Tales from Turnpike Lane station 4: Sandra and Jodie.

There’s not been a great deal to grin about this week. Things at home are, well, they’re not easy. Several of my dearest people are all fucked up and there's precious little I can do about it. Last night, having been bailed on for my last appointment of the day, I lit a cigarette outside Kings’Cross and decided to watch the world go by for a while. The weird, hallucinogenic strip-lighting under the awnings, the crush and low, murmuring panic of rush-hour, the smokers in their own little worlds. I didn’t have anywhere special to go, but I didn’t want to go home, and I’ve always found it meditative to snatch a moment of silence in the in-between places, where everyone’s busy going somewhere else. I stood there, blowing smoke at the sooty air, wanting to taste the dirt, feeling sorry for myself.

Then I met Sandra.

Sandra is 48, and her neck is covered in little white scars where the violent husband, who she ran away from, burned her with cigarettes. Despite the associations she sold me a Big Issue and told me her story in exchange for a fiver and a couple of smokes.

‘See that guy over there?’ she gestured to another Big Issue seller, a round guy in his forties who was hassling a weary female commuter. ‘He can get money out of people like that – like that, and he spends it all on heroin ! A woman on the streets, though, noone wants to know. They look at you like you’re trash. It makes me feel like trash, and, I mean I know I am trash, really, dyou see what I mean.

‘Last night I woke up and this dirty old guy had his thing out, right in my face. Disgusting.

‘I’m done with London now, just trying to get home to see my boy – I’d like to bring him some chocolate, he’s mad for chocolate, just like me. Although I can only have it now if it’s melted, dyou see what I mean.’ I do see. Sandra has no teeth.

I gave her all but the three quid I've left to get me home. Feeling like a complete twat, I mutter ed something about going back inside to meet my boss (who left an hour ago) and finished my fag behind a pillar.

Then I met Jodie.

Jodie was standing sobbing in the puddle of dark by the entrance to the underground, with a couple of security guards hovering around about to move her on. She was trying to sell her last Big Issue. You’d have thought that the inconsolably-weeping, strikingly-pretty-blonde-teenager gag would have been enough to make at least one or two commuters stop and offer her some cash, or at least enough to make the hired police go away, but no. This being Britain, most people just slunk past looking vaguely embarrassed.

I gave her a cigarette, and two of my remaining pounds (I could pay back the debt on my oyster tomorrow, that’d be fine, definitely). She now had six of the twenty pounds she needed for a deposit on the hostel she’d got a place for, which would give her a shot at housing benefit and a real place to live. A sweet, scared-looking nineteen year old from Ireland, she’d been in and out of care in London for years. If she was scamming me, she was scamming me for something I didn’t need quite so much as she did right then. But I had nothing left to give, nothing at all to give Jodie to keep her warm and safe whilst I scuttled back to the home that suddenly seemed a lot more inviting. I stammered my apologies, and sloped away.

About halfway down the escalator, hemmed in by briefcases and light-haemmoraging adverts for boob jobs, I thought: no. Fuck this, no.

I scanned the crowd for the richest looking bastard I could see. Fortunately, I can recognise bespoke tailoring when I see it, and within seconds I was bouncing up to a stern looking dude in his late thirties, wearing subtle tweeds and a fetching pink silk tie that probably cost more than everything Jodie owned.

‘Excuse me, sir, I hope you don’t mind – I’m doing some research for a school project – but what job do you do?’

‘I’m a banker.’

Brilliant.

At this point, the chap took a quick look down my top, and any qualms I’d had about being manipulative disappeared as if by magic.

So I explained.

I explained that there was a little girl at the top of the station stairs, crying, with nowhere to sleep tonight. I explained that she was cold, and frightened, and in danger, and just wanted a place to go. Could he spare even some of the fifteen pounds she needed?

‘Sorry, I have to go.’

‘Come on,’ I raised my voice, ‘you make a good living. This girl has nothing. She's freezing. She's sick. This isn’t for me. Come on, please. Her name’s Jodie.’

And to my absolute astonishment, the man in the pink silk tie produced a bulging wallet and whipped out a crisp new twenty-pound note from a bunch that constituted more money than I earn in a month. He handed me the twenty with a growl and swept away in a whirl of Prada, not seeming to hear me yell thank you thank you. I never even got his name.

I bounded up the stairs two at a time to give Jodie the money she needed plus enough for something hot to eat. I have never been hugged so earnestly and unexpectedly before. Being British, my first sensation was, of course, crushing embarrassment. But heading home, I felt vindicated. Wealth redistribution by public humiliation of the casually loaded may not work as a long term social strategy, but damn it’s fun.

Because look, I know I sound like I'm just about to burst in to song, but life is fucking hard. Your life's hard, my life's hard, Jodie's life is hard, even pink tie man's life is probably hard in its own peculiar way. And it's because life is so fucking hard all the time that as long as I have my faculties I will fight unfairness wherever I see it, and I don't care if that makes me an annoying bitch, actually. I don't care who I have to shock and humiliate and shout at in order to make life that little bit easier - if not for us, then for someone, somewhere. That's guerilla socialist feminism, and it's always easier to look away.

(I did make it home to Turnpike Lane in the end, but I had to jump the barriers, and at 4'11 that's no mean feat. More kicking against the pricks shall follow just as soon as my groin is a little less sprained. Oooh.)

Kill Patriarchy 3: Cleaners' strike

Whilst the Tories squeal and bicker over one working woman's pay-packet, let's talk about some practical feminism happening in London right now.

The cleaners of the London underground work through the night to keep the city's vascular system pumping and sanitary. Most of them are women with families. Many of them face abuse and sexual harassment every day from loutish travellers as a part of their work. On top of wiping up our vomit and newspapers and taking crap from our scum, they have to struggle with shockingly low pay, on-the-spot third party sackings, little to no sick pay and a measly 12 days' annual leave. And they've had enough.

RMT, the tube workers' union, will be striking on the 26th-27th July, and again on the 1st-2nd July 2008.
'The tube cleaners are an inspiring example of women fighting for their rights,' said Laura Schwartz, a representative of Feminist Fightback. 'London Transport must stop under-valuing so-called women's work such as cleaning and recognise that it is crucial to the smooth running of the Underground.'

These people are us. These are the people who clean up our muck. They have feelings, and they have families, and they have a level of baseline leverage that the Old Firm trembles to contemplate, and they're sick of being fucked with. This is feminism.

Let's make one thing crystal clear right now: we're not talking about the caring face of service privatisation here. Much of the abuse faced by these workers, most of whom are migrant women, does not just come from commuters. Clara Osagiede, a representative of the tube workers' union RMT, told me that it is extremely common for women to come to her complaining about serious sexual harasment from their male bosses- agency supervisors- but too afraid to make formal complaints. Male bosses take advantage of immigrant workers by threatening to expose them if they don't keep their mouths shut. This is the type of insidious patriarchal fist squeezing the breath out of the vulnerable women of this country every day.

Because, for the benefit of the uninitiated, London isn't all fashion and finance, Kate Moss and cocaine. There are millions of people here living on the poverty line, doing hard, thankless jobs that they hate just to keep themselves and their families together. Most of those people are women. Feminism happens on the ground, it's not traded in bitumen between snarling academics, and it's a central and inextricable part of anti-capitalism.

Eat the rich. Demand decent pay and support those working to do so. We are entering a new strike economy and you, too, are likely to be inconvenienced in your daily habits at some point over the next few months. But not half as inconvenienced as we'll all be if we allow the Old Firm to kick workers' rights and women's rights to the bottom of the agenda.