And a voice came from the cloud saying, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’
Luke 9: 35
I have analysed the stories of homeless people in various ways. In this chapter, there is a brief character sketch of each person interviewed, which values their unique individuality, and allows the reader some access into their lives. I have included here also a sketch of self as researcher. Although on one level this is an artificial construction since I was not able to interview myself, yet it does recognise that to shy away from personal involvement is equally artificial. The previous chapters contained enough theological and sociological material to make this adventure both permissible and desirable. This project began with a personal encounter, and continues here with some more insight into why this project is important, and how personal vulnerability can sometimes be advantageous.
In the three chapters which follow, I provide a thematic analysis of interviewees’ replies structured around the areas covered in the conversations: on common themes in the biography of the 11 men and women involved; on related emotional issues; and about experience of God or spirituality. All names except my own are pseudonyms. A fourth chapter describes what happened when a different group of homeless people began to read the Bible together. The biblical quotations from St Luke’s gospel which stand at the head of Chapters 6 to 8 are intended to ground this analysis in the stories which Jesus tells to his disciples concerning wealth, poverty, community and the Kingdom of God. The account of the Transfiguration of Jesus (this heading) is extended to include all people as chosen sons and daughters of God, not least the lives which now follow.
Caroline begins her story at the age of seven, recalling a dysfunctional family, divorced parents, her mother always out at the pub, and sexual abuse. At the age of 13 she was shoplifting to buy food, and at 15 she left home and moved in with a friend. She admits that she ‘was hanging around with the wrong people’, drinking, smoking, missing school and feeling suicidal. She once tried to phone Childline but the line was engaged. After a number of unsuccessful relationships, she was married at 18. Her husband assaulted her badly, and although they tried a reconciliation, this too failed. She became addicted to valium and attempted to kill herself. She was made homeless when she was evicted for non-payment of rent on the flat she was sharing with another boyfriend. Unable to obtain any drugs, she visited the local Health Centre in a state of collapse, and was advised to move into The Victory hostel, remembering the date precisely. This began a process of recovery, which enabled her to talk about her life with a key worker, and, with the help of the Community Drugs Service, to reduce her dependency. She is pleased that she is now on a reducing ‘script’ of valium. From The Victory, needing more independence, she moved to Aubyn House about a month before the interview:
I had a key worker, never had one before. I told him everything, from when I was young, from the age of six and upwards. It was the first time in my life, I got it out. I had someone to speak to, I had a roof over my head, my own room, meals everyday, what I always wanted. It was the only thing I really wanted. I had it but then it was my independence was getting between it, you know, ‘cause I was having friends in my room, and you’re not allowed to have anybody in your room. So that’s why they moved me into here. I’ve got a counsellor now, so I see him each week.
She is starting to pick up on her missed education with a computer course, and is looking forward to organising herself for job interviews. Her one major concern is that her younger brother (then aged 15/16) would go through the same process that she had experienced, that he will be pressured by his peers and others into taking drugs, and start the same destructive cycle. She tries to advise him how to avoid this.
Caroline is agnostic about belief in God, but still calls herself a Roman Catholic. She attended Mass as a child and as part of her schooling, but as an adult she sees almost no connection between her life and the life of the Church; she is hardly aware of the Church at all.
The earliest point Charlie refers to in his interview is the death of both parents: ‘I had already lost my father in a fire and my mother with multiple sclerosis …’ but it was the death of his wife which was the prime cause of his homelessness. Prior to this he had ‘worked in one place for eleven and a half years’ and had known ‘a normal, orderly existence’. After her death, her parents asked him to leave. This began eight or nine years of life on the road with increasing dependence on alcohol.
