After a few years spending evenings in central London, taking food to homeless people and listening to them, the author began writing down some of their comments on life for her own benefit and the idea for a book evolved. Originally intended as a platform for homeless people to express their views, it soon extended beyond the obvious homeless - the street-dwellers - to the 'homeless-at-heart.
Word for word interviews introduce the reader to people such as Chrissie, survivor of alcoholism, schizophrenia and a broken home: 'People on the streets tend to be innocent. Even though they're involved in a lot of things - drugs, prostitution, shoplifting, whatever it is - they only do it as a way of surviving. But we're all addicts - everyone, not only the homeless - even if it's only caffeine or TV.'
The homeless-at-heart may be successful and wealthy, but still far from being at home with themselves and their lives: Francis, living in an empty house after his wife left; Daniella, eating compulsively to sweeten a bitter childhood; Deb, hard-working and prudent, yet left penniless by her addiction to an uncaring husband who refused to work for a living.
The author invites readers to place themselves on this scale of nearness to spiritual 'home'. None of us has arrived yet; we are all still journeying. And on our journey home, the homeless people who speak through this book may have some help to offer us, from their difficult but inspiring experience.
For a while, we avoided going into ‘the Bullring’ - a maze of subways near Waterloo station, home to a shifting colony of homeless people of all ages, some long-term residents and some who stayed only a few nights. Even among the homeless, the place had a bad reputation - hard-line drugs, violence and rats. But one evening we decided to go and see for ourselves, and it became the first of many visits.
Under the partial cover of several subways, an open fire was lit at one end of the arena, and shacks (or ‘bashes’) improvised from bits of board and plastic leaned against the walls, which were damp even in summer and running with water in the winter months.
The council had closed down the only available toilets after one was vandalized, forcing the people to choose between using the ground and walls or going further afield to bushes along the Embankment. The rats and pigeons left their own contributions to the general squalor.
One of the long-term residents of the Bullring was Grant, a Scotsman from Kirkcudbright, an ex-army man who had also spent some time in the Marines. He was only in his late fifties, but looked about fifteen years older. He made a joke of this; ‘I’m younger than I look; I haven’t worn well!’
In the midst of the chaos of daily life in the Bullring, Grant could usually be found sitting on an old office chair outside his bash, reading a book in the fading evening light. He had a constant supply of books - ‘the students bring them’ - and read anything and everything, ‘to keep my mind off this place’, he said.
He was philosophical about living in the Bullring. ‘I’ve known people worse off than this,’ he said. ‘No, not just in the Third World - here in this country of ours. I can sleep anywhere as long as I’ve a sheet of cardboard under me. I’ve a roof over my head here, of a sort, and the rats don’t bother me - not as much as the human rats, anyway! The worst are the businessmen. They think, because they’re earning a living, they can treat homeless people like dirt.’
At this point in the conversation, four or five of the younger people around the fire charged across the arena, shouting, threatening to kill a couple just entering the Bullring, and the Alsatians with them joined in the fray, barking frantically and snarling.
‘What about the violence here?’ we asked Grant.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t take much notice. It’s mostly noise. But I wish they’d stay down that end, the younger ones. Some of them, especially the ones on their own, prefer to sleep up here; I think they feel safer with us older ones around. But we like to be left in peace. Most of us have been here for years, on and off.’
Like the others there, he faced despair every day, but fought it. Noise and violence were not his way but alcoholism was, and this, combined with the insanitary living conditions, led to his health failing. He couldn’t get up one morning, and one of the other homeless men contacted a worker at the local church day centre, who called an ambulance. He was taken into hospital with a bad chest infection.
He was discharged, without treatment, three days later - back on to the streets. ‘They don’t want homeless people in their clean hospitals,’ he told us. ‘The doctor came in and told me to go.’
Shortly afterwards when we visited, we found him very weak, purple in the face and hardly able to breathe. He had been lying in his bash for a week, eating nothing but cold canned rice pudding, brought to him by the other homeless. He was still drinking.
He let us bring him food, a pillow and a quilt, but wouldn’t hear of anyone arranging for him to be taken into a hostel, though he was well known to several organizations who had offered him a place.
