Chris Sutcliff

It is hard to be generous during a recession, but the needy remain the neediest and even if you only have a little at least you have the opportunity to share.

I’ve been walking to work every day this year and on my way through town I walk past a ‘patch’ that always has one of two homeless guys in it. Same as they all do across the length and breadth of our great country these young lads sit cross legged and hunched over; framed between two shop fronts, with a cap on the floor in front of them and a thoroughly dejected look on their faces. Charity – without the middle men. It’s financially been a tough year for me and I’ve found myself giving these guys a steadily wider berth every time I have to walk past them. I walk on the other side of the street. I avoid their gaze. I pretend to be on my phone. Once I even imagined what I would say to them if I really just let rip about how angry it sometimes makes me to be guilt-tripped into giving them money, money that I’ve worked all day and painted all night for, barely to make enough to cover the bills. Because I entertain the idea that at some point they actually chose to quit life, stop working and let the rest of us take care of them out of pity. And as that imagined scene grew steadily uglier in my head and I felt how annoyed I’d become, I realised that something deeply uncomfortable had happened.

It wasn’t always like this for me. My Mum has a photograph of me from years ago on a sunny afternoon in Covent Garden, London. I have my arms around a tramp who is dressed exactly the same as every tramp Disney have ever portrayed on film. I had been talking to him for ages and we were laughing and dancing to the music that came from a nearby pub; then he thoughtfully shared his very warm, very open for a long time can of Special Brew with me. I remember swigging it just as I noticed he had about three teeth left in his head; they were the colour and texture of mahogany wood. I must have ingested a cocktail of germs that day that would have made Louis Pasteur erect. That’s about twenty Man-Points. I had such a good time that for years afterwards I gave all the money I could spare to every homeless person I met and would bother them incessantly with late night drunken conversations at every opportunity. It did nothing whatsoever for the problem of homelessness but I met some nice people and felt pretty good about myself. Incidentally, the war memorial outside Victoria Station in London is a daily meeting spot for many old homeless guys who are all ex-servicemen. When they get drunk and their stories come out they are well funny and worth an idle afternoon when you’ve missed your train.

In 2007 I met Tony. Tony was the homeless guy who’s ‘patch’ was the 24 hour kwik-e-mart that I lived above in Portsmouth. He was in his late forties, with wispy hair that may have been ginger when clean. Always boisterously drunk on cider no matter what time of day you encountered him. I had to re-introduce myself every time we spoke; he would know my face but be unable to recall how. He had my spare change, ate my spare pizza and had my painkillers when he fell and hurt his hand. He told me about his lost family about five times. All memory of this he erased in a drunken haze. Winter that year was particularly harsh and one night near Christmas my mate Tom James and I found Tony at three in the morning in a doorway across the road turning blue. He was drunk, disorientated, shivering violently and crying and scared. His trousers were thin and ripped and he was trying to wrap himself in filthy newspapers as he had no jacket. It was unbelievably cold. I ran home and got a pair of decently lined tracksuit bottoms and a quilt. Tom and I had to get him dressed and wrap him in the quilt otherwise I’m pretty sure he would not have lived to see the daybreak. Such is the thin line between good and bad fortune for lost souls like Tony. By morning he’d gone, leaving a quilt I didn’t want anymore in a doorway that had nearly been a grave. Last time I saw him he had a room at some sort of care centre and they had located his daughter so he was walking the three miles to visit her. It was about four in the afternoon. He looked pretty tipsy.

My work colleagues in Pompey spend two days each Christmas doing voluntary work in London at a homeless shelter and one year I went with them. We were part of a team of about fifty volunteers for the homeless charity ‘Crisis’. If you ever want reality to slap you good and hard around the face I highly recommend you do this one year. We fed people and clothed people and talked to people and then watched helplessly while most of those same people went immediately outside the shelter to buy crack off the dealer – The dealer that lived in the flat opposite and sold directly to all the broken people of no fixed abode. You can imagine the sort of chap HE was. Most of the people at the centre were forty years or older. Some were Poles who had immigrated here for a job that had failed to materialise. Some were just pensioners who did have a house but had no visitors for the holidays and couldn’t afford to heat their homes or buy food – so they came here. I couldn’t believe I was in the same country. On the last night someone brought a guitar and we all sang Christmas carols together, I felt like I was back at school but in a good way. As we warbled out ‘Silent Night’ one of the old boys started sobbing – he had contracted AIDS from sharing a needle and the doctors had said this would be his last Christmas. I haven’t thought about him since that year and now I am writing this and he is long since dead.

