

### Far From Home

### Stories of the Homeless

### and the

### Search for the

### Heart's True Home

### by

### Clare Nonhebel

### Smashwords edition

Copyright 2014 Clare Nonhebel
INTRODUCTION - Home is where?

The word 'home' must be one of the most emotive in any language.

Everybody has an idea of home – an idea that has little to do with four walls and a roof, and more to do with a feeling of being at one with the world and having a place in it.

For some, the word conjures up an image of cosiness and security; for others, a nightmare.

For emigrants and refugees, it is a bundle of remnants of memories clutched desperately to their minds as they travel further and further away from the reality of home, which may never be seen again – or which may no longer exist.

For children who grew up unwanted, home is a place to leave as soon as possible – perhaps thrown out by a parent or step-parent or a mother's new boyfriend.

For the homeless, what is home?

It's a question that sometimes goes unasked, in the effort to rescue the homeless from the streets and provide them with homes.

Despite all the housing projects for the homeless, the number of people sleeping on the streets of our cities renews itself annually and shows no sign of diminishing. Not only do newly homeless people join the ranks of those sleeping in shop doorways and derelict buildings, but many of those who have actually been housed return to the streets again.

The fact is often quoted to prove the theory that 'Some people just don't want to be helped.' But it may be that being housed is not the same as having a home, and that the wrong problem has been solved, perhaps because the wrong questions were asked – or no questions were asked.

If the question 'What is home?' were asked of a thousand people who had left or lost their homes, there would be a thousand different replies. For each individual person, something different is needed.

And how about us, the privileged ones who read books and have homes? Are we fully at home in the world, because we're housed? Or are we far from home as well and on a perpetual journey in search of it?

In a sense, we're only one step away from those spending their days in the same small area of the same city, aimlessly wandering or begging or sleeping the empty hours away. We can feel that we're going nowhere, endlessly repeating the same routines, but each of our lives has a purpose that we may not be fully aware of – and all of us are on a journey home.

Whether we have only a doorway to sleep in, or whether we have homes and jobs and families and cars and mortgages, all of us came into the world alone and will leave it alone, and our stay here is temporary.

It sounds depressing and pointless. And if we're all homeless, how can we begin to solve the homeless problem? Have we failed to identify what the problem is?

That the homeless need a home more than anything else is beyond doubt. But what that 'home' is for them, only the homeless can tell us.

This book is an attempt to listen.

I am not qualified to write a professional thesis on homelessness or carry out policies designed to alleviate the problems. But the practical problems are already well documented, and most of us are not in a position to solve them anyway. Are we in a position to do anything, then, apart from donate what money we can afford to charities?

I believe we are.

I believe there is a value in approaching the subject in a different way – not from a perspective of 'us' and 'them,' of how those who have homes can help those who have none – but in terms of the homelessness of everyone. Do the physically homeless – who understand their condition only too well – know something that the rest of us need to learn?

I had no intention of writing a book when I started listening and talking to homeless people, but over the course of a couple of years I found that many of the things I heard from them stayed in my mind and wouldn't go away.

No two voices were the same, no two stories were alike, and no two people had reacted the same way, even to similar circumstances. For that reason, when I started to write, I decided to transcribe each person's actual words without too much tidying, so that in hearing their life expressed in their own voice you may get a feeling of what it's like to be that person.

Much of what they talk about is alien to our own experience – an eye-opener to a different way of life – but if we manage to stay with them as they describe their journey through homelessness and beyond it, we may find glimpses of their vision of life in our own lives.

Staying with them as we read their stories can be uncomfortable, not just because some of their experiences have been painful but because, by the last page of the book, we may no longer be able to see homelessness as something that could never happen to us, or believe that it must in some way be the person's own fault. And those are beliefs we might have preferred to keep.

By the end of the book, it may also seem less valid to draw a line between the deserving and the undeserving poor, or between those who keep themselves clean and those who let themselves sink into dirt or degrading lifestyles, or between those who survive without turning to drugs or drink and those who don't.

But the greatest discomfort of all may be to realize that those of us who have never been without a home in this life, and perhaps never will be, can recognize in these accounts some echo of our common human yearning for home.

It may seem, as we read, that – along with Grant and John and Miriam and Dennis and Tom and Eva and the others – we too may be far from home. We may even be far behind them on the road to home, for they have faced their homelessness and survived it, whereas we have not been so forcibly confronted with our rootlessness and aloneness.

It may take courage, then, to read this book.

But it will inspire courage as well.

In all these accounts you will find your worst fears realized: that ordinary women and men, through no fault of their own – or no worse fault than the rest of us – can find themselves alone, unloved and unsupported, without either a home or a welcome from anyone in the world.

But in some of these people who are about to share with you the most desolate moments of their lives, you will find something else as well. For them, that experience of finding themselves at the end of the road – down and out, beyond help, beyond innocence, and beyond the limit of their own human resilience – was also the starting point on the road to a new kind of home.

And for some, that home turned out to fulfil their most heartfelt longings.

CHAPTER 1 - It couldn't happen to me... could it?

A few years ago, Alan – a friend – and I began spending occasional evenings walking round central London talking to some of the homeless people on the streets.

We began tentatively. A representative from one of the homeless organizations in London told me, 'It's best to become a volunteer with one of the organizations, or you can get well-meaning people duplicating their efforts; everyone goes to the same places on the same nights, with their sandwiches and their soup, and other people get missed out completely.'

It made sense. But it didn't feel quite right. We saw crowds of people in certain places, like the Strand, queuing for the charity van and being handed sandwiches or dockets to collect blankets. But we also saw individuals in doorways who didn't queue for the vans, and went hungry.

When we asked them, they said either that they were afraid of losing their sleeping-place for the night if they left the doorway vacant, or of their blankets being stolen if they left them, or that they didn't want to be on the receiving end of charity handouts. They were homeless, jobless and hungry – but once they accepted that first free handout from a Salvation Army van, they felt they would really have hit the bottom and there would be no return.

So we started, at first, just wandering around talking to people, asking how things were going for them and how they were. We half expected to be told to eff off – standing there in our warm coats and boots, with return tube tickets in our pockets ready for the journey home to a comfortable bed that night. But surprisingly few reacted with any hostility.

Most said. 'You begin to feel you're invisible, when you've been on the streets for a while. People walk past you – or step over you, or tread on you – and don't even see you as a human being. Thanks for stopping to chat.'

One couple, standing on the Embankment in a biting November wind, started berating us one evening. 'Why don't you do something? You could if you wanted to! The politicians and the churches could all do something about the homeless!'

We weren't politicians, and we weren't representing a church, we said. We were two individuals without very much to offer, who felt concerned about the number of increasingly young people sleeping out on the streets while we lay in warm beds at night, listening to the rain lashing against the windows. We wanted to do something. But we didn't know what.

'What would you do?' I asked them. 'If we were you, and you were us, what's the best thing you could do for you?'

Their anger subsided and they thought for a moment. Finally, the girl said, 'People do come round with sandwiches and things sometimes. But they don't have time; they give you the food and move on to the next crowd. No one has time to listen to you.'

So we carried on just walking round, stopping and saying, 'How are things going for you?' Some didn't want to talk but some were desperate to. A few, after talking for half an hour or so about their lives, would say, 'You haven't got a cup of tea or anything, have you?'

I bought a couple of thermos flasks and made soup. It was welcomed by those who, addicted to alcohol or drugs, couldn't manage solids. Those who could said, 'Have you got a bit of bread to go with it?'

We made chicken sandwiches. Some of the people said, 'I'm vegetarian. I'm tempted, because I'm hungry, but... no, I'll try and stick to it as long as I can, thanks.' So next time we took cheese sandwiches too.

In the summer, when the streets were dry and dusty, we took cartons of squash. Designed for children's lunch boxes, they had cartoon characters on the front, which made a few people laugh and say, 'I always used to watch them, as a kid!'

Seeing that the child in people was still alive, we bought chocolate bars. If people were sleeping, we left them by the head of their sleeping bag for when they awoke. It was less functional than just offering food as fuel to live. Chocolate was for fun – a treat.

Often, an older homeless man would refuse the soup and the sandwiches. 'I'm OK; I'll get something from the van later on.'

'Bar of chocolate?' we'd say, and his eyes would light up. 'Oh – go on, then!'

Some people from evangelical churches told us we weren't doing it right. 'You shouldn't just offer food. You should be evangelizing – telling them about the life they can find in Jesus Christ.'

Again, what they said made sense – we're Christians ourselves, and Christ is the focus of our own lives, so why withhold him from anyone else? But again, it didn't feel right.

People living on the streets become very suspicious of strangers' motives. Whenever we stopped to chat to someone, the first question was invariably, 'Where are you from? Which church? Which organization?'

We heard stories of people offering material benefits like food or housing, apparently with no strings attached, then following the person up by coming every day and talking to them about their particular religion, being persuasive to the point of coercion.

The tactics seemed uncomfortably close to those of the drug pushers who cruise the streets, homing in on the homeless and trying to persuade them of the benefits of the contents of their little packages of dope or crack or heroin.

We decided not to evangelize for anything. We were finding it a humbling experience, meeting people whose only home was the streets. They certainly had courage and perseverance beyond any we had ourselves. We had a strong suspicion that they might already be closer to Jesus Christ in spirit than we were, with our relatively comfortable lives.

If Jesus was in them, we concluded, he would make himself known. In the meantime, the only message we would preach would be soup and sandwiches.

After a while of this non-evangelization, we started to notice something. More and more people were talking to us about God and about their own beliefs. It happened too often to be a coincidence.

It would usually start when, in answer to their question about which organization we were from, we said. 'We're not. It's just us.' Or they'd ask, 'Who made the food?' and we'd say that I did, with help from my husband and with chocolate bars provided by a neighbour, out of her pension.

The next question would be, 'Are you Christians, then?' and when we said yes the response would often be either, 'I believe in God!' or, 'I'm not a Christian myself, but I know there's something.' Only occasionally would it be, 'I don't like Christians, so piss off!'

I didn't find it surprising when people were bitter. They had a poor opinion of Christians and a worse one of God: 'If there is a God who cares about people, how come I'm in this state?'

I was asking some of the same questions myself.

I couldn't doubt that God did care about the people we met, and some of them surprised us with unwavering faith: 'I know God has been looking after me, or I wouldn't be here; I'd never have survived.'

It didn't make sense that the God who is called Creator, Provider and Father would only provide a place on earth for some people and not for others, and I had never been able to make sense either of the saying that 'God only helps those who help themselves.' My own experience had been the opposite, that God helped me most when I was most helpless.

And my reading of the life of Jesus Christ showed that, far from making a distinction between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, he chose to spend much of his time with social outcasts and prostitutes. It seemed to me that when he looked at people he saw need – not fault.

There was also the inescapable fact that he was born homeless himself and lived with 'no place to lay his head' for much of his life, before dying a criminal's death, an outcast to respectable society. That wasn't the lifestyle of someone who saw the poor as inferior or inadequate.

In fact, it seemed that anyone who had experienced being homeless or an outcast, or having no place where they could rest and feel at home in this life, automatically had something in common with Jesus Christ, whether they considered themselves a believer or not.

Could it be, then, that God takes a completely different view of homelessness from us? Could it be that we see things back to front and that homelessness, far from being a social stigma or a sign of personal inadequacy, is a spiritual status symbol, a sign of closeness to God?

But that doesn't sound right either! Jesus Christ didn't go looking for homelessness in itself, or recommend it to others. Urging everyone to love each other 'as yourself' includes sharing with the poor. If poverty itself brought spiritual rewards, then he would have advised leaving the poor to be poor and the homeless to remain without a home.

I started wondering if God saw no division at all between the privileged and the disadvantaged – the housed and the homeless – and saw us all as equally homeless, all on our journey home. In that case, he might have solutions of his own which would involve taking a quite different view of homelessness.

The question then became not, 'If there is a God, why isn't he doing anything?' but, 'If God understands us better than we can, why don't we ask him what he wants us to do for anyone, before we try to do anything?'

We tried to be open to possibilities and not rule out any action because it seemed impractical or extreme. We prayed about everything, even which streets to walk down, which people to talk to and which ones might need to be given space.

One or two people came home with us for a night or more, but we both lived quite a long way away. Some were afraid even to leave the small area, or the street, where they had made their temporary home. Granted, that world was unpredictable and often dangerous but at least the area was familiar to them; the world beyond it seemed an even greater risk.

Some, offered a bedsit at last by some charity, would be back living on the streets within a few weeks. Their only friends were there, and although those friends were as powerless and as vulnerable as themselves, they understood and they listened and they were often generous in sharing the little they had.

An empty bedsit, with no carpet or cooker or curtains, just literally a roof over their heads, often on a bleak housing estate miles away from their own patch, was often less of a home to them than a doorway or a subway on familiar streets, with other homeless people walking past asking, 'How's it going, mate?'

At first, we wished for a million-pound lottery win. We fantasized about housing everyone, giving them shelter and comfort. Gradually we began to understand that home means more than this. It's something that money alone cannot buy. It has to be paid for in terms of interest and care and acceptance, and friendship on an equal footing, provided by fellow human beings.

Providing a space enclosed by a roof and four walls can even be experienced as threatening, to someone whose original home was a place of fear – and most of the younger residents of the streets have been abused at home in some way: emotionally, verbally, violently or sexually. Deposited in a hostel room, B&B or bedsit, once again 'at home,' all the memories of home can return and haunt them. It can place on them an unbearable emotional burden, unless good support is available while they tackle the difficult psychological work of reliving the nightmares and laying the ghosts. And it _is_ work, which is why it may not be reasonable or kind to 'provide' a job along with providing the home, and expect the person to adjust instantly to life as a wage-earning citizen.

The best of the homeless charities understand that the process of adjusting to home can be as painful as losing it, and try very hard to achieve the right balance in encouraging a homeless person to take a step towards the world of work, while avoiding applying too much pressure too soon. Suicides among the homeless are not rare.

We've met boys as young as nine thrown out of home when his single mother got a new boyfriend who didn't want 'another man' in the house.

A 13-year-old girl, cursed to hell by an alcoholic father in a drunken rage, was told by her frightened mother to run before she got killed. One girl had seen her mentally ill mother try to smother her younger brother with a pillow, and ran for her life when she threatened to kill her as well, knowing it wasn't an empty threat.

An alcoholic young man was refused admittance to his home when he called to visit on Christmas Day afternoon, his mother's new husband telling him, 'We never want to see your face again.'

A 15-year-old girl took to the streets with her boyfriend when her brothers wouldn't let him in the house because he was 'unsuitable.' Shivering with cold and fear on her second night, she only half believed him when he told her, 'Don't worry; I'll protect you.' 'I know you'll try,' she said, 'but what happens when you're not here?'

A young girl who slept on a rotting foam mattress in a subway streaming with damp and rats used to scream out in her dreams every night, 'Get out! Get out of my room!'

She spent most of her days apparently asleep, with a thin blanket completely covering her head, so that no one passing by could tell that the occupant was female. She would answer in a wide-awake voice, though, if anyone called her name.

'Couldn't you get a hostel place?' we asked her one day. The area was well known to homeless welfare organizations, and she was a regular at the local day centre.

She shook her head. 'I've tried one. But I came back here.'

'Wasn't it safe?' We'd been told by many of the girls, and a number of the boys as well, that the hostels they'd stayed in were dominated by drugs addicts who would intimidate the others, demanding money or stealing their possessions. They were vulnerable too to sexual attacks from room-mates or other residents. Many of the young people felt safer out in the open – 'where we can see people coming.'

She shook her head again. 'No, it was OK. But I can't be shut in by four walls. It does my head in.'

Many of the people we spoke to said the same. Home for them had been a nightmare. Taking them off the streets and putting them in another confined space and calling it home only caused the nightmares to recur.

So where is the real home for the homeless – the refuge that will shelter them from the emotional as well as the physical storms?

Among the speakers in this book, some are homeless in the most obvious sense – the people who live on the streets. Others have a roof over their heads, but are still homeless in the deeper sense: they have lost their footing in the world, due to some personal crisis, and although they are sheltered from the physical elements of wind and rain, their souls are exposed and 'find no place to lay their head.'

Far from matching the stereotyped idea of the homeless – inadequate people whinging and blaming fate – I found each of the people I interviewed to be a strong, resilient character, often with reserves of courage and perseverance and gifts of insight beyond the limits of many people with successful or orderly lives.

All of them have gone through desolation; most have come out the other side, shaken but ready to take up the next challenge. Even those, like Carl, who consider they have gone from bad to worse, are in no way 'down and out.'

In going to meet them I expected a harrowing experience, and at times it was. Despite their best efforts and desires to attain happiness, they had not been able to avoid the kind of suffering we all fear most – finding ourselves unable to cope. Worse than that, they found themselves blamed for it, instead of being offered help.

But at least the fear of the unknown – that ever-present, unfocused fear which underlies society even in its greatest security – became for them experience of the known. They faced their fears and survived.

To listen to them is to face our own fears. And survive them.

CHAPTER 2 - The street-dwellers (1)

For a while, we avoided going into 'the Bullring' – a maze of subways near Waterloo station which, before it was claimed for commercial redevelopment, was home to a shifting colony of homeless people of all ages, some long-term residents and some who stayed only a few nights. Even among the homeless, the place had a bad reputation – hardline drugs, violence and rats. But one evening we decided to go and see for ourselves, and it became the first of many visits.

Under the partial cover of several subways, an open fire was lit at one end of the arena, and shacks (or 'bashes') improvised from bits of board and plastic leaned against the walls, which were damp even in summer and running with water in the winter months.

The council had closed down the only available toilets after one was vandalized, forcing the people to choose between using the ground and walls or going further afield to bushes along the Embankment. The rats and pigeons left their own contributions to the general squalor.

Grant

One of the long-term residents of the Bullring was Grant, a Scotsman from Kirkcudbright, an ex-army man who had also spent some time in the marines. He was only in his late fifties, but looked about 15 years older. He made a joke of this: 'I'm younger than I look; I haven't worn well!'

In the midst of the chaos of daily life in the Bullring, Grant could usually be found sitting on an old office chair outside his bash, reading a book in the fading evening light. He had a constant supply of books – 'the students bring them' – and read anything and everything, 'to keep my mind off this place,' he said.

He was philosophical about living in the Bullring. 'I've known people worse off than this,' he said. 'No, not just in the Third World – here in this country of ours. I can sleep anywhere as long as I've a sheet of cardboard under me. I've a roof over my head here, of a sort, and the rats don't bother me – not as much as the human rats, anyway! The worst are the businessmen. They think, because they're earning a living, they can treat homeless people like dirt.'

At this point in the conversation, four or five of the younger people around the fire charged across the arena shouting, threatening to kill a couple just entering the Bullring, and the Alsatians with them joined in the fray, barking frantically and snarling.

'What about the violence here?' we asked Grant.

He shrugged. 'I don't take much notice. It's mostly noise. But I wish they'd stay down that end, the younger ones. Some of them, especially the ones on their own, prefer to sleep up here; I think they feel safer with us older ones around. But we like to be left in peace. Most of us have been here for years, on and off.'

Like the others there he faced despair every day, but fought it. Noise and violence were not his way but alcoholism was, and this, combined with the insanitary living conditions, led to his health failing. He couldn't get up one morning and one of the other homeless men contacted a worker at the local church day centre, who called an ambulance. He was taken into hospital with a bad chest infection.

He was discharged, without treatment, three days later – back onto the streets. 'They don't want homeless people in their clean hospitals,' he told us. 'The doctor came in and told me to go.'

Shortly afterwards, when we visited, we found him very weak, purple in the face and hardly able to breathe. He had been lying in his bash for a week, eating nothing but cold canned rice pudding, brought to him by the other homeless men. He was still drinking.

He let us bring him food, a pillow and a quilt, but wouldn't hear of anyone arranging for him to be taken into a hostel, though he was well known to several organizations who had offered him a place.

'I hate being confined by four walls,' he explained. 'I have nothing, but I've always been free. But I know I'll have to go somewhere eventually; I can't last another winter and I don't want to die here. One night I'll go to sleep and I won't wake up in the morning.'

'You'll wake up in heaven,' I said, but he laughed and coughed and said, 'I wish I had your optimism!' So I said, 'Well, I'm going there; my place is booked!' and he said, 'Oh, you are, all right, but not me.' I told him, 'You are, because I'm not going without you; your name's on the door!' and he laughed and coughed even more.

The idea of drawing his last breath in the Bullring, even on the way to heaven, wasn't appealing. We asked our prayer group to pray for Grant that week.

Alan worked in a nursing home and arranged for Grant to be offered a place there. It was a large building, a former hunting-lodge, with a garden and an orchard, and accommodation in open wards. Hoping it might suit Grant better than an inner-city hostel, we went up to the Bullring in the daytime to ask him if he'd be willing to give it a try.

As we went down the subway towards his bash, there was Grant walking towards us, with a spring in his step and a cheery greeting. His colour was normal, though he was still wheezy. He was on his way to the day centre, which opened for a few hours each day in the crypt of a church, and invited us to come and see it.

'Friends of mine,' he introduced us to the volunteer manning the door, and we were let in without question. He made us all a coffee, sat down and begun telling us something of his life in the army, travelling all over the world. In particular he talked about the parachute jumps he had made.

'It's a great feeling,' he said. 'Not so much the lower-altitude jumps – there, you're opening your 'chute as soon as you're out of the plane – but the high ones, the free fall.'

'What does that feel like?' I asked him.

'Free as a bird,' he said simply. 'That's why I can't stand being shut in. Never could.'

He was touched by Alan's offer of the nursing home place. 'It's just what I need,' he admitted. But he declined it. 'I'll go when I have to. But not just yet.'

Before we left, he offered us the freedom of the day centre. 'Come up here whenever you like. If you're looking for some of the guys and can't find them, this is where they'll be. Say Grant sent you, and they'll let you in.'

It was a few weeks before we were in that area again. At the first bash we visited in the Bullring, the occupant told us, 'Grant was taken from here in an ambulance again yesterday. We just heard he died last night.'

So he was saved another winter in that place. His bash was taken over by someone else but Zy, a Northumbrian who had travelled the world like Grant, despite having no legs and propelling himself around on a skateboard, spoke for many of the residents when he said, 'The place isn't the same without him.'

The bulldozers had already moved in by the time Grant was moving on, and within a few months the Bullring was closed to people taking a short cut to Waterloo Bridge, and to the residents. The flimsy bashes were dismantled without difficulty and the area was cleared, ready for building a multiplex cinema.

The residents were offered accommodation and some of them accepted it but others – like Grant, preferring freedom to security or comfort – moved to some other colony: the back of the Savoy Hotel or the park beyond it, or under Vauxhall Bridge, or Lincoln's Inn Fields.

The girl who screamed in her sleep went home. Her mother and sister arrived one evening and she said goodbye to everyone and went with them. Others had lost their chance of going home a long time ago.

Lisa had lost the support of her parents when she became alcoholic, though they kept her baby and looked after him for her – till one day she phoned home and was told he had been taken into foster care that day. They wouldn't tell her where he was and there was no provision for her to see him. She had had her chance, they said, to come off the drink and prove herself a fit mother, and now they had given up on her; if she wasn't able to take responsibility for her son, they were not willing to care for him any longer. He had gone. On the day she heard this, Lisa tried to cut her wrists.

Many of the women living there shared a bash with a man they hardly knew, often a violently unpredictable alcoholic, in the hope of some protection. To be abused by one person seemed better than being at the mercy of anyone and everyone – though the 'respectable' passers-by were more of a threat to them, the women said, than any of the homeless men.

John

As well as the people living in the well-known 'colonies' of homeless, there are many who feel safer on their own, like John. His usual pitch for begging was by the railings of a city church, sitting cross-legged on the pavement with a sleeping bag wrapped round him, head down, intoning, 'Spare some change, please,' in a voice so quiet as to be almost inaudible. Certainly, not many of the passers-by took notice.

When we met him, he seemed willing to chat to Alan, though shy of women. He was only young –23.

'The girls either ignore you or laugh at you,' he said. 'You get a different view of life from down here. All I see going past are legs and feet. You get to know quite a lot about people by their feet. A lot of them speed up when they see me. They pretend they haven't seen me, so they look at their watches or talk to one another very loudly.

'I used to think – all I want is to get a job and a place to live and I'll be like everyone else. But now I'm not sure I want it. I see what it does to people, having their life all secure.

'When they're young, they might care about people being homeless. They notice you but they haven't any money to give you because they're students, and they're embarrassed, so they cross the road when they see you're begging.

'The ones who are a bit older have jobs but they have to pay their rent and they want nice clothes and nights out, so they don't give you anything because they're busy trying to make their way in the world and make a good impression.

'Then, when they get a bit older, they're earning more but probably they're thinking about settling down, saving up for a deposit and getting married. So they don't stop and give you anything. They think, when they get rich they'll do something then.

'But when they're settled, they've got a mortgage to pay and kids are coming along, so they tell themselves they need all they earn for their family.

'Then the children are grown-up and they're students themselves, and the parents are helping them out and the kids haven't got enough – and the whole thing starts again.

'I don't blame them. They've got to live, and people tell them it's all a con, that we're all junkies and alcoholics making money out of decent people working, and anything they give us will go on drugs and booze. But there are a lot of us who are trying to live. If something better came along, we'd take it. But where do you go from the streets?

'There's always some reason why people can't stop just now and why they can't afford to help you. I don't want to get like that, I really don't. The way I am now, if I get a few quid and I've eaten today, I'll share it with the next homeless person who comes along who hasn't got anything. And there are other guys who've done that for me at times. They've got nothing but they're not greedy; they share what they get.

'I don't know if I want to get into the system now. I can say it wouldn't happen to me: I wouldn't walk past a homeless person on the street if I had a job and a place to live. But it seems like, once you're in the rat race, it gets you. You stop being human inside.'

In the time he was talking, probably a hundred people walked past. Two hundred legs and feet, speeding up as they went by.

CHAPTER 3 - The street-dwellers (2)

When we met Carl, he had been homeless for several months. It was his second time of living on the streets. He had joined a Christian community then left it and returned to the streets. He gave this account of his experience.

Carl

'I've fallen out with God at the moment. I don't know what to think. I'm having trouble with him. I used to be so close to him. I knew the Bible; I read it all the time. People were amazed I could survive on the streets without drugs or drink. But now I've done something bad. I've gone on drugs. I'm injecting. I don't know if God is forgiving, or if he won't want to know me anymore.

'I'm not afraid of being on the streets, because I've been so that I was nearly dead. My heart had nearly stopped beating and I thought I was gone, and in the hospital they thought I was gone as well. But suddenly I felt like a warmth surrounding me and a pair of arms lifting me up off the bed. And I got well from then on. So I know for some reason I'm meant to be alive and go on living.

'I don't doubt the power of God. I've seen it working. He's so powerful. People can see the power of Satan more easily sometimes; people say they can believe in the power of evil because they see it in the world. But what I say is that the power of evil is real, but it's so tiny compared to the power of God.

'One reason I don't get frightened on the streets is that I know that even Satan can only do to me what God allows him to do, and no more.

'People start turning to God and reading the Bible and coming off the drugs and they get all this confusion. They thought they were happy enough before, then they realize they've got to change, but that's when the trouble starts sometimes. I don't think it's simple for anyone who tries to change their life, because Satan starts attacking them. He stirs up their minds and they get all this confusion. There's a battle going on in them – a battle between good and evil.

'Like now, I'm confused. I sometimes don't know if it's God or Satan who gives me the power I have. I think it must be Satan sometimes, because of the drugs, but maybe he hasn't got the whole of my mind. Maybe two per cent of me is still God's, I don't know. I don't even know which of them I want, to be honest with you.

'I've seen some amazing things happen. God really has power over everything, even the weather, the clouds and everything. People don't believe it, but it's real. And when you're with him, you have that kind of power in you, and it reaches out to everyone on the streets and they can feel it. Even if they don't know what they believe, people can feel the presence of God around, and they notice it and comment on it.

