The homelessness of the bird

What do Ridley Road, Little Dorrit, a glass pavement and a budgie cage have in common?

I think everything that happens to me, still, is even now a part of the homelessness. I keep realising it afresh: you don’t have your home taken away from you and then just bounce back. And by ‘home’ I don’t mean your flat. We all know a home is so much more than four walls. It’s people, sounds, the smell of the air; the certainty of the paving stones under your feet, knowing where the pub hatchway will creak underfoot; knowing when to get off the bus even while reading a book, without looking out the window; your relationship with the past of the place, your understanding of where you fit into the scheme of things, and how it fits into your past. Home’s the place you understand.

I keep writing about this same thing but it keeps not going away.

People have often told me they’re glad I’ve ‘settled’ somewhere — at first it was Brighton, when I spent some weeks on my friend Elaine’s sofabed, then it was here in Kent where I was staying in a cottage no one was living in while feverishly trying to get my head to stand up straight, see where I was, and devise a plan — and then it was when I rented this little flat, which I came to realise was only really the real beginning of the story. Once you’re in, then you have some of the raw materials of a home. That’s all.

They are missing something, though probably not all the same thing. I’m sure it means at least a vaguely kind desire to see me settled. And sometimes that is for my sake — though they’re jumping the gun a bit — but more often I think it’s because I’m just cluttering up the emotional thoroughfare, messing up the order, and scarily reminding them how the order can be messed up.

Other people keep thinking I’ve sold my house and downsized out of the city; it’s impossible for them to imagine someone not having anything to sell; there’s no conversation for that: ‘Hastings is nice, and such good value!’. No. (By the way, this was one of the things people kept saying to my friend Nick, a well-known book journalist, when it happened to him. I remember a monster thread on Facebook where he could not persuade people that he had no house to sell — even though he’d been writing columns about life in ‘the Hovel’, as he used to call it, for years…) I wonder if this sense of ‘home’ partly depends on choice, the ability to decide for yourself: a sense of agency.

Like Nick, I had nothing to sell, no savings, nothing but liabilities in the form of possessions and myself, both of which needed to be put somewhere. A nice older man asked me a few months ago, in a friendly way, ‘So are you a typical DFL (‘down from London’)?’ Just no.

If anything I’m the new typical, as more and more people without the means to choose are shunted outward. The London Borough of Southwark has purchased some of the houses that are being built in huge, controversial developments around the outskirts of Faversham, because even with prices rising in Kent they are cheaper than any solution that could be found in Southwark; we are in a massive social housing crisis. But I’ll be less typical of them, too, because I arrived here by the middle-class fluke of some friends owning an empty house.

I will identify with them, though. It’s worth mentioning in passing here, though there’s a lot more to write about it, that I am an immigrant. I was a Londoner; London is made of us. Here in Kent, which isn’t, I’m an immigrant all over again.

I was watching that new BBC series, Ridley Road, last night — attracted partly by the hope of catching a glimpse or two of the real Ridley Road, in Hackney (but it was filmed in Manchester, not London), and partly because the subject matter (London Jews fighting back against the neo-Nazi movement of the 1960s) is both timely and important, and feels personal.

Where I grew up, almost everyone we knew was Jewish; where I lived in Stamford Hill, almost everyone was Jewish. Like some of Ridley Road’s characters, I pass for ‘normal’ in England, at least until I open my mouth. And indeed I can also pass for Jewish, though a bit less so around Jews. But the point is that I had to make London my home. I built my sense of belonging in London brick by brick, fact by fact. It wasn’t quick and it was hard work. Losing that is like losing not only your home, but also all your effort. When I first arrived in Faversham, knowing no one, I used to sit under a blanket and watch the Israeli series Shtisel, a Hasidic family drama, on Netflix: it was the only thing that felt like home.

One of Ridley Road’s subplots seems to be developing around the displacement caused by the postwar demolition of old terraced streets and building of the new tower blocks: the middle-class utopianism, dreaming of ‘decent housing’ but forgetting that ‘home’ is so much more than your actual house. An elderly (and magnificent) Rita Tushingham worries about her neighbourhood and loss of community, while renting out a room (‘at my age!’) and sitting in church meetings where these fears are being used to stoke prejudice. Prejudice that’s still alive and well, by the way, and being stoked by our own very modern 21st century discourse.

We’ve seen material about this on television before. The 2012 series, The Secret History of Our Streets, was dazzling and heartbreaking in its portrayals of why the town planners of the mid-century had it all wrong; they didn’t (mostly) take into account what real people actually needed. In Ridley Road it’s a cleverly foregrounded background influence on events. The difficulty and unhappiness of the people rehoused away from the people they’d known all their lives (I’d lived in Hackney half my life) is being replayed now in the lives of the people who have recently been shunted out of those very same idealistic tower blocks — like the recently gentrified, because already successful, Balfron Tower, in Poplar.