He decided to move down to the West Country because he had always liked it, and by the time he actually moved (four and a half to five years before the interview) he was addicted to pethidine as well. His recovery from these addictions began at the same time as he moved into the Salvation Army hostel, about 18 months from his first arrival. He had also started to attend the clinics of the local Community Drugs Service and had been prescribed methadone. As he recovered, he found that he had done some permanent physical damage:
I’ve just, it’s taken time, but gradually I’ve got better over the years, the last two to three years. I found once I was more or less on the road to recovery, it got easier, obviously it would be, physically. Unfortunately, I’d already done the damage in a lot of ways. My pancreas, I’ve had half of that taken out, so I still suffer from the physical effects of what I’ve done to myself.
His residence at Aubyn House and its key worker support system has been part of a continuing recovery process. He feels that he is almost back to a point before his marriage except for the intervening experience:
Before I couldn’t stand my own company, whereas now, I’m quite happy with my own company. I wouldn’t have had the patience to sit down and talk to you for half an hour before – no way, unless I was getting something out of it at the end. Yes, I’ve changed a lot. My attitudes have changed. I’m more or less coming back. I’m back where I was before I got married really, in many ways, except I’m a hell of a lot more experienced now than I was then. I found it very difficult to ask for other people’s help before as well. But the main thing I think I did discover is before you can look after anybody else in this life, you’ve got to look after yourself.
Charlie frequently repeats the phrase ‘I’m not a conventionally religious person’, expressing his dislike of organised religion, but recognising the existence of a Higher Being. He makes a link between a spiritual side of life and emotional awareness, which is now coming back to him.
David comes from a middle-class family. While his father claims a working-class background from Birmingham, he was educated at a grammar school and went to university; his mother went away to school and became a PE teacher. David passed the 11 plus exam and went to the local grammar school, which in the course of his time there became comprehensive. He excelled academically, but was the last to be chosen for the football team on wintry games afternoons. ‘Fitting in’ was quite difficult, but he did not really care; he had a small group of friends and very supportive family. Like lots of nicely spoken, able children, the others retaliated by shouting ‘poof’ which could be embarrassing on occasions.
He did fit in at university – or in other words, there were sufficient like-minded people around to feel comfortable, and to realise that he was, at last, part of the in-crowd. The college chapel and the Cathedral enabled him to begin an appropriation of Christian faith and its integration into the rest of life. A rather painful year in Paris as a language assistant led to a concrete decision to be confirmed in the Church of England after his finals at the age of 21.
His first permanent job was teaching languages in a smallish independent school in Shropshire, part of the Woodard Corporation – again, hardly an encounter with the underprivileged. David observed that the size and quality of cars which came at the end of term to take children home increased each year Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. His interest in and work with the college chapel grew and the chaplain encouraged him to consider ordination. He jumped through the hoops, was recommended by a selection conference and started another round of university classes in Oxford. St Stephen’s House is in the east of the city, in a mixed area of students and an Asian population, a lively but relatively poor community. His first term-time pastoral placement was as a volunteer with an AIDS/HIV charity.
His curacy at St Peter’s Plymouth involved him working alongside the City Council, the Probation Service, and Stonham Housing Association, managing together a direct access hostel, a housing project for single homeless people, a community centre and development workers, a home-makers group, and so on. Working here, with the marginalised for the first time, David saw poverty and heard poverty, listening to the stories of the entrapment of the poor and sometimes reflecting upon them.
There was a sharp contrast between this situation and that of being a chaplain in the University of Exeter, his next job. There he experienced a sort of conversion. David invited his next-door neighbour and family for tea. He was curate of the local Anglican evangelical powerhouse. He prevaricated. When he finally came round, he explained that they could not have tea with him since he had heard of his (David’s) liberal views about homosexuality, and David detected perhaps an undertow of something more personal that was left unstated. The result of his anger with this was a series of articles and conference papers about sexualities, including a reflection on the failed tea party experience.
