Return from Shit Street - " Lucky " Danny, Who Came Back From The Edge.   Danny was one of the first to offer himself for an interview. He had a lot to say, a lot to tell; he had years of rough sleeping and street-drinking behind him, and he had a bellyful of rage about the subbies who had made fortunes out of his years of hard labour. He told of the rough treatment he had suffered because he hailed from the North, of ganger-men who wouldn’t even let you stop work to take a piss. He told of the humiliations of his working life, he told of the desperation of his drinking life. The material gathered from Danny in those first interviews formed the backbone of the report which eventually emerged, One Better Day. Better than any graphs or pie charts, Danny illustrated how the culture of casual labour, with always enough money for drink, never enough for secure accommodation, had shortened and blighted so many men’s lives. And Danny did not hesitate to point out that it was Irish sub-contractors [who supplied labour to the construction industry] who had exploited, and profited from a corrupt and rotten system; where those who did the actual work, benefited least, and suffered in unhealthy and dangerous conditions without any employment rights whatsoever. Danny’s outspokenness earned him praise from many who had suffered under the casual labour system, and appreciation from those who acknowledged the historical importance of this material. On the other hand, there were those who begrudged Danny’s impudence at revealing just how bad working conditions had been, at revealing how a whole working community had been left stranded in Camden Town. And there were others who had difficulty with Danny’s success in his on-going battle with alcohol. Danny’s sobriety made some drinkers anxious, and perhaps triggered feelings of guilt. But despite taking some "stick" around the House, Danny has persisted and thanks largely to him, the history of the Irishmen of Arlington House has been made available to the public.   Prologue to Danny’s story " I’ve been lucky in a way. For the past six years, I’ve had a lot of therapy, and a lot of psychotherapy; a lot of recovery work, a lot of alcohol recovery programmes and rehabilitation programmes, which has made me a very, very different person than the one I was before. So, I’d be speaking more as a person with self-esteem, and know that I have to have this self-esteem. I don’t need anyone coming to the rescue any more, I realise that it’s ME that has to do it. I don’t look for support. I don’t know if this is a right thing to say... I don’t look for support from anyone anymore. With the therapy, and the things that I’ve had, you understand. I’ve got completely away from family support, church support, country [nation] support. I’m talking about being an autonomous human being. That doesn’t mean that I’ve gained anything material; in fact, material things don’t really matter to me at the minute. I mean, I have the choice to move out of Arlington House [hostel], if I wanted to push myself, but I’m more interested in learning about ME and how I can cope in an environment like this, which is a stressful environment. Now, that’s not saying that I’m not who I am, an Irishman. It just means that I’m able to be myself, my Irish self. ...Without drink, I’m talking about. I realise that all I have to do is to take up one drink, and all this falls into one heap of crap again. I can either look on it as: I have a physical disease; or a disease which is mental, emotional. And I work from every and any corner, to try and fight this disease. I’ve had a lot of good training how to... and I’ve used that resource to bring me to where I’m at. The therapy has taught me about the individual, and taking responsibility for your own life, taking responsibility for every thought you have, taking responsibility for every feeling you have, every action. So I am AWAKE. I am CONSCIOUS today, totally CONSCIOUS of every... almost everything I say."   Danny’s Story. " I came from a big family. There was a lot of support there, in a lot of ways. As far as life-skills are concerned, I didn’t have ANY. My mother made the dinner, my sisters put it down in front of me. My shirts was ironed, my shoes was polished, and all a this type a thing. And all of a sudden, WHACK !, I’m out in the big wide world. Now, this is a wonderful experience, like heading off on your own and all the rest of it, but then these things start to come in; God, I’ve got to pay my rent every Friday, I can’t sort of bluff my ma, and say, " Ma, I spent it, I’ll give you double next week ". I’d never give it to her, type thing. But, if you didn’t pay your rent on time... If you drank your money, you had no money for food, no money for cigarettes, no money for flash clothes, which you wanted, as a young man. There was an awful lot of uncertainty in me when I first came over [to England], an awful lot of fear. The fear was in me, like, WHAT AM I DOING HERE ?, type a thing. And a bout of FEAR would hit me. I