"Bronson" - special charity screening in Cambridge

Since the Willow Walker folded, a lot has been happening behind the scenes to re-establish a written-word service for homeless and vulnerably housed people in Cambridge and the people who serve them.

This culminated earlier in the year with the formation of Flack, a company registered as a social enterprise which aims to launch its first issue next spring. Their patron, Tom Hardy, is coming to the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on Sunday 9 May to answer questions after a special screeening of his controversial film
Bronson in aid of the charity. I don't think I can do better than give you the press release, with hyperlinks and pics.




Hollywood star Tom Hardy will be coming to Cambridge on Sunday, May 9 for a special screening of his film Bronson. The showing, in the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse at 1pm, will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the actor.

The screening is to support the newly-formed charity Flack, which was set up to replace and expand the services to homeless/vulnerably housed people and the agencies who serve them by the magazine Willow Walker. The first editor of the Willow Walker, named after a Cambridge hostel run by English Churches Housing Group, was Alexander Masters, whose book Stuart: A Life Backwards was turned into a film starring Hardy.

The editor of Flack, which hopes to launch its new magazine in Spring 2011, is Kirsten Lavers, whose tenure at the Willow Walker as Alexander Masters’ successor saw the formation of a business called Cambridge Link-Up, run by present and formerly homeless people, and Street Voices, whose double CD Both Sides of the Tracks was released in March 2009 to critical acclaim.

Tom Hardy, patron of Flack, has successfully battled an alcohol and crack addiction he acquired after the box-office failure of Star Trek Nemesis, in which he played Praetor Shinzon, an evil clone of Captain Jean Luc Picard; the film was released at the same time as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the James Bond film Die another Day and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Bronson is the story of prisoner Charles Bronson, who changed his name from Michael Peterson to give him a harder image as a bare-knuckle fighter in London. First arrested in 1974 for armed robbery, he has spent just four months as a free man since, and is still imprisoned. He has been called "the most violent prisoner in Britain", and has been moved 120 times. Hardy famously did 2500 press-ups a day for five weeks before filming started to bulk up for the role. His other films include Black Hawk Down, Minotaur and RocknRolla, while he has also starred in TV productions such as Band of Brothers, Wuthering Heights and The Virgin Queen.

top ten songs about thomas

There's a charity in North-East England called Thomas, which stands for those on the margins of a society, that works "at the cutting edge of social exclusion providing therapuetic and practical support to the drug addict, ex-offender, homeless and others suffering various kinds of social exclusion". I think the acronym says it all - please click the link to the right and have a look at their page; I'd like to concentrate in this post on people who are socially excluded in Cambridge, and who are about to lose an invaluable service which has blossomed into a whole system offering people who are or have been homeless, in the words of the Big Issue motto, "a hand up, not a handout".

In Cambridge we have a magazine produced for and by presently and formerly homeless people called the Willow Walker which is under threat because its funding has been removed; an Autumn issue is forthcoming thanks to the good graces of Cambridge University Press, and editor Kirsten Lavers is presently raising funds through justgiving.com to produce the annual calendar.

The Willow Walker provides the unique service of getting the voices of homeless people into the services which commission and provide services for them. It speaks not only about needs and tragedies, but about aspirations and successes. Cambridge City Council seems to think at the moment that other services duplicate this, but I'm not aware of any.

I thought, as my monthly "top ten", I'd post ten songs about homelessness and responses from within and outwith the communities of people who are excluded in some way. There are as many songs that I could have posted as there are pathways into exclusion, so here are my choices, which are arranged without the usual numbers.

Witnessing and abuse

Fish voices the distress a neighbour feels when listening to a neighbour and her children get beaten by her partner - and the temptation to escape from that distress through fantasizing about being a "rescuer", literally a knight in shining armour, which leaves him in a guilt-walled cell where "I become an accessory/and I don't have an alibi".

This is a very harrowing song at the best of times; if you're feeling vulnerable because of domestic violence issues, please click the link to the left.





Violence

In the Autumn 2006 edition of the Willow Walker, Big Issue founder John Bird told Nick Dominguez, who is one of my favourite blues singers as well as a great writer, that - in the time of the infamous London landlord Peter Rachman - he was trying not only to survive a violent father but an "ideology of failure" imposed upon certain families by Social Services. Here is No Son of Mine by Genesis:




Relationships

While one hopes that one's relationship is forever, poet Cate Wiliams wrote for the Willow Walker of the sad truth that some go to hell in a handcart with the lines:

The loser and the winner
Are playing the same game
And the hopeless young beginner
Will do it all the same.

