Stuart: A Life Backwards. Alexander Masters

hostel, no matter how dedicated the support staff, is like putting a paedophile in a kindergarten. Temptation is everywhere. The only place that has more drugs in it than a homeless centre is prison.

      At 222, Stuart got beaten up and didn’t squeal; got beaten up again and still kept his mouth shut; got beaten up a third time, head-butted one of the bullies, ‘split all his eye open’, had a knife fight with another and had to leave.

      He wouldn’t go in Jimmy’s, either, in the basement of the Zion Baptist Church on the other side of town. Technically, Jimmy’s is a ‘shelter’ rather than a ‘hostel’: people do not have rooms there, just the possibility of a bed in a dormitory, which must be arranged night by night. No alcohol, body searches at the door and no sin bins in which to deposit your needles safely.

      ‘There’s some nice people who go down Jimmy’s, but you get a lot of the mentally ill and the drunks down there. And they chuck you out the door at nine o’clock in the morning. They get a good whack of money for you staying there but they put you out on the street at nine o’clock in the morning till half seven at night.’

      Jimmy’s, named after a charismatic dosser, another of the homeless now-dead, is something of a throwback to George Orwell flophouses, though a good example of one. It can be a stabilising place for people who would otherwise spend all night on the beer and brown. But it’s useless for someone who likes privacy, or is easily bullied, or has a persecution complex, or likes to sleep in a dress, or snores so loudly that the other residents gang up and stuff a sock in his mouth.

      Whatever service you provide, no matter how welcoming, tolerant, well staffed and decorated with pretty pot plants, there will always be homeless people it doesn’t suit.

      ‘Because that’s the point of them, in’t it?’ explains Stuart. ‘The homeless are what’s left over after all the usual things what keep people straight and narrow – yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir – like family, career, the army, have been taken out.’

      For a year while writing this book I worked at the Willow Walk hostel, the best hostel in the city: twenty-two beds, single rooms, twenty-four-hour staff sitting in an office by the door. Rent: £279 a week per person. (The homeless don’t pay that, of course. They pay around £6.50. The rest comes through housing benefit, from you and me.) It is run by Ruth’s husband, a kind, relaxed and thoughtful man.

      The residents at Willow Walk are in general pleasant, although some individuals have their moments. (The list of people banned from the premises, for example, includes one with six convictions for attempted murder and another for trying to kill a hostel worker.) They are essentially a cautious, edgy crowd who, when they ‘lose it’, are raging against their own losses more than against anyone else. Some of them have experienced things that would make you throw up if you knew the details, but they don’t become serial killers, arsonists, letter bombers. They doubt, they grizzle, they stamp about their little cubicle rooms, they suspect everything is their fault (or they think nothing is their fault and therefore think they have no control over their existence), they cut themselves, they watch the days and months slip by, they get smashed out of their skulls. Some are hilarious, some are very talented, many are kindly, many are boring, a few were once rich, a good number are to some degree insane. Some are so apologetic it is unsettling. They might have been a bit rude to you the day before, called you a ‘twat’ (frequently with some justice) or just stumbled about for a while, being merry and foolish. But they apologise at the soonest sober opportunity, even when the person listening to these sorries hasn’t the foggiest idea what they’re on about any longer. It is impossible to be precise in characterising the people who live in such places. In my own estimate, about a quarter of them you could pass on the street and not have the faintest reason to think they are anything other than successful (the best-dressed man in Cambridge at the moment is a man living in Jimmy’s). But alongside these are the usual stereotype figures so beloved by people who write about low-life: the crackheads, the dope fiends, the Irish drunks, the nonces, the whores (but don’t read that word in a Raymond Chandler voice – think instead of pallid girls with fungal infections, and grandmothers who’ll let you feel their varicose veins in return for a mouthful of half-digested beer), the burglars, the shoplifters, the ambitionless, the self-disgusted, the weak of will and, very rarely, the just plain poor.

      The final step on the ladder of opportunity – after Wintercomfort, Jimmy’s, 222 Victoria Road, the young persons’ project in Haverhill, Willow Walk, Emmaus, temporary shared housing with organisations such as the Cyrenians – is to be put into a bedsit or flat of your own.

      If this rehabilitation process works well, you can be off the streets, in accommodation of your own and looking for a new job within half a year, though even that is not quick enough. On average, it takes nine years for a person, after the event that has unsettled them (abuse, bankruptcy, marriage break-up, etc.), to become homeless. It then takes four weeks to become ‘entrenched’, i.e. to settle into street life and begin to adapt irrevocably.^fn1

      But the ladder hardly ever works well – at least, not with ‘chaotic’ rough sleepers. Stuart’s sort do not live under the stars and endure piles and hypothermia simply because they’ve run out of luck and ‘self-esteem’. Therefore, it’s not just a matter of providing encouragement, vocational training and money to put them back on their feet. To them, every day is a hum of casual outrages. In the worst cases such a person is hardly human at all, but like the shell of a man walking around crammed with minced ego. It is as though some piece of their soul is missing. The way he is and the manner in which he lives are symptoms of a mental disruption – maybe even a full-blown incurable illness – and it is as good to tell him to apply for one of the fifty warehouse packing jobs advertised in the employment office as it is to tell a man with half a leg to drop his crutches and run home.

      ‘See, the homeless culture is a weird culture,’ explains Stuart. ‘One minute they’re all fighting against each other, but then there’s days we all stick together through thick and thin, all different little groups. Like, once, I sat there begging with a fellow, and he just jumped up and started kicking me in the face. He don’t know why neither.’

      At one point, in an effort to get away from this mayhem hostel and street life, Stuart bought a caravan for £25 and had it towed down to the river, but something came a cropper there too. Other people took it over. He let the wrong friends sleep on the floor. They set light to it. It exploded.

      Another time, Stuart got into an argument with Frank the Tank, and Frank the Tank walloped him in the park behind the bus shelter. Result: bus shelter out of bounds.

      ‘Even if you get a job, you’re caught in a catch-22, because the only time you can get work is if you’re living at one of the hostels, because no one gives you work if you haven’t got an address. But if you get a job when you’re staying there, the staff immediately raise the rent. They got to, because them rooms cost fucking £200–300 a week and benefits won’t pay the full whack any more if you got a job, will they? It might go up to £60–70 a week, overnight, from the first fucking day you get work! Fucking frightening to someone who was paying a fiver a week the day before. But this is the stupid bit: legal jobs don’t pay except in arrears. Two weeks, a month in arrears, that’s when you get the first pay cheque. How can you pay the new fucking ridiculous rent them first four weeks? It isn’t possible. Where’s the money going to come from? Get a job and what happens? Get kicked out of your accommodation for non-payment of rent.’

      I do know about this. I have myself advised homeless people not to get work, especially if they have just arrived on the streets (the benefits situation improves slightly if you’ve been down and out for six months, although by that time the sense of community with the homeless, and sence of homelessness not being that bad really, has set in) because if they do they will lose their hostel accommodation, and hence their job, too, for exactly the reason Stuart describes.

      In short, at every step up the ladder, the chaotic homeless person will stumble. He throws a tantrum, loses his nerve, drinks himself to the brink of oblivion, ends up in the police cells and three weeks later has to be restarted on the bottom rung by people who grow increasingly tired of seeing his mottled face.

      This is