'You know that part in the Bible where it says the sky will turn black and roll back like a scroll? Well, I know what that means. It's the ozone layer catching fire, and the blackness is the smoke, and it billows; it sweeps back in great curls. And from down here, where we are, that's what it will look like – the sun turning black and the sky rolling back like a scroll and revealing God. And it'll be too much for anyone to stand. We'll all be terrified. So that's why we're told to pray to be taken before it happens.

'But I don't know what I'm praying for now, for myself. I don't care any more because I don't know where I stand with him. I was so strong before but now I'm on drugs, injecting them into my arm. I don't know if I care what happens to me.

'I don't know what will happen when I face him, and if he'll still want to know me. I don't trust him. I know Jesus came for sinners and not the good folk, so that's something. I'll just have to wait and see.'

Confusion is a common suffering. It's easier to say of somebody, 'It's the drugs, or the drink, talking,' than to face the reality of the confusion we all experience when we lose our security and suddenly feel cut off from the mainstream. The life we have taken for granted up till now no longer seems to support us. Carl's words about 'the sky rolling up like a scroll' recall some of the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah: 'Like a weaver I have rolled up my life; God cuts me off from the loom.'

Isaiah was talking about the approach of death and having to leave the body which is 'home'. But the line before this reads, 'My dwelling is plucked up and removed from me, like a shepherd's tent.' And every morning, on the streets of many 'civilized' cities, homeless people wake up in shop doorways and basement areas and roll up the blanket or sleeping bag that is their only home and remove themselves, to make room for those who are still living in the mainstream.

Alex

We didn't so much meet Alex as stumble over him. He was semi-conscious, lying slumped against the wall of a subway that had obviously been used as a toilet by many people. He mumbled a few words of apology and told us to stand clear of him, then went into a seizure clenching his teeth and throwing out his fists.

A young homeless man, passing by, told us, 'He's epileptic and he drinks. You can call an ambulance if you want but if you can stay with him he's usually OK after a while.'

Alex recovered consciousness for a few minutes, apologized again for the inconvenience, and had another succession of fits. He had no bag of belongings with him and no blanket. During one of his periods of recovery, he noticed that his radio had been stolen, and thumped the ground, saying, 'It was the only thing I had!'

He checked his pockets and was relieved to find he still had his social security book. He fished a few coins out of his pocket and counted them.

'Was your money stolen too?'

'No,' he said. 'That's all I had. I shouldn't drink but I do, you see. Only myself to blame. But it's hard to get by without a drink or two.'

After a while he felt well enough to have a sip of soup.

'I'll tell you one thing,' he said, 'and you might want to remember this. God will never let you down.'

'You don't think he's let you down?' I said.

He shook his head vehemently. 'Never,' he said. 'He always gives me what I need. Look at this evening. I was ill and he sent you two along with soup and a sandwich for me. I told you, he never lets me down. You haven't got a blanket by any chance too?'

'No. Sorry.'

'That's OK. Maybe someone'll come along later and give me one. But even if they don't, I'm hardy,' he said. 'I'm a Yorkshireman. I'd have liked a blanket, or a bit of cardboard under me, but I can sleep without. I'm hardy, you see. You remember what I told you, won't you?'

'God will never let you down?'

He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall, the cup of soup tipping in his hand. Alan removed it from his grasp and set it beside him on the ground.

'That's it,' Alex said. 'You take it from me. He'll never let you down.'

Chrissie

Chrissie was sitting in a doorway on a spread-out sleeping bag, most of which was occupied by the two dogs she has for protection. Shaun, whom she had recently met, was asleep but woke up when he heard her talking. During the conversation, several passers-by came over to look in the brightly lit window of the closed shop. They trod on Chrissie's sleeping bag as they moved in to get a closer look at the goods in the window – fashionable menswear.

Chrissie told us, 'I've been living on the streets for the last couple of years now. I lost my home and my children, through alcoholism and schizophrenia. My marriage had broken up already.

'Living on the streets is hard but it makes your faith strong. I believe in God. Someone must be looking after me or I wouldn't have survived all I have. I've been in prison and in hospitals. I've been on medication that makes you just like a vegetable. I hear voices and I get delusions and it's bloody frightening, I can tell you. I got very down, after my marriage broke up. I nearly gave up then.

'I usually sleep in a shop doorway, out of the rain. When I go to sleep at night on the street, I don't know what's going to happen to me or if I'll wake up in the morning.

'The world's as bad as it is because of people. We can't blame God for it. It's people's choices. He gave us free choice, and look how we use it.

'I've been in prison and that gives you time to think. Sometimes I think about Jesus and I think, "What did he die for? What difference did it make?" But two thousand years later, people are still talking about him.

'People on the streets tend to be innocent. Even though they're involved in a lot of things, they only do it as a way of surviving. We're all addicts – everyone, not just the homeless. Everyone's addicted to something. If it's not smack or drink, it's caffeine or TV or something. Everyone pretends they're not addicts; they pretend to their kids.

'I used to be on two bottles of vodka a day and I shoplifted to get it. Now I'm just on one bottle of cider and I can afford to pay for that so I don't shoplift. It's because I met Shaun and he's helping me go easy on the drink, and I'm helping him stay off heroin. It's still hard, but it's easier if you're trying to do it together. He says he's different since he met me, and his friends say it as well – he's calmer.

'Jesus didn't have anywhere to live. He didn't know where he'd be, from one day to the next. He died for our sins but we still go on hating and killing; we don't listen to him. That's our choice; it isn't his fault. I can understand people being full of hate. I've felt like that. You feel you have to be hard to survive, when so much has happened to you and you've been hurt so many times. But it's no good to you, hating people.

'You get sharp, being on the streets. People think that people who live on the streets are stupid but they're mostly intelligent. You have to be or you wouldn't survive. I don't know how I've survived. There've been times I thought I wouldn't; I've thought, "This is it now." And what I believe is that there must be someone looking after me, and I've felt it sometimes – that there's someone there, with me, and that's why I'm alive.

'Shaun says religion is what starts wars but I think it's economic reasons. Wars start because people want more than what they have. People don't care about you if they want something. You see it on the streets. You're carrying a heavy bag and you've got the dogs to keep with you and people just push you aside as though you're not there. You're in the way of where they're going and they don't care if they make it harder for you.

'I don't know where I'll be tomorrow. I just take one day at a time. What I'd like is to be free of medication and to have peace. When the voices are in my head there's so much noise. I just want to shut it off and find peace, so that the only thoughts in my head are my own thoughts. That's what I want more than anything really – peace in my head, that's all.'

In a sense, Chrissie is coping with two forms of homelessness: having no home to live in, separated from her family, and also not feeling at home in her own mind. Her plea to have only her own thoughts in her head is poignant. Having a mind occupied by strange voices and ideas beyond your own control must be like having a crowd of football hooligans invading your living room at all hours of the day or night.

But how many of us are totally at home in our own minds? We may not hear voices in our heads but how many of the beliefs and ideas we live by are really our own? Who told us that they were reality and alternative ideas were delusions? Have all our beliefs been tried and tested by our own experience of life or are they just passengers, blown in on the wind of fashion, that have settled in and become part of our mental furniture without us noticing?

How many strangers do we have living in our home? How many alien philosophies will we allow to take up houseroom in our mind before our own mind doesn't feel like home to us either?

CHAPTER 4 – The girl who didn't feel at home in her own body

I'd like to move on now, from the people living on the streets – the ones every society recognizes as being without a home – and look at other forms of homelessness.

If Chrissie is not at home in her own mind, then Daniella is someone who has never felt at home in her body. The impression you may get, from reading her account of herself, is that there must be something physically very wrong with this person, so I'll describe her first. Daniella is 23, very attractive, with dark glossy hair, wide eyes and a dazzling smile. She has a standard size-12 figure. She is articulate, humorous, friendly, obviously intelligent, and speaks English, which is not her first language, almost as fluently as her native Czech.

Yet, asked whether she notices any disparity between the way she views herself and the way other people see her, Daniella replies, 'I don't know how other people see me. But I see myself as shit.'

Now I'll leave it to her to describe her life – the girl who is homeless in her own body.

Daniella

'An eating disorder is an addiction, like alcoholism. When an alcoholic stops drinking, they must give it up and never touch a drink again in their life. But someone who suffers from an eating disorder can't avoid food and give it up, because everyone has to eat. And it's very hard to try to get the balance, once you have had this addiction to food.

'I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1975. I was an illegitimate child; my mother had me with a married man. She was putting great pressure on him to leave his wife and they got married when I was one year old but he was unfaithful to her and she always knew. It went on like that till 1983 when he met another woman and the relationship got more serious. It was a very bad situation: one week at hers and a few days at our place. Eventually they got divorced.

'They had wanted to have another child; my father wanted a boy, and my mother got pregnant again but the foetus was outside the womb and she lost it. I think it was a reason why my father found another woman, so there was a possibility he might have a child with her. He didn't stand by my mother when she really needed him.

'It was a great stress on my mother and she started to drink. She was working all the time. I was at school and I used to spend the summer holidays, traditionally, with my granny and also with my uncle and aunt and cousins, so the holidays were a fairly happy time for me.

'Things started to go wrong for me from the moment my parents started splitting up, when the affair got serious. Although I didn't know what was going on really, there were things mentioned and bad feeling, so I didn't really need to be told. My coping mechanism at the time was to shut off and feel nothing and when I think about it now, that's how it comes across – just nothing.

'In the end I was glad it was over, that my father had made up his mind and was not coming and going. For four years, there was uncertainty over whether we could stay in the flat. My father's mistress has a flat but there was some reason why they couldn't live there and at one time he even suggested that we all lived in our flat together, which was unthinkable because obviously my mother and his mistress hated each other! So I was glad when he gave up that idea and eventually we left there for another flat.

'My mother was not drinking all the time. She had binges; she used it as a crutch, when she really felt she couldn't cope – to forget for a little time. But it got into a habit. She didn't realize but it got more and more and as I got older I was more aware of it, and obviously you can't not be affected by it.

'When she was drunk she was very sorry for herself, staying in bed and unable to do anything, like a child who has to be looked after. I was old enough to manage but it got on my nerves when she kept apologizing. Then the other side was when she got well – though I couldn't call it _well_ because it was really the opposite – she was sarcastic and very critical, moody and negative and sceptical, and that dragged her into a depression in the end and that's when she would drink again.

'I do understand her drinking habit because I eventually developed an eating disorder, but what I really minded and what did affect me very badly was her negative nature, not seeing the positive side of life. It is vital to tell children that there is hope and they have the choice – either to be miserable or to do something with their lives and not just live for the sake of living. I was never told there was something to enjoy in life, that there was something good about it.

'I was going to grammar school at the time and by the third year I really hated it; I felt so unhappy and confused and the relationship between myself and my mother was so negative. There was no one to give any support or encouragement, so when I was sixteen I tried to find help from a psychologist at a training school where they gave counselling, but he didn't seem very interested. So I went to another one, then another one, then another one... which probably kept me going.

'I was 19 by then, because I had had to repeat my fourth year when I failed my exams. I wasn't able to cope with school work any more. I didn't find it that difficult but I just couldn't concentrate and didn't want to bother with it because I was so unhappy. It was pure nightmare; I just felt I was not going to pull through alive.

'I was very troubled and it cost me all my energy to survive. I had no friends – not because I didn't want any but just because I had no energy left to enjoy myself. I just went to cinemas, by myself. My weight went up to 90 kilograms – something over 14 stone.

'One of my teachers encouraged me to go to art school and another gave me some help with learning music and singing, and for the first time I felt someone believed in me and there was hope for me. But my mother refused even to talk about the idea of me going to art school; she said it was too late to start something new. Her main thing was for me to be at home; she didn't want to be left alone.

'But when I left school, after the summer holiday, I did leave home; I came to England to be an au pair. The idea was to improve my English but really I just wanted to get away from home and the negative atmosphere there. I thought coming to England would be a different way of life.

'I had met Dennis when I was working in a department store in Czech, during the summer – he was there just for two weeks, from England – and he asked me for a drink. I was surprised he was interested in me really; I don't know what he saw in me.

'I called him a few times when I came to England but he was cold at first; I think he was afraid of a relationship but I sensed there would be a chance for us so I didn't give up too easily!

'It was September 1994 and I worked in Surrey as au pair to a Jamaican family with two children. The lady was very good but I didn't get on with the children too well, especially the girl, who was eight and a really spoilt brat! In Czech it's very different: children are brought up to obey after one or two times of being told, or they get a smack; you don't tell a child to do something five times and then in the end do it yourself because the child thinks you have no authority! And then when you don't speak the language and can't understand TV you feel very alone. So after two months I left there.

'I didn't want to go back home and by then I was seeing Dennis regularly and I started to live with him, and after a year and a half we got married. My mother wanted me to go home but I told her life would be easier for me here. Until then, I think she had kept thinking I would go back, so it was hard for her to accept that I was here permanently, though I do go back to visit. I'll go home for two months this summer again.

'I saw a bit of adventure in Dennis, I suppose. I never dated anybody before. It was a surprise to me when anyone could be bothered to talk to me or spend time with me, so I felt good with him. I felt I was worth something because he liked me. I just felt like shit about myself!

'When my father had left, finally, I had developed a coping mechanism – compulsive eating. Whenever I didn't feel good about myself, I just ate. My weight mounted because I was so unhappy and eating was the only pleasure I had. Nobody asked me why my weight was creeping on; they weren't interested in how I felt or what was happening but they were making remarks about my weight, which made me feel absolutely awful. My mother made remarks, and my uncle.

'I was 13 when I first tried to go on a diet; I was not chunky but I was not skinny either and my uncle saw me eating biscuits and told me I shouldn't do that because I might have a problem later on. Plenty of girls have a bit of puppy fat but they grow out of it, and I might have, but because I was told I could have problems with my weight, I started to have them.

'It started gradually. Unconsciously, I started to eat a bit more than I needed when I had flu and I was off school for about three weeks – and in those three weeks I put on about 13 pounds. I was nearly 14 and I date it from then that my obsession for food started, and the craving for sweet things.

'It was too hard to cope with the criticism in addition to everything else and by eating food, stuffing it down, it was like pushing the feelings down.

'My mother cooked at the weekends but I didn't feel comfortable eating with anyone; I suppose because I was afraid of the comments. My pleasure was in eating on my own – though there was no enjoyment really; I just stuffed as much in my mouth as I could, as fast as I could get it down. At times I made my mother angry because I wouldn't eat the meal she had cooked, because I had eaten an hour before – and then I would be eating again an hour afterwards. But I couldn't eat when she was present; I had to be on my own.

'On a bad day – and every schoolday was a bad day because I had to cope with everything at once – eating was a kind of treat: "I've suffered and now I have to have some kind of reward!" Any food would do, but especially sweet. There were times when I felt, "If I don't have a sweet _now_ I am going to faint."

'I ate as much as my stomach could possibly hold and then felt I was about to burst. When my stomach was full it pressed on a nerve and made my back ache. The whole thing was really unpleasant. I felt bad because I got fat. But the process of overeating calmed me down; it was like a ritual.

'I even ate the bon-bons that had been on the Christmas tree the year before. I had never been interested in sweets before but now every day I was buying ice lollies and chocolate. And it was then the remarks from my uncle started, and went on really until I managed to lose weight about two years ago.

'When my uncle saw me again recently, he said, "Oh, you are all right now, aren't you?" But I don't feel right. For me, slim means having no fat whatsoever, apart from your breasts. I don't consider myself slim at all. I am size 12 , and four stone lighter than I was, but I feel very conscious of my body; I am just obsessed with slimming down.

'Dennis never commented on my weight; he made comments that I had pretty eyes, which people had said before. He thinks I am all right now; that I don't need to lose any more weight, that it doesn't matter whether I am as thin as I can be. And he wasn't exactly slim himself when I met him! But it matters to me. Even though everyone says I am all right now, the size I am, I still don't feel slim enough. I would like to be a size eight – or perhaps, because I know I am not a petite build, size ten at most.

'I do exercise every day now and it gives me self-confidence, a feeling that I am in charge of myself.

'I received many, many comments on my body and it screwed my mind up. To think about food every day, to be preoccupied seven days a week, thinking, "Is there too much on your plate?" but still craving it so badly, creates a big conflict and it's draining. It takes a lot of energy.

'Through the summer holiday, before I had to repeat the year at school, I slimmed down about 13 pounds and my mother, who had been complaining to other people that I was too fat, said I looked much better, and I was proud of myself. But immediately that fifth year at school started, I put it on again and much, much more; it was a vicious circle really.

'When I came to England, I slimmed down again. The idea in my mind was that the more slim I could be, the more pleasurable comments I would encounter from my family – that they would like me after all. When I was fat, I was not good enough for them, so I thought if I was slim they would be nice to me.

'I never saw it as their problem, that they made those comments and never asked what was wrong with me, When it's your family, it's very hard to acknowledge that they could be malicious, because you don't want to think it could be true. But whatever size the human being is, there must always be a reason for the way they are, and making remarks is never going to make it better, but worse.

'So I was surprised Dennis liked me. I don't know if he was surprised if I liked him! He has a skin problem and I know he was always conscious about it but it never bothered me. I was a bit conscious of it the first time my friends met him, in case they made remarks, but myself, I was never bothered by it.

'When I first moved in with Dennis, some of the places we lived were not too nice, and we were sharing with other people. Dennis was a lorry driver and was away for long periods of time and I was alone and got very depressed. Also, emotionally he was very cold at first, and moody, so that was difficult as well.

'In a way, it was not too different from living with my mother: I had someone to take care of me financially but emotionally I had to reach, I had to give... they were the ones who were taking and I was the one trying – and trying and trying! – to make it work. I think I repeated the pattern of the relationship with my mother; it was not an accident that I chose him.

'Now, I know more people than I did before but not a lot really. It didn't bother me because I was used to being alone at home. It didn't seem weird to me, being lonely. I wasn't looking out for friends at all.

'I worked for a while at a dry-cleaner's, after I left the au pair job, but it was bad money and I was quite tired afterwards so it wasn't worth it. After we got married I got a florist's job, in Safeway's, and I quite enjoyed that; then I decided to study beauty therapy.

'A great joy to me was going for singing lessons, opera singing. When I first heard opera music I was amazed. I thought, "What a lovely sound to give to the world! I would love to be able to do that." It's not something you can learn on your own or you pick up bad habits, so at one time I was going for lessons three times a week. My teacher was encouraging and said if I worked hard I could amount to something. But it costs a lot of money to learn. I know it's a big dream but I'm not going to give up on it.

'That was the happiest time, I suppose, when I was singing. And I had a roof over my head and I was surviving. Of course it would be nice to have our own place sometime but you need plenty of money for that as well. But I don't worry too much about where I live; I adapt quite well and I feel at home quickly where I am. It's the feeling inside myself that bothers me.

'Over many years of my life, I became aware of my own pattern of thinking: a very intense feeling that there is no hope for me, that there is no point for me to do anything or achieve or aspire to anything. And obviously this sends you right back to feeling bad about yourself and your life. I inherited this pattern from my mother and it is very difficult to fight it because it's so strong; it paralyses me. Recently I had a very bad few days and thought, if it's going to be like this then I don't want to be, at all.

'Happiness, for me, would be peace in my mind; to like myself and not to punish myself and get angry about my eating habits but just take one step at a time. Because I was criticized I have gone on criticizing myself. That pattern is passed from parent to children, to their children, and so on.

'I would like to be tolerant and I can be when I'm relaxed but when I'm under more stress than usual I can be very critical of other people, especially my husband, and I know I hurt him sometimes.

'When Dennis became a Christian, it was a shock. I was bloody scared! I knew quite a few people who got mad over religion: you'd ask them a question and they would answer you from the Bible, instead of saying what they thought themselves, in their own words! I felt that the more a person was insecure in themselves, the more they would cling to that particular religion, and Dennis was fairly insecure and had a lot of doubt about himself so I was afraid of it.

'He mentioned it to me when I was in Czech for Christmas, over the phone. I actually asked him because at the end of his last call he said, "God bless you," and then he said it again the next time and I said, "Are you becoming a Christian or something?" And he said yes.

'I was angry – he just told me it had happened and he hadn't consulted me first! I was afraid that it would jeopardize the way we were and although we weren't that happy it was secure and safe and I was afraid it would change him.

'And he did change – but for the better, generally: more positive and able to enjoy things, and better-tempered, and it stopped the addiction to cannabis, which I hadn't been happy with at all.

'He thought the cannabis didn't affect him at the time but he was dreaming a lot, always talking about, "I'll do this and I'll do that," and then never doing any of it. He was always coming home with ideas that would never work. And it took a lot of money – when he was doing well as a lorry driver the cannabis would take 60 quid a week. When he was on it he was out of his head most of the time, laughing and talking rubbish. I knew I couldn't do anything about it; he had to do it himself.

'But he always had a sense of responsibility; he didn't lose that, so even when Dennis gave up his job and we moved here, I was never worried that we would lose our home and have nowhere to go. He hated his job so it was OK that he gave it up, and now he is in college and gaining some qualifications.

'Being a Christian means he believes in God, and where before he was a confused and troubled person, it has restored peace of mind to him. It helps him a great deal and he is committed to it, which is a relief to me as well. He believes in human beings helping each other, being better to each other, and in living life as it is, not losing touch with his surroundings. And he needs the other people there as well.

'It has affected me because we get on definitely better than before. I went to church with him once and it was all right. I liked it when the reverend was speaking because he was very passionate about it and I find it electrifying when someone is passionate about anything, but when they were singing songs I was just thinking my own thoughts – but it was a nice peaceful meeting; I didn't mind it.

'What I would like for myself would be to earn enough money to pay for singing lessons and I would like to continue with my studies and to be able to concentrate more on them.

'I hold a great deal of resentment against everyone who has ever done me wrong in some way – and I remember it all, like an elephant! And that makes me feel very burdened and depressed and prevents me from working and getting on and enjoying my life. I have a lot of work to do to get rid of that, because it's ridiculous to hang on to these thoughts about what people have done, as though it's some kind of precious treasure and I am planning sweet revenge!

'I thought that once I began to explore myself and the past, things would get better, but first it gets worse! It's over a year since I started seeing a psychologist here and by now I thought I would feel better.

'A few months ago I contacted an organization, Caraline, for people with unhealthy eating patterns, and now I get counselling there as well, one-to-one. It does help, because I can simply downright complain! I was not used to complaining, because there was no one to tell, and if you do tell people how you feel it can make you vulnerable. So it feels now as though I am important enough for someone to listen to me.

'I tried the self-help group just once but I felt it dragged me down. In some way it's relieving that there are other people who are feeling the same way you are but on the other hand they are all fairly negative; that's why they go there, because they are suffering and feel negative about their lives. I understand that but I need positive people around me. I'm like a sponge, soaking up other people's energy.

'I don't want children. It makes me agitated when they are running around, squeaking and screaming and getting on my nerves. But the main thing I am worried about is that I will treat them exactly like my mother treated me, never satisfied with what they are doing, telling them what they can't do and what they should be doing – all this stuff. I just don't want to do it.

'The pattern would repeat itself. I know it would because I do it to Dennis, moan at him and criticize. Unless I learn other ways, I would do it to our children as well.

'I don't see having children as having people around me who would love me; I never thought of it like that. I see it as a worry. I have barely enough to get myself through the day, without looking after them as well.

'I do like to have a few people around me and when we go out with friends for a drink now I can talk and laugh and I do enjoy myself, and that's what I want – just to have a nice, unburdened time – not to worry any more. I am 23 now but I feel about 15 years older and I have done since I was a young girl. I'd like a chance to be young now.'

CHAPTER 5 – The happiness-seeker

Mention addictive substances and your first thought is... what? Heroin or maybe cocaine at the top of the scale, followed by Ecstasy and other 'designer drugs', amphetamines, marijuana, mood-altering prescription drugs, alcohol, nicotine... Does your list go something like that?

But Chrissie makes the point that even if our drug is only caffeine, or we get withdrawal symptoms when we have to miss a particular programme on TV, the effect is the same – we're not as free as we pretend to be. One measure of the damaging effect of our 'drug' on our personality is the amount of resistance we have to letting go of it.

Daniella, while wanting to distance herself from her mother's alcoholism, is able to recognize that her own relationship with food is very similar and that her compulsive desire for physical perfection may alter her moods as severely as her husband's former drug habit.

In some ways, the more recognized addictions like narcotic or alcohol addiction may be more straightforward to treat, simply because they are recognized. Media coverage of celebrities who have been admitted to rehabilitation clinics for the humiliating process of detoxing or drying out may have had some influence on society's view of drug taking; we've become readier to acknowledge the courage of the user who destroys the habit before the habit destroys the user, and less likely to glamourize the habit along with the celebrity.

Sex addiction is largely unrecognized. Few people would accept a political leader who was a known drug addict but sex addiction is still seen as a joke, or a status symbol, or as unreal or insignificant. Yet it enslaves at least as forcefully as the other major addictions.

Addiction of all kinds is a common cause of homelessness. Not only the financial cost of addiction but also the psychological, intellectual and physical toll it takes can result in loss of job, home, relationships and mental stability. Many addicts on the streets were formerly successful at work and affluent.

The young men and women stopping off at the cashpoint machines on their way to an evening out in the pubs and clubs are neither homeless nor poor; they are smartly dressed and carry the latest model of mobile phone and will go to work in the morning with a hangover that they accept as the inevitable symptom of a lively social life. They don't see any similarity between themselves and the people their own age who sit huddled in blankets on the street begging for small change.

A few hours later, though, it is harder to tell the difference. Many of the homeless, worn out by another day on the streets, have been asleep for hours. It is more likely to be the city's partying crowd spilling out of the clubs who are seen reeling and staggering, talking incoherently, threatening fights and vomiting into the gutter.

But they still see no similarity between themselves and the city's alcoholics and junkies. They believe that they themselves could never become addicted to the substances they wouldn't think of doing without.

How far the addict is responsible for his or her homelessness is a topic that often comes into discussions about the homeless. Many people say they have sympathy for the innocent victims of homelessness – but none at all for the drug addicts and less still for the drug dealers. But is it as simple as that?

Many of the homeless people we got to know said, 'I can't blame anyone else for this. I got myself into it because I drank' – or took drugs. Some had started with a few experiments 'for fun' or to feel accepted by mates, then found it had become the inevitable Saturday night routine. More had got into trouble when they started using drugs as a means of feeling good and escaping uncomfortable feelings. When depression is the habitual state of mind, the natural desire to be happy and enjoy life can quickly become translated into a craving for anything that causes a temporary feeling of being carefree.

There is no single huge step between the casual use of drugs and addiction. Once drugs become an emotional painkiller, there is no longer an equal choice between staying sober or getting stoned. And there comes a moment when there is no longer any choice.

The clubbers who use drugs would not consider themselves addicts, because they continue to function: they go to work and make money and make choices about their lives. They have other sources of feeling fulfilled and happy. They may rely on drugs but they rely on many other things – and people – as well. The true addict has only the drug; there is no other distraction from the pain of life.

The heroin addict does not rely on the drug because he or she believes it to be a reliable source of support. The fact that it is destructive is not in doubt – but it may seem no more destructive than the treatment the world metes out to those who don't succeed and thrive. There may simply seem no alternative but suicide.

The addict who lives for heroin is more obviously addicted than the person who lives for drugs – and partying and sex and success and social life and new experiences and getting what everyone else they admire seems to have, as well. But the heroin addict has only one addiction. The person who seems to be 'having it all' may actually be 'had by' an addiction that is multi-faceted.

When minor setbacks occur in more than one area of life at once, the extent of the 'successful' person's dependency on favourable circumstances reveals itself and the whole basis of their security falls apart. They feel shocked and hurt, let down by life. The homeless heroin addict, used to expecting nothing from the world, may actually be better at surviving the ups and downs of life.

