best for REAL LIFE
Having been homeless as a teenager, Luan Bushby now works tirelessly to make sure everyone has a place they can call home...
Looking at the man in front of me, my heart went out to him.
‘I can’t carry on like this,’ he told me, his face tight with anxiety. ‘I can’t be homeless anymore – I need somewhere to live.’
‘I’ll do everything I can to help,’ I assured him. And I meant it from the bottom of my heart.
Because, from being a child, I knew how terrifying it is to be without somewhere to call home, somewhere to feel safe and secure, to keep your things and lay your head at night. Although it was decades ago, I still felt so passionately about it that I’d made it my job to do everything I could to ensure that as few people as possible were living on the streets.
My first experience of homelessness happened when I was just five years old. By then, my mum and dad had already broken up and Mum told me and my brother she was taking us out for the day. We gathered up crayons and colouring books and she took us to the council office and told them we weren’t leaving until they gave us somewhere to live.
They put us in a B&B and for the months we were there, I was scared. There were so many strange people coming and going at all hours of the day and night.
Finally, we were given a council house. If that had been it, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. But that was the start of my experience with homelessness. Because even though we finally had a house, life was tough. Mum juggled two jobs and really struggled to pay the bills. We only had one radiator upstairs and in Winter months, icicles would form on the bedroom windows and my brother would snap them off. One year, I remember asking for a duvet set for Christmas because I was so ashamed of the blankets that covered my bed, like a baby’s.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned
Mum went on to have my younger brother, and was a single parent to three children – barely making ends meet. But as a child, I couldn’t appreciate that. Instead our relationship got worse and worse. When I was 15, my dog Amy Turtle chewed up her single pair of shoes and she threw me out of the house, told me not to come back. My dog and I went to a nearby field, found a sheltered spot and settled down. I’d picked up a tin of a dog food, another of beans and I lit a fire. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I thought, proud that I’d thought to take provisions. Then suddenly, my heart sunk. I’d forgotten to take a tin opener.
Huddling up against my dog, I snuggl
