Off the Road
by Charlotte Neumann, ex-staff at O'Hanlon House
The annual battle against the ground elder is raging. As well as changing the not ever-lasting wood on the gables, the main bathroom is wearily awaiting a much-needed renovation. I am worried about the cost of changing the timber-framed windows in a not so far off future. Sometimes I wish I did not have to worry, sometimes I wish I did not have a house. Sometimes I wish that I could just chuck it in, go on the road and be rid of all responsibility.
There is sometimes a romantic air about the vagrant lifestyle. In the beginning of the last century the spastic black and white movies of the good-ol'-days, a young Charlie Chaplin shared a sandwich with either a cute friendly little canine, or a dirty faced little boy, tripped over his cane and did hat tricks. In more modern days the beatnik generation celebrated the independent hobo existence, and Jack Kerouac call to the world that "the world belongs to me, because I am poor" has been heeded by generation after generation of people who do not feel at home in their existence. Even in children's literature the happy vagrant is present. Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking, wrote the most beautiful novel about the camaraderie between an orphan boy and a tramp in the early 1900s and Mark Twain himself spent years on the road, or rather the river.
Not all depictions of vagrancy are altogether pleasant though: Charlie Chaplin gets beaten up by the police in every flick, much to the entertainment of the audience; in Enid Blyton's books vagrants are almost always crooks (and also gypsies and/or foreign spies) and get put away behind bars. Some literary works get closer to the rough truth than others: George Orwell's Down and out in London and Paris and Robert Swindell's Stone Cold are but two.
Wondering from place to place with no permanent home is very different from having, or feeling that one has, no home at all. Homelessness has not got the same romantic ring to it, something that the main characters in the latter mentioned books experience more than any of the others.
At the Oxford Night Shelter you sometimes meet people that seem to be happy vagrants. They travel between towns, making use of the shelters and squats, transferring incapacity and housing benefits from council to council, never hanging around for very long. Some seem to be truly content, like the archetypal surviving hippie academic who presented himself at the Shelter with a laptop and some Buddhist text that he was spending his days translating, sitting cross-legged shut up in the library, until he decided to move on. Others seem to aimlessly roam the country, loosely held together by addiction and friendship, moving on every time the pressure and self-image gets to hard to carry, burning bridges behind them, trying to shake off the past and their own shadows. These are the people that are the hardest to help, and often the most vulnerable.
How do we make them hang around long enough to face their battles? And how do we prevent that others find themselves in their situation? And can we ever find a way of treating the disease rather than the symptoms? Can we ever cure homelessness?
