Down and Out Today: Notes from the Gutter

By Matthew Small

'Enlightening and startling... The world needs more writers like Matthew Small.' Charlie Carroll

'Brings into sharp relief the realities of poverty... inspiring and uplifting.' Tracy Shildrick

'A fascinating insight into what it feels like to live on the streets of the UK and India today.' Joanna Mack

Poverty stretches across all of humanity and by travelling East, Small encounters the raw faces of poverty in India’s slums; he works in a leprosy community, and joins the Sisters of Mercy on the smoggy and exhilarating streets in Calcutta. He then returns to the UK, to Bath, to see what the passing of three months means to those who are scarred by one of the most unglamorous of all humanities’ ills, being poor.

Small engages with different community members who are living with poverty, to answer these long standing questions: What’s keeping them down? What’s pushing them out? And how can we move forward?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785079979

Matthew Small

Matthew Small is a writer and freelance journalist, currently living and writing amongst the limestone city of Bath in South West England. Matthew has travelled through many parts of the world exploring different cultures and societies across five continents. In 2012 Matthew embarked on a trip to the Holy Land to further his political understanding of the area, which is documented in his debut book The Wall Between Us.

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Contents © Matthew Small 2015

The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

Print ISBN 978-1-7850799-6-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850799-7-9

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Cover design by Simon Levy www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

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Matthew Small is a fiction writer and freelance journalist, currently living and writing in the limestone city of Bath in south west England.

Matthew has travelled through many parts of the world exploring different cultures and societies across five continents. His debut novel, The Wall Between Us - Notes from the Holy Land explores humanity behind the Israel Palestine conflict.

Visit Matthew at

thewordsisaw.co.uk

Follow him

@TheWordsISaw

Just because people are poor or have little, doesn’t mean that their dreams aren’t big and their soul isn’t rich.

Eva Rodriguez – Searching for Sugar Man

Preface

What does poverty mean today? What does it look like? How does it feel to those living in the midst of it? Why, and despite humanity’s incredible capacity for innovation, does poverty persist?

This book will be an exploration into some of the ways poverty can be defined at the beginning of the 21st century. It will be a narrative following my journey into bearing witness to some of the different and distinct guises of poverty today. I will seek to engage with it, to see the symptoms of poverty in my attempt to better understand the causes. It’s a book that has been taking seed inside me for some time.

In early August 2014 I was walking across a bridge in Paris which spanned the railway tracks just north of Gare du Nord. The central divide that ran between the two roads was wide, but still, the sight of fifty or more souls inhabiting it was nevertheless shocking. They were sat on bare mattresses with their clothes draped over the surrounding wire fence. I stood still and stared at all the waiting faces as they watched the cars driving quickly by them, while others moved further beneath the overhead metro line in order to escape the sun’s hot glare. Children lay beside mothers and men sat in circles talking, the air around them troubled by car fumes and the clatter of trains on the tracks below. I was struck by many questions: where had they come from? What had led them to Paris and, from where I was standing, to certain poverty? If they were immigrants, what poverty had they left behind to instead seek shelter in an unforgiving city in Europe?

This community of down and outs is just a snippet of the poverty and hardship displayed on Parisian streets. But Paris is not exceptional in its high rate of rough sleepers or people struggling to meet their daily needs. Poverty is a global condition and an ill that humanity has failed to cure.

I do not claim that this book will provide an answer. It will be pursued on the basis that to address something we first have to be willing to touch it, to not look away because poverty is an ugly thing and it taints the otherwise beautiful world we try to paint around ourselves. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t paint and admire.

I write this in an environment of natural beauty and relative comfort; it is mid-September in south west France and I am beside the river which is flowing slowly through the grounds of the meditation centre where I have just volunteered for the summer. The late afternoon sunshine is shimmering through the oak trees and bamboos while birds are happily singing at their tops. Despite finding an inner richness throughout my time here, a question or two has been awoken in me about poverty. This largely comes when reflecting that I do not earn money while I’m here. I don’t, for that matter, necessarily need to spend money either, except for the odd razor blade and tube of toothpaste, or un petit café on a rare trip to Périgueux, the old cathedral city 20 kilometres away. My daily needs are met; I have enough food to eat and, once my chores are done, time to write, to meditate, and to give to creative engagement or long discussions with others after supper.

