| 1 | | | Snow from the blizzard of two weeks before had still not melted from the |
| | | road verges in the town of Nottingham. It had been too cold. But every day Karen, 19, |
| | | wandered the streets, from housing agency to council office to day centre, waiting for the |
| | | night shelters to open at 7 p.m. There she would be given a cup of tea and a bed or a |
| 5 | | couch, and would try to get some sleep amid the groanings of the mentally ill and the |
| | | moanings of the dispossessed and desperate. |
| 2 | | | Karen has been living on the streets since she left her family two years ago. She said: |
| | | 'I had to go, let's just leave it at that. Believe me, I wouldn't put up with this if 1 didn't |
| | | have to.' |
| 3 | 10 | | The desperate world that Karen and thousands like her inhabit is a place where even |
| | | the most simple functions - eating, sleeping, personal hygiene - become complicated. |
| | | Simple things take on impossible dimensions, as novelist Robert McLiam, who as a |
| | | teenager spent two periods living rough in Belfast and London, recalls. 'For example, it's |
| | | hard to imagine - with central heating - what cold is really like; where it is so bad it |
| 15 | | becomes monstrous. It is totally demoralizing when there is no possibility of getting warm, |
| | | where sleep is impossible. That is vicious.' |
| 4 | | | Karen is just one of the thousands of homeless people in towns and cities throughout |
| | | Britain who will have a cold Christmas this year. She finds it hard to understand why |
| | | Government money to help the homelessness problem has been devoted to London. 'We |
| 20 | | need help too ,' she said. |
| 5 | | | While London has undoubtedly the most serious homelessness problems, the |
| | | roofless are to be found in every city. 'Living rough in somewhere like Belfast is very |
| | | different to living in London,' says Robert McLiam. 'It's much safer outside London. For a |
| | | teenager in Belfast there just isn't the same risk of, for example, drugs, but it is harder. |
| 25 | | There aren't the same groups of people so there is less support in a shared experience.' |
| 6 | | | For the young single roofless like Karen, homelessness, especially if it is in an |
| | | unfamiliar city, has its own logic, an all too familiar pattern. McLiam says most young |
| | | street people go through an almost identical experience, six weeks of rooflessness and |
| | | confusion before they are adopted by the more experienced roofless, who teach them how |
| 30 | | to survive. |
| 7 | | | Others, perhaps as many as one in three, will be so embarrassed that they will do |
| | | their best to conceal the fact that they are on the streets, hiding away from established |
| | | groups. 'You tend to find them grouping together for mutual support,' says McLiam. |
| | | 'Once they have reached that stage, it is actually more difficult to break out of their |
| 35 | | situation.' |
| 8 | | | For the older, long-term roofless the problem is more likely to be one of isolation. |
| | | One doctor described how some of the older homeless would make as many as five visits |
| | | to the local mobile surgery just to have a 'look' before summing up the courage to go |
| | | inside. |
| 9 | 40 | | Nottingham has a highly efficient network of voluntary hostels run by the locally- |
| | | based Macedon Trust. The organization has managed to keep people from sleeping on the |
| | | streets. So now the Home Office has sent Government representatives up to see how the |
| | | Trust has managed where London has failed. |
| | | |
| | | from the 'Observer', December 23, 1990 |
