It’s a stark picture in the UK today. More than 300,000 people are living on the streets, all of them with a story. Over the last six months, we’ve gone out and asked 103 homeless people if they’d share their life tales. Six
people said yes. This is what they had to say.
By Alexander Marks McLeod
By the time the baby boy was 32 seconds old, he had already lost his mother. Several days later, his father had taken his own life as well.
The baby left the hospital in Warwickshire with his aunt, Sandra Harrison, who coul
d not think of a name for the orphaned child and so called him “Boy”. When he was four years old, he still had no name.
Owing to abuse and neglect by his aunt, at 10 years old, Billy – as he now chose to be called – entered his first foster home. At 10 and a half, he was transferred to his second.
When Billy Harrison was 15, he tried to kill himself for the first time. At 18, he spent his first night on the streets. His life has been a map of persistent trauma and torment and grief.
“It only took 32 seconds for my life to start folding in on itself. And it hasn’t really stopped since,” he says.
This is Billy’s story. But it is not an uncommon one. Speak to anyone living rough and they’ll tell you a similar tale. People like Billy don’t automatically end up on the street. It is a slow and gradual process. A messy mosaic of pain and fear, that often stems from unthinkable childhood trauma.
For Billy, that trauma can never go away. Several decades later and the 43-year-old still does not go a day without remembering.
“I spend my nights now on the streets of Leicester,” says Billy. “I never drink, I never do drugs, so I am very careful with what I spend my money on.”
“I save up enough so I can spend two nights a week in a local B&B. Sometimes, if I have money left over, I will buy a single cigarette from a friend. Nothing more.”
For more than twenty years this has been Billy’s life. He says he has always suffered from anxiety and depression, but he doesn’t like to make his problems known. He is a good man. He has a kind heart.
“It just gets so lonely sometimes. I haven’t talked to anyone in two weeks. I have no friends. I have no family left. I just need someone to talk to,” he says.
Five more minutes. That is all he asked for. When the interview with Billy was done, he was offered any hot meal or drink his heart desired, but all he wanted was five more minutes with me. Just so he could talk to someone for a bit longer. Just so he did not feel so lonely.
We talked for hours.
Around the corner from Billy, lives David Neale. It is a big night for the 31-year-old. It will be the last time he ever does the drug that has taken over his life: heroin.
Picture the scene. it’s midnight, and on the cold, empty back streets of Leicester, David prepares his needle for injection for one final time. He straps up his arm with his tarnished leather belt, and searches for a vein along his pockmarked skin. He locates his entry point and injects the chamber into his blood.
Then immediately, all of David’s pain - all of his torments that keep him up at night. All his angst and grief and sorrows and sadness, fade away. He knows it will be short lived. But this short burst of euphoria is all he needs. Because for that tiny segment of time, David feels happy.
Then, when morning comes, as soon as his eyes flicker open, David goes looking for more heroin. Again. In reality, every night is David’s last dance with heroin. But every morning he realises that he can no longer live without it.
“I haven’t been on the streets for long, but I have been doing drugs my whole life,” says David.
“The first time I tried weed, I was 13 years old. I loved it instantly. People said I couldn’t get addicted to it, so I did it every day.
“But, when I started to get older, I realised weed was not strong enough for me. I needed more.”
For David, marijuana was the gateway to a whole new kind of euphoria. Pot turned into ketamine. Ketamine was a colourful diversion before speed. Speed led to methamphetamines, and methamphetamines was just a sidestep to heroin.
Before David’s 21st birthday, he had managed to do the whole pantheon of illicit substances.
“But there is nothing that comes close to heroin. Nothing. It feels like you’re flying without wings,” he says, whilst scratching his arm with his broken nails.
“As soon as I did it, my world turned from black and white to Technicolour. I felt alive. Heroin makes you feel like a god. Like your indestructible.”
“And then it starts to wear off. And the colour starts to dim. And you realise you’re not a god, but you’re lying on a thin, damp strip of cardboard on some cold dingy street. And the only reason you call that street home is because of that f**king drug.”
“It has taken everything from me. But I still chose to do it.
“I think about quitting every day. It is a lot easier to say you’re going to quit when you're already high.”
David has a thick scouse accent that sounds out of place on the streets of Leicester. He is a Liverpudlian at heart, but now he is a long way from home.