The 'small' addictions we tolerate in ourselves – like shopping for clothes we don't need, or reaching for chocolate instead of confronting a difficult emotional situation – are a means of suppressing mild insecurity or discontent. But when addiction swamps a person's whole life, we are no longer talking about a passing mood – we are entering the arena of real despair.

Homelessness is a problem that can be solved by providing homes. But to the person enslaved by addictions and emotional problems, the world doesn't feel like home, even when they're at home.

Some children grow up never welcomed into the world, seldom praised, never cuddled. Conversation is limited to instructions, arguments, warnings and telling-off. Eye contact is rarely made; smiles are scarce. The child feels isolated, unnoticed, hardly sure that he or she really exists. The parent may feel just the same, having grown up in the same absence of welcome. Whole families can live together for years, with each member feeling alone in the world.

Dennis, Daniella's husband, in telling his story, invites us to identify with his attempt to escape from isolation and find contentment.

It was this search that led him into the deceptive security of drugs, the mellow moods and the easy money to be made, and most of all the companionship of apparently happy and laid-back people – until the bubble burst, leaving him unprotected against reality.

Dennis

'A lot of my childhood memories are vague, but I have this sense that it was very lonely.

'My father was already married and was seeing my mother at the time she conceived me; she was living with her parents, and working. I didn't see much of her except on Saturdays; quite often it was my grandmother who picked me up from school and looked after me.

'When I was six or seven, my father got divorced and lived with my mum but there were a lot of problems: anger and arguments. I remember him hitting my mum and she had to go to hospital. They never expressed any love for me. Maybe they did love me but couldn't show it or maybe love wasn't in them, though when my sister was born when I was seven they gave her a lot of attention.

'I developed a skin problem – vitiligo, which makes the skin colour patchy – and it got worse in adolescence. I felt like the odd one out and found it hard to mix with other children. I was quite disruptive in high school.

'The one thing I was good at was music: I played trombone in the school band but my dad would say, "Stop making that noise," when I practised at home and my parents used to make excuses not to turn up at concerts.

'I left school at 15 without any qualifications and went in and out of jobs, in a local grocery shop, on a building site, as a motorcycle messenger and then in the factory where my dad worked.

'One evening, at the youth club, I was given magic mushrooms. I knew it was a drug but I didn't know what effect it would have. I got home, made a cup of tea for my dad and started hallucinating, so I went up to my room. I was seeing a different reality; things kept moving. I thought I was going through hell or going mad and I shouted to my mum that I was dying but I don't think she heard me. It lasted for nine hours then it suddenly stopped.

'When I was 20, my dad had a stroke and my nan died: that broke my heart. The factory closed down and I got a job in a similar one, then got a job on London Underground as a train driver and moved into a council flat with my first serious girlfriend but we both had our own problems and after two years she left me. I was really devastated.

I hated living on my own and just never wanted to go home, so I started knocking around with friends who were drinking and doing drugs – mainly cannabis but then I started taking LSD, Ecstasy – a whole cocktail – at weekends. My life revolved around drugs. I felt lost, depressed and suicidal.

'One thing I did that helped was travel round Europe by train for ten days – France, Denmark and the Netherlands – and it gave me a different perspective. Then a friend from work who had met a Czech girl and gone out to live in Czechoslovakia invited me to visit, so I went in the summer of 1991 for a holiday, then went back in November because I loved it out there.

'I suggested that the three of us could open a bar, financed with the money I'd get from taking voluntary redundancy on the Underground and a loan my friend's girlfriend said she could get. So in the New Year I gave back my flat to the council – leaving rent arrears and debts which would catch up me later – bought a van, packed up all my stuff, took my dog, and left for the Czech Republic, as it had become.

'We found a place but after five months it was clear that the business wasn't going to work; there wasn't enough thinking behind the idea and my friends were having problems in their relationship. I missed home too. I had thought that going abroad would change everything but I still had all the same problems. You can't really "get away from it all." So I left the dog with them and came home – except that I had no home to go to now.

'I expected my parents to offer to put me up but my father was living on benefit since his stroke and maybe he was afraid of losing it if I moved in and was earning. Anyway, they never offered.

'I sold all my belongings at a car boot sale and moved in with some friends who shared a house but I couldn't settle, so I went to Czech again and this time my friend Mark and I went to Rotterdam to look for work. But I was so restless and impatient, I couldn't wait around; I wanted everything _now_. So I came home again, got another van and did courier work for a while, till one of the managers spoke to me in a way I didn't like and I got angry and walked out. I was always taking offence like that.

'I was just drifting, travelling backwards and forwards between England and Czech till I was twenty-seven, working and making some money but not a lot, staying with friends here and there – most of whom had problems with drink or drugs – then in a bedsit, then another house-share.

'A friend asked if I'd join him as a self-employed driver, only the business had to be in my name and we worked 18-hour shifts. He had a drink problem too and sometimes when I'd go to pick him up in the morning he wasn't up. One morning we were meant to be making an early start to drive to Cornwall and, surprisingly, I was late and he was ready, and he threw all his maps at me and said, "You do it!"

'One of the blokes in the shared house, who was a lorry driver, worked with me for a while but he used to throw tantrums, even in front of the customers, and get road rage and because the business was in my name, I was responsible.

'I went back to Czech for a break and that's when I met Daniella. I was afraid of committing myself and was trying to keep up this hard image. Even when she was over in England, working as an au pair, and she phoned me, I didn't answer the calls. I didn't know why I was like that; I knew she was hurt.

'Eventually my heart did soften a little bit but I was working long hours and couldn't see her much. Also, she used to taunt me a lot, only joking, but I couldn't cope with it.

'I really got into smoking cannabis; it got to the point where it was habitual. The house was full of people every weekend, using the place as a doss-house, leaving beer cans everywhere then heading off to the pub. I used to stay in and smoke on my own. I felt it took me away from reality but it caused more problems than it solved.

'Daniella wasn't into drugs or alcohol and didn't like what it was doing to me. Whenever I saw her I was high and she knew I was hiding away from my difficulties instead of dealing with them like she was trying to deal with hers. She had a lot of problems herself but she's got a very good character – it shines out.

'I wanted to get away from the people I was with and set up home with Daniella but at some times of the year I didn't get much work and it was hard to find the rent for the studio flat we were in, so we tried another house-share but there was a lot of stress. One of the blokes had a drink problem and I had a drug problem – and debts again.

'We moved out of London because the rents were cheaper. I was making false promises to my wife but all I was doing was smoking and having these philosophical ideas which I thought were great wisdom – as long as I was high.

'I kept thinking about all that was wrong with the world, all the pain and hurt, and how there was no time for yourself, working like a robot, and that it shouldn't be like that. I was exhausted and I didn't know who I was and one morning I just didn't go into work.

'The bills were coming in and I panicked, thinking, "What am I going to do?" Till Daniella had been in England a year, all we had was a single person's income support between us - £47 a week.

'I'd been going to techno clubs in London with old friends and for a short period I started selling Ecstasy. I didn't think about the damage I was doing to people, which was out of character for me. It seems to me now that an evil force was on me; all I could think of was making money. But it didn't seem like that at the time.

'I didn't think about the danger to myself either, going into places where teams of drug dealers were running – till one time in a club in Brixton when I thought the police were on to me and realized I could go down for five years. It gave me a shock, which I needed, and I stopped dealing as quickly as I had started.

'I cut down my cannabis smoking and joined a meditation class and got into all this New Age stuff: crystals and astrology and so on. I was looking for peace and love and I thought this was the way but it was a great deception. Their ideologies were like the Prozac the doctor gave me; they made me feel better but it was an illusion. The truth was missing from it.

'I had stopped dealing drugs but I was still attracted to them and still searching for friendship and for peace. Then one night I went to a rave quite far from my home, set up in a field with all these marquees, and I bought some acid and started seeing demons.

'I tried to tell myself I was hallucinating and the things I was seeing were only part of the trip but it was terrifying. Behind every person I could see another form, like an underworld animal, illustrating what the person was really like inside. A lot of them looked demonic to me, though some of the people had something shining out of them, like peace – and I thought they shouldn't be here; they didn't realize what was going on.

'There was a whole network of drug pushers, talking to each other on their phones from one marquee to the next, and they looked like devil-workers: there was darkness all around them. People didn't seem aware of it; they were just interested in getting drugs and having a good time, though a few people I spoke to said they didn't like the atmosphere there.

'I sat down and felt gripped by fear. Then I realized I was sitting among this group of drug dealers and they were watching me. One of them flicked a lighter in my face and demanded to know what was in my bag and another one got on his phone to somebody. I opened the bag to show there was nothing in it but my camera and some fruit and I thought I'd better get out of there.

'I feared for my life as I walked down to where the buses were. A group of people were following me and one stood by the bus, staring through the window at me, till I was totally paranoid. I got halfway home and phoned my wife, terrified, at four in the morning and she comforted me. Although she didn't like what I was into she never preached at me and I really abused that.

'That incident should have put the frighteners on me where drugs were concerned but by 1997 we had real money problems; we'd come back from spending Christmas in Czech to find the house flooded and wrecked from burst pipes. My wife had been happy living there and the only place we could get after that was a real dump – messy, undecorated, no carpets and we got overcharged on the rent.

'Daniella had started at college, doing beauty therapy, but the pressure of deadlines brought back memories of school where she had to get all her work done and then keep the home as well because her mother had a drink problem. So she was under stress and the relationship between us was deteriorating rapidly.

'I was smoking cannabis again, going to places like Avebury and Stonehenge and spending time with friends who were into all that philosophical rubbish. They weren't open and honest with each other; everyone hid behind a mask. I didn't have a mask: my skin problem meant I was exposed. All I had to hide behind was the drugs.

'I did care about the things that weren't right with humanity and I thought I'd do some voluntary work so I phoned up the local day centre for the homeless – and they told me about this training place and asked if I'd like to do a course in carpentry.

'My application to go on the council housing list was refused because my rent arrears from the past were still on record – but then the relationship with my parents started to get a bit better and my mum lent me the money to pay off the arrears.

'I was happy about that and about doing the carpentry, then I started getting self-critical again and thought I'd never be any good so I might as well not bother to finish the course. The landlord was trying to get us out of the house but the council advised me to stay till the court order came, then they might be able to offer us a place.

'Daniella was going to Czech to see her mum but I had to stay here because of the trouble with the landlord and because I'd started growing cannabis at home. The crop paid off my debts but I was smoking bits of it myself and my conscience was starting to bother me. I thought, "I'm not changing myself, and my wife's going to come home and find things the same and she might decide she's had enough." She was meant to be away for four weeks but it turned out to be six. She was probably glad to get away; she'd put up with a lot from me.

'There was a friend on the course that I sensed something different about – a humility. He was a born-again Christian and he asked if I'd go to church with him. I didn't believe, myself, but I'd always thought there must be something more than just us. He took me to a Catholic charismatic church and I felt really out of place. I thought, "This is a group of weak people; what am I doing here?!"

'I was in this place of worship and I didn't understand the word of God but something was speaking to me, about what I was doing. Before Daniella left, I'd said to her that I felt like destroying the cannabis plants and she said, "Don't be silly; think of the money." So I'd poisoned her as well – given her that spirit of darkness.

'At Christmas, at my parents' house, they really tried to look after me but I felt so empty and miserable. I even told my mum I was growing cannabis and she was really shocked and worried. I was smoking in my room while I was there but it didn't help me. The game of trying to escape was over.

'On my way home I became paranoid, thinking people were looking out of their windows at me. A few days after leaving my parents I came home from a smoking session, got in the house, looked in the mirror and said out loud, "Oh God, help me." Then I just cried and cried.

'I went into my bedroom and ripped out all the plants, bawling my eyes out all the time, and it was like a great burden being released from me.

'When I spoke to my mum the following day, she said that when I'd left she'd prayed for me, though she's never been religious really.

'My problems weren't solved overnight; there was a real tug-of-war taking place over the next few weeks. I felt a lot of fear and slept with the light on, with the Bible in my arms. I visited a friend who owed me money and had a smoke but instead of giving up on myself, I thought, "Tomorrow's a new day and I'll start again." That was a new way of thinking for me.

'When I went to church again with Paul, this fellow there gave his testimony: he was an alcoholic and I could really relate to what he'd been through. Paul gave me a lift home and asked me to repeat a prayer of confession with him, accepting Jesus Christ into my life, so I did. I could feel the rebellion wasn't there any more; an acceptance was coming in and the depression was lifting too.

'Paul and some of his friends kept coming to see me and all this pain was coming out and I kept weeping – forgiving people for things they'd done to me and becoming aware of what I'd done to them. When I thought about what I'd put my wife through, I was screaming and saying, "Oh God, forgive me." I was looking at the truth as though through a new set of eyes and a new mind.

'But I felt loved as well. I was beginning to see that there is this deception in the world, a spirit of darkness making us perceive ourselves in terms of the objects we own and the money we make, but happiness isn't in that; there's God, our creator. I think he has always had a plan for me but we have choices and I was making my own plans. And no matter how great you are or how much wisdom you think you have, at the end of the day there are things you can't do, and trying to work everything out for yourself will just destroy you.

'You hear about the bad things Christianity has done but it's hearsay. It's only by what you know and experience yourself that you learn what's true. There are so many souls that are lost and I was one of them.

'At first when I told Daniella, she thought this was just my latest thing. It was hard for her; she'd always been the strong one and looking after me was her role. She got angry a few times and said I was preaching at her, and instead of getting angry back, like I used to, I said I was sorry and went upstairs to pray.

'It was while I was praying that I got this idea to go and see my grandfather. The family abandoned him because he abused his children. He was a harsh man and I think he condemned himself a lot. But I've been going to see him every Saturday now and the last time I went he had found this part of the scripture that says. "By God's grace I will give you time to repent," and he felt that was meant for him because he's ninety-three now and still has his mind and his memory clear.

'I used to feel resentful about what he'd done to the family, though I know he had a terrible childhood himself. I think evil can get passed down from generation to generation; that's why I don't blame my parents, that they didn't express any love for me. But someone has to make the first move to forgive; it doesn't matter which one goes first.

'I'm about to be made homeless again. I hope the council will offer us a place but even if not, I'm not that worried. I have the things I desired all this time: I can feel peace and joy, which I never thought I would.

'What I'm hoping for now is that there can be a reconciliation in the family and that I can finish this course. It takes patience but it's important to me to accomplish it, not to run away from things like I used to – not to run away from myself.

'I think I can do it. With God's help.'

CHAPTER 6 – The professionals (1): the breadwinner

It seems reasonable to conclude that becoming down and out is something that could never happen to hard-working, employable people who have no addictions to drain their health and their income.

So it can come as a shock to realize that some of the people we work with or live among were once penniless and rejected, or that some of the people queuing for handouts in homeless centres were once successful professionals.

Deb and Miriam are two professional workers – one an almost-qualified psychotherapist, the other a talented musician and teacher.

Although neither ended up living on the streets, both experienced a downward spiral of poverty and rootlessness, stemming from marriage difficulties. Miriam had a series of forced departures from impossible accommodation, while Deb found herself queuing for lunch in a homeless day centre, along with several of her psychotherapy clients.

But I'll let them tell it in their own words.

Deb

'I'm not particularly religious and any faith I did have has totally gone out of the window.

'I'm living in two worlds: I finish a four-year training in July to qualify as a psychotherapist, and I'm here in the day centre for the homeless, as a nothing. The way you get treated, as a homeless person, is so degrading.

'What happened to me was that I was in an unhappy marriage and it took me 11 years to make the decision to leave. I was trying to hold on to the money I had, so that my daughter and I could move out and start a new life, but my husband was accusing me of not caring and not providing. He hadn't been paying for anything and the house was in danger of being repossessed. By the time I left, I didn't have any money to fall back on.

'On the advice of a solicitor, I looked for rented accommodation as a Department of Social Security tenant, but the DSS don't pay advance rent or deposit and I just didn't have that money. Also, you need a guarantor and there was no one I could ask. I had no relationship with my family: I've lived on my own since I was 15, when my stepfather threw me out of the house. He was violent and my mother couldn't stand up for me.

'I met my mother in secret and in the end she did help me out with some money to live on and the solicitor and the psychiatrist I was seeing wrote letters to the council on my behalf, saying I hadn't voluntarily made myself homeless: I had to leave because my husband was abusive.

'I was given a place in a hostel: a room for myself and my daughter, who's eight, and a shared bathroom and kitchen. Even there, you had to pay for the hot water and gas; it wasn't a lot to pay but I didn't have it.

'By then, I had lost my job because of illness. I had got to the point where, because of stress and depression, I needed to be told what to do and the psychiatrist advised me to stay off work till the job was terminated, so I got a month's salary as severance pay, and my salary paid up to date, but by the time it arrived we had no money at all, so it didn't last long.

'I had nothing between December and March. I told the homeless department I just couldn't pay for the hostel – but the DSS wouldn't believe it; they asked how I'd been managing to live all this time, if I had nothing. So my application for housing benefit was held up while they checked for my non-existent finances!

'I was getting a meal at the day centre for the homeless and my daughter had a school dinner, potatoes and pasta at home, and some tinned food my mother was giving me. My husband was taking me to court to prove I was an unfit mother; he said my daughter was developing an eating disorder. But he wasn't giving me any money to feed her. I was living off packets of Tunes cough sweets, to keep my energy level up, and water.

'It was hard walking into the day centre the first time. Although I'd had to take a few months' break in my clinical practice because of my depression, some of the psychiatric patients I'd been seeing as clients attended the centre. I was queuing up with them for a cheap meal.

'My training as a therapist took one 12-hour day and one five-hour evening a week, plus the studying and seeing clients. A lot of them had problems with poverty but I was worse off!

'People don't ask how you are. Now, they say, "You were looking really bad before, poor and pale, but now you're looking better," but they still don't ask you if you're OK. I think they're afraid of the answer.

'In my marriage I was leading a secret life. People saw us as a happy couple and I was ashamed of the real situation. My husband was always telling me, "I love you," but what was happening was so different.

'He was my first long-term relationship. I've always been independent, because of living on my own since I was 15. At that age, all my friends were old-age pensioners. I couldn't relate to young people; their lives were so different.

'I never went to pubs and clubs. I worked and by the age of 16 I had all the furniture and everything I needed to make myself a home, first a bedsit and later on a flat on my own. The job I had wasn't very well paid and a school friend said I could live with her parents but it reminded me too much of home. The atmosphere at home had been literally stifling – my stepfather smoked eighty a day and didn't like me opening the windows, so he nailed them all shut.

'I met my husband when I was 19 and he introduced me to another type of life: going out to pubs and for meals, having fun. That was new to me. He was working as a security officer in a bank. Working in a bank, it was a sackable offence to go overdrawn, so they offered lots of cheap loans and cheap mortgages. He and a friend were talking about buying a house but they fell out, so he wanted to buy it on his own.

'I provided the furniture and moved in as a lodger. That was the idea. In fact I was the living-in girlfriend, doing his cooking and cleaning – almost a married life – but paying rent. We had only known each other for three months and we weren't ready for that kind of relationship.

'He'd go out with his mates and not come home till two in the morning. He said he'd give up smoking but didn't and I found that hard because it reminded me of my stepfather.

'We got engaged; it was our turn. Among our friends, someone got engaged every New Year. My husband wanted marriage for tax reasons. But in 11 years of marriage, he never claimed the married man's allowance. He would never fill in the forms or claim anything he was entitled to and all the finances were left to me. I was still paying rent as a lodger while we were engaged.

'He left the bank because all his friends were getting promoted and he wasn't, because he wouldn't do the banking exams. That meant we no longer had a cheap mortgage or loans – and everything was on loan – and the interest rates went sky-high. He took a job in sales, cold-calling, but he wasn't that kind of nature so he wasn't working.

'That's when the double life began. Nobody knew he had these loans or that he wasn't working. He persuaded his dad to lend him money to get a car and he kept up appearances of having the same standard of life. People would invite us out and we'd have to say no because there was no money, and they didn't understand why we didn't want to go.

'I was working as a receptionist and I kept changing jobs, trying to earn more. Even when my husband was working, he'd do things like tell me he'd paid the council tax when he hadn't. The bailiffs would come round and I'd talk to them and agree to pay £4 a month but my husband wouldn't pay them. I forget how many times the gas and electricity got cut off. He always said he was looking for work but he wasn't. He wanted to move away, rather than let anyone know the house was being repossessed.

'When we went to see my mother-in-law, she'd always have a dinner ready for him – but not for me – and would tell him he didn't look well and his shirts weren't white enough and I wasn't looking after him.

'Then a job came along for him and I was still working but even then he wouldn't pay the debts off. I'd always give him the money for what he wanted, then try and sort the debts later on. You want to please the man you love and every argument got heated. But each year I got more and more depressed.

'The house we were living in was part of a relocation package from the company and the rent was part of my husband's salary but then he got made redundant and we were responsible for the rent and it was very high. I didn't realize, till the first month had gone by, that the company had stopped paying. I couldn't answer the phone or the door in case it was the bailiffs. We ended up moving away from there owing £2,000. My husband said he'd found a house to rent; I didn't know how, with no job and no deposit.

'He said he'd go on income support but didn't. He got a mortgage by claiming to be self-employed and getting £8,000 from his parents for a deposit. But we were in arrears from day one. I'd lost my job when we moved and could only get one as a waitress. His parents were threatening to stop looking after our daughter if the loan wasn't repaid. He got a job as a security guard but it wasn't enough. So he decided to get some qualifications and became a student but he didn't fill in the forms for a grant, so I was supporting the three of us.

'I got a full-time job as a secretary but the mortgage was more or less the same as my salary. Sometimes we couldn't afford a pint of milk or a loaf of bread. But he still kept up appearances: for instance, the papers had to be delivered; he wouldn't go and collect them. He said he was paying for them when he wasn't and he ran up library fines. I could deal with the genuine hardship but not with the fact that he wasn't prepared to work while he was studying or that he wouldn't economize.

'He kept saying he would look for work and I kept trusting him but after four years it came out that he had no intention because he said the jobs he could get were degrading. He took out student loans but we were already so much in debt.

'The jobs I was getting weren't very fulfilling either and I found we would actually be better off if I was studying as well, so I started a course. My husband was supportive and encouraging about my studying but we were all living off my grant because he still wouldn't claim for himself. Then he told the DSS I had left him and told me not to answer the door or the phone or to have any friends in because no one must know I was living there. He got income support, single-parent benefit, and the council tax and water rates paid. Every time someone knocked at the door I had to hide. My daughter was three at the time.

'I was getting more depressed. I was studying, working on a contract basis for my last employer, doing another job in the evenings, doing voluntary work as experience for my psychology course, and in the second year of the course I started another one, for psychotherapy, and I worked full-time during the summer holidays. I was exhausted, I was hardly seeing my daughter, and my health started to suffer so I put my foot down and said, "You have just got to work part time," but he said it wasn't worth it. We argued for the whole three years of his course but nothing changed.

'I got my degree and he got his but he still wouldn't work. He put his name on the registers of two agencies, then decided to go on studying and do a Master's degree. He got the Master's and said he was going to study again. Everyone thought he was brilliant, getting qualifications and bettering himself. The course was in accountancy, which was really ironic!

'Again, he didn't apply for a grant so we got hit for the course fees. He knew I wouldn't let us get into the situation of having no money again. I was working as a personal assistant at this time and the job was getting more demanding. I felt I just couldn't do it any more and I wanted to look after Emma. My husband was offered work for £10 an hour but he wouldn't accept it.

'Finally, he got a job but there was still no attempt to clear the debts. He had been off income support for three months and hadn't paid the mortgage for two months and I felt the only way out of the financial situation was to be declared bankrupt and put the house on the market but he said our only answer was for me to earn more. And if I didn't work, I couldn't go on with my course.

'My mum had cancer, we were going to lose the house, and I was exhausted and feeling suicidal. I went to the doctor and he said I had to stop. He gave me some tablets and a certificate for two weeks off work but after a week I went back. I continued with the course but stopped the clinical work: I just couldn't concentrate on people's problems, with so much pressure of my own. I was pissed off with being the one putting things right all the time!

'I tried to go on part time at work but the boss said he needed me to work longer hours, not less, and when I said I wasn't well he said, "Are you going to be any good to me? Get your head together and do what you're meant to do here."

'I was on the phone every day to the Samaritans and one day I just collapsed. That's when I decided to start divorce proceedings. I was considered a suicide risk and was packed full of tranquillizers, sleeping tablets and sickness tablets because of the stress. I knew one drink, on top of all the tablets, was all I would need to kill myself.

'As well as not paying the mortgage and cancelling the direct debits, my husband stopped paying for the food; he had never paid for Emma's clothes. He said the problems were my fault because I wasn't contributing. He was checking up on my phone calls, going through my diary, taking my daughter away from home and not letting me see her, talking about me in a nasty way in front of her, making me cook for him, but criticizing everything I did, stopping me watching television, and threatening me physically. I was going out of my mind. I locked myself in the bedroom most of the time. The psychiatrist told me it wasn't safe to go home but I was told if I went to a refuge, or into hospital, I might not get custody of Emma.

'Then solicitors' letters starting arriving, listing the medication I was on and saying I was an unfit mother. Emma loved her dad and I thought I'd have to leave her with him. I couldn't let her know what was really going on and I didn't know how to tell her we were separating but one day she said, "Daddy isn't being very nice to you, is he? Why don't you get a divorce? My friend still gets to see her dad and it's all right." She wanted to live with me and visit her dad.

'She stopped eating and had to go into hospital with bad constipation, I suppose from all the stress on her but my husband said it was my fault. I stayed in the hospital with her and, because he left me nothing, the mothers of the other children were buying me food!

'When my mother-in-law heard we were getting a divorce, she said, "But you're such a lovely couple!" It's only recently that she's told me she just didn't realize what was going on. And a woman at Emma's school the other day said, "Your husband is such a lovely man."

'When I heard we'd got the hostel place, I had about five hours to pack all our things and move out before my husband came home. I didn't want him to know where we'd be living; I didn't know what he'd do. I made four trips in two hours and managed to bring all Emma's things. I don't know how I found the energy to lug everything. Then my husband came home early. But all he said, with a smile on his face, was that I couldn't steal his daughter.

'He lied to his solicitor, said I'd done things I hadn't, and didn't tell him about the house being repossessed. He said I'd abducted Emma and in the courtroom he broke down crying, saying he feared for his daughter's life. So I had to prove to the court I was a fit mother – always having her in clean clothes and well fed. For four months, I was eating hardly anything. The hostel wasn't considered a good environment for Emma and she hated it but no one was offering any better.

'After five weeks in the hostel I was given a flat and a decorating allowance of £300 but that had to be used to pay advance rent. The flat was empty, uncarpeted, unheated and the taps weren't working. We had no money for hot water anyway. It was March, and freezing. We could have gone back to the hostel for a meal and a bath but Emma didn't want to go there.

'I borrowed some money from my mum while I waited for the income support to come through. We've been here three weeks now and people keep asking, "How's the flat coming on?" – but how can it "come on" with no money to do anything to it?

'I don't usually ask for help but it was so cold I went to a friend's house and stayed there till he rang round and found someone who could lend us a heater. But I still don't tell people the real situation. Even when friends commented that I'd lost a lot of weight and I was shaking, they didn't ask what was wrong.

'I feel totally let down by friends and I don't have any faith in the system or the government. I applied to the DSS for a social fund grant and sat in the office from 9 a.m. till 3 p.m. while they said I must have some money somewhere that I wasn't telling them about. I got a bank statement and showed them my overdraft. Then they said, "Why didn't you go for unemployment benefit?" but I hadn't known I was entitled to it.

'Finally I got £368, which was meant to buy two beds, quilts, pillows, sheets and pillowcases, towels, carpets, curtains, a cooker, furniture, saucepans, crockery, cutlery, etc. The DSS said I wouldn't need a fridge or a wardrobe: they were luxuries.

