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seven - Experiencing rural homelessness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2022

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Summary

Stories

Rick

We interviewed ‘Rick’ in his house in a west Somerset village quite close to where he had grown up. Back in the 1970s he had spent time in the US (“living in a shack in the mountains”) and had participated in a number of squats in London, in one of which he met his partner, ‘Daisy’. He did not like London much, so came back to stay at his father's house in Somerset. Subsequently he and Daisy lived in a woodshed in rural Worcestershire, a wooden shelter, a caravan and (briefly) a flat in the Glastonbury area, and a caravan and a remote cottage in rural Devon. He told us:

“I just like the variety. I like to live quite isolated. I don't like to be overlooked. Like the caravan I lived in, up this track, up this valley, likeright out the back of beyond. And it was really wild. It was just magic.”

The seeming idealism of his life-style, however, was tempered with other, more difficult, memories:

“Sometimes I’d spend half the day just getting firewood, like just to keep me warm at night…. Sometimes it was quite desperate as well, you know, sometimes I just wanted company, and some money or something … the pay-off is that if you are living like kind of, sort of,like ‘on-the-edge’ sort of way, sometimes the ‘on-the-edge’ gets back to you.”

Rick and Daisy had a daughter, and after they split up they “lived in orbit around each other because of the kid”, finally deciding to settle together so that they could co-parent their child through her teenage years. Rick first stayed with friends:

“So I moved back up (to west Somerset) and lived in [friend’s] – a littleroom above [friend’s] kitchen, like a store room. It hasn't even got a staircase to it, you have to climb up through a ladder into the ceiling.”

Then he briefly moved into a house in the village, but he “fell out with the bloke that was living there” and when Daisy and his daughter returned from travelling, they once again shared with friends, until they finally found a house of their own. Their search was a hard one:

“We saw several places, but we had a lot of difficulty, bizarre little things like agents who said they had a nice house, and when you went round it was rubbish.

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Rural Homelessness
Issues, Experiences and Policy Responses
, pp. 169 - 190
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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