The hidden homeless
Rebecca de Saintonge describes how Friends in Tunbridge Wells are turning their Meeting house into flats for homeless young people
In Tunbridge Wells it’s not just dogs that get turfed onto the streets after Christmas, it’s children. Workers in the local housing department call it ‘the season of parental chuck-outs’. It was a bitterly cold February when Roisin, just fifteen, found herself homeless. Locked into an abusive relationship, and drinking heavily, her behaviour had changed so radically that her family was no longer able to tolerate her. For four months she lived rough, sleeping wherever she could – in car parks and children’s playgrounds – trying to keep decent by washing her clothes in public toilets, smoking weed at night to help her sleep. She was cold, scared and exhausted, and all the while tied to a man whose destructive emotional hold she felt herself unable to break.
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