'I get the minimum weekly allowance now. Gas, electricity, food and clothing, and a contribution towards the rent all have to come out of that. But it's more than I have had, when we were living in debt all those years; at least I've got money in my hand. I bought two of those air-beds you use on the beach, instead of beds; a woman who attends the day centre gave me two towels and I'm painting the living room now. It's beginning to feel like home.

'I can get my washing done at the homeless centre but this week by mistake they sold two carrier bags full of my washing, with four pairs of trousers in and my daughter's school uniform, and said they weren't liable. I have to look presentable for my clinical practice and if Emma isn't in clean uniform every week the court can say I'm neglecting her welfare. After a lot of arguing I was offered £20 and some clothes from their charity shop.

'That's the thing about being homeless. Your life and your possessions are worth nothing and being needy is considered your fault. There's no conversation, as human beings – just asking for what you need and being told yes or no. It's hard to see people at the day centre being spoken to the way they are. If you try to stick up for yourself they say you're not cooperating but they can't see what they're putting you through.

'I didn't want to be homeless or poor but I think I'm going to be living the poor life for a long time yet. I listen to people at the homeless centre, talking about their lives, and I think, "This place isn't me." But it is me.

'It's made me really think about what it is to be a human being and what counts as living: is it just surviving? Even the charities really hate giving – even things they've been given to hand out. I don't have a problem accepting things; they just haven't been offered!

'The good news is that I've got a life again, one that's not dependent on tablets, and I can concentrate on my work and listen to people again. I've been a counsellor for ten years now and listening is a skill. It does involve denial of my own problems, acting as though I don't have any, but you learn from your own experience and from others' and you can use that to help other people. I've always been curious and interested in people and they talk to me.

'It's still easier than talking about myself. It's lonely, this way, but it still feels safer than letting people in. I don't really trust anyone to care any more.

'I've lost faith in human nature, through this experience of being homeless, and if there is a God, then where is he? There's a chap at the day centre who says God has a purpose and things happen for a reason but I think things can't be meant to go on being as hard as this. The suffering has to stop sometime – doesn't it?'

CHAPTER 7 – The professionals (2): The bag lady

Alcoholism can lead to homelessness. That we know. But homelessness, with its desolation and its emotional as well as physical cold, can in itself lead to alcoholism.

Miriam comes from a family who used alcohol as a pick-me-up when times were bad or they were feeling low. Even as a child, she was perceptive enough to see clearly the harm that came from relying on drink to banish uncomfortable emotions and blur the edges of difficult relationships. She had no wish to repeat that pattern herself.

A university degree, a career, marriage and her own circle of friends, promised the chance of independence and the freedom to follow a different pattern of survival. But when crises occurred one after another and her hard-won security deserted her, the old family friend – alcohol – seemed the only one that remained to offer her a way of keeping going.

As she says herself, 'If I hadn't drunk, I would have ended up in a psychiatric unit.'

For those who believe that alcoholics always have a choice – that was the choice Miriam had.

Miriam

'People tend to think an alcoholic is the tramp on the street in the old raincoat with the rope around his waist. The standard image of the homeless person is the same – the tramp.

'But my experience of homelessness is simply having nowhere that you can call your home, for years – being tossed from pillar to post – and the struggle of trying to keep up the appearance of being normal. What was going on in private and what was going on publicly were so far apart.

It started when I first came to London. I was running away, I suppose, from my home town, which is a smallish place with a definite centre. It's where my family are and where my married home had been. Arriving off the train in London with plastic carrier bags – a bag lady – was the start of years of endlessly emptying and repacking those bags, always moving, never finding any rooted place.

'I thought I was escaping a prison when I left the married home. There wasn't much choice; I had to go. But I just found myself in smaller and smaller prisons.

'My face looks young. People would think I was in my early twenties and I would hide behind that façade. It was less shameful than being in my thirties, approaching 40, and being in this sort of situation.

'Most of my contemporaries had managed to get their homes; most had bought places of their own, most were married or in long-standing relationships and most of those had children who were going to school.

'Each place I lived in was a new sort of torture. It was constantly "out of the frying pan and into the fire". I started off by living with landladies. I can't believe some of the ridiculous, petty little things they used to do to control me. Everybody always wanted my money but they didn't want me.

'With the first one, I wasn't allowed to choose the bread I bought; it had to be ready sliced because she said when I sliced bread it made crumbs. She reduced the wattage on my reading-lamp without telling me and I found my eyesight deteriorating rapidly and I didn't know why. I don't know if she was trying to save electricity or what.

'I came back once and found no bedclothes on my bed. I got dirty curtains from somewhere to sleep under. Also, when she went out she'd unplug the phone and take it with her.

'This was the start of my drinking heavily. I don't know whether it was some kind of act of revenge. She had cupboards and cupboards of booze and I didn't know anybody in London so I started tippling away at her supply, meaning to top it up. When I went away for Christmas, she told me I couldn't come back.

'The next place was with a wealthy family who rented out one room. At this one, I didn't have use of the garden or even the kitchen. I was expected to do all my cooking with a kettle and a toaster in my room. I wasn't even allowed to go into their kitchen to get water from a drinking tap; I had to boil all my water from the bathroom.

'There were also rules about going out. Their security burglar alarm was set to a certain time and if I wasn't in by then I would be locked out all night. That was another thing that made it feel like a prison.

'The bed was so bad I had to sleep on the floor. And yet these people were incredibly wealthy. The rent was quite low and that's why I put up with it, because I was studying then, doing my teacher training. My husband had been against me becoming a teacher. It was one of the things that led to the marriage breaking down. The other reason was he didn't want children. If I could have neither children nor a career it seemed pointless.

'The marriage home was bizarre – beyond belief really. I could never have called it a home; it was a permanent builder's yard. There were ceilings pulled down, walls knocked down, doors missing. There was no marital double bed, just a single bed, so if it was hot I slept on the floor.

'The house was overrun with snails and slugs. Each morning when I came downstairs, the kitchen walls were crawling with them. When we moved there first, it was overrun with fleas. I did try to put up curtains and so on but the basic things were never dealt with. There was no door on the toilet; it led straight to the kitchen. We had to put up a board when we went in there. My husband would open the front door and let people in sometimes when I was on the toilet. There was no privacy.

'My husband was DIY mad. It was an obsession with him. It came as a shock to me; I didn't know he had that side to him. I believed I'd married a fellow musician. He would start one job, tear something down, then start on something else. He never finished anything. All I wanted was a door on the toilet but I never got it. I'd have put up with anything really.

'I thought we'd move in, slap up a bit of wallpaper and get on with our lives as musicians. He went out and played in bands, evenings and weekends, and carried on his jack-the-lad bachelor lifestyle. So there wasn't much time really for all these projects on the house.

'He wouldn't let me play my instrument while there was work to be done on the house – but then he wouldn't let me help with the DIY. He told me I was cack-handed, couldn't do it properly, and mocked me for being Irish – he said because I was a Paddy I had no taste. But when I tried to go and stay with my parents for a while, he called me selfish, because there was all this work to be done in the house. What was going to be a home became a hell.

'It had been another "out of the frying pan into the fire" situation because I'd had to get out of my family home because of my mother's drinking, compounded by my younger brother's drinking. It was very clear to me, in retrospect, that I'd married just to get out of that. I was 25 – old enough to know better, but I had a fear of being on the shelf as well. I don't know what I was thinking.

'So when I left the marriage that was the start of the cardboard boxes. Most of my belongings went to a neighbour round the corner; she had a spare room and stored them for me. It would be years before they were with me again.

'So – I had got through two landladies, in London, and was trying to train to be a teacher. Teacher training is hard, even in the best of situations, and I was trying to cope with teaching practice in wretched schools, with little support, with no fixed home, and I was beginning to feel quite ill.

'It was my third term and my third landlady. This one was even more restrictive. I wasn't allowed to be in the house in the daytime. I was literally only allowed to pay for the bed and to come in to sleep. I was trying to find places to go at weekends. I couldn't go to my family and I couldn't go to my digs. I found myself getting into wretched affairs so I could stay at a man's house for a weekend. Oh God! Terrible for my dignity and self-esteem.

'I got really ill. I thought, "Where can I go and lie down? I can't go and lie down in my bedroom when I'm not supposed to be there." So I went and lay on a park bench.

'When I got taken into hospital, the nurses said they'd never seen a young girl in such a bad state, only old ladies. They had to put a catheter in me because I couldn't wee and I got really bloated. I think my body just seized up from the tension.

'By the grace of God, I qualified as a teacher and got my first teaching post. And there I was blessed because I was in with a good team and I did get a lot of love from those teachers.

'I thought, "Right, enough of these landladies – I'll move in with someone I know." A friend knew someone in that area who was willing to let a room. It would help her out; she was a divorced mother and she would keep the rent nice and low. I had heavy debts from my teacher training year.

'But again, it was a case of, "Give me your money but I don't want _you_." I wasn't allowed to flush the toilet if I woke up before her. I wasn't allowed to sleep with my bedroom door shut because she didn't like hearing it click if I went to bed after her or got up before her.

'I quickly realised I wasn't allowed any visitors. I had men friends who weren't boyfriends and she couldn't understand that. Two men from a healing circle I belonged to came to visit and she humiliated me in front of them, telling us we had to talk in hushed tones. Another one saw me to the door one night and she said she'd heard him saying goodnight and we'd woken her up. I felt as though I was being listened to and spied upon.

'There was no privacy. She criticized everything I wore and everything I ate. It was as if I no longer belonged to myself – as if, once I was in people's homes, I was their property.

'Of course, she wouldn't let me play my violin. I had to go out to a wooden hut to practise. And this was as a professional music teacher; I needed to practise, and she knew that.

'The worst moment of indignity was when, one night, practising the violin in this wooden hut, I was caught short and there was no toilet. I found myself doing a poo out in a field. I just couldn't believe I'd come to that. I paid my rent and left without saying goodbye.

'The greatest godsend was that I'd got a car. I'd managed to get an old banger, to travel round all my teaching jobs, and despite all my drinking and driving I never lost my licence. That's what saved me.

'People used to joke that I should be driving a caravan because there was no point in unloading my carrier bags and boxes between one place and the next; as soon as they were unpacked it was time to move on. And they'd say there was no point in writing down my new address. "Look, Miriam, you've taken up a whole page in my address book!"

'With the increased desperation of each move, there was no planning where I was going to go next. I was just running, running, running. So when I ran out of the divorced woman's house, I just answered the first advert in a shop window and went off somewhere else.

'This time it was with a Filipino family. There were nice things about them; they weren't all horrible. But I hadn't been there long when the wife had to go back to the Philippines for her mother's funeral. The first day she was gone, the husband made a pass at me. I couldn't believe it. And I think because I couldn't believe it, I tried to pretend it hadn't happened. I should have left then but I couldn't bear to be on the road again so I stayed a bit longer.

'Anything that got broken, they said must have been my fault. I got blamed for every problem with the television, video, washing machine. Then suddenly she said, "I want the room you're in. I want my daughter to have that room. You can go and live with your family." But I was working in West London and my family were forty miles away and this was in the middle of term at a really busy time. Anyway, I didn't want to go back to my family.

'So, again, there was no time to look for a place, just take the first advert. This time, I thought, "I must go to my own kind. Maybe Irish people would be more hospitable." So I bought the _Irish Post_ and – I have to laugh at this, because there is humour in it – the place I took was owned by an Egyptian landlord and the house was full of New Zealanders!

'These guys were carpenters and heavy workers – and heavy drinkers. They would go out and get smashed every evening and I would go out with them – and I loved that. It was as though I'd found a family, I suppose. At least I felt protected by these people. That was actually quite good time, for a little time. But it was all linked in with my drinking.

'One by one, though, the lads left and some more sinister characters moved into the house and there was a more hellish time then. There was a guy who played rap music all day, all night, and who put the washing machine on at three and four in the morning, and someone in the room next to me who was creepy and made suggestions about how we should get together.

'My room was next to the kitchen and there were always people in there, shouting their heads off. Yet I still had to get up at eight o'clock for a day's teaching and be nice to kids. Trying to be prepared and mentally alert was taking its toll. I was getting ill and I was drinking to numb the pain.

'There was an off-licence round the corner and I would buy in bottles of wine, lock myself in and just drink on my own. I was falling apart at the seams and starting to crack up at work. I couldn't keep it all together, the pretence – being a professional person at work, with this terrible life at home, which was never a home.

'Anger was coming out on the pupils and on other staff. I couldn't cope with the stress any longer or even with being teased. I couldn't stop crying. I'd turn up for work and then turn round and go home. I left the job, thinking I was going to go and study, as if another certificate would make things any better, but it didn't work out.

'The room next door to mine in the house had become available and one evening I heard some rustling coming from there and I thought someone new had moved in. So I went to say hello and welcome to this happy household! The door was opened by the all-day, all-night rap guy – six foot six, nasty, selfish, sinister – who always wore sunglasses so I never saw his eyes; he'd changed his bedroom and was now next to mine.

'I had been out of touch with the church of my youth but I was trying to get back, trying to bring God into my life. So when this happened I went round to the church, thinking "What do I do now?" and I found a notice in the porch, someone looking for a lodger.

'I was running out of people to help me move. I'd left my teaching job and had begun playing in bands in pubs, which was the beginning of the end really. But the people I played in the pubs with helped me move this time. I knew if I kept all my books I'd be able to work again so I carried all these carrier bags of books round to the new place.

'It had sounded ideal – a landlady who was a Christian. But she'd tricked me. She'd put her notice up in the church but she didn't go to church. She thought she'd get a nice person if she advertised in the church but she didn't believe in God.

'Yet again, I found myself sharing with someone who wanted the money but not the person. This woman didn't even want to smell my cooking. She'd come in and literally scream, if I was using the stove, and say, "Oh, my clothes will smell of your cooking!" She didn't seem to eat much herself. All she had in the fridge were cans of beer. I'd moved in with another alky.

'I know she was probably tired after a day's work but it was too much effort for her even to talk to me. I'd come in and say, "Hello, did you have a good day?" and she'd say, " _I'm watching the telly!_ " So I left her with the telly and gradually kept myself more to myself in my poky little room, which was damp; all my clothes were going mouldy with the damp.

'By now I was in Alcoholics Anonymous and I was told not to make major decisions for a while so I stuck it out for a year. Then people in AA started to help me see myself differently.

'I hadn't seen myself as homeless, till they began to point it out to me. They said, "You know, at your stage of life, people need a home – and deserve a home." I was mid-to late thirties then. Also, they said that as I was an alcoholic now I needed protection and it was very important for me to have peace where I lived.

'It had never occurred to me to put my name down on a council list – I suppose because there was this double life and no one knew how I was suffering in my private life. But someone said, "If you'd put your name down when you first came to London, you'd be in a flat by now." But no one told me then. I didn't know.

'Two blokes in AA had got into flats through a housing trust and they said, "What you do first is you move into a communal house and after that you get a flat." I thought, "Oh God, I can't bear to move again!" But they said I wouldn't be in the hostel for very long so I agreed and they set up an interview for me.

'The only place available turned out to be in a house which was specifically for people with mental illness. I so wanted to have a home by this stage that I went along with it, thinking it would only be for a month or so. But this had to be the worst yet.

'I was told before I moved in, "Everyone will be sympathetic in here because they've all got their problems and as a recovering alcoholic you'll be given peace and support." Was I _fuck_!

'I was victimized, made fun of, there was racist stuff because I was Irish, I was the only woman and was in there with men who hated women, and they all had severe mental illness. I'd thought it was bad enough having the guy with the rap music and the drums keeping me awake but it was nothing compared to the guy who was schizophrenic keeping me awake. His radio was kept on loud, untuned, all night and all day, with the speaker turned towards my wall.

'No one wanted to know. The housing trust ran out of money, basically, and there were political rows going on and just no one was listening. I made so many phone calls but after a year there was no sign of being moved into a flat.

'I was in danger of completely losing my sanity there. It was the closest I came to really cracking up in a big way. I know that I did have a kind of a breakdown but I was accused of telling lies about that because I looked so well and fresh-faced, not like a mangled old bag lady. But you can't see someone's sanity or their brain and a lot of alcoholics do look well: drinking takes away the worry and the strain. But I was so scared. I could feel my sanity slipping away.

'I'd lost the ability to work full time and at least the rent in the hostel was very low, and I kept hoping to be offered a place on my own. That's why I tolerated it for a year. Then I ran for it again.

'I thought, "This time, I've got to go to a genuine church person; then I'll be all right." I found this advert and I thought, "This is it. This one is a real churchgoer, a real ally." She didn't even want me to pay rent; she just wanted company and someone who'd say the rosary with her now and then. I thought, "Oh, praise the Lord – at last, a safe haven!" But this woman tormented me.

'She did a sinister kind of emotional blackmail on me that outstripped even the schizophrenic's torture. It was unbelievable. I think she was quite mad herself. She didn't give me a moment's peace. I was desperately trying to keep up some kind of a front so I could go and work but she tortured me about everything: what I ate, when I ate, whether I'd gone to mass, why I wasn't fasting, how I prayed.

'She'd come into my bedroom and haul me out of bed to say a rosary with her. Oh, my God! Up to that time, I had at least found solace in my religion and in my beliefs but she took all the pleasure out of my religion! It became something that she could whip me with.

'I like to pray freely but because I'd not memorized all these standard prayers that she had, she shamed me. She'd say, "What do you mean, you don't know such-and-such a prayer? I thought you were religious!" Oh, my God!

'She wouldn't turn on lights, wouldn't use electricity. Because I wasn't paying rent, I was like a slave; I had to do all these other things for her. At one o'clock in the morning, she'd call me out of the bed to come and listen to a row the neighbours were having. One evening, I went out of the house because she was putting pressure on me to go round to someone's house and beg to borrow a lawnmower but instead I went to an AA meeting.

'When I was there I broke down. There was nothing for it but to go back to the family but all my family drink and I'd got this far down the line – three years' sobriety – and to have to finally give in and go back and live in a drinking situation absolutely broke my heart. But there was nowhere else to go.

'But one thing I'll say for my parents is that they did come for me that day, and one dear friend as well, and loaded my things into the car. The whole street were out there watching as I left; this woman had got a crony of hers with her and they were shouting abuse at me as we loaded up.

'I was still trying to get back on track with my career and at this time a very good, strong woman in AA came into my life and helped me start putting the pieces back together. I was frightened to go and put my name down on another housing list but she said, "Ask God to help you then just go into that office, ask for your name to be put down and then ring me and tell me you've done it." I wouldn't have had the courage without that support but I did it, and from putting my name on that list I finally have the home that I have today, from a housing association.

'I love my home. It's a lovely flat, very peaceful. I do still have fear because it's no longer a housing trust property; a private landlord bought it a few weeks ago. So I'm frightened they might put the rents up. It's not quite over yet. But just for today, I know I'm in with a chance. I put my hope and trust in God, one day at a time.

'I don't know how I got through it, all the time when I was drinking. But at the same time, if I hadn't drunk I would definitely have been in a psychiatric unit. It was one or the other. I couldn't have stuck the situation; without the drink I'd have gone round the bend long ago.

'Going through all that does give you an appreciation of the little things in life. I have a faith in God that is absolutely unshakeable now. He's the only home that matters to me. I know this home is not lasting, here. The things of this earth won't last. This is only for a short time span. The home I'm working towards is my home with Jesus, in eternity. That's all that I want to say.'

CHAPTER 8 – The empty home

For both Deb and Miriam, leaving their husbands meant leaving their homes. Francis stayed in the marital home when his wife left. Although the stress of divorce eventually cost him his job he was able to keep his home, so in that sense he was not homeless. What he experienced was the loss of all the comfort and meaning of 'home', while still having a roof over his head.

It is this kind of homelessness that many of the street-dwellers discover when they are newly housed. They are living in a space enclosed by walls – but, alone and comfortless, that space can seem very empty indeed and nothing like a home.

Francis

'I think I am over it now, in as much as anyone can get over a major bereavement – and marriage breakdown and divorce are a kind of bereavement. If it had been a death, I am sure I would feel much the same about the times I had with my wife, and the loss. But if it had been death, there wouldn't be that hope, and for the first year or so after the separation I did hope that we would get back together again.

'The shock of Charlotte's leaving was tremendous; I had no idea that she was seriously unhappy with our marriage. Sometimes there were difficulties but other times we really enjoyed the time together.

'She came home one evening and said she wanted to leave. What prompted her to leave was that she had met somebody in her office, who was younger than both of us; she hadn't known him very long but I think it gave her a lever to confront me.

'She left three weeks before Christmas, leaving me in the house and taking all her clothes and personal things. I decided to go back to spend Christmas with my family but I thought while I was away she might bring her boyfriend into the house or remove some of our joint possessions. We had bought the house and the furniture together; it was all that was left of our relationship.

'So I changed the locks on the door. When I told her why, she said, "But you know I wouldn't do that!" But I felt I simply didn't know her any more: I hadn't known she was going to leave me. I suppose the house was familiar and gave me some security and I felt very vulnerable about leaving the place, knowing she could have access to it.

'Six months after that, when Charlotte had really made up her mind that she wanted to make the separation permanent, we went through our possessions and split them up and by that time I felt they weren't important; I wanted to make the split as painless as possible for her, with the hope of keeping the relationship amicable.

'We had applied for marriage counselling but by the time the appointment came up she had already moved in with her boyfriend and gone on holiday with him. We both learned a lot about our relationship from the counselling but after giving it a lot of thought Charlotte felt she couldn't go back on the decision she'd made to leave.

'I kept in contact and continued to be very good friends but a year later I proposed divorcing. Her reaction was shock and horror but I'd got to the point where I felt, for my own sake, it was important to move on.

'I was born and brought up in Canada, the eldest of six children. My father is English and still has a broad Lancashire accent and my mother still sounds distinctly Irish and when I came to England, when I was 21, within two years most people couldn't pick up my accent.

'The culture I was brought up with was almost exclusively European – the history, literature and music. I was very interested in books and films and for the first couple of months in England I travelled round a lot, especially London and Dorset, visiting all the places mentioned in Dickens and Hardy novels and even Enid Blyton's children's books. I probably got to know London better than most British people!

'The cultural changes were something I had been looking forward to, though obviously living in London took some getting used to: I had grown up in small towns so I wasn't used to urban living. So I was struck by the noise, the volume of people, the small houses and lack of space. But I felt at home. I have never felt strongly drawn to return to Canada, though I did miss my family and if I hadn't met Charlotte I might well have gone back eventually but in a sense she became my family, and my home was with her.

'I have quite a lot of family here as well: my mother's two sisters and my father's brother and his family and I got on very well with my cousins. I spent the first four or five Christmases with them and felt very much at home.

'After six years of being in this country, sharing houses with a series of people, I was ready to have my own flat. I enjoyed my work and was used to living alone, though I was lonely and frustrated with my inability to make a relationship and perhaps I hung on to Charlotte because of that. She was my first proper girlfriend, at the age of 28.

'We met at work; we had similar interests and a similar attitude to life, even though she wasn't a Christian and didn't understand my faith, which was very important to me.

'I was brought up in a devout Catholic family but as a teenager I drifted away from what I saw as a rather rule-bound religion. At university I became very friendly with a lot of evangelical Christians and rediscovered a faith of my own, through the Christian Union. I feel that my Christian faith was born then, when I was eighteen. Up to that point, I can't really say I believed in God or was a Christian but at university it became a serious commitment, which eventually led me back to the Catholic Church.

'A friend of mine who was training for the Presbyterian ministry had spent a couple of days on retreat in a monastery and I liked the idea of a retreat. A cousin of my grandfather lived near a monastery in Ealing, West London, that had a lay community; they suggested I might like to move in with them, which I did for five months. I was out at work during the day but we shared meals and divine office with the monks.

'It was that experience that brought me back to the Catholic Church, though my father's reaction to my becoming an evangelical Protestant Christian had also made me think very carefully: he was very upset about it and felt I was missing so much.

'It did feel a bit strange, coming back. I was aware that I was coming at Catholicism from a very new perspective. I still had a lot of Protestant ideas about the Catholic Church, where it was failing and so on. There was a sense in which my relationship with it was new, yet it was familiar. I saw the sacraments and the prayers in a new light; for the first time, I began to understand the meaning of the sacraments.

'As a child, I had been very devout: I was an altar server and at the age of eleven or twelve I was thinking about becoming a priest. So I wanted to re-explore what the Catholic Church was offering.

'Charlotte didn't object to my faith – at the wedding, she told people she thought it was a good thing – but she didn't understand it. When we first met and became involved, she was talking about moving in with me straight away. I resisted that very strongly – on religious grounds but also feeling I couldn't deal with that kind of responsibility.

'The relationship between us wasn't easy, in the initial stages. She had told me at the outset that she had been anorexic but said it was all behind her. I didn't discover she was bulimic till after we were married. She had continued to be bulimic after we met but she said it was my commitment to her in proposing marriage that gave her the security to finally get over it.

'Even if she had told me about it sooner, it was something I didn't know anything about. I did know her childhood hadn't been easy. Her parents had married very young because her mother was pregnant with her; her father would have preferred she was a boy and the relationship between her parents was so close that it excluded her.

'When we met, Charlotte was at a crisis point. She had just split up with a boyfriend, after a year, who turned out to be mentally ill; she was pregnant by him; we had only known each other about two months and she decided to have an abortion. It was a very difficult start and put an immense strain on our relationship. I think in a way I became a substitute father; she was looking for someone to look after her.

'During the three years' courtship and the two and a half years of our marriage, she grew a lot in confidence and a sense of what she wanted from life and she felt she had moved on and moved away from the time we first met and she had outgrown me. In that way, I felt used: that she'd taken what I could provide then, when she'd outgrown that need, dumped me.

'The house we bought had been Charlotte's choice. I had been very reluctant to move to the area she chose which I felt was too far from central London, and the noise from Heathrow airport was horrible but I compromised. But when she left, she went to live in central London, and I felt she'd left me with the responsibility – and all the mortgage payments – for a house that I'd never liked.

'It had been our home and we had some very happy times there but it didn't feel like a home after she left. It was a place to escape to and I spent a lot of time on my own in the early months of the separation but in a sense I felt homeless: it was an empty shell of a house, not a home.

'Going shopping on my own was horrible; we had always gone together on a Saturday morning and we didn't have a very busy social life: we'd spent a lot of time alone together and there was no routine of going out and meeting friends. About nine months after she left, I was trying to keep myself busy every night of the week – out with friends or at church meetings or evening class. I found it very hard to go home and spend an evening on my own. Home was just a place to sleep. I tried to avoid it at other times.

'It affected my work. I had been promoted about a week before Charlotte said she was leaving, so my boss had increased expectations of me but for months I just couldn't concentrate on anything. I was on antidepressants but only for a month or so and we were going to Relate for counselling.

'I didn't stop work but, with hindsight, if I'd known Charlotte was going to leave, I wouldn't have taken the promotion. On the face of it, my bosses were sympathetic; my immediate boss had had an experience as a student where she had to take a year off because her mother committed suicide. But they gave me a deadline – four months – to get back on my feet. I was functioning but in the perception of the company I was on a different planet and they had a business to run.

'My work is self-motivating; I'm not faced with a daily timetable. In other jobs, having people around you, timetables and deadlines, serves to distract you from the emotional turmoil inside.

'It took me 18 months to get my confidence back and by that time I'd left the company and taken a job elsewhere. Then it was another two or three years to get back to where I was, in my work. From reading about the subject and talking to others who have been through the same thing, I've learned that for most men in full-time careers, divorce sets you back five years in career terms.

