If you won’t give to beggars, you’re going to have to work hard at becoming a friend of mine

Funny how no one has mentioned it, but I’m not really down and out, whatever it says at the top of the page. Well, compared to most of my friends, fellow hacks, and even – I have a hunch – readers of this magazine, I am as poor as a church mouse, as they used to say, but compared to some of the people I see, I am relatively wealthy.

I might not be able to afford a holiday (when people ask me where I’m going for mine, my mind reels with sarcastic replies) but at least I have a roof, however contingent, over my head, friends, and can afford to eat.

But the dossers I see every day on my journeys – they’re down and out. They’re the real deal. I have become attuned to their plight since my expulsion from the family home. It is interesting what happens to one’s attitude to the destitute when you realise that you are rather fewer notches from the bottom of Fortune’s game-wheel than you were before.

You start evaluating others’ neediness. You stop saying: “There but for the grace of God go I.” And you start giving more.

For not to give to beggars constitutes a very simple and straightforward failure to understand what it means to be human. I am sorry, but when I see someone shivering in a doorway holding out the bottom of a polystyrene cup, the instinct is to put a quid in it. This is an instinct that can be – and, thanks to our powers of justification, often is – successfully repressed, but if you’re the kind of person who looks at a beggar and thinks: “Why isn’t he working?” or “It’s so much better in the long run to have a standing order with Oxfam; beggars only spend the money on drink or drugs” – then you are going to have to work hard at becoming a friend of mine.

I certainly have my own ways of rationalising, on the hoof, about when I’m going to dish out the alms. There’s a homeless hostel round the corner from me, and quite often the inmates drop round to the Duke to pester the drinkers outside for money or, more typically, cigarettes. The last lot who came round were quite a sight. They looked like the most ill-fortuned survivors of some devastating apocalypse.

I am almost invariably generous with my snout (a dosser who refuses a hank of tobacco and a few Rizlas is, frankly, taking the piss), but these people had been so depraved by circumstance and cheap cider that they had quite forgotten their manners. Were I a proper Christian, Muslim or Jew, this would not have been an issue, but being an atheist means you can be flexible in your responses. So this time, to the amused but definite rebuke of my friend Z– (“You’re only a shaving away from them!”), I said “No” before they’d even finished their sentence. Not good.

But otherwise I do my best. Well, not really, but a bit. I buy the Big Issue. There are the regulars. There’s the toothless wreck of a woman who, if you look even a little bit closely, has to be under 40 but looks a lot older at first sight; the silent man, rather younger, who sits patiently and, unrelentingly, unemployable, victim perhaps of some great trauma; but then there were the couple, a youngish man and a woman, neither of whom you might want to go on a date with, but who would lie together under sodden sleeping bags and newspapers in the underpass by Baker Street Station.

I give most days to the ruined woman, because she looks as though she’s going to die if you don’t; the quiet man less often, because he doesn’t look quite so wretched; and the couple not at all, because they don’t even look as though they’re asking for money and also because they seem to have found comfort in each other’s company.

As I passed them while they were asleep one night, they looked so touching, like the figures on the Arundel tomb, that I felt like doing something for them – but they looked at peace, self-sufficient, and a lot more at ease in each other’s arms than many more affluent couples I could think of.

They’ve gone. I think of them now, and my failure of charity towards them, because the underpass now stinks, chemically. It always used to, chiefly of urine, and enough to make you wonder whether it was worth waiting for the lights to change if you wanted to cross the Marylebone Road; but now the stink is deliberate, unsupportable, designed to force people away. You now only use the tunnel if you’re in a real hurry.

The question is now settled; the gauntlet of pee and claims on your conscience was far easier to run than this much viler assault on the senses. For this smell is much worse: it’s the odour of some eugenicist, at council level, saying: “Let’s make this place smell so bad that not even the homeless can use it.”

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