stand up in court and describe how he’d attempted to strangle them – after they’d tried to finish with him. He is subsequently convicted of murder. It looked as if this girl, too, had tried to end the relationship. But tragically she died for her wish to end it.
So at least justice has been done. And yes, this was a challenging job. I’d have preferred a happier ending.
I can hardly believe what I’m seeing. I’m in Norwood, trying to get into an old, dirty and unloved Victorian house that looks like it probably saw better days a century or so back. I struggle even to get the front door open; the owner has left the key hanging from a shoelace inside the letter box, but I have to fiddle around for ages to locate it. When Rick and I finally manage to get in, it’s quite a shock. ‘Squalor’ just about describes it. Think Life of Grime and you’ve got the idea.
First there’s the smell. It’s overwhelming, and knocks you back as you walk in: a combination of cat’s and human urine. Paint is peeling from the walls. And every single inch of floor space that the eye can see is covered with rubbish, boxes, newspapers, cereal packets, paper bags, envelopes, plastic bags, every bit of junk mail that came through the door – nothing has been thrown out of this house for decades. Someone’s been living like this for years.
The kitchen would have Aggie and Kim from How Clean Is Your House? in raptures. They could do a whole series just on this one home. Every surface is thick with grime and grease, filthy plates, smelly rubbish and empty tins everywhere. Health, safety, fire hazard, you name it – this place is a rotting tip. And there are manky cats running around. Somehow they’re managing to survive in all this filth.
The control room say there is a man in his 70s with chest pain and difficulty breathing. The control room warned that we’d have to let ourselves in. He’s in a ground-floor bedroom, surrounded by another tidal wave of rubbish, junk and yet more paper, an old man, lying there in urine-stained, wet, filthy sheets. By the bed are a couple of dirty glasses containing some sort of liquid pond life. He’s in his underpants – and very short of breath. Somehow, in all the dirt and chaos, he’s struggled to get by all these years. But now illness has taken over and he’s stranded in his home, adrift in a sea of grime.
‘I can’t breathe,’ he groans at us. Rick and I manage to sit him up but there’s no question: he’s very poorly and needs the hospital. But it’s quite difficult for us to get to him; clambering around the boxes and clutter to reach him is no easy matter. How on earth did he even manage to get around? He must have been crawling over all this stuff.
I try kneeling on the bed – and note that the urine is already seeping through my trousers – but it’s impossible to stand properly on the floor, it’s so thick with clutter.
‘We’re going to get you to hospital,’ I tell him. I sound like I’m in control, but I’m not because I can see there’s a real logistical problem involved in getting him out of here. There’s no way this man can walk. And there’s no way we could get our carrychair, a version of a wheelchair, out to the hall or the front door because the rubbish and clutter everywhere make it impossible to do this safely. So we have to call control and ask for assistance from the fire service. We manage to set up an oxygen mask to help him breathe. And then we get a bit of his story. His wife died many years ago and he hasn’t been able to get out very much.
‘My neighbours help me,’ he tells us.
‘But does anyone else come in to help you?’
‘No,’ he wheezes. ‘I don’t go to the doctor and I don’t take medication. I don’t want anyone coming here. I can manage.’
How many times have I heard those three little words? Frail, elderly people living alone who want to cling to their independence say that to us time and time again – when the evidence is so clearly the opposite. They say it to concerned relatives too, usually the ones that ring up but, for whatever reason, usually distance, never actually get to see them. So it goes on and on for years. Technically they’re ‘managing’, ‘getting by’. In reality, it’s all out of control. But this really is the worst chaos I’ve seen for a long time.
Luckily the fire service have turned up so we can organise his departure. It’s a real struggle but four of us manage to strap him on to a board and we form a small chain so we can easily pass him along to each other. The fire service have decided our best bet is to get him out via a sash window in the bedroom which I manage to open with some difficulty; it hasn’t been opened for years. Outside there are more firefighters to help carry him into the ambulance.
‘What about my cats?’ he asks me. ‘Who’ll feed them?’
I suggest I ask the next-door neighbour who might be willing to put some food out for them. He nods. ‘Yes, but as long as they put it on the front doorstep,’ he warns me. Clearly he doesn’t want even the neighbours to step inside. So before we drive off, I jump out to knock at the house next door. The neighbour, a pleasant-faced, plump, blonde woman, fills me in. They’ve been worried about him for quite some time. In fact they’d called the ambulance; they’d seen lights on in the house but hadn’t heard anything of him for several days.
‘He won’t have a phone,’ she tells me. But they’re fine about the cats. ‘He won’t let anyone help him. Apart from us, he’s got no one,’ the woman says sadly. But they’d worked out a little routine: they’d been regularly collecting basic foodstuffs for him for ages.
At the hospital he is taken to the emergency department. Part of our work is to alert hospital staff to his living conditions. The fire service also report the house as a fire hazard. In due course social services will get involved and liaise with environmental services to clear the house. But I keep wondering about him. A few weeks later I manage to pop into the ward. A nurse told me the house has been cleared – and he’s gone home. Apparently he’s accepting a bit of help from social services too. So while it was probably the worst example of domestic neglect I’d ever seen, at least it didn’t all end in total disaster.
Sadly our job involves seeing quite a lot of this kind of neglect. Often the call-out itself is for a relatively minor thing. But when you talk to the elderly person you discover that they might only see another human being for an hour or two once a week. And the rest of the time they just sit there, in a chair, often in silence. If you’re very old with impaired vision or hearing, even the simple pleasures of life, such as listening to the radio or reading, might be impossible. If you don’t go out at all, no one visits, you can’t walk much, you struggle to heat a can of soup or make a sandwich, what is left? Life just drizzles away from you. Yes, you’re still alive. If you can see, you’ve got the TV. But in another way you’re not really living, are you?
Yet it’s not the dirt and the chaos that are the problem. The heart of it all is sheer loneliness. You can live alone in a spotless environment with everything you need around you. But you can still be totally isolated. I don’t know the answer to that kind of loneliness, I really don’t.
He was 26. He died where he stood, absolutely upright, his body leaning against the bathroom wall. I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies. But not many standing up like this, almost as if he’s got a broom stuck up the back of him. It’s a ghastly picture. His lower limbs are a mottled, purple colour because of the position he’s died in and the natural effect of gravity. There’s a name for it: it’s called post-mortem staining. His face, shoulders and