‘I hate being confined by four walls,’ he explained. ‘I have nothing, but I’ve always been free. But I know I’ll have to go somewhere eventually; I can’t last another winter and I don’t want to die here. One night I’ll go to sleep and I won’t wake up in the morning.’
‘You’ll wake up in heaven,’ I said, but he laughed and coughed and said, ‘I wish I had your optimism!’ So I said, ‘Well, I’m going there; my place is booked!’ and he said, ‘Oh, you are, all right, but not me.’ I told him, ‘You are, because I’m not going without you; your name’s on the door!’ and he laughed and coughed even more.
The idea of drawing his last breath in the Bullring, even on the way to heaven, wasn’t appealing. We asked our prayer group to pray for Grant that week.
The friend who visited the homeless with me worked in a nursing home, and arranged for Grant to be offered a place there. It was a large building, a former hunting-lodge, with a garden and an orchard, and accommodation in open wards. Hoping it might suit Grant better than an inner-city hostel, we went up to the Bullring in the daytime to ask him if he’d be willing to give it a try.
As we went down the subway towards his bash, there was Grant walking towards us, with a spring in his step and a cheery greeting. His colour was normal, though he was still wheezy. He was on his way to the day centre, which opened for a few hours each day in the crypt of a church, and invited us to come and see it.
‘Friends of mine,’ he introduced us to the volunteer manning the door, and we were let in without question. He made us all a coffee, sat down and began telling us something of his life in the army, travelling all over the world. In particular he talked about the parachute jumps he had made.
‘It’s a great feeling,’ he said. ‘Not so much the lower-altitude jumps - there, you’re opening your ‘chute as soon as you’re out of the plane - but the high ones, the free-fall.’
‘What does that feel like?’ I asked him.
‘Free as a bird,’ he said simply. ‘That’s why I can’t stand being shut in. Never could.’
He was touched by Alan’s offer of the nursing home place. ‘It’s just what I need,’ he admitted. But he declined it. ‘I’ll go when I have to. But not just yet.’
Before we left, he offered us the freedom of the day centre. ‘Come up here whenever you like. If you’re looking for some of the guys and can’t find them, this is where they’ll be. Say Grant sent you, and they’ll let you in.’
It was a few weeks before we were in that area again. At the first bash we visited in the Bullring, the occupant told us, ‘Grant was taken from here in an ambulance again yesterday. We just heard he died last night.’
So he was saved another winter in that place. His bash was taken over by someone else, but Zy, a Northumbrian who had travelled the world like Grant, despite having no legs and propelling himself around on a skateboard, spoke for many of the residents when he said, ‘The place isn’t the same without him.’
The bulldozers had already moved in by the time Grant was moving on, and within a few months the Bullring was closed to people taking a shortcut to Waterloo Bridge, and to the residents. The flimsy bashes were dismantled without difficulty and the area was cleared, ready for building a new multiplex cinema.
The residents were offered accommodation and some of them accepted it, but others - like Grant, preferring freedom to security or comfort - moved to some other colony: the back of the Savoy Hotel or the park beyond it, or under Vauxhall Bridge, or Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
The girl who screamed in her sleep went home. Her mother and sister arrived one evening, and she said goodbye to everyone and went with them. Others had lost their chance of going home, a long time ago.
Lisa had lost the support of her parents when she became alcoholic, though they kept her baby and looked after him for her - till one day she phoned home and was told he had been taken into foster care that day. They wouldn’t tell her where he was, and there was no provision for her to see him. She had had her chance, they said, to come off the drink and prove herself a fit mother, and now they had given up on her; if she wasn’t able to take responsibility for her son, they were not willing to care for him any longer. He had gone. On the day she heard this, Lisa tried to cut her wrists.
Many of the women living there shared a bash with a man they hardly knew, often a violently unpredictable alcoholic, in the hope of some protection. To be abused by one person seemed better than being at the mercy of anyone and everyone - though the ‘respectable’ passers-by were more of a threat to them, the women said, than any of the homeless men.
