When I was 16, I left home. It wasn’t a choice I made – it was a family breakdown. We grew up in a council flat in Coventry in a normal working-class council estate, rough in parts but full of good people doing the best that they could. Mum had me at quite an early age by a man who soon disappeared. I was maybe one year old when she met the man who would raise me and who I had always known as Dad.
On my 16th birthday, all of that changed. I found myself homeless, living in the back of a yellow Mini Metro in the back of a pub car park, sleeping in the woods, or frankly anywhere I could get my head down for a bit. I’d left school, so some friends tried to help me, but a lot of their parents told them to stop letting me come round the house. When you’re homeless, people instantly assume the worst.
And I completely get it. For all intents and purposes, homelessness scares some people. I don’t know why. If you live in a cosy house and you’ve got everything you’ve always wanted, the thought of someone coming in could be scary. In my mind, friends’ families should have stepped up. But all my friends were told that it was bad news and I should be avoided. What I’m trying to say is that I had known I was working class, but then, being homeless, I was lower. I was an underclass.
Then I struck gold. I met a girl called Bryony who was a bit older than me, 24, through a friend. She had a flat and a little boy. All of a sudden, I had this new family that didn’t think the worst of me and who needed me at a time when, by and large, I felt looked down on by everyone. That this two-year-old boy was looking up to me shifted something, not just in my brain but in my heart. I loved it very much.
A week after my 18th birthday, there were two double whammies. I found out that Dad wasn’t my real dad. Then Bryony died. She’d always suffered quite badly with asthma and had to go to bed with a nebuliser. She’d had a few bad attacks in the six months before this when we had to go to the hospital.
I came back one day and there was no reply to my knock at the door, so I threw a few stones up at the window. Her little boy pulled back the curtains, and I told him to go to the front door, where I opened the letterbox. The words he said then will stick with me forever: “I can’t wake my mummy”. I knew we had to break in, and that’s how I found her, lying on the bedroom floor.
After that, I had to get out of Coventry. I found myself in Nottingham at a hostel for under-20s. It was fairly rough. You were given food bank parcels every week to eat in your room, where you had a tiny, little one-hob oven, so you could cook yourself a meal – and when I say cook a meal, I mean you could make beans on it.
But I stayed for a while, and they were good. They ended up putting me in touch with various charities and helping me deal with the council, benefits, and what have you. Eventually, they found me a little one-bedroom council flat in Nottingham, fully furnished with second-hand donated furniture. I went to college, got my life together, and I moved to Manchester – and I’m still here 25 years later.
What I would say now is that I didn’t realise that there were people out there who could help. As far as I was concerned, I was on my own, and I had to sort this mess out myself. When you’re a 16-year-old kid with no family, and then an 18-year-old kid who is grieving, it’s hard to sort anything out when you can barely think straight, let alone get your life straight.
It’s important that the message gets out there that, whatever situation you’re in, it isn’t forever. That’s the key feeling I can always remember. I just remember thinking, “This is it, man, this is it. This is my life now: cold, wet, and it’s never going to get better. Who's going to take a chance on me?” But people do, and I think the more people who know that and the more who can hear that, the better.
Please donate now to the SafeCall campaign, launched by The Independent and charity Missing People, to help raise £165,000 to create a free service to help find new, safe futures for vulnerable children.
For advice, support and options, if you or someone you love goes missing, text or call Missing People on 116 000. It’s free, confidential and non-judgemental. Or visit: missingpeople.org.uk/get-help
