Ending homelessness

When Jane, Stephen’s support worker rang me to say that Stephen was dying, I thought she meant he might be dead in two months. I said I would visit him the following week. I had last seen him six months earlier. He was slightly drunk at the time and his skin a bit blotchy, yet he was cheerful, with ambitious plans for improving his flat. I was shocked by the news and talked on for a bit, but at the other end of the phone there was one of those jarring silences when you suddenly realise that you have missed the point. ‘No, no, he’s dying now. You need to see him today’. So I cancelled my morning appointment and took the train to West Norwood. As I came off the train I could see the ambulance outside Stephen’s block. Inside the ambulance they were busy making him comfortable on the stretcher bed. A mask was clamped to Stephen’s face and his breathing was accompanied by a sickening rasp. He was a stomach-churning yellow-brown colour, the colour of someone whose liver is damaged beyond...

Most days we are rung at Thames Reach by somebody who wants to help the homeless; it is really rather gratifying. Media bods come with propositions intended to shed fresh light on ‘The Plight of the Homeless’. The Big Idea often involves them sleeping rough on the street to give a ‘down and dirty’ account of what it is like to be a rough sleeper. Quite often they are genuinely unaware that a proposal of this type is put to us at least once a month. Sometimes the call is from a designer with a new invention to pilot, such as a collapsible tent for rough sleepers or a particularly warm body bag to keep them snug during those winter nights. As the vast majority of rough sleepers aspire to a bricks and mortar solution rather than a life under canvas or in a sleeping bag, we tend to give them short shrift. Some approaches are from, to be frank, cranks. On this particular morning I seem to have been reached by a Premier League crank. The conversation went as follows: ‘Mr Swain, my na...

There were six rough sleepers at the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo when we got there at 6.30am on Thursday morning. The group included a Lithuanian carpenter who had got drunk in London and missed his train back to Bognor Regis as well as two Poles who conversed intently with my colleague, a Thames Reach outreach worker who is fluent in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and English. The only female in the group was a young woman – let’s call her Chloe – who swore profusely and good-humouredly at the men sleeping rough around her. Chloe’s wrist was bandaged up and her story was this: She had fallen out with her boyfriend Pete the night before and ‘split’ with him. The break-up had led Chloe to cut her wrist using a shard of glass. The Accident and Emergency department at nearby St Thomas’ Hospital had duly bandaged it up and, being unwilling to stay there overnight, she had returned to the street to sleep rough. It seemed as if her action was both a cry for help and an attempt to create...