The Lay-by and the Tramp

I am about to be forced from cover. I don't really see that I have much choice. I suppose I could stay schtum and thereby retain complete anonymity but my journalistic instincts, notably my love of a good story and the overpowering urge to share it, are too strong. I have to blab!
I have, like most Bloggers, always kept my exact location a secret to all but a few but a story has broken nationally to which I feel compelled to add my four penneth. This tale, unfortunately, is set in Pither's Small Town home, something which is about to become blindingly obvious to all but the most dimwitted, and so I shall be flushed out into the open - but hey, ho. Let's go.

The story concerns one Josef "Fred" Stawinoga. Have you read or heard about him? Well, for the uninitiated, Joe was a tramp who lived for 30 years in a tent on a grassy central reservation on the ring-road in Wolverhampton (ooh, what a give away!). He was such a unique character (Ed. Oi! You can't have degress of uniqueness!) that a few years ago some wag put him on facebook under the imaginatively entitled "We love you, Wolverhampton ring-road tramp" and he soon became an unwitting and extremely reluctant worldwide celebrity.
Joe became the subject of newspaper articles and television and radio features and then he hit the headlines again yesterday when, not content with having lived in a tent for a third of his life alongside one of the busiest and noisiest stretches of road in northern Europe, he went and did something REALLY silly - he died!
It is perhaps most remarkable that this Tolkienesque character, who had withstood downpours, gales and almost Arctic conditions through 30 winters with just sheets of canvas between him and the elements, was 87 when he finally checked out! Fuck me! I have been on camping holidays in which I almost died after just two days!!
Contrary to all the blathering in the press and media, little is really known about the late Josef. What IS on record is that he was a Pole who came to England after the Second World War. One surely has to question the state of mind of someone who decided to swap post-war Poland for Wolverhampton. Hitler didn't bomb Wolverhampton - he didn't need to - but Christ knows somebody should!
This seemingly bizarre relocation became somewhat more rational when it was revealed that during good old W. W. I. I. he had not, in fact, fought alongside his persecuted Polish brethren but had taken a long, hard look at his bread, noticed on which side the butter had been spread, and sided with the Germans. Not content with becoming an honorary squarehead for the duration, he went one better and joined the SS!! You would have thought that would have been enough for any budding traitor and all round arsehole but then yesterday one of the few people he ever spoke to, a fellow Pole living in Wolverhampton, described him as "Not one of the nicer members of the SS!" Admit it, you gotta go it some to be labelled the unacceptable face of the SS?!!
Well Joe, not surprisingly you might think, kept his SS background a secret when he moved to Wolverhampton but he needn't have bothered. Any city which is home to such a Nietzscheresque organisation as MENSA (yes, I kid you not!) would doubtless not only have welcomed such a bastard but also made him mayor!!
Life in Blighty seemed to go fairly well for Joe for the next thirty years and there are photos of him, suited, booted and with a dapper haircut, seemingly enjoying life in the Black Country. The arrival in the city (then a town) from across the country of Pither in 1965 did not seem to bother Joe unduly, nor did the commencement of work a few years later on something which was to play a central role in his pensionable years - that bloody ring-road!
By way of a brief digression, the ring-road is one of Wolverhampton's claims to fame. The city, which also boasts a signatory of the American declaration of independence (the fantastically named Button Gwynett), the home of the first set of experimental traffic lights outside London and the only latterly appreciated Slade, has a ring-road which not only took almost thirty years to complete (seriously!) but goes through the middle of the city!!
Anyway, back to Joe. It seems that Pither's increasing presence on the streets in everything from flares or Oxford bags to penny-round collars or polo-neck sweaters did not upset the balance of Joe's mind. The rise of Thatcher through the Tory ranks also failed to disturb him (not surprising, considering his soldiering days!) and he seemed positively unfazed when Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep spent 234 weeks at the top of the charts. No, what apparently tipped old Joe over the edge was when his wife fucked off!

Instead of throwing a party, he there and then took the decision to give up worldly ways and go back to nature - in a battered, tiny old tent aside the St John's stretch of the ring-road. Shaving and regular trips to the barber's became things of the past for him and he shunned all attempts to coax him back into society. Social services did everything they could to bring Joe round to their way of thinking but he was adamant - "I'm happy on the fucking ring-road so fucking leave me a-fucking-lone!!" (only with a Polish accent).
I know Joe used to return to his Anglo Saxon roots when speaking to anyone who stupidly chose to try to communicate with him because a big pal of mine once did a feature on him for the paper on which we both worked (the Express & Star, aka the Distress and Stir, aka the Express & Swastika). Bob, for it was he, was about the best fucking reporter I ever worked with. He was legendary in journalistic circles, as was his dad who was a notorious Fleet Street hack. It was Bob who dubbed the recalcitrant tramp "Fred" for the purposes of this article because he had been unable to extract his real name from him during one of the most entertaining interviews of his Wolverhampton life. The way Bob tells it, the interview ran along the following lines:
"Hello, may I have a quick word with you?"
"Fuck offski!"
"Ha, ha, ha. No, seriously, I just wanted to ask how you are and how you are coping out here?"
"Go shitski yourself, cuntski!"
"If it's not a daft question, why are you living in a tent on a ring-road?"
"Mind your own fuckski business, you wankoffski!"
"What is your name?"
"I shootski you, mother fuckski!"
And so it went on. Working on the basic assumption that "Man who live in tent on ring-road unlikely to have solicitor", Bob duly published a two-page article full of made-up quotes and referring all the time to the tramp as "Fred". Although his real name emerged in later years, he was forever known as Fred to the good folk of the city.

Social services eventually admitted defeat in their attempts to civilise Joe and some years back they took a pragmatic approach to his case and moved in to replace his battered, little tent with a large, brand new one. His reaction to such an unwarranted act of generosity and accommodation was typical of the man:
"Fuck offski, you bastards!! Leave me a-fucking-loneski!!!"
So there he stayed. He became as much a fixture of life in Wolverhampton as the raincoated bloke who used to stand at the top of Darlington Street hurling imaginary stones at passing cars or the loony who used to race round the Mander Centre dressed as a cowboy while clutching a ghetto blaster to his ear. The only contribution Joe was ever asked to make was to ensure that "his" stretch of ring-road reservation was kept clean and tidy and that he did. As you drove home from work you would see him shuffling around, rake or broom in hand, sweeping up the leaves and collecting the litter, litter not left by him, I hasten to add, but by the mindless shitheads who make up about fifty per cent of the population of this city. He had his tent, he had his patch of land and he survived on meals provided by soup kitchens and various charities. Most notable among his benefactors was the Sikh community which revered him greatly, seeing him as some sort of holy man for abandoning the wicked ways of the world to live a simple life.
Now he has gone. Things don't, and will never, seem quite the same anymore. They unceremoniously pulled down his tent soon after his death on Sunday and there is now no trace of where he once lived - but he lives on in my mind. I never thought I would wax lyrical about a former member of the Waffen SS but Joe's story is irresistible - very much a game of two halves, you might say.
Good on you Joe, you curmudgeonly old Nazi git! You did it. They said you shouldn't, that you couldn't, that you mustn't - but you did. Fuck 'em all. You got out of the rat race and you did it your way.
Raise a glass to Joe tonight - Grantham shall not have him.