He moved jobs after nearly a decade in Exeter, returning to be a parish priest in Plymouth. He commented that the increasingly polarised debates in the Church of England about sexuality left him feeling compromised in a sort of ethical and theological way: ethically, the question was about being representative of an institution which was perceived as, and might well be, intrinsically prejudiced; theologically, because for him issues of justice and equity were of the essence of Jesus’ life and teaching, and the Church of England seemed tarnished in this respect. He needed a way of retaining some authenticity and even self-respect. One way of achieving this was to be engaged in part-time paid research work about sexualities (including within ministerial training) at the same time as parish work.
The experience of inner city regeneration and linked housing issues, the economic downturn and related political and social changes, and a small joint project about contextual Bible reading brought him back to previous study and reflection about homelessness and homeless people. This complex and paradoxical matrix of marginalisation and ‘at-homeness’ is his current dwelling place; David wonders to what extent he has chosen it, or it has chosen him.
Danni lived in a children’s home in Milton Keynes up until the age of 17 when she was asked to leave. The home arranged a flat on a six month tenancy, but since she was still only 17 when the tenancy finished none of the local housing associations was prepared to offer her a place. Her best memories of this time concern trips to the nearby countryside:
When I used to live in Milton Keynes, you only travel a couple of miles and you’re out in the country and that’s what I used to do when things got too hard at the children’s home. I used to just jump on a push bike and go out to the country. I used to just sit out there and after a couple of hours there, I felt calmer.
Although she had been in trouble with the police a lot when she was younger, she had imagined that living in the flat would be an opportunity for personal growth: in fact she did succeed in curtailing her heavy drinking. However as the end of the tenancy drew nearer, with no other accommodation in sight, she began to panic, started drinking again and returned to crime. She describes the early part of her life in these words:
I was homeless on and off for a lot of years, was living in a children’s home when I was younger and they threw me out when I was seventeen. And they did give me a flat, but that was only for six months. Now when the six months was up I was still seventeen. All the housing associations, the Milton Keynes ones, down there, they wouldn’t take me until I was eighteen. So when the six months tenancy of this flat finished, I was homeless.
She then spent four or five years in and out of prison, being jailed in London 13 times. Often she would be released on Friday, re-offend and be back in prison again on Monday. In that period her alcohol dependency and criminal activity became more serious. Danni spoke of a recurrent kidney problem from the age of 14, made worse by alcohol. She felt that in prison she was looked after in this respect with good medical treatment; but as soon as she was released her resumed drinking would lead to kidney problems again. This continued until a particular severe deterioration in health when she was hospitalised outside prison. A doctor made it very clear to her that she was seriously ill and needed to change her behaviour. This led to a decision to change her lifestyle, and helped by the sister of her solicitor she was put in touch with rehabilitation centres around the country.
Staff at Akron House (a residential centre for alcohol and drug treatment) were prepared to interview her over the phone, and she was offered a place which would remain until she was able to take it up. There was some uncertainty as to when this would happen as she was still awaiting sentence, but being released from prison sooner than she had imagined, she went straight to there. She had spent four months this time in prison and spent nine weeks at Akron House. She had experience there of the Twelve Step rehabilitation programme, and so when asked about spirituality refers in vague terms to a Higher Power. On being discharged from Akron it was intended that she would spend six months in a secondary treatment centre in Weston-super-Mare, but she left after three days. With only £15 in her pocket the only option was to return to the city she had come from. She contacted a friend who was supportive but unwilling to take her as a lodger; she recommended The Victory hostel where Danni stayed for six weeks. Her second application to Aubyn House was successful and she moved in. At the time of the interview she was living elsewhere in the city, but because of trouble with her neighbours she wanted to move out of this area, but stay in the city. She still sees a therapist once a week.
