VT Coughtrey - Brighton Hostel: the community

NOTES	When I got back to Brighton and the hostel, I got two surprises. One was that the place was no untidier or dirtier than I had left it. The three residents so far - Ken, Sid and Carol, seemed to have coped pretty well, with very little help from the volunteers (mostly students who had left Brighton for the Long Vacation). Ken had, in fact, sold quite a lot in the shop, and there was a fair amount of money in the biscuit tin used as a till. The other surprise was that they seemed not to have noticed that I had been gone for twice as long as planned.
	I resumed the selection of residents from among those coming for the free Sunday meals, until I had eight. However, this posed problems of accommodation, for the following extraordinary reason. One day, Tom and Mary, the great shoplifters who had put me up a few months previously (see Chapter 63), turned up on the doorstep. They were suddenly homeless for some reason and asked if they could stay. They somehow persuaded me to rent them two rooms upstairs. So for the other nine residents, including myself, there were now not enough rooms, so some had to doss down wherever they could.
Bryan Breed was the author of The Man Outside, a book on the dossing scene, published in 1966. He lived in Brighton or Hove at the time and came to see me at the hostel as soon as he heard about us.	I directed one resident to sleep on the piles of jumble stored in the filthy cellar. He was very happy indeed about this accommodation, and thanked me warmly many times. This was Jock, who became the dynamo of the hostel and the great favourite of the volunteers. A Scottish gypsy and meths drinker in his sixties, Jock assured me that he had managed to dry out (otherwise he would certainly not have been offered a place in the hostel). However, it was not long before he started on the meths again. But Jock was very unusual, possibly unique, in that he could stay permanently drunk on crude spirit while remaining full of energy and fun and without ever becoming obnoxious or difficult. As a result I let him stay and was rewarded with great loyalty. For example, when I was approached by a publicist, Bryan Breed, with the offer of a free publicity campaign, Jock offered to help in any way possible. This gave Bryan the idea of a dosser being spotted by press photographers picking up a fat cigar butt that the Duke of Edinburgh had supposedly just flung into the gutter from his car, while being driven through the gates of Buckingham Palace. I took Jock to Buck Ho, where we were instantly surrounded by press photographers and reporters who had responded to Brian's press release. There was, of course, no sign of the Duke of Edinburgh, and the cigar butt was carefully placed in the gutter by a Sun reporter. Jock had to pick it up in different ways dozens of times before the photographers were satisfied. The story was in all the papers the next day, but the best result was in the Sun. They had a full-page (front-page, possibly) picture of Jock picking up the butt. Jock looked every inch the meths drinker, even if he didn't behave like one, so it was a great picture. Alone of all the papers, the Guardian wasn't prepared to go along with the deception, so instead, they interviewed me at length about crude spirit drinking. They described me as "brimming with bespectacled earnestness". Jock assisted with several other publicity stunts, the biggest of which I shall relate in due course.
	Unfortunately, I'm not able to provide many clues as to the backgrounds of the residents, as I kept strictly to a Simon-like ban on asking questions. This was one of the ways in which we were very different from the official social services, to whom interrogation was all-important (and probably still is). Nevertheless, in some cases, the immediate cause of their homelessness was fairly obvious. Jim, for example, was epileptic. I'm not sure it's politically correct to say this, but epilepsy was definitely one of the causes of dossing. In fact, I've a vague memory of going on a weekend course for hostel wardens on that subject at about that time. Jim was a soft-spoken but sharp witted young Scot. He could be great fun, but also enjoyed employing his wit for the purpose of being very sarcastic. On two or three occasions, Jim had major fits in pubs after only a couple of drinks. The pub managers, the ambulance crews and the hospital staff simply assumed he was exceedingly drunk, and treated him accordingly. I was called to the hospital on these occasions (residents carried cards with the hostel number on them), and had blazing rows with ward sisters. They wouldn't hear of epilepsy. I can't remember what role in the hostel I gave him, but I don't think he actually did anything. Unlike the other residents he seemed to have some secret source of income. I couldn't allow residents to apply for Social Security, because we were not supposed to be running any kind of hostel there. There was plenty of food, somewhere to sleep and a limitless supply of free clothing from the jumble, but only Ken had any known source of money - his shop commission, which he seemed not to spend on anything at all.