I want to make note of my present setting and situation as next week things will be very different. I’ll be heading home to the city of Bath in south west England, where I presently don’t have anywhere to live and where my daily needs, primarily food, drink and shelter, will need to be paid for.

I have a rough idea where this book will take me; firstly, I will walk the streets in the city I’ve come to call home, seeking to know what poverty means to different members of society in an English heritage city; then I’ll travel to India, to see what similarities and differences exist in a country that has been accelerating up the global financial charts, but nevertheless is still home to a population of over 100 million human beings deemed to be poor. This book, for the most part, will be written as it is lived.

Brown crinkled leaves are falling from the big linden tree behind me, scattering over the pebbles before the main house. I imagine the end of summer arrives with some foreboding for those who sleep on the bridge just north of Gare du Nord – the chill of autumn and winter is coming. I invite you to journey with me as I begin to search out my notes from the gutter.

Matthew Small

17th September 2014

BATH, ENGLAND

Late September to November, 2014

I

As the train’s steel wheels screamed to a stop in the limestone city I was met with a view to material wealth. Opposite Bath Spa station is the Southgate shopping centre, built on the site of a previously demolished complex with the buildings constructed with a Bath stone façade, in keeping, if not meticulously so, with the honey-coloured dress of the city. There are restaurants with menus perhaps out of a poor person’s sights (I have to look away from most) as well as the familiar golden arches whose marketing won’t let us forget that We’re loving it!, along with an array of other fast food outlets. There are clothes shops, phone shops, department stores, a market stall selling relatively cheap fruit and veg – call by at the end of the day and they’re practically giving broccoli heads away – there’s a flower stand and the street performers who are usually found strumming their guitars and beating their drums at the end of Stall Street, playing to the consumers as they march on by to spend, spend, spend.

Running along the eastern edge of Southgate and away from the train station is Manvers Street; home to a few shops, cafés, nightclubs, and a wonderful old second-hand bookshop, George Gregory. There’s also the council building and city police station with Manvers Street Baptist Church next door. The Julian House night shelter and Bath Foodbank operate from the basements of the building and it is not uncommon to find a group of the charities’ ‘clients’ sitting on the steps outside the church’s café, or leaning against the stone wall around the police station car park. They’re a diverse bunch; a thirty-something man with the top buttons of his shirt undone to display the outstretched wings of the tattoo across his chest; an elderly woman with her tired face often covered by the dreadlocks that fall out from beneath the woollen hood she has pulled up over her head, despite the warm September sun, along with others whose clothes are frayed and cheeks somewhat pale.

I observed this group as I walked along the pavement and a voice inside my head said, Poor. But do they see themselves in this way? Julian House uses the phrase ‘socially excluded’ to identify the people it comes into contact with. I looked back over my shoulder, questioning. Most were holding bottles in their hands, sipping at whatever was inside as they talked (the bottles were not labelled so I cannot say if they contained alcohol). Most would be deemed as scruffy in comparison to the tourists, commuters, consumers and students walking past them on the pavement and, standing huddled in a group with the rest of the city swirling by, they would likely be identified as being in poverty. But what does that mean?

I arrived in the city two days ago and, financially speaking, I guess I could also be placed on some statistical chart as being poor, although this I do not feel or identify with. I can, for the time being, buy enough food to meet my needs and even go to my friends’ coffee shop and sit checking emails with a cappuccino beside me. This is where a part of the complexity of understanding poverty begins; it is primarily recognised aesthetically. Sitting at the brew bar at Colonna & Small’s, tapping at my laptop and enjoying my drink made from beans grown on a remote farm in Ethiopia, I, in most people’s eyes, would not look to be poor. But in truth I have around £140 in my bank account and £350 cash on my being. Before arriving in the city, a quick search online told me that the average starting price to rent a room in Bath is around £300 to £350 per month, normally requiring a deposit of £200. I do have a part-time job in a local inn but my first wage slip won’t come until the end of October, one month away, and the only other immediate income I can expect is the advance I’m due for my previous book, The Wall Between Us, which would also not be enough to cover a room.

