He was quiet for a moment, and I thought I had offended him. But then he laughed. 'Yeah! I did, didn't I? Guess they can't be so bad, after all!'
I felt guilty for my hectoring tone. It was a rare man who did not resort to obstinacy when his ideas were challenged, and I liked him for being that rare man.
'So what you written, then?' he asked. 'Anything I might have read?'
I told him.
'Never heard of you.'
It was my turn to laugh. 'Not many people have.'
'Are you gonna hitch another lift from Tiverton or start walking again?'
'I should walk,' I said. It had begun to rain again, his car was warm and dry, and I could have happily curled up in its back seat and been driven all the way to London.
'Where to?'
'Wellington. If I stick to the road I should make it there by this evening.'
'If you're going to Wellington, you can walk most of the way along the Grand Western Canal. It's much nicer. I'll drop you off at the start. It's on the way into town.'
As he pulled up to the car park, I felt grateful to him, for he had given me good advice and then gone out of his way so that I could take it. I thanked him as I climbed out.
'No problem,' he said. 'Good luck with your book. And don't end up selling The Big Issue in London. I don't want to hear that you've been going up there, stealing their jobs.'
7
The so-called starting point of the Grand Western Canal was filled with boats and tourists. Swans hissed at curious dogs that rushed too close to the cygnets, and their owners laughed: 'He just got told where to go.' Young families picnicked by the brown water and barges carried old couples in raincoats up and down the canal.
I walked east, pleased with the recommendation of this flat, gentle towpath. The boats decreased in number as the canal thinned, and for long miles I was alone tramping through quiet woodlands, the water at my side stagnant and topped with a foam of algae. I stopped for lunch – a Cup-a-Soup boiled in my mess tin and eaten with a spoon – in a clearing. The sun was at its peak overhead in a cloudless sky and I unfurled my sleeping bag on the towpath. It dried in minutes.
The plaques and leaflets in the unmanned Grand Western Canal Information Office had hinted that I could follow the canal all the way to Bridgwater, and I fancied that perhaps I should. But when I came out on the road at the small village of Holcombe Rogus to cross the Waytown Tunnel, I saw a sign for Wellington and remembered why I had wanted to stop there for the night.
My wife and I had once lived in Wellington and been bored there for over a year. I knew of a spot which would be perfect to spend the night, where it was safe and, most importantly, sheltered. With the memory of the previous night's misery resonating in my fatigued thighs, I left the canal and walked the
5 miles along a busy dual carriageway to the town, entering at the suburb of Rockwell Green with its Italianate water tower, where I had once driven past a man at midday lying in an unnatural position on a grass verge. I had stopped to ask if he was all right, and he had opened one eye and said, 'I am sleeping.'
I did not stop in Wellington, though I took a short detour to pass my old house, as one must, before making my way on to the road to the Wellington Monument. This 175-foot, 120-year-old plinth stands on the Blackdown Hills, leering down at the M5 motorway and, beyond it, the Vale of Taunton. Walking up the road which scaled the hill, a sign informed me that this was a 20 per cent gradient. After the Cornish coast path, I gloated at its easiness.
It used to be that you could sit with your back against the monument and admire the panorama, but when I arrived the stone had been fenced off with chicken wire, and the few gaps in the overgrown foliage offered measly vistas. Somewhere out there, not far to the west, was the Devon-Somerset border, which I must have crossed on the towpath, though no sign had marked it.
I had walked up here for what lay behind the monument: a stretch of navigable woodland with scores of places to unroll a sleeping bag beneath the cover of a domineering oak tree. It had those three things I had come to learn the tramp needs at night: safety, quiet and shelter. Sometimes older teenagers would drive up here for late-night sessions of drinking, smoking or shagging, or a combination of all three, but they rarely ventured from the seclusion of the monument. I knew I had a good spot here, and I was right, for I had the best night's sleep so far on the journey, woken only once when a rainstorm crashed into the tops of the trees above. I sat up and felt my sleeping bag and the ground. Both were dry. I fell back to sleep, smug.
8
Invigorated from my night in the woods, I set off before sunrise. I intended to get to Portishead, a fair distance, by the end of the day, for a bed waited there, and I could think of nothing more appealing. Walking back down the hill and through Wellington, I fell into step with three men from Lithuania on their way to work.
'What do you do?' I asked.
'We pick,' one replied.
'What do you pick?'
'Everything.'
The road from Wellington to Taunton was bordered by a pavement, which was fortunate, for I entered the latter with the morning rush-hour traffic and would have been terrified if I had been forced to step along the edge of the teeming road. At Taunton, I descended on to the Taunton-Bridgwater Canal: 15 miles of rabbits, faraway deer, motionless herons, and low, moss-covered bridges. Principally, it was duckland: hundreds of the birds swam back and forth and shrieked their laughing cackles. On the far side, the occasional head of a cat appeared slowly through the stems of corn, eyed the ducks and their safety in numbers, noted me, and then disappeared again.