The effects of David’s hideous addiction to his body are disturbing. He is a slight, small man, whose eyes speak of hard days and even harder nights. He looks like Kurt Cobain wearing zombie make-up. His nails are fractured and blackened and wisened, and he constantly uses them to scratch his veinless arms and long, tangled head of hair. His skin is punctured and pale.
His teeth stand out the most, though. Cracked and putrid. Rotten and yellow. They have been ground to the gum and look decayed beyond repair. But David says he does not mind his rotting teeth.
“I’ve got nothing to smile at anyway,” he says, whilst taking the first drag of his cigarette which he claims will be his last. It won’t be his last. It never is.
In Leeds, 100 miles north of Leicester, live Chris and Janet Baker. Chris, 42, and Janet, 37, share their concrete bed together.
Let’s go back three years.
Chris and Janet are a normal couple, with stable jobs, and a routine home life in Middlesbrough. That was until Chris’ alcohol problem started the gradual disintegration of their steady life.
“Like many alcoholics, I figured the problem was not me, it was where we lived,” says Chris.
“So, we moved. But no matter where we went, the alcohol always followed. We ended up in Leeds because we had friends there, but now neither of us had jobs and the drinking no longer worked its old magic.”
Chris began to covet happiness.
“I became miserable. I would steal from my friends and convince myself it wasn’t theft. I was meant to be godfather to my nephew, but I didn’t show up to the ceremony. I hated myself,” he says.
Alcoholism is lonely. Chris realised he was spiralling out of control and didn’t want to drag Janet down with him. He begged her to leave him. But she couldn’t.
“You don’t get to choose who you fall in love with,” says Janet. “Chris didn’t choose to be an alcoholic either. The only thing I knew and still know is that my life is with him.
“I never thought I would ever be homeless. Who does?
“First, you're staying on a mate’s settee. ‘Cheers pal. It’s just until we sort ourselves out’, you say. Then you don’t sort yourself out. And then you’re in a hostel - and from the hostel, it’s a sidestep to the streets.”
It has now been two full years of sleepless nights for Chris and Janet. They have not spent a day apart. Janet dreams of one day getting married and owning a small house, with white picket fences and a brown Labrador called ‘Chocolate’.
That’s her dream. Chris dreams of quitting alcohol. But it has become a dreary necessity for him.
“I hate myself even more now. But the only thing I know how to do is pick up the bottle. I know it is me that has made us where we are today, I know I am at fault for it all, and I know that the pain I have inside has spread out and ruined the ones I love most,” says Chris.
“I drink even harder to get rid of that realisation.”
When you think of the 274,000 homeless people living in England, a story of romance probably doesn’t come to mind. And maybe there is a reason for that. Because the story of Chris and Janet Baker seems to be more of a tragedy than a romance.
As far as tragedies go, no story is as heart-wrenching as Terry Milkins’.
Terry, 36, suffered a spinal abscess 14 years ago which paralysed him overnight. His dream of becoming a professional rugby player was stripped away from him in an instant.
With no family to support him, and no job that would accept him, Terry had to beg for money to pay his rent in Barnet, London.
“Before the drugs, I was just about getting by,” says Terry. “But begging every hour of every day, just so I could afford a sh*t, run-down flat, was too much for a sober man.”
“I got introduced to crack and heroin early on, and my life started to deteriorate from there. My begging money slowly stopped going towards rent, and quickly became my source of drug money. I was hooked.”
Terry looks far older than his 36 years. Living like this has a tendency to do that to a man. It’s a hard life and it ages you.
Every step of the way Terry has at least had one loyal, brave companion: his dog, Aled. Terry got Aled 12 years ago as an assistance dog, and he’s been Terry’s best friend ever since.
He has black and white fur, with whisps of grey showing his old age. He is scared of loud noises and often seeks quiet and dark places for comfort. He is like Terry in many ways - a sensitive, gentle and friendly soul.
“I couldn’t do it without him. I don’t think I would still be alive if he wasn’t here. He is everything to me,” says Terry.
“I was robbed at knifepoint not too long ago. The guy said if I did not give him all the money I had, he would slit my throat. Just like me, Aled is no fighter. But it's times like that when you really need a friend, and Aled is the greatest friend a man like me could ever ask for.”
But this is an all too familiar story for Terry.
“There are some truly horrible people out here. People see my wheelchair, and see an easy target,” says Terry.