As well as the people living in the well-known ‘colonies’ of homeless, there are many who feel safer on their own, like John. His usual pitch for begging was by the railings of a city church, sitting cross-legged on the pavement with a sleeping-bag wrapped round him, head down, intoning, ‘Spare some change, please,’ in a voice so quiet as to be almost inaudible. Certainly, not many of the passers-by took any notice.
When we met him, he seemed willing to chat to Alan, though shy of women. He was only young - twenty-three.
‘The girls either ignore you or laugh at you,’ he said. ‘You get a different view of life from down here. All I see going past are legs and feet. You get to know quite a lot about people by their feet. A lot of them speed up when they see me. They pretend they haven’t seen me, so they look at their watches or talk to one another very loudly.
‘I used to think - all I want is to get a job and a place to live, and I’ll be like everyone else. But now I’m not sure I want it. I see what it does to people, having their life all secure.
‘When they’re young, they might care about people being homeless. They notice you, but they haven’t any money to give you because they’re students, and they’re embarrassed, so they cross the road when they see you’re begging.
‘The ones who are a bit older have jobs, but they have to pay their rent and they want nice clothes and nights out, so they don’t give you anything because they’re busy trying to make their way in the world and make a good impression.
‘Then, when they get a bit older, they’re earning more but probably they’re thinking about settling down, saving up for a deposit and getting married. So they don’t stop and give you anything. They think, when they get rich they’ll do something then.
‘But when they’re settled, they’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids are coming along, so they tell themselves they need all they earn for their family.
‘Then the children are grown-up and they’re students themselves, and the parents are helping them out and the kids haven’t got enough - and the whole thing starts again.
‘I don’t blame them. They’ve got to live, and people tell them it’s all a con, that we’re all junkies and alcoholics making money out of decent people working, and anything they give us will go on drugs and booze. But there are a lot of us who are just trying to live. If something better came along, we’d take it. But where do you go from the streets?
‘There’s always some reason why people can’t stop just now, and why they can’t afford to help you. I don’t want to get like that, I really don’t. The way I am now, if I get a few quid and I’ve eaten today, I’ll share it with the next homeless person who comes along who hasn’t got anything. And there are other guys who’ve done that for me at times. They’ve got nothing, but they’re not greedy; they share what they get.
‘I don’t know if I want to get into the system now. I can say, it wouldn’t happen to me, I wouldn’t walk past a homeless person on the street if I had a job and a place to live. But it seems like, once you’re in the rat race, it gets you. You stop being human inside.’
In the time he was talking, probably a hundred people walked past. Two hundred legs and feet, speeding up as they went by.
Chapter 3
The street-dwellers
When we met Carl, he had been homeless for several months. It was his second time of living on the streets. He had joined a Christian community, then left it and returned to the streets. He gave this account of his experience.
‘I’ve fallen out with God at the moment. I don’t know what to think. I’m having trouble with him. I used to be so close to him. I knew the Bible; I read it all the time. People were amazed I could survive on the streets without drugs or drink. But now I’ve done something bad. I’ve gone on drugs. I’m injecting. I don’t know if God is forgiving, or if he won’t want to know me any more.
‘I’m not afraid of being on the streets, because I’ve been so that I was nearly dead. My heart had nearly stopped beating and I thought I was gone, and in the hospital they thought I was gone as well. But suddenly I felt like a warmth surrounding me and a pair of arms lifting me up off the bed. And I got well from then on. So I know for some reason I’m meant to be alive and go on living.
‘I don’t doubt the power of God. I’ve seen it working. He’s so powerful. People can see the power of Satan more easily sometimes; people say they can believe in the power of evil because they see it in the world. But what I say is that the power of evil is real, but it’s so tiny compared to the power of God.
‘One reason I don’t get frightened on the streets is that I know that even Satan can only do to me what God allows him to do, and no more.
‘People start turning to God and reading the Bible and coming off drugs, and they get all this confusion. They thought they were happy enough before, then they realize they’ve got to change, but that’s when the trouble starts sometimes. I don’t think it’s simple for anyone who tries to change their life, because Satan starts attacking them. He stirs up their minds and they get all this confusion. There’s a battle going on in them - a battle between good and evil.