If I was forced to rent somewhere, with unforeseen bills and council tax to pay, then I would quickly find myself in a situation faced by many millions across the world: struggling to exist. That’s why I’m writing this from a small, slightly mouldy and altogether little bit poorly caravan, situated at the bottom of a sweet lady’s garden on one of the hilltops surrounding Bath. I’ve promised to give it a lick of paint and Clare, my landlady, has let me stay rent-free. I don’t have electricity, running water or even a toilet (although Clare is happy for me to come into the house if nature calls). I am incredibly fortunate, even if I don’t presently have a desk where I can write. I think most writers go through the same thought process when they move into somewhere new; the owner might be pointing out the light coming through the window but we’re only interested in where we’re going to be able to sit down and write.

After finishing work last night and locking up the inn around midnight, I walked through the drunken city which is now inebriated most days of the week, with students falling over each other after having knocked back trays of cheap shots, and hindered further by the school ties knotted together around their legs as they take a pub crawl to mean just that: crawling. I carried my sleeping bag under my arm, crossed a footbridge over the River Avon and began my walk up the long hill to where the caravan and my new home awaited. My first night was spent using John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a pillow. It’s not a thick book, more’s the pity. What this has shown me is that without the graciousness of another, I would have had to stay in a hostel until my money ran out, or on the street with only my sleeping bag and Steinbeck to fend off the chill and my vulnerability. It showed me how close we can come.

II

My work at The Griffin Inn mostly entails pulling pints, cleaning glasses and engaging with whoever decides to drink at the bar. In days gone by, the inn was the drinking den for locals, pub brawls, dominoes and singing songs. Occasionally an old timer will call in and tell me a story or two about ‘the old days’ when there was an Alsatian sat at the door, eyeing up limbs of the punters on entry, and a pool table which was where most of the brawls broke out. It was the type of establishment where you’d be hard pushed to pick out the landlady and landlord from the punters, stood smoking at the end of the bar and as drunk and merry as the rest of the inn.

It was a little bit like EastEnders, that sort of thing, a man at the bar told me one autumnal night, his fingers tobacco-stained and his skin weathered. He and his wife had called in to see what The Griffin had become after holding onto many memories from two decades prior. He sipped at his pint of Griffin Gold and his wife a Bacardi and Coke. It’s the first time me and the missus have come back into town, like. If the landlord and lady ever went on holiday then we’d run the place for them while they were away.

Was it very different back then?

I’d say so, he replied, now leaning on the bar.

His wife smiled as she looked towards the window which dislodged a view to yesterday. She turned to her husband.

Remember that Bath Rugby lot, doing their dares when they’d get here?

Course I do.

Dares?

They’d do silly things, she continued. There used to be an aquarium in the window, just over there. They dared one of them to eat a fish. He walked straight over and stuck his hand into the water and pulled out a little one, before putting it in his mouth. He swallowed it straight down.

No!

He did, confirmed the husband.

I looked towards the window, imagining the fish tank with glass stained by green algae on the inside and spilt beer on the outside. The husband and wife drank their drinks and continued surveying the inn. I watched nostalgia shape their expressions; it wasn’t the same inn for them anymore, so many lives and stories had been scratched into the heavily worn wooden floors – all that remained of a place where they had passed days and nights, shared embraces and good times. I pulled them more drinks and they brought some of those stories back to life for me.

But The Griffin has moved on from those days when beer was cheap and smashed glasses were as common as fresh lime in slimline tonics. It’s had a couple of coats of paint; the eight rooms upstairs are listed as ‘Four Star’ and, due to being five minutes from the Roman Baths are, generally full most days of the week. The tourist season has no end in a city famed for its Englishness.