“I get robbed, ripped off, spat on, and tormented, constantly. My health is deteriorating. I don’t think I have much longer left. Why can’t people just leave me alone?
“I live in constant fear.”
Mick Lace, 44, says the worst part is always at night.
During the day, he at least has passing pedestrians to keep him company, and occasionally time passes quicker. But not at night. The sun goes in and any meagre warmth you might have had in the day fades as the darkness falls.
Being on the streets on the cold, rainy nights of April is always the worst. Mick knows this. This is the 19thwinter he’s spent under the stars. He unfurls his ripped sleeping bag and settles down underneath the Westgate Towers in Canterbury.
“You sleep with one eye open when you’re on the streets. You never know who may be coming around the corner,” he says.
“I grew up with my mum and stepdad in Canterbury, Kent. My actual dad left when I was young, I never even found out his name, and my mum clearly had a type because the man she replaced him with was quite the a**hole, too.
“He beat her, and me, sometimes.
“Growing up, home was never a nice place to be. The worst nights were when he didn’t take his rings off. I think he enjoyed those nights.”
At 17, Mick left his mum and stepdad with no money and no qualifications. He stayed with some friends, and then some cousins, but when his time ran out there, he was forced onto the streets.
At first, he stuck to park benches, but after a while, anywhere would do. He had always been an outsider, but he had never felt so lonely.
“It just happened so quickly. I went from leaving home to search for a better life to living on the streets in the blink of an eye,” he says, whilst rolling himself a cigarette from a pouch of tobacco.
He twisted the end of it in his mouth and turned it around and lit it with an old Zippo lighter, worn through to the brass. He paused. Smoking in silence, holding the cigarette pencil-wise between his fingers, watching me through the smoke.
“I still can’t believe I am homeless. I haven’t got a bad bone in my body, I was just dealt a shit hand.
“But people don’t give a shit about that. To them, I am a homeless man, not a human.”
He stubbed out the cigarette on the bare concrete floor.
“Anybody could be me right now. Feel lucky that you’re not,” he says.
Paul White — a simple name, two syllables, the minimum.
Because the beginning was lost, his story always began in the middle, but there wasn’t much to the middle either.
Paul was once in a big accident. He and some workmates were coming back from a fencing job in Ashford, when a drunk driver T-boned the van they were in. Bodies flew everywhere.
Three people died, but Paul didn’t. Inside his skull, though, his brain shook like an Etc-A-Sketch. Any clear image of his past, erased in a moment.
“I woke up in Canterbury hospital. The doctors said I had been in a persistent vegetative state,” says Mick.
His eyes sometimes tracked people across the room, and his arms and legs sometimes moved, seemingly involuntarily, but he couldn’t speak or eat or even breathe on his own.
He had no idea what his name was or where he came from or what had happened or who to call. He had only had his body to speak for him; a young round face, dark fuzz on his chin and upper lip; no tattoos or notable scars, except for the one the wreck had given him.
Whoever he’d been before, whoever he still was inside, to the world around him, he was now a human riddle, a blank slate on which to write a thousand possible names and stories.
“One of my work friends, who had survived the crash, came and identified who I was. He told them, and me, that my name was Mick. He said that I lived on my own, and my family were not around,” he says.
“He told me about the crash, and how some others had died. I was hoping when someone told me what had happened it would all come flooding back to me, like a wave of memory to suddenly answer all the questions that had been building up in my head. But it didn’t.”
“Eight years later, and it still hasn’t.”
Paul was 21 years old when he lost his memory, and he’s 30 now. Amazingly, he has had no issues with creating new memories, it is just the old ones that are lost.
The journey from the hospital to the streets was a long and hard one.
“I was out of work for a long time,” says Paul. “I could no longer afford my flat and I got evicted not long after.
“I turned to my friends who had visited me in the hospital. Only they believed my story. But that was only a short-term solution, and after a while, I found myself on the streets.
Paul gave up. He started taking drugs, lost most of his teeth, and departed from the person he used to be but could not remember.
“It’s a tough life sleeping rough. For me, it wasn’t drugs that made me homeless, being homeless made me do drugs.
“The issue is, though, that drugs have kept me on the streets. It has been six years now. Some nights I get to stay in a hostel, or a B&B, but it won’t ever be long until I am right back here.
“This is my life now. This is where I belong.”
Comments