My first Christmas spent virtue-signalling
It was the midEighties, I was a student, and a combination of middle-class guilt and vaguely right-on political opinions led me to volunteer at the annual shelter for the London homeless, created by the charity Crisis at Christmas. No, I told my tolerant parents, I would not be returning to the warmth and comfort of the family home in Wandsworth: I’d be doling out soup in a former bus garage in Euston, and learning about Real Life. What’s more, I’d volunteered for the night shift, which I thought sounded extra noble.
In the week before the shelter opened, I helped to collect redundant mattresses from hospitals, and cycled to Covent Garden market at dawn to help load donated vegetables into a van. Then, on my first shift, my uselessness was quickly exposed under brisk questioning from my team leader. Did I have medical skills? Could I cut hair? Mend clothes? Cook? No, no, no and no. Did I have any skills at all?
Well, I could roll cigarettes. Back then, we handed out a fag made from donated tobacco to any guest (the official term for those using the shelter) who wanted one, after each of the three meals we served daily. I spent most of the Christmas week rolling cigarettes for hour after hour through the night. They even put a team of four people under me. It is still a matter of great pride that I taught a young French nun, a fellow volunteer, how to make a well-crafted rollie.
There were other benefits: sharing door duty with people of all ages and backgrounds; learning how to pacify an angry drunk enraged by the shelter’s no-booze policy; listening to the life stories of insomniac guests. One fellow volunteer detailed the mathematical in-jokes in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland to me at 3am. A guest explained the different hierarchy of homelessness that existed back then: dossers, skippers, itinerants.
Though I’d undertaken the experience for all the wrong reasons, it was rewarding enough for me to volunteer again the next year, this time alongside my mate Ian from Manchester, for a mix of day and night shifts.
From the days, I remember the brisk lorry driver whose life seemed much more organised than mine, even though he was sleeping rough; the punk with the neck tattoo who used a lighter to turn an aerosol spray into a flame-thrower; and a lad who had gone to my south London comprehensive, who reminisced about teachers we both remembered, and was homeless after breaking up with his girlfriend.
The only thing I remember about my night shifts was the end of my last one, on Christmas Eve, when Ian and I checked out of the student rooms in Russell Square that had been lent to Crisis, and wandered through the snow – yes, really – down to Leicester Square. Like I said, this was the Eighties, before fast-food outlets proliferated and opening hours extended across London. There was one greasy spoon open right by the Tube station, where we had a bacon sandwich and then, somehow – maybe my dad fetched us – got back to Wandsworth and fell asleep face down in the Christmas lunch.
My volunteering was a short-lived act of teenage virtue-signalling, but it did make me realise how easily anyone can become homeless. I haven’t volunteered since – and I quit the roll-ups years ago – but I still donate to Crisis.
It’s still a matter of pride that I taught a French nun how to make a rollie