After living in Japan for two months, I came to understand the draw of this small heritage city nestled in the Somerset valleys, it’s in Bath’s stoned conformity. The city has been constructed, for the most part, out of the stone of one man, Ralph Allen. Prior Park House, Allen’s 17th century home and built in Palladian grandeur on a hill overlooking Bath, was commissioned in celebration (and promotion) of the stone. It certainly had an effect. His stone is the city and the city has become his stone. Of course the tourists also flock here because Jane Austen lived and wrote in the city, capturing the pomp of the bath houses so astutely in Northanger Abbey; they also come to see the Roman edifices and it’s only a short coach trip to Stonehenge. However, I still believe the main reason for their visit is to admire the sunlight sinking into the limestone walls, to watch the River Avon being split into three channels as it flows beneath the iconic arches of Pulteney Bridge, with Bath stone buildings speckling the tops of the distant hills like gold dust. The real reason the tourists arrive in coachload after coachload, with a recorded five million visitors in 2012, is to simply amble around the beautiful Georgian city of Bath.

A few nights back I was pulling a pint for a guest at the inn. His job was to drive tourists, mostly Australian and American, on coach trips around the UK. He was one of those guests who would sit at the bar for a couple of hours or more, leaving only to pick up some dinner in a nearby fast food outlet. His days were spent on motorways or sat in laybys and coach parks waiting for his group to return. So with a pint and me before him, he inevitably wanted to talk.

She’s from the Mediterranean, so everything’s got to be a bloody drama. He was talking about his co-driver who had just called him to report another coach having hit her wing mirror, pushing it inwards. I told her, ‘Don’t worry, push the thing back and it will be fine,’ but she’s from the Mediterranean, so she’s all stressed and getting me stressed. But I don’t get stressed.

He sipped at his drink and rested it back down on the bar. It would not be unreasonable to say that he had a beer belly; his hair was cut short and his eyes were watchful. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved top that was one big Union Jack. The red, blue and white were perhaps the boldest colours to be found within the dimly lit room. I stood on the other side of the bar, polishing glasses and, as the place was empty except for the coach driver, offered him my full attention.

So you’ve written a book about Israel and Palestine? He was referring to The Wall Between Us that was being released the following week. That’s a complicated subject.

It’s been made complicated, I said.

And you’re going to write another book?

I’m just starting.

About what?

Poverty.

Where do you begin with that?

I think that’s what the book’s going to be about.

He drank and I placed a clean glass back on a shelf with many others beneath the ale pumps. The coach driver leaned forward on his stool as he spoke.

Poverty isn’t just on the streets. Poverty isn’t just in the council houses. It’s also in the houses you see as affluent.

You’re right, I said. But this poverty isn’t easy to engage with, it’s hidden. I’m still not sure how to find a way to capture it.

This was something that had been niggling at me. How do you speak to people who do not want to be defined by their poverty, living day to day on the breadline, stuck in an unending cycle of bills and not knowing where the money would come from to cover them? Or people who had fallen into poverty for the very reason that they did not want to appear poor, living and purchasing on credit which had led to debts that felt like a heavy slab of concrete resting on your chest, pushing out the remaining pockets of air from your lungs? The bar was so quiet it was fit for tumbleweeds and this meant the coach driver’s voice commanded the empty tables, and easily lifted over the music playing out of the two small speakers on the paint-chipped walls.

You got to think outside of yourself, he continued. Take this for an example, you’re a woman who is homeless on the streets, you’ve no money or possessions and then that time of the month arrives. How do you deal with it?

God, I’ve no idea.

Poverty isn’t just about not having enough food or water, it’s also about not being able to maintain personal hygiene.

I was starting to wonder what coach drivers got to be thinking about during those long hours behind the wheel.

How do you come to be contemplating such things?

I used to be a probation officer, before driving coaches. Used to come into contact with lots of people, some were struggling, some were on the streets.

It’s their voices I’d like to include in this book, I said.

So you’d best get out on the streets then.

I intend to.

He finished the last of his drink and slid the glass across the bar towards me. I retrieved it and moved to the larger taps, pulling him a fresh one. He watched me on his stool with his back straight and his Buddha belly pregnant with two pints of larger and his evening kebab.

You want to find that person who chooses to be on the streets, he added. That person who’s happy to be on the streets. They’re not looking for a home. They’re not looking for work. They’re on the street by choice and they’re happy to be there by choice.

I placed the full pint glass down before him, the door opened and two guests returned from their evening spent at the Theatre Royal, having enjoyed The Importance of Being Earnest. They smiled at me as they passed the bar before climbing the stairs to the rooms. I turned back to the coach driver.