came from a mixture of town and country. I spent a lot of my time in Belfast, as a young man, and a lot of my teenage years in the country, so I’ve a good sort of view of both of them, right now. I can remember the first day I was in Camden Town; I backed in here [Arlington House] and I turned the corner there on Parkway. There’s a pub there called McGowans, and all these Fenian records was blasting out through it. This is totally alien to me, as I come from living in County Down. There’s no pub in County Down would get away wi’ playing Republican or Fenian songs. And it hit me like that there[ shock]. I was totally shell-shocked, because it was SUCH an Irish pub. There was a lot of different things happening, that wouldn’t have happened, where I had come from. Like, you may have sat in your own room wi’ a little record player listening to Republican songs, but you just didn’t walk into a pub in the middle of a town... Say you walked into Lisnabraw town, which was probably made up like a lot of Ulster towns - y’know, you’ve got maybe a Protestant pub there and a Catholic pub there, two Protestant ones there, two Catholic ones there. You wouldn’t get away wi’ blasting out rebel songs there, all over the whole street. And this was coming out all over Parkway. I was absolutely shocked down to my boots. I found it very, very strange. Okay, I thought it was great, but at the same time, I wondered how they could get away with it? I had this idea when I came here, that Inglann didn’t really want me. When I got here, my idea of Inglann was [formed by the antagonism of the ] Inglish soldiers, that I’d seen around Northern Ireland. So, when I emigrated to London... You walk around London, and I was young, say 21, but when I first discovered Irish areas... [expresses amazement]. Having lived at home for four years of ‘the troubles’, gradually getting worse and worse, I seen a lot of [terrible] things happening there. The first time I came to Camden was September,1972, and what gave me the incentive, the kick up the ass to move, was that two of my friends was murdered. We used to sign on the dole together. An horrific murder, one of them was - Jim Donnelly, and the other was Peter Conlon. They [ Loyalist terrorists] really cut them to bits. The police in Tenants Street reckoned that they tied ropes around Donnelly’s legs and threw the rope over a beam, pulled the rope up three floors, and dropped him on his head. They took him out and drove cars back and forth over his feet, before they shot him. And that put fear into our whole community. It really did. It put a lot of fear, because this was the first time that anybody we KNEW had been whacked. This was the first time it became fucking REAL. It was alright if it was five miles away, someone you didn’t know. If it happened in Armagh, or if it happened in Derry, it might have been the other side of the moon. Although, in hindsight, I knew it was only a few miles, but in my small little world, Derry was somewhere else... and Armagh, ditto. This was the first time that it smacked into me, between the two eyes. And at that time, I had severe acne, and that was a big enough crisis in my life; I didn’t need the whole Northern Ireland crisis. I was trying to cope as a teenager, going on into young adulthood, trying to cope with this mess of a face. That was a great insult to my self-esteem, my well being. I had to cope with that, [which was enough] without the rest of this mess starting up. I just couldn’t cope with the situation. It was either hang around there and get involved [or emigrate]... I was asked one night to get involved [with an armed Republican group], and that really put the wind right up me. One guy approached me [to join up], so I said, I’m FUCKING OFF !! [Laughs]. My family was too big. I had enough sense to know that if I’m caught doing something of that nature, it’s not only me goes down, it’s not only me that going to be killed or whatever, that my whole family is tarred [marked out as Republicans] for the rest of their lives, my family’s children and everyone else. It was fucking crazy. Even then, I didn’t want anything to do with anything like that. So, I’d been to Inglann [on holiday] a coupla times before that, so I said, fuck it, I’ll go to London. When I first came to Inglann, my attitude toward the Inglish was one of fear, that they were all like British soldiers, that they were all this aggressive type thing. Around Lisnabraw town, there was a lot of barracks, and on a Friday and Saturday night, the soldiers would get leave - before the troubles got too bad - and they’d all go into pubs around Lisnabraw and the locals would all be fighting soldiers; as a "straight go", not wi’ guns or anything, fist to fist. There were some hard soldiers there, and there were some hard guys from around the area. And it never stopped. There was a lot of jealousy there, because the soldiers were different, and the women, well, they’d looked at the same guys for years. And there was a lot of fights. That was my impression of what Inglish people were like, at that time of my life. ...Although, I’ve found out a lot different, since. Y’know, people are people. You can’t stereotype anyone. But I didn’t really know how Irish Camden was. