Half a century ago, at the age of 21, I travelled around the UK and Europe for a year. Because I arrived without any money, I had to take temporary menial jobs to finance my stay. I worked on building sites as a labourer, was a window cleaner for a while, and even spent time as a lavatory attendant in Amsterdam in order to pay my way from one place to another. At times I was obliged to live rough, like sleeping on railway benches or in cheap hostels frequented by individuals who were down on their luck.
About a year after returning to South Africa, a fellow traveller sent me a book with this inscription in it: ‘Hello there. I wonder, doesn’t this strike a familiar note?’ The book was Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and it did indeed resonate with memories of roughing it in Britain and on the Continent.
It is now fifty years later. A week ago I was sitting in my car outside Blue Bottle Liquors, when a man approached me. He looked exhausted and dehydrated, as if he had been wandering in the desert for a week without a hat. He said he wanted to buy a rooidoppie but was R5 short. Could I help?
As I handed over the coin, I asked him what a rooidoppie was. He said it was a plastic bottle of wine with a red screw top. When he emerged from the bottle store with his purchase I watched him make his way down the street to a narrow alley and he disappeared from sight.
It was then that I remembered the Orwell book and its depiction of Salvation Army refuges, squalid doss houses and grimy city streets. I tried to imagine the kind of life endured by the man I had just helped to buy a bottle of booze. What condition would I be in, I wondered, if I had fallen on hard times and was homeless? I concluded that by now I would most certainly be feeding the worms.
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