Over a quarter of a million people including 270 thousand children are recorded as homeless in England. Sometimes, we pass them sleeping in doorways or helping to sell copies of the Big Issue, but we are unlikely to know what brought them into that situation.
Nine writers with experience “of homelessness, poverty or inequity” have each produced a short monologue conveying a range of voices for the filmed collection entitled More Than One Story. These fine performances, accompanied by articles in the Big Issue, will gradually become available over the summer.
A woman (Oriana White) sits outside a building on sheets of cardboard in Naomi Westerman’s Sandwiches. On one of the smaller bits of cardboard are written the words “Please Help”. Alongside her are various supermarket-style packs of sandwiches.
She says her recent foster placement was to last just ten days but turned into six weeks, during which she wasn’t allowed to use the front door, had to live off sandwiches and never went to school because "no one had worked out how to do that bit." She complains that her life has become “delineated by sandwiches”. She needs a lot more than that, but wonders if her home will be on the street.
The difficulties of renting a home, especially if you are a migrant, are illustrated in Sabbir at the Estate Agents by Sonali Bhattacharyya. It opens in an estate agent’s office which the fifteen-year-old Sabbir (Mansa Ahmed) and his mother (Noor Bashir) hope will point them to a place that will have them. The mother looks defeated. The reference from her employer was turned down when it became a month old, and then she lost her job.
The lad speaks about the guilty awkwardness of them staying for three months on a sofa-bed at an overcrowded friend's home feeling constantly that they may lose even that. As they avoid bus fare costs after the estate agents by walking back to where they are staying, they pass empty, boarded-up houses they wish they could use.
Sabbur can't help but feel the difficulties they are having is connected to them being Bangladeshi, even though he thinks the estate agent may also be Bangladeshi.
Prejudice and discrimination contribute to homelessness in Ozwald Boateng, If You Must by Roy Williams. We see the Big Issue red-jacketed seller Johnny (David Olapoju) also in his earlier suit when he had “a good job and a banging car that was so banging I can’t count the amount of times police pulled me over.”
If that wasn’t enough to make him angry, then the threat to send his dad back to Jamaica after he’d worked here fifty years “would be enough to make anyone lose their mind.”
He just wanted to cry for his dad the day the “boys in blue” again pulled him over. He yelled in reaction and was carted off to a police cell, where he carried on yelling, was sent to the hospital, lost his job and ended up homeless. He asks, “why can't they just let us live?”
Racism isn’t the only prejudice that can cause people problems. In Charlie Josephine’s And For Once, I Just Let It Be Nice, a young person played by Noah Silverstone sits at a bus stop recalling a first kiss in a park with someone special which couldn’t be followed up because of being homeless. The teenager’s previous accommodation ended suddenly. “As soon as I uttered the word trans, I had to pack my bag.”
Sometimes, the abuse we experience develops so gradually we aren’t aware of it till it causes a disaster. In Boiling Frogs by Kayleigh Llewellyn, the actor Natasha Sparkes as the daughter of an abusive father compares her family's situation to the way frogs dropped into boiling water immediately leap out. In contrast, frogs placed in tepid water that is gradually increasing in heat stay until it's too late.
The shortage of homes and their spiralling costs can mean you have little choice about where you live. The Surviving Room by Neetu Singh takes us to the overcrowded conditions of the young woman played by Sonia Singh, who describes having to sleep in the living room of a three-bedroomed house full of cockroaches and mould shared by seven people, making it almost impossible to find space to read a book, watch TV or even do homework. This surviving room is the product of a “decade of underfunding and austerity”.
Admitting that as a kid, all that closeness with siblings felt “cute”, she says, “then you become an adult and feel you are performing like zoo animals in this television show called Capitalism.” As her dad arrives home smiling, she admits that he came to this country for a better life, “but we’re just about surviving, not living.”
In prison, the options in life are even more limited. There is little thought about education, rehabilitation or where you will live when you exit. Despite this, in Errol McGlashan’s No Walls, Still Trapped, the character Ezra (Michael Quartey) has achieved a 2:1 in criminology. He has also become a bit of a mentor to other prisoners. However, he worries about the young neurodiverse prisoner Terry, his “old cellmate”, who had spent time in nine different children’s homes and was often bullied. Recently freed from prison into temporary accommodation, he became homeless and again turned to crime.
Debbie Hannan’s Snakes and Landlords imagines an opportunity to challenge the negative myths around homeless people when a woman (Yvonne Wickham) is accidentally recruited to a focus group on the homeless roughly the same time as she has been told by her landlord that her rent is to go up by £500 and that her housing benefits are to be frozen again.
When the facilitator asks the group about alternative words or phrases for the homeless, a middle-class woman who rents out property suggests the term “residentially challenged” might be better, provoking a lively response.
The final piece in this collection is the intense, polemical, poetic flourish of This Is What It Means by the Cardboard Citizens director, Chris Sonnex, spoken by Shahab Awad to a low, upbeat soundscape indicting a system with reference to the situations depicted across the monologues. It finishes by claiming that “breaks for the 2% are built on the broken backs of the poorest of people” and demanding these stories be heard.
Beginning 11 July, a short filmed monologue will be released every Thursday throughout the summer on the Big Issue web site.