Street life | 16 August 2018

‘What can you tell me just now,’ asks Audrey Gillan. She’s talking to Tara, who’s been sleeping rough on Fournier Street in Spitalfields, close to Gillan’s home. Tara, aged 47, sounds like a man, so deep and growly is her voice, ruined by drink, cigarettes and the hardness of her life. Gillan wants to know how and why she ended up living on the street. But beyond explaining that she was slung out by her mum when she was 14 there’s little that Tara can or is prepared to tell Gillan.

In Tara and George on Radio 4 (produced by Gillan and Johnny Miller) we are taken on to the street and some way inside the lives of those we see nowadays in town, not even camping with cardboard boxes and newspaper but just lying on the pavement, no longer part of the whirling world around them, while we carry on, walking by. Gillan quotes statistics that suggest the number of rough sleepers in England is almost 5,000 and increasing rapidly year-on-year.

Tara has a friend George who’s known her for nine years. He, too, cannot really say why he’s living rough, except that he hates being shut inside and rarely sleeps in the hostel bed to which he is entitled as an ‘older, entrenched rough sleeper’. There are days when neither Tara nor George are lucid, but mostly they’re up for a conversation with Gillan who has been recording them for a couple of years. They have a radio, and listen to music, mostly love songs, ‘’Cos it’s all about love and friendship; it’s about knowing each other.’ Tara once went to prison for hitting George over the head with a bottle, but he stays loyal, believing he needs to make sure she’s still taking her medication for epilepsy.