What an irony.

Re the housing blocks. Many have been torn down, of course, as not fit for purpose, or actually unsafe. Many are still unsafe, and as of June 2021, six households from Grenfell Tower were still in temporary accommodation waiting to be rehoused.

Anyway, to what extent is this idea that everybody has a ‘home’ just a fiction? The paucity of the public imagination was revealed by the lockdown measures, the ‘emotional support bubble’ that assumed everyone was going to be someone else’s mutual priority, the Tory myth of the ‘hometown’ when in fact many people are either living somewhere because they got a job there, or are suffering out-&-out economic displacement. Many people were on their own somewhere in lockdown, but almost all we ever saw in documentaries or on the news was families in terraced houses. And nor did we see overcrowded families in bed & breakfast accommodation 10, 20 or 30 miles from their former home. Something like 41 per cent of UK households are single-occupancy; that’s a lot of people on their own in lockdown. We didn’t see them, either. The news coverage around single people was mostly about sex — oo er, we couldn’t legally have it — and grandparents — branded as ‘vulnerable’, ‘with underlying conditions’, told to stay indoors, and then milked for their pathos. But nobody talked much about the general run of single people who may not have an actual community around them.

My own relationship with this sweet little town where I washed up has gone through several phases, all of them mirrors of my homelessness. I’m beginning to understand now how that is going to be an intrinsic part of me.

This is getting long. And it’s been aiming from the start for the bullseye of last week’s disaster, when my budgie, Little Dorrit, escaped. She got out of the cage the cage by wriggling through the gap between the bars, and the first I knew was a happy CHEEP! from outside the window glass. The window was open; the entrances to her cage were not only shut, they were tied shut with string. They were still tied shut after she got out.

Her happy face. Her beautiful aquamarine tummy.

Then the wings. Beautiful green and black wings.

Then the delayed reaction.

It took a few days to get used to imagining her in the horror of the sudden lashing rain, the plummeting temperatures and the wind. I had to get tired of roaming around Faversham looking for her and calling, “Dorrit! DORRRIT, my Little Dorrit, where are you baby?’, getting more depressed each time. Eventually I had to turn off the Youtube budgie sounds playing as a lure, and to shut the taped-open casement window because the wind was so strong I thought it might break the frame. It took many days to realise how cold and dark and quiet the flat was — because the light was for her, the music was for her — to realise how alone I really was, alone in a way I wasn’t even during lockdown. It’s been a week today and I still alternate thoughts that she must be dead by now with hopes that she can survive, maybe taken in by some kindly sparrows — because which of us can manage all on our own? — and the hard task of admitting she isn’t going to come back. It’s almost, almost, as if I was the one who flew out the window.

Now, there’s a whole story about Little Dorrit. She had been here about five months, and had spent her first two weeks trying to become an escapologist. She was from a pet shop and not finger-trained, and I was working very hard on taming her. The whole justification of buying a bird from a pet shop is that you’re liberating them from the pet shop. She’d been attacked by a cockatoo in the pet shop, and had a patch of feathers missing on the back of her neck; I was overjoyed because they were beginning to grow back in.

There is a whole long story about why she came here, and even about the cage itself, which had been bought for a very tame bird who never once tried out the gaps; the gaps were too wide, but the listing online actually says they are 1cm, which if true would have been very safe for a budgie. It was sold as a budgie cage. I’m dealing with my guilt.

I’ve spent the past three days mostly in bed, actually physically incapacitated. Weak. Cold. For a while I thought I might actually have something, and when the tears finally started I realised it was just grief and discombobulation.

It’s partly that my company is gone. I used to talk to her all day, in the flat. I got a little table and worked next to her cage to get her used to me. I’d leave the light on, the TV or the radio on for her, if I went out. She was eating millet from my hand and twice let me stroke her chest. We were getting there. She had come to London for ten days with me, but in fact it was London that made her restless again.

It’s partly that I was so busy working with Dorrit that I’d never really mourned the (entirely natural, but protracted) death of the adopted budgie genius, Diogenes, two days before the fall of Kabul in August. (Also, there was a startling day-long campaign of abuse from his original owner on Facebook, which in its own right had taken it out of me for about a week.)

It’s partly the crashing, plummeting sense of loss, more loss. Loss of the last thing. A home (which is a self), a pet, now the pet who was supposed to be the long-term one. The friend who was my support bubble in lockdown had left in February, much happier in colourful New Orleans, flown like another parakeet. So the escape of a bird feels like the escape of everything else all over again — and that in turn feels like divorce (loss of a self), like losing my job in the 2011 cuts, like everything pointing at me not being supposed to be able to keep anything — like being jettisoned… That glass pavement I sensed three years ago when I was out in the streets is replaced by a drop of sheer air underneath, the flutter of some wings into oblivion.

And Faversham is now the place where beautiful Little Dorrit might — hiding, starving, dead, injured, or okay — be, still.