He lived in a hovel under the Humber Bridge. It wasn't always a hovel. It was once a very well constructed chicken coop. Before that it was briefly a pigpen. And before that a rather muddy field. Some would say a marsh. It had been drained at some point, but it still got flooded in the winter. He didn't live in it when it was a pigpen. But he did briefly live in the chicken coop. That was after the chickens had gone.
The chickens had disappeared when they built the Humber Bridge. He thought it might have been good to have free-range chickens under the Bridge. It wasn't as noisy as people thought.
People liked to go to the Wildlife Centre cafe and look out of the big window at the stream of traffic crossing the long span from Hessle to Barton. They liked the Bridge, but they didn't want to walk under it. They were suspicious. He wondered if it was something to do with him. He didn't know. Maybe it was more to do with bad luck. Like the walking under a ladder thing.
He had a habit of collecting bird feathers. It might have gone back to the time he lived in the chicken coop. He wasn't sure. Maybe he just liked birds. He sometimes walked along the mud marshes on the river bank. He went barefoot. He liked the feeling of clay squeezing through his toes. It made him feel clean. He never had problems with his feet. There were plenty of bird feathers on the Humber shore. He picked them up and took them home.
He had a ladder. It was propped up over the hovel. He climbed the ladder and put his feathers on the roof. He liked living under a ladder, under the feathers, under a bridge, under the sky. The ladder had a few rungs missing. It didn't really go anywhere. It was stuck in the mud at the bottom, and rested against the concrete anchorage of the Bridge.
One day he was sitting at the top of the ladder. His back resting against the cool concrete. He was enjoying the contrast of the shade under the bridge and the sunshine on the grassy banks either side. He felt a word bubbling up. It seemed to come from deep in his belly.
'Anchorite,' he said out loud. It was the first thing he had said in a long time. He had heard the word before but wasn't quite sure what it meant. From that point onwards he decided to call himself the 'Anchorite of the Anchorage.'
His job was the hold the Bridge up.
And he did.