Fran presents the most confused life history of all these subjects, with only passing reference to a number of potentially important events, and sometimes appearing to contradict herself. It is easier to start from her current situation and work backwards. She had been at Aubyn House for two weeks at the date of the interview and prior to that at The Victory hostel, although she initially says that she is still at The Victory. She explains these moves like this:
So this Christmas I was going over to Portugal I was flying from Manchester to Bara and there was a misprint on the ticket so there was another date booked in for me for the following week but during that week, I was attacked, my belongings were stolen, luckily enough I still had my coach ticket to get back. As soon as I arrived, I booked there and at the beginning of January, no at the beginning of December, two members of staff from here came to visit me. One of them, can’t remember who it was, it was Mike, Mike said that … I had actually gone through this channel before, I’d tried to get in before and when I say get in I was offered a place but I didn’t take it, something else came. … I told them what I’d been doing for the last two years, that I’d become a life saver, the accommodation and money was not sufficient.
Fran says she has stayed at The Victory hostel on four separate occasions, arriving there after she had been travelling around the country, and being unable to stay where she wished to. She gives no indication as to where she was living previously and I do not ask.
I travelled a lot up and down the country, hitch-hiking which was quite a sporty thing, open air, fresh air all the time … Plenty of sky really. I can’t exactly remember why I moved into The Victory, The Victory that was it. When I first arrived, I went into the YWCA. I tried to get a contract with them for three months and I was refused and they recommended The Victory hostel to me, and then I went and did a trip, and … they sorted accommodation for me and it was a place called Littlehaven. It was a larger house, a type of manor house. And there were other youngsters there, younger than me and possibly one or two ex-criminals who had recently been released.
She found this house too regimented, with insufficient personal freedom, and left after six months, sharing accommodation with another ex-resident. She describes this period (around two and a half years previously) as positive and healthy. The whole interview reveals a sense of rootlessness, especially as she indicates some detachment from her family. Her parents live in Portugal; her brother, who was a Royal Marine in the Falklands War, is now married and lives locally; and her sister lives with evangelical Christians, ‘so there’s no chance of me living there’. The single theme running through this confused commentary is the notion of freedom, associated with healthy outdoor living and with swimming.
I met Geoff, an itinerant seller of cigarette lighters and the like, at St Piran’s as he was on his way to Cornwall. He comes from Basingstoke where his daughter lives in a caravan on a travellers’ site, and where by implication, he lives too. His granddaughter was killed in a traffic accident three years ago (he mentions the date specifically), the day after her twelfth birthday; his two daughters travelling with her were also badly injured but have recovered. After the accident he went on holiday to Cornwall and is now repeating the experience. He says that he has tried talking to God about the accident but had no reply, so this time will talk to Amy, his (deceased) granddaughter instead.
He mentions in passing that he has been married but they have split up; that he is also illiterate. He talks about having a gift of second sight, but does not call this religious. He holds strong and often negative opinions – there is no point in feeling sorry for yourself, ‘I’ve no time for robbers, murders, or child abusers. I’ve a better idea than throwing them in jail’. He doesn’t like Myra Hindley’s use of religion and thinks that charity should start at home before Christian Aid abroad:
I don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t take drugs, I’m not a reformed addict. I’ve no time for wasters. Sometimes I think you encourage [it], I’ve no time for that. It puts nothing in. I am in receipt of benefits, do my own thing in the meantime. The vehicle is bought with my own sweat. It’s not given me by the Social.
He has mixed views about the Church, strongly disliking his Catholic education, but speaking quite warmly about a recent visit to a URC church in Basingstoke where the Bible was taught clearly. He distinguishes this from religion.
There is little direct biographical material in this interview, although she speaks at length and with clarity about her beliefs and understanding of God. This is examined in more detail in a later section, but there is an outline of the major events in her life. Her early years (from 2 until 15½) were spent in a children’s home run by nuns; she also refers to a Church of England school where she was educated until she left. Home had been problematic between mother, father and stepfather. On leaving she became homeless, was arrested for vagrancy and sent to a remand home. It is at this point (aged 16½), without real home or money that she turns to shoplifting and ‘I haven’t been out of crime since’. She refers to two other episodes in her life. She has been married three times, once to an alcoholic, once to a heroin addict, and has had children who went into care:
I sort of wandered. I’ve been married a few times, been homeless as well. My marriages have broken up. Had three marriages so my children went into care, because there wasn’t places that would take children in those days. Today, it’s a lot easier for … one parent families to get accommodation than it was for, back in those days in the early 60s, late 60s, early 70s.
