Chapter Thirty-Four - Shelter

Monday 4th December

'Hilary!  Hilary!'

Someone was shaking her gently by the shoulder.  Hilary Carrington opened her eyes.  Despite the hardness of the camp bed's thin mattress and the snoring of some of her companions, she had fallen asleep; she sensed, from the darkness, that she had slept only briefly and there was a crisis of some sort which needed her attention.

'What's the matter?' she asked anxiously.

'It's eight o'clock,' said Paula.  'Tom asked me to give you a nudge in case you wanted a cooked breakfast or porridge and toast, as the hot food is going fast.'

'Eight o'clock!  It can't be!' 

Hilary sat up and focused on her odd surroundings.  A night-light glowed on a shelf beside Terry's well-ordered ranks of tinned stuff.  Her bed was in the foodbank storeroom, closest to the door, one of five.  The one immediately beside her was undisturbed, its pillow undented and its blankets neatly folded.  The other three were empty now but had been slept in, their covers disarranged when their occupants got up for their morning meal.

'I guess you had a quiet night,' said Paula.

'Reasonably so,' Hilary replied.  She was concerned that she had slept so deeply she hadn't heard the other women get up.  It had been her responsibility to make sure they had a safe night's sleep.

Hilary would have preferred to have settled down to sleep at Tom's side that night, in their new bedroom, in their new house.  They had finally moved on Saturday, aided by the Construction Co-op's cheerful team and their small fleet of bio-diesel vans.  Sally refused to take payment for the job, despite seeing that her workers did, insisting it was a thank you present to Tom, who had announced he was finally laying down his paint brushes at Christmas.  All the furniture was where it needed to be; the essentials were unpacked.  There remained a myriad of sorting and tidying tasks, although Hilary almost looked forward to these.  She had grown fond of her former home, falling back in love with it after years of tragedy and resentment, as she and Tom had built their married life together there.  She had indulged herself, designing the guest rooms and dressing the communal areas when they launched their Bed and Breakfast enterprise.  She and Tom had made a miniature country estate of the walled rear garden, planting and pruning and lazing and, sometimes, frolicking naughtily through the warm days of shared summers.  When it was finally time to leave for the last time she had wept, hiding her tears against Tom’s shoulder.  Despite this, she had no doubt they had made the right decision to move on before Andromeda House became too much of a burden.  Her 'little cottage' came with the promise of quieter, slower days; of independence into their older age, of easy access to all the facilities - bookshops, theatres, restaurants, health centres, hospitals - they might need for a contented retirement.  

It also came with finite space and an imperative to declutter still further.  Having entrusted some of her furniture to her niece, Hilary was left agonising about which of her prints and pictures they should keep and which should be hawked around the well-stocked charity shops of Winchester.  She pondered this on their way down to their shift at the Community Café’s night shelter, sharing her thoughts with Tom and trying to coax some preferences from her husband.  Of course, she would be the first to concede that it was ridiculous to make a fuss about such trivial matters, especially when she would be spending the next twelve or more hours in the company of men and women with neither pictures nor walls on which to hang them, but in such a small space a bad selection would jar terribly.

‘Why don’t we store all of those we can’t find room for in our rooms at the back of the wardrobe for now, my love, and have a fresh look at them in the spring,’ Tom suggested, with eminent good sense.  ‘We don’t have to throw everything out all at once, you know.’

Hilary had continued mentally positioning her prints and paintings in her new home, using the exercise to help her find sleep, once she was sure the women she was keeping company were themselves settled.  It helped to stop her dwelling on their troubles.  She had listened to them all, and to some of the men who had been bedded down in the main café area, offering advice where she had the skills to do so.  Many of their troubles spilled well beyond problematic benefit claims and flawed decisions, although almost all could fairly identify that as a factor.  Vandeny, the Lithuanian meat-packer whose zero-hours contract gave him too low a wage for his work to count as genuine and effective, had lost his housing benefit, and then his roof, and finally his job, as a result.  Hilary offered him an emergency appointment at the Solent Welfare Right's Project, but he was afraid to appeal the decision, convinced he would be deported if he made trouble.  Hilary, who knew nothing of the Home Office's workings, was in no position to reassure him otherwise. 

Denis had been found fit for work, when he was evidently in no such state.  He had tried to make a new claim for Universal Credit but failed, despite help to get online, having no acceptable proof of his identity to show at the Jobcentre and no patience for what seemed unduly personal questions asked to try to establish it.  He agreed to wait around after breakfast for the IT clinic team to see if they could set him up a fresh claim and negotiate a meeting to break the deadlock. 