However, she finishes her verse in the hope the downwards is not the only motion:

At the foot of every mountain
The path tells us to go
To keep on climbing upward
And never answer no.

This is Abba's song about about "the loser and the winner" from the film Mamma Mia, where Meryl Streep plays a woman who has lost in love in every sense - but suspects little the reparative action that life has in store for her.



Labelling

Sometimes when homeless people become housed, they face criticisms of still forming part of the street community that is spoken of in negative tones. This legendary song by the Shangri-Las encapsulates the difficulty of getting the streets out of one's mind once one has bodily emerged from them.


Illness

Many people on the streets have an illness, but some would say that this reflects the prevalence of mental illness in society as a whole - ie more than some quarters would like to admit: in Cambridge alone, we've seen the closure of two acute psychiatric wards; and the Cambridge Clubhouse, part of the Clubhouse movement, which helps people rehabilitate themselves from chronic illness and the effects of hospitalisation, was closed down and replaced by the Cambridge Mental Health Resource Centre, which itself is now to be closed. As a fellow Clubhouse alumnus told me, more folks than should be the case will end up being ping-ponged between prison and the wards as each argues the case for the other to be responsible.


Here's Jane Torville and Christopher Dean skating to Olympic gold to to Ravel's Bolero, which - it has been asserted - reflected his incipient manic-depression in the repeated phrasings.



Horace speaks from the past

One of the tracks on the critically-lauded album Both Sides of the Tracks by Street Voices is Horace Odes Book 3 Verse 29 recited by Geoff Coombe. It contains the lines written by the 1st century BC Roman poet:

Though storms around my vessel rave,
I will not fall to craven prayers,
Nor bargain by my vows to save
My Cyprian and Sidonian wares,
Else added to the insatiate main.
Then through the wild Aegean roar
The breezes and the Brethren Twain
Shall waft my little boat ashore.

The best song I can think of to represent Horace's maritime metaphor for life is Paul Simon's Bridge over Troubled Water: here it is sung by Eva Cassidy.



Hope

Lee Jay wrote his first poem in custody, and his stanzas take no prisoners. His poem Regrets, published in the Willow Walker, begins:

He sits alone, on his own
In a lonely place
As he wipes a tear from his eye
As he looks life in the face.
And he wonders why he lived his life!
The way he lived his life,
And he wipes another tear from his eye.

In Madness' hard-hitting and symphonic One Better Day, we hear of the hope that many people in the street community have that things will get better - getting out of that lonely place one day at a time.



Exclusion

This poem was written by a former alcoholic who had recovered but seemed to feel imprisoned by others' assumptions. It begins:

I am put away
I am discounted
I'm unwanted, don't fit,
I have no "house", of my "own",
Outside the city I sit, homeless.

Rejected, as I pay no tax, a social leper I,
A great assumption made.
That I am of no value...

When I read these lines, the first thing I thought of was Labi Siffre's Something Inside So Strong with its video based on Nelson Mandela's imprisonment, because of Mandela's refusal to remove himself from the consciousness of those to whom his existence was an embarrassment.



Building Oneself

The Willow Walker, with the English Churches Housing Group, sponsored a scheme in 2007 shrewdly called "the self-build": it both highlighted the breadth of talent languishing on the streets and in hostels at this time when we need as many people working as possible, and provided a parable in wood and nails of building oneself up as a person. The Self-Build motto is you'll always get what you've always got if you always do what you've always done:



On a constructional theme, here's The Who singing Pete Townshend's Dig.



Beatitudes: turning things upside down

I found this beautiful video on Revd Bosco Peters' Liturgy blog - it's the monks of the Russian Orthodox Valaam monastery singing the phrases from Matthew 5:3-12, helping us to try to identify that hardest of questions, who is the neighbour that Moses' book of Leviticus tells us we should love as ourselves, a task Rabbi Akiva called "the greatest principle of the Torah. I hope the present and future bodies looking at funding the Willow Walker will see that helping presently and formerly homeless people both fits in seamlessly with the Judaeo-Christian principles upon which our country is built, and makes sound econonomic, social, political and humanitarian sense.

(Update: the original video has been taken down, so here's the Beatitudes from Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev's St Matthew's Passion.



Click here to view and download issues of the Willow Walker.


