Tramps

There were "tramps" roaming the country when I was a kid. I remember one calling at our house, a dishevelled old man with blue eyes and snow white hair; my mother gave him something to eat and a glass of milk. That's what you'd do in those days; these days you'd probably tell him to "get lost" or use words to that effect!
They never seemed dangerous people then. You felt sorry for them. Maybe they'd been somebody important and had come down on their luck and had nowhere to go. Of course there are plenty of people like that now who live on the streets but they don't roam the country begging, then move on; they lie about on the streets of cities and, well, just stay there.
My father always put a strong case for the life tramps lead - I cannot remember what the case was now but whatever it was he always argued it vehemently. Maybe it had something to do with their being free to choose a way of life unhindered by capitalist forces.... he was strongly on the left at one time but changed over the years to being, well, not so much on the extreme left but sort of centre left.
I am reminded of the great novelist Thomas Mann who, I read somewhere, went the other way, so to speak. Born into a strongly upper class, conservative family of industrialists, as the years went on he gradually became more liberal until at the end, in his 80's, he became a Communist.
There is a new edition of W.H.Davies's famous book just out, "The Autobiography of a Tramp". Now there was a genuine tramp who tramped all over Britain and America. He wanted to be a poet and did not want work to interefere with his ambition.
And indeed he did become a well known poet with a book of poems published, with an introduction by George Bernard Shaw, no less.
I'm afraid I know only one quote from Davies's poems, two lines that everyone knows and which probably sums up his way of life:

"What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?"