Soon after that, I returned to England and got a job, and my time on the streets dwindled.
4
Putting myself back on the streets would be an act of decisive will; one which, I knew, few others who slept rough had the luxury of. Reading books, articles and web pages on homelessness before I embarked on my journey, it became clear that, for most, that first drop, the initial slip into homelessness, is rarely purposeful. Often, it comes from something uncontrollable: trauma, an accident, job loss, debt, addiction. Nobody chooses to be homeless, but some people do choose to be houseless. In the long history of English popular culture, such people have been called tramps.
'Tramp' is a debatable term and, as we push deeper into the twenty-first century, it has grown increasingly pejorative. The public consciousness of anyone nomadic and unsettled has become peppered with distrust and scorn. The word 'gypsy' used to be double-edged: for some, it depicted baby-snatchers, thieves and tinkers, the source of the local curse which had caused last year's harvest to fail miserably; but for others a gypsy was the harmless itinerant in his ornate walnut-shell caravan, who tourists photographed and locals donated food to – Danny the Champion of the World. Now, it means only 'pikey'; it means hostility, illegal camping and shock-reality TV programmes, all colluding to paint the word 'gypsy' black and the word 'traveller' – once so harmless – even blacker.
'Tramp' has similar twenty-first-century connotations, and its etymological root, the verb 'to tramp', is now all but obsolete in favour of the downbeat noun. Yet tramps, like gypsies, also have a legitimate, and sometimes ameliorative, history. For many years, tramping was a lifestyle and, often, a purposeful one. From the Elizabethan to the Victorian ages, to go 'on the tramp' would be to use well-known paths and networks to travel from town to town in search of casual work. It was viable, it could even be respectable, and there was something exclusively English about it. The Americans have their bums and hobos romanticised by Kerouac and his Beats, with their bindles and brown paper bags, hopping between railroads and park benches; the Indians their ascetic sadhus with their ochre body paints and yogic incantations; the Germans and French their journeyman carpenters and smiths who completed their apprenticeships and became masters of their trade by wandering between villages and refining their crafts in workshops across the country; but the tramp with his long coat, his worn shoes, his beard, his tea and tobacco – he is necessarily English, as much a part of our island-culture and our definition of self as red postboxes, subtle irony and rain.
For some, the age-old urge to roam – to be nomadic – is deep, while in others it is non-existent. When my first book – On the Edge, about a previous journey of mine through England – was published, I received an email from a man who had been my best friend when I was eight years old, and who I had not heard from in over a decade. 'My wife bought me your book for Christmas,' he wrote. 'I recognised you in it instantly. I remember you once telling us you had cycled to the Tesco in Truro. That seemed to me a world away.'
He now lives less than a mile from the house he grew up in.
Another friend, as I was leaving to travel for the first time at the age of eighteen, asked me: 'Why are you going travelling? What else do you need?'
He still lives in his parents' house.
Where I come from, few people leave. When I did, some considered it traitorous.
Others, however, those who knew me best, saw it was inevitable. My heroes were Laurie Lee, Heinrich Harrer, Jack Kerouac, George Orwell, Bruce Chatwin, and I was youthful and fanciful and silly enough to see the romance of nomadism, the liberation of solo travel. Perhaps if I had been born a hundred years before, I would have been a tramp. Then, the stigma was milder.
But there are few tramps these days. It is wrong to think that they have evolved into the homeless. There has always been a homeless population in Britain, just as there has always been poverty, deprivation and ruin in Britain. Tramps have instead been translated. They are today's backpackers and travellers, temporary tramps, for whom nomadism is an itch scratched in youth. A tiny minority leave home and then never return, bouncing around the globe between Peru, Thailand, Kenya and Greece until only the calcification of old age can halt their movement. But most come back, come back home, where the itch either heals or is repressed, surfacing at those times when nostalgic rumination allows it.
Orwell would have disagreed with me. The tramps he knew did not move because they were in essence nomadic; they moved because they had to, for the spikes in which they slept each night would not accommodate them more than once a month. Tramps tramped because there was nothing else they could do. And, as for deliberately taking to the road, Orwell could not even conceive of this – no Englishman, he believed, would embrace poverty on purpose. Tramps did not choose unemployment: they either could not find work, or had to tramp elsewhere to get it.
The admiration I have for George Orwell is both deep and unyielding, yet I cannot help but find his naivety here as blinding as it is uncharacteristic of a man usually so perceptive. Of course there are those who choose not to work – we have the expressions 'dossers', 'slackers' and 'benefits cheats' for a reason. I met plenty on the streets who claimed their avoidance of work came from an abhorrence of 'the system', the 'rat race', 'convention', but these were just excuses. Many of the rough sleepers I met on my journey were troubled people in need, but there were also a few who did not mind the discomfort and the squalor so long as they got to do whatever they liked all day.
