“It is fatal to look hungry,” wrote George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. “It makes people want to kick you.”
Not much, it seems, has changed since Orwell lived for a while among the homeless in the late 1920s. For Four Feet Under, Tamsen Courtenay, a former investigative reporter for Panorama and Dispatches, interviewed 30 people who survive on the unforgiving streets of London. Many of them recall violent kickings delivered with relish by passersby, mainly bunches of drunken lads for whom bashing the homeless seems to have become urban blood sport. Even more recount being woken up by laughing men urinating on them.
It is not just passing drunken louts that the homeless have to contend with, but the newly emboldened voices of privilege. In May, Simon Dudley, Tory council leader for the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, demanded police use legal powers to clear the local streets of homeless people before the royal wedding. With this in mind, it is worth recalling one of the essential questions asked by Orwell 85 years ago: “Why are beggars despised?” It is a question that echoes through Four Feet Under and raises bigger ones about social progress, contemporary morality and Darwinian capitalism. This book does not set out to answer those bigger questions, instead opting for a more hands-on approach that entails Courtenay befriending and interviewing a fraction of those she encounters as she wanders the capital.
Inevitably, in a book punctuated by accounts of casual violence directed at the most vulnerable, several young girls speak haltingly of often sustained sexual assaults on the deserted back streets and alleyways where they hoped to find a degree of quiet sanctuary. A good night’s sleep is one of the taken-for-granted necessities of the settled life that the destitute automatically forgo. Here, they speak of it with a palpable degree of regretful stoicism, like something treasured that has been irretrievably lost.
That which has been irretrievably lost is, unsurprisingly, a recurring topic in these survivors’ stories. Mothers, fathers, siblings and relatives are recalled, though not always fondly. Violent upbringings haunt the lives of almost everyone Courtenay encounters. Some of them, in their oddly innocent way, seem to have never quite surrendered their own childhood selves despite, or because of, repeated abuse and parental neglect. One young woman, Jade, recounts how she was given her first crack pipe by her father when she was just 10. “It’s only me, ‘daddy’s little princess’, that went downhill,” she says bitterly. “All the others have got a brilliant life.” Another young woman, Donna, is 21, but looks 14, the age when she began using heroin. On first encountering her, Courtenay decries Donna as “utterly wiped out”. This is indeed the case. “I find it very difficult to think,” Donna says apologetically. “I think I’m just exhausted with it, with my whole life.”
There are tales of pride here, too, not least from principled souls such as Melissa who says: “People think I’m a scrounger, but I won’t take benefits.” Indeed, many of these accounts are oddly heroic, because survival on the streets of the capital is, of itself, a kind of dogged heroism. It is a book, it has to be said, that might have benefited from more assiduous editing – there are one too many meandering Q&As and Courtenay herself is sometimes a distracting presence – but it is insightful and heart-wrenching. At a time when the homeless, like the mentally ill, are increasingly being criminalised because of a lack of resources, it provides firsthand evidence of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of our sympathy and our disdain. “The way people look at me… ” says Donna, “it makes me feel like I am a piece of shit on the floor.”
• Four Feet Under: 30 Untold Stories of Homelessness in London by Tamsen Courtenay is published by Unbound (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