'What helped me the most was getting involved with a group for separated, divorced and bereaved people. Being with other people going through the same experience was reassuring and helpful. When I first went along for a weekend course called "The Beginning Experience", I thought, "Oh no! What a bunch of losers!" I was the youngest there, one of only three men among forty women, all of them middle-aged. But they were wonderful people. One woman, a widow, was very quiet and didn't seem to have much about her but when she opened up was an incredible person, full of love and insight and care.

'Perhaps where churches fail is they try to make out that they're strong. This group, for me, made more sense of Jesus' claim to reach out to the outcasts and sinners and my faith grew enormously through being part of it.

'The weekend course was run by people only one step ahead of us and took us through the grieving process to a point of starting to think about the future. One of the exercises was to write a final goodbye letter: it's the death and resurrection process.

'After the weekend I continued to meet some of the people regularly and about six months later I had this really strong vision that this was what the kingdom of God was. I was leading meditation at one of the meetings and found myself talking about kingdom: this group of broken, grief-stricken people meeting together _was_ the kingdom of God. It was a sense of home – the spiritual home.

'I became involved in organizing some of the other weekends as one of the leaders, listening and encouraging people and sharing my own experience with them. One lady there who had been involved for a number of years wasn't a Christian but she had the same sense that there was something important going on here.

'I felt that God reveals his kingdom and I felt his presence there in a way I hadn't encountered in other circumstances. I never had the sense that, "This was meant to happen to me," but my faith grew enormously through the experience and became a great source of hope and strength.

'I'd go home and although I was still on my own I didn't feel homeless in the same way, but as though I was still part of the group. Everyone shared their problems and their strength and they'd ring each other when they needed to. Some stayed with the group for two or three years and some for only one weekend; people move on in their own time, when they find they're not experiencing the grief and pain any more. I left the group when Sandra and I decided to get married.

'I met Sandra at the group. She had been married for eleven years and had found the group important to her as well. We were married by my Presbyterian friend three years after Charlotte left me and three years after Sandra's husband had left her, and the baby came along within a year.

'In a sense, we've taken on a lot of stress. In my case, I had a promotion then a change of job, separation, divorce, remarriage and became a father, all within four years! As Catholics, divorce is not recognized but we both had grounds to have our marriages annulled. My annulment came last year and Sandra's will be soon, so within the next month or so we'll be able to be married in the eyes of the church.

'Since the baby came along – he's now two – my faith, in terms of daily prayer, has rather evaporated. I'd like to have the time to pray. But I am involved in helping people prepare for the baptism of their children and I'm one of the readers in church and your faith adapts to circumstances, I suppose. In my heart, I feel I'm not nearly as close to God as I was three or four years ago – not as open.

'Having a baby changes a lot about what you do with your life – like spending Sunday mornings reading the paper – that's just not possible now! But it's just wonderful to walk in the door at night and be welcomed by, "Hello, Daddy!" He's waiting for me, and Sandra says he's been asking when Daddy's coming home.

'The house we live in was Sandra's married home and when we first married and I moved in with her I didn't feel it was my home. It's decorated in the way Sandra did it after her husband left her and I have still got a lot of my furniture and pictures in storage; we haven't got room in the house for them. We're looking forward to the time when we can buy a house together and feel it's really our own.

'So yes, I do feel at home now – especially when our son comes to meet me at the door. But the new home is yet to come.'

CHAPTER 9 – The job-seeker

It's frightening to realize that any of us, however carefully we ensure our security and plan our future, may be only one step away from homelessness.

When Alan encouraged me in the idea of going round central London talking to people living on the streets, he had no idea that he could up end up penniless himself. He had a secure job, a place to live and a family he could always go home to if things got tough. But even with all that security, he came perilously close to becoming homeless.

Alan

'I've often left jobs without having somewhere else to go; I could always go home to my family. But the last time I went home, that changed.

'I'd been rotating round the same kind of jobs and I felt I wasn't developing enough of my talents. I was starting to exist, rather than live. So I went home, moved in with my elder sister and her husband and four children for a few weeks and looked into training for something else. I like being with children and I like being around horses so I was looking at being a riding instructor but I found I would earn too little to live on while I was training.

'I took a job in a showjumping yard but got injured and had to stop. Then, because I'd been involved in doing a soup-run for the homeless when I was in London and was very keen on that, I made enquiries about volunteer schemes for the homeless instead. My family were trying to discourage me because they were afraid I'd end up emotionally and financially drained. They saw homeless people as being rock-bottom and thought working with them wasn't a career at all and that I'd get caught up in the way those people live and end up in a negative "down-and-out" outlook.

'I knew it was a possibility but I felt if I trusted in God I couldn't go wrong. What might look like a failure is not a failure to God. Even if I ended up homeless myself, it wouldn't be a disaster as long as I kept God as the centre of my life and focused on him. I felt my family were pushing me away from what I wanted to do. Living with them didn't feel like my home any more because I didn't feel accepted as I am.

'I applied for the Jesuit volunteer scheme – but it was the wrong time of year to join. I was interviewed for another scheme, the Simon Community, but I didn't get that either – and it sounded terrible. You lived in a house with elderly homeless and worked four days and four nights with no break. They said everyone found these hours very demanding and asked how I thought I'd cope. I wondered why they didn't change them, if everyone found it too hard. I've worked in a lot of places where the hours were long and the pay was low but I'm not so willing to do that now. I don't believe God wants people treated like that and the employers don't get the best out of you that way either.

'Nearly all my jobs had had accommodation with them, with other people living there as well, which was nice but it never felt like home – more like being in boarding school. I usually never emptied my suitcase. The average time I spent in a job was five months.

'Now, everything was falling through: I was injured and I was skint too and the family were putting pressure on me to go on benefit, which I wouldn't do because I was afraid of falling into the benefit trap. I've seen people find it almost impossible to come off benefit, even when they have a skill and can get work, because being on benefit is so easy: you don't have to get up in the morning or produce anything and you still get money every two weeks. A friend said I wouldn't fall into that trap but I think it could have happened to me too. My desire to work had gone, I was very disappointed that things hadn't worked out with jobs or with being with my family, and getting turned down even to do voluntary work was the last straw.

'I had really felt God wanted me to go back home to be with my family and to try something new and even while I was there I did believe all this was part of his plan but I couldn't see anything at the end of the tunnel. I got very low and depressed and decided to leave and come back to London.

'Just before I left, I went to a prayer-meeting held by a Catholic community led by this man and his family; there was mass and confession, then everyone went up for individual prayer. The man asked what I wanted to pray for. All I wanted was to die. I didn't tell him anything about myself but he said my hope had gone and that it was my schooldays that had taken away my hope.

'It was true, because I'd been told I was lazy and a slow learner, when in fact I was dyslexic and it was never discovered. I felt like a failure and it destroyed my confidence and any hope to ever achieve anything, even in practical things that I knew I was good at. I felt it was bound to happen – not being able to get the kind of job I wanted, or even voluntary work. My choice was narrowed down, not just by being dyslexic but by having no confidence.

'The night before I left, my brother-in-law told me I could have work with him in London, on the roads, and I moved back in with a landlady I'd been with before. It was nice coming back; I had friends here. But it didn't feel like home either – just a stopover. And it was hard to see any future.

'When I was working on the roads with my brother-in-law, he was driving us to work one morning and there was a dead cat on the roadside and he said to me, joking, "That's what you're going to be; I'll be going round the pubs at night, trying to find you."

'And I said to him, "You don't have to worry about me. God will take care of me." But I didn't know what was going to happen to me and I didn't plan what did happen.

'The friend I used to do the soup-run with had been invited to a prayer day for the homeless and asked me along too. There was a real warm peace and friendly atmosphere. The people there wanted to help the homeless, using God's strength, not relying on their own, and that was a big difference from the other project where people were forcing themselves to keep going, with inhumane demands being made on them. These people were looking for God in everybody and bringing God into every situation and every problem, by prayer and being at peace, knowing that we're all God's people – everybody, not "us" and "them". And the volunteers decided for themselves how much they wanted to do, rather than having to fit into the organizers' programme.

'I started working as a volunteer at the day centre, renting a room in town, in a nearly empty building that was being sold. I did one day a week helping in the day centre kitchen – they had around seventy homeless people coming in for dinner every day – and two days driving a van collecting donated furniture, and then I was asked if I wanted to join a course they were running, so I was two days a week doing that; it was an NVQ qualification in joinery and furniture making. I agreed to join because they didn't have enough people for the course and because I thought it would give me time with the people doing it. They were all unemployed: some had been sent by the dole crowd, some had been coming into the centre for help and some were volunteers like me.

'I still didn't want to go on benefit so I took a Saturday job helping out an elderly lady who lived in a big house with seven and a half acres of land and had nine ponies, two dogs and two cats. But the money wasn't enough to survive on and after five weeks I was skint. When I told her I'd have to leave and find full-time work, the lady offered me a live-in job – four days a week working for her, with two days at the centre going on with my course and one day driving the van.

'I was very enthusiastic about the course now. It was obvious I was talented in carpentry and the other lads were a huge support. I went there with the idea of helping them but I felt I was coming out of it best: they were constantly helping me and each other as well.

'It seemed that the lads that had gone through the hardest times and hit rock-bottom financially or emotionally were more willing to help than the people who hadn't had it so bad. They'd been dealt those cards: their circumstances of life had been mental problems, addictions, broken homes or just not fitting into the so-called brackets of society. But they hadn't become negative: they took things as they were and tried to make the best of them.

'They uplifted me; I found another part of my being. I was getting closer to being whole, by being around these people. It was the realness of them: they had no real ambition or plans for the future, just the here and now – today's problems. They're probably more whole than people who have never experienced their situation; they see reality more clearly; they don't delude themselves with what could be, the ifs and buts. The real, lasting things like friendship and respect are the valued things of their life. Through being with them, I found I was more at peace, more content.

'But it was very demanding, working for the old lady. She got sick and could do nothing for herself and someone always had to be there. The girl she took on had no experience in looking after elderly people; she was just there to help look after the animals.

'The old lady worried a lot, to the extent of sending us out at night to the field if she heard one of the ponies whinnying, and getting upset if the dog wasn't let out at the same time every night. I was being paid hardly anything for being there and I felt she was relying on me so much that she wouldn't organize any proper help while I was still living there.

'The money had nearly run out, so I left the homeless centre and the carpentry course and got a full-time job on a nearby stud farm but the old lady asked if I would still live with her and travel to and from work. I agreed to, but only for a few weeks. I thought that would give her time to get used to me being gone and then I could just visit her after that. I didn't want to hurt her or make her feel I didn't care about her, because over the years so many people that had worked there had robbed her or let her down. And by this time the girl was finding it too much, looking after her as well as doing her job with the animals, and she left.

'There was a week before the next girl was due to start and one morning when I went to the old lady's room with her breakfast on a tray, I found her in a lot of pain and paralysed on one side of her body and I realized she had had a massive stroke. I was very upset; I had got very fond of her in the time I'd been there. But when she was taken into hospital, it was a relief as well.

'She had never wanted to go into a nursing home and she wasn't able to wind down or accept that she couldn't do everything she was used to doing. She had even kept on riding till she was in her eighties. So I felt that she would never have been able to let go and that in a way God was taking control of the situation. She was in hospital for three weeks and she died there.

'Her son asked me to stay on in the house and take care of the place until it was sold, so I'm living there now – rent-free and paid to be here, so I was able to go back on the course. My brother-in-law, who teased me about ending up like the dead cat in the gutter, now says he'd love to have a skill like I have, making furniture and doing carpentry.

'I expect the house will be sold in a month or two but, for now, I like being on my own here – the quietness and the garden and the big trees. Nature means more to me now: before, it was just grass and trees but now I see it's life and I feel a part of it.

'I don't feel homeless any more. I'm at home within myself, on my own here or with the people in the college. I see that "home" isn't a building, or even about being with family: it's being at home with yourself and with people who help you feel at home.

'I still want to keep moving. I love change and being free to move. But the move I want to make now is to move on from the dyslexia and that's going to mean staying in one place long enough to have regular classes over a period of time, to remove all the fear I had while I was at school and to leave it in the past, where it belongs. Then if I'm thinking of a job that has an academic side or that I'd have to study for, it would cause no threat. That would open up a lot of doors that have been closed since my schooldays. I don't just want to be able to read and write better but to have a love of it: to do it because I enjoy it. That would be a real freedom – and security, for me, has a lot to do with being free.'

CHAPTER 10: The family man

The realization Alan came to was that security must involve freedom and that, for him, 'home' means inner peace. If he has that, his sense of being at home doesn't depend on a building or even on the companionship of people who love him. It was only by risking losing everything that he found how important his relationship to God was to him and to his understanding of where home is.

For Carlton, home always meant family. Ever since he was sent away from home as a young child, he always longed for a family of his own. Now he tells what happened when he found that family and that home.

Carlton

'I came to England from Jamaica when I was nine. I was crying when I left because I didn't really know where I was going.

'In Jamaica, I looked on my gran as a mother because I never knew my real mother. My aunt, my mother's sister, brought me up from the age of six months. Then my aunt and uncle came to England and I stayed with my granny till they could afford to send for me.

'I believe I have got brothers and sisters I've never seen. I think it was because my mother's sister couldn't have children that I was given away to her. Sometimes I feel sad because I've never met my mother and father or brothers and sisters. I knew I wasn't my aunt and uncle's son because their name was different from mine but they wouldn't say anything when I asked questions.

'When I came to live with them in Sheffield I hadn't seen them for a few years so I didn't really know them at all. I made friends but I was never happy at home. I used to run away from them; they never showed me any love and affection and they were constantly arguing together.

'I remember one time they bought fireworks and I didn't know anything about them so I set them off in the flat when my aunt and uncle were out and they stripped me naked and beat me with the electric flex. After that, I was always running away. I was very frightened of them. There was no contact from my granny or anyone from home.

'I suffer from depression, I think because of the way they treated me when I was young. I have no contact with them now. I feel better staying away from them.

'We moved from Sheffield further south but things were no better and I'd still run away and sleep in woods and in a friend's garage and places like that. One of my friend's parents took me in, at 15. I stayed with them for quite a time. That was better; I felt like I was wanted by somebody instead of being rejected.

'I never knew the address of the family in Jamaica, or where they were.

'I stayed at school till 16 then I worked in the service station on the motorway. I was still living with my friend's family till I got my own accommodation, at seventeen: a bedsit, on my own. It wasn't too bad because I was used to living rough. It was a roof over my head.

'I just wanted to be happy and to be loved but I didn't have a lot of faith that it would happen to me, because of what had happened in my youth. I was never really taught anything about God. I never thought about him or whether there might be something more.

'Eventually I left the motorway job and found another one in a car factory, on the production line. It was quite good: the money was very good and the people were really nice; it was a nice atmosphere to work in. We'd all get together after work and go and have a drink and I felt part of the crowd; I was OK. But I did get a bit fed up with the job in the end – it was like being a robot! So I stuck it about three years and then I left. I had more confidence by then, to make new friends, so I wasn't really worried about leaving.

'I didn't have another job arranged. One of my friends was going to Devon so I hitch-hiked down there with him. I got a couple of jobs, working in a hotel in the daytime then collecting glasses in a nightclub in the evening. My friend worked in other places. We met up on our days off and would go on the beach and chat to all the pretty girls! We stayed there a couple of years. In the winter there wasn't much work but the jobs were still open; it just wasn't very busy. I was living at the hotel.

'I must have been 23 or 24 when I left Devon. I got on really great there but I missed my friends. Devon was nice but it didn't feel like a permanent home. So I came back and got another job and another bedsit. My friend stayed in Devon.

'Some of my friends had settled down but there wasn't much change otherwise. I missed Devon a bit but I only went there to see what it was like. When I came back, it felt like being back home.

'I met a girl called Mandy and we found a place together and moved in with each other. We had a daughter and managed to get a council flat, and had another daughter a year later, and eventually got a council house together.

'Everything seemed to be going really well. I was quite happy; I was working in a factory and doing up the house. It was the kind of life I'd wanted: my own family. Everything seemed to be going OK.

'One day I came home and Mandy sent me round to a friend's house because it was his birthday but it turned out to be a wild-goose chase: when I got there he told me I'd better get back home straight away. Mandy had told his wife she was moving out, to go with one of my friends, taking the children.

'By the time I got back and opened the door, everything had gone: the kids were gone, the furniture was gone. I was devastated. I had no idea at all. All that was there was a letter and a bottle of rum.

'She had never been content and I think perhaps she thought my friend could give her more. But I had no idea she had been seeing him.

'This was over ten years ago now.

'I read the letter and opened the bottle of rum and then I just drank the lot. Then one of my friends came round and saw there was no furniture in the place and I wasn't too well and he called the doctor and they took me into the psychiatric wing at the local hospital.

'I didn't realize what was going on. I was well mixed up. I have never heard from her since or seen the children. That's the part that hurts: not knowing where they are or how they are. They'd be in their teens now. People say when they're older they'll want to know where their dad is but she may have told them, "Your dad doesn't want to know you."

'I did hear that they were in Milton Keynes one time and I took a coach there and looked over and over, and took pictures and showed them to people, but I got no joy so I got really upset. Probably they had moved on somewhere else.

'I am very hurt about that. I was always a good father; I enjoyed being with the children. She did say in her letter that as the days and weeks and months went by, the pain would ease and go away, and it has, as far as I am concerned about her, but it's not right that the kids shouldn't know where I am. I'm afraid they might feel the way I felt as a kid: just not knowing.

'I was in hospital for about two months. They gave me medication and talked to me. All my confidence was gone so they tried to help me get my confidence back by talking and therapy, one-to-one. It did help, because at the time I was very low but when I came out I felt a bit better.

'I didn't go back to work, because I couldn't concentrate. I gave up the house because of the memories; it was too painful to stay there. They offered me a flat in exchange for the house so I took that. It was empty but I managed to get bits and pieces to furnish it.

'It was just sadness. I didn't really want to be around anybody so I just shut myself away. Sometimes people would come but there was an intercom buzzer for the door and I didn't answer it.

'I fell into the trap of alcohol; that was my only friend really. That went on for a good few months. The days were all the same; they merged into one. It felt like that was it – things weren't going to change.

'I shook myself out of the depression in the end. It took a lot of doing. I just thought, "I've got to get on with life." So I went to see a couple of my friends and talked to them about what I was going through and I stayed with one of them for a little while, rather than be by myself. I was trying to turn things around because my friends were concerned about me as well.

'I got an exchange to another flat, for a change of scenery, and things were a lot better after that. It was still too much to get back to work – but when friends would pop round and see me I answered the door now! It never really felt like home, because I was always thinking of when I had my family and my proper home, though I tried to put it to the back of my mind.

'People say time is a healer but it isn't really time that heals you; it's effort from inside. Something motivates you to carry on. It didn't get any better but I suppose I just got used to it.

'I managed to get a job with an electrical firm in the same road I lived in, as an electrician's mate, and that was quite interesting, doing different things. I stuck it about three months but the drink got to me again; I wouldn't turn up some mornings so we just parted company.

'What got me back on the drink was thinking back about things that had happened in my life and how I was treated as a youngster. The drinking was to blot out the memories. It helps at the time but then afterwards the memories are still there; the pain is still there. Sometimes I'd just think, "I'm worthless."

'It's worse if you don't say things but keep them bottled up inside. Sometimes I'd be hurt inside and wouldn't want anyone to know. I found it too hard to talk to people – but if you can talk, it helps. I just shut off sometimes, a bit because I was afraid to bother people and a bit because it's humiliating to admit you're not coping.

'I met other people in the hospital who were in the same way and sometimes I'd talk to them; they could understand a bit better because they'd been through similar situations themselves. You've got to undergo something to really understand about it.

'I didn't work again after the electrical job; I haven't worked since then. I've been off sick, for my depression, for a good few years. I have antidepressant tablets but they don't really do anything for me and I've been in hospital again for a couple of weeks.

'I used to get suicidal before, and sometimes I still feel there's nothing here for me in this life any more. I don't think I'll find happiness ever again like I had before because that's been taken away from me; it's gone.

'I've been trying to fight the depression by getting out more; it's better than being at home all the time. When I first went to the day centre for the homeless, I did washing-up for the sisters over the Christmas time and asked if there was any work for me to do. The sister introduced me to the manager and I've been here for the past few months, on the vans and restoring furniture, and I'm getting a bit more confidence in myself.

'I might give the woodwork a try but I wouldn't want to take on too much too soon. People help each other out here; it's like a family though not a lot of people talk about themselves. One or two do but probably most don't want to. We get on great really. But the most I ever felt cared for was when I had my family. That was the best part of my life.

'My children were five and four when they left. They'd be 14 and 15 now but I'd know them straight away if I ever saw them again, even in the street. I could never forget them. I'm still their dad and no one could take that away.'

CHAPTER 11 – Nowhere to go from here

Poverty is the single most common cause of homelessness. Falling into poverty may be no more the person's own fault than falling into a hole in the road. Even those who look where they're going and plan ahead can hit an area of sudden darkness where hazards arise, unheralded, in a securely grounded life.

For every person who 'thinks the world owes them a living' and refuses to work, there are countless more who want to earn their own living but find themselves unemployed, made redundant or forced to retire due to illness or injury.

As in Alan's case, there may be no reluctance to apply for jobs but when too many applications prove fruitless, it does diminish the desire to try. We're about to hear Veronica's story – a young girl from France with no family in this country, who lost her job and her home almost overnight. But first I'll mention my own story, because we haven't so far heard about homelessness affecting a whole family.

My mother was the youngest of four children, brought up in a loving family without much money. My grandfather had periods of illness when he couldn't work. Bills could not always be paid on time and at least twice (according to one of my uncles) the family had to move house in the middle of the night, to escape unpayable rent demands.

These events, not surprisingly, left all four of the children with a fear of poverty and a determination to do everything to avoid it. All four worked hard at their chosen careers and made their own way in life and all four married and had children of their own. They were financially and emotionally secure. Then my parents' marriage, which proved traumatic, ended after eight years. My father went abroad and my mother had two tiny children to bring up alone. There was no income, and no support apart from her elderly parents who were living on their pension. She took a series of living-in jobs as cook/housekeeper for hard-to-please employers for whom nobody else would work – not surprisingly, because the jobs were unpaid. The conditions were similar to slavery: in return for work, often with no time off, she was given board and keep for the three of us.

I remember my first ever dream, at the age of three or four. I always remember my age as a child by the place we were living in. This place was the seventh home I had had in my short life, shared with my mother and elder sister, It was a wooden chalet in the grounds of the employers' house. The back porch was used as a coal store for the main household. There were gaps in the wooden walls, which let in the cold and the damp and a plague of earwigs.

I didn't know at the time but almost as soon as we arrived my mother made up her mind we couldn't stay. The reason was that the couple who hired her, after examining her references so critically, had failed to mention one salient fact about themselves: the lady of the house had tuberculosis. She was highly contagious, constantly spitting blood into crumpled tissues. My sister and I were five and three years old.

So we had to leave, which was a pity because in many ways this placement was a great improvement on the previous ones. We had to leave for the simple reason that there was a risk to health and life by staying – but there was nowhere to go. Finding a new job would have been hard enough with two under-five-year-olds in tow but there was also the fact that the employers allowed little or no time off.

That was the adult reality, of which I was unaware at the time. I knew only that we had come to a new home, that there was a nice big garden and the employers' grandchildren left their tricycle at the house during the week and I was allowed to ride it.

That was my childish reality. But this was the dream.

I awoke, screaming and hugging myself, to the cold, dark room of the house that was sitting room, dining room and bedroom all in one, and my mother came to my side.

'What is it?' she said. 'Aren't you well?'

'Pictures!' I sobbed. 'I saw pictures in my sleep!'

I had been outside the house, in the dark. It was raining and windy and very cold. I was wearing my mother's coat and her headscarf – I _was_ my mother, in the dream – and my mother and sister were behind me, holding hands. We were outside the door of the house but we couldn't go back. The door was locked behind us. Even as we stood still, the house drew further and further away. It was no longer our home. Everyone else was asleep in their own house. Everyone else had a home but we didn't have one. I stood in the wind and the rain and knew we had nowhere to go.

Remembering it, awake, I screamed even more.

'Sssh!' my mother said. 'It was only a dream. Everybody has them. Go back to sleep now. You won't have any more.'

And I didn't have any more dreams like that, or not that night. But I've never forgotten that one because in my heart I didn't believe it was just a dream. It was too close to reality. I had felt the cold.

We didn't end up homeless but, like many families, lived for years in the situation that homeless charities refer to as 'hidden homelessness' – living in places that were not our own, putting up with almost anything to avoid losing the roof over our heads.

Many women – especially women with children – do not become technically homeless but live in insecure conditions which are often unhealthy, either environmentally or in terms of the relationships on which the home depends.

Having said that, homelessness does still happen to thousands of women, some of them young and vulnerable and with no other options to choose from. This was Veronica's situation. Young, optimistic, enjoying the adventure of living in England, freshly arrived from a financially secure family home in France, Veronica never thought that it could happen to her.

Veronica

'Being at home meant a very secure family environment. Everything was provided for, three meals a day, nice and warm and cosy. Home has always been very important to me. It's a base, a nest.

'I was bought up by my grandparents. My mother and father died in an air crash and instead of putting me in an orphanage my grandfather adopted me. So I was brought up in a good family home, along with my brother, who is really my uncle because he is my grandfather's son.

'It was a quite materialistic environment and I was quite materialistic until I was a teenager. I used to fear not having certain things. I used to wonder how I would cope without all the material things I was used to.

'I was a very spoilt child, with all the things I wanted. I used to have wonderful Christmases – loads and loads of presents. My mother used to take me to the shops often to buy me new clothes. I was never short of anything – I always had new shoes, new dresses. I had an aunt who used to make dresses for me, and a godmother in the centre of France who was knitting me jumpers and sending me presents as well – a very warm, loving and caring family.

'I didn't leave home until I was 16. I came straight over to Britain; I had passed my baccalauréat exam in English and languages and I wanted to travel. I was excited by England because of the pop music that I loved – the Beatles and so on. It was 1976. I used to think that you'd walk off Piccadilly Circus and bump into Paul McCartney!

'I stayed in a hostel run by French nuns, in London, and I did two years in college to improve my English and to study technical terms because I wanted to do technical translating.

'It was a culture shock. I missed the French food and the atmosphere. In Paris, I lived near the famous Market Street, with stalls everywhere, people shouting, pretty picturesque little streets going up to a square with cafes and a fountain in the middle and all that. London is a pretty city but not as village-like as Paris. In France there is more feeling put into things; there is more family life. I missed my family a great deal.

'After some time in London I began to work as a translator but I didn't stay; I became a nanny soon afterwards, for private families. I wasn't living with them; I was still in the hostel but the family were friendly, with nice children, and they used to invite me back for dinner and I felt part of them.

'They had a son who was about my age and who was into pop music as well and we started a band together: I sang and he played the keyboard and I had a friend who wrote songs and we got ourselves a drummer and a guitar player and started rehearsing. It didn't get very far but it was fun.

'After that I was a nanny for a family at the House of Commons and they were very good to me as well but the contract was only short-term because the mother was going to come back home and look after the children. I was living in a London bedsitter, paying quite a high rate. When I lost my job I couldn't pay the rent any more and the landlord didn't like people on social security and wouldn't accept housing benefit.

'I only had very few savings and I didn't find another job in time and I didn't find another bedsit in time, so I was made homeless, literally overnight. In those days I didn't know that there was the council you could go to, and nobody told me. I stored all my belongings in a garage and for a couple of nights I slept inside a building, under the staircase. I just wandered around the streets during the day. I got myself on the social security but no housing benefit.

'It's a vicious circle because if you have no home you can't claim housing benefit: you have to have the home first. But you've got to find a landlord who agrees to wait about a month before the housing benefit comes through, and very few would, and they want you to leave a deposit as well - usually another whole month's rent. So the situation was impossible.

