No Fixed Abode

by Charlie Carroll

  When you spend time on the streets, you learn how terrifying other people can be. Whether in cars or on foot, whether they were my neighbours or passers-by, the sheer volume of people had been inescapable. How long must it take a tramp to get used to footsteps? How low does one have to get before one's worries of violence are finally replaced by indifference? If I really wanted to become a tramp I would have to get there, to that place where one can curl up anywhere in the world in any weather and relinquish consciousness. To reach such a state would take years, I supposed, perhaps decades. It requires a dedication I do not have; a dedication most rough sleepers only discover out of needful obligation. For all my posturing, for all my immersion and deprivation, I never truly became a tramp. I just bit at the heels of the lifestyle. Even when I was most down and out, I always had something others did not: I had a home, and it was ready for my return whenever I felt the need.

  My final night in Tent City triggered that need. I was tired, I stank, I hated my two T-shirts, despised the weight of my knapsack, and my beard looked more ridiculous than ever. I disembarked the bus at Victoria Station and sat on a bench, munching on a cereal bar and holding on to the peak of my cap with my other hand lest the heightening wind rip it from my head. I had started this journey with a question: what was it like to be a tramp in the twenty-first century? There, on that bench, the answer resounded in a few simple words. It was abominable. Surely, it always had been. Even for those who chose the lifestyle in the past, perhaps only a few had managed to make a living, had succeeded in finding safe places to sleep night after night. And they, that lucky minority, would have still forged an existence far from the cheery and mythical tramps one meets in folklore and fairytales. Perhaps that was why there were so few tramps left. Who would choose this?

  Taking the last of my cash from my pocket, I walked into the coach station and bought a ticket for the next bus home. Back there was a bed with a duvet, central heating, television, a long couch, a loving cat, fresh food in the fridge, an oven to cook it in, electric light, clocks, a wardrobe of clothes, two machines to wash and then dry them in, wine, shelves of books, a shower, my computer, my music and, most importantly, my wife.

  Inside the coach as it idled within Victoria Station's confines, I lazily fingered the wedding ring I had kept on my finger. I had had an internal debate about it, I remembered, at the beginning of the journey. I had divested myself of anything which could be stolen from me on the road, and for a long while I had considered leaving my wedding ring at home along with my credit cards and iPod and non-charity-shop clothes. But I had been unable to remove the ring, the symbol of my marriage. And, while I thought about it, I realised that no one had even noticed it. I felt pleased about that, as pleased as I was when the engine stirred and the coach moved out and away from the streets.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE END

  1

  At 7.30 p.m. on Monday 16 January 2012, police vans appeared at Parliament Square to evict the protesters and homeless who lived there. Under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, they legitimately removed all tents and sleeping equipment from the area. Two people were arrested and some of the homeless were referred to hostels, but most fled back to the anonymity of the streets. By sunrise the following morning, Parliament Square was cleared for the first time in a decade.

  Exactly six weeks later, on Monday 27 February 2012, following a High Court decision to evict the Occupy London campaign, a regiment of police officers and bailiffs entered the square outside St Paul's Cathedral at midnight and began to clear the site, loading tents into the back of a garbage truck. Twenty arrests were made after a barricade was built from pallets and wooden shelving. I feel certain I know who some of the resisters were, and hope their night in the cells passed without incident.

  In the Easter holidays of April 2012, I retraced my route, though this time at the wheel of my VW Camper van. The new journey took a tenth of the time and cost ten times as much.

  I found Jan on the same bench at Broad Quay in Bristol where we met the first time. We walked to The Wild Goose together and ate beans on toast. 'I am a salesman,' Jan said, pointing to the sack of Big Issues below the table. 'And I will be for a long time.'

  Sue was likewise at her post. The man she had lived with had kicked her out, but she would not tell me why. She had been back on the streets for the last two months.

  I asked both, and a few others, about Stan. None had heard of him.

  I spent a day walking Bradford-on-Avon and its outskirts in search of Nigel, but could not find him.

  In London, at Frank's regular pitch in Covent Garden, a new Big Issue seller had taken over the location. 'Frank?' he said. 'Not been here for months. He works at Sainsbury's now.'

  On the Strand, I met a man who knew Diana. 'Shacked up in a caravan somewhere,' he said.

  I called all the hostels in Central London: some had Mareks in residence, but none fitted my description, and I did not know his surname.

  Passing Victoria Square, I thought I saw Greg stood in a group of six before a three-foot-high pile of duvets and bags. I did not venture over.

  I contacted my liaison at St Mungo's and asked if she or anyone she knew had heard of Ian and could tell me where he might be, whether on the streets or in jail, but she had no clue, and nor did any of the rough sleepers I asked across the capital.

  On the drive back to my Cornish home, I stopped one final time in Bristol, determined to locate Stan. I visited all our old spots – Castle Park at three o'clock in the afternoon, the Methodist chapel, The Wild Goose – but I never saw him. Finally, I happened upon the man Stan bought his cheap tobacco from. He had last seen Stan a few days before that winter's snowstorms, and that was months ago. I remembered the way Stan sometimes passed out into a vodka-coma before he was able to get himself back to his garage, and found myself dearly hoping that he had simply left Bristol for the next stop on his tramping odyssey.