	Yorkie's problem was also fairly transparent - he was a compulsive gambler. He was about forty and ruggedly handsome in a 1950s film star kind of way. You felt that he could have gone far on looks alone had it not been for his addiction. He became the only resident I evicted from the hostel. This was after Ken had reported to me that about a week's shop takings had disappeared from the biscuit tin. After very little probing on my part, Yorkie confessed to stealing the money and losing the lot in an illegal gambling den. At about the same time, a neighbour spotted two carriage lamps that had disappeared from outside his house, on display in our shop. Ken, in all innocence, had bought them off Yorkie, who claimed to have bought them from the owner. There had been remarkably little trouble from the locals so far, but this misdemeanor resulted in a visit from a Corporation official, who accused me of running a hostel without planning permission. I showed him round. Apart from mine, the only real bed he could find in the place was the double one in Tom and Mary's area upstairs, and the couple were able to prove that they were renting the rooms as a flat, on a permanent basis. Only one proper bed elsewhere on the premises meant that the place was a day-centre with accommodation for the 'manager', not a hostel, and it was for a hostel that planning permission had been refused. I'd been saved by the beaurocratic mind and the Corporation didn't trouble me again, but Yorkie obviously had to go. Actually, Ken was far more annoyed with me than with Yorkie about the takings. He had begged me many times to bank the money more regularly. I was in the habit of leaving it until the tin was full.
	Of those with no immediately apparent reason for needing to resort to the hostel, John was arguably the strangest and certainly the creepiest. He was a very tall, thin and gaunt man, ashen faced, probably around seventy years old. He couldn't be persuaded to part with more than the occasional monosyllable, of which "John" had been the most useful. In taking him in, I had supposed that he would soon liven up a bit and be capable of fulfilling some role in the place, but I was disappointed. He ate very little, and from the moment he arrived spent several weeks, to the great irritation of Denis, sitting catatonically still in a dark corner of the shop, staring wide-eyed at some horror we couldn't see. As far as we could tell, he never removed his tattered old grey suit, day or night. Dennis, to whom he was obviously an embarrassment, ordered him out of the shop many times, but there was no response. We knew he wasn't deaf, because of those rare answers to questions - usually a mumbled "yes" or "no".
	One day, when Jock became tired of Dennis's constant complaints about John, he burst into the shop and harangued John for some time about what a useless and ridiculous specimen he was, etc, etc. Being Jock, his anger became more and more inflected with Glaswegian humour as he warmed to his theme, and he ended by suggesting all manner of gymnastical and vaudevillian activity as therapy. It happened that this somewhat unorthodox counselling coincided with my imminent departure, in the company of some hostel volunteers and one or two residents, to join the annual student Rag procession through the town (the hostel had been nominated as the main beneficiary of the proceeds from Rag that year). John suddenly leapt to his feet, the usual terror in his eyes subtly mutating to demonic glee. He followed us out of the door and all the way to the assembly point for the procession, repeating to himself all the while "jump up and down, do the Can-can, hop and skip, custard pies..." He was fairly bouncing along the street.
	The Rag procession was as juvenile and as energetic as it should have been, and John, to the bewilderment of the students in our part of the procession, faithfully imitated everything they were doing, only with more gusto and raucously yelling a command to himself in advance of every action he performed: "Twirl around! Wave your arms about! Kick your legs up! Blow your whistle! Laugh!" When we arrived at The Levels, the open space where Rag traditionally dissolved into chaos, flour bombs began to fly. John soon appropriated a supply to himself and began flinging them about with more enthusiasm that anyone else.
	After this extraordinary day, John was much more of a nuisance than he had been before Jock's outburst. He would stride purposefully round and round the house all day, interfering with everything but doing nothing useful. Eventually he disappeared in the middle of the night and was not heard of again.
