Therapy

might expect: broken home, absentee father, mother a boozer, truancy from school, in trouble with the law when he was twelve, taken into care, placed with foster parents, ran away, was put in a home, ran away from that, came Up West, as he calls the West End, drawn by the bright lights. Lives by begging, and the occasional casual job, handing out fliers in Leicester Square, washing cars in a Soho garage. I asked him why he didn’t try and get a regular job, and he said solemnly, “I value my freedom.” He’s a queer mixture of naivety and streetwise sophistication, only half-educated, but with some surprising nuggets of information buried in that half. He saw a copy of Kierkegaard’s Repetition that I bought second-hand in Charing Cross Road today, and picked it up, frowning at the spine. “Kierkegaard,” he said, “the first existentialist.” I laughed aloud in sheer astonishment. “What d’you know about existentialism?” I said. “Existence precedes essence,” he said, as if reciting the beginning of a nursery rhyme. He wasn’t reading from the dust jacket, because the book didn’t have one. I think he’s one of these people with a photographic memory. He’d seen the phrases somewhere and memorized them without having a clue what they mean. But it was astonishing that his eye had fallen on them in the first place. I asked him where he’d come across Kierkegaard’s name before, and he said, in the Library. “I noticed it,” he said, “ ’cos of the funny spelling. The two ‘a’s’. Like ‘Aarghhh!’ in a comic.” He spends a lot of time in the Westminster Reference Library, just off Leicester Square, browsing through encyclopaedias. “If you just go in for the warm, they chuck you out after a while,” he said. “But they can’t if you’re reading the books.”
    The longer the conversation went on, the more difficult it became to bring it to a close and turn him out into the cold street again. “Where will you sleep tonight?” I asked him. “I dunno,” he said. “Can’t I sleep downstairs?” “No,” I said firmly. He sighed. “Pity, it’s a nice little porch. Clean. No draughts to speak of. I ’spect I’ll find somewhere.”
    “How much does the cheapest bed cost round here?” I asked.
    He gave me a quick appraising glance. “Fifteen quid.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “I’m not talking doss-houses,” he said, with a certain indignation, “I’m not talking Sally Army. I’d rather sleep on the pavement than in one of them places, filthy old men coughing and farting all night and interfering with you in the toilets.”
    In the end I gave him the fifteen pounds, and escorted him out of the building. In the porch he thanked me nonchalantly, turned up his collar, and sloped off in the direction of Trafalgar Square. I very much doubt whether he will blow his windfall on a room for the night — it would keep him in food and tobacco for two or three days — but my conscience is salved. Or is it?
     
    As I was going to bed, it occurred to me to try and solve the mystery of “proud one” by consulting the dictionary I keep in the flat. It has names of famous people in it, as well as words, and sure enough, there he was, though I’d never heard of him before: “ Proudhon, Pierre Joseph. 1809-65, French socialist, whose pamphlet What is Property? (1840) declared that property is theft." How about that?
     
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    QUAINT TALES OF BRITISH RAIL NO. 167
    (By “Intercitizen”)
     
For some months past the escalator between the taxi drop underneath Euston station and the main concourse has been out of action. Before that, it was intermittently under repair. Large plywood screens were erected round it for weeks at a time, and passengers, or “customers” as British Rail calls us nowadays, struggling up the emergency staircase with our luggage, babies, pushchairs, elderly and infirm relatives etc., would hear from behind this barricade the banging and clattering of fitters wrestling with the machine’s constipated intestines. Then the screen would be removed, the moving staircase would move again for a few days, and then it would break down again. Lately it has been left in this state, stricken in mid-cycle, no apparent effort being made to repair it. With typical British stoicism passengers have got accustomed to using it as if it were an ordinary solid staircase, though the steps are uncomfortably high for this purpose. There is