Orwell called this idea of choosing-to-tramp an atavism, the re-emergence of a nomadism which he thought of as primitive and pejorative. But nomadism is neither of these. It continues to exist across the world, and nomadic cultures can be just as civilised as their settled cousins. We often have nomads to thank for the great leaps in human history: nomads discovered the importance of crop rotation long before settlers did; the nomadic Huns instigated the fall of the Roman Empire; nomads struck out and discovered the world – for were not Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, and the pioneers and cowboys of the Wild West nomads in their own right?
There has always been, among certain folk in every country, a choice to roam. In England, those who make that choice often become tramps. And Orwell should have been more careful when he disparaged the idea, for – with all the help that he could ever need from his rich family just a telegram away – he too made his own choice to tramp.
It was a choice I decided to make myself.
5
Plenty had travelled through England and written about it. But this was not so much a journey through a country as a journey through a lifestyle. I would, I decided, walk through England, and I would walk as a tramp.
I forced myself to minimise on everything I would take. My two sets of clothes were charity-shop bought, as was the shabby knapsack they were stuffed into, alongside a pound-shop penknife, bin-bag raincoat and two tatty paperbacks: Penguin Popular Classic editions of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. I looked, by all outward appearances, a tramp, though some things gave me away. My boots were good. My tiny camping stove, a plastic spork, a few tins of beans and sausages and my warm sleeping bag were all items I perhaps should have discarded, but they were minimal luxuries I felt I could not do without on the long walk I planned.
What also gave me away, behind my patchy beard and beneath my stained cap, was my voice: a voice honed over the years as an English schoolteacher. Orwell had the same problem when he went down and out in Paris and London: when he first took to the streets in the latter city, he dared not speak for the first night, for fear others would notice the juxtaposition of his soiled and grubby clothes with his public-school, imperialist voice.
As aforementioned, the seed of this book began with Orwell, and early treatments of the idea revolved around a kind of Down and Out in the Twenty-first Century. But I did not want to merely follow in Orwell's footsteps about the spikes of London and kitchens of Paris. I wanted his immersive investigation, but I fancied marr
ying it with a nice long walk.
And so I became a tramp. I would travel like one (on foot), sleep like one (rough), and live like one (all possessions portable). No mobile phone, no laptop, no bank cards; a wallet with fifty pounds to spend on food so that I would not have to rely on begging (though I will admit I sewed an emergency hundred pounds into the lining of my shoddy jacket), a cheap digital watch, a toothbrush, fingerless gloves. Everything I carried was expendable. Only two matters remained: the route and the rules by which to travel it.
I would start, I decided, at my own Cornish front door. From there, the rest of the country lay in the same direction: north. Scottish John O'Groats was a tempting finale, but scores of thousands had done that before. If I were a tramp, I thought, eager to leave Cornwall, where would I go? The answer came immediately. I would go to London. London. Where the streets were paved with gold. I could be bloody Dick Whittington: bindle on a stick; mangy cat at my heels.
I scanned maps and saw a likely route. If I began on the coast, I could walk it all the way to Bristol, then forge a line east to the capital. I called a friend who lived in Portishead – on the coast, a few miles outside of Bristol – and asked if he might let me sleep on his couch for a night or two. It would be a welcome halfway pit stop.
'You make it this far on foot,' he replied, 'and you can sell my couch.'
Was sleeping on a couch cheating? I wondered as I put the phone down. Of course it wasn't. Tramps lived by
whatever means they could. Would a tramp turn down shelter for the night if it was offered? Would a tramp ignore a free lift?
I decided on two simple rules for my journey: rules which, I supposed, all tramps lived by out of necessity – I would not pay for transport, but I would take it if it came free; I would not pay for accommodation, but nor would I dismiss an available and cost-free bed or couch – and I would live by those two rules as I tramped from Cornwall to London. This was choice.
CHAPTER TWO
CORNISH COAST
1
I had liked the alliteration of tramping from Land's End to London, but all reasons for starting at the former were arbitrary. I had been to Land's End on a score of school trips, first as a child and then as a teacher, and it held no symbolism for me. I knew all too well its faux pirate ship, its smuggling stories, its signpost which cost money to stand under. And I had a notion that I might have to pay an entrance fee just to get to that arbitrary starting point. Sennen Cove was but a few miles from Land's End, and it was far prettier. I stopped for the night at my mother's on the way.
'You've always been like this, you know,' she said over a jacket potato dinner.
'Like what?'
'Disappearing off on your little missions.'
'It's wanderlust. I like it. It's made my life interesting.'
'Even when you were a kid. I used to try everything to keep you from wandering off from the house and getting lost, all manner of locks and bolts, but you always escaped somehow.'