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of Northern Irish people here; say there was twenty [in the Camden area], and they’d been here for many, many years. A lot of them were in Arlington House. This past few years, there have been gradually more and more Northern people. But at that time, I started meeting a lot of Southern Irish people. I felt at home with Southern Irish people, because I knew they had the same religion, the same upbringing, basically [as me]. Take myself, who’d left a big family... There was nine of us, but one died, which left eight. And me being the eldest, I had quite a lot to do with the upbringing of that family. Y’know, going to school and looking after them and all the rest; sort of a role that way, like. So, that’s stripped from you for a start [when you emigrate], y’know the family support, the parents’ guidance. So, all of a sudden, you’ve got this great freedom. And I thought, ah, three months along the way, aw, I’m doing alright: I’ve got a job as an asphalt foreman. I was doing alright, trying to hold onto things like work, during the week. I was ‘on the cards’ [legally employed, paying tax and National Insurance] at that time. And I would work all week, go out on a Friday night, go out on a Saturday night, go out Sunday dinnertime. The same thing the next week, go on, get my wages... I came over here in September and the time it ticked round to Christmas. I didn’t have any holiday money to come; but, I was young, and had a bit more "go" about me than I had later. I had so many days off [for the Christmas holiday, without pay]. I had money, like, I had my weeks wages, and at that time it was only £ 3.50 for your rent [in Arlington House], and I thought to myself, this money is never going to last me, if I go drinking in the Good Mixer, next door. There was a little Belfast bloke working in the hostel kitchen called Paddy Starr, and I was telling Paddy this, and Paddy says, " I’ll have a word with Mr. Bennett " he says, " and y’know they’re always looking for casuals to work here over the Christmas ". So Paddy had a word with him. That was great. I had a job in the kitchen, and I got my room free, and I got all my food free, y’know, for this 2 week period into the New Year. And I worked away. I quite enjoyed it, it was good. There was quite a lot of men in here at that time - well over 1100 men. I worked in the kitchen, and I can remember doing the Brussels sprouts; they sent me down about 6 cwt bags of Brussels sprouts, and sitting there, making crosses in them, like. But it was warm, better than walking the streets... So I done all the Brussels sprouts, and gradually I started to do other things. And Mr. Bennett’s wife, Mrs Bennett, she thought I was a great worker, altogether, because I was big, tall and strong. I was able to lift boxes, off the top of where they were stacked up high, rather than looking for a step-ladder. So, that was very good. I can remember also, on Christmas day, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett used to give a little present to all the staff. Mr and Mrs. Bennett were the manager and manageress, at that time, for Rowton Enterprises, going back to your early seventies. She used to make pastry, and that, and flog them out there on a Sunday dinnertime. Every Christmas, they used to serve all the workers themselves, after all the big rush was over. After all the tenants in the house had eaten, they’d sit the staff down then, and they’d have a little present for them, and they’d serve them their dinner. I can remember, that they had two little small tins of beer for each worker, and they’d only be about three inches tall. They had give them to all the workers, and I can remember - because I was only in there over the Christmas period as a casual, because I was going back to my own job - they [the staff members] were all upset, they were all very, very, upset, because they give me [only a casual worker] these two cans of beer. And all these old boys [staff] who were in here, for so many years, were saying: " Look at that, HE’S got two tins !". They were most upset about that. Rowton Enterprises, at that time, used a lot of vulnerable, a lot of disabled people, that maybe couldn’t go out and work in Camden Town [on the buildings]. They [the staff] were getting at that time - they weren’t getting robbed or anything like that - they were getting £ 18 a week all found, plus all their food, plus free rent. Where as, I was getting maybe £ 40 a week working at the asphalt, and my rent would have been three pound ten shillings. So, we were a lot better off than them. I wouldn’t say that they [the Rowton company] actually USED them that much, but uh.... That was my first Christmas in Inglann. [After Christmas] I wound up in a room off the Holloway Road, off Mercer’s