Heat Wave
The sun glares down on the streets of Streatham.
The common is a scorched tan, the concrete pavements shimmer with haze. The
heat wave has arrived.
The stretch of pavement opposite the now empty
Tesco’s has been a microlab for the pandemic rules for some time now. Packed
within 50 metres are 2 bus stops, a chippie and an off-licence. Not much
further down, cafes that have been closed and are now opening, the patrons
almost in each other’s laps.
Some wear masks, some don’t. Some walk around,
some brush on by ignoring you. On the buses most seem to wear masks from what I
can see but I am too fearful still to step onto a bus. I can see that nobody
sits side by side, but clearly also people are sitting one behind the other,
much less than a metre apart. Teenagers on bikes pack on the corner. The young
have always been immortal.
I queue outside the off-licence for a beer. Am
I scared to go to work on public transport? Hell yes. Am I prepared to risk my
life for an ice cold beer? Again hell yes. But as a compromise I shuffle around
outside trying to keep my distance, and several decide to go inside ahead of me
to stand cheek by jowl, while I hover on the pavement, patient and seething by
turns.
The phone lines are exploding with calls. Every
single mother who is stuck in a hostel with a young child who cannot reasonably
live cooped up in a studio, or sharing a kitchen with strangers is desperate.
Every disabled person in a homeless hostel or emergency hotel is desperate. The
hostels are full to bursting, the police come weekly, there are fights,
drinking, weed, madness. Above all frustration of hope.
The rough sleepers were brought off the street,
they haven’t had the support they need. One such young man who was illegally
evicted walked 6 miles with Covid symptoms to avoid infecting others. He got no
Universal Credit for 6 weeks and had no income.
Everybody wants to get out.
Even those who are wheel-chair bound are
trapped in unsuitable hotels, unable to bathe, some dying of cancer.
Roksana is Roma. She and her children have been
suffering in lockdown just like the rest of us. While in the street, yards from
her front door, some men approach her, threaten to sexually assault her and her
children who are with her, and pelt them with eggs. They tell the Romanies to
go home, but they do not mean the place that is her home.
Pat is from the Irish Traveller community, she
has a son with mental health problems. During the lockdown her windows are
broken, stones are thrown, racial slurs follow. Pat and her family cower inside
while summer blazes.
Both families flee to sofas or caravans with
relatives who are overcrowded themselves.
Photographs, police crime references, calls to
the local authorities, interventions from local charities, all of these are
available and yet nothing changes. The Councils are overwhelmed, and liable to
sweep it under the carpet.
And yet we have been so kind to each other
recently. The food banks. The deliveries of food to those who are shielded. The
round robin support calls for people who are self- isolating. The furlough
payments. The neighbour who never speaks to her neighbour, this being London,
and says how are you? The clapping for the NHS.
For example the 15,000 rough sleepers who the
Minister for Housing said must be housed, no ifs no buts. True homelessness
solved at a penstroke?
Alf is almost of pensionable age, lost his job
as a carpenter when his back gave out 10 years ago. He used to sleep in his car
many nights, he got a hostel at the height of the pandemic, and in that time he
was awarded Personal Independence Payment, and he used some of those arrears to
fix his car.
Now he has been found not to be in priority need and may have to moved back
into his newly fixed up car.
It feels as if our coming together may be falling apart. Warm words that we
were all in together became real in the pandemic. But now it is business as
usual and we must kick the weak to the wall.
And yet.
On the 24 of August the Courts were to have
opened again to hear possession claims, and there would have been an avalanche
of evictions, I am guessing. Perhaps 3,000 backlog case in my local County
Court, perhaps 40,000 nationally.
But today the evictions and the Court
possession cases have stopped mostly, until 20 September.
And a Council agreed to reconsider Alf’s case
all over again.
Thomas Hardy said, we must treat each other
with loving kindness.
After the last war we had homes for heroes. We
are all heroes now, but where are the homes?
A young guy with no shirt and no mask comes out
of the off-licence. He gives me the door but I hesitate to step in. He looks
quizzically at me.
Outside Streatham blazes.
