‘Harry, how did you come to be on the streets…really?’
‘I just went walking.’
‘Come on, Harry. It’s more than that. What happened?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Then I’d like to hear it. We are not short of time.’
We had agreed that I would join him on the streets for ten days. After Jenny was killed, Harry had gone off around Southampton before making the 15-mile walk to Calshot Beach where he slept behind the multicoloured huts. When he had got his head together, he came back to sit outside the jeweller’s where the two ladies looked after him so well. I was very relieved to see him.
As part of my new world, getting back to what life is really about, I wanted to see what it is like to have nothing except the very basic requirements of life, to strip everything down and have no clutter, no paraphernalia, no junk. I gave myself a budget of £5 a day and even left my mobile phone behind.
Susan understood immediately. Although it meant me being away for ten days and leaving her on her own with the kids, she not only agreed, but also encouraged me to do it. The kids took more persuading.
‘What the bloody hell do you want to do that for?’ Paul asked but, in the end, just shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Am I bovvered?’ before giving me a proper man hug and muttering ‘lunatic’ in my ear. After hearing what I said to Paul, Josh, aged thirteen, asked if he could come, too, leading to a row with Paul who said: ‘You only want to go so you don’t have to wash.’ Gemma, eleven, asked where I would go to the loo and, when I told her that I would use the public toilets, just said, ‘Yuck,’ before asking if she could turn on the telly. Lucy, our youngest, asked me for a cuddle and suggested that I should take Buster with me. Buster was her never-go-anywhere-without-him teddy; she is very loving, like her mum.
So, there I was, in February, on the streets with Harry. I had asked him if I could spend ten days with him and he had agreed.
What, then, was the story he told? The story he told was one that left me feeling more and more foolish that, for so long, I had allowed his depth, his wisdom, his warmth, his faith and everything else that I then learnt about him to go unnoticed. How could I not have picked it up? But then I suppose that is what happens when everyone is so defined by role.
Harry spoke for most of the night and, the more he spoke, the more I got drawn into what he was saying. He had a degree in English from Sheffield University and then had qualified as a teacher. He came from a background that sounded secure and perfectly average – two parents at home and a younger sister. He had worked for a few years as an English teacher in a very deprived area, but had got increasingly disillusioned with what he was doing. That’s when he had started getting depressed and, as he had sunk lower and lower, so his wife had got more and more fed up with him. He did not say a word against her, though, when he was describing what happened and just said: ‘I hated myself so why should she not do so as well? I wasn’t helping with the kids, was a useless husband to her, and was just a pain.’
Harry had tried all sorts of ways to sort himself out, he said. He’d been on pills prescribed by the doctor but they just made him feel like a zombie. He tried therapy but that didn’t work either. In the end, he said, one of his fellow teachers suggested that he should try meditation and referred him to a local group of Buddhists.
‘That’s when my life changed,’ he said. ‘For once I found something in which I believed. Somewhere I could go and not be told what I should or should not do but where I was encouraged…supported…to find my own solutions through meditation…by thought.’
‘Are you Buddhist, Harry?’
‘Yes, I am. I hope you don’t mind.’ There was a pause and then I looked at him. To my own surprise I found myself reaching over and taking hold of one of his hands.
‘Harry, I want to ask you a huge favour. Please would you help me with that… would you explain to me what faith means? Not now…but over the next few days while we are together? I know it sounds stupid but, you see, I’ve ignored it for so long and now I really don’t want to carry on like that any longer.’
He squeezed my hand and smiled a rotten-toothed smile. ‘We’ve all the time in the world.’ I let go of his hand.
‘Sorry, I forgot. Is your hand OK?’
‘It’s fine now, Jon. It’s fine.’
Harry went on to describe how, as he began to feel stronger, he found it more and more difficult to live his life as it was. Hated by his wife, a failure as a father and a failure as a teacher, he said that he reached a stage where he couldn’t see the point of continuing as he was. The more he thought, the more he accepted the four noble truths of Buddhism, he said: that all life involves dukkha or suffering, that the origin of suffering is attachment or craving for worldly phenomena, that if we rid ourselves of attachment and craving we end our suffering and that the route to rid ourselves of that is to follow the eightfold path of rightful living.