'I was getting my social security cheque over the counter so at least I wasn't destitute, and it was in the summer, which was lucky. I had blankets and for over a week I camped. I slept in doorways, in my garage and inside buildings. It was very tough to do. It was awful. I was really down in the dumps. I felt I had lost everything; I felt I was like a tramp. There is nothing worse than losing your security – no home, hardly any money, nowhere to cook, nowhere to wash. I used to go to the swimming pool to have a shower.

'It makes you feel very depressed and like you are the least in the world – down and out. You don't feel like doing anything. You lose hope in everything. Life seems so cold. You look at other people in the street; they pass you by and they have homes to go to, and when the night comes you see the windows being lit up and people inside their homes having dinner, and you feel all lonely and you feel as though you're rejected by the world.

'It is quite a shock. Even when the time is over, you don't forget it; it stays in the back of your mind: I was homeless. You remember the days you slept rough and it's not something you want to talk about; it's a bit like a dark secret that you feel ashamed of – yet it happens to thousands and thousands of other young people. They lose their bedsitters because the rents are too high and the landlords are real sharks. The money they ask for is ridiculous; the places aren't worth it.

'Being alone at night in the cold, under the staircase; being threatened with the police when the people come out of their flats in the morning and see you sleeping there; being moved on... it makes you feel like a reject, as though you are a criminal, as though you are an outlaw. It was a very bad experience to have and I didn't know how long it would last.

'I went back to the hostel but it had closed down and the nuns weren't there any more. I met some other nuns who gave me the addresses of convents and I went to a couple of them but it was only for one night; I wasn't allowed to go back the next day. In the morning they gave me breakfast and I was moved on.

'The best help anyone can give a person who is homeless is understanding and a warm meal. Most of the shelters take in the drug addicts and the winos as well and, rather than find yourself in this environment which isn't yours at all, you prefer to go back on the street. You can be perfectly respectable and perfectly homeless. To share a dormitory with tramps feels more degrading than being on the street alone.

'I didn't contact my family. I didn't want them to know I was homeless. I thought it would worry them to death. I didn't have enough money to buy a ticket to go back to Paris and I was too ashamed to tell them what had happened. I was stuck in England in this vicious circle of homelessness and I didn't want anybody to know. I never told them, never. They don't know now.

'The pain of missing home was agonizing. I felt as though I was never going to get up again. I was wondering how I was ever going to get out of that situation.

'I always kept my faith; it's what kept me going. There were some nights, sleeping in those doorways, when I felt that I wasn't worth anything in the eyes of God and I felt, "My God, why don't you take me home?" I wanted to die; I wanted to go home to paradise and be one with God. I felt God had abandoned me but I never stopped believing he was there.

'Then when I went to sign on at the dole office I got chatting with some people who told me that they were squatting in a house and that there was a room there, so I said could I have it? Could I come with them? And they said OK. So that's how I got mixed up with them – there were about 25 people, all squatting in a big old empty house that they had overtaken; they had been there for about six months.

'For me, it was like a dream come true: I had a room again and there was electricity and cold water and we could cook and there was furniture there. It was nice; it wasn't like a rough squat full of tramps and winos; it was all young people in the same boat who were made homeless and had no choice and had got themselves together and gone round the streets looking for empty houses and overtaking them.

'In those days, the laws about squatting were different. You could go into a house and squat there until the owner took out an eviction order and that process usually took up to six months so it gave you a bit of breathing time.

'We paid the bill for the electricity so it didn't get cut off and one of the people living there was a builder and he discovered how to turn on the water again from the outside pipe.

'We were like a little family: we used to keep each other company every evening and play guitar and there was a couple with a youngish baby, about six months old, and we used to make big meals and cook for everyone. It was nice having company but sometimes it was a bit of a drag having to share the bathroom and always being disturbed and not having much privacy because everything was in common. If you bought food and left it in the fridge it would be gone!

'The first night I was in the squat with the others and I had a room again, I was very thankful and praised God a lot and thanked him for having rescued me, for having made me bump into these people.

'It lasted for about a year and then we got evicted and most of us moved to a house that I discovered myself but some went into another house just up the road. It was furnished but all abandoned. The owners were selling it.

'The first night we moved in there, we all got arrested by the police. Squatting wasn't illegal in those days as long as there was no breaking and entering, and we had got in through the windows without breaking anything. But twenty-five police moved in on us with vans and dogs and took us all into the police station; they kept us overnight and let us go the next day. Meanwhile, they boarded the house up but we reopened it and moved in again and the police left us alone.

'We had some rough times while we were there. The electricity board came around because we couldn't afford the bills and we said, 'But we've got a baby here; we've got to have some heat.' It was in the winter months. But they took the electricity meter away and for three months we lived with candles and all gathered in the rooms upstairs to keep ourselves warm and wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags.

'Eventually, one of us found a way to join the wires to make electricity again. It was dangerous; the wires used to go off every hour and he had to rewire things, at his own peril. But that was the only way to have a bit of electricity.

'I nearly had a breakdown because of the insecurity and the moving, while we were in the second place. It was so spooky at night and depressing to be freezing in the house with no electricity and not being able to cook and we couldn't do much, just stay in the same room all day talking and playing cards. We couldn't go to work because we couldn't have a bath and eat properly.

'I got quite run-down physically. The amount of money you get on the social security doesn't last you long. You sign on every two weeks and the first day you get your cheque you rush to the cafe for a good meal, and the money always runs out four or five days before you sign on again, so you go for that time without money and often without food and it makes you feel depressed and exhausted.

'I lost a lot of weight and I was crying a lot and I was very grey, and losing hair. I didn't go for treatment because I don't believe in tranquillizers – and it would have been pointless; it was just because I was cold and not having enough to eat. I drank a bit for a while; I took to wine, which cheered me up a little bit. I didn't get drunk; I wasn't like a wino but I was having a drink from time to time and it made me forget my sorrows and shut the cold out as well.

'I got to the point where I just couldn't cope. I was in hospital for two weeks because with the cold and not eating I got problems with my kidneys and nearly had kidney failure. I was in pain and having tests but it was actually quite nice to be in hospital because it was warm and I had a bed! I was looked after and being given meals and it was a break. But it shows you how ill you can get. Not having enough to live on and going hungry makes you feel very, very down.

'I used to come to the church and tell the priest I had no food and he would go to the kitchen and come back with a bag of food for me. It was embarrassing to have to ask but he was very kind. He even gave me a job once because I told him I could sew. He asked me to make a cushion for a wedding and I made it from white satin, with a beaded design and lace all round the border. It took me a month to do it, all by hand, while I was living in the squat and when I finished he gave me £100.

'When you're run down, you lose your bearings a little bit; you lose your sense of time and you lose track of reality; you start living in a dream-world. I was in touch with my family by phone but I used to say I was OK, I was in a nice flat and working. When they asked why I wasn't coming home, I would say I was busy with work. I couldn't have told them I was squatting because they would have been horrified; they would have imagined me living with drug addicts and winos. Even if I had the money to go home, I was in such a state, with holes in my clothes and holes in my shoes.

'What stopped me from telling them I had got into a mess was pride – pride and not wanting to worry them because my grandparents are so conservative and they are an older generation; there's a generation gap and they wouldn't have understood at all. I thought they might have been ashamed of me. For them, living in a squat and on the dole was a failure. They would have thought, "My God, our granddaughter is a failure; she has got nowhere in life," and I didn't want them to have that embarrassment. I used to feel like that myself at times and wonder when it was all going to end.

'Every squat we were in, I used to put crosses everywhere, to protect us. We used to look into skips for furniture and one day we found a big Bible that people had thrown away and I brought it home. I was very much into my faith. I was coming to church though I felt the odd one out at church because I was homeless and the odd one out at home because the people I was with didn't believe in anything.

'We were in that squat for about six months. The owners took out an eviction order and around Christmas we were evicted.

'What happened next was fantastic. The man who was a builder was working on an estate and noticed a house with a garden that was all untidy and neglected. He went to have a look around and discovered that the back door was open and the house was empty, So we moved in there – for Christmas – and we felt like rock stars because there were fitted carpets and private showers in rooms; there was furniture and we all had a bed and there were chairs in the living room, and a big kitchen.

'Some of us were working and some of us were signing on the dole. I was taking part-time jobs, working in a chemist's and newsagent's, but the strain of moving every six months and not knowing if you're going to get arrested or you're going to be thrown out is quite a lot.

'The story of the house was that it was owned by a company that had left it in the hands of a manager who was supposed to rent it out for them but the manager had done a runner and left the country owing money to the banks and had left the house unattended. So the whole process of the house and all the paperwork to sort it out lasted for ages; we were in there for about a year.

'It was great. I used to have a boyfriend who did lighting for pop bands. We had two squats in the area and we used to visit each other and have parties and everybody was doing something and we had a good time. It felt like home and the baby was growing up; it was nice. We forgot we were homeless. We grew attached to the place.

'A year later we were evicted and we moved into an old housing association house. Usually they were good for squatting in because they could be left empty for a long time before they got done up for the next person, and sometimes housing associations would rehouse squatters because they are in the business of looking after homeless people.

'We lived in there for another year. We used to celebrate each other's birthdays. I remember they celebrated my birthday, surprised me with cream cakes in the kitchen, and wine.

'Then I worked as a nanny again for about six months, still living in the squat. This squat was a huge house; it was like having your own bedsitter in it; it was incredible. After eight months the housing association evicted us and didn't rehouse us.

'The old squat on the estate had been boarded up and still wasn't being used, so we took the boards down and reopened the water and bought some new fuses for the electricity and moved in there again for another year.

'Then the laws changed and squatting became illegal and we had to leave. That must have been about 1995. We all drifted apart: some got married, some got council houses and some moved into private accommodation but we still visit each other. It felt sad to leave, because we had all grown together. It felt a bit lonely.

'I went to the homeless unit at the council and showed them my eviction papers and they put me in a hostel for the homeless and said they would put me on the list and in a number of months I would get a flat.

'The hostel was really nice and I made friends there; there were other girls, pregnant girls and homeless young women. We all had something in common and we grew together.

'I stayed in there for a year and then the council found me a flat. When I heard about it I went home on a visit, for the first time in six years. They were so pleased to see me they forgot all their worries. That was two years ago and I have been home each Christmas since. I am going again this year.

'It was tremendous, moving into my own flat, having a place to call my own again. It was nice to be alone and to have freedom – to be my own boss, to be able to put all my things in one place, not having to store them here and there, and to have a bath when I wanted to, to use the cooker when I wanted to, to have my own food in the fridge.

'It's only one room, with a kitchen and a bathroom, but it's enough for me and I made it cosy; I made it my own. It's in a little block of ten flats in a lovely leafy area, quite quiet. It doesn't look like council property; it's not like one of those high-rises on an estate, which can be quite impersonal. I painted the walls and I took the door off a cupboard and put some plants on the shelves and I put some carpet down and furnished it myself.

'Once I was settled in the flat, I started working again. I worked in a charity shop, first of all unpaid, sorting out the clothes and ironing and working behind the till, chatting to people, then after six months the manageress said there were vacancies for paid assistants so I worked for them properly.

'Then I found a job in the paper, as a technical translator, and went for it and I got the job right away. And here I am working full time in a really well-paid job, in a home of my own – and I've just heard that I can buy it. I visit my friends and they come and see me; we're all still scattered around the area.

'What I would tell people now who are homeless is, "Don't lose hope; there is always a way out," and I would tell them to plan ahead in their life, not just live from day to day like you do when you are young, and also to build up family ties and keep up relationships with friends.

'The nightmare of homelessness and being moved on all the time is over for me. But it stays with you. Sometimes I get depressed. It had an effect on me.'

CHAPTER 12 – The black sheep of the family

Veronica was the cherished child of her family – until she became homeless, when she feared that their love and acceptance of her might not stretch far enough to accommodate her 'failure'.

Tom's experience was different. He never found favour with his father or had any encouragement to be himself. As a boy, his acceptance among the older men who should have been his role models depended first on his submission to an authoritarian father, then involvement in the heavy-drinking culture of his mother's uncle.

Tom

'I was the fifth in line, in a family of nine: two sisters and twin brothers ahead of me, and four more after me.

'My father was an ex-army man and Lord Mayor of the town where we lived in Ireland. He had very harsh rules. He used to beat me, really badly, for things like having long hair – I grew up in the sixties – and not being home at ten o'clock at night. With hindsight, the things I did weren't so dreadful but I was considered the black sheep of the family.

'My father was a good provider but no father. After I left, things changed; I don't think it was as hard for the younger children.

'After one terrible beating with the poker, I was in a pretty bad state and I went to the Garda – the police – and reported him. They could see the bruises and they went and saw my father at work; he was mortified. When he came home, himself and my mother were fighting like crazy. Mum tried to stand up for me but she had nine kids to take care of: cleaning, cooking, washing, trying to keep the home together... that was her life.

'My father said, "Either he goes or I go." Four days later I was on the boat to England. That was in 1968. I was 15.

'When you're young, there's one way of looking at yourself and at life and that's the way you're taught. I've spent 45 years looking at things one way. Now for the last six months I've had therapy and it's being an eye-opener for me. My father was harsh with me for 15 years. Now, the therapist tells me, I'm my own harshest critic: I don't need criticism from anyone else; I beat myself over the head with it.

'My mother had an uncle in England. I travelled across the country on the train and arrived at my uncle's house on the Sunday morning and he took me to the pub as soon as I arrived and I had the first drink of my life – or the first three or four. When we got home the room was spinning round.

'On the Monday I was beaten up by skinheads. They were all skinheads here then. I looked different; I wore white shirts, and my accent was broad Irish. All the trouble had started in Northern Ireland then and you didn't say you were Irish; it was quite hard being Irish in England in those days.

'The money my mother gave me when I came over, my uncle took from me and I never saw it again. I got a job in the brewery where he worked and spent my time with people twice my age, in pubs. Always in pubs.

'My uncle didn't want me. There was a whole lot of family down in London and they all talked about me, and everything I did was reported back home in a big way. So I was still the black sheep of the family. They were covering up their own problems by putting the attention onto me. My uncle was having affairs and so on. I was bitter and angry about it all.

'We had a free bar at the brewery; we were allowed three drinks a day but no one ever enforced the limit and I used to come out of there drunk every day.

'I had a sister in London who had left home a year ahead of me but I had no contact with her really. She had been sent away from home because she was having a baby; she was sent away to a convent in the south of Ireland and the baby was taken from her and she never saw it. And she never went home again; she'd had enough. Another sister went to London as well. After a few months, they didn't have a trace of Irish accent; they talked broad Cockney. I could understand why.

'You try and bury all these things. I never knew why I drank so much or what was wrong.

'I was painfully shy. I was afraid to say hello and the more I liked a girl the worse it was. I loved the atmosphere in pubs and I drank to give myself confidence but by the time I'd had a lot to drink someone else would have asked the girl out. Then I'd say, "I never liked her anyway!"

'I got a reputation as a hard drinker; it was the only thing I was good at. We thought nothing of drinking ten pints of Guinness between 11a.m. and 2 p.m. then another dozen at night. I thought everybody did it; I didn't realize it was only the small community I was in where it was the natural thing to drink, the macho thing. And all my life, I was trying to fit in.

'I have three brothers who drink, and drink heavily, but then stop and go to work. I passed that barrier a long time ago. We used to call it "the Monday morning club" – a group of us who couldn't make it into work and would stay home drinking instead.

'Even now, after six months of therapy, I don't really know why I drink, and to understand something isn't necessarily a cure anyway. I have a friend who stopped drinking and stayed off it for 20 years, then nearly killed himself with drink the other weekend.

'I've examined myself inside out and upside down for the past few years. I went inside myself but that was more scary – because I didn't like this eejit I found there. We're told that alcoholics drink for a reason, to bury something – abuse or something in the past. But, to me, most alcoholics drink because they can't cope. People can help you. But in the end you have to find the answer yourself.

'I ended up unemployed; I was drawing unemployment benefit and housing benefit and doing cash-in-hand work, which was illegal. My friend was still working but living in my flat, sleeping on the floor, to save money – so we always had money to drink.

'That was our life. But Mick was about to get the sack; he kept missing work and the doctor wouldn't give him any more sick notes. They said they'd keep his job open for him if he did something about his drink problem, so he went into a detox unit then on to a rehabilitation unit.

'I saw him occasionally and couldn't believe the change in him. He was eating and taking care of himself and physically he looked so much better. He thought I looked terrible but I was just the same. But without the drinking we had nothing in common. He tried to persuade me to come off the drink like him but I thought I didn't have a problem. It would have taken a lot to make me stop – and it did.

'I was living with a woman. We weren't married. She was a single woman and I was living the life of a single man: I wasn't there for her and when we had a daughter I wasn't a father to her. I was no better than my own father was to me. I wasn't as harsh with her; I just wasn't there. She's almost 22 now.

'I remember the May Bank Holiday weekend, three years ago. I was in a bar. I weighed four a half stone less than I do now, I was coughing up blood, I was dehydrated and I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get to the toilet. I went into the toilet to clean myself up and the one thought in my head was to get back to the bar before they threw away the rest of my pint of Guinness.

'I stayed in bed two days, trying to keep soup down. At the end of the week I went to my first AA meeting. Things had to get that bad, to make me go. But it wasn't the worst time I'd been through. The worst was this.

'I was walking through town from one bar that closed at three p.m. to another that opened at four. They served pints of Guinness for a pound, so for £10 you could do a lot of damage. I was with a couple of mates, staggering through the town centre, and apparently my daughter was coming along, in her school uniform, just out of school, with two of her friends. She was 16 at the time.

'I didn't see her myself; it was one of my mates who told me afterwards that one of her friends said, "Look, Maria, there's your dad." And she said, "No, it's not my dad."

'When I went to AA the first time, I knew where to go but not what to expect. I thought it would be like the Salvation Army: we'd pray and beat tambourines and then I would be better.

'I walked in on my own, sweating and shaking, and a lady made me a cup of tea. I didn't know what was going on. A man was talking about himself but I didn't take any of it in.

'They came to visit me at my house and they wouldn't leave me alone for about twelve days. One chap took three days off work to stay with me. They talked about a higher power but at that stage I just didn't know.

'The next two or three months, I visited the day centre for the homeless and started eating a bit more regularly and quickly put two stone back on. I got to know the people and helped out on the vans. The training centre wasn't up and running then. It was a derelict warehouse to begin with, full of rats and dogs, vandalized and unused for eight years. I was one of those who helped build it. I loved helping out because I belonged.

'But there were problems there and corruption on a massive scale. What began as a charity helping the poor became a business. The poor were charged for goods that had been donated for free. Some of the people who worked there were helping themselves then asking for increasingly big "donations" in return for furniture and things, from people who had nothing, like young single mothers in high-rise flats – children having children.

'I would justify it by saying I was only a packhorse, carrying wardrobes and so on. But I was involved and I knew it and I couldn't cope with it. I was going to AA meetings at night, trying to sort my life out, and by day I was doing things that I knew were wrong – lying and cheating and stealing and covering up.

'After two years, I had a near breakdown. And I went back on the drink. What you learn in AA, though, is that drink is not the problem; you are the problem. When people first told me that, I thought they were talking German, but it's true. It's your own insecurity that makes you go back to the drink.

'Where I am now is in stage two of rehabilitation. In stage one, you stay in the project house with other people and have therapy every day for six months. Stage two is to leave the project and go into another house, usually with another person, for another six months. You cope on your own but you have phone calls all the time and you have to be there and say where you've been and where you're going. Stage three is going into a flat on your own for another six months but you still have a co-worker. After that, you're on your own.

'What would be my idea of home now would be to get to a place where I'm independent. I wanted to leave the rehabilitation project after six months but they said it was too soon. All the people who left then fell and ended up back on the streets.

'So I'm three weeks into stage two now, and part of it is that you have to do some voluntary work. So that's what I'm doing.

'I'm six and a half months off the drink. But I'm still on step one with AA. It's a 12-step programme and I've been on step one for two years, because step two is coming to believe in a higher power – and I can't.

'I lost the woman I was with. I thought AA was going to get everything back for me but she married again. I lost my daughter because I was never a proper father. And I lost faith in the people who call themselves religious, because they were involved in all this corruption, or turning a blind eye to it. So how could I believe in God? But... I know he's looked after me. I know that. I should have been dead on numerous occasions. It's amazing I wasn't beaten up and killed.

'And something else happened as well.

'Four years after my daughter disowned me in front of her friends, I was walking through town one evening. I'd been in AA for 18 months and the guy who always picked me up for the meetings hadn't turned up that night so I walked down into town to see a friend but he was out.

'I was just walking, going nowhere, when a voice said, "Hello, Dad," and it was her.

'We went and had a cup of tea and then another cup of tea and talked and cried. It was great. We get on well now. She worries about me, asks me what I've been doing and so on.

'It's up and down. But so far I'm doing all right.'

CHAPTER 13 – The deported family

So far, we've heard about a number of instances of being made homeless as a result of poverty or the breakdown of family relationships. Being made homeless as a family is a different experience – less lonely and less destructive to the ability to form relationships in later life, though the constant fear and insecurity of homelessness can place an unbearable strain on even the closest of family relationships.

Eva is one of the millions of people made homeless for political reasons, when the ruling authorities decide that their family home – or town, or state – can no longer be considered theirs.

For such families – unlike many homeless people – home is not a dangerous place they had to leave, nor a haven they dream of returning to when they have success to show. Home is an ideal which may no longer exist by the time they are finally free – if they ever are – to go back there.

In every country of the world, refugees dream of the home that used to be. That home may still be there but they are forever barred from reclaiming it. It may belong to another nation. It may be a pile of rubble, or the home of one of their enemies.

Unless they can detach themselves from the idea of home that once was their reality, they are not free to make themselves at home in their new country but are for ever visitors, rootless wanderers on the planet they share with their scattered compatriots, their foreign friends, and their enemies.

For Eva, deported with some of her family from Poland in 1940, the experience of coming home that she longed for above all was not so much their return to the family house as reunion with her father. Their separation from him was a worse form of the homelessness even than their deportation to one of the grimmest outposts of the world – Siberia.

Eva

'We were deported from Poland in 1940. I was just nine and three months. I remember it well but not as a continuous thing, more as a series of images.

'My father was arrested because he was a director of a gas company and anyone considered to be intelligentsia or of a higher social standing was being arrested by the Russians. Immediately, the whole family was thrown out of our flat: my mother, my sister, my brother and my father's aunt, who happened to be visiting at that time. We lived in south-east Poland, a small town called Boryslaw, near Lvuv.

'One of the workers in the firm offered us his little house – two rooms and a kitchen – and we were there for about two months before we were deported.

'The Russian soldiers came for the first time in the early evening and told us – as they always told you – that we were going to be reunited with our father. You had no choice about whether you went but that was the story they told you, to persuade you to go without making a fuss.

'There was one nice solider who was very kind. I don't remember but my mother told me he said to her, "Pack everything." He even pointed to the portraits of us children and said, "Pack those as well because at least when they die you will have their photos."

'My mother said that my little brother, who was two and a half, and my father's aunt, were sick and that she couldn't go; she needed to call the doctor. A Jewish friend of the family who was a doctor came and wrote certificates saying that they couldn't possibly travel, and the soldiers left us. My mother, in her naïvete, started to unpack; she didn't think of running away. We could have, because it was two or three hours before they came back. But then another lot came, with a lorry, and there was no argument. They chucked everything that was packed, and us, into the lorry and that was it.

'We were put on a train, a cattle wagon that had bunks on both sides. In the middle was the place for the luggage, and a hole in the floor to use as a toilet. It was packed with people. We were on the top bunk. I remember the first day, my mother had some milk for my brother – he still had a bottle in the mornings – and perhaps the second day, but on the third day she said to him, "I'm sorry, there's only water." We had some food with us, just what we had brought from home.

'I remember being told we were nearing a town, so we made holes in the sides of the truck with a penknife and wrote on little pieces of paper, to say that if anyone found this note could they please take it to the address of my grandmother to tell her that her daughter and the children had been taken. We stopped at the station and stood there for about three days. They would open the door of the wagon every now and again, and my grandmother and my aunts came – someone must have found one of the notes – and although they were not allowed to come close they gave us a rug for my brother and some food.

'Some people were talking about running away but for us, with three kids and an elderly aunt, it was not possible.

'Just before we left Poland, we stopped in the village where the estate of my father's aunt was – the one who was travelling with us – and some of the villagers heard she was there and brought us some peasant bread, big loaves of rough brown bread that I'd never tasted before, and garlic. My mother didn't like garlic so I didn't know what it was but I loved sausage and sausage always had garlic in it, so to me this bread and garlic tasted like sausage and I didn't feel hungry after it!

'The whole journey took three weeks. Whenever we stopped, someone would be allowed to go out for boiling water and that's all they gave us. But people from nearby would come and give us something. Some Russians came once and gave my mother two eggs for my brother.

'What was unpleasant was that for the three weeks, people were telling us that children would be separated from their parents. So there was always that disquiet and fear: was it going to be true?

'At the end of the railway line, in Siberia, we were put onto trucks and travelled through flat steppe country. The trucks stopped at different places and put people off. We arrived at this little settlement of ten or twelve houses and the soldiers chucked our family and some others out of the lorry and drove off.

'We were in front of this mud hut that consisted of two rooms: the first one, which was called the _seraj_ , was where people kept the animals and cooked, and the second one was where they lived and slept on the floor.

'The people weren't Russians; they were Kazakhs. They were long-bearded and wore their sheepskins inside out and carried these long curved knives. They didn't speak Russian; they had their own language, which we didn't understand. But although they looked fierce they were actually very kind. They gave us a corner of the hut, where my mother made us a sort of bed.

'In the middle of the night the officials came and took my mother and great-aunt away. My mother told us, "Don't cry; be very quiet and don't wake your brother. We'll be back!" But my sister and I were afraid they wouldn't be, because of what we'd heard. We were afraid to light a candle in case we woke the Kazakhs, and it seemed a very long night.

'I can't say that we prayed, because I don't think we did, but somehow we managed to survive and at about six o'clock in the morning my mother came back. She said all they wanted was her name and address and they always did that in the middle of the night. But she came back.

'There were about six people in the Kazakh family and we lived with them for about six weeks, till Mother found an empty hut and we moved into that. It must have been summertime because soon after we arrived they would take Mother to go and work at harvesting on the steppes. She would go out in the morning and come home late at night. I cannot recall what my sister was doing; she was two and a half years older than me. What I do know is that I was the one who had to look after my brother and to prepare a meal for the evening when Mother came home.

'I would make soup with a few vegetables in it. We had no money but money was no use there anyway – there were no shops – but you could barter. Every now and again a lorry would pass the settlement and if it stopped, my mother would barter for tea, which was in bricks and very strong. There was no sugar.

'We were Catholics and in Poland we went to church every Sunday but I have no recollection of it except one particular time. It must have been some special holiday and we went to church. We weren't in church but outside, so obviously it must have been very full. I was standing next to my father and we were singing a hymn. If I close my eyes now I can almost feel myself standing next to him and whenever we sing that hymn in church now I can remember that feeling.

'When we left Poland, I was being prepared for my first communion, and then obviously I couldn't make it. But I don't remember learning a lot.

'Then one day, while we were with the Kazakhs, my great-aunt was walking up and down outside the hut. She didn't do a lot to help: she was a maiden aunt, not used to children, and she had had servants at home. So she was more of a bystander; she was there. And I remember her walking up and down, saying her rosary. She must have done that many times but this time it made an impression on me. I didn't like to ask her about it but from that time onwards I think I must have started praying and I got some inner quiet and inner strength.

'There was one instance when I was very frightened: my mother decided we wouldn't survive the winter in this settlement and she heard there was a bigger Russian settlement some distance away. There was no one to stop us moving. Once you were dumped in this place you could run away if you wanted to, because where would you go?

