Begin Again Moments: The Reality of Homelessness

0:00Well, when we were kids, some of the kids in my street went to a little church, a Sunday school. And one day, Miss Williams, a Sunday school teacher, said, next week there's a new boy coming and you better be kind to him. He doesn't have a mom and dad like you, lives in something called a care home, and we're going to pick him up from the care home and bring him to Sunday school. And when Ronnie arrived, he's a couple of years older than us and he was unusual. First thing he did was hide Miss Williams' handbag. Second thing he did was put my friend Cecil in a headlock. He was a bit unusual. and then when he was 11 he disappeared we didn't see him for five years when i was researching my book i discovered he'd been sent to a home 200 miles away that the report described as disgracefully for subnormal boys he was there for five years and eventually that school was closed down because the carers had sexually abused the kids and they were imprisoned um but ronnie comes back at 16 and occasionally he would drop into a youth club I ran and then you wouldn't see him again.

1:00But now it's two days before Christmas and he's on my front door. He's found out where I live. And he's got all his worldly possessions in a black plastic bag.

1:08Davina McCall:And how old was he at this point? 29, 30. Wow, so a fully grown man. Oh, yeah, fully grown man. And how long was it since you'd seen him? Probably, well, I used to see him around the best you'd see him around, you know. So I'd probably seen him perhaps six months before or a year before. It might have been a little sooner. But you'd see him around and he'd occasionally drop into the youth club where we were. But he was always distant and always different. But now he turned up at one of my kids' youth club's homes the night before. And the kid's father said, there's a tramp at the door. And the boy came down and told Ronnie to come up to me.

1:49And he was there. And in his other hand, he had a frozen chicken. I said, well, it wasn't with the chicken. He said, somebody gave it to me for Christmas, a frozen chicken. And then I said two words, and I've often thought about it, Davina. I said, come in. But those two words changed all our lives. And, yeah, and he did. Diane made him a meal.

2:18Davina McCall:And so it started with a meal? Started with a meal. As the meal was finishing, Diane ushered me into another room. We hadn't been married long. We didn't have kids then. So how long had you been married? Oh, four years, three years. So that's really not a very long time at all. You've got no kids? No, we've got no kids. And you invite this man in for dinner, and then she ushers you into the kitchen, and she says, what? What are we going to do? And I said, what do you mean? What are we going to do? We said, it's Christmas. He's got nowhere to stay. She said, look, I'll clear the guest room out, ask him if he'd like to stay with us tonight.

2:52And I went back in, and I think by then we'd move Ronnie into another room and settled him in front of Coronation Street. And he hated taking his eyes off the Rover's return because I said, Ronnie, and he turned around eventually, and I said, would you like to stay with us tonight? And Ronnie Lockhart said, fine. And he did stay that night and the next night and over Christmas, and he never left.

3:17Davina McCall:And so when Just I know that like Ronnie You'd known him for a very long time And he'd been a bit awkward And he was a bit difficult But now we know he was neurodivergent And had struggled a bit with communicating With people So you invited him in But was he like easy to talk to? Was he easy to get on? No he was agony Davina We were around the dinner table and we were having a meal with him and it was like dragging out syllable after syllable. And so I would say to him, well, Diane said, where are you sleeping tonight, Ronnie? And he'd say, nowhere tonight. Well, where do you normally sleep? Well, here and there.

4:02And it was agony drawing every little thing out. And before he went to bed, Diane said to him, would you like a shower before you go? No, thanks. And she looked to me for support and I shrank my shoulders and he went up to bed. I think, you know, the thing is, I suppose,

4:23Davina McCall:with someone like him, if the story about the care home was true and that he'd potentially been a victim of abuse there, you know, something like a shower could be terrifying. Yeah. You know, like... Yeah, all of that. He was living on the streets or not having anywhere, no fixed abode. You'd be in constant danger. You'd be on high alert all the time. Do you know, Davina, you're absolutely right, and I've never thought about that, the shower thing. Oh, really? No, you're right. Of course you're right. That must have been part of it, mustn't it? And he was always saying phrases like, have I done a bad thing?