And over the next nine days he taught me what the eightfold path means – right view (in the sense of correct outlook), right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood (in the sense of correct way of life), right effort, right mindfulness (in the sense of correct state of mind) and right concentration.
‘So, one morning, I just went walking. I had my wallet, about £25 and a credit card. And, once I had started walking, I felt that I didn’t want to stop.’
‘Do you ever think about going back?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t belong there.’
‘Do you enjoy your life?’
‘No, I don’t think that I do. But I don’t know how to change it.’
‘Harry, I’ll do a deal. You help me understand faith. I’ll see if I can help you think about what you want to do with your life. Fair do’s?’
‘Fair do’s.’
Chapter Eighteen
So, besides being fucking freezing, what is it like on the streets? The first thing that you notice is that you become invisible. It feels like being litter. People plainly know you are there, but they look straight through you because they don’t want to make eye contact with a beggar and… what?... you certainly don’t trust a beggar – even though I was not actually begging. I was just sitting there. Over those ten days, people who I knew would walk straight past me and I suspect most of them genuinely did not see me. What is more, I was out of role, so they didn’t expect to see me either.
During the daytime, if someone talks to you as you sit on a pavement, they are usually about to say something horribly charitable or else just horrible. And, at night-time, if people talk to you it usually means that they are totally pissed and may be thinking about kicking your head in. So, I learnt to keep my eyes down and just sit, passively.
The next thing I found was that it is incredibly boring – there is nothing to do and, for a lot of the time, you don’t want to do anything, either. I didn’t have a phone to play with, money to buy things with or anything to look forward to. If Harry had not been there, I would have had no one to talk to either and, as he said, when you are on your own on the streets you get incredibly lonely. There is no community on the streets and you never trust other people who are in the same position as you are. So, you start playing around with thoughts in your mind and you feel as though you are going mad.
Nobody trusts you either. When Harry and I bought food together, people tended to treat us like biblical lepers – they kept as far away as possible and, when we went into the supermarket down the road, we were watched all the time in case we did a runner with something that we had nicked.
Very quickly I also came to understand the sense of hopelessness that Harry and other homeless people feel. It’s like being stuck in a transparent bubble – you see the world going on around you, but there is no way you can join in. There is a feeling that you have no future – you’re never going to get a home to live in, you’ll never improve and things can only go downhill. Like shit, you can only go down the drain. I also found myself worrying a
ll the time about my health in a way that I never normally do and I was only on the street for ten days. Harry had constant pain in his rotten teeth but no means at all of getting dental care.
The final thing that I want to mention is that you stink and never get properly warm. At home, I shower twice a day and, even more than that when I do exercise. I use soap and dry myself with a clean towel. I change my clothes. I use deodorant and aftershave that costs more for a bottle than all of the money I spent in ten days. On the streets, I didn’t change clothes once and I never took all my clothes off – I’d have been arrested if I’d tried that outside the two ladies shops. There is nowhere to wash and getting to public toilets is a drag and involves a walk of about half a mile to get to somewhere that is, itself, filthy and which also stinks... So we used to pee down a side alley between two shops and do the rest in the park behind a tree before picking it up in a polythene bag and chucking it in the bin.
But, with all that said, those ten days taught me things that nothing else could have done and they took me to something that I had searched for all my life. Faith. Pantheistic faith. To a belief that there is no such thing as them. There is only us. That there is only one universal, overarching truth – that God is the force that unites us, be we beggar or be we prince. And so it is our contribution to our shared existence as part of God that defines our value, a contribution that can be defined in one word, compassion. Shared suffering. The truth that Harry taught me during those ten days is not earthbound either, as most monotheistic religions are. It has nothing to do with Jerusalem or Bethlehem. It is universal. If there are living beings elsewhere, as there must be, I cannot see why that core truth should not apply where they are, as much as it applies here.
I know now that I don’t believe in the Christian God and never will do. Harry doesn’t, either. There is no creator God; if there is, what was God doing for the infinite years before creation? But, because of all that Harry has taught me, I know that God exists. And when I die, as die we all must, I will not continue as a separate entity, I wouldn’t want to anyway, but if I have shown compassion to life around me, then I will have contributed to the force that unites us all, to God. If I haven’t, well, then I have been a waste of space.