'My mother asked the driver of one of the lorries if he would take me and my brother, because we couldn't walk that far, and she would walk with my sister and great-aunt. So we were taken to this bigger village and put in a communal hall for the night, and by this time my brother was very sick with dysentery. All through that night, I kept putting him on the potty and asking him not to cry.

'What struck me very forcibly was that there was a room full of people and no one spoke to me and I kept thinking, "Will my mother arrive?" But somehow I had this feeling inside me that it would be all right. But this utter loneliness of being in a room full of strangers – that stayed with me, and I think because of it I'm always willing now to speak to people whom I don't even know, just to make contact.

'When my mother arrived, first of all a Russian family took us in; they had two rooms and a _seraj_ and I used to help the lady around the house. If I made bread for her she would give me a loaf, for us. It wasn't too bad; there was food. Thanks to that young Russian soldier, my mother had packed a lot of things from home and had a lot to barter with. I remember once she bartered her ball dress for a calf.

'Then we moved to a hut – one room and a _seraj_ – on our own. My mother was always out at work; it was forced labour. The Russian trucks would come and take her, every day; otherwise she wouldn't get her ration of bread. She would either be at the harvest during the summer or they would be making bricks. My sister worked in the gardens for a time, then they left her – she was only young – and we would attend Polish classes. There were a lot of teachers in that settlement. I remember writing on the edges of the newspaper because there was no paper.

'For quite a long time then, life was almost normal for me. I would cook the evening meal and look after my brother and in summertime we would go for walks in the steppes with my great-aunt.

'Then, when the war between Germany and Russia started, everything got very scarce. There was nothing to barter with because everyone wanted food. I remember once trying to make some sort of meal, mixing potatoes and flour – only the potatoes were completely frozen and the flour was just husks from the mill and it would not bind; it was hopeless!

'How we cooked was like this: there was an enclosed fireplace in a corner of the hut, with a shelf over it, and the fire was kept going underneath. The food was cooked in an iron pot with a lid, pushed into the fire with an iron prong. If the fire ever went out you had to run to the next hut with a shovel to get some embers to get the fire going again. My mother and brother slept on that shelf above the fire.

'There were lots of instances that made things from past history real to me because we lived the way they used to live. The floor of the hut was earth and to keep it disinfected – it sounds ridiculous – we would go out on the steppe, collect the dried cow-pats, mix them into a thick paste, spread it on the floor and sprinkle grass on it. Even so, you just couldn't get rid of the bugs and lice; you lived with them. The Russians would sit round picking nits out of their clothes, almost as entertainment! I used to like brushing my hair and hearing the nits fall out onto the paper!

'It was as cold in winter as it was hot in the summer – 40 degrees in the summer and minus 40 in the winter, but it was very dry. In winter, the hut was completely covered with snow and my mother would dig out a little passage. My brother wasn't allowed to go out. One day it was dry and sunny and he was allowed out but within five minutes he had gone white with cold; my mother rubbed him to get him warm and he was screaming.

'I don't remember feeling cold. But I remember in the springtime wearing a dress and walking around up to the waist in water, on ice, and people going around in boats because of the amount of snow that was melting.

While we were there, the Russians and Germans became allies and a lot of the Polish prisoners had to be released – because by this time we were all allies. My father was in Starobielsk, a prison from which they took Polish officers and killed them, and he was lucky enough to be released and joined the Polish army that was forming in the south of Russia. Somehow, during his imprisonment, he learned that we were deported and he found out where we were.

'It was 1942 when we got the first news, from the town where the railway started: a Polish official was there with permission for five people to travel to join my father. There was no transport so he couldn't get to us; we had to make our way there. They wouldn't let us go from the village but my mother learned that there was a grain caravan going from the next village to this town. She bribed someone who had a horse and cart and we went to that village in the night; she gave my father's suits and the other things she was keeping for him to the people driving the ox carts and they allowed us to join the caravan.

'My mother and brother drove one cart, my sister and I drove another, my great-aunt went with another driver and there were two more carts. It took us three days and three nights to reach the town. We slept under the carts. One night it was raining and we were all huddled over my brother so he wouldn't get too wet!

'It was very hot and there was not enough water so when Mother wasn't looking we drank from the little puddles, which were covered with green! My sister and I took it in turns to mind the oxen, while the other one would get into the grain and have a sleep.

'When we got to the town we had to cross a deep river by a bridge that had quite a lot of planks missing. My sister and I were afraid to cross, in case the oxen lost their footing, so my mother had to drive across and then come back and take us.

'In that town there was a large Polish community. I have vague memories of some people taking us in – to a real house. The floor was painted red and my brother was afraid to walk on it! There was sugar on the table, which we hadn't seen for two years; we didn't know what it was.

'The people we stayed with changed our travel permit, putting a two in front of the five, so that 25 people could travel, including them. While we were still in the town, there was a priest who found out that I had been supposed to make my first holy communion there. I didn't have anything to wear so a Jewish friend lent me a blue dress and I had a blue bow in my hair. During mass, just after the consecration – before communion – the priest said that there was someone making her first holy communion and I was allowed to go up first.

'My faith and my dealing with God became embodied in this first communion; it clarified what it was that had got me through our time of being deported. It was a very special time and from then on I have been very close to God and practising my faith. But the events that happened to us made my mother go away from the faith. She would make sure that we went to church but she never went.

'I wasn't conscious of it during the Russian time, that she had lost her faith, but when I realized it later on I began praying very hard that she would come back. She never spoke about how she felt or why she had lost her faith but it will become obvious as I go on ...

'It took us a long time to travel from that town to where my father was with the army. By that time the war was really on; we had to spend three days in Tashkent, where there were raids, trying to get to the train.

'When we got to the place where the Polish army was, my mother's brother who was a surgeon in the army was there, but by that time my father had already left with the forces, for Persia.

'We stayed there for a couple of months, left Russia with the last transport, with my uncle the surgeon, and when we got to Persia we were put into a civilian camp in Tehran. I know now but I didn't know then that my mother then learned that my father had died. We never caught up with him.

'She didn't tell us for four months. By then we were in Palestine and my brother was saying his evening prayers: "God give health to Daddy, Mummy..." when suddenly my mother said, "No! Don't say that any more. Your father is dead." It was the day when she had to go to Tel Aviv to get all his belongings. You can imagine how she felt. She had been hoping all the time since the day my father was arrested that we would be together again, and what was so cruel was that we were getting there and he was arranging it – and then when we arrived it was too late.

'What happened was that he was shipped from Persia to Africa for the African campaign and because of the two years in prison he was very weak and thin and he got pneumonia and his heart couldn't take it. He was buried in Suez. We spent five years in Palestine but because we were refugees with no money at all we could never go to the grave. But I am going back this September; my son is going there to lecture and is taking me with him and I am hoping we can hire a car and go to the cemetery.

'Palestine never really became home. All through the war we were hoping we would go back to Poland and then there came the Yalta Agreement, which gave that part of Poland, where I was born and bred and all my family lived, to Russia. My relatives who were still there were given the option of moving to Krakow and they are there now but the part where we lived is now the Ukraine. I can remember the choking rage, how betrayed we felt; we had been through all this – and they had given away our home and we couldn't go back.

'In 1991 when Poland became free again, it was what I had hoped but didn't really believe – that it would happen in my lifetime. It was wonderful.

'When I retired from my work recently, as a teacher at a school for children with special needs, my goodbye present was a satellite dish so I could get Polish television and I was able to watch the Good Friday service from the Polish military cathedral. Somehow, to see Polish soldiers worshipping – something they couldn't do openly for fifty years – touched me most of all.

'I can't say whether there was any purpose in what happened to us. Certainly, for me, it helped my religious faith because before we were deported I was very happy and had a wonderful childhood but the faith wasn't there, but since then it has become increasingly important.

'When we got to Palestine first of all, the civilians were being sent to either Africa or India. We were civilians but my uncle was in the army and arranged for my mother to join the ATS and work at the cadet school; my sister and I, who were 13 and 11, joined the ATS school – we were too young but they turned a blind eye; and my brother was smuggled across the borders, hiding behind suitcases, till my uncle arranged papers saying he had joined the army – at the age of five!

'He was placed with the Sisters in Bethlehem but he got diphtheria and my sister was in and out of hospital with malaria. My mother was very worried and thought we would do better to leave the army, become civilian refugees and live together in Jerusalem, so that is what we did in 1944.

'In 1947, when the war started between the Jews and Arabs, we were living in the old city and we tried to leave the country but there were a lot of official objections and delays. Finally we left on the last transport, with the British police; we stayed for two weeks in a refugee camp in Egypt and arrived in England in January 1948.

'I thought I spoke English very well; it was the official language in Palestine, but when we got to England I realized it wasn't very well at all! My sister and I spent three months in a boarding school to gain our matriculation. My mother worked at all kinds of jobs: as a chambermaid, a dressmaker, a hairdresser, a factory worker.

'During our five years in Palestine, my mother was away from the faith; she wasn't with God. Afterwards, she did come back. But eventually she became ill; she had bone cancer – and I was surprised how she took the news. I was with her when the doctor told her she had six months to live and I was taken aback: she was so angry. I didn't think she would be; I thought she could take it. She found it extremely difficult and again turned against God.

'There was a Polish priest visiting, who was very well known for writing religious books, and she loved his books. I asked him to visit my mother in hospital and he agreed but I was so sorry because he was a wonderful author but he couldn't communicate and it was a fiasco. I remember praying very hard that my mother would be reconciled with God and, two weeks before she died, she was: she was at peace and happy, accepting it all, and she died in that frame of mind.

'What I felt about the things that had happened was not bitterness but once or twice there was this dreadful longing for my father and a sadness that I didn't have him. It almost choked me and I had to push it away from me because otherwise it probably would be destructive.

'But no – I didn't feel bitter about those years in Russia. Thanks to my mother, they seemed almost normal. She would come back from those long days of hard labour and – in the dark because the candles had to be saved – would tell us about all the books she had read, the operettas she had seen, and she would sing us songs, recite poetry; she made it so secure. She made it home. I always felt that home was where we were, not back in Poland. She gave us so much strength, it was no wonder that she didn't have any faith left for herself.

'I stayed for a long time at home with my mother because, while I was studying, my grant was a steady income for the family but I longed to be away.

'I was engaged to be married when I was at boarding school in 1948; we were in a military camp and my sister fell in love with an officer and I thought I fell in love with another but I was only 17. I can't blame my mother but she thought that marriage would be security for me. But fortunately – and I see God's finger in this – after my matriculation I was going on a Guide camp and during it I got sick; I couldn't speak. They thought it was my heart but I'm sure it was psychological.

'I spent two weeks in hospital having tests and I realized that those two weeks without my fiancé were absolutely wonderful, so when I got back the first thing I did was break off the engagement. I was in the doghouse with my mother, my uncle, my sister, her fiancé who was his friend... and it put me off boys so from17 to 23 I didn't want to know! But I felt I was saved by the Almighty because it would have been a disaster.

'I wanted to do teaching and I got accepted to go to college but I had to wait a year for the grant, with no guarantee I would get it then. At the time they were giving out grants for home economics and catering so I did that instead. It was at college that I met my husband, who happened to be from the same town I came from – Lvuv; my uncle had removed his appendix at the age of 11 and our sisters were in the same Sacré Cœur class but we didn't know each other at all!

'I always wanted to have my own home, to get married and to have children, and we were very happily married for 18 and a half years. We borrowed money to get married; we had no money to start with. My husband had a job as a structural engineer but he had only just qualified and I was working but as a cashier, not in catering. We rented a flat and decided we were not going to have children yet – but I had great problems with that.

'I walked into a church and found an Irish priest and said, "How is it that all my friends are using things not to have children and are quite happy and I'm so miserable I can't cope with it?" He said to me, "Get down on your knees, thank the Almighty for your conscience, then go home and throw everything away and leave everything to him." So I went home and spoke to my husband and after that we had five sons and it was fine.

'The Almighty was very good to me but I found out what it meant to say, "Thy will be done, not mine," when my husband died. What happened was that he had a heart attack at the age of 46 but recovered – then died 12 hours later. That was the hardest time in my life but it was amazing how much help the Almighty gave me.

'The last few years, with the children almost grown up, had been so happy. We had just come back from a holiday in Spain and within six weeks he was dead. But it was such a happy holiday; we were there all together. So I have very good memories.

'We were going to go back to Poland for a visit in 1973, once we had British citizenship – you couldn't go as a Polish person, otherwise they could keep you and not let you come back – but my husband died in 1972. So it was 1978 when I finally went, with friends.

'It was very traumatic. Some of the family had died during the war, some in German prisons, and one uncle had been taken away and not returned for seven years and died shortly afterwards. But there were my first cousins and aunts and uncles – and my cousin looked exactly like my uncle, so that made it easier, not as if they were strangers.

'It wasn't like going home because they were in Krakow and Warsaw and I'd never been there – but it was family. Now I try to go every four years. But I wouldn't think of going to live there; 50 years of communism have left their mark and I couldn't cope with that.

'I lived in a big family house in London for 39 years then four years ago I decided to move to a smaller house – and this is really, for me, home. This is my place. I love having the family around me but I'm never alone.

'My security is in God. I see him as a very loving father. I have learned he is with me in everything, in every decision. Since my husband died, I have always taken decisions by asking God for help – which I always get – or by just talking it over with him. My friends often ring me and say, "Eva, tell me what to do," but I never need to do that myself; I rely on God for the minutest detail.

'I've never felt that he left me, not for a minute. I was working as an assistant in a school for children with learning difficulties. The head teacher wanted me to train as a teacher but I couldn't cope with that; after my husband died I needed too much support. But after a year I did get the courage and I did the three-year training, which is what I had wanted to do before I met my husband.

'But there was difficulty when I applied: I was told that my matriculation wouldn't be accepted and I would have to do an entrance exam. The night before the exam, my mother had a heart attack and I sat up all night with her in Greenwich hospital. It was very distressing because my husband had died only a year ago and she was all wired up just like he had been; it brought it all back. But the next morning I travelled across London and sat the entrance exam and passed it – then I was told my matriculation was acceptable, after all!

'There were other hard times as well. But I think faith has a lot to do with keeping on, persevering, and sometimes you have to push for what is right. I wouldn't know always what is the right thing to do – but when you pray, you do know. Sometimes you have to wait for a long time and to give up your own ideas.

'My main prayer is, "Don't let me harm anyone, and if I am doing the wrong thing, let me know."'

CHAPTER 14 – The eviction

If we're fortunate, we may avoid all those circumstances that can lead to becoming homeless and helpless – poverty, abuse, addiction, the breakdown of a marriage or family relationships.

But one condition that can't be avoided, that comes to all of us, is death. For everyone the moment will come when it is time to let go of this home we have known: this earth and our place on it, this home, this mind and this body.

Whether those 'homes' were good or bad for us, we will become homeless from them and move on, to encounter the unknown. The ways we envisage our next 'home' – whether we see it as a dead end or a doorway to a new stage of our existence – depend on our beliefs and theories, which influence the ways we prepare for this move, or avoid preparing for it.

Statistically, for most of us death will be preceded by old age. And ideally, the 'third age' of an average lifetime should be a time of slowing down, of contemplating, of receiving care as well as continuing to give it, although in less active ways.

But for some, old age with all its inevitable changes and challenges brings with it a spectre which is unwelcome at any age, and that spectre is homelessness.

Lucy was 80 when she was persuaded to leave her flat and move into a retirement home where she could receive some help in caring for herself, and while it was a wrench to leave her own home, she could, reluctantly, accept the necessity.

What she didn't expect was to be made homeless twice more by the time she was ninety-four. Still very alert and active in her mind, she tells her own story now.

Lucy

'Many years ago I lived in a very nice flat, which was not my own – I rented it – but it was extremely suitable.

'How I'd come to get this flat was that I was praying every day to find somewhere to live and my elder sister, who was in a retirement home, told me that someone who had a flat in a nice house down the road from there had just died and she thought the flat might be available. It was in the neighbourhood of the church and I wanted to live near the church if possible. But the landlord said he didn't think he wanted to let that flat again.

'So what I did was, I went to the church and brought a medal of St Joseph. It was February and the ground was hard but I pushed this medal of St Joseph into the front garden of this flat. Very soon after, I got a message from the landlord: "If you still want the flat, would you please let us know in a day or so." So I went and had another look at it. It had lovely rooms with high ceilings and was between the shops and the church and near to my sister and there was a lovely garden, so I took it.

'I was very comfortable and happy there for many years. I had a nice cat who was more like a dog and used to wait for me when I came back from outside and everything was super. I was there 15 years.

'But when I got rather older, but perfectly active, my charming doctor said she didn't think I ought to be living alone because it wasn't safe because I did a lot of naughty things: I'd get the ladder and put three telephone books on top of it, to change my electric light bulbs. I was quite steady, and I could have gone on like that, but I gave in to the doctor. I was just over 80 then. I'm 94 now but I could still be doing it now if I'd kept the flat.

'So I thought, "Oh dear, I'll have to find somewhere to live." I wasn't very keen to go to the retirement home where my sister lived but they looked after her very well and it was the obvious thing to do, so I did.

'I was very, very sad about leaving the flat, exceedingly sorry. But in the retirement home I was still able to do a little of my own work because there was a kitchenette on each floor that we could use and I was the only one hale and hearty enough to use it so they called it my kitchen.

'I cooked for myself a bit, made my own bed, dusted my room, entertained friends for tea with my own cups and saucers and everything. The staff very kindly gave me a large piece of garden and I grew lettuce and tomatoes and lots of flowers and bought some goldfish to put in the pond. It was a very nice house, looked like a country house, and I kept my cat and I was able to go on with my painting and I was quite comfortable.

'While I was there, my sister died: she had a stroke. But by that time it felt like my home; I was more or less settled.

'Then one day we were told by the authorities that there was a big meeting, to which we should go. We thought it would be saying they were raising the rent but they said they were closing down.

'It was a terrible shock to everybody, particularly those who still had their mental faculties. For those who were elderly and had some illness it didn't really register but the rest of us were very upset.

'But it had to be. As I was very independent and still am, I thought, I'm not going to be sent away from here to some home that I don't fancy. I prayed a lot and asked God to help me and as St Joseph had got the flat for me I asked him to pray for me as well. I thanked him every day of my life for finding that flat and I still thank him for looking after me.

'He was the one I asked because he was the one who always found the homes for Jesus and Mary. Not only that, but I knew a very holy priest who founded two churches and a school by asking for help from St Joseph. It was his example I followed in burying a medal of St Joseph in the ground he wanted to use. Our church at home, where this priest was, was bombed and half destroyed and the priest wanted to build a chapel of ease – a relief church.

'When the big church was bombed, the statue of St Joseph wasn't broken but it turned round on the pedestal, with the shaking of the bombs, and was facing down towards a site that was for sale – a corner site with a bungalow on it. The priest was a friend of our family; my mother gave him a room in our house when the presbytery was bombed and the three curates went to live with other families in the parish. So when the priest went to look at this site, he took me with him.

'Before he even went and enquired, he took his medal of St Joseph and chucked it over the fence into the garden and he got the house and it was turned into a little chapel of ease. We moved the statue of St Joseph down there from the main church, on a lorry. Now it's St Joseph's Church, with a big parish.

'When it was ready to open, a little girl I was teaching was just ready to make her first communion, so Father said the first mass in the new chapel of ease and the little girl made her first communion in it.

'I first started teaching communion classes 65 years ago, and it came about through being cured at Lourdes.

'When I was in my twenties, I had suddenly got a very bad illness and they couldn't find out what it was. Eventually they found out it was an Asiatic bug – and I hadn't even been out of England! They never found out how I got it but I just faded away. I lay on cotton wool on the bed, couldn't have any covers over me and couldn't have any food or I would haemorrhage; I was on a drip. I was like that for five years, on and off. My weight went down to three stone.

'I said to my mother, "Do you think I could go to Lourdes?" and she said she couldn't afford to go with me but she put me on a pilgrimage.

'The second time I went in the baths at Lourdes, I thought, "Oh goodness, I must get to the toilet quick" – and all the nasty stuff came away.

'I spoke to the doctor who was with us on the pilgrimage and said, "What shall I do?" and he said, "Well, if you think Our Lady has helped you, eat whatever comes to the table," and I did and I never had any haemorrhage.

'But the next summer, when the hot weather came, I saw signs of the illness possibly coming back again. So I went to Lourdes again, had a worse blow-out and after that I was perfectly all right – ate anything, did anything.

'I was so overwhelmed that I had suddenly lost all this trouble that I thought Our Lady might want me to be a nun but I didn't want to be! So instead I took the training for Our Lady's catechists, to teach people about my religion. I taught in five parishes in my time. We had lovely classes and I used to have the parents there as well when I taught the children. We all learned together.

'The priest who was staying with us went to the funeral of a priest in another parish. The church there was only a wooden hut but this priest came back and said, "Don't say anything now, but I see possibilities. I could turn that into a good church."

'Later he said, "The bishop said I could go to that church. Would you like to come and look after me?" I asked what I would have to do and he said, "Everything!"

'I was trained as a private secretary and had just left a very good job, well paid and everything but because I hadn't been well I wasn't able to go on with it. I'd never done housework except dusting and I wasn't awfully strong so I refused.

'Then I said to myself, "You awful woman – a Catholic woman and you refuse to help your priest!" So I told him, "Well, I'll try it." I was just over 40. The bishop had to pass me as a decent kind of woman before I could take the post.

'I was trained as a private secretary and a lot of the work I did in the church was secretarial: dealing with the collection and writing letters and so on but I also looked after the house. If I'd stayed in my job as a secretary to the aristocracy, I'd have made a lot of money by now but working for priests you only get a little pocket money. But I was much happier working for the church, with no money, than I was in my previous job, going everywhere in a Rolls Royce and having the butler bring me a glass of wine in the morning and being in charge of seven staff.

'I did everything for the church: I was sacristan and I made all the robes for the altar boys and I taught the communion classes and people preparing to enter the church. I loved it. I went for three months, to try it, and stayed for about 35 years! I helped start up two new parish churches while I was with that same priest and for that I got the _bene merenti_ medal from the Holy Father the Pope. The job only came to an end when the priest died. That's when I had to find the flat, and it took some time.

'Now, just as I was settled in the residential home, I had to find a new home again. When I heard the place was closing down I went to another home where I'd visited friends and knew the people who ran it and simply asked if they'd take me in and they said they'd be happy to. The other people in the home waited and the borough sent them into all different places but I found my own.

'This house was one of many that had been started for ladies and gentlemen who had come down in the world financially. It was a sort of trust. It was very nice. I had a downstairs room, quite big, looking onto the garden, and I did all my own washing in the laundry there, sheets and everything. Each room had a little oven and sink and I had my own kettle and toaster. I still made my own breakfast and supper and went to the dining room for lunch every day – a three-course meal with wine. I could go in and out when I pleased and I was still near the church.

'I went there in July. In February, there was a similar meeting to the one at the last place and they said they were closing down. More elderly people were staying in their own homes so the rooms weren't being filled and they couldn't afford to keep the place going.

'It resulted in many men and women having to find new homes. It was ironic that we were told that our home was going to be used for homeless families!

'Some of the residents went to other houses run by the same trust in different parts of London but most of us wanted to stay where we were. I had made very good friends there. Quite a lot were Catholics who wanted to stay in the parish. There are still some there who haven't found anywhere, six months after the meeting, and they all have to be out in the next three months.

'So I had two moves in less than a year. I was very upset. It was in the local paper – old lady of 94 had to get out of two homes in the past year.

'I didn't grumble at God. I just asked him every day to find me another place, near church and in this area, near my old flat which is just down the road.

'I never applied for this place because I knew it was a care home and I wanted to keep my independence, not have everything done for me. But they were very kind and offered me a room on the ground floor.

'So I was thinking it over and a lot of people in the parish were praying for me to find somewhere. And on a more personal level I was speaking to one of the priests and saying how well I had known his mother who had died, and always prayed for the repose of her soul, and he said, "Pray to her. Ask her to help." So I prayed to her in heaven and next day I got a letter from this same care home – a second invitation: "Do come and live with us."

'I don't know if it was anything to do with it at all but my faith is very young and childlike and I do believe in miracles and answers to prayer – every day, all over the place. I never do anything without praying. And I've always been helped, right through.

'I had been praying every day for the right place so when they kept asking me to come I came and had a look at the room and asked if I could bring some of my own furniture. One thing that made the moves so difficult was that I have my own furniture and personal possessions, souvenirs from holidays in Rome and so on. It was stressful, packing it up each time and having to decide what to keep and what to throw away.

'Each move was hard but none of them was as hard as leaving the flat. The flat was me. I think if I hadn't given in to the doctor I could still be living there by myself – except that they put the rent up and I couldn't have managed that.

'I'm very happy to be so near the church; it's just across the road and I'm able to go as often as I like. I always loved the mass. On my day off, when I was working for the priest, I used to go to mass as usual in the morning then I'd go up to town and go shopping or see friends and while I was in town I'd go to another mass, or maybe two, in different churches. So it was important for me to be near the church here.

'But I haven't got used to living here because I'm here as a care resident, more or less. It's a very different situation. All the residents are very elderly and unable to help themselves – and I understand that any day I may be the same. The staff are so kind and patient; they do everything the residents need. Although I do still like to do things for myself, I look at the others and I realize that as time goes on I won't be able to. So I'm in the best place for my age. And it's getting old that causes the difficulties, not being in a home like this.

'But because I'm with older people or people who are more ill, and because I'm not doing anything, I feel so much older myself. I feel more my age now. I'll be ninety-five in December and I'm losing my sight.

'The thing I feel saddest about losing is my class; I had to stop teaching when I was 90. It wasn't because of my age; it was because everything changed after the Second Vatican Council. That broke my heart, giving up, because I love children and they loved me and we had the most successful classes.

'For example, the way I used to explain to the children about sin and grace was, "If you have a nasty cough that goes on and on and just won't go, Mummy takes you to the doctor and he gives you some medicine to stop your cough so it doesn't get worse. Well, when you go to confession, you haven't done any bad sins but perhaps you've been a little naughty so you go and tell the priest – like the doctor – and he gives you grace, to stop you getting any worse. It's just the same."

'One little girl I taught was very nervous about going to confession the first time, so I took her into the confessional myself and said, "Now, you just talk to Father," And she came out grinning all over her face and said, "When can I go again?"

'I loved teaching. We used to act the stories out then they remembered them. They liked doing St Stephen being stoned and another part they liked was St Paul escaping in a laundry basket. One little boy was put in the waste-paper basket and they dragged it all round the room. Even now people come up to me and say how much they enjoyed my classes.

'I counted up how many children I'd prepared for first communion and it was over a thousand. I took on this work as thanksgiving to Our Lady for curing me and I did it for 65 years.

'A priest said to me that perhaps God wanted me to do something different now. I'd thought of that too. I thought if God sent me to this place, perhaps I could help to look after the old people. But there's an excellent staff who do everything so there's not much I can do.

'I realize I'm definitely still of use, in God's eyes. But what I'm good at is being with children and I hardly see a child now.

'When I felt low in the past, I would read. Getting lost in a book helps. I did a lot of spiritual reading but now I can't read even my prayer books or follow the liturgy in the book at mass. I can't read even the large-print books. The worst thing is losing my sight. And not having people to talk to.

'I can't move homes again, at my age. I've got to recognize that I am an old lady but my brain won't lie down. My doctor said, "You must keep meeting people and going out," and that's what I do need, I know. I'd like to go out to concerts and so on but they're all in the evening and I can't wait for buses in the dark and come home late at night.

'A lot of my friends have died, and most of my brothers and sisters. There were seven of us at home; I'm the fourth. Three of us are left: one older sister in America who was 99 last month, and my baby brother, who is 89. Of the three of us, we're wondering who will go first. My father died when I was only nine, but my mother lived to a good age. She had a wonderful funeral, wonderful music and everything; she would have really enjoyed it!! I was very sad when my brother died recently but he was ill and I was happy to think that he was all right so I tried not to consider myself.