  2

  Back in Cornwall, I found work teaching again, and began to regularly play a game with my Year 11s in the few weeks remaining before their GCSEs. Based on Radio 4's Just a Minute, and stolen as a teaching technique from my own English teacher, the game required students, picked at random, to speak for sixty seconds on a subject of my choice without hesitation or repetition. The Year 11s groaned each time I interrupted normal proceedings for a bout of the game, but I always explained that it would help them think and respond spontaneously, something necessary in exams, and they would grudgingly acquiesce. Not long after the Easter holidays, I picked on Tom, and bid him stand up.

  'Tom,' I intoned in the mock-serious broadcaster's voice I had come to enjoy. 'You need to speak for sixty seconds without hesitation or repetition on the subject of… the homeless.'

  Tom launched into his impromptu speech. 'The homeless are people without homes. They live on the streets and beg for money. Other names for them are hobos, gyppos or pikeys. They have dogs and sell The Big Issue. They don't work and our taxes pay for them. We call James homeless…' a nod at his best friend James, followed by a collective snigger from the rest of the class '… because he once ate a kebab off the floor. The homeless have nothing and…' a pause, but too brief to be called '… and they have nothing because they do nothing… the homeless are…'

  This pause was long enough to be a bona fide hesitation, and Tom's friends shouted it before I could. Tom sat down.

  For a brief moment, I considered telling Tom and the rest of the class about my journey, about the homeless I had met, about the tramp I had been. But the thought dissolved less than a second after it had formed. I knew too well what the responses would be, and the respect I would lose.

  Later that evening, I contemplated my decision to keep quiet about my experience. It was a matter of shame. My students thought of the homeless in the same way many adults across the country think. The homeless, to them, were scum, and if they ever suspected that their teacher – their guide through the most important exams of their l
ives so far – had been homeless, then the shame would have rebounded about the classroom's walls.

  Not that I had, I realised, even really been homeless. My experiences on the streets from Cornwall to London had in no way been representative of all the homeless across England. I thought about my first book, which I had hoped would encapsulate the experiences of teachers in the country's most difficult schools, delve into why they were leaving in droves, and then provide answers.

  Within this book, I have not employed the same tactics. This is not a dialectic nor a polemic, not an answer to the riddle of homelessness nor an explanation of why or how it occurs. This is, instead, the story of my own journey from Cornwall to London; my 300-mile tramp of footsore days and rough nights followed by my brief life on London's streets; my choice. And, living with and amongst the homeless, sharing vodka and beer and stories with them, speaking to them and a number of others who have forged noble careers out of aiding and assisting rough sleepers, I gained at least a rare insight into the kind of street life I never before knew.

  If I have managed to successfully share that insight with you and, perhaps, along the way given voice to a few real, dispossessed and disenfranchised people who continue to exist in your world, and who continue to be ignored by most mainstream literature and media, then I can derive satisfaction from that. And I hope that, maybe, it might alter your perception, even slightly, when you next walk your local streets, when you next pass a rough sleeper – I hope that, maybe, you might offer them some money, or just some companionship. A conversation, or at least a smile. They will be able to tell you far better than I can what it is truly like to be a homeless person in the UK today. They have opened my eyes, and for that I am grateful for my brief life as a twenty-first century tramp.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are many I met on the streets who I express heartfelt thanks to, and many I do not. I hope the reader will divine from my words which camp each individual falls into.

  To extol the virtues of the myriad institutions and organisations which exist to aid rough sleepers in twenty-first-century England would require a whole book in itself, and so I will enumerate just those I happened upon along my own short journey – in particular, The Wild Goose in Bristol, St Mungo's in Camden, Anchor House in Newham, and the One Percent Scheme in Hackney. All are doing invaluable work, and demand the reader's attention.

  Thanks also must go to those who have offered me financial support over the year it has taken me to write up my journey. The K Blundell Trust awarded me a bounteous sum with which I was able to fight off work for two whole months and dedicate myself to this text. Their generosity was as well received as it was unanticipated, and without their help this book would have taken me perhaps six months longer to finish.

  For similar reasons, the details of which I will not go into, I must have it in print that, without the altruism and philanthropy of Adrian Cox, the means to write every day would have diminished to a pinhole speck.

  I am extremely grateful for the advice, suggestions and encouragement of those at Summersdale who have worked with me to polish and mould this book into the best and shiniest shape I am capable of, whose constructive criticism was always spot-on, and whose kind words and heartening sentiments matched the privilege I feel at having the opportunity to work with them. They are Jennifer Barclay, Abbie Headon, Stephen Brownlee, Alastair Williams and Ray Hamilton.

  It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that Michelle, Mary, Jodi, Kel, Barrie, Josh, Debbie, Alistair, Aaron, Kellie, Ian, Sam, Ben, Jess, Marcus, Rachel, Jo, Bryn, Dave, Amy, Tim, Cassie, Allan, Jake, Bertie and Digby were there throughout with differing levels of support: support which I needed as I walked from Cornwall to London in late 2011, a twenty-first century tramp with no fixed abode.

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