A story about life in a council block in the age of austerity
This is a lightly fictionalised account of John Hoggett’s experience of living alongside people who have fallen through the cracks in society, and are also being let down by welfare services. He highlights how social problems are medicalised and how in his opinion the left has been inadequate in addressing this. Names and identifying details have been changed.
A couple of weeks ago my buzzer rang, the one on the intercom for the front door of the small block of flats I live in. I was having a lazy morning, just clearing up after breakfast, it was about 10am. I spoke into the intercom and this woman with a mid European accent replied, but being hard of hearing I could hardly hear her, so I said, “Wait a moment, I’ll come out.”
I live on the ground floor; there are two other flats on the ground floor besides mine. A young woman called Daisy lives with her young daughter age about 18 months, a young toddler, who I occasionally see. Sometimes, Daisy’s ridiculously hunky boyfriend parades around with his shirt off visible through the kitchen window of their ridiculously small single room bedsit. Opposite to my flat lives an Afro-Caribbean woman, Olive, age mid 40’s, I guess. I have lived in this council owned block for 20 years and Olive has been here even longer than me. We hardly speak. About five years ago carers started calling in about three times a day. No idea why. Her curtains are drawn most of the time but occasionally I have seen that her flat is almost bare. Sometimes I smell skunk in the lobby and assume it’s coming from Olive’s.
There are three bedsits on the second floor but they are empty at the moment. One is boarded up with an exclusion notice stuck on it by the police about six months ago when they evicted a young woman, Debbie, who we all assumed was a crack addict or sex worker. She had a string of strange visitors, doors were left propped open and things kept getting stolen from the block, including my bicycle. She had been rehoused here after a spell in Prospect Park Hospital, the psychiatric hospital about a mile away. At one point she was having a breakdown and smashing up her room. Maisy, another young woman with a baby and hunky boyfriend, Kieran, lived above me in flat 4; they were always mailing the Nuisance Neighbour officer about her. I was too but not as often as Maisy.
I go the front door and speak to this buxom woman, died blond hair, age about 40, 5 foot 4 maybe, green uniform the carers wear. “Olive?” she asks. I tell her Olive lives in flat 1a, I live in flat 1b. She apologises and says Olive isn’t answering in a thick European accent, so I let her in and she knocks on Olive’s door. No answer. “Don’t you have a key?” I ask. Olive’s carers usually let themselves in using keys in the key safe on the wall of the block. We go outside and she opens the key safe and takes out a key. I point out that it’s the key to the block, not to Olive’s flat. Having shut the block door, I point to the lock and indicate to the carer to try the key, I do the demonstration routine because the carer either doesn’t have a brill grasp of English or isn’t understanding me too much, but maybe I don’t understand her accent too well, not having my hearing aids in. We then go to Olive’s flat and I show her that the key she has will not fit into the lock on Olive’s door. We go outside, look in the key safe again and I say, “Don’t’ you have Olive’s phone number? You will have to phone your manager.”
The buxom woman with her green uniform phones her manager while I mutter to myself about not wanting to call the police again – how last month I had to call the police because Ritchie, who lived upstairs above Olive, had not answered the phone or door for a couple of weeks and when the police broke his door down, found he was dead.
The council have been using the block, as well as the two adjacent ones, for former homeless people as short term housing until they find somewhere more permanent for them. It’s been going on for about ten years. All part of austerity, cuts in services, housing shortages, strap capped councils doing what they can. A Labour council cutting services, stressing staff out by giving them too many desperate people to deal with, a dead left (to borrow a phrase) that couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery never mind knock on our doors and say, “What’s life like round here then? How do you feel about it? What shall we do about it?”
My block got filled with desperate former homeless people and I end up feeling like an unpaid worker in a homeless hostel.
Ritchie’s was the second time I called the police, had them break the door down and find someone dead in three months. The first time I was asked to identify the body, I refused; “let some council worker who provided such shit services do it”, I said, but actually Maisy did it. She said she used to work in the Royal Berks, our local hospital and was used to seeing corpses, even if this time it was a guy she used to see several times a week for the last year or so. The first body was my friend Pete who lived about a mile away: long term mental health service user, type 1 diabetic. He sometimes got overwhelmed, couldn’t remember to inject his insulin unless I reminded him and had been going through a bad patch recently. Neglect from services if you ask me. I suspect neither his GP nor Mental Health called the diabetes service, for a case conference and the main risk to his life was ignored. I’m still waiting for the coroner’s report. If I drank I’d be reaching for the brandy right now, but instead I just spend too much time on social media, pissing people off and reading too much Marxist screed in between staring into space and eyeing up men on Grindr while having no intention of meeting any of them.
