The film-maker Lorna Tucker was once a teenage runaway, sleeping rough in London for 18 months. Twenty-five years later, she has relived the harrowing experience for a documentary, returning to her former haunts and speaking to homeless people at a time when record numbers are living on Britain’s streets.
She was reunited with some of those she left behind, including “Darren”, who has been on the streets since his alcoholic mother was unable to care for him. “Darren sleeps where I used to sleep under Waterloo Bridge,” she said. “He still has the same eyes he had as a 15-year-old boy. He’s still got this beauty, but obviously he’s been very affected by it.”
Many others had not survived, she discovered. “Ninety-nine per cent of them died.”
The documentary, titled Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son, will be released in cinemas next year. Tucker wrote and directed, Colin Firth narrates, and Bryan Adams donated a song for use in the film.
Tucker said she wanted to give a voice to homeless people because not enough was being done to help them, and what was being done was not working, partly because those on the streets were not being listened to.
Traumatised by violence at home, she was 14 when she was groomed by older men. “They got me into crime. I was climbing through windows for them, burgling shops for them. They gave me trainers … There were other children they were doing this with.” She ended up on the streets at 15, falling into addiction and subjected to abuse and violence. Two of her friends were murdered on the street in their sleep.
She said: “The longer you’re on the streets, the more opportunities there are for dangerous things to happen. The more that happens, the more you take things to forget. It’s a downward cycle … We can all use our imaginations to figure out what happens to young girls on the streets.”
Her life was turned around by mentors with lived experience. “They paid for me to get trauma therapy, something I couldn’t afford because it’s not on the NHS. That’s when everything started to change … I started making documentaries, shooting a short film for Vivienne Westwood.”
The documentary – produced with the support of Dartmouth Films and Raindog Films – reminds us that homelessness can happen to anyone. “When we think of homeless people, we think of them as ‘others’. Them. Not us,” Tucker said.
She wanted to show the fragility of human nature. “In general, 80% of people who end up on the street have witnessed childhood trauma. But I’ve met people on the streets [from all walks of life, including] a female doctor from America who had lost everything.”
In the documentary, female rough sleepers speak of being molested and learning to become invisible to survive, and they describe hostels as “very dangerous”. One says: “I live under the bridge with mice. Move to a hostel and pay the service charge and it’s riddled with cockroaches.”
Another is filmed as pedestrians walk past her sitting on the pavement. “We’re not scumbags … We were like them once. I’ve been out here for five years. I left domestic violence.”
One man says he ended up on the streets after seeing his alcoholic stepdad “beat my mum so black and blue, we didn’t think she was going to live”.
Tucker wants the documentary to be shown across Britain and to make a real difference. She wants to galvanise charities and other organisations associated with homelessness to call for action from the government. “We have so many incredible homeless organisations and charities, all fighting to raise their money and doing incredible work. But they’re not working together,” she said.
She argues that money is being spent “in the wrong places”, including on unsafe hostels. “If they were to build good, secure housing, not only do you get people off the streets, but … they can go back into society, earn money, pay their taxes, study and become something. Then you’re saving money on prisons, you’re saving money on the NHS … on rehab. It’s that long-term thinking. The government doesn’t care because they’ve got a four-year cycle.”
The film also features survivors of homelessness who are now helping others. They include Earl Charlton, who was on and off the streets for 25 years from the age of 14 having experienced violence at home. He turned his life around and launched an initiative for homeless people in the north-east.
Charlton said the documentary was “very powerful and straight from the heart”. He said: “Change needs to happen.”
