by Paul Sussman
‘The finest daffodils always grow in shit.’
We left London that same day, my new associate having devoured an improbably large plate of shiny currant buns (purchased, I might add, at my own expense).
‘Too many eyes,’ he explained as we tramped out of town. ‘Keep moving, keep low. That’s how to stay ahead.’
We went, I believe, roughly north-west, spending our first night together underneath a bristly hedge somewhere in the foothills of the Chilterns. The next morning we rose early and set off again, as we did the morning after, and the morning after the morning after, and the morning after again. I think in the five years we were together we never stayed in the same place for more than a single night.
‘Informers,’ he muttered darkly when I once inquired whether we might not treat ourselves and spend two consecutive nights in a rather nice little barn we had discovered in Yorkshire. ‘Informers everywhere. Stay too long and they find you out. Motion is survival.’
And so we kept moving, rolling ceaselessly and exhaustingly forward with barely a pause for breath.
We moved in a variety of manners during the course of those years. Usually it was by foot, pounding down lanes and through fields and up hills and across towns until our legs ached and our backs screamed and our feet were covered in blisters. Occasionally we would hitch, although it was rare for a car to stop for a pair of such disgusting-looking creatures as we were, and sometimes we would go by train, riding as far as we could until we were ejected at some back-end-of-beyond station for not having a ticket.
‘Tickets are the currency of moral servitude!’ Walter once informed a small, moustachioed train guard who had discovered us cowering in the carriage lavatory.
‘Fuck off my train,’ retorted the small, moustachioed train guard.
Other modes of transport included lorries, amongst whose cargo we would insinuate ourselves whilst the driver wasn’t looking; small rowing boats, which we would untie from their moorings and splash around in for a couple of days before heading off once again cross country; and, on one memorable occasion, roller skates. We had ‘liberated’ these from a garden in Bracknell where the eagle-eyed Walter had spotted them languishing beneath a climbing frame, and thereafter skated merrily on our way for two whole weeks until one of my wheels went wonky and continued rolling became impossible.
Usually, however, it was by foot.
There seemed to be no great scheme to our movement, no particular route that we were following. For Walter, where we were going was always subsidiary to the actual going.
‘Never think about destinations,’ he advised me early on. ‘If we don’t know what we’re doing, chances are no one else will. Ignorance is survival.’
‘I thought motion was survival.’
‘You’re right!’ he exclaimed. ‘Perpetual ignorant motion, that’s the recipe for staying alive. Don’t think, just move.’
And so we moved without actually going anywhere, rather like flies zipping back and forth with no obvious thought or pattern to their zipping. In five years we covered the whole of mainland Britain, as well as enjoying a brief sojourn in Guernsey and an even briefer one on the Isle of Wight (from which we had to make a swift departure after Walter was discovered carving ‘Bugger!’ into a bowling green in Ventnor). Some places we only visited once, others we would come back to again and again. So far as I can recall, and this is one of the more vague periods of my life on account of the fact that I spent most of it pissed, we visited Liverpool five times, Edinburgh twice, Birmingham, Brighton, Eastbourne and Bude three times each and, for some inexplicable reason, Runcorn in Cheshire 17 times. The latter was a rather grim, red-brick town on the banks of the Mersey and had little to recommend such frequent attention other than the fact that its name made Walter laugh.
‘Runcorn,’ he chuckled throatily. ‘Like something you get on your feet. “Oooh, Mum, I’ve got awful painsome Runcorns!” Ha, ha, ha! Thank God for places like that. They’re like a slap in the face of modernism.’
We would sleep wherever we could find shelter. Sometimes, as I’ve already mentioned, this would be in barns or beneath hedges. On other occasions we bedded down in, variously, derelict houses, shop doorways, caves, packing crates, hayricks, bus shelters, sheds, greenhouses, abandoned cars and basically anywhere that would offer some measure of protection both from the elements and the legions of spies Walter was convinced were out to get us. In London, the one place we visited more than Runcorn, we frequented a rather bijou little tree house in Epping Forest, whilst I remember with some fondness a night spent curled in the pulpit of a church in Tunbridge Wells, although unfortunately we overslept the next morning and stood up to find ourselves in the middle of a wedding service.