But why would someone choose to be on the streets?

All I’m saying is that you find that person who is quite happy to be on the streets and there you’ll have your story.

The door opened again and this time some punters entered, I left the coach driver on his stool at the end of the bar to welcome the arrivals. I pulled pints of ale, measured out a glass of wine and mixed a gin and tonic with fresh lime and ice. I worked. My thoughts, however, lingered over what the coach driver had said. This book is meant to be about the hardship of poverty, not the freedom, and I didn’t like the idea of him flipping it upside down; it was a difficult subject as it was. As I tallied up the drinks on the till, the coach driver’s phone rang; he lifted from the stool and walked to the door, answering it.

It’s alright, just calm down will you, he said before the door closed behind his words.

It must be the Mediterranean, I thought. I pressed cash on the till and the money drawer rattled open.

III

It was a cold but fine October day, the sun occasionally being concealed by harmless sheep-white clouds, the type of sheep whose wool is pure white like clumps of fresh fallen snow. I’d just come from sitting in the café in Manvers Street Baptist Church, speaking to the coordinator of the Bath Foodbank. I wish to include our conversation in this book but first I want to write about two other encounters I made after finishing the meeting, while walking back through the city en route to the coffee shop to write up my notes.

The first took place on Milsom Street, a main shopping road running through the centre of Bath, and one I often see as the spine of the city, busy with cars and people going about their every day. I was waiting for a break in the traffic when I heard guitar music nearby. Looking along the pavement, beyond a group of youngsters employed by Coca-Cola to give out little cans of the stuff to passers-by, their smiles wide as they handed over the free samples, I could see a guy sat on the stone strumming a guitar. I walked towards him, politely refusing the cans of Coke being offered to me from all directions. I stopped and listened to him play for a while. Placed on the pavement was a bag with some coins in it, a piece of cardboard rested over the bag with words scribbled onto it with marker pen: Homeless: Busking to get a train ticket to Portsmouth where I can be housed. Thank you + God Bless. Please Help. He finished playing and I took a pound coin from my pocket, crouching down and placing it into the bag.

Thanks.

No problem, I said, my mind secretly racing to find the next right words to say. I’m… I’m writing a book and it’s about people struggling and stuff, and I wonder if you’d mind telling me why you can get housed in Portsmouth and not here?

He rested his arms on top of the guitar and looked up at me, squinting against the sunlight that reflected off the light limestone all around. His hair was black with a quiff not unlike that of Elvis. I placed him to be late thirties or early forties; he had a prominent nose and ears. His voice was soft:

I was in Southampton as a witness in a criminal investigation. They then moved me to Bath for my safety. They wanted to put me in a hostel for people who had been in prison. I refused to stay in this hostel so they refused to help me, and because I had refused they refused me help from any other services. I’ve got nothing here. I don’t know anyone. I’ve an ex-girlfriend living in Portsmouth who might be able to put me up for a bit. I don’t know what else to do.

I told him the book I’m writing would seek to give a voice to stories like his, because I don’t think they’re being heard or listened to.

No, they’re not, he said before resettling his fingers over the strings.

I turned and walked away, running across the road between slow moving cars and passing the building society on the corner of Quiet Street. This street, as it happens, is seldom quiet; instead noisy with traffic, unloading vans and human voices. I was looking straight ahead, beyond Queen Square to my day’s first coffee and space where I could write, now wanting to also detail my encounter with the Elvis of Milsom Street (I passed this chap again a few weeks later, he was playing in the same spot only this time his sign had changed, Looking for work. I wondered if this meant that his story and history had also changed). Thinking ahead meant I didn’t quite capture the voice that came from below. It came again.

Excuse me, couldn’t spare a little change?

I stopped and turned towards him; a man, mid-fifties with heavy stubble and humble shoulders, looking up at me with his whole being nothing but uncomfortable.

Sorry to ask, he added.

No, don’t be, I said, suddenly aware that on two adjoining streets there was someone to be found asking for money.

I rummaged for my wallet but in the meantime the writer inside me sat my body down on the step beside