Sleeping Rough

Whenever I am feeling down and there is that very heavy rain, that sounds like the heavens have simply opened up with a torrent of water, it reminds me of being out in that weather for almost 2 months. I try and use it as an opportunity to remind myself that no matter what else is going on that I have a roof over my head while the weather is outside and I am inside, and that is something I need to be grateful for, and therefore not take for granted.

When I was 15 and first out of home I used to go into what was then call ‘Social Welfare’ which is know known as WINZ (Work and Income New Zealand), on Lake Road in Takapuna. I would go in there and tell them that I had nowhere to go, no place to sleep, no money, no food and that I needed help. They told me that because of my age that there was nothing that they could do to help me, they suggested that I try the Community Advice Bureau. This was before the park opposite Shore City was developed, and also the area of land on Takapuna beach waterfront along from the Sailboat Club there. There were random other ‘homeless’ youths, I guess ranging in age from about 12 to up to about 30. So I would often head up to the Salvation Army office, it was just off Hurstmere Road then up a flight of dingy stairs. I was always full of shame going in there, so tried to not go if I could help it. But they would have food packages that would be the alternative to standing outside Shore City begging for spare change to get enough to go upstairs and get a cheeseburger and perhaps some chips from the MacDonalds up the top. I don’t remember all the contents of the food packages from the Sallies, but I remember several times having to enlist the help of one of the other random homeless people around to help me open a tin of baked beans with a rock, with the understanding that it was to be shared in exchange for the help. The number of evenings eating cold baked beans out of a tin with an old plastic spoon. There was a run down house down on Takapuna beach with a filled in pool, the rumour at the time, which now looking back doesn’t make much sense was that it used to be Rachel Hunter’s house. It was two story and was a mess, it had literally been stripped, with most of the windows smashed out, and upstairs there were portions where rot had caused the floor to fall through. BUT for a time it was a place to find a corner out of the rain to doss down for the night. Usually carefully with one or two others, cause you never knew what kind of crazy was going to turn up during the night.
I’m not sure exactly what happened, but it got covered in signs saying that it was due for demolition, then all of a sudden there was Security Guards patrolling it at night and then a metal fence went up around it, with the demolition work eventually coming after that.
So around this time I met this guy called *****. He was 3 years older than me and seemed like heaps older and more on to it (at the time) than I. He did smoke quite a bit of pot, which despite the ‘scene’ was something I had decided after the first half dozen times I did not like how it made me feel, so it was something that I never did with him. But anyway, one night I had absolutely nowhere to sleep and he said that he had somewhere we could go. It was already dark and we walked up to the Pumphouse, down by Lake Pupuke in Takapuna. We walked around down past the pumphouse, around by the lakes edge past bushes and trees, quite a way around. Then there was a clump of bushes from underneath he pulled an old ripped sleeping bag. He unzipped it, it was a cool night, but not yet the middle of winter, so we hunkered down under the bushes with the sleeping bag covering us both as best as possible. I don’t think I got a lot of sleep that night, I know that I was constantly exhausted with it having been awhile since I’d had a good night’s sleep, but it was so dark and kind of spooky around there, but I know I eventually got some sleep.
So over the next couple of months this area would become a place I would regularly come to try and sleep at night when I had nowhere else to go. I actually ended up coming here most of the time by myself, even though I was scared of the dark and being by myself at night, I had seen things like people get stabbed who were sleeping in other more well-known areas for people who had nowhere else to go at night.
This was before the Pumphouse got it’s re-vamp, and so there was the two public toilets which were pretty bare, sparten, often not very clean, they had the basic metal toilet with no seat, a sink with a cold tap and a ‘mirror’ which was just a piece of polished metal screwed to the wall that was pretty scratched up. Apart from that it was just brick walls and a cold concrete floor. I think it was meant to be locked up every night, but occasionally the Security Guards would forget and I would be in luck and would get to curl up on the floor in there for a few hours, invariably though the Guards would do rounds and eventually find me in there and tell me to move on. Even during the times later in winter when they were more on to the system of keeping it locked at night, it would be unlocked in the mornings and I would have somewhere that I could go to the toilet, and use the cold tap and if there was toilet paper something to try and wash my face and under my arms.
So for the times that I could get into that female toilet area I would make my way around the lakeside, the Security Guards would actually check in the grassy area a little way around, so I’d have to go far enough that it would probably be further than they would bother, sometimes I would get it wrong and they would find me and tell me to move on. Otherwise there were a couple of particular bushes that helped take the brunt out of the rain as long as there wasn’t the wind driving it in any direction but down. I managed to claim possession of that sleeping bag, often at the beginning of the night (cause it was the middle of winter) it would still be soggy from the night before, but I would still use it to try and provide some sort of protection from the torrential wind, rain and cold. I don’t think I have ever been as cold as I was some of those nights during that winter. Looking back now the ‘sleep’ that I would drift in and out of in the cold, was probably more dangerous than I realized with how cold I was.

Why am I telling you about this?
One year before I was mainly living in a Boarding House attached to one of the most expensive Private Girls’ Schools in New Zealand. For most of my school life I’d been above average achiever, with an active long term interest in Speech and Drama and Public Speaking. Ironically a year or so before getting several Firsts and Placings in the New Zealand Speech Board Speech and Drama Competitions held at the Pumphouse in Takapuna.

A few weeks later I was ‘found’ by someone who had already sexually, physically, verbally, mentally attacked and abused me. I was hiding out from him at a caravan park on the West Coast. He found me, and he was very angry. He tied me up and over the next day and a half with the curtains drawn in the caravan he did, well, he did a lot of things to me. There was one point where he had the knife at my throat that I really truly believed that I was going to die. I can’t begin right now to describe everything that happened during that time. It was something that I am still running from. So I had written all that above about trying to find somewhere to sleep in the winter because when I escaped from that caravan, when I escaped from him. When I hid under the desk of the Caravan Owners Office while that Police came, when they asked me if I wanted to file a complaint, all I could think about was that he had told me that if I told anyone what he’d done that he would find me and kill me, and then he would find my family (he knew where they lived) and he would kill them. So I was very young, very scared, very very confused. And I didn’t get any help, after the police checked that the caravan was empty and had a look in the surrounding bush I didn’t or couldn’t talk, I couldn’t find my voice to explain what I’d just been through. I had no idea how to handle the situation that I was in. The person, my attacker, during his time with me, had cut up and destroyed every item of clothing except for a pair of culottes and a singlet. I remember thinking that I had no underwear and I didn’t or couldn’t even ask for help to explain that I didn’t have any clothes and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to get some more without even having any underwear.

So this is something that happened, something that has had a ripple effect in my life. And that I needed treatment and help for. I wasn’t able to ask for that until many years later. I am still scared of it all. My treatment got stopped in the middle, and now I am left with THIS STUFF, with the lid off the can. And now I am in a dark and scary place. And I don’t understand how ACC have let policy decisions re-traumatise me, a person, when they could have let me keep trying to be brave and get better. Instead I have gotten worse, and it’s a dark and scary place with the lid off and I can’t put it back on.