardice (or writerly self-preservation), He is driven and unyielding in the determination to return from darkness to light with a story worth the telling. That story grips and bites and blisters. Read it.'
Iain Sinclair
'A most courageous undertaking, beautifully told, that would test the mettle of even the hardiest. Charlie Carroll must be congratulated on a fine book!'
Harry Bucknall
'Charlie's managed to poignantly capture the plight of our often forgotten homeless in a way that's sometimes scary, frequently surprising but always genuine and heartfelt. Eye-opening – a true insight into a life many of us will never know.'
Phoebe Smith
'This was a fascinating concept and an immensely courageous assignment… It should be required reading for all those who have difficulty in seeing behind the face of the destitute in our affluent society.'
David Bathurst
'A courageous and sensitive book. No Fixed Abode finds Charlie Carroll tackling another knotty social issue that is all too often brushed under the carpet. It is… well-written and, perhaps surprisingly, inspirational. Orwell would be impressed by this travelogue…'
Will Randall
It's an honest, poignant and often courageous tale of homelessness and life on the move and raises many questions about the kind of society that we live in; about tolerance, prejudice and probably - most of all – about camaraderie and the affirming power of the human spirit.'
David Le Vay
NO FIXED ABODE
Copyright © Charlie Carroll, 2013
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
Charlie Carroll has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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eISBN: 978-0-85765-929-3
Substantial discounts on bulk quantities of Summersdale books are available to corporations, professional associations and other organisations. For details contact Nicky Douglas by telephone: +44 (0) 1243 756902, fax: +44 (0) 1243 786300 or email: [email protected].
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlie Carroll is a writer, musician, teacher and traveller. He lives in Cornwall with his wife and their cat, Digby. His first book, On the Edge, combined travel writing with the exploration of social issues, namely the state of British education. It was described by the Daily Mail as 'A profoundly shocking book' and as an 'important read' by The Times Educational Supplement. Charlie has spoken on local BBC radio stations and BBC Radio 5Live, and written for The Guardian and The Big Issue. You can read more about Charlie's work at www.charliecarroll.co.uk and find him on Twitter at @CharlieCarroll1.
For my wife
Michelle
CONTENTS
Chapter One – Preamble
Chapter Two – Cornish Coast
Chapter Three – Devonshire Roads
Chapter Four – Bristol Streets
Chapter Five – Wessex Waterways
Chapter Six – London House
Chapter Seven – London Streets
Chapter Eight – London Tent
Chapter Nine – The End
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE
PREAMBLE
1
Where should the book of a journey begin? Should it be in the car or the bus, above the tyres, en route to the train which in turn leads to the airplane or boat? Or should it be later, triggered by touchdown and passport control? Should the opening line depict the first sense of a different climate? Perhaps it should wait even longer, starting with familiarity and comfort rather than rampant ticket-searches, airport farewells, jet lag and acclimatisation. Because everything before that, they say, is just a preamble.
My journey began the moment I stepped out of my front door, locked it, and then pushed the keys back through the letterbox. My official starting point, a small beach called Sennen Cove, was an hour's bus ride away, or a day's walk. I started as I meant to go on, and strode down the hill. That morning, the news had been of the fire of riots which blazed its way from London to Birmingham: a montage of men dragged from their motorbikes, balaclavas and shattered shop windows, exhausted policemen asleep on tables, community clean-ups, flaming department stores and looters, looters, looters. If I was to become a tramp, now was an opportune time: more people than ever had taken to the streets.
2
The itch never started in my feet – instead, it manifested itself in sharp, fleeting prickles across my forehead, a slight twitch around the eyelids, and an increasing habit of spinning the globe hung from string above my desk and gawping soundlessly at the yellow and green patches of land which came to a stop before me. My wife sometimes caught me doing it, and she recognised the symptoms before I did. This wanderlust was a perennial fever, and it had not, as we had both expected, diminished as I shifted into my thirties.
The academic year was drawing to a close, governmental cuts had hit my school hard, and my temporary contract was not to be renewed. My previous travelling had been limited to the six-week summer holidays, and I had used them most years in East Asia and East Africa. This year, with no September return to the classroom, I had as much time as I wanted, but I did not have the money.
I considered various options: backpacking was cheap if you did it right, but the plane fares were too expensive to justify; teaching abroad would take me anywhere in the world and pay me for the privilege, but all contracts demanded at least one year, and I could not bear to be away from my wife for so long; a seasonal job on Alpine slopes could be nonchalantly dropped after a few months, but, at thirty-one, I was already too old for the epicurean nihilism which dictated the days and nights of those fresh-faced gap-year students who staffed the pistes, and who saw a hangover as a temporarily inconvenient half-hour the morning after.