Other posts related to the Willow Walker:

Homeless not hopeless

Catching Street Voices

Both Sides of the Tracks

Save the Willow Walker

The Willow Walker looks for a funder



Related posts on music: click here for more top ten songs about...

Both Sides of the Tracks

Expect blues, expect hip hop, expect reggae, expect rock 'n roll, expect folk, expect virtuoso musicianship, raw passion and a musical night to remember proving that homelessness does not mean hopelessness.

I wouldn't normally bring home a CD that has a parental advisory for "explicit lyrics", let alone a double one. But there are things we need to talk about explicitly: this is Both Sides of the Tracks, a compilation by artists who have experienced or been at risk of street life and their supporters, including the ground-breaking Street Voices, who can apply lyrics about loss and recovery to any genre of music and come out with complex works displaying the hard edge of having walked the walk - unlike, say, Ralph McTell's worthy but slightly patronising Streets of London, or Phil Collins' masterpiece of histrionics, Another Day in Paradise.

The professionalism evident in every aspect of the album, from musicianship to artwork, shows the degree of talent languishing on our streets at a time when the country needs all its talent at work. For instance, crossover hip-hop numbers have intelligent guitar-riffs in the background, like Psycrowe, Alchemist and Dislexya's Last Chance; Toby Peters' gentle love song It's Your Eyes benefits from a stripped-down acoustic backing, and Daniela McDermott makes percussion sound relaxing in her composition Yemonisa.

We meet old favourites here, too. Street Voices give a nod to Eric Clapton's introductory riff to Crossroads with the acoustic guitar in Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues, Stella gives a bouncy lift to traditional Irish folk tunes with the guitar and penny whistle, and one of my favourite Cambridgeshire singers, Nick Dominguez, persents an interpretation of Pink Floyd's get-well-soon card to Syd Barrett, Wish You Were Here, that I had to listen to three times.

This double-album is a stopping-off point in the often painful process that Cambridge Link-Up has gone through in setting themselves up as a business that enables present and former homeless members to climb out of the dustbin wherein society is happy to deposit human beings it no longer wants. The misery street life often entails is reflected in several poems read in the album - for example, Dean Tobias' hard-hitting Victim of the Night is about street prostitutes: "just don't look too close in the daylight...covered in bruises and sores".

Perhaps to reflect the number of former forces members that end up on the street, Malcolm Driver performs Billy Connelly's Sergeant Where's Mine. Connelly, who had been a member of the TA Paratroop Regiment, probably wrote the poignant folk-song after talking to regular Paras who had served in Northern Ireland. The song is, unfortunately, once more germane to current affairs - Connelly describes the dilemma of the professional soldier faced with young people mobilised into action against them by cynical elders: "what do you do with a gun in your hand/when you're faced with a hundred odd weans [children]?"

It's a much-needed wake-up call: around 150 British Forces personnel are discharged for mental health reasons per year. Mental illness can be one of the slippier slopes leading to the street - if it hadn't been for my family I think I might have slid down it myself - as Dean Tobiass describes in his poem Nutty Nuts and the Section Threes (Section 3 being a mandatory hospitalisation for six months). The best-known slope is substance abuse - Freeman Freebyrd's Man from the Pool describes this process in five ever-darker verses in the form of limericks reflecting the pain inside figures of fun.

If you live in Cambridgeshire, then have another look at the quote at the top of this page, which is from the publicity for a concert held by many of the artists on this album and others in Cambridge pub Man on the Moon on Friday March 13th, entry £3.

Whether or not you live in Cambridgeshire, please have a look at the Willow Walker site, where Both Sides of the Tracks is avaliable for £10 ($14/€11) plus p&p. And click the Willow Walker logo below for some more poetry readings - but be prepared for everything from Horace to some very robust talking.

catching street voices

Street Voices is a band formed by people living in hostels for the homeless in Cambridge or who are otherwise members of the street community. I'm not very good at catching them in performance.

On 20th June, I went to the Leper Chapel in Cambridge to hear the group rehearse for a memorial service for seventeen members of the street community who had died in the past year. They were practicing the first verse of a traditional song arranged by Bob Dylan, He was a friend of mine:

He was a friend of mine
He was a friend of mine
Every time I think about him now
Lord I just can't keep from cryin'
'Cause he was a friend of mine

The verse was sung six times, with band member Carolyn Perkins (Caz) intoning the name of one of the deceased in between each personal-pronoun-adjusted line.