'I don't believe in heaven as a place where you're going to meet your mother and father and everyone else. I think it's going to be a wonderful state of being with God. We may recognize our friends and parents but in a corporate way of being very happy – but nobody knows what it will be like, do they?

'I used to quite look forward to it. I used to have a childlike idea that Our Lady would fetch me when I died. But that seems to have all left me recently. I cry an awful lot. I can't even enjoy church like I used to. I go to the services and come back from church at night to my room, on my own, and I haven't got any joy out of it. One of the priests told me not to worry about it; he said, "We all go through that at times." But that particular priest is so holy himself he doesn't get as worried about things as the rest of us.

'I don't want to complain. There are so many people worse off than me. But ever since that last move, I feel very depressed.'

CHAPTER 15 –The voluntary exile

There is one cause of homelessness we haven't explored yet.

Jesus Christ said, talking about people who would never be able to form a marital relationship, 'Some are born that way; some are made that way by people and some take on that state voluntarily, for the sake of the kingdom of God.'

Every year since the time of Christ, and every year still, men and women leave home and family, either at a young or a mature age, and commit themselves both to lifelong celibacy and to lifelong homelessness, placing themselves at the disposal of God and his work on earth.

That this commitment requires sacrifice is understood in advance. What kind of sacrifice will be incurred can't be known in advance. There are no guarantees of security, happiness or even fairness from the religious superiors who make decisions about the life and work of the priest or monk or nun, religious or lay brother or sister, who makes this unseeing sacrifice.

What makes a person willing to give up, voluntarily and for a whole lifetime, the right that so many homeless people want so much to attain – the right to a place of their own to call home?

This final interview is with Father Vincent, a missionary priest who has spent his life in many different places around the world but for whom 'home' remains the family place where he was born – and where he will never live again.

Father Vincent

'When I hear the phrase, "no place to lay his head", my first thought is of Jesus, because he was the one who said it: "The Son of Man has no place to lay his head." But when I think about it, he had more places to lay his head than most people. He had a home, a mother, a foster father looking after him, a job. We know nothing about him between the age of 12 and the start of his public ministry but he seems to have grown up with everything he needed.

'Many of the people I've come across have had a hell of a life. Their relationships with their parents have been dire. Many people have never had a home. So when I think of having no place to lay your head, I think of the homeless – youngsters, teenagers, on the streets – and of people living alone, where their only companion is the cat and the place smells of urine and they don't have two pennies to rub together.

'My home, personally, was six children, two parents. I'm the eldest. My father was rigid in his religion – but finding out about his upbringing, he had a very rigid father himself. My grandfather was very anti-Catholic. My grandmother put my father into Catholic school and his father went down to the school and took him out of it.

'So my father didn't have a good relationship with his father. But he took on his rigidness and that became part of his Catholicism: Catholics were _the best_! Later on he mellowed but in my early years my relationship with my mother was much easier than with my father.

'My mother was easygoing, gentle, accepting of other faiths. She had many more deep relationships with people than my father did. She was the one who kept the family together. When she died, unfortunately I was away at college, abroad; I was 20 and I'd left home. I knew she was going to die and I managed to see her about six months before. She had been ill for most of her life with heart problems. She was very close to her sister, who always helped out. I see that aunt today as the one who brought us up and kept us together when my mother died – even though we were split up in different houses.

'My brothers and my sister went to live with various aunts – my mother's sisters, whose children were about our age – except the youngest, who was four at the time; he stayed with my father, who went back to his mother. So we lived with cousins, as brothers, though I had left by then and was only home for Christmas and so on.

'We didn't see the family as broken up because we all lived in the same area and were always in and out of each other's houses. My mother's family are like that – even third cousins are considered cousins; it's that type of extended family.

'The idea of priesthood had come because there was a vocations exhibition and the whole school went, on a coach trip, and I just put my name down to go to all sorts of places – we were all doing it! This missionary order wrote to me and at the age of 18 I decided to try it out – not really thinking about the priesthood but just to try it out.

'I was there for four years and then I left for two years – partly because I felt I'd missed out. I missed the family terribly and I hadn't got to know my brothers and sister in their teen years. My mother had died and my father was around, present, but not really there for them.

'For those two years, I did voluntary work with families and kids. I just wanted to be myself. Then when I decided to go back I took on a paid part-time job in a pub-cum-restaurant to get a bit of money and have time to revise my studies.

'I get very angry at times, even to this day, that I don't have a home. You belong to an order and that's your home, and you have many houses throughout the world, but it's not yours; it's "ours".

'When people invite me to have a meal in their homes, I can't invite them into my home when I wish; it's always conditional. You always have to ask if it's all right if they come or if someone can stay for a few days and some of my colleagues don't like the idea: they've become very insular and built this little patch of their own and they don't like interference.

'People say, "Oh, it doesn't matter," when I can't invite them back but to me it does matter because I'm not free to be myself.

'But at home, when I'm there, my brothers and cousins and sister will take in anyone I invite – people coming over from the States or Ireland or any of the places I've been – and make them welcome. That is still my home.

'Although I'm in an order I have never been able to call it my home. And I'm not always free to go home when there's a family crisis. When my mother died, I was told no. I wasn't able to be there. And I won't forget it. I can't forget it. That was partly why I left the order for those two years. Deep down, there was something not right there, something that was not of God.

'What made me go back to the order was the people I was working with in the pub – all different denominations, students, philosophers, hippies, talking and asking questions. I got my vocation through them – first, through my mother and her relations and the love they had – but I got it back through these people. The vocation I saw I had was to be with people.

'I don't need to be in a community, as some people do. There was more love and more acceptance from people outside, people who were less rigid and had a love for God. But as a priest you've got to be part of a community; you've got to be ordained for a diocese or an order; you can't just be ordained and be a one-off. Although it was a pain for me, having to be part of this kind of community, nevertheless it has opened doors to all sorts of people – the poor, people in squalid conditions, youngsters on drugs. It has also opened doors to other countries.

'I could have done it, I suppose, as a social worker but the priesthood was very important to me. Not only could I give of myself but I could give what Jesus gave. For me, the attraction for the priesthood didn't come from knowing any particular priest or from being an altar server – I never was one. Priests? If they came one way, I went the other way! For me the people were the priests.

'I did see something in some of the religious sisters and brothers I got to know casually – and some of them I only saw once and never met again – a love and a giving that I was not afraid of; they were not rigid.

'Jesus had a home and because of the perfect relationship he had with his mother he could invite people home, and his mother also went with him on his journeys. But what many of the religious orders have done is they've become inward, for their own security; they cut themselves off and more so now perhaps because of various scandals and so on – at least that's how I see it, though I may be wrong.

'The way I cope with that closed environment is to get out as much as I can. At one time, people would tell me I had to change my ways, and I'd think about it. But I must do what I believe I've got to do and I believe that the people give me my priesthood daily and I will give it back. Then there's a growth.

'Jesus had no place to lay his head, in the sense that the Father demanded that he go around and accept the hospitality of different people. He followed his Father's will. At times he had meals with people and at times he was not welcomed but he got support from his friends, the ones who did welcome him. But he didn't have a place where he could set up and say, "This is mine and you're welcome equally."

'I have my own room in whichever house I'm based in. We're not a religious order, in the exact sense, because we take an oath; we're not like monks, who take solemn vows. In the history of the church, there were first hermits, then monks, then there were different religious orders like Jesuits, who took solemn vows but were not confined to a monastery. And there were others – friars, such as Carmelites, Franciscans, Dominicans – who had another kind of approach.

'Then gradually, through the development of going out to Africa, South America, China, India, you got orders that were together as a community because they needed to be, as a support for one another, but they didn't take vows; they took a promise, like diocesan priests working in the parishes; they're seculars, not religious. The only difference from diocesan priests is that we live in community. You need it more abroad than if you're working in the home country.

'We don't take a vow of poverty. We can have our own possessions but it also means that, as students, our books and so on are not supplied, as they are to students in religious orders. We have to buy our own.

'As regards chastity, that is for all priests, be they diocesan or monks or in an order, and that promise is taken before you're ordained; it's a condition of being ordained deacon, before coming to priesthood. Chastity is for the whole church.

'On being ordained we take an oath of obedience to the superior of the order because we're not freelance. At one time, when I joined the order, we would have no say in where we were sent. You weren't allowed to question; you were told where to go. Nowadays you're consulted but they can still say no.

'They asked me to do what I'm doing now, which is going round different parishes speaking about the order's missionary work and raising money for it. It leaves me free to meet people and to stay in touch with people I've met in different places over the years, whom I counsel or give spiritual direction to. I'm attached to a house but I'm not often there!

'When I was first ordained I went to Africa. It was what was done. Naturally, it was a cultural shock: the poverty, the mud huts, the kids running around in squalor. It wasn't like Nairobi or Johannesburg, which aren't too different from Europe or North America: I was in the bush, where the majority of people live, and that's poverty. In addition, they had a political situation that was very unstable.

'I had mixed feelings because I felt out of place. At the same time, I felt that we were imposing – though not deliberately – a Western culture onto an African situation.

'I went into an already established mission. We have a policy of having three on a mission station so I joined two who were already there. We were warned to be careful, to be cautious about who asked us questions, because if the military or the government saw you as a threat they could make you leave the country at a moment's notice.

'The people accepted us there, as priests. We were there in a different capacity from the other Europeans and North Americans going out in companies, for business, taking money out of the country. The Africans needed them but they didn't want them. They didn't want us either; they wanted to fend for themselves. But they accepted that the priests and the sisters and brothers were there for them: visiting the people, baptizing them, confirming them, saying mass, doing what priests do in parishes at home.

'We had around ten out-stations. It would take each of the three of us about two and a half months to get round by motorbike or _piki-piki_ – that's a bike with an engine on the back – and staying in a mud hut with bats in the roof and the droppings all around. The people lived in mud huts, one room, dirt floor, cooking outside, with a little _shamba_ – field – that they ploughed and grew vegetables in, and if it didn't rain they starved.

'When I came home one time on leave, I was interviewed live on local radio and said some things I wasn't meant to, about the injustice of the military towards the people. It was all right for us Westerners: we could speak out, because we could get out if the military didn't like it. But it could mean trouble for the people and they couldn't get out.

'As priests living in community, you're asked to live with people that you didn't choose. It may happen that the priests get on very well but if it doesn't work that way there should be a change and if the person in charge doesn't make that change then it's just the same as it would be in lay terms – bad management. You do all these personality tests, to check whether people will be compatible or not, but the majority of superiors (those in charge) disregard the outcome of the tests – maybe because of the lack of manpower.

'I got moved from the first post because I didn't get on too well with the priests I was with; I found them too rigid so I spoke to my superior and I was moved somewhere else. I was in different places in Tanzania and Kenya, with leave to go home every three years.

'I have some very good friends who are priests, in the dioceses and in other orders as well as the order I'm in, but by far the majority of people I get on with are lay people. Travelling round the out-stations, I always found support from the people – opposition from some but always encouragement from others. My relaxation came from being with people, as well as from being alone, walking, reading – novels, science, history as well as spiritual books – and praying.

'When I found I was in a situation where I didn't like the way things were done, I made it clear. I'm in an international order and some of the nationalities were superior towards the Africans. It happens the other way round as well: African clergy looking down on whites. And I've seen it with the military but that's because they have a gun and look down on everybody; they want to show their authority. But I've never seen it with the ordinary people. They don't look down on you.

'The African people want to be able to say, "This is our church." But they've been westernized – not deliberately but because the Western church could only give what it had. They do adapt the liturgy and have their own music, using whatever instruments the tribes in that area use traditionally. And to some extent you need a Western setting – for instance, to have mass you need a building, even if it's an extended mud hut.

'But there's a lot that could be done differently. I have all sorts of ideas. To be a priest in Africa or South America you don't need all the qualifications that someone would need in London or Los Angeles or Sydney: you need someone to be able to say mass for the people and bring them the sacraments. That's fundamental and that helps in their spiritual life: the grace from Jesus Christ, that he offers himself. After two thousand years many people still don't have the opportunity. They don't get the support from Jesus, the sacraments, and the forgiveness that they could and should have.

'In Africa and Asia, some become priests because it's one way of getting an education; to them it's a profession. I'm generalizing and I can't judge a person but it may not be a matter of faith – though faith may grow on them or when they get into priesthood they may find it's not a matter of the academic.

'But you don't _need_ the qualifications. People need to have mass. They don't need Western education in order to celebrate mass. I'd like to see the church bring in men, as men, in Africa and Asia, to be able to celebrate mass for the people – to bring the greatest gift that God has given: his son Jesus Christ. Not that they'd be qualified to counsel people or give them a theological treatise; however, you could still have the priest who was qualified to do those things going around to help them.

'It happens like that in the Coptic Church in Ethiopia, so I'm told: the person who says mass can be a farmer and some of the priests may be barely able to read or write – and you don't need to, to say mass.

'People say that uneducated priests may be influenced by all kinds of other religion – animism and so on. Fair enough, but in our Western theology we're all influenced by Greek philosophy and other things. Augustine was influenced and so was Thomas Aquinas; at the end of writing this great _Theologica_ , he said, "I would have done better to keep my mouth shut."

"The Lord looks after his people. You do what he's asked for – give them the sacraments, let him give himself – and he'll look after the rest. People will teach themselves. Of course, in places like China, where the Roman Catholic Church is underground and people have to meet in secret, it's important to go in to give them support and be with them, just as people did in England during the Reformation

'The possibility of martyrdom, being killed for my beliefs – I may have been naïve but when I was in Africa I never thought of it. I don't know what I would have done if I'd been faced with that. You don't know. I might have run a mile!

'I was aware, as all the priests, sisters and brothers were, that I could be kicked out. You couldn't criticize the government, say, for forcing people to move to a certain area. If you remain neutral and say nothing, the people say, "Are you on our side or on the government's side?" If you speak out and say it's unjust, you get kicked out of the country and leave the people on their own.

'When it happened in our area, I did give the people encouragement but I didn't speak out against the government. But that time, the people weren't forced to move, because famine intervened.

'I'm not the stuff martyrs are made of – at least, not at the moment. I'm not going to volunteer!

'Liberation theology is good. I admire priests who do speak out, in Latin America and places like that. Everything has to be checked because anybody can come up with their own ideas and you can't just act at random. But you have to look at the particular political situation in the particular country.

'The problem is that people have always looked on the Church as siding with the State. It's a problem in South America today – and even in France; they've never got rid of that because the Church seemed to be one with the State in the French Revolution.

'But priests taking up arms – no. As a person I have a right to self-defence but priests taking up arms, like in guerrilla warfare – no, it can't work. I know that's what some people mean when they talk about liberation theology but it's not the gospel; it's not what martyrs are made of. We're to trust the Lord – not to be stupid; you can defend yourself – but it would be very difficult to see taking up arms as trusting in the Lord.

'One of the greatest blessings in my life had been living in an international community, sharing my life with Mexicans, Dutch people, South Americans – you name it – and also working with priests, sisters and brothers from all different orders, not being confined to my own. Naturally, each order wants to emphasize the spirituality of the person who founded it but working with others orders and nationalities gives you a wider view. And the other great blessing has been being able to mix with people, not being bogged down in administration or theory.

'I was in Africa for nine years altogether. I never felt at home there: the culture was too different. My roots have always been where I was born. But in some ways it was easier than being in Europe. On the missions, in the bush, you are freer than at home. I didn't have a bishop around my neck. And the Africans, at least the ones where I was, have a great quality of patience.

'I came back to England for a number of reasons. One was that I got malaria very badly. Another was that men who were newly ordained were coming out to Africa, but also that there was a drop in the number of vocations and priests were needed more in Europe and North America to replace the ones who were retiring. In Africa – and in Poland – there was an increase in vocations so we weren't needed there so much.

'It's always very painful to leave a place. Even within the same country you get moved on to other places and it's always hard to leave the people.

'Of course, as well as the good side of being with people there is always some negative stuff. When people suffer bereavement or something goes wrong they get angry with God, and to them you represent God so they get angry with you. They forget you're human like they are. A mother whose baby had just died a cot death lashes out at you because she's angry with God. It's understandable. I get asked to explain why God allows it, but how can I? I don't know.

'It doesn't make me lose my faith, seeing so much suffering. You're there, trying to help and give support in the crisis. But I have to say I don't know, if I'm asked to explain. What's the point of death? I seem to be apologizing for God at times because I wouldn't have done it that way myself! If we have free will and we're going to be with God for all eternity – OK. But if there's the possibility that someone's going to suffer, from having free will, then I'd say don't give them it.

'We read scripture and see that God allowed his son Jesus Christ to suffer like that, and millions of people suffer even more than the crucifixion – but _why_ is beyond me.

'Like Jesus, priests do take people's suffering on themselves – and we're all priests, not just those who have been ordained to special ministry, or leaders, but everyone.

'I do find myself getting burdened with people's sufferings but no differently from a mother or father or wife or a friend. It's the same for everyone who loves. You get attached to people. When they suffer, of course you suffer with them. You do what you can to help but you can't do what you'd like; you can't stop the suffering happening.

'That leaving people and moving on is part of having "nowhere to lay your head" and so is having no home of my own but I'm not suffering like people who are homeless on the streets.

'It's a fact that if people are on drugs or drink they have got to be weaned off it before they can move on and it may be true, as they say, that they have to get to the gutter before they change. But there's no blame on them. People are on the streets for a number of reasons – for mental reasons or because they've been caught up in abuse at home and have had to leave and they have no home.

'Where the blame comes in is on society – original sin, greed, "me"-ism. We _are_ our brother's keeper: Jesus said so. We say, "Let go and let God," and we do have to let go and let God deal with some things because we can't solve the whole situation by ourselves but saying that can be a cop-out as well.

'If we all did our part we know it would make a difference but we're all very selfish people, the lot of us. We know we have two pairs of shoes and someone hasn't got even one pair, and we've got three pairs of trousers and someone else has only one.

'Being in the priesthood doesn't guard you against selfishness. The situation is brought to us more forcefully, because of our training. But it doesn't mean we're any less selfish; we can still turn a blind eye or a deaf ear.

'And we don't have the strength to do all the things we'd like to do. We have to say every morning, "Lord, your will be done," and it has to be done his way, which is often not ours. Often, he doesn't give us the strength to do all the good things we want to do and we get frustrated.

'But it was the same for Jesus. Because of who he was, and is, he could have healed everyone in one moment but he didn't do it that way. He went to individuals; individuals were important to him. But, humanly speaking, he couldn't get to everyone. He had to rely on his legs like the rest of us. And it's in our weakness and the things we can't do by human strength that we become acutely aware that our strength lies in a higher power than ourselves.

'We're told if we had faith, even a tiny grain, we could move mountains, and we don't, but we all hold a piece of the jigsaw and what we do or don't do makes a difference. If we see people suffering and don't want to help them – which would help us to grow as human beings as well – then we have a problem. Maybe things that have happened to us have caused us to grow in a way that the Lord didn't want us to grow but he hasn't stopped it, because of free will. He didn't stop the concentration camps. It doesn't make sense that someone who has power doesn't do that. But we don't always use our own power.

'I know myself, I can say harsh words or kind words – and in order to make me always say kind words, God would have to annihilate me as a person, to take away my choice. He doesn't do that. He has tied himself in chains with his hands behind his back because we don't want him to interfere; we've chosen that.

'The evil of evils is children abused, abortion... people using their choice to take away others' choice. Those children have a right to be here, like everyone else. Having no defences and no one to turn to – that's homelessness: no place to lay your head.

'People who see someone in a wheelchair and want to destroy them have a problem. The problem is theirs, not the disabled person's. Something has happened to them – as it did to Hitler – to make them want to destroy another person, a human being like themselves.

'We're told as Christians to heal the sick and cast out demons – anything that's not of God – and I do pray for that, simply, without using a lot of words. I always pray, when someone is ill, for them to be cured – if it's God's will but I don't see why it wouldn't be. Even if they're not cured they may gain peace of mind – but sometimes they don't even have that. It's very complicated and I don't understand but I pray and I believe that praying with a person and being with them and making sure they're not alone is something in itself.

'We're told that dying is going home at the end of our journey, being born into eternal life, and I believe it because Jesus Christ said so and he's not a liar. I don't understand dying or see the point of it myself but if he says it is a homecoming, then that's the way it is.'

CHAPTER 16 – Not so far from home?

Grant and Sharon, homeless because they couldn't bear to be enclosed by walls ... John, begging for small change, invisible to passers-by ... Chrissie, besieged by voices in her mind ... Miriam, not allowed to go back to her rented room to sleep ... Veronica, threatened with the police for sleeping in a stairwell ... Francis and Carlton, living in an empty home when the life had gone out of it ... Eva and her family, homeless and searching for a father who moved further away every time they got near to finding him ... Dennis, looking for peace of mind in drugs and philosophies ... all these people in different ways are searching for a way to feel at home.

It seems from this that home is not a place in the world but a place in the heart. Whether someone lives in the same place all their life, or travels far and wide, the need for home is the same.

Some people place more store on security, and interpret security as stability of circumstances – a settled place to live, regular work, enduring relationships. For others, freedom is more important. Their sense of security has to involve change, the opportunity to move on and the chance to keep meeting new people.

But each of us, every day, has a need to know where home is. If there is no centre, no oasis, to return to even in our minds, then it's all too easy to get caught up in life's whirlwind and let circumstances toss us about and end up feeling like victims.

It's clear that, for the people in this book at least, being powerless to dictate their own circumstances did not make them victims of fate or of the uncaring world. Even in the bleakest situations imaginable, some still had a sense of being supported and believed there had to be a glimmer of light at the end of that very dark tunnel.

Even those who saw no way out, and whose situation took a long time to show any improvement, didn't become victims to the world's view of them as worthless. When no one noticed their suffering or even considered them as human beings they still managed to keep hold of their own sense of being worth something.

Carlton, deserted by his family of birth and then by his wife, could still say, 'I was a good father,' and know the truth of it. Tom's anger at being seen as the black sheep of the family showed that he knew there was more to him than that – even when everyone told him otherwise. Deb could still believe in herself as a professional, working hard to gain important qualifications, even while being treated as a homeless woman with no rights.

In that sense, they never became totally dispossessed of everything. They retained their own identity and their awareness of being human. Others might have seen them as less than a human being but they themselves never quite lost sight of the truth – that everyone is equal and everyone's experience of life is a valid one.

If we start to measure the value of one person's life against another's then we place ourselves on shaky ground.

As Father Vincent pointed out, it's the person who believes that the disabled person or the unborn child should be destroyed who has the real problem. Perhaps we are most homeless from ourselves, most dispossessed of our humanity, when we fail to love and start to judge instead.

Behind the search for home, then, is a deeper need to be affirmed in our right to have a place in the world – a world which, with all its imperfections, is designed to be our home for the time between our birth into it and our departure from it at death.

No person's right to live in this shared 'home' can be more or less valid than any other's. The right to come into it can't be earned and can't be denied – though it can be violated, and for millions of unborn babies a year, it is. The right to leave the world that is our home, at the appointed time when the body draws its last natural breath, can also be violated: death can be hastened by unnatural means or artificially postponed.

This home is not perfect then. Like the dysfunctional family homes that so many youngsters leave every year, the world can be the scene of many occasions where one person abuses their authority over another and violates their rights. But still – because the home belongs to each member of the family equally – the right to be part of that home remains, even if it goes unrecognized.

It is a tribute to our in-built sense of who we are that some part of us never seems to lose touch with ourselves as valid and valuable human beings – even if the world doesn't value us.

Jesus Christ, who showed us the human face of God, was crucified – not for claiming to be more godly than the rest of us but for demonstrating the power of living a fully human life among other human beings.

Since he came, it's no longer possible for us to claim to be powerless to change the world – or at least our small corner of it and the people we encounter on our own street corners. We're not God – or the government, or millionaires – but if we don't meet at least some small part of the need we see, there may be no one else who sees it or responds. Mother Teresa said once, 'What we do is only a drop in the ocean, but without our drop the ocean is poorer.'

We can't give all the homeless a home. We may not be equal to facing the challenges of sharing our home with even one. A homeless alcoholic or addict or sufferer from mental illness is only too aware that they may not be the easiest person to live with; they find it hard enough to live with themselves in their own condition.

But we really fail – where we could so easily begin to succeed – at the point where we lose sight of the equal humanity of a fellow human being. The moment we start to believe that a person who is dirty, or sleeping in an alley, or drunk, or confused, or dressed in old clothes, is less of a human being than ourselves – less needy of love and affection, less deserving of respect, less worthy of being offered a chance of a better life – is the moment when we lose touch with the reality of the world we live in.

When people seem too much trouble, and our own human problems feel overwhelming, it's easy to see the world as badly designed by its creator – prone to disasters, both geographical and man-made; overcrowded; socially structured to ensure that the violent get what they demand and the gentler souls become their victims.

We lose sight of the fact that there is a place in the world for everyone, that there is enough food to go round as long as it's shared – and that, in many areas, it is happening. Many people do have homes and acceptance and respect and are willing to share with people who have less.

It doesn't happen like that everywhere. The people in this book are a witness to that. But where it is happening, it works.

It's not that we haven't chanced upon the right system for housing the homeless and loving the unloved. The ordinary system by which we love our own families and want them to have the best from life is the system that's effective. What makes a good home makes a good world. There's no naïvete in the notion.

There is only naïvete in pretending that it's as good as it can get – that because a government makes a few reforms or a charity founds a successful project, the homeless are receiving as much as they need. However good an organization is, it doesn't replace what can only come from individual people: the awareness of a person's plight and the personal care and interest that only an individual can provide.

We become frightened by the scale of the need and feel useless because we can't do everything. We can't bear to look at the reality of the person in front of us – the hopelessness and desperation in their face as they sit in the pouring rain, with a cold night ahead of them. We wouldn't be human if it didn't trouble us, and it does.

But we're wrong if we think we have to solve all of it, or that meeting one small need will turn out to be the thin end of the wedge, and countless more demands will fall on us. We don't have endless money, or time, or energy. There are limits on us as human beings and it's healthy to recognize when we've reached those limits.

But in my experience, going as far as my own very narrow limits, knowing when I've reached them and withdrawing to regather the stamina and courage to do a small amount more, can lead to finding those limits have stretched slightly: what I find myself doing today is more than would have seemed possible or normal yesterday. And there is a strange exhilaration in this. We can almost see ourselves becoming more human and less afraid.

Again and again, you hear people say that when they set out to be generous they only saw what they were giving – and then were amazed by what they gained. What they did was very little. But the little they did changed them.

Trying to meet one small need in one person considered by the world to be insignificant, they found that the world had a need for them. They no longer saw themselves stranded like whales washed up on the shores of a planet which turned within its own relentless system and functioned exactly the same with or without them.

There are enough resources in the world. If we look at the deficit, we are soon forced to look at the surplus – including our own deficits and surpluses. It may include money we need to give but money is never going to be enough. To give money without giving anything more of ourselves labels someone a beggar rather than a fellow human being.

We can be so worried about offending, or trespassing on the territory of the professionals, or being taken for a ride and made to regret our generosity, that we end up avoiding doing even the ordinary things that we know are effective – stopping to ask how someone is, or smiling, or offering to buy them a cup of tea or a snack.

We're not required to make ourselves destitute, to lay ourselves open to being manipulated, to drive ourselves to the point of exhaustion doing 'good works' or to neglect our own family's needs. That would be giving the seal of approval to destitution, by extending its dominion to our own lives. That's not what God wants, in the world he has given us to be a home for life.

But I firmly believe that if we take what we need from the world and give what we can, we will see a natural miracle occur.

What we need will imperceptibly grow less, over time. And what we have to give will suddenly seem to have increased.

And no one will be any poorer for the incredible richness that that experience will give us.

Welcome home. To all of us.

For more information on Clare Nonhebel's books, see:

http://clarenonhebel.com

