Thursday 26 May 2022

The days when you could give it all up


Britain's old 'men of the road' disappeared - or, more accurately, died out - years ago. Three generations of urban alcoholics and drug addicts replaced them, and they never properly die out. Fresh members are recruited all the time.

Tramps, as the name implied, never stayed in one place. They walked about so that they could never be moved on when their faces broke the unwritten law of being overly familiar. Some had regular circuits and some just went North to South (usually that direction, I think), a journey by foot which would last long enough to see out their lives with no particular destination in sight.

Driving with my father one day, we spotted a ragged vagrant in the incongruous setting of our leafy suburban road, and he wished out loud that he could swap places with him. I asked him if he was serious.

"No job, no house, no wife, no children, no cares."

I remind myself that he was going through a rough time, but he got over it.

12 comments:

  1. We had plenty of tramps when I was a child in the thirties. One was a woman with a child - 'Pyewipe Liz'. My mother saved any old clothes which came her way for them and never let them go without a meal in the washhouse - a table put there specifically for the purpose. (Pyewipe was a village about ten miles away).

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    1. Pyewipe Liz. What a name. Did you have the French onion seller on a bicycle too?

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  2. I remember tramps as well, you saw them on the road. My grandfather never took one in, but at Xmas we would have children from a Birmingham place, I suppose orphanage, to share our table. Also two of our housekeepers were single mums with children, fallen on hard times. As Pat says charity did begin at home. You forget the homeless Tom, the ones that sit in city shop entrances, drugs maybe but not always.

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    1. Two of your housekeepers? How many did you have? I don't forget the modern homeless, I just put them into a different category which is not particularly relevant to this post.

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  3. You've reminded me of a mentally ill man that lived in the little town where I grew up. He was really, really eccentric. Everyone had crazy Varney stories, and come to think of it, he would make an excellent subject for a blog post! Real southern gothic stuff.

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    1. Mental illness is a fairly recent analysis. For the last hundred years here, shell-shock was always blamed.

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  4. The tramps on the London Road used to sleep in our barns in the straw.

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    1. Very cosy. I have spent many wonderful nights under hay.

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  5. Living on the streets in any form seems sad and forlorn. Yet, it continues on today.

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    1. There are those who exist on the streets, but I am thinking of those that incessantly wander roads right now, for whatever reason.

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  6. Tramps came through my yard back in the forties. The railroad tracks and the roundhouse was only down the hill. I was giving a tramp a glass of water when my father came home from work. He told the man to drink and begone. It was his second glass. I was not frightened of him, he looked so sad.

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    1. Here, we never had the open goods trucks that U.S. railways had (I know from films, etc.) so tramps had to walk everywhere - much smaller distances! I remember the images from the Dustbowl era, when ordinary families had to take to the roads. My father pretended to admire the lifestyle, but he too would have been hostile if one turned up on our doorstep.

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