Ritchie and Pete were both in their mid 40’s. Ritchie had learning disabilities, was anxious and on antidepressants – not that they did much good and he also had an autism diagnosis, not that that did much f-in good either if you ask me. I once called an ambulance because he was having a panic attack and chest pains that went on for 40 minutes. Luckily me and the paramedic were able to talk him down. He also had a couple of mini-strokes, was fat and drank a lot. He told me he had been in the “The Avenue”, a notorious “Special School,” in Reading – the one for children with learning disabilities, where he had been routinely bullied by another pupil and, if he is to be believed, raped. He told me that his stepfather was violent and that he lived with his mother looking after her until she died. The law changed and housing benefit would not pay for two bedrooms any longer after his mother died so he got evicted. Ritchie told me how his brother’s wife made sure almost all of his mothers’ money went to them and not to him. At one point Ritchie was harassed by a woman trying to get money out of him. He was shouting in his room about this, disturbing Maisy, the woman who lived above me. I often contacted the council officers about Ritchie because I was concerned about him, and also about Maisy. We both complained about the young woman who smashed up her room and her dodgy friends too.
I feel like I’m living in a Steinbeck novel sometime: Cannery Row or Sweet Thursday, with its prostitutes and hobos.
For a couple of years, we used to see strangers handing round on the top landing. When you challenged them and asked what they were doing there, they would say they were waiting for someone, but they would never say who or what flat they lived in. I reckon they let themselves in using the Tradesman button that the postie uses in the mornings. I think they were waiting for a text to go and collect from the drug dealers who work from the ally way round the corner, by the graveyard. The big drug dealers arrive by car, sell it off to runners who do the distribution. I reckon we had become a place for runners to hide out till they got the text to collect.
A friend who works in social care for the council, tells me that everyone who has a social care package is meant to have it reviewed annually but it hardly ever happens. He says lots of the social workers resign because the workload is too big and they don’t get adequate supervision. They return later through agencies and get paid just as much working part time. Another guy I know, some kind of anarchist, managed for the council homeless service. He told me they cut council staff, just as austerity hit and the number of homeless people increased. He had to tell one of his workers not to work so hard as she was becoming sick because of her desire to help people – the actual hours she was paid to work conflicted with the resources she had available to her. I know another council worker who ended up on antidepressants and a diagnosis of ‘General Anxiety Disorder’ for similar reasons. Me, I’m old school antipsychiatry, I think psyche diagnosis act as distractions from the actual individual and social causes of distress and that the drugs, while sometimes helpful, on the whole cause more harm than good. But hey, don’t let me start on that or I could rant on for hours.
The anarchist who ran the council homeless service was part of the IWW, (International Workers of the World), a smalltime anarchist trade union that is meant to be radical in some kind of way. The local group had a training manual on organizing workers but instead of doing that they organized drinking parties, played country and punk music on there banjos and guitars, and sometimes country punk music.
Ritchie told me that he used prostitutes sometimes, and that he liked to be hit on the bottom by them. Mainly lady prostitutes, sometime males, they were often the drug addict ones, and maybe the woman who harassed him was one one of them. He said he liked to be hit because he had been hit by his mother. Strange that he made that link as that’s what some psychotherapists think too. Ritchie had a trolley with one wheel missing and he used to drag it upstairs to his flat. The trolley often contained a big bottle of cider, and sometimes he slurred his words. After he died one of his friends said he drank Pernod and said with pride that if you drink water the morning after, you gets pissed again.
This tale is getting more like a Steinbeck novel the more I tell it
So here I am back in my flat, having left the buxom mid-European carer phoning her manager thinking, do I call the police about Olive or not? Maybe she is out shopping but if she knew the carers were coming that’s a bit odd? Or do I leave it to the carers this time? I mean, if Olive has carers coming round two or three times a day it won’t be long before they call the police. I get on with my day, cycling to someone’s house, mowing their garden, weeding, edging lawns etc. I get my pension next month so maybe I can slow down on the work and do a few other things?
A week later I see a light shining out of a corner of Olive’s window so I guess she isn’t dead yet.
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