‘Three cheers for the bride!’ cried Walter to the horrified congregation. ‘Doesn’t she look a peach!’
Working, of course, was out of the question during those years, since Walter considered any form of employment to be servitude and refused point-blank to submit to the ‘noisome tyranny of wage-earning’. He likewise objected to the whole idea of state benefits, convinced they were a sort of financial honey-trap designed to attract and then enmesh dissidents such as ourselves, a conviction he backed up by pointing out that ‘State Benefits’ was merely an anagram of ‘I Be A Fat Net’. We were thus forced to rely on other means to provide for our daily needs.
One of these was begging, although Walter steadfastly refused to consider it such, preferring instead to refer to it as ‘fundraising’ or ‘the eliciting of donations towards the freeing of the oppressed masses’.
‘We are not beggars,’ he told me early in our acquaintance. ‘Beggars want something for nothing. We, on the other hand, are offering a service. People give us money, we fight to set them free. It’s a perfectly fair trade. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that we’re cheap at the price.’
Whenever we came into a town we would duly scout around for a suitable street corner – ‘It needs to be busy,’ explained Walter, ‘but not so busy that you get lost in the crowd’ – and, having found one, would get down to business. A handwritten placard declaring ‘Wounded in Action: Please Help’, would be placed on the pavement, and my companion and I would then position ourselves to either side of it, me in such a way as to make it look as if I only had one leg, and Walter with his arms hidden inside his coat to give the impression they’d both been amputated. The public responded magnificently, especially when one of us managed to summon up a few tears, and the length and breadth of Britain the pennies came pouring in.
‘It warms your heart to see such generosity,’ Walter enthused after one particularly successful fundraising afternoon. ‘The lamp of goodness burns bright in Doncaster.’
Anything we couldn’t afford through fundraising we simply procured through what Walter, with another of his handy euphemisms, described as ‘liberating’ (i.e. theft).
I was introduced to ‘liberating’ on only my second day as a tramp. We were walking down a footpath, Walter ahead, me tagging along behind, when he suddenly turned and announced: ‘You need new clothes.’
It was a fair point. Whilst red satin trousers and a cheesecloth shirt might have been suitable for my previous life, vagrancy required an altogether different uniform.
‘You’re probably right,’ I replied. ‘The problem is, I can’t afford any new clothes. What little money I had was spent on currant buns.’
‘“Afford” is a word I refuse to acknowledge,’ chimed Walter, ignoring my barbed reference to tea-cakes. ‘“Afford” is an anachronism. There’s no “afford” about it. We must do some liberating.’
The rest of the afternoon was duly spent lurking at the bottom of a variety of suburban gardens, sallying forth when the coast was clear to pilfer things from washing lines. In this way I accrued a pair of thick corduroy trousers, two pairs of socks, a polo-neck sweater and a rather nice silk tie which I was able to wear as a headband. In a musty potting shed we found a large grey overcoat and a pair o
f sturdy, if rather large, wellington boots and, with the unravelling mittens we discovered in a dustbin behind a fishmonger’s shop, my outfit was complete.
‘Now you look like something proper,’ declared Walter, not without a hint of paternal pride. ‘A warrior in the cause of freedom.’
The sole reminders of my past existence were The Photo, which I kept in an inside pocket of my new coat, and, of course, The Pill. The latter remained about my neck in its fake-gold locket for several weeks until the locket was pawned to raise funds for a bumper bag of Liquorice Allsorts, after which I secreted it beneath my armpit with a roll of liberated Sellotape.
As well as clothes and sticky tape, we also liberated, amongst other things, pork pies, Cornish pasties, sweets, biscuits, bottles of wine, pen-knives, loo rolls, cigarettes and even an entire mattress from a bedding showroom, although we were forced to abandon it the next day because it was too heavy for us to carry.
