Vol. 15 No. 22 · 18 November 1993
pages 9-14 | 10685 words
Walk on by
Andrew O’Hagan goes begging
George Baroli and I were soaked to the skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain, a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose. I tried to roll him a cigarette inside my jacket while he spoke of Newcastle, of how he thought he’d never leave it, and then telling me stories of his life now, as a beggar in London. He tapped my arm: ‘Times’s bad,’ he said, ‘but good times is just around the corner.’
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 23 · 2 December 1993
From Dermot Lewis
By going into print with his moving account of his stint among London’s beggars, Andrew O’Hagan (LRB, 18 November) has opened our minds as never before to what the beggar’s eye-view of street lite is really like. He has also, I have to say, succeeded in adding a new layer of anxiety on top of all that we already feel when faced by beggars in London, as we run through the reasons why we aren’t going to give them anything. Those reasons usually come down in the end to our telling ourselves that what’s the point, they’ll only spend it badly, on booze or whatever and not a bed. But Mr O’Hagan has perhaps without realising it provided us with a new reason: how do we know that that grimy, depressed-looking character huddled passively up at the way in to the tube station isn’t a journalist, doing his brave best to be one of them for a few days so that he can tell us later what it was like? I’m now worried that I may have seen Mr O’Hagan when he was doing his fieldwork and sidled past him with my loose change firmly clamped into my trouser pocket and my customary guilt feelings chasing through my head. If so, I wish I’d known; it would have saved me a few bad moments. That there is something like a hierarchy among London’s beggars I’ve known ever since the day a year or two back when I was bearded by one of them at a mainline station and, after I’d made some stumbling excuse for not coughing up, was told: ‘I’m the real McCoy, not like those other cunts.’
Dermot Lewis
Horsham
Vol. 16 No. 1 · 6 January 1994
From Christopher Hitchens
Andrew O’Hagan’s essay on the beggar’s art (LRB, 18 November 1993) is also a wonderful treatise on the ways in which we must all learn to bear the sufferings of others. Recently I heard a pointful story from the great Herb Caen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. A lady vegetarian councillor in that most compassionate of cities was walking between lunch and work, and passed a derelict with hand outstretched. ‘I feel bad sometimes about not giving anything,’ she observed, ‘but I’m so afraid he’ll just go straight off and spend it all on meat.’
Christopher Hitchens
Washington DC