‘Like now, I’m confused. I sometimes don’t know if it’s God or Satan who gives me the power I have. I think it must be Satan sometimes, because of the drugs, but maybe he hasn’t got the whole of my mind. Maybe two per cent of me is still God’s, I don’t know. I don’t even know which of them I want, to be honest with you.
‘I’ve seen some amazing things happen. God really has power over everything, even the weather, the clouds and everything. People don’t believe it, but it’s real. And when you’re with him, you have that kind of power in you, and it reaches out to everyone on the streets and they can feel it. Even if they don’t know what they believe, people can feel the presence of God around, and they notice it and comment on it.
‘You know that part in the Bible where it says the sky will turn black and roll back like a scroll? Well, I know what that means. It’s the ozone layer catching fire, and the blackness is the smoke, and it billows; it sweeps back in great curls. And from down here, where we are, that’s what it will look like - the sun turning black and the sky rolling back like a scroll and revealing God. And it’ll be too much for anyone to stand. We’ll all be terrified. So that’s why we’re told to pray to be taken, before it happens.
‘But I don’t know what I’m praying for now, for myself. I don’t care any more because I don’t know where I stand with him. I was so strong before, but now I’m on drugs, injecting them into my arm. I don’t know if I care what happens to me.
‘I don’t know what will happen when I face him, and if he’ll still want to know me. I don’t trust him. I know Jesus came for sinners and not the good folk, so that’s something. I’ll just have to wait and see.’
Confusion is a common suffering. It’s easier to say of somebody, ‘It’s the drugs, or the drink, talking,’ than to face the reality of the confusion we all experience when we lose our security and suddenly feel cut off from the mainstream. The life we have taken for granted up till now no longer seems to support us. Carl’s words about ‘the sky rolling up like a scroll’ recall some of the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah: ‘Like a weaver I have rolled up my life; God cuts me off from the loom.’
Isaiah was talking about the approach of death and having to leave the body which is ‘home’. But the line before this reads, ‘My dwelling is plucked up and removed from me, like a shepherd’s tent.’ And every morning, on the streets of many ‘civilized’ cities, the homeless wake up in shop doorways and basements and roll up the blanket or sleeping-bag that is their only home and remove themselves, to make room for those who are still living in the mainstream.
We didn’t so much meet Alex as stumble over him. He was semi-conscious, lying slumped against the wall of a subway that had obviously been used as a toilet by many people. He mumbled a few words of apology and told us to stand clear of him, then went into a fit, clenching his teeth and throwing out his fists.
A young homeless man, passing by, told us, ‘He’s epileptic and he drinks. You can call an ambulance if you want but if you can stay with him he’s usually OK after a while.’
Alex recovered consciousness for a few minutes, apologized again for the inconvenience, and had another succession of fits. He had no bag of belongings with him, and no blanket. During one of his periods of recovery, he noticed that his radio had been stolen, and thumped the ground, saying, ‘It was the only thing I had!’
He checked his pockets and was relieved to find he still had his social security book. He fished a few coppers out of his pocket and counted them.
‘Was your money stolen too?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s all I had. I shouldn’t drink but I do, you see. Only myself to blame. But it’s hard to get by without a drink or two.’
After a while he felt well enough to have a sip of soup.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, ‘and you might want to remember this. God will never let you down.’
‘You don’t think he’s let you down?’ I said.
He shook his head vehemently. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘He always gives me what I need. Look at this evening. I was ill and he sent you two along with soup and a sandwich for me. I told you, he never lets me down. You haven’t got a blanket by any chance too?’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘That’s OK. Maybe someone’ll come along later and give me one. But even if they don’t, I’m hardy,’ he said. ‘I’m a Yorkshireman. I’d have liked a blanket, or a bit of cardboard under me, but I can sleep without. I’m hardy, you see. You remember what I told you, won’t you?’
‘God will never let you down?’
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall, the cup of soup tipping in his hand. Alan removed it from his grasp and set it beside him on the ground.
‘That’s it,’ Alex said. ‘You take it from me. He’ll never let you down.’