The roar of the motorway was always near, and I walked under it more than once. Every half hour or so, I passed the carcass of a bird floating in the water. Each a different size and colour, they were all so brutally mangled as to render their species indistinguishable. I could not comprehend what had done this – perhaps a large pike patrolled these waters. Surely they had not been hit by the slow barges, becoming cousins to the gruesome roadkill I had seen throughout Devon. It began to rain, and large red puddles swelled along the path.
At Bridgwater I rose up through the town and walked to the motorway service station, where I stood at the exit with my thumb out. It was getting late and Portishead was too far away to make on foot by the end of the day. There were plenty of places to sleep around here, but I was determined to reach that bed.
'Where are you going, pal?' a white-van-man who called himself Milesy asked out of his window. I had let him ask first: I had an answer this time.
'Portishead.'
Milesy shook his head. 'I'm only going as far as Weston.'
'That'll do,' I said, and got in.
We came on to the M5 motorway directly into stationary traffic.
'You should have carried on walking, pal,' Milesy sighed.
At Weston-super-Mare I rejoined the coast path, walking over the hill to Sand Bay and then pushing on towards Clevedon. The sun was setting, and the lights of Cardiff and Newport began to twinkle across the Bristol Channel. An awkward farm protruded out, slicing through the path towards the impassable rocks, 'DO NOT ENTER' signs on its decaying fences. Grumbling and footsore, I took the long detour around it and back on to the path. From there, I knew it would take me all the way to Portishead and my friend's house, but I still had over an hour to go, the darkness was steadily building, and the path was overgrown so that the wet foliage brushing my boots with each step had finally permeated the waterproofing, and my feet were sodden. I strapped my miner's torch to my head and strode on.
It was ten o'clock by the time I reached the house. A large glass of wine was poured, and I fell asleep on the couch before touching it.
CHAPTER FOUR
BRISTOL STREETS
1
I spent the next two days housebound: sleeping and overeating and taking a bath a day with burgeoning agoraphobia. Portishead was another place I had lived for a few years, the familiarity bred comfort, and it was exactly wh
at I needed. The rough sleeping thus far had been uncomfortable and it had been cold, but never had it been frightening. It would be soon, I knew. The tramp will spend nights in fields and dunes, on the fringes and in solitude, but he will also spend them on streets, inside the city walls and surrounded by peers. It was such peers who scared me the most. What would they make of me? What would they take?
On my final day, it occurred to me that I needed more money to see me through the rest of the journey to London. My original fifty pounds had dwindled with surprising rapidity – what had I used it for other than beans, bread, tea and water? – and, though there was still a full hundred sewn into my jacket, that was for emergencies, and I did not want to touch it. I walked to Portishead's branch of my bank.
It was an uncertain enterprise. I did not have my bank card. The cashier stared at me in disdain as I explained myself to her. I wished I had borrowed some of my friend's clothes. I wished I looked more respectable.
'Do you have any other ID?' she asked.
'No,' I said. 'But I know my sort code, my account number and any personal details you might need.'
Her fingers tapped across the keyboard between us, then moved to pluck a leaf of paper from its holder and pass it under the partition. 'Before we do anything, I need to see if your signature matches what we've got.'
I signed the paper and handed it back to her. She tapped at the keyboard again, read from the screen, tapped some more, and overall appeared very anxious. Two long minutes passed. The queue behind me was beginning to grow, and I could sense rising tempers, bored frustration.
'How long do you think…'
I was interrupted by a suited man who had appeared at my side without my noticing. 'Could you come with me, please, Mr Carroll?'
I looked back to the cashier, her anxiety melting into relief. 'Of course,' I said, and followed him through swing doors to a small alcove of an office in the rear of the building. As we sat opposite each other, he stared hard at me like a television detective, and I found it difficult to resist laughter.
'Why exactly do you not have your bank card with you, Mr Carroll?' he asked after a lengthy silence.
'I don't carry it everywhere,' I said.
'And what exactly do you need money for?'
'That's a very personal question,' I replied. 'One which I'm not going to answer.'
'You must understand that we rarely have customers entering the bank requesting money with absolutely no identification on them.'
I was growing tired of this faux interrogation from this overblown shopkeeper, who was perhaps at this moment imagining himself in a courtroom or holding-cell. My friend would lend me some money, I thought. 'I understand if you can't give me any money,' I said. 'But all you have to say is "no".'
'What's your full name?'
I told him.
'Your address with postcode?'
I told him.
'Your previous address with postcode?'
I told him.
'The address of your local branch? Your account number? Your sort code? Your three most recent purchases? How many direct debits do you have? How much do you pay for your mobile phone? How many credit cards do you have with us? What was the last deposit made in your account?'
I gave the correct answer to each until, exasperated, he finally said: 'All right. How much do you want?'
'Fifty pounds.'
'Fifty pounds?' His tone implied the question, is that it?
He left the office, returning moments later with my cash. I took it and stood up to leave. He looked baffled. I opened the door.
'Are you a mystery shopper?' he suddenly called out from behind me. 'Because if you are, you have to tell me.'
2
I left Portishead before dawn. I needed to get to Bristol by midday and spend the afternoon searching for an area where I could weather my first night on the streets with a small semblance of security. I knew the city well, but I knew it as a shopper or drinker, a day tripper: the homeless underbelly of Bristol was as alien to me as Tokyo, and I would have to learn it. Sadly, there was no guidebook for that.
A cycle-path took me from Portishead through the Gordano Valley and then alongside the Avon at Pill. I followed the river's low-tide sludge through woodland, along the base of the gorge and then beneath Brunel's suspension bridge. Dark, urban lanes criss-crossed out beneath the dual carriageway, swinging between abandoned warehouses with boarded-up windows and graffiti from 1983. Inexplicably, a pristine pop-up tent had been pitched beside the cycle-path which bordered this grimy hinterland. It must have been a cyclist's or hiker's – tramps and homeless did not have tents, I thought, and the kind of people who would frequent this place late at night did not camp. Little did I know that, not much later, I would find myself living in a tented community with other homeless upon London's streets.
My plan was to speak to any rough sleepers I could meet in Bristol and find out from them where I should sleep. Doubtless, there were unwritten rules I should be unaware of, and what I really wanted to know was where I should avoid. Perhaps there were areas where arrest was inevitable (on any private property), areas where kicks and taunts from passing locals were likely (outside any pub), or areas where the homeless themselves were the biggest threat. I was never so naive as to believe that all rough sleepers would welcome my attention or my presence – I knew that some were as volatile as fire, and a danger more to each other than to anyone else. Nevertheless, I hoped one or two might offer some advice. The homeless do not sleep down back alleyways in ten-strong cuddle-puddles like a litter of puppies, I was not going to be invited over to the nearest mattress, but they were still human, and I hoped the urge to help would shine through.
But Bristol, at first glance, seemed devoid of any kind of homeless life or activity. I checked my watch. It was not yet noon. Perhaps it's too early, I thought, then realised the absurdity of such an idea. The homeless didn't come out at a certain time of day. They were always out.
Crossing College Green, passing the Hippodrome and winding through the foamy water-features of Broad Quay, I came across no conspicuous rough sleepers. Passing me were throngs of university students; sitting on the benches were doting parents who watched their children splash in the jets and fountains; and walking towards me as I moved up Corn Street, of course, was a charity-hawker.
'Hello, Sir!' she beamed. 'You got a minute? I'm Nicky.'
'I don't think I can help you,' I replied. 'I don't have an address.'
Nicky smiled at me for a few moments more and, with cheerful thoughtlessness, said: 'But you're too clean to be a homeless.' The second the last syllable passed her lips, her eyebrows leapt up her forehead, her chin plummeted in the opposite direction, and her free hand clapped violently over her slack and hanging mouth. 'Oh my God,' she muttered between her fingers, 'I'm so sorry. I just… oh my God…' Locking her gaze on the ground, she hurried away.
At the top of the street I was accosted by another hawker. I stopped him before he could begin his pitch. 'I've already spoken to Nicky. Tell her I'm sorry I couldn't give her any money. At least I gave her an anecdote.'
The long shopping thoroughfare of Broadmead was similarly free of beggars, loiterers or street-drunks, and I began to despair that I would find no one to ask for advice. Contemplating the walk back to Portishead, I continued to trawl the streets, and finally found Sue selling The Big Issue near the university.
Sue was approaching middle age but already looked like a pensioner. She stood with a hunched stoop, giving the impression that her shoulders had set like plaster, and one of her legs shook with a faint but perceptible tremor. Though the sun was bright and reaching its peak, Sue wore the hood of her red vendor-jacket pulled in tight so no hair or neck was visible, only the poked-out extremities of her bird-like face. But it was a face which never stopped smiling, which spoke only happy words, and which laughed as a punctuation marker every few seconds: a face I found lovely.
There was a two-pound coin in my wallet and
I bought a copy of The Big Issue. Sue thanked me profusely in her round, rolling Bristolian accent, and we fell to talking. I asked how long she had been homeless.
'Oh, years, my love, years. But technically, I'm not actually homeless any more. Haven't slept rough for nearly seven months now.' She announced the last sentence with undisguised pride. 'Nope, I been living in this flat looking after this bloke – lovely guy, he is. He retired a few years ago, and he's got some kidney problems, so what I do is I cook for him and clean the flat and do all the shopping, and he lets me live there for nothing.'
I pointed at the magazine in my hand. 'Are you still allowed to sell this if you've got a place?'
She giggled. 'I know, bit cheeky, innit? But, nah, it's all right, I've cleared it. See, I've got a place but I ain't got no money, so I need to keep selling this for just a little longer until I gets a job. But that'll be coming soon, too. I've got me place, I'm sorting things out with me husband – next stop, a job. Can't bloody wait. Life is good.'
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