	I've already mentioned Sid, Carol and Ken, both in this chapter and in Chapter 64. Sid and Carol were a pleasant young couple, willing to work hard around the house. Sid was lively and had a good sense of humour, whereas Carol was dopey and didn't understand any of Sid's jokes. Sid led me into a terrible habit of staying up all night almost every other night, playing gin-rummy in the gloom of the scruffy little kitchen while Carol watched and yawned from the corner. There was no clue at all as to why they needed the hostel.
	Neither was there any clue as to why Hank should have been there. He was the youngest resident - probably younger than I - but claimed to have spent several years in the RAF. He certainly knew an awful lot about aircraft. His military bearing, marching gait and officer-like tone of voice, not to mention his extreme right-wing views, were all curiously at odds with the hippie appearance he had meticulously cultivated. His strings of beads and his bells were the most extravagant and exotic in town and his splendid flowing locks were carefully groomed, rather than left to fend for themselves, like mine. He hounded girls mercilessly, and they all claimed to detest him. Unlike Geoffrey (see Chapter 56), whom girls also claimed to detest for his harassment of them, while being quite prepared to sleep with him, Hank got less than nowhere in that department, as far as I know. Also unlike Geoffrey, he seemed to be detested by most men as well as by women. It was probably a mistake on my part to appoint him second-in-command. The residents were remarkably willing to carry out my instructions, but reluctant in the extreme to obey orders issued by Hank, whose name they extended to a rhyming pair. Ken came close to being evicted by me for kicking Hank's shins on one occasion.
The former Hervey Arms is now called the 'I Go Inn', and it's apparently a very different place indeed from the pub I knew. Who remembers the landlady's bowls of curry? She occasionally presented me with one free of charge.	But Hank had at least one friend - me. I took a liking to him from the start. At the end of the previous chapter I hinted at the beginning of a 'sea-change' of attitude brought on by the contrast between the ease with which I was able to hitch back to Brighton and my experience in France. Hank's hard-line nationalistic sentiments were somewhat in tune with my revised mind-set, while still able to appeal to my continuing need for some form of generally unacceptable radicalism. We often strutted rapidly around the town together, usually ending up in the Hervey Arms at Black Rock. The Hervey was an extraordinary pub in those days. It attracted all manner of revolutionaries (but mainly anarchists) as well as poets and artists, but the Austrian landlady loved to boast of having been a member of the Nazi Party. Her English husband, a retired colonel, made no secret that he shared her views, which had not been modified all that much by the demise of her party. Yet, as far as we, the clientele, were concerned, this couple were the most liberal-minded and tolerant of all pub landlords and managers in Brighton, even allowing revolutionary posters to be put up on the walls. For Hank and me during that phase, that excellent establishment was the perfect vessel for our exotic cocktail of contradictions. Hank, of course, had no source of money at all, so his love of good whisky and cigars increased the drain on the Brighton Hostel funds significantly. Many a time, after the Harvey, we would roll about the town until the small hours, in hilarious high spirits (Hank could even roll militarily). Hank was a damn fine drinking companion and I hope he's had a happy and successful life since I last saw him in 1970.
	Those were the long-term residents of Brighton Hostel in 1969, but others would occasionally be brought to me by the police for a one night stay, because they didn't know what else to do with them. These people tended to be expensively-dressed, respectable citizens who had made fools of themselves - perhaps for the first and last time - after too much drink. Usually they were middle-aged women. I had a little bare cell reserved for them in the cellar, which could easily be cleaned out after they had vomited and urinated in it. They would creep out at about midday the next day, groaning with terrible hangovers, but desperately embarrassed at the same time. They were usually grateful, because the police would have taken them back and put them in a police cell for the night, had I refused to take them in. The Chief Inspector knew that the hostel was illegal, but it was too useful for him to want to do do anything other than give me a nod and a wink over tea and biscuits in his office at the police station. I enjoyed those visits, and he was pleasantly surprised by my views, which were sliding ever further to the Right - on a roll.