What does poverty look like in the era of COVID-19?

Garbo morning. Still living under the great thumb of COVID. The woman is almost bent double as she rummages through my recycling bin. I catch her at it as I’m leaving home at dawn, before the trucks arrive, can hear the clink of the glass she’s scooping up from deep inside the bin.

“You looking for bottles?” I ask. She glances up, startled at being caught. Nods guiltily, even though I try to convey she shouldn’t be. “Where do you live?” I continue. “I can drop my bottles off to you.” No worries, it’ll make it easier for her and we’ll both benefit; I assume her place is just up the road somewhere.

She tells me she lives five suburbs away, a half-hour drive. Ah, I see. So, she’s risen early to do this, for the 10 cents from the recycling centre for each bottle or can she’s collecting. From anonymous, far-away garbage bins like mine. Perhaps it’s easier to do it around here. No one will recognise her. There’s a flicker of shame in her wry smile; I wonder what’s driven her to do this.

The woman is neat, well dressed, a middle-aged, mothery-looking type. Just like me. Our small, pleasant early morning exchange feels like a collision of two worlds, yet we aren’t so different, don’t look so different, and I shiver as I head off into my day. How gossamer-thin that wall into real hardship feels now, for so many of us. One lost job away, one redundancy, one more rental payment or school fees that tip you over, one longed-for text calling you up for a gig that you were relying on that never actually comes.

The woman returns to the depths of my recycling bin, not quite finished with it yet. I continue on with my day, rattled by the naked demonstration of this new kind of Covid poverty. Feel the chill winds bearing down upon us all; feel the ghosts of the Great Depression stirring once again. It was an era my grandparents talked about with fear and great respect, that time of the great levelling, when the world pivoted and everything changed. They were grateful they’d lived the lessons of its bleakness only once in their lifetime.

Poverty is violence. Upon your psyche, your wellbeing, health. Samuel Johnson said poverty is the great enemy to human happiness. It is corrosive and exhausting, leaking its worry into your sleep, taking up all the space in an anxious head. How to not be hungry, how to feed your children, how to be warm in the depths of winter, how to pay the next power bill, the next water bill, and how relentlessly they all come. All the little traumas crowding in. Poverty is the stern jailer always watching in the corner of the room, coughing drily, battening you down, flattening you.

“It is fatal to look hungry,” George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London. “It makes people want to kick you.” I wanted to befriend this woman, talk to her, but she wanted her anonymity; didn’t want to be caught doing this. And there was a curious dignity to her too – she would not be bowed by this, as if it were the new world order and we’d all better get used to it, for it would touch us all.

My respectable-looking garbage rummager highlighted the socioeconomic lie perpetuated by governments – that poor people are lazy, that they bring their circumstances upon themselves, that their lives are somehow dysfunctional. Poverty and joblessness is not a personal shortcoming, and this strange time makes it glaringly obvious.

The net of COVID poverty is reaping all types now, including the battlers, the doers, the optimists and the alphas. My garbage rummager made me realise how vulnerable so many of us are. It’s going to be tough, come September.