Wilfred De’ath

At some point in the 1990s, I was obliged to spend six weeks in a place called Riverside, a Church of England hostel designed to help homeless people, just out of prison or a mental hospital, turn their lives around.

The place was chaotic and very badly run. Hordes of drunken hoodlums, ‘tattooed gorillas’, roamed the corridors by day and night. There was never a member of staff on duty when you wanted one. There were no single rooms: I was obliged to share with a disgusting, smelly little conman, just out of prison, who came back drunk every night (how is it that these people always have money for drink?). Quite often I found him rifling through my things. I couldn’t wait to leave.

So you can imagine my trepidation on being told, a year or so ago, that I was going to have to return to Riverside for a period of six months. Fortunately, the hostel had managed to turn itself around; it was completely transformed. No more drugged or drunken dregs of society wandering around. A head count of (extremely pleasant) members of staff – nine for thirty residents – who couldn’t have been nicer or kinder or more polite. Half of them did it for the money; the other half genuinely wanted to help people less fortunate than themselves.

I was given a room of my own, ‘the luxury suite’, in honour of my age (eighty next month). Since I am that very rare breed, an English intellectual, I was left alone to read and write.

At night, agency people took over from the daytime staff. They were not so kind or so caring. One night, returning after a long day in London, tired, having been swindled by no fewer than three taxi drivers, I found that the girl on duty had managed to lose my post. I came near to losing my temper.

Christmas was a disaster. They did their best to cook a lunch: cold turkey (how appropriate) with lashings of cranberry sauce straight out of the freezer; undercooked vegetables (sprouts like bullets and carrots like iron nuggets); no dessert; no drink.

I decided to give up and retire to bed to sleep off a heavy head cold, but the fire alarm kept going off – twice on Christmas night and once early on Boxing Day morning.

For the first time in forty years of wandering the face of the Earth, I began to feel a bit sorry for myself. How had I managed to sink so low? A bit of it, of course, is my own fault. But there was also a certain amount of sheer bad luck.

It was certainly time to turn my life around. Or was it too late?