Andy wasn’t fit for work.  The DWP agreed.  His benefits were in payment, as far as he knew, but into a mate’s account.  He wasn’t mates with that mate anymore but he didn’t know how to contact the Social or change the arrangements for his payments.  Hilary said she’d see him first thing, before they formally opened to the public.  A little unworthily, she rather hoped he might use the cafe's facilities to take a shower and get some clean clothes before they were closeted together.

Two of the women were also without funds.  Monika from Hungary had been begging since her time-limited JSA had run out; she confided to Hilary that she had done street sex work as a last resort the previous week, before learning about the café.  She could get no help from the state without a job first; she understood this.  Paula promised to see if anyone connected with the café or Father Cornelius's church needed a cleaner.  It had worked as a way in to the system for vulnerable migrant women before but Hilary couldn’t help thinking that was a shocking waste of Monika’s talents as a chemistry graduate.

Nicole Hamilton had only recently become homeless after being evicted from a rented house in the south of the borough.  Her ex-husband had taken in their three sons but couldn’t house Nicole and, without her dependent children, the Council decided it had no duty to her.  The root of her crisis lay in the Benefit Cap.  Although of ‘limited capability for work’ due to her mental health, Nicole hadn’t made the grade for the Support Group and her boys were all in robust good health too, growing fast, physically active, eating incessantly, fighting like rats in a sack. 

‘Their dad’s going to get the shock of his life!’ she laughed.

Their dad, settled with a new partner and a new baby, wasn’t all that well-paid himself, according to Nicole, and had been in no position to rescue them when the bailiff arrived. Hilary wondered how secure the boys’ new home would prove to be.  Certainly their step-mother’s charity might run low when she found they could claim Tax Credits for the boys but, with more than two children now in their care, would lose it for her own child.

Nicole joked bitterly that she would have found it easier to budget if they had been more like the couch potato kids who populated so-called documentaries on benefit claimants.  Her boys wore out their cheap supermarket clothes and shoes long before they could be passed down to the next brother.  Nicole got about fifty pounds a week in Housing Benefit.  Her rent had been more than three times that, leaving her with the almost hopeless task of making up the difference from her Tax Credits.  She had managed to do that for a surprisingly long time and might have carried on, had she not made the mistake of borrowing from a local loan shark to pay off the debts from the previous Christmas.  She wouldn’t name names; she still owed him and she would still have to pay him, when she was back on her feet, or there would be trouble for her and for the boys.  

‘What if you could move a long way from here?’ Hilary asked.  

'I would, but the boys need their dad.  He and I fell out but they think the world of him.  He's not a bad man.'

'Could he approach the police about this money lender?'

'I wouldn't want him to.  Not with the baby.'

Hilary couldn't believe that gangster tactics would really be used in such a salubrious suburb but she could say nothing to prompt Nicole to face her fears and report the loan shark. 

Nicole had never meant to be in the house right up to the day the bailiffs came, but there had been nowhere else for her to go.  Her ex-husband had finally agreed to take the boys the night before, if it turned out that her landlord was serious.  He had been certain it wouldn’t happen, that the landlord couldn’t chuck kids out or that, if he could, the Council would have to rescue them and stick them in a decent house at the taxpayer’s expense.  When it looked like they were all heading for a cheap B&B in a dodgy neighbourhood, he agreed to take in his boys.  Nicole was on her own.  She stayed with a friend for a few nights but that ‘didn’t work out.’  She didn’t know who to ask for help finding a hostel place, although she didn’t think she wanted one, from what she’d heard the other rough sleepers saying about some of them, and there was no way she could raise a deposit for anywhere in the private sector.

‘The team here can talk to you about the different hostels,’ Hilary assured her, kindly.  ‘They aren’t all dens of iniquity!’

‘Have you stayed in one?’

Hilary had to admit that she had not.

The last of the women seeking a bed for the night was Lydia, fleeing an abusive relationship without children and unable to get a space in a refuge because they were full of families waiting to be rehoused.  After spending the previous night on the city streets, she had almost been desperate enough to go back and take whatever her partner – quite literally – threw at her, until a fellow rough-sleeper put her wise to the café.  They had walked there together; her companion had picked up a nasty cut on the face from a plastic bottle hurled at them from a passing car, which Hilary had cleaned and dressed using the Project’s first aid kit.  Lydia too was wary of going into a general hostel.  Hilary could offer her no solutions.

‘Are you alright, my love?’ Tom asked, when they had sat together for a supper soup before helping to set the beds up.

