BEGGING TO DIFFER

Beggars are honourable people, says Lloyd Evans. They have faith, hope, charity — and courage

MESSAGE to party-goers: if you're expect- ing a beggar to break your fall as you col- lapse into a gutter this New Year's Eve, prepare to be disappointed. The reason is that Shelter, the homelessness charity, is launching Millennium Plus, a scheme to house every vagrant in the country an 31 December. The government backs the pilot project and has pledged to reduce rough sleeping (estimated at 2,500 every night) by two thirds within the next three years. Shel- ter is more ambitious still and hopes to eradicate the problem altogether. Yes, the future seems bright for our beggars.

In fact, according to Louise Casey, head of the government's Rough Sleepers Unit, they're already living the life of Riley. 'You can get a better sleeping bag on the Strand', she told the Observer the other day, than you can in the camping shop, Blacks.' Homelessness charities, she went on, per- petuate the problem by offering `a plethora of services on the street'. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Hot curry, free sandwiches, tureens of consommé du gibier aux quenelles being ladled out left, right and centre — no wonder the doorways are crowded with loafers. Well, I'm for the easy life too, espe- cially if someone else is paying, so I toddled down to the West End to pick up some cheap mountaineering equipment and sam- ple la soupe du four.

The first beggar I came across was crouching in the lotus position beside a Barclays cashpoint. He was coatless and shivering. `Spare-ny-change?' he croaked. I knelt alongside him and we started chat- ting. He didn't have much of a life. Adopt- ed at birth. No qualifications. Slept on warm air-vents coming up from the tube. I gave him a fiver and a couple of bananas. A typical victim, I thought. But what sur- prised me was his lack of anger or resent- ment. He seemed positively stoical.

Next I met Mark, a South African min- ing engineer. He'd injured his arm and was no longer able to work. A decent chap, but he'd chosen a poor pitch in an empty street with no passers-by. He said he didn't like to 'get in people's faces'. Strange, that. He was more concerned for those who might have helped him than they were for him. I asked about his family. He became teary-eyed when he mentioned the two boys in Durban he hadn't seen for three years. I gave him a fiver and two more bananas. His life was being tragically wast- ed. He was bright, sensitive, friendly and articulate. He had plenty to offer. All he lacked was the means to return home.

I watched a Salvation Army soup-run. Two dozen vagrants outside Charing Cross station were being treated to noodles and Hobnobs — but there was no a-la-carte menu and not a polycotton bivvy-bag in sight. What offends homelessness charities about Louise Casey's statement is that she implied that begging is a life choice, like being a milkman or a merchant banker, and that if society makes things harder for beggars fewer people will do it. It's true that people start begging through choice, but only after the range of their options has been severely limited.

I met Richard, a cheerful 25-year-old, sitting cross-legged on a bread crate in a tunnel at Marble Arch. It was six degrees above freezing with a 20-knot wind blow- ing. He was visibly shivering. He couldn't work, he said, because he had no address. Meanwhile he took plenty of abuse 'tramp, bum, scrounger, that kind of thing'. Once someone scalded him with hot tea. Another man gave him 20 pence, then came back and booted him in the face. His yellow, puffy eyeball bore the remnant of the injury. `Why do you do it?' I asked. 'Better than dipping,' he said. 'Dipping?' I asked. Stealing, apparently. An interesting point. I'd always assumed that a beggar had forfeited his dignity. Not so. To beg is more honourable than to become a criminal and more virtuous than to become a prostitute. All the beggars I spoke to felt that their dignity, though damaged, was intact.

In a windy stairwell at Bond Street tube I came across an Eastern European mother in traditional Romany costume: a printed flo- ral headscarf and an Arsenal bomber-jacket. She held up a swaddled infant and gestured towards its mouth for food. As I handed her a pound, three of her countrywomen came barrelling round the corner, all armed with babies. I was surrounded. They blocked my way, grinning and leering. 'Excuse, sir, geev please! Meelk! Geev.' There was only one thing for it — do a J.P.R. Williams. I feinted left, dropped a shoulder, then side-stepped through a gap. They charged after me, pointing crazily at their babies, crying, `Meelk! Meelk!'

Returning along Oxford Street, I saw a cripple with a sense of humour. He sat on his amputated stumps in a wheelchair out- side Debenhams, blowing tunelessly into a tin whistle. His placard caught my eye: `Look, Mum! No legs!' I handed him £3. I'd have given him a banana, too, but I'd run out.

On the steps of the Dominion theatre I found Wayne, hugging himself inside a torn rug. `Good day?' I asked. 'No,' he said. He'd made £15 in ten hours. 'And my sleeping bag got nicked this morning.' Aha, I thought. 'What type?' I asked. 'Gore-Tex fleece-lining? High-Andes Thermolite?' He gave me a funny look. 'Just, like, a nylon thing,' he said. He told me he'd met the thief before. 'Total psycho. Known him for years and he's HIV positive. Threatened me with an infected needle.'

