The government has lifted the income of the poorest fifth of the UK population, but official figures show that up to 12 million men, women and children still live in poverty, usually ignored by the media. In the first of a three-part series, Nick Davies traces the life of one man who lives on the poverty line.
Mr Purvis lives alone. He is 68. He knows a few people to talk to, but he wouldn’t say they were friends exactly. He has a daughter with children, and he generally goes to see them on a Saturday. Apart from that, the most important thing he has in his life is photography.
He lives in a small, dark flat, near Kings Cross station in central London. It is damp, and a thin skin of mould lies on some of his furniture. Most mornings, he takes his free bus pass and gets on the first bus he sees, maybe the 205 which runs eastwards to Liverpool Street, or the 63 which heads south for Elephant and Castle, and, if he feels like it, he might get off en route and just take the next bus that comes along, so he never quite knows where he will end up. And all the while, he sits up on the top deck, with his Nikon F90 in his hand, looking for something special.
He is very fond of buses – he was a driver and then an inspector until London Transport made him redundant, when he was 54 – and he’ll often snap a line of buses, or an advert on the side of a bus. And people – he loves faces, anything a bit quirky. He hopes perhaps one day he might take a picture which will make him famous. He can’t take too many pictures, just one roll of film a week, with 36 shots. At the end of the week, he takes the roll to Jessops and pays £7.99 to get it processed, and they give him a free roll for the next week.
Until now, he has managed to find the £7.99 each week. There are a few other little expenses to his trips: he sometimes gets hungry and pops into a caff for a sausage sandwich, which might well cost £2; or a cup of tea, which can easily set you back £1 or more nowadays. Over a week, he might spend £15 in caffs so, all in all, his photography usually costs him a total of about £23 a week. Until now, he has always managed to find it, by making little economies.
He has a rule that he never spends more than £5 a week on gas. In winter, the flat is often cold, so he may spend most of the day in bed. He is not complaining about that. He only has the one chair to sit on, and the bed makes a bit of a change. From bed, he can reach the phone, if anybody calls him; and he can see the television; and he sits there and he looks at his photos and sometimes, if there’s one he is especially pleased with, he puts it in a frame.
He has the same rule for electricity – just the £5 a week. From time to time, he does have to sit in the dark, but he keeps costs down by cooking in the microwave which his daughter gave him, instead of using the electric Baby Belling. Another £5 for the phone: he’d get rid of it, but he has a bad heart, and the hospital and the GP are forever sending letters telling him to phone for this and phone for that. £2 for the TV licence (he won’t get it free until he’s 75). £2 a week for envelopes and stamps so he can write to the council (the older you get, the more you complain, he believes.)
He has cut down on eating. Every week, he buys two tins of pease pudding for 50 pence each and a large loaf of sliced bread for 19 pence. Every morning, he toasts two slices of bread and spreads some pease pudding down the centre of the toast so that, even if it doesn’t cover the whole slice, you get a taste of it. And, if he is careful – as he always is – he can get through breakfast for the whole week on the two tins of pease pudding and just a loaf and a half of the bread. That would be £1.28 for the week. At midday, he might have something in a caff while he is out on the buses and then in the evening, he will have a microwave meal, or a tin of baked beans, which is nice and cheap and very convenient because he can eat them cold if he needs to save a bit on the electric. He reckons to spend no more
than £18 a week on food, including tea bags, and then £10 on things for the flat like toilet rolls and cleaning materials. (Sometimes, he does go a little over the top on tea bags, but then he can always take that out of the next week’s money.)
His state pension comes to £92 a week so, even after paying £47 for all these essentials, he still has £45 to spare. But it’s not quite as simple as that. He needs company. He is not saying he needs friends, but he has always been a mixer, and sometimes he likes to hear voices that are not coming from the television. So, each week, he draws out exactly £10 in cash to pay for six pints of bitter shandy over the week in the Northumberland Arms, around the corner on Kings Cross Road. He has never been a drinker, but there are two or three people there who know his name and say ‘How are you?’ Then, on Saturdays, when he goes to see his daughter, he buys a few bread rolls and some ham and three tubes of sweets for the kids, and that might well cost him £5. So then he has only the £30 left.
Sometimes, in the small hours of the morning, Mr Purvis has panic attacks. Often it’s because he misses his wife. She went back to Newcastle more than 20 years ago, and he feels she was his best friend and he says he feels like a total failure. Other times, he thinks about his dad, who was a poor man all his adult life, mostly because one of his hands was ruined in the Great War and he couldn’t work, and Mr Purvis feels so sorry that he never took him down the pub for a pint when he might have done. And at times like that, Mr Purvis knows he has to keep his mind occupied. He’ll turn the light on and look at his photographs and remind himself exactly how he took each one. But every so often, he needs something more than that.
He is a bit ashamed of this to tell the truth, but it happened a few months ago that he felt so troubled that he knew he had to do something to pick himself up and so he went into a model shop in Holborn and he bought himself the most beautiful miniature replica of one of the old Routemaster buses. It has everything: the little winders on the windows, real glass headlights, a bonnet that lifts up, and underneath there’s an engine that Mr Purvis reckons is spot on. It’s a limited edition, and he’s got the framed certificate to prove it on the wall right next to the model which is proudly displayed in the corner of his room, where he can see it and feel good when he needs to, in the small hours of the morning. It cost him £100.
He put it on a Barclaycard. And once or twice he has used the same card to buy little frames to put his best pictures in. So he is paying off £2.50 a week on that. Which leaves him £27.50. And sometimes, he needs clothes. He always goes to charity shops for his shirts, but he prefers to buy underpants and socks from real shops, and recently he did buy one pair of decent trousers on the Barclaycard – his only other pair is torn. Then he needs birthday cards and Christmas presents for his daughter and her children. He really doesn’t want anything for himself, he’s quite all right spending Christmas Day in bed with a bit of cake. But by the time he’s paid for clothes and those little extras, he is down to about £20 a week which only just covers the £23 a week for the photography.
Now what is making him worry is that his rent and his council tax keep going up. A lot of pensioners don’t have to pay them, but he says the worst mistake he ever made was to take out a private pension a few years before he left London Transport. There is not much of it, but it means he gets less state pension and he has to pay £26 a month in council tax. And that has doubled in the last year or so. And he has to pay £15.10 a week in rent, and now he has just had a letter to tell him they miscalculated, so he has to pay an extra £8.55 a week on top of that for a while. And he dreads to think what would happen if he had to repair something, like the fridge or the television.
Sometimes, he lies awake at night and worries about the future. He used to have a car, but he can’t afford that now. He has not gone on holiday for more than twenty years. He never goes to a cinema or a theatre or a restaurant. And he thinks it’s a joke really, the idea of him sitting in this little flat all day, with the smell of damp and the curtains drawn in case the boys outside kick a ball through the window, and he is not sure what he would do to keep his mind active, and he is sorry that somehow he has lost the knack of making friends, but he feels that if there is no other way to make ends meet, he will just have to give up the photography and make the most of living alone.