‘Weighs us down,’ said Walter ruefully as we dumped our prize over the edge of a quarry. ‘In this life mobility is all.’
Liberating was, of course, illegal, although not, I would like to think, wholly immoral. Walter was very specific about this.
‘We are not so much taking,’ he opined, ‘as exchanging. It’s really a form of trade, the only difference being that our fellow traders don’t have much say in the matter.’
To this end he insisted that, whenever we liberated something, we left something else in its place. The family who lost their corduroy trousers, socks and polo-neck sweater thus returned home to find themselves the proud possessors of three conkers and a half-eaten sandwich, whilst the wellington boots and overcoat we took from the mouldy potting shed were replaced with a live hedgehog and a bag of stones.
‘I reckon that in many ways they come out of the deal better than we do,’ opined Walter. ‘Some of those stones could be really valuable.’
Although ‘fundraising’ and ‘liberating’ more than provided for most of our basic needs, tramping was still a tough, cold, uncomfortable life and would most probably have been an intolerable one too had it not been for one significant diversion – booze.
I have always been a drinker. During my half-decade with Walter, however, I became a real drinker. And by that I mean a real drinker. From day one I boozed deeply and indiscriminately, gulping down anything and everything I could lay my hands on. Wine and cider were my staples, but I was just as happy with beer, whisky, vodka, gin, schnapps, brandy, crème de menthe, avocat, cherry liqueur, Drambuie, Babycham and just about any alcoholic beverage you might care to mention, as well as several non-alcoholic ones such as lighter fuel, car de-icer, washing-up liquid and Baby Bio.
It was, of course, an extremely unhealthy way of going about things – car de-icer doesn’t half give you a hangover – and once I parted from Walter I reformed my ways immediately. At the time, however, inebriation on that scale, and of that intensity, was quite essential to the lives we led. Without it we could never have stood the freezing winter nights spent sleeping in dank doorways and the backs of derelict cars. Nor put up with the fleas, and the worms, and the damp, and the insults, and the vile, hideous, all-pervasive stench of ourselves. And, of course, most importantly, The World Freedom League would not have been half so active had its duet of members not been so relentlessly and permanently sozzled. Next time you turn your nose up at a drunken vagrant, just remember – he might be fighting for your soul.
The origins of The World Freedom League are shrouded in mystery. Walter claimed it was at least 3,000 years old, and that he was merely the latest in a long line of members. When I pressed him on how he had been recruited, however, he became rather vague, and I suspect the organization was not quite as ancient as he would have had me believe.
Although he never actually said as much – and I certainly didn’t confront him with my suspicions – I believe the League actually originated in the early Sixties, when Walter himself had first descended on to the streets.
My companion never said much about how or why or when he had become a vagrant, and I didn’t push him, for the subject was clearly a source of some considerable pain. So far as I could glean from various hints and drunken asides, however, he originally hailed from Oxford, where he had owned a small antiquarian bookshop and enjoyed a perfectly normal, rather boring middle-class existence until his wife had suddenly upped sticks one day and run off with the milkman (hence, perhaps, his injunction to avoid dairy products, Rule Four of the ‘How to Stay One Step Ahead’ manual). After that things had fallen apart somewhat, and after a brief spell in a secure psychiatric unit – the origin, perhaps, of his conviction that some malevolent force is keeping a watchful eye on us – he had embarked on the way of life I’ve outlined above, The World Freedom League, I suspect, coming into being at much the same time.
Whatever its genesis and underlying motivations, the League was, by the time I joined, a firm and operational reality. Walter claimed it was an international organization, with agents as far afield as Siberia and Patagonia, although I personally saw no concrete evidence to support this assertion.
‘Are you in contact with any other fighters, Walter?’ I once asked.
‘Let’s just say there are channels,’ he replied with a knowing wink. ‘But at this stage the less you know the better.’
Since I never actually progressed beyond ‘this stage’ I can neither confirm nor deny reports of an active, pan-global revolutionary organization. Walter seemed to believe it existed, and that, frankly, was all that mattered.
