I bought a reduced-to-clear sandwich and sat on a bench to eat. Beside me, a man ranted passionately at another, who sat meekly nodding and chuckling. I tuned in.
'People say Cockney rhyming slang is dead. But what they don't realise is that they're using it all the time. When you say "use your loaf", do you know where it comes from? It's cockney. Loaf of bread, so head. Or if they say "barnet" to mean their hair. Comes from Barnet Fair. There's loads of them. Me old China. China plate. A really interesting one is when people say "aris" to mean "arse". Most people think it's just because they sound similar, or that looks like how it's spelled. Actually, it's short for Aristotle, bottle, bottle and glass, arse. See? Funny, that one. Same as when you say someone's bottled it. It's got the same meaning, cos they've lost their bottle, their bottle and glass, their arse – they've shit themselves. Same thing. I love it all. Best one was one me dad used to say when it was a bright day. He'd say "the currant's in me mincers". Currant bun and mince pies. See? That's a different one, but all those others are slang, and everyone uses them now. But they come from Cockney slang. They come from London.'
I smiled when I remembered that here, in London, the favourite topic of conversation was always London itself.
7
I scurried out of Staines and back out beyond the M25 before night fell to sleep behind the cement wall of a hotel's car park. There, I spent most of the night trying to ignore what I would do the next night – over all this time living rough, I had still not slept on streets, but once I was firmly ensconced in London I would have no choice. There were no cliffs nor beaches, no farmer's fields, no woodlands nor safe towpath hedgerows in the capital.
Entering London, by whatever means, always produces a feeling, be it one of excitement or trepidation or fear or nostalgia or disillusionment. One senses that the rules change when you hit London, as does the smell.
One of the walker's joys of inner-M25 London is pavements, flat pavements. I could have followed the Thames path to my goal, but I was tired of nature's meandering trajectories. I wanted the Roman route: straight and direct, functional, mechanically unerring. London Road was flanked by a constant pavement, and I followed it to Kew, where I stopped in a greasy spoon for ham, egg and chips, a capital breakfast.
Over my meal, the creeping anticipation of the night ahead, my first night on the streets, began to loom and, once the last swig of tea joined the last chip on its plummet towards my stomach, it was all I could think of. All along London Road the temperature had steadily lowered, the sky grown relentlessly greyer and, as I returned to the Thames path at Kew, I realised the river had, too. It rained for the rest of the morning. I followed the long sheets of drizzle as they pushed east along the river.
If London started at Maidenhead, Central London started at Putney Bridge: red buses; mosaic underpasses; constant construction; hurried pedestrians and a congregation of cars; futuristic high-rises; Georgian terraces and bicycle racks; smokers under umbrellas; the inevitable, indefatigable tourists.
I began to notice less and less. Visions of a night rough in London clouded my eye-line.
At Chelsea, a line of houseboats – giants to their canal cousins – rested on the mudflats side by side. A common sign recurred amongst them: 'WE ARE A COMMUNITY. WE ARE NOT A COMMODITY.'
Where am I going to sleep tonight?
Beyond the houseboats: Albert Bridge, lathered in ship-shaped scaffolding.
Where?
Further still, on the north bank, across the river, Battersea Park, just another statue of Albert or Victoria, perhaps? I drew closer. It was not a statue, but a pagoda, within it the Buddha icon, as incongruous in London as I was.
I should go home.
A stern plaque on the last building before Vauxhall Bridge, presiding over a littered and dirty terrace: 'PRIVATE PROPERTY. IF ANYONE IS FOUND SLEEPING ON THESE PREMISES THE POLICE WILL HAVE YOU REMOVED FOR TRESPASSING.' The jarring conflict between third and second person.
This isn't fun any more. When was homelessness supposed to be fun?
The first of the skyline-icons: the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben.
This is it now. You're here. There's no turning back. You have to sleep here. On the streets. Unless…
An old man in his Sunday best walked along the low-tide beach, throwing stones at the wading seagulls.
Unless…
Unless I didn't sleep on the streets tonight. Just tonight. I had friends in Hackney happy enough and gregarious enough to offer me their couch, even if I turned up in the middle of the night with no prior warning. They were good like that, and they knew me well enough to not expect it as such, but to tolerate it when it happened. I would just spend one night, I reasoned, just enough to sleep well, wash once, and then be out again in the morning. London, for all I knew of it, and I knew it well, was too large and too anonymous to plunge straight into. I needed some time; time to gauge and assess. Though I had tramped now for well over a month, London was a different arena, and I had to prepare for it.
My resolution made, I tramped on, light again. Just one night, I told myself, already acknowledging it would doubtless be longer than that before I felt brave enough to join London's homeless community.
8
There were just 5 miles to go between me and London Bridge. I knew the distance because I consulted the Transport for London leaflet about the Thames path which I had picked up in the Kew cafe. Next to the map of the river I read: 'The vein of London life pumping liquid history through the heart of the Capital'. That sentence, coupled with the thought of a warm couch for the night, made me so happy that I underlined it twice and jotted down an exclamation mark at each end of the blue-drawn river. Five miles to go. Despite sore feet, my step quickened.