Road. It was eight pound a week [rent] at the time. All was in this room was myself, and another guy, and a sink. That was eight pound a week. And he [the other guy] didn’t talk to me, at all. He was an Irish bloke. I don’t know what this guy’s problem was; he didn’t even speak to me in the room. I spoke to him, but the guy didn’t communicate at all, just sort of got up, gawked at you, and went out the door. And every Friday night, I used to go out. I’d go home, have a bath, put money in all these meters and things [for gas and electric]; this was all strange to me. I’d have a bath, put a suit on, and off I’d go. I remember coming from Ireland. I’d four suits when I came here, four made-to-measure suits, and within a year, I didn’t have four pairs of socks. Genuine. This is my first education in this town. So, every Friday I used to go out, with my suit, round the Buffalo, and round the Gresham, and round the Forum, and round all the Irish dancehalls. And I’d come back, and I’d wake up the next morning and - I’d be going to work on a Saturday - I’d think, right, I have to go to work, and maybe I’d been drinking a lot of whiskey or whatever was going the night before, and I’d get up (we were paid on a Thursday) and check my clothes and... I expected to have maybe twenty-five quid there and there’d be about ten quid, and I’d think to myself, My God, I musta LOST fifteen quid. Thinking, I couldn’t have spent all that. Because, there was eight pints for a pound, at that time. Couldn’t have spent it. The next week, the same thing happened again, and I thought, what’s going on here? I was green. And on a Saturday morning I woke up, and I looked, and the door of the room was wide open. My trousers was half in and half out the door, and the guy in the other bed was gone. And I thought, what’s going on here?... I went over to my trousers, and all my money was gone. And I fell in, then. I started to tumble, then. He’s robbed me. He’s robbed me. He’s BEEN robbing me. When I was drunk, this guy had been going through my pockets. Probably, he had wanted to stay a few extra weeks, so [previously] he left a few quid in there; but, shooting through [leaving for good], he took everything. So, that REALLY put me in shit street. I couldn’t get to work the next week, I had no money for food, I couldn’t pay the rent... I didn’t know what to do. I was totally lost. I didn’t know where to go, like Irish Centres or anything, or day [advice] centres, like there is now. I was just totally lost. And so, I wandered about for a week, till the following Thursday, when I got my lying wage. I walked to a place called Turnsford, which is out the Great Cambridge Road, way out from Wood Green, way out there, and I got my lying week. That’s when I started to wind up on the streets, because some guys started telling me: " Go down to Camden Town and jump on a van, and you’ll get the shift " [a day’s work and wages]. It went from that. I started working with subbies [sub-contractors who hired out labour to bigger contractors] and went downhill from there. I got into a real heavy drinking culture then, because there was nothing else to do. You went out in the morning, you got your one pound ‘sub’ [an advance on your wages]; that was enough to get you a packet of fags and a breakfast, and you got six or seven quid at night, and you drank that. There was nothing else to do. Camden Town, at that time, was full of MEN. In all the pubs, the only women were barmaids. There was no such thing as women. It was a very male culture. The whole thing was male. At the weekends, even. They were rough pubs, cider-houses even. The ‘Buck’s Head’ was a cider-house, then. It had a saloon bar, but most Irishmen didn’t use that. The barrow-boys there, in Inverness Street, they used the saloon bar, maybe, with their wives. But even when we were cleaned up at the weekend, we all used the public bar. And there was no women went in the public bar. And if a women was spotted in a pub, it was - honestly - it was unbelievable. So, a lot of problems, a lot of frustrations, came with that. The idea was, to strike up a relationship with a woman, you had to go to a dance, like the Buffalo, the Forum, or the Gresham, around this area, Camden. But by the time people (men) got there, they were off their heads with drink, and the women didn’t want to know them. So, they came out, angry and frustrated, fuck knows what, and just drank more. And over a period of time, got to think that it wasn’t worth going to a dance. This idea that you had to get dressed up at the weekend [to go dancing], left me after a short time [laughs]. So, I started skippering [squatting in derelict houses], then, sleeping out. Sleeping about and fucking about. At that time, there was about thirty to forty of us, round Camden, slept rough. A lot of them are dead, now. As the years have gone by, the alcoholism has taken its toll. Sleeping out has taken its toll on an awful lot. I used to say: " Wi’ the troubles in Northern Ireland, I had to get over the murder