I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand what a change it was for me to feel angry with the guys on my way to work and deliberately and inventively go out of my way not to give them a penny. What had gone wrong there then? I was so worried about my own finances that I’d shut off from the less fortunate and was now angering myself at having the impulse to share any of my money for no benefit of my own. I had forgotten that people go through hell when they truly lose everything and that maybe I’m in no position to judge how they react. I know for a fact I’m not the only one who walks past these people in the street and in life and if that is our choice then fine. But we’re good people though right? We still want to do the right thing. Are we being tight and selfish or do we just not want to give money to people who will then spend it on drink or drugs and be worse off for our kindness? Perhaps if we get a better understanding of their plight, on a personal level, we’ll be more inclined to help, right? Right. I thought so too. We just need to re-connect. So on Saturday I went into town with five quid, a cold can of Fosters, a note book and a pen to interview the homeless guys.

I found them both together, sitting in the merciless sun watching their collection cap and keeping their dog occupied. I sat with them and introduced my self and asked if it was OK if I chatted to them a while. They asked if I was from ‘Tower’; I said I didn’t know what that was, at which they relaxed and agreed to speak to me. I explained what I was trying to achieve and why I had decided to do it and where the resulting story would appear – they were fine with all of it and I have to say immediately very friendly. The beer bribe had worked a treat. The guy I really spoke with the most is called Paul, his dog is called Zeb and his mate is called Ryan. The following is a write up of our conversation rather than a written interview as I tried to keep it as chatty and non-intrusive as possible and because I can’t hold a linear conversation to save my life. Also whenever I go back to old notes and try and read them they are always baffling or illegible, as if I picked up someone else’s by mistake.

Paul is 32 years old and a Burnley boy, he has been officially homeless for the last ten years. He has the swollen hands of a man that has known cold. His downward spiral began one January when he walked into the family house to find his Dad lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. His Mum and Dad were both heavy drinkers and his Dad had suffered a massive and fatal brain haemorrhage. This had enough of an effect to boot Paul clean off the tracks and he soon found himself mixing with entirely the wrong people and self medicating with Heroin. Within a few short months his ‘mate’ had duped him into assisting with a burglary for which he was caught and sentenced to nine months at her Majesty’s pleasure – released in four and a half. That October, not three months out of  Prison he returned home one day to find his Mum dead as well. She had been drinking more heavily than ever since her husbands death and son’s incarceration – the result was sclerosis of the liver and death by septicaemia. That’s both parents in the same year, on Sundays that both happened to be the 24^th day of their respective months. Get your mind round that one. Paul quickly became homeless and took to begging in order to avoid a life of burglary and theft and to get enough drugs to not think about what had happened. He was able to eventually get off Heroin by seeking help and undergoing a program of methadone reduction. He eventually got off methadone but increased his intake of alcohol – resulting in the strange kind of alcoholism that is measured by severely restricted funds. I learned immediately that giving beer to homeless people is as stupid as you can get. He had done his fair share of sleeping rough but eventually got himself a care-of address with a friend – probably not the burglar friend.

I asked him how much money he usually makes in a day and the answer was about £6. I found this a bit of a shock (I’d expected way more for some reason), as from that £6 he has to get enough food for him and Zeb, presumably pay something towards his lodgings and get a couple of cans of beer so he can get to sleep at night. I asked him what his best takings on a single day had been and he said £15. I asked him what his worst day was and he said seventy pence. I guess that was diet day. Sometimes people bring him a pasty or a sandwich which helps his money go further.

I asked him what he was doing to get out of his situation and this was when things started to fall into place. Paul has been trying to get psychiatric help so he can deal with the death of his parents and re-build his life. He has seen three doctors in ten years that have not been successful and now he has to apply in writing to someplace in Preston that will refer him back to a fourth specialist in Burnley. Depending on whether this specialist is more adept than the last three and – taken only from Paul’s side of the story – can be a bit more bothered to help him, could mean the difference between his getting back on his feet or forever sitting behind a cap between two shops. I wonder when he’s going to write that letter.