I recalled, at the age of seven, a habit I developed of getting up early in the morning, sneaking out of the house while everyone else slept, letting myself into our neighbour's house (with the spare key we kept in case of emergency), creeping past the mother's and the sister's bedrooms to wake my friend, and then walking with him around our little village while it was still dark. I used to say I liked the smell of the village in those hours, though I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.
'No, you were doing it long before that,' my mother corrected me. 'It was worst while we were still in Manchester.'
My family had moved from Manchester to Cornwall when I was three.
'Exactly! Just a little toddler, and you kept bloody escaping! It used to drive me crazy. It was especially worrying there because our neighbour was a wanker.'
My mother is the only person I know who uses that word in its most literal sense. Our next-door neighbour had a record of exposing himself and masturbating in public.
'That's one of the reasons we got a dog after we moved to Cornwall. I thought, at least if he wanders off the dog will follow him and look after him. And he did, as well. Good as gold, he was. Once, about ten or fifteen of us went down to Wheal Jane and you disappeared again, and all of us split up to look for you. It took us an hour, but when we did, we found you sat under a bush playing with your fingers, and Oscar sat in front guarding you. The amount of times you nearly gave me a heart attack. I used to think there was something wrong with you.' She eyed my knapsack and patchy beard. 'Sometimes, I still do.'
2
It had rained for the last three weeks: a grim and miserable wash. England could be so beautiful, but it could sometimes seem the greyest place in all the northern hemisphere. As I walked through Sennen, palm trees drooped under the early-morning clouds and, down at the beach, the tourists were already out, fully clothed and squatting behind their windbreaks, their foam surfboards anchored into the sand. At the far end of Sennen Cove, a small path led up towards the cliffs. This was the South West Coastal Path, marked with the British walking autograph: the white acorn. I followed its arrow, the first of many, beneath the granite stacks which leered over the trail, ecstatic to be on my way.
The weather seemed to meet my euphoria, for within an hour the sun came out and, to my astonishment, stayed for most of my time in Cornwall. The waters which lapped at the fringe of the coast, the coves and lagoons, turned turquoise. Purple heather and yellow gorse sealed the gentle slopes down, and buzzards circled beneath my feet, bleating their signature three staccato, piercing shrieks. This aesthetic advantage was one of my reasons for beginning the tramp here, but the north coast of Cornwall also gave me time to find my feet. The whole distance was scored by a National Trust footpath; wild sleeping was easy and safe.
A group of two women and two children sunbathed on rocks jutting out from the path. They saw me as I rounded a headland. Though I was far away, I could tell from their swivelled heads that their eyes were following me as I approached. When it was clear I was going to reach them, they stood up to leave, gathering their belongings in their arms. I knew what I looked like: a tramp, it was purposeful. I was still clean and I did not yet smell, but the power of one's clothes is robust. Orwell noted that, when he first wore tramp's clothes, he felt like they thrust him into a different world, one where women shudder, men scoff, and other street-fellows start to call you 'mate'. He compared the sudden plunge into shame to a first night in prison.
Today, in the cities, tramp's clothes are like magic: they make you invisible. To all, that is, except those others dressed like you. They notice you – they nod, they smile, they do not ask for spare change or offer a copy of The Big Issue, and you begin to realise that, in fact, they had always noticed you. But, until now, they had been invisible to you. In the countryside, it is different. Tramps are not found there any more. Anyone dressed like a tramp in the countryside must be, categorically, a 'weirdo'.
As we crossed paths, the two children and the first woman kept their eyes fastened to the ground. The second stared coolly at me.
'Is this the right path to Cape Cornwall?' I asked. There was another below.
'Yes, it is,' she replied, her sudden relief apparent.
I was soon to learn that, while my clothes had power, so too did my accent.
Sennen Cove stayed present and visible behind me from every headland I circumnavigated. After two hours, I reached Cape Cornwall and, as I turned my first corner, Sennen disappeared for the last time. The environment seemed to change, too – the wind rose; turquoise lagoons turned to blue surf; engine houses rode the cliffs' peaks while ventilation shafts poked out on to the footpath, eerie and black as death. I was no longer walking north, but east.
Beyond the Pendeen Watch lighthouse, I crossed the waterfall at Portheras beach and then ascended a killing climb. It was late morning, the sun was ferocious, and I was exhausted already. I needed a break. An old German gentleman who spoke with a Scottish accent hovered at the turn-off to Morvah.
'Do you know how far it is to Morvah?' I asked.
'Only five minutes. Where have you walked from?'
'Today, Sennen.'
'Yes, me too. Have you seen any beaches near here?'
'There's one back over that headland,' I said, pointing behind me at Portheras.
'No!' he snapped. 'I do not mean Pendeen!'
'Sorry.'
'They say Morvah beach is the best beach on the coast. But they will not tell me where it is. It is a well-kept secret. No matter. I will find it.' He widened his eyes and grinned a manic leer with the last sentence.
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