ASPIRATION: 10 Jailhouse Doss

Marine Drive, Morecombe

Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.

- Bernard Goetz

I no longer recall how we disposed of our belongings - sent them by train maybe - but, mounting the motorbike, we passed through the camp gate for the last time and made for Morecambe. There, we joined the M6 motorway, beginning a journey that has left just the ghosts of recollections: the road running underneath, grey skies above, a shower of rain and now and sometimes a bridge swooping overhead.

Forton Motorway Services on the M6

As no link then existed between the M6 and the M1 I veered off the motorway onto the A5 and sped down the A34 into the city of Birmingham just as the evening sun was falling aslant the streets. We made a meal of fish and chips somewhere, and then entered the nearest pub, where we bent our attention to the problem of where to bed down for the night. As it happened, our talk on that topic was overheard by a girl buying cigarettes there. To our surprise, she offered to share with us the room she and her boyfriend occupied nearby. Naturally we were suspicious and I asked what the catch was. There wasn't any, she said. John and I exchanged doubtful glances.

"Come and have a look if you like", she said. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to."

Well, darkness had fallen outside by now and, empty of ideas ourselves, we drained our pints and followed her out. She led us through a pool of yellow light in the roadway to a darkened dwelling opposite and then along a dim pavement to a dark backyard where we climbed a staircase to the top floor and entered a large room lit by a naked bulb hanging in the centre of the ceiling.

John and I were speechless. There was no trace of furniture in the place, and the entire surface of the floor was strewn with a confusing lot of objects, the bulk of which consisted of discarded clothes and old newspapers. In one corner, the form of a mattress was discernible under a couple of jumbled blankets, and directly below the light bulb a bowl of half-eaten food with a spoon in it formed the focus of the décor like a favoured display. The girl now trod daintily into this dishevelment, leaving John and I confined to a strip of clear space adjacent to the doorway, where the sole adornment of the chamber hung on a hook: an image in ashen plastic of a portion of the female anatomy between the navel and the knees.

I scrutinized the spectacle in disbelief. Then the blankets on the mattress stirred and a shaggy mop of hair emerged into the light, followed by an unshaven face and a bare upper torso and arms. The fellow raised himself to a sitting position, but as he was not at all disposed to address us, I asked bewilderedly:

'Are you beatniks or something?'

He just sniggered at that and said nothing. A difficult conversation, this. I tried again.

'How can you live like this?' I asked, out of the depths of my innocent, artless sole.

No reply.

When I lapsed into silence myself, the girlfriend demanded:

'Well, are you staying or not?'

'Staying?' I countered, grimacing and shaking my head with disgust. How could I express my profound aversion to the idea of sleeping amongst this jumble of rubbish?

'I'd rather sleep outside!'

Since there was no rejoinder to this trashing of their habitat, we showed ourselves to the door, descended the steps and returned to the lamplit street.

Now what? Time was getting on. Where were we to sleep?

John suggested we find a police station. He said it was illegal to 'sleep rough', and that you could be charged with vagrancy for doing so. If we took our problem to the police, he maintained, they would be compelled to find us a place to sleep, and if they failed to find one, they would have to house us for the night in a cell. I voiced my doubts. Any police I’d ever known proved to be rather less...er...accommodating. But John assured me that it was true. He'd known people who'd done it.

The only defect in the plan was that the officers of the law might really succeed in the procurement of a place to stay, a place that would have to be paid for out of my dwindling supply of pound notes. But the night was cold and the grass was damp, so we decided to pitch our appeal late in the evening, hoping that by then no proper lodging could be found for us.

The time was about midnight, I think, when we planted our elbows on the desk of a local police station and told the sergeant in charge that we had just arrived in town and had no place to stay. He made a telephone call or two while we waited with fingers crossed, and – happy days! – he had failed to find anything. Now we were each handed a pillow, hard as a football and actually made of leather, and a blanket that looked and felt like it was made from the fibres of coconut shells. Then we were led to separate cells, where, dog-tired, we got to sleep at last, each on a kind of shiny shelf of bare wooden planking fixed to a wall.

Come morning, we loitered a little, hoping to be offered a cup of tea, but it seemed that the sergeant's supply of saving grace had been exhausted by now and we had to leave and look for our own tea.

Our cells were a little less comfortable than the one pictured below, which shows a thin mattress on the planking!