“Sorry to knock, but have you got a spare fag?” The symbiotic solidarity in semi-independent living
When I was told at 17 that I was going to be leaving foster care to move into my own flat, I wasn’t upset or angry or felt like I had been let down — these feelings came much later. I was actually excited. I was so excited that at least a few times a week after college, I would browse the shelves of the home section in Debenhams and Wilkos, gushing over the matching retro kettle and toaster sets and the baby pink bin that would look just perfect in the ’50s themed pastel kitchen I was envisioning in my head. My first purchase for my new home was a pink macaron kitchen timer. It stopped working after three months but I never did any baking anyway. I had it all planned out, in the evenings after college I meticulously priced up my shopping list of all the essentials, much to my PA’s annoyance. I’m sure she would have much rather taken a single trip to Ikea to kit out my flat but no, I was having my pink bin and my matching kettle and toaster set whether she bloody liked it or not. I had budgeted for it. I was much more assertive as a teen than I am now, and it certainly paid off because just a few days before Christmas I moved into my new flat in a semi-independent living scheme for children leaving care, and I had kitted out my kitchen in all pastels — just how I imagined. My foster carer called it the ‘pink paradise’. To be truthful, I was quite sad to be leaving but I think this was overshadowed by the relief I felt about finally having somewhere to call home. My own flat. Nobody can make me feel unwelcome, unwanted, or unsafe in my own home. Right?
I wish I could tell you the true price that teenage me had to pay for that pastel pink bin. There are lots of things I experienced in the almost two years in which I lived there which were horrendous. But I wanted to share some of the experiences I had with other care-experienced people living there that warm and nourish my soul when I think about them. When we are searching for solutions we spend a lot of time thinking about what went wrong. And there were a lot of things that happened there which were not and are not okay for teenagers to endure. But what has always struck me when I look back on this time in my life was the moments of care that we afforded one another, despite how abandoned we felt by the system we had been abandoned into. Once seen as so desperately in need of protection that we couldn’t live a day without a case recording or risk assessment written about us, we were now pushed into a world we were never prepared for, or asked for, or ever expected to reach.
It felt like tradition amongst the tenants that each newcomer would be greeted with a knock at their door on their first or second night. Sometimes this was an act of hypervigilance developed from our need to survive; other times it was because the lads were assessing the potential of their new neighbour and wanted to invite you back to theirs for a ‘few drinks’. But sometimes it was a pure, single act of kindness. A shared sense of knowing how you feel and knowing what’s to come. Lots of people come and go in a place like this — some people move on to independence, others are hurled backwards if they don’t do the things in the way which we were never told about. I made friends with lots of different people during my time there. There were many I had nothing in common with, and yet, we shared so much with one another.
I hadn’t been living there long when I first felt like we were truly alone in this world. Strangely, I shared that sense of loneliness with another tenant. She was the first friend I made there and she had taken an overdose in her flat. Where I lived, it was staffed twenty-four hours and the emergency services had been called by staff. The paramedics arrived only to tell us that they were unable to take her to the hospital because the ambulances were under pressure that night. I remember the staff member on shift muttering to the paramedic “well I can’t take her.” I thought “isn’t that what you’re fucking paid for?”
The hospital was a half an hour drive away and I managed to secure a lift from somebody I knew. We spent hours waiting, both taking turns to charge our phone in a plug socket we found 4 feet up the wall in the A&E department, on a charger from Poundland that disconnected every time you moved. My friend was admitted and I came home at 3am, shattered but relieved that she was in the right place. I was exhausted turning up for my morning biology class the next day.
We all looked after each other in the ways that we knew how. A hot shower, a twos on a cigarette or just in the company of one another in a place that felt incredibly lonely. We did it because we had no other choice. We did it out of love, of shared solidarity, and as necessity. In the end, in those rare moments where the building was unusually still, we were faced with the fact that there was simply nobody else there to help us through. We had to do it for ourselves and for each other. The young nursing the young. My fondest memories are of our afternoon trips to Iceland or Asda — the former for actual food and the latter for baccy and booze — and then crashing in one of our flats to make dinner for each other. It was always either fajitas or spag bol, and it was always either me or my friend who bought the ingredients and cooked for everyone else. I didn’t really mind though, we all helped each other out in whatever ways we could, and besides, I wasn’t going to let my mates go hungry. When I was travelling to my first interview for University, it wasn’t my mum or my dad or my siblings who messaged me “Good luck, I’m so proud of you Lys. You’re gonna smash it.” It was the girl who lived directly downstairs from me, who in the first few months of me living there, lodged so many noise complaints about me that I would avoid her at ALL costs in the communal areas.
Tenants weren’t allowed to be in each other’s flats past 11pm, but we always snuck into each other’s flats and tried our very best to get away with it. We felt so accomplished when we managed to fool the night staff, but more often than not we didn’t, and I can’t tell you how many visitor bans we got on the weekly. Living there was weird in the fact that you constantly felt lonely, but you also could never get a moment of peace and quiet when you wanted because they’d always be somebody banging on your door for a fag, or to borrow your leccy or just for a chat.
None of us ever had any money but we still found ways to have fun. We spent a lot of time in the pub, making the most of the 2 for £5 in our local spoons. Most of us had never lived in the area before but we soon made friends on nights out, who would often pop over to our building to give us spare pizzas from their freezers and the crisps in the multipacks that they didn’t like. In the summer we went crabbing, and I remember how relaxed everybody’s faces looked in the warmth of the evening sun. For a while, we didn’t have to worry about anything else, the emptiness in our fridges, the plates piled up in the sink almost as high as our water bills.
There is something both beautiful and tragic about these stories, and of course, I have chosen to frame these narratives in this way. The whole truth is a little more complicated and a lot more painful. But what is clear is our shared need for care and community, our need to be loved and for our journeys and selves to be recognised — not as a statistic, not as damaged goods, nor a commodity for profit. But for what and who we really were in those times. Children doing the very best we could in a situation in which we should have never been placed in. And some of us did better than others. Many of my friends from care are doing well in what it means for them to do and be well — they are in jobs they enjoy, have a place to call home, they are mothers and fathers. Others have walked very different journeys. I feel extremely privileged and immensely guilty for being one of those who would be considered to have “made it”, to have “overcame my adversity”. I feel resistance towards those who congratulate us for “overcoming the odds” but continue to work in ways that actively stack those odds up against us. We cared for each other, but we shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place.
If you haven’t already, I would urge you to sign up for this petition tonight that calls for the government to keep caring until 18: https://secure.togethertrust.org.uk/uk-government-keep-caring
