More single men should get social housing

 

More single men should get social housing. I know there isn’t enough social housing full stop. I was shocked to learn the other day that out of all the thousands of houses Peabody plan to build in the next decade only 6% will be social housing partly because they get no grants from the government anymore.

I got talking to this 59 year old Irish guy on one of my estates and he told me the saddest, saddest story. He is the eldest of 8 children, 4 of whom are step brothers and sisters. His earliest memory was of getting beaten by his step-father for something his sister did. He remembers once, this same man, in obviously a better frame of mind, asking him what he wanted most in the whole wide world to which he replied, ‘for you to stop hitting mummy’. His mother drank. At least two of his sisters were adopted and he was reconciled with them via a social worker 47 years later.

At one point during his childhood when he was not attending school for one reason or another and could not read or write a teacher intervened and he was given a place at a private convent school where he thrived and began to learn. However, the teasing he got from his peers led him to stop going and a chance to reach his potential was thrown away.

He spent most of his working life as a hod carrier on construction sites and only recently has managed to get work as a security guard.

You can see that the man was once beautiful. Great aquiline bone structure and clear blue eyes. This and his streetwise charm enabled him to draw the women and he got married and had two children. Goodness knows what sort of upbringing his wife had had, but she had affairs and seemed to expect her husband to show he cared by beating her. He didn’t beat her, but left her. I don’t know how much on-going contact or support he provided to his girls, but his ex-wife is now dead and the children will have nothing to do with him.

Life went on. He went to prison at least twice for GBH. At some point in his late 40s he got talking to a guy in the pub who worked for the council and this guy helped him to get a council flat. He had to go on the dole and get a psychiatric assessment, but he managed it. The security of that one bedroom flat with its window, balcony, front door extra iron bars helped turn his life around. That and a Jewish women he dated for 3 years who taught him Pilates. It doesn’t sound like he decorates it particularly well, but it keeps him out the pub. He is one of the lucky ones.

As we age, we all have sadness in our lives, but to me his seemed particularly unremitting and cruel. He has the most beaten up, twisted and distorted nose I have ever seen in my entire life that he has to put a spray up every day to be able to breathe through. Yet, in all this, he still felt able, and he was not drunk when he said this, to say that he felt God had walked with him. All his friends are dead.

The picture is from an exhibition I went to at the Tate Modern.