5:11Or have I offended you? And always phrases like that would come out. So he goes, he's in the room next to us. And Dan and I are in bed. And Diane says to me, is we going to sleep? What if he does something? I said, what did you have in mind? Don't be funny. We hardly know him. I said, what do you want me to do? she put a chair under the door. So I go downstairs, I come up with this darn inch, and I stick this chair under the door, and Diane's practically asleep by then. But you know, Davina, and I don't understand this, that chair won under the door for long. Feverest evenings, Ronnie, there was never the slightest hint of fear of Ronnie, not with our kids, not with anybody else.

5:59He was the loveliest man.

6:02Davina McCall:but I mean even when I when I first read your story the idea of taking even though you did know him a bit basically a stranger you don't know him very well into your home and I can understand why Diane would do that it's a very brave thing of course but then he stayed I mean I think what you've done with what I guess like psychologists would call a social experiment is unpicked or created like a blueprint of how to kind of fix society. By just taking in one person for that amount of time, you have learned what is wrong with the whole of society and how we can build a more loving, inclusive place for people.

6:57Davina McCall:it's like what I mean what would what would you say are maybe the top learnings that you've had that can really change someone's life that any of us can do well of course I'm no expert on homelessness as such or that but but something's going on 25 % of people who are homeless have got a background in care I teach creative writing in a prison 25%, roughly the same proportion of adult men, have got a background in care. So although social workers and others do incredible jobs, something is going on. And a report came out some time ago of what could be changed, and it said what is needed is not just systems but relationships.

7:45Relationships. So more and more now, local authorities are trying to put kids in care. There's something called supported lodgings where a child will go and perhaps live with a family or organizations such as Safe Families or Home for Good with fostering. The truth is it's relationships. Yes. We all need relationships. We need that more than breath almost. So if we can give that, that changes everything. And even when we're buying a copy of Big Issue, not just to buy it but to actually look in somebody's eye and ask a few questions and a little bit of dignity. You know, I was on a subway in New York many years ago, and a guy came on pitching for money, and we all had our heads down reading, and a woman gave him a dollar bill.

8:33And then just before it came to the next station, he moved towards the doors, and he turned around, and he said, in a very clear voice, he's a young guy, and his features were pinched with the cold. And he said, ladies and gentlemen, I haven't always been like this, and you should all know that anything can happen to anybody. and now when he's gone there's a silence in the carriage because we know a philosopher's been on the train and he's right yes we spoke to one of the guys in our homeless center the other day he's homeless man he said i lost my family and my kids in a house fire and i never i never got over i never none of us know and and the really scary thing is we think we're a million miles away from that kind of life, but not necessarily.

9:24Not necessarily. We need each other. And that's the tragedy today is we have more communication than ever digitally, but more loneliness. And so there'll be people in our street who, look, I don't recommend what we did, but we can take a bunch of flowers around, we can say, how are you doing? The tiniest thing can make a difference.

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11:17Davina McCall:You never went back? Never went back. Wow. 15? Yep yeah and even now when I think about it now I feel a bit sad about it because it's it's um I went from having a father and a mother I've got three brothers we're all together in a house and then suddenly I'm on my own out in the real world and And I think the thing that really hit me was just how unprepared I was for the real world. Even though the eight-year-old experience, that wasn't my daily experience. That was just a one-off experience when I was younger. Actually, at 15 years old, looking like an adult. So you don't look, I didn't look 15.

11:50I was, I looked, I was a rugby player. I looked like a grown-up. You know, most people thought I was 18, 19, 20. So, you know, 15 years old out in the street. Yeah, but I mean, the other side of it is the world I learned suddenly throwing out into the real world. I have a lot of empathy for the homeless because I was actually homeless in total for eight weeks. But the homeless people were the kindest people ever to me. Most people's experience of homeless people in this country are like someone begging you for money. I had a completely different experience. They gave me the half a sandwich they had left.

12:19They gave me the blanket that they couldn't really justify. They needed it for themselves to me. They told me how to survive in the streets. The people that I thought were almost society's abnormal weirdos were the kindest people.

12:35Davina McCall:Kinder than your mother. Kinder than my mother in that moment.