When I was with Harry, he gave me his most prized possession. It was a book, by then filthy, and somewhat torn. It is called The Good Heart and is a discussion between His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and Christian academics. Like Harry, I have found it to be the most influential book I have ever read. And, like Harry, I have read it cover to cover many times.
So, Harry, I want to thank you. Susan and my children want to thank you. Homeless and penniless you might have been, but you gave me something that is worth more than all the riches in the world. Faith. I am a lousy Buddhist, I know, and very shaky on the concept of reincarnation, although I’m not sure if that matters at all. But as I watch you now, as I do most days when we work together, I am constantly reminded of all that you have taught me.
I also think that I kept to my side of the bargain. I helped Harry decide what he wanted to do with his life. And the answer to that did not lie in money. It did not lie in going back to his family because that was, by then, a closed door. The answer was simple. He learnt to be happy. He learnt that it was OK to get off the streets, to accept the friendship that was offered to him by me, my family, my friends and the community in which we live. He even learnt to look after his teeth.
So, what did we do in those ten days? In one sense, sweet fuck all. But, in another sense, we changed each other’s lives. I taught Harry to live again. He taught me something much more important and much more enduring…faith. A faith that has let me understand my place in the world and has reinforced my love for my family – the place where I truly belong...
So, that is why this book is called Harry. How could it not be? Susan suggested the name.
Chapter Nineteen
What happened next? Well, the legal aid contract was assigned to our new firm and we rented small offices above a corner shop. We make a reasonable living but nothing like the amount that I earned before; Susan and I just don’t need it anyway. We are still far richer than the vast percentage of people in the world and we lack nothing. We work with the bigger firms as well to do pro bono work when needed and, in doing that work, I have met some of the most committed and morally driven lawyers I could ever hope to meet.
There are only two partners in our firm, me and Seb. We have a wonderful and hard-working secretary, Jane, who is not only very good at her job, but also feeds us with a never-ending stream of filthy jokes – see what I mean about being a lousy Buddhist? My favourite? What’s the difference between a cockerel and a lawyer? A cockerel’s primal urge at dawn is to cluck defiance. Her worst? A man goes to a fancy dress party wearing only underpants. ‘What have you come as?’ the hostess asks. ‘A premature ejaculation,’ the guest replies. ‘I don’t understand,’ the hostess says. ‘I’ve just come in my pants.’ Thank you, Jane.
According to Sophie, Humphrey had been asked to draft the documents releasing Jane from her employment with the firm and had told Sophie: ‘If Jon wants the dyke he can have her.’ Mysteriously, after Jane left, Humphrey’s prized possessions, the orchids and the big cactus that he kept in his room at work, died after someone watered them with bleach. It must have been one of the temporary cleaners.
And we now have a trainee legal executive, the funniest man in town whom Jane has taken completely under her wing. Mark, the very handsome Mark, whose trousers are sometimes possibly a little bit tighter than they should be (I told you I’d get that bit in, Mark) but, there again, in the wise words of Peregrine, who does give a fuck about the homophobic? James, Mark’s very handsome partner, certainly doesn’t – thanks for clearing that remark, James.
And who helps us with our business? With the admin, the VAT, the bundles, helping clients as they go through the misery of family litigation, business development and all the rest? Who maintains our business premises (as well as our home)? Who looks after our welfare at work? Who reminds us all not to forget our spiritual needs in the hurly-burly of legal practice? Harry does. He is not always there, he remains wonderfully untamed, but we all love him even when he disappears on one of his walkabouts. He lives in a flat which is clean and bright. He dresses simply but smartly and has even taken up jogging. He now looks like a totally different man. Most of all, though, he has found happiness, even though our attempts at getting his kids to see him didn’t work out. And when Harry smiles, showing off his capped, white teeth, the world lights up around him and, for some reason, he reminds me of Jenny – she used to bare her teeth slightly in a nervous smile whenever I saw her.
What about me? It doesn’t need saying. I have the companion and love of my life, Susan, with whom I share everything and who gives me more love than I could possibly deserve. I have the best children that any father could ever wish for and I love each one of them without any limits. I have the friendship of Seb and Freja. I have the joy of knowing Theo and Lucas. I have Jane and I have Mark…and James. And I have Harry. I also have faith. Who could possibly have more than me? I am the richest man on earth.
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