She mentions that she has worked in residential homes for the elderly in Weston-super-Mare, and is critical about the way these are run. Her kindness to the residents and her outspokenness did not endear her to her employers. Since she has been at Aubyn House, Julie has been attempting to reform her habitual shoplifting and in her own view is making some progress.
I first met Jim as an acute and voracious player of Scrabble. As a result of playing and losing many games with him I asked for an interview. When Jim tells his story, he mentions two significant events. He was in work as a steel fixer, but the end of a ‘bad relationship’ about 15 or 16 years previously led him to a series of bedsits and other temporary accommodation, having abandoned his house to his girlfriend. Ten years before on August Bank Holiday he had been involved in a near-fatal car accident, in which he had come drunkenly out of a pub in front of a car. He spent some time in hospital, and because of confusion with housing benefit while he was there, he lost the council house in which he was living. He spent another period of very insecure accommodation, preferring in the end to sleep rough with nothing, than to have the little he did possess stolen by others. He describes these times in this exchange:
David. But have you ever been out on the streets?
Jim. Yes, I have. At one time, it was about five years, sleeping anywhere, hedges, anybody’s floor, in a bus, squats. I used to get drunk just to make me forget, so I could sleep. I was like that for about five or six years. Hell of a state.
He is currently living in a bedsit which is relatively satisfactory, but he hopes to have his own home again at some point.
He feels that he has started a process of recovery with the help of St Piran’s and the National Health Service, and is beginning to be less numb, less blank, which is how he described himself before. He has also been receiving treatment for a form of obsessive compulsive disorder which expresses itself in habitual counting. He explains this by saying that he had been single for such a long time, that he had had no one to talk to. His former partner offered him a new start two years ago, but he refused – he has become distrustful of women. When asked about God, he expresses no particular belief except to suggest that at the time of his accident ‘someone didn’t want me to die’.
I had met Marc at least once before this interview and knew a little of his story, yet at first glimpse the transcript appears confused, with jumps backwards and forwards in time and in geography. The connections made are those of the speaker and rely more on emotions than logic, yet close attention reveals a clear series of biographical elements which will now be summarised.
Early childhood in Doncaster appears chaotic – a dysfunctional family where a drunken father physically, emotionally, and sexually abused him, and physically assaulted his mother. There is also mention of a stepfather and a stepmother, though when he refers to ‘dad’ it is uncertain exactly who is meant. He first attempted suicide at the age of 7 and at 14 left home. He returned at 18 as an openly gay man facing rejection by his family because of his sexuality. He spent some time living with Martin in Doncaster where there was a measure of reconciliation with his mother. His homosexuality still caused problems with the family. He was reluctant to tell his other brothers and sisters and was prevented from taking a partner to his stepbrother’s wedding.
He moved from Doncaster to the South West, hoping to find work, but ostensibly to live with Andrew, a new lover. This relationship broke down almost from the outset, and with it went any secure home. Marc moved into The Victory hostel reluctantly, describing his surprise at shared rooms, drunk residents and the attempt to force him to smoke cannabis. At the evening meal he eats, goes to the nearest toilet and makes himself sick. He was at The Victory a number of months, tried a reconciliation with Andrew which failed, moved to a B&B in a local town with the same practice of making himself sick and taking laxative, then returned to The Victory for a second time. He started another relationship with John which went badly wrong, ending when he was stabbed and hospitalised. John reminded him of his father: ‘it was like my dad because my father beat me up, laid me down on floor, smacked me in the face with his fist violently, because he’d been drinking. This is not for me’.