Ryan has seen much more death than Paul and once again it was failure to get the right help at the right time that had landed Ryan on the streets, also in the grip of Heroin. That drug sure digs the meek. Amongst many other tragedies, Ryan’s girlfriend had lost five babies during pregnancy, when the sixth was born it lived just a few months. I got the impression they weren’t together anymore. He was optimistic though because he was on methadone now and feeling better (he showed me the bottle of it that he had just picked up from the Pharmacy – he referred to it as ‘Kryptonite’), and he had friends in Scotland that had arranged for him to go and live with them. Better indeed. Apparently, getting out of Burnley was paramount to his well-being. I know about 30,000 people that would agree with him.

Ryan also explained how easy it was to get Heroin anywhere in the UK. I was told that if you just stand outside the nearest public telephone box to the local Post Office on Giro day, first thing in the morning, there will be a queue of Junkies all calling their dealers to get a fix. All you have to do is give them your money and jump in on their purchase. Why, that’s almost too easy isn’t it. Begging and Heroin are both illegal but on the subject of crime Paul and Ryan were fiercely opposed to any criminal activity that made someone else a victim, particularly burglary. They said that when you were ‘on the rattle’ you had enough time to think about what you had done to people (theft) and it made you feel terrible. I never asked what ‘on the rattle’ meant but it was said in the context of either being in prison or suffering the painful withdrawal of Heroin by means of cold turkey, so it refers to one of those. We were all done so I thanked them both for their time and set off home with that weird feeling that happens when you get what you asked for but not what you wanted.

What I got from all this is that Paul and Ryan became and remain homeless because they suffered depression as a result of a family tragedy and before their issues of grief, guilt or remorse could be dealt with by the right people it all turned into self-destruction. Heroin was the easy out. Heroin is a cheap way of totally annihilating yourself and it comes with the added bonuses of – A) taking years to destroy you so you can really load up on self loathing before you wither and die and B) being totally socially unacceptable so that people go out of their way to not help you and also blame you to really rub it in. Perfect. When you finally kick Heroin you find you have sold all your valuables and no longer have an address so getting a job or any sort of benefits is enormously difficult. You also have few friends left and those you do have are usually the guys you did Heroin with so once again your support network is paper thin. How does one get out of the trough? Well, you steal or you beg or you do both and you drink if there’s no drugs because every time you try to go to sleep sober you see your dead parents. I know very little about mental illness but I would guess that Paul and Ryan have had a savage dose of it – which means that the only difference between me and them is that if I had problems I would probably get to a Doctor in time and be properly supported afterwards. If you’re not that lucky then the rest is just a slippery slope that is dictated by your peers and your own dwindling resilience.

You were right at least. When you thought to yourself “I’m not going to give this person any money because they’ll just spend it on drink or drugs” you were right. When you thought to yourself “there must be a more intelligent answer to this rather than endlessly giving this guy my spare change so he can drink it and we can just start all over tomorrow” you were right again. But you don’t want to be the person that turns a blind eye all the time and neither do I. Pretending to be on your mobile phone to avoid the homeless is the mark of an ass-hole. I did all this so I could re-evaluate and do the right thing and not be an ass-hole anymore. So next time I’m faced with it I’m going to at least say hello to the homeless because I want them to feel acknowledged if nothing else; and I can do that without breaking my stride. When I have a bit more time I’ll stop and have a chat with them because it’s nice when somebody wants to hear about your life and it’s nice to feel like you’re participating in the world. Maybe every time you tell your story you see a teeny bit more of the wisdom of it too. If I actually want to donate it seems like the best thing to do would be to buy a bit of food instead of handing over cash, a tin of dog food probably wouldn’t go a miss either. It’s not going to solve anyone’s problems but I can manage it and maybe contribute towards the growing hope of a less fortunate human being.

If you are interested in doing more, take a sneaky peak at www.crisis.org.uk, and see if you dare spend Christmas with people more interesting than your Aunt Mabel.