Janet, we hardly knew you

JANET, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

Janet Anderson's body was found in the gutter of a side road in Hyde
Park on Christmas morning last year. She was lying on her back, eyes
open, arms wrapped round the two plastic bags that held all her worldly
possessions. The night had been cold, clear and frosty.

Janet Anderson had frozen to death under the careless stars and
ignorant moon shining down on just one more of London's homeless.
Underneath her black bomber jacket she had wrapped herself in layers of
Christmas paper to keep in what little warmth was left.

Established facts of Janet Anderson's life are few. That she was a Scot
is beyond reasonable doubt. Her soft warm brogue and rolling r's
testified to a life begun well north of Hadrian's Wall. Her lilting
voice, often drunken to be sure, sang songs that have outlasted
mountains. Her age was indeterminate, but her face ravaged by time,
grief and alcohol, her hands crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and her
cry of 'spare an' auld lass half a croon' suggested someone steeped in
years and experience.

Certainly I cannot remember a time when auld Janet was not there, a
landmark as fixed as the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus under
which she squatted watching, when not in an alcoholic fog, the busy
world bustle by.

To suggest that Janet was nothing more than a drunken dosser is unjust:
her observations were acute, her wit could bite, and her concern for
the 'puir wee bairns' around her touching and not always ineffective.
She scolded young street girls - "Dinnae end up like me, I'm on'y
trash." - and hustled them, often against their will, to the security
of Centre Point and other young hostels. Young boys, seduced by the
bright arcades of Leicester Square, would find themselves gripped
fiercely and frog-marched to the nearest police station. Janet Anderson
cared for a world that cared little or nothing about her.

If Janet Anderson was a fool, she was a wise one. She could quote from
her Gideon Bible at length and make you ache with the arrows of its
wisdom. She knew passages of Shakespeare and, it seemed, all of Rabbie
Burns by heart. She scorned the blockbuster novels that her friends -
taxi-drivers, refuse collectors, the police, tourists - tried to pass
on to her saying "Ah dinnae like them; they're trashier than me." She
had no illusions about herself or her future, sitting in a cold dawn,
waiting for the hip replacement operation she knew would never
come.

Janet made you think.

Who were the homeless? What had led them to this life on the streets?
Who would record their sad, unfamous history? Why did a stray cat or
dog move us more than the sight of their bagged-up bodies lying in shop
doors? Why did we glance at them, look away and hurry on by?

I excused my curiosity on the grounds that I was a journalist. It was
my job to dabble in the stuff of other people's souls. Privacy is not
an option for the poor. I didn't learn much, perhaps I didn't learn
enough. Janet had been a nurse, sometime, somewhere. Now she could not
nurse herself.

There had been a young man, a soldier, in the Seaforth Highlanders, and
he had gone to war and never come home. That's the way it was, that's
the way it had always been.

Had there been a baby, a wee bairn, when she was a girl? Hints,
fragments, tears in those bleary blue eyes, but nothing definite, no
true confessions. I wanted there to be a baby. I wanted Janet one day
to rest in her narrow cell, comforting her lost baby to her breast
through eternity. If Janet had no history, I would write one for
her.

Janet Anderson was buried in a pauper's grave. It is surprising how
many of the homeless are. There is a simple wooden cross. They told me
that they will add her name when they have time.