He agreed to give a statement to the police, but months went by before the court case and the whole incident preyed on his mind. He was shocked to read his name in a local newspaper report and this prompted another suicide attempt. It was at this time that he first visited Pete The Rock, a Christian cafe close to The Victory hostel. He was drawn more closely into the social activities and did some voluntary work there. Shortly afterwards he moved to Aubyn House and changed his name from Stephen to Marc. By the time of the interview he had been at Aubyn for 14 months and is looking forward to moving out into his own accommodation, describing this as ‘the second thing I’ve done in my life’, the first being when he left home aged 14.
Before the interview finished, he describes how he has written to his parents and started to renegotiate his relationship with them and the rest of his family. He wants to tell them what life has really been like, but worries that they will try to persuade him to return to Doncaster. Indirectly at this point, he also mentions that another man, Phil, had raped him and subsequently threatened him. This incident probably occurred before his arrival at Aubyn. The interview ends as Marc tells me that he is more able to tell people his story now, but that he recognises that he has to tackle problems for himself.
After some opening remarks, Pete begins the interview with a precise event and date, and in fact he says little about his life prior to that event: ‘I lost my first wife, New Year’s Day, thinking that when I lost her that as I was going to continue living, I was going to spend the rest of my life on my own’. This was followed three and a half years later by the death of his mother-in-law. At this point both his parents, his wife’s parents and his wife were all dead. However, only a month later he met the woman who was to become his second wife and they were married. In the meantime, he had been forced to take early retirement from the dockyard on the grounds of ill health, and therefore spent a great deal more time at home. The story of the breakdown of his second marriage and his experience of homelessness began properly after about 11 years of married life. The reason he gives for the collapse of their relationship is the difference in their ages, yet he recognises later that she has had a difficult childhood, and needed a father as much as a husband. He describes their first encounter: ‘At quarter to ten that evening I met the most beautiful 23-year-old, blue-eyed, blonde which any man could ever wish to meet and remember then at the time I was 47 years of age, which put an age gap of 24 years between us’. By this point, his wife was 34 and he was 58 – ‘an old man who was quite happy to spend his time of an evening sat watching the TV …’. They had two children from his wife’s first marriage, who were now teenagers. This is how he describes life at that time:
I’m afraid that my children were, by then, teenagers so my wife and my children used to disappear at seven o’clock of an evening, meet up with another crowd of youngsters and have an evening together, much to my regret, smoking dope and listening to reggae music. She used to come home with ten to a dozen of these youngsters every evening and I accepted that, I appreciated that my wife had to have friends of her own, the same as I did.
However, what he really objected to was that when he came downstairs in the morning, they were still a number of these friends sleeping in the sitting room. Eventually he gave his wife an ultimatum that it was either them or him. His wife preferred the friends, so Pete left home and moved into a local B&B. However, remembering his marriage vows, during the seven months he spent there, he continued to provide financial support for his wife and children. What he only realised later was that most of the money had been spent on providing amphetamines for his wife’s increasing dependency. An attempted reconciliation failed when she appeared ‘stoned out of her brainbox’, so he was forced to spend the night in his car in a local car park. He was referred by his doctor the following day to The Victory hostel where he spent five weeks. A second attempt at reconciliation with his wife lasted two days, after which she told him without equivocation that their marriage was over. His reaction was rapid. He drove to Dartmoor, swallowed sleeping tablets, connected a hosepipe to the car exhaust and prepared to end his life. He woke up surprised the next morning.
Pete explains that on further examination the hosepipe was still connected, but the engine had broken down. He had to be towed back, discovering that the car was beyond repair. He first visited his wife, who promptly called the police, and so he was arrested and spent the day in the police cells before being released in the evening. He went to his house and his wife refused him entry this time, so he was forced to return to the police station. They arranged accommodation for him again at The Victory. A couple of days later he accepted a place in the Salvation Army hostel. While he is quite critical of the Salvation Army regime, this marks a turning point in Pete’s life. He was still in contact with his wife so was able to give her the support she needed while her health and dependency worsened. After 10 months in the hostel, he was accepted at Aubyn House, where he has now been for 16 months. He is impressed that the staff there bent the admission rules to allow him in, since he was in some need of supervised care.