The notion that anyone would choose this lifestyle if there was an alternative is ludicrous. Like most people I judge beg- gars by their appearance — gaunt faces, frail pleas for money, the sad doorway bundles of blanket and dog fur. But once you cross the huge gulf that separates Us from Them, you find something different, something more human and more ordi- nary: chatty, cheerful types, full of high spirits and optimism.

In Oxford at the weekend I passed a man in Cornmarket wrapped in a yellow blanket. Did he mind if I chatted to him? 'Make it quick,' he said, 'I've got some begging to do,' He'd been living in a coun- cil flat with his wife and child. When they divorced he became technically a single man and therefore ineligible for council accommodation. He also lost his job. Pride kept him begging. It was preferable to admitting his destitution to his friends. A sense of hygiene kept him out of hostels, which he said were full of fleas. All he needed was a couple of hundred pounds for the deposit on a flat.

Next day I found Ray crouched in the doorway of a tailor in the High Street. 'Like sleeping rough,' he said. 'Feel claus- trophobic in buildings. I'm schizophrenic.' He showed me his arms. Deep lengthways gashes ran from his wrists almost to his elbows. They'd been stitched crosswise so the scars looked like the cartographer's symbols for railway lines. Yet he didn't seem downhearted, 'Won't be on the streets for ever,' he said. 'All I want is a job outdoors. Gardening maybe.'

Claire, a failed musician aged 20, was sitting in the emergency exit of the Play- 'I'm the ghost of Christmas pissed.'

house theatre. She'd recently been hit by a drunkard wielding part of a billboard. 'Last Christmas', she said, 'the police nicked me. Operation Tinsel. They round- ed up all the beggars in Oxford, took their money and spent it on their New Year's Eve party.' Operation Tinsel? Could that be the crackdown that Jack Straw hinted at when, in September 1995, he denounced 'aggressive beggars and squeegee mer- chants'? Apparently not. The police I spoke to said that Mr Straw had done nothing to restrict the activities of street beggars or the Honourable Guild of Wind- screen-burnishers.

When you weigh it up, you realise that what keeps beggars in their piddlesorne porches is a combination of bad luck, poor judgment and personal qualities that are positively saintly. To live as a beggar you need determination, physical hardiness, emotional stamina, a disdain for posses- sions or personal comfort, a sense of opti- mism and an abiding faith (despite daily evidence to the contrary) in the goodness of your fellow men. It's a myth that beg- gars are idle.

Proper employment would be a blessed relief to anyone living on the streets because begging itself is the hardest job in the world. About half the vagrants I met told me that a loan of a few hundred pounds would secure the deposit on a flat and get them off the streets. Saving money is almost impossible if you sleep rough, particularly if you lack a bank account. I called a spokesman at Shelter and asked if any charity had considered offering savings accounts and repayable loans to the home- less. He'd heard of no such scheme, and he hinted that I was naive to think money might solve the problem.

Instead, Shelter argues for new laws obliging local authorities to rehouse all vagrants. But it's unlikely this would change anything. Councils are adept at shirking their duties and new laws simply mean new loopholes. The last thing a council wants is a reputation for promptly rehousing every member of the Great Unroofed who strolls on to its patch.

Shelter's noble crusade to end homeless- ness will have to embrace characters such as Pete, a blind ex-seaman selling out-of- date copies of the Big Issue in Islington. With a wizened face, a strong jaw, a beard of crdpped white quills and a prompt, rau- cous laugh, he was 62 but didn't look a day over 80. I asked him about Millennium Plus. 'Not for me,' he said. 'I 'ate beM' cos- seted.' He slept in a churchyard off the City Road. His married son who lived in Worthing was aware of his circumstances, yet he had nothing but praise for the young man. 'He's got my determination, my spirit. And he's done all right for him- self.' No hint of bitterness or self-pity. 'Why not stay in Worthing?' I asked. 'Oh, I don't want to interfere with their Christ- mas,' he said, as if it were a standard parental courtesy to sleep in a graveyard while one's son and daughter-in-law tucked into stuffed goose and mulled wine. When I asked him about the future he turned his whitened eyes heavenwards. 'No one can build me a pair of wings. And the bloke down there' (he thwacked the earth's crust with his stick), 'he don't want me. He's frightened I'll take over.'

A blanket and a hot bun could never tempt such a man to shelter indoors. It may sound fanciful, but he should be left alone, if he wishes, to lie under the stars and reflect on the excellent qualities of the son who has left him out in the cold.