Chrissie was sitting in a doorway on a spread-out sleeping-bag, most of which was occupied by the two dogs she has for protection. Shaun, whom she had recently met, was asleep but woke up when he heard her talking. During the conversation, several passers-by came over to look in the brightly lit window of the closed shop. They trod on Chrissie’s sleeping-bag as they moved in to get a closer look at the goods in the window - fashionable menswear.
Chrissie told us, ‘I’ve been living on the streets for the last couple of years now. I lost my home and my children, through alcoholism and schizophrenia. My marriage had broken up already.
‘Living on the streets is hard but it makes your faith strong. I believe in God. Someone must be looking after me, or I wouldn’t have survived all I have. I’ve been in prison, and in hospitals. I’ve been on medication that makes you just like a vegetable. I hear voices and I get delusions, and it’s bloody frightening, I can tell you. I got very down, after my marriage broke up. I nearly gave up then.
‘I usually sleep in a shop doorway, out of the rain. When I go to sleep at night, on the street, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or if I’ll wake up in the morning.
‘The world’s as bad as it is because of people. We can’t blame God for it. It’s people’s choices. He gave us free choice, and look how we use it.
‘I’ve been in prison, and that gives you time to think. Sometimes I think about Jesus, and I think, What did he die for? What difference did it make? But two thousand years later, people are still talking about him.
‘People on the streets tend to be innocent. Even though they’re involved in a lot of things, they only do it as a way of surviving. We’re all addicts - everyone, not just the homeless. Everyone’s addicted to something. If it’s not smack or drink, it’s caffeine or TV or something. Everyone pretends they’re not addicts; they pretend to their kids.
‘I used to be on two bottles of vodka a day, and I shoplifted to get it. Now I’m just on one bottle of cider, and I can afford to pay for that so I don’t shoplift. It’s because I met Shaun and he’s helping me go easy on the drink, and I’m helping him stay off heroin. It’s still hard, but it’s easier if you’re trying to do it together. He says he’s different since he met me, and his friends say it as well - he’s calmer.
‘Jesus didn’t have anywhere to live. He didn’t know where he’d be, from one day to the next. He died for our sins, but we still go on hating and killing; we don’t listen to him. That’s our choice; it isn’t his fault. I can understand people being full of hate. I’ve felt like that. You feel you have to be hard to survive, when so much has happened to you and you’ve been hurt so many times. But it’s no good to you, hating people.
‘You get sharp, being on the streets. People think that people who live on the streets are stupid, but they’re mostly intelligent. You have to be, or you wouldn’t survive. I don’t know how I’ve survived. There’ve been times I thought I wouldn’t; I’ve thought, 'This is it now.' And what I believe is that there must be someone looking after me, and I’ve felt it sometimes - that there’s someone there, with me, and that’s why I’m alive.
‘Shaun says religion is what starts wars, but I think it’s economic reasons. Wars start because people want more than what they have. People don’t care about you, if they want something. You see it on the streets. You’re carrying a heavy bag and you’ve got the dogs to keep with you, and people just push you aside as though you’re not there. You’re in the way of where they’re going, and they don’t care if they make it harder for you.
‘I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow. I just take one day at a time. What I’d like is to be free of medication, and to have peace. When the voices are in my head there’s so much noise. I just want to shut it off and find peace, so that the only thoughts in my head are my own thoughts. That’s what I want more than anything really - peace in my head, that’s all.’
In a sense, Chrissie is coping with two forms of homelessness: having no home to live in, separated from her family, and also not feeling at home in her own mind. Her plea to have only her own thoughts in her head is poignant. Having a mind occupied by strange voices and ideas beyond your own control must be like having a crowd of football hooligans invading your living-room at all hours of the day or night.
But how many of us are totally at home in our own minds? We may not hear voices in our heads, but how many of the beliefs and ideas we live by are really our own? Who told us that they were reality and alternative ideas were delusions? Have all our beliefs been tried and tested by our own experience of life, or are they just passengers, blown in on the wind of fashion, who have settled down and become part of our mental furniture without us noticing?
How many strangers do we have living in our home? How many alien philosophies will we allow to take up house-room in our mind before our own mind doesn’t feel like home to us either?
Published by Lion, ISBN 0 7459 4054 4
http://www.lion-publishing.co.uk