He believes his wife was close to death as a result of addiction, but she is now on her way to recovery. She visits him two to three times a week, spending the night with him. They hope to secure a bungalow from a local housing association, where they intend to live together again. Pete is realistic that the woman he married has changed considerably in the intervening years.
Two other significant factors are mentioned in Pete’s story: his ability to sing, which he particularly made use of after the death of his first wife, and again now that his life is more secure. He is keen to share a gift which he regards as coming from God, especially at concerts for charity. Secondly, he describes himself as going to Church and Sunday School as a child. Although at 18 he decided that he had had his fill of church, he clearly retains respect for the clergy, speaking about the visit of a local curate after the death of his first wife, his friendship with the vicar who married him to his second wife, and his stay with the Salvation Army. After a long period of absence, he says that he has started attending services again in the Church of England.
When Richard left the Navy he moved straight to John Brown Engineering. He worked there for some years before sickness and an operation forced him to leave. It had been completely unexpected: ‘Never had an illness, just that things came to a halt, which I’ve never experienced before’. He does not say how precisely he came to the town, or became homeless, but does describe where he is living now:
A friend of mine, whom I’ve known for a number of years, has got like a conservatory place with pot plants and things, so I’ve got like a Z bed, so just sleep there. No cooking facilities. I’m grateful to St Piran’s for meals cooked. Saves me a lot of money because if I was going to restaurants and things, I would say that I would never get through the week with what I get. Four to five days a week I get something inside me, heated up.
It is difficult to keep warm in the winter, and find somewhere to go on Saturdays and Sundays. He uses the swimming baths for washing.
Richard finds his present situation very restricting and is looking forward to getting well again. When he retires he would like to do some voluntary work with homeless people because he feels that he has some understanding of their experience. He feels strongly that more should be done about homelessness, ‘because it’s not like a thing crept up overnight’. He sees his present situation as a task or a test to gain experience, that this is part of a bigger plan which has been worked out in advance, with a purpose yet to be discovered. Richard is more philosophical now he is older, more accepting, ‘you sit and listen more’.
A review of Tim’s interview transcript reveals a loop-like structure in which certain themes recur and phrases are repeated often with no apparent connection to the question asked, but with a new piece of information added. Staff at St Piran’s have said that his short-term memory-loss is due to diabetes and some alcohol dependency. The two main themes of his story focus on his working life and his divorce, both of which are connected to his housing problems, but with the exact sequence of events and precise links left vague. He worked for British Aerospace but implies that during a large-scale retrenchment he was made redundant. He then worked for the Government Information Service in conjunction with the Army, where his job was to interview serving soldiers for local papers and specialist publications. He mentions that once he took part in an exercise in Jordan:
The British government was asked to provide assistance. If they had sent troops in it would have been an act of aggression, so some bright character thought of staging an exercise. ‘Get someone like Timothy to walk into Jerusalem and get the parachute regiment to find him’.
He was already in his fifties at this stage and the fixed-term contract was not renewed because of his age.
Tim speaks of being forced into a marriage with the woman he was living with because of the traditional views of her father. He implies that not long after the marriage the relationship ended and the divorce was difficult. They did not own the house they lived in, and so to avoid paying alimony he simply disappeared. He comments adversely on his experience of bedsits and greedy landlords, preferring his present arrangements: ‘I sleep in the doorway of a bank’. Rather charmingly, he makes these and other remarks as if they are quotations from his own autobiography. Although he has to sign on every day at the Benefits Office, he sees this as a way of being able to pay his debts off.
He says that his experience of homelessness has taught him the essentials of life, and that his Christian faith has been strengthened. While he was brought up in the Church of England, he now prefers to attend the Baptist Church where they take an interest in him while respecting his lifestyle.