Across Europe, Faces of Homeless Become More Visible and Vexing

Published: January 05, 1992

Just before midnight, an unmarked Salvation Army van pulled up to the curb outside Euston Station and a trickle of tattered men and women edged cautiously from the shadows around the railroad terminal, hunched against the biting winter air.

There were, in all, about 30 of them, many wrapped in blankets. Most were young, in their early 20's, a few smelling sharply of alcohol.

As they formed a ragged line to collect their ration of sandwiches and soup and steaming tea, one man, a mute, leaned into a Salvation Army volunteer, his eyes wide as his hands chopped the air in a frenzy of sign language, trying to make himself understood. A bearded companion intervened, explaining that his friend's sleeping bag had been stolen. Could he have some blankets to help him make it through the night?

He was given blankets, plus a chit that entitled him to collect a free sleeping bag the next day from a Salvation Army warehouse.

The young, the infirm, the mentally ill, the alcoholic, the immigrant -- they are among the faces of a growing population of homeless people who are increasingly visible these days not only on the streets of London, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid and Rome but also in smaller cities across Europe.

"One of the biggest changes are the numbers of young people, not just in London but in small towns too, in Basingstoke and Eastbourne, Croydon and Hastings on the coast," said Maj. Robert McClenahan, a Salvation Army officer who regularly makes the midnight soup runs around the capital. 'I Am Hungry. Please Help Me.'

Sue, a woman in her early 20's who begs for handouts in the London underground, often holds a small sign that reads: "I am hungry. Please help me."

"I don't want to do this, but I don't want to go home either," she said, explaining that she could not find steady work after leaving home four months ago because she did not get along with her parents. "At least I have some friends now, and we all look after one another."

But many other homeless people, particularly the older men, gave up long ago, and now refuse offers of assistance. One of them is John, a thickly bearded, scruffy man of indeterminate age who has survived for years beside a subway entrance along the Thames, not far from the posh Savoy Hotel. His legs are badly infected, but he refuses medical attention.

"I worry about the cold and winter, but I'll get by," John said as he adjusted a plastic bag around him and settled against a wall. "Don't worry about me."

In Paris, Panayotis Xirias, who is 46 years old, said he had spent 24 years on the streets. "I won't sleep or eat in any of the shelters," he said flatly. The small monthly Government subsidy he receives he uses to bet on the horses. "If I win, I will treat myself to a night in a hotel." Otherwise, home is a sleeping bag over a ventilation grill.

Homelessness in Europe does not appear to have reached the grim proportions familiar to New York, Washington and many other American cities. But the romanticized image of the clochard, the footloose European vagabond, has been supplanted by a more Dickensian scene, of thousands of people -- many of them sick, some of them immigrants, most of them without work or hope -- who sleep in doorways, parks, underground parking garages or cramped shelters in which whole families must share a single room. Accurate Numbers Elusive

Still, as in the United States, the precise scale of homelessness in Europe is difficult to judge, and numbers and impressions vary widely.