For seventeen members of the street community to die in a year is a terrifying figure in the context of Cambridge City Council's most recent statistics on the number of homeless people (including those in hostels). There were roughly 200 homeless people in Cambridge in the quarter ending 31 December 2007. If the attrition is solely inflicted upon this group, we are looking at a mortality rate of 8.5%. However, provision of a roof, as essential as this is to moving onwards and upwards, does not necessarily remove somebody from the street scene by itself, for the same reason that somebody who retires from a factory will find themselves attending the attached social-club for a while afterwards.

The statistics show that the English Churches Housing Group's tenancy sustainment team were supporting 21 tenants who had moved into permanent housing for six months or less, 73 people who had been housed for 6-12 months, 61 for 12-18 months and 90 for 18-24 months. The figures for the tenancy support team attached to Jimmy's Nightshelter are one, four, four and four respectively. So, taking all of these into consideration, the most precise statement we can make is that the mortality rate for the Cambridge street community lies somewhere between 3.7-8.5%. (I emphasize that these are the figures from the time of the study; Jimmy's, for instance, currently supports 29 people in their tenancies, including 14 in the 2-5 year range.)

Looking just at the smaller figure and extrapolating it to other groups at national level, 3.7% represents 55,500 NHS employees, 18, 690 civil servants, 27 members of the House of Lords or 24 MP's. Or 15,891 members of the Armed Forces, whose former members can be represented among homeless people much more than those of the other categories. I cannot think of any estate in life, other than the street community, where even the lower mortality rate of 3.7% would be tolerated without a massive and government-toppling outcry.

I was gutted that I wasn't able to stay for the memorial service, but Maxima had enmeshed me in the sort of complex babysitting situation that only women can understand.

The next time I missed Street Voices was when they opened an exhibition by Missing Links called Corrugation Street - Thinking inside the Box, which featured several cardboard boxes with pictures and writing by homeless and recently homeless people on the inside describing their experiences of homelessness. There was one touching testimony of a man who had been given permission by a disabled lady to live in her shed, and in return he walked her dog, something she was unable to do.

It was facilitated by puppeteer/community artist Linton Bocock. Described as "a project straight from the heart of Cambridge's homeless community", each installation was composed of "a cardboard box, some materials and some intense experiences [to give] a glimpse of a side to medern life that most people don't see".

Minima and I were late because she'd gone over on her ankle, so we had to take two buses to get there instead of cycling. We were in time to catch artist and Willow Walker editor Kirsten Lavers and Caz, who were showcasing some of the goods sold by Cambridge Link-Up, a company managed and ran by homeless and recently-homeless people. Stock had gone fast, but there were still some items left: handbags knitted from plastic bags (Minora had two of these, both featuring the colour pink), mobile phone pouches crocheted from plastic yarn derived from aforementioned bags, hats made from videotape and presented in the original boxes (mine was in The Rain Man), and picnic bags which, when un-velcroed, folded out into ground-mats.

I started to panic a little when Kirsten started to explain the technique for ironing the plastic bags together to Minora, as the house is littered with the detritus of her hammerbeads experiments. I was mercifully distracted by Caz explaining that Cambridge Link-Up, which runs a monthly market stall and will also have a stall at the Cambridge Folk Festival, has received support from John Lewis and a visit from senior civil servant Sir Gus O' Donnell, as well as Street Voices receiving lottery funding to produce a CD which should be out around November. Personally I'm looking forward to it, having heard the samples posted on the Cambridge Link-Up audio gallery - where you can hear the concert performed at the Leper Chapel.

It's really good to see Cambridge Link-Up providing a service for the homeless community in Cambridge from within that community - in the words of one motto, it gives a hand up, not a hand-out. It is a resource that unfortunately may become even more urgently needed in the light of current financial trends - mortgage arrears were given as a factor in respondents' homelessness in 0% of cases in the quarters ending June and September 2007 in the study linked to above - and in 6% of replies in that ending December 2007, the quarter on which the study concentrated.

Some music started up - but Street voices had left; this was Rough Beast, who'd come to lend support. "Now that's real blues," I commented as they jammed but Minora, a High School Musical devotee, looked at me and blinked.

Street Voices will be performing a summer jam from 11am-1pm on 22 August in the Community Room at 82 Akeman Street. I'm going to try not to miss it. Honest.



Related post: Homeless not hopeless