‘I feel terrible,’ she replied.  ‘Here we are, moving into our lovely little house, when these people have nothing, literally nothing!  There’s so little I can do.  It’s a vicious circle; they can’t get the help they need with their rent unless they can work but they’re unemployable without a home.  They can’t get subsistence benefits unless they have valid identification documents, but some had to abandon those when they lost or fled their previous home.  With no income at all, they can’t even get rooms in cheap rented houses and even some of the charities turn them away.  I've never seen so much utter misery, Tom, not in all the years I've done this type of work.’  She lowered her voice.  ‘I’m tempted to put up the deposit money for all three of the women here tonight, you know.  We’ve got it, now the old house has been sold.’

Tom had said that was for her to decide, supportively as ever, but without real enthusiasm.  Hilary thought through the practicalities.  She was sure she could make her gifts anonymously, perhaps with the aid of Father Cornelius.  Her worry was where it might end.  She and Tom had promised regular weekend shifts in the run-up to Christmas and into the New Year, for as long as the café could open.  She might set aside the money to get tonight’s homeless women into rooms, only to meet even more needy cases next week, and the week after.  Might it not be better, fairer, to make a generous donation to one of the refuges or housing charities?  Yet that wouldn’t move any one of her companions that night closer to a safe bed for the future.  The urge to do something practical for the people right in front of her, rather than anonymous strangers, had been almost overwhelming.  

The light of morning made matters no simpler.  When she got up and dressed, not having slept fully-clothed as her companions in the makeshift dormitory had done, she found the café clientele already changing, as the night’s guests finished their breakfasts and ambled away, some to secure the best of the daytime pitches, others to appointments with housing professionals and agencies, and paying guests for breakfast coming in.  Tom, looking typically dishevelled and rather haggard, was dishing up scrambled eggs and sausages.

‘Just a little egg and toast for me, Tom darling,’ said Hilary.  I must have a wash and brush up before we start work – I promised someone an early appointment.’

She couldn’t recall which of the whiskery faces she had made that pledge to.

‘Have you had any more thoughts about…?’

‘I’m not sure.  I really must do something, but I have to be realistic too.’

‘That’s true, my love.  We can’t rescue everyone.’  He put two slices of buttered toast and a generous scoop of scrambled egg onto a plate for her.

‘That doesn’t mean we can’t rescue someone,’ she answered.  ‘The awful thing is deciding who.'

Which almost made it easier to do nothing.  Doing nothing, however, was not Hilary’s way.  She looked to see if Father Cornelius was still breakfasting but there was no sign of him.  She resolved to catch him for a quiet word later in the day.  She took a seat at a quiet corner table to think on her own.

'Wotcha Hils!'  Sally Archer crashed into the seat opposite her, clutching a fry-up in one hand and a huge mug of tea in the other.  'Rough night?'

'Frustrating, Sally,' Hilary replied, trying not to wonder what the question said about her appearance.  'I feel quite helpless in the face of all this.'

'Austerity sucks,' said Sally, shovelling a forkful of baked beans into her mouth.

Hilary agreed.

'Can I ask you something, strictly in confidence?' she asked Sally.

Sally nodded.

'Is there a loan shark in your village?'  Hilary half expected Sally to laugh at the very idea. 

'At least one, yeah,' she said.  'Though I hope he'll see the error of his ways, shortly.'

'Sorry?'  Hilary was taken aback.

'Wayne Reynolds owes me a favour after messing up Dan's chances on Amazing Designs, so I've asked him to pay it forwards.'

'Sally...!'

'No-one's going to get hurt.  He's promised me that.  Wayne's hard but he's a man of his word and anyway, if he got into trouble with the law, Marie would murder him!'

'Does he still let property?' asked Hilary, not entirely reassured.

'Is Father Cornelius Catholic?' laughed Sally.  'He's got as much as ever, though Marie's nudged him up-market from his old student squats and HMOs, into the executive dwellings sector.'

That was a pity.  Hilary had hoped he might have some low-budget empty homes she could ask him to rent to her homeless women.

Sally ploughed relentlessly through her meal, wiped her mouth, slung her hard hat back on her head and wished Hilary a good day.

'We're almost finished over the road,' she said.  'Or we hope we are, anyway.  The trouble is, Wave keep changing their minds about what they want to do with it.  First it was shops at the bottom and flats for vulnerable young people above, but they got objections to that.  Then it was going to be student accommodation, but that's been voted out too.'  She looked around the café.  'It'll be a shame if it's empty over Christmas.'

'It would be, wouldn't it?'

Hilary could definitely feel a plan coming together.  However, she needed to talk to Paula rather than the priest about it.