Tuesday, 24 December 2013

Homelessness - it ain't what it used to be


I spent Christmas 1979 working in a homeless shelter in Coventry.

Like Maia in Ghost Town, I’d spent the summer after a graduated volunteering at the Shelter, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go back there for Christmas. 

Christmas Eve, I went to the midnight service at the ancient Holy Trinity Church next to the Cathedral. And Christmas morning we borrowed the kitchen at the local Methodist church to cook turkey and all the trimmings for around 30 homeless men who had nowhere else to go.

Back then, most of those we catered for probably complied with your stereotype of a homeless person. They were male. In their thirties or forties, but looking a lot older. And almost all were alcoholics.

Even back then, though, there was much to defy lazy stereotyping. We did indeed have an ex-soldier,  like Pongo, who had failed to adjust to civvy street – who kept himself spotlessly clean and had a passion for mathematical puzzles and lateral thinking. With a few exceptions, these guys were kind, often funny, and fiercely protective of the women volunteers.

Move the clock on a few years and the nature of homelessness was changing.  First came the transients, who hit the road looking for work when the recession hit in the early 80s.  Then there were those who slipped through the cracks of ‘care in the community’ – the mentally ill who failed to adjust to life outside an institution, but who hadn’t Pongo’s resources to cope on their own.   And then there were the children – the runaways and those leaving care at 16 – who in the late eighties had their right to claim benefits taken away from them.

By then I was working in an office on Kingsway in central London.  I will never forget the drift of homeless people that seemed, night by night, to move further north from the river, starting on the Strand and moving their way up Kingsway until, by dusk, every doorway would be occupied by a huddled form under a threadbare blanket or a piece of scavenged cardboard.

To walk south over Waterloo Bridge towards the National Theatre was even more heartbreaking.  Within spitting distance of the champagne-swilling excesses of the Square Mile, a cardboard city mushroomed. There hard-core, old-style homeless men slept alongside children who didn’t look old enough to be allowed out on their own – never mind to be living on the streets.

Gradually things changed.  Policies – some well-meant and some ruthless – gradually reduced the numbers of rough sleepers. And in the boom years of the noughties, the number of homeless genuinely reduced.

It's on the rise again now, though you might not know it. There are more rough sleepers to be seen in London than there have been for a decade or more - but nothing like the numbers I saw in the late eighties.  Homelessness has become a hidden scourge.

Homelessness today is kids like Alesha in Polly Courtney’s Feral Youth, living under the radar and dodging social services as they sofa-surf from one unsuitable home to another. It’s mothers with small children living in B&Bs with filthy communal kitchens and stairways booby trapped with used hypodermics. It’s hostels for young adults you wouldn’t home a dog in.

This is the legacy of three decades of failing to provide the housing stock that’s needed, runaway rent prices and – now – a government that is hell-bent on reducing the welfare bill by cutting back on housing benefit. Whatever side of the fence you sit – the three of those together makes for a toxic mix.

Back in 1966, Ken Loach made Cathy Come Home – a film about a young woman forced into homelessness.  It helped to launch the charity Shelter and brought about a change in the law that  gave a duty to local councils to house vulnerable women and children.

We need another Cathy Come Home . We need to change the narrative from ‘workless scroungers claiming thousands in housing benefit’ to something that reveals the true picture of homelessness in the 21st Century. And we need to do it before it’s too late for kids like Alesha.

Christmas seems like a good time to start.

Friday, 6 December 2013

The Power of Reconciliation: RIP Nelson Mandela


When I was a very small child, my father wrote a book which contained a short chapter on Apartheid.  Both the book and my father were immediately banned in South Africa – which didn’t seem to have much effect on us, as we didn’t live in South Africa and had no immediate plans to travel there.

But it meant that my father became a minor focus for anti-Apartheid activists escaping from South Africa, and for other South Africans who came to view their country in a different light once they travelled outside its borders. As a result, I grew up hearing extraordinary stories of courage in opposition, of last minute escapes and daring subterfuge.

When I arrived at University, one of the first conversations I had was about the rights and wrongs of boycotting South African goods. And when I started work, I would walk every day through Trafalgar Square, past the South African embassy and see the handful of people holding their perpetual vigil outside its doors.

I remember almost weeping when, in April 1994, that handful of people swelled to queue that wrapped itself round the building, as ex-pat South Africans queued to vote in the first free elections in the country’s history.

Last year, I was privileged to attend the opening, on Mandela Day, of the Shakespeare: Staging the World exhibition at the British Museum, attended by Sonny Venkatrathnam who was a prisoner with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island for twelve years

The exhibition included the’ Robben Island Bible,’ Venkatrathnam’s copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.  The only other books allowed on Robben Island were religious texts, and in order to persuade the guards to let him lend it to other prisoners, Venkatrathnam pasted Divali cards over the cover and convinced them it was a ‘Hindu Bible’.  The book was passed among the prisoners and 32 of them annotated the text, marking passages that had particular meaning for them.

The book lay open at the passage from marked Julius Caesar by Nelson Mandela:
“Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.”

When Nelson Mandela walked free from Robben Island in 1990, his image in the world changed.  For almost thirty years, no photographs of him had been permitted. The images of him we had all seen – on banners, on t-shirts, at every anti-Apartheid rally – were of a young man, an amateur boxer. In an instant, as he walked through those gates, that image changed.  He was older, much thinner, his hair beginning to grey.

But when he spoke, his image changed in a much more profound way – from a Freedom Fighter to a man who was able to forgive.  A man who could feel nothing but compassion for his oppressors.  A man who could hold his nation together through the power of reconciliation.

Today, the Rainbow Nation has lost its father. May they, and all of us, continue to walk is his light.

Monday, 2 December 2013

Triskele's Black Friday ... and Saturday ... and Sunday ...

Black Friday may have come and gone, but TRISKELE BOOKS have one more treat in store for book lovers. For just three days next weekend, from 6th-8th December:

ALL TRISKELE eBOOKS ACROSS ALL PLATFORMS 
IN US, UK, EUROPE & AUSTRALIA
WILL BE AT 0.99   

We have CRIME FICTION:
Gillian Hamer's historical crime thrillers set along the wild Welsh coast, laced with an otherworldly flavour.
http://authl.it/B0080JOA7W
http://authl.it/B00A6DL1RW
Or JJ Marsh's fast-paced international crime series, with the incomparable Inspector Beatrice Stubbs. 

http://authl.it/B007V512A4
http://authl.it/B00CUP0QPM
http://authl.it/B00A5TYZS4
HISTORICAL FICTION:
The first two volumes in Liza Perrat's Auberge des Anges Perdues series, set during the French Revolution and in Nazi-occupied France...   

Or JD Smith's beautiful retelling of an ancient Cornish legend...                          


http://authl.it/B00CS5X020
http://authl.it/sh
http://authl.it/sg

and of course my own CONTEMPORARY FICTION from Canada and Coventry:


http://authl.it/B00CWD6HDM
http://authl.it/B00G6K9DQU
So if you have yet to sample one of the Triskele authors - or if you want to complete a collection you have already begin - now is the time to do it. Just click on the links below each cover image to find the sales point for your region.

All Triskele eBooks across all platforms at the special Christmas price of 99cents/pence. 
December 6th-8th 2013
DON'T MISS OUT!