His Name’s Dave.

I didn’t know his age. I didn’t know where he was born. London or the Estuary, to judge by his accent. A back of the throat rasp, with that peculiar, drawling fullness that you sometimes find in Estuary accents. A sudden hiccup of vowels, shooting up from the Albert Dock before slipping back into the rasp.

He was in his early forties, back in 2014. That would have put him in his late forties now. eight, nine winters later.

When I was a teenager, I stayed in East London from time to time, in the holidays and when I got a weekend away from school. I’d get the train from Godalming to Waterloo, then either walk East or get the Tube, getting off at Tower Hill and walking the rest of the way. Dave had two pitches- one in a pedestrian underpass up by the North-East corner of the Tower, and one in the Northern stairwell to Tower Bridge. I never worked out which one he chose to occupy on a particular day — I don’t know if he had a system, but whichever route I took to Tower Hill brought me past him. The last time I passed him regularly, he was mostly in the stairwell.

It was open to the sky, and the rain would come down before running off the stairs, dripping over Portland Stone and tourists’ shoes. And this hunched shape would stay there, head propped on arms propped on knees, just ticking through.

I stopped when I passed him. We’d chat, exchange what news we had, and I’d buy him a sandwich or a pint of milk. The last time I saw him was in Winter 2019. We talked about teachers and family. I apologised for not having been in touch- I’d lost the family connection in London, so had been in town less and less frequently. We chatted some more, wished each other a happy Christmas, and that was that.

The next time came in March 2020. A friend’s 22nd. I hadn’t been in London for a while, or at least had the chance to wander- everything over the past few months had been a case of passing through or going up for very specific events. But I had a couple of hours free, so I went in search of him.

First, I checked the pitches at Tower Bridge. No luck. Then the underpass. No luck. I asked at a spot if anyone had seen him- they said he was off elsewhere, but that he was around. So I left my name and asked them to pass on my wishes and some cash, and carried on. Lockdown came two weeks later.

I was next in London in June 2021. It was a cold, wet day, as a heatwave broke with rain and thunderclouds. I went to Tower Hill and searched — first the underpass, then the bridge. Both sides, and down into Shadwell. I asked if anyone had seen him. No luck. I asked at the station. No luck. I was told that I should ask at the food van by the Tube station — they were there every day, so if anyone knew it would be them.

There was a girl flipping burgers and brewing tea. The van smelt of oil, sugar, and grilling meat. Rain fell into the gutters.

I asked her she’d seen him, giving the name to find that it meant nothing. Then I described him, flicking through images. A flicker of recognition crossed her face, and she explained what she thought had happened:

“Just before the second lockdown… he was taken to hospital. I don’t know what happened. He passed away. Found out through my boss”

I felt a tightening in the throat. A prick of confusion. And, then, tears. A sense that I’d lost a friend who I never quite knew.

Dave made it through eight winters when I knew him. The ninth did for him.

There was nothing to be done, nothing I could do. Dave was dead, and nothing could change that. But I knew he was a Christian. So I walked from church to church, looking for a priest in the rain. I found one by the river, at St Magnus the Martyr, and asked for him to pray for Dave’s soul. Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord. The soul of a man being commended by some of those who remember him. It’s a scene which has happened in a thousand churches in two thousand years of London. Let light perpetual shine upon them. All individual tragedies and individual acts of remembrance, taking someone who fell through the cracks and trying to give them some sort of send-off. Bring him into your presence.

A year or so later, I moved to Southwark. One evening, I found myself walking past Tower Hill Tube — the food van was still there, and a man was huddled beside it. I grabbed him a coffee, and we chatted. His name was Bob — he was an ex Coldstreamer, and had been on the streets for a while. I asked him if he had known Dave. For some reason, I felt that it was worth getting some more information.

He nodded. He’d known Dave well. They, along with another guy, had formed a small group over Lockdown; as the streets emptied, they had pulled into each other to find some security. It turned out that the girl at the food van had gotten her dates wrong; he had died towards the end of the second Lockdown. The three of them — him, Bob, and another — had set up camp for the night and fallen asleep. The next morning, Dave was dead. He’d died in the night.

The police came, and the coroner carried out an autopsy. No drink or drugs. His heart had given out. His family were contacted, and they came to pick up the body. Bob and the others never heard what happened afterwards. If he was buried or cremated, where his ashes were scattered, even where he was properly from. He disappeared.

We talked about the man we knew, and details emerged in shades and dashed lines. He was from the Medway, and in his late forties. He had spent time in prison. We both heard armed robbery. Bob heard he was from Gillingham. I heard Rochester. We racked our brains and tried to work out if we could remember anything else — a partner, a child, anything? We came up short. Neither of us could pick out his surname.

I can’t give someone’s full story. I can’t map a life I only knew in snatches, and I can’t speak someone’s mind. By training, I’m a historian. I deal in hard evidence. And with this I find myself clutching at shadows. I think about a man hunched on the stairwell. I know that there were images of a life lived beforehand: a man in a cell; a teenager cutting about the streets; a boy in a school uniform; a child with no idea that his life would end in an underpass by the Tower of London. I know these images exist somewhere, in some mind, but I don’t have them. All I have are images of his final years, testimonies of his end, and shadows of his life.

They may be shadows, but they’re something, if it means a form of survival. I try to connect the dots and images to trace the legacy. Because it’s all we can do. We write of the dead to keep their memory alive; to make sure that they have the recognition and humanity in death that they were denied in life.

Perhaps it’s the way of things. Things pass, and memories ebb. One face on the street blends into another, and one figure in a doorway is the same as the next. This works for families as well as bystanders. For a period, my uncle was on the streets. Since then, I’ve seen him in shadows and flickers. In an accent or expression, in a face or hunched back. Things blend into each other.

Things blend. Lives change, evolve, and end. People come and go, and leave traces in the city that made or broke them. For some, they are neither made nor broken; we come, live for a while, and move on — the faintest of passing shadows in these old streets. A legacy could be something clear and visible, forever linked to them: Wren came to London and shaped its churches. It could be something which survives while their memory has gone: we don’t know who carved the London Stone, or what it was for, but it still sits at Cannon Street. Or it could be in the memories of a few and a slowly fading image; some corner which, in the minds of those who knew them, is forever theirs.

One of those people was from Kent. He came to London. He found himself, through circumstances which remain unclear, on the streets. He has gone to his rest by the Medway, where the silt and dust of the London clay seams empties into the North Sea. Where Dickens’ convicts stalked the Marshes, and where Magwitch found redemption. Like them, he has disappeared into the fog.

He is a memory, now. A memory for a family and friends who mourn the man they knew — not the man he was, perhaps, but the man they knew. His life was known in broad strokes and contradictions. He may have done some good, he may have done some ill. This is the way of things.

His name was Dave. He lived in Tower Hill. He was my friend.

He deserved better.