WHEN IT WAS raining hard the other day, a familiar silhouette appeared at my front door. I knew it was him, because, having rung the bell, he retreated to the gate: a defensive habit gained on the streets. ‘It’s the man’, said my young daughter, ‘with no name.’
He had on his usual tie and tweed jacket and was leaning against the hedge, though he said he hadn’t had a drink. ‘Just passing through,’ he said as usual, and money passed between us with the customary clumsy handshake. ‘I’d better give that a trim,’ he said, as he always did, pointing at the hedge, and again I thanked him and said no; he was too unsteady for that. Collar up, he turned back into the rain.
I have known him for about three years. He comes to my door at least every week, and I see him out on the common in all weathers, asleep or reading or looking at the traffic. I see him nodding as if in silent discussion with himself on a weighty matter; or waving and smiling at a procession of women with small children in buggies. Understandably, women hurry away from him; others look through him.
He has no home, though he once told me he lived ‘just around the corner’. That turned out to be a hostel. From what I can gather, he sleeps rough most of the time, often on a bench in front of a small powerboats clubhouse, or in a clump of large trees where sick and alcoholic men go and where there was a murder some years back. In winter, he has newspapers tucked inside his jacket. Perhaps he is fifty, or more; it’s difficult to tell.
He vanishes from time to time, as the homeless tend to do; and when I last asked him about this, he said he went to ‘visit my sister’. I very much doubted this; I know he goes to one of several seaside towns for a few weeks at a time. There he scans the local newspaper small ads for ‘unemployed guests wanted’. These are inserted by the owners of bed-and-breakfast hotels and hostels, where homeless people are sent by local authorities and by the Department of Health and Social Security.
I can imagine a little of what it must be like for him. As a reporter I once ended up in one of these ‘hotels’. When I couldn’t produce the Social Security form that would allow the owner to collect every penny of his ‘guest’s’ state benefit, I was thrown out. This wholesale diversion of public money is acknowledged as one of the fastest ways of getting rich in Britain since the Thatcher Government stopped councils spending on housing more than ten years ago. Hotel owners are said to make about £120 million a year. In the Enterprise Society, homelessness, like drinking water, has been ‘privatised’; or is it ‘restructured’?
My friend is one of 80,000 people who are officially homeless in London. This is the equivalent of the population of Stevenage, in Hertfordshire; the true figure is greater, of course. The national figure for homeless households is 169,000, ten times higher than a decade ago. The homeless are now a nation within a nation, whose suffering makes a good television story at Christmas or when there is snow and ice.
I have never been made homeless. To have nowhere to go, perhaps for the rest of my life, to face every day the uncertainty of the night and fear of the elements, is almost unimaginable. I say ‘almost’, because in writing about the homeless I have gleaned something of their powerlessness once they are snared in what used to be known as the ‘welfare state’. This was true before Thatcher.
The difference these days is that there are no ‘typical’ homeless any more. They are also from the middle classes and the new software classes. They are both old and young – an estimated 35,000 children are homeless in London alone. My friend is typical in that he bears the familiar scars of homelessness: such as a furtiveness that gives the impression of a person being followed; a sporadic, shallow joviality that fails to mask his anxiety; and a deferential way that does not necessarily reflect his true self. The latter, because it is out of character, is occasionally overtaken by melodramatic declarations of independence. When he told me he had to go to hospital one day for a stomach operation and I offered to take him, he said, ‘No! I can walk! Of course I can!’ And he did.
I didn’t know who or what he was until recently. It seemed an intrusion to ask. My place in his life was simply as a source of a few quid from time to time. Then one day he was telling me about a television programme about Asia he had seen, and it was clear he had been there in the Army. And that led to a statement of pride about what he had done with his life on leaving the Army. He had worked in a garage, training apprentice mechanics, until this was thwarted by a string of personal tragedies: a divorce and finally his ‘redundancy’: that wonderful expression of the Enterprise Society. He was then too old to start again; and he was taking to drink.
He has turned up with cuts and bruises, and blood caked on his cheek. Once, when I said I would go and call a doctor, I returned to the door to find him gone. On the common and in the streets, he is prey to thugs and to the police. He has little of the protection the rest of us assume as a right, provided by a civilised society. The defences that have been built up for the likes of him since the great Depression of sixty years ago continue to be dismantled with platitudes that are spoken, unchallenged, on the news almost every night.
Recently it was National Housing Week. The junior housing minister, Tim Yeo, said the government’s ‘rough sleepers initiative’, which was launched during the freezing conditions of last winter, had halved the numbers of homeless sleeping out in London.
Anyone driving through London’s West End knows this to be untrue. The homeless in the capital have become a tourist curiosity. Europeans are incredulous at having to step over so many human bundles on the pavement, in the Underground, on the steps of galleries and museums. Eavesdrop on a French tour guide describing the sights in the shopfronts of the Strand. ‘They were hosed away,’ she says, ‘but they have come back.’
With the maximum publicity, the government allocated £300 million for ‘rough sleepers’. As the London Housing Unit has pointed out, this has been wiped out by the £138 million in cuts in long-term housing investment by councils and by the abolition of £100 million-worth of special allowances for London boroughs.1 The minister, Tim Yeo, said: ‘You will see a similar priority given to housing as to education and health between now and the general election.’2 In the circumstances this had to be irony; but it was not.
June 14, 1991