The actual creed of the movement was a confusing rattlebag of not entirely complementary philosophies. Marxism, socialism, anarchism, communism, pacifism, Platonism, Sophism, Catharism, Buddhism, Sufism, obscurantism, reformism and Republicanism all got a look in, melded together with a healthy measure of paranoia, alcoholism and outright insanity. A typical rallying speech by Walter would go something along the lines of:
‘The people must rise up and claim their rightful inheritance. With increased productivity and free hearing aids for all, we can break out of the abattoir of social debasement and pass through the eye of the needle to the 18 green and pleasant circles of paradise. Women’s rights! That’s the key! Liberate the woman, and you succour the child within,’ etc., etc., etc.
What any of this signified intellectually I haven’t the least idea, although it all seemed to make rather good sense after three bottles of crème de menthe and a half-pint of methylated spirits. What it signified practically was an endless succession of mini-assaults on anything that to Walter symbolized ‘the tyranny of the ruling class’.
Our targets were legion. Post boxes, town halls, banks, expensive houses, moderately expensive houses, war memorials, statues, museums, libraries and churches all came in for our subversive attentions. Indeed, any structure whatsoever which didn’t evince abject poverty and dilapidation – these being the province ‘of the downtrodden masses’ – was grist to our mill.
We never caused any really major damage; just enough, as Walter put it, ‘to let them know they can’t have it all their own way’. Thus we never planted any bombs, or started any fires, or in fact did anything to cause more than the most minor inconvenience. Considering the vehemence of Walter’s denunciations of the ruling class, this revolutionary sheepishness always rather surprised me, but my mentor saw no incongruity in such gentle acts of sabotage.
‘We are messengers, Raphael,’ he explained. ‘Not monsters.’
Our messages took a variety of forms. Sometimes it would be a brick through a window, sometimes a slogan graffitied on a wall – ‘Free the people!’ ‘We are not slaves!’ ‘Fuck off, Edward Heath!’ – sometimes a small heap of malodorous refuse pushed through a letterbox. If the manager of Barclays Bank in Halifax is still wondering how a pound of tripe found its way into the exhaust of his Morris Minor, I can now exclusively reveal that it was courtesy of The World Freedom League. Likewise, the gift-wrapped individual horse droppings secreted around the fur coat
department of Harrods; the pornographic magazines in Canterbury Cathedral; the egg attack on Preston Town Hall; and the stink bomb in the reference section of Weston-super-Mare Municipal Library. All the work of The World Freedom League, and all accompanied by a small scribbled note declaring: ‘WFL strikes again!’
Each attack would be minutely planned and carefully, if drunkenly, executed. We did at least one a day, sometimes two or three, and often attacked the same target more than once. Poor old Weston-super-Mare Municipal Library, hardly the most obvious symbol of social oppression, suffered three stink bombs, a urine-filled plastic bag and an unexplained spate of pig’s livers in the gardening section, all in the space of a couple of months. I suspect such treatment was actually down to the fact that they once refused to lend Walter their copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but I never said anything. Walter was very sensitive about his motives being questioned.
And so the years went by. We walked, we fundraised, we liberated, we battled the faceless forces of oppression. On and on, day after day, ceaselessly and without rest. And all the while as pissed as pissed can be.
Two years after entering The World Freedom League I discovered, quite by chance, that someone else had been arrested for Keith’s murder, thus negating my original motive for joining the organization. I didn’t leave, however. Quite the contrary – I remained with Walter for a further three whole years. Not because I particularly believed in what he stood for (I didn’t even understand what he stood for, so belief never really entered the equation). Nor because I especially relished the lifestyle to which he’d introduced me. No, I stuck with Walter because deep down I derived an immense and inexplicable degree of satisfaction from watching the Weston-super-Mare Municipal Librarian emerge from her book stacks struggling beneath the weight of a bulging, urine-filled plastic shopping bag. I loved planting dog turds in sweet shops, and spraying graffiti on front doors, and cutting the brake-cables on vicars’ bicycles. It appealed to my sense of mischief. It was fun.