Still, the urge persisted. In bed at night, I thumbed through old guidebooks for the Philippines, Kenya and Nepal, searching for the pencilled circles I had made on the maps, around hostel addresses and bus stations and bars, as cues for nostalgic reverie.
'Jesus, Charlie,' my wife, exasperated, finally declared. 'Just go for a bloody walk!'
An idea flashed, built, revolved and then set. I tentatively explained its outline to her.
'Sounds good to me.'
'So you wouldn't mind? It might take a few months.'
'If it'll stop you moping around the house like you've just had to put your dog down, you should do it.'
I loved my wife.
The idea was so simple it startled me. I had little money; I had much time: what better thing to do than walk? Cornwall's coast was not far from my house – perhaps I could walk the whole 630-mile South West Coastal Path from Exmoor to Poole? Even better, I could follow in the footsteps of one of my favourite travel writers, John Hillaby, on a reverse JOGLE from Land's End to John
O'Groats. I had no tent, but I had a good sleeping bag bought for a winter in Tibet a few years before, a mini-stove and mess tins to cook with along the way, and I was strong enough, healthy enough and motivated enough to do it. I began to practise, ignoring my fuel-thirsty van whenever possible and walking to and from plotted destinations that stretched me a mile or two further every day. I learned that I could travel four miles an hour on a flat, and that I could walk for up to eight hours providing I rested once every two. I borrowed friends' dogs for the day to lend an excuse for long excursions across Bodmin Moor and along tributaries of the River Fal. The frequent exercise grew addictive, and I fancied that I could feel my legs strengthening and my heart rate slowing.
At home in the evenings, spreadeagled on the couch, I revisited old books I had not read for years: books about walking, books about England, and sometimes books about both. Iain Sinclair followed Laurie Lee, Paul Theroux followed John Hillaby, but always, between and above them all, came George Orwell. There was a theme in those early works of his – Keep the Aspidistra Flying, A Clergyman's Daughter, and, most crucially, Down and Out in Paris and London – which I could not dispel.
How about, I thought, walking, but walking as a tramp?
Did tramps even exist any more? I considered the idea of becoming one, a tramp in twenty-first-century England, walking the ley lines of the country, existing both for and by movement. The notion seemed educational but whimsical, romantic even, yet underneath it a viable darkness bubbled.
It would mean, I thought, becoming homeless.
3
I had never been homeless, but I had come close, or thought I had. For eighteen months, I had lived in a rusting, leaking VW Camper van, sleeping for the most part in free lay-bys. Once, I found myself in York, Saturday-tripping through the Viking streets. I parked on the outskirts of the city. Five carefully arranged cardboard boxes had been crammed beneath a nearby stairwell, and three men sat amongst them. One nervously hopped over to me.
'Love your van, mate,' he said.
'Me, too,' I replied. 'She's done me proud.'
'Any chance you could spare a bit of change? Me and my brothers over there…' – he gestured to the cardboard boxes beneath the concrete overhang where his two companions crouched and stared at us – '… we wanna try and get into the local hostel tonight. It's gonna be a cold one.'
I did not doubt it. It was early February and, though only three o'clock in the afternoon, the bite of a winter's night was already in the air. 'I've got a few quid,' I said, taking out my wallet and handing him the coins.
'Thanks mate, thanks. Really appreciate it.'
'Listen,' I said. 'I'm going to brew a cup of tea. Why don't you grab your mates and join me? I've got enough.'
'Nah,' he replied, backing away. 'Good of you to offer, mate, but nah, we're all right.'
'I know what it's like,' I remonstrated. 'I've just spent the winter in this thing. It's freezing out there. Come and have a cup of tea.'
The man stopped walking and stared hard at me. I felt suddenly scared. 'Know what it's like?' he whispered. 'You ain't got a fucking clue, mate! See this here?' He smacked the side of the van with an open palm, sending several splinters of rust to shatter on the ground. 'This is fucking luxury, this is. You think you're homeless just because you've spent winter in a van? Tell you what, spend the night with me and my brothers over there. We'll show you what fucking homeless is all about.' He lurched forward, as if about to strike me, then perhaps felt the coins embedded in his fist, for he uncurled his fingers and looked at them for a moment. 'Thanks for this though, mate,' he said, all traces of anger vanished. 'You have a good one, yeah?'
He was, of course, right. My eighteen months living in the van had been a far cry from genuine homelessness. To assume as much to this man was feeble, the play-acting of a soul trying to convince itself of its false nobility. I was not homeless and I never had been. I had slept rough, but it was a dabble: the promise of a bed and a hot meal always existed on the fringes of my experimentation, no matter how far I strayed from them.
In my late teens and early twenties, as a poor, aimless and happy backpacker in Europe, I had tinkered with sleeping rough as a kind of rite of passage or a test of my own endurance. Those odd nights on park benches in Florence and Thessaloniki had not come from desperation, but from will; the weekend I spent camped out in Geneva airport because I could not afford a hostel had been, to my nineteen-year-old self, remarkably fun; and the long night outside Istanbul train station had been precisely the same, though that was tempered somewhat when I awoke at three in the morning to find a grinning Turk spooning behind me, staring at the back of my head, and feverishly masturbating.
I once spent a week hitch-hiking down the Costa del Sol, getting drunk in strange bars in Fuengirola or Estepona or Puerto Banús with my backpack beneath my bar stool, stumbling down to the beach to fall asleep on a wooden sunlounger, and then waking with crusty eyes to a bright morning and a fat north-Englander saying: 'Have yer paid for this, lad? No? Well, she 'as, so get on.'
I was no stranger to the streets. At the age of sixteen, while my friends worked in shops, waited in cafes and cleaned in hotels each weekend, I made my spare change with my guitar, busking upon my home town's pedestrianised thoroughfares. The guitar came with me to Europe: it was my lofty idea to busk my way around the continent's cities. Chased off the pavements of Kalamata by the Greek Mafia, almost arrested on Prague's Charles Bridge for lacking a permit, my guitar strings cut with a penknife outside the Uffizi, and my songs drowned out by the blaring of didgeridoos on either side of me in Covent Garden, I finally found Las Ramblas in Barcelona. I lived there for two months, belting out acoustic songs under the torrid Spanish sun to the waves of passing tourists. The pesetas they dropped into my guitar case paid for my bocadillos each day and my San Miguels each night, but my accommodation – which outweighed the earnings of all but my best days – always came from my savings.
That was the crucial difference. For all my posturing, I had never needed the streets. I was poor, but I knew it, and I had worked hard at two jobs before leaving home so that, no matter how little I made busking, I could always rely on the ATM to set me up for another night with a bed. When the clock passed midnight and Las Ramblas got dangerous, I had a room waiting.
Nevertheless, I grew friendly with a few from the city's street-level subculture: the buskers from all over the world who kept their pitches at a respectful distance from each other and then drank away their earnings together at night, trading stories of busking hotspots across the globe; the gangs of boys at Plaza de Catalunya who skateboarded and smoked weed for ten hours a day because they had nothing else to do; the beggars who curled up along the alleyways of the Arab Quarter and who often spoke less Spanish than I did. I was tolerated because I was on the streets every day, and so were they, and recognition blossomed into nods into greetings into friendship.
There was, however, another group of street-dwellers, perhaps the most populous, and they were relentlessly unsociable, even to each other. My busking friends called them Los Locos – 'The Crazies'. Singular, solipsistic, cursed with a plethora of mental-health issues, they wafted through Barcelona like ghosts, lost in anxieties no one could explain.
One of Los Locos – an old Catalan lady who hissed at me like a cat whenever I asked her questions or offered her some of my spare change – policed the alleyway down which my pensión lay. She slept there each night on top of a mattress blackened with scum, which she had wedged beneath the right-angled overhang where two buildings met. She slept there for only a few hours each night: at dawn she would be gone to walk up and down Las Ramblas from the Plaza de Catalunya at the top to the Christopher Columbus statue at the bottom. Before her, she pushed a supermarket trolley which held her entire belongings encased in plastic carrier bags. From each corner of the trolley a broomstick poked up above the bags, a teddy bear anally impaled upon each. When she returned to her mattress late at night she would stand bes
ide it with an empty plastic bottle in each hand, alternating between bashing them together in a flamenco rhythm, and then hurriedly shouting into the neck of one as if it was a microphone, and she a radio commentator.
Los Locos were impenetrable, but they were for the most part harmless, too enveloped in their own fear to foist it upon anybody else. But there was plenty of danger on the streets. By day, tourism ruled Las Ramblas; by night, it was reserved for crime. I was never beaten, but I saw it happen to too many others, sometimes with weapons, and it made me sick no matter how drunk I was. Once, I was mugged at four o'clock in the morning by six fifteen-year-olds. I nearly laughed, but then one grabbed my hand and placed a knife against my wrist. And I finally left Barcelona because of a threat – I had told two American girls that the Romanian gangs who played 'Find the Lady' along Las Ramblas were con-artists, had pointed out the stooges and the lookouts who kept watch for police, and warned them never to play. The girls had then marched over to the gang they had lost money to the day before and demanded their pesetas back: they knew it was all a hoax, they said, the long-haired British busker down the road had explained it to them. That afternoon, I was approached in a bar by a man with an Eastern European accent and a web of thin scars across his hands who told me I should leave. I took the next train to Malaga, which departed before darkness dropped.
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