London, and especially this part of it, might be the most written-about city in the world. In response, I left my journal untouched in my knapsack and marched onwards.
I did, however, make one short note during those 5 miles. On the shelves of the South Bank's Foyles bookshop, where I stopped for a five-minute respite of browsing, I found a copy of my first book. I almost wept, for it had been a long time since I had seen it physically, tangibly, corporeally in a shop. Paul Theroux often wrote of discovering one of his travel books in a window display or nestled between the hands of a fellow train passenger. Sometimes, when this happened, he would reveal himself as the famous author. I considered a similar course of action in Foyles, chuckled at the thought of the blank, perhaps pitying, stares I would receive, and moved on.
With London Bridge came a surge of elation, and then a surge of exhaustion. I had no further to walk. Collapsing on the floor against the perspex sheet of a bus stop, I remembered why I had nominated this as my finishing post. A friend of mine had once cycled from Sydney to London, and he too had finished here. It took him two years, and he travelled over ten thousand miles. I had come 300 miles in less than two months, and the insignificance of my tiny tramp caused me to laugh aloud so hard it astonished me, but not the commuters around me. Perhaps if I had been dressed like them, they would have moved away. As it was, and as I looked, they remained indifferent. This made me laugh louder.
Nevertheless, there was fortuity here, for, once I calmed myself and rose to my feet, I remembered that I could hop a bendy-bus to my friends' house in Hackney for free from this very stop. Three years ago, I had done it all the time.
After half an hour, no bendy-buses had arrived or passed. This was unusual. I recalled they came every twenty minutes or so. I asked a fellow at the bus stop.
'The bendy-buses?' he snorted. 'Don't have 'em any more. Boris got rid of 'em. Brought the double-deckers back. Too many people taking the piss, riding the bendy-buses without paying.'
Rain began to fall so hard it gave me flashbacks of the night outside Hatherleigh. For the second time on the journey, I broke my rules and paid for a bus ticket to Hackney.
CHAPTER SIX
LONDON HOUSE
1
Ce
ntral heating. Walls. Books on the shelves and a sitcom on the television. A pasta dinner with meat and fresh vegetables, not a baked bean in sight. Conversation. Companionship.
Staying in this house was not cheating: I was not paying for the accommodation, and my friends would not have accepted my money even if I had offered it. I was to sleep on the couch, something that surely all tramps did when they could. It was, I reasoned, acceptable – even the Compass Centre in Bristol had seemed to allow this state of being as one of the permutations of homelessness. But I could not shake the feeling – as the aftertaste of beef and red wine mingled in my throat; as Marcus told me he was getting married; as the reminiscences of student-days mayhem echoed about the room in concert with our ringing laughter – that I was emotionally and tangibly at home.
'They burned a bus right there,' Marcus said, pointing out the living-room window to the Dalston street. The infamous riots which had spread across the country less than two months before were not born here, but Hackney looters were some of the first to jump on the fiery bandwagon.
'The day before I started my walk,' I said, 'I saw Kingsland Road mentioned in a paper.' Kingsland Road was only a few steps away.
'The Turks all lined up outside their shops with baseball bats,' Dave said. 'No one fucked with them.'
'On the second night we sat right here and watched them from the window, piling up rubbish and setting it alight.'
'I was actually pretty impressed with the police. They got a lot of flak for it, but I reckon they handled things well.'
'The best bit, I was watching these three kids standing on the sidelines, getting keyed up, about to join in. Then their big sister comes out. "What the fuck are you playing at? Get in, yer stupid bastards!" She cuffs them round the head and drags them off.'
'The thing about the police is that they were containing. Just standing there with shields keeping all the rioters in one place. They could have got in there, made a few arrests, but then the crowd would have broken up, dispersed and caused havoc all over. Then the police would have had to chase them individually, and that's when the really bad stuff happens, down an alleyway on their own with four rioters and no support.'
'It was good to see, the next morning, all those people taking to the streets with bin bags and gloves. Community clean-up operation.'
'The media didn't portray the police right. It wasn't fair.'
It had been the same all across the country: the police had been blamed universally. With Swiftian logic, David Cameron had utilised the poor press to justify the government's decision to continue with its cuts to the police force. It was all faintly ludicrous, like responding to a flu epidemic by shutting down hospitals.
In the short moments before I fell into a deep coma on my friends' couch that first night, I decided to visit Tottenham – the trigger for the UK riots – the next day. It seemed fitting. The riots had raged as I had begun my journey. Now I was at its finishing post, a visit to Tottenham seemed a logical denouement.
I also decided I would stay a few more nights.
2
Tottenham in the morning had the air of the developing world: the slapdash markets; the shuttered bars; the charred buildings like colonial ruins; the door-to-door independent stores; fresh fruit for sale on the street; boarded-up windows; demolition sites where one expected construction sites (this was London, after all); cracked windows held in place with cling film; flat roofs; the shady money-transfer bureaus.
One burned-out building, perhaps the famous one from the papers, was in the process of demolition. Inside the walled-off enclosure, the arm of a digger swung up and into view. A single wall still stood high: brickwork, blackened plaster. Its interior side was visible, along with an extant row of books lined along an intact shelf. The digger's arm swung, breaking the wall below sight, and the books tumbled into the pit.
Upon the enclosure's exterior, permanent-marker graffiti splashed across the whitewashed plywood:
Bringing unity back into the community
Put down the guns & knives and lets live nice!
Spurs win the League Tottenham will be a better place X
I did not know why I was there. My journey was not about riots, it was about the streets – granted, some of them streets upon which riots had taken place, but these Tottenham streets had long been abandoned. Packs of commuters huddled at bus stops, passed only by long lines of sealed cars. Even London's hardy cyclists seemed absent here. Men sat and glowered over their quiet market stalls, and when I entered the main road's shops the cashiers looked me up and down with evident surprise. I thought perhaps street life would be intensified in Tottenham, but I was wrong. If anything, it had been frightened, and the streets here were as quiet as Hatherleigh.
I walked back down Stoke Newington Road, aiming for Central London. I had an Oyster Card in my pocket: Marcus had lent it to me (he was always full of generosity, it helped him reconcile being a banker in the City), but my feet seemed to need the mileage, and I gladly gave it to them. Passing a shop with the proud sticker 'This is a PORN FREE newsagent' plastered across its window, I reflected on the dearth of homeless people I had seen since crossing the M25 ley-line.
Perhaps the single passage of Orwell which has remained in my memory more than any other – even over Room 101 rats and the animal revolution – comes from his own least favourite book, A Clergyman's Daughter. The protagonist, Dorothy, suffering from amnesia, is reduced to homelessness on the streets of Central London. Wandering along Waterloo Road late one night, she arrives at Trafalgar Square. Here she spends the next nine days and ten nights of her itinerant life, joining the group of homeless who congregate there after dark each night. The dozen or so individuals who form the group come from all walks of life, testament to Orwell's unerring notion that anyone, no matter from whence they came, under the right set of circumstances can find themselves homeless. Amongst the brigade are Deafie, who likes to sing; Mrs Bendigo, whose husband earns four pounds a week busking in Covent Garden while she has to do a 'starry' upon Trafalgar's flagstones; the educated and verbose Mr Tallboys, a defrocked priest; The Kike, whose favourite exclamation is 'Oh Je-e-eeeze!'; the indefatigable and inquisitive Charlie (always my favourite), who sings for money outside London pub doorways at Christmas; Florry, the crab-ridden prostitute; Daddy, the old-timer who has been on the road for fifty years; and of course Dorothy in the middle of them all, so cold and disoriented that she can barely remember if she has feet.
This merry and spirited band, bitter at their collective misfortune but still alive and clucking nonetheless, people the centrepiece-chapter of Orwell's novel. As I re-entered the realm of the Congestion Charge, Capital Central, I turned west and made my way towards Trafalgar Square, confident that I might find my own band and slip into their envelope as easily as Dorothy had with hers. I felt fortunate for the time on my hands. With the Dalston couch available to return to when I needed it, I could seek out companions and then join them, rather than slipping behind the first green bin I found and uneasily closing my eyes. It was another privilege I knew most tramps were not afforded, that to do this right I should march to Embankment or Blackfriars Bridge, wait until nightfall, and slap my sleeping bag down on the nearest patch of concrete.
But London's streets frightened me, and I felt the need to bide my time. As I learned later, such fear was justified.
3
I walked two laps around Trafalgar Square, checking each of the thousand or so pedestrians for any sign of vagrancy. There was none. I scanned the nooks about the National Gallery, the tiers at the base of Nelson's Column and the benches around the edge, sitting down on one myself for the next hour and timing it by the Olympic Countdown Clock, but all the people I passed and all the people who passed me were clearly not homeless. Perhaps I was here at the wrong time of day. Men in black and red jackets with officer's caps and epaulettes which read 'Heritage Warden' patrolled the square, changing direction randomly and at right angles like bluebottles. I wondered what ti
me they finished work. I should have to return after that. Clearly, no homeless stayed here while they were on duty.
I remembered someone. When I had last spent time in London, I had on occasion frequented a pub on Leicester Square. There, in the subterranean toilets next to the tiny park, an old tramp was always present, no matter what time or day. I walked towards it, finding when I arrived that almost all of Leicester Square had been cordoned off for construction work. The toilets were closed and inaccessible. What was going on in London, not just the Capital of England, but the Capital of the Homeless? Had some clandestine clean-up operation under that shock-blonde mayor 'disappeared' them all over the last few years? Had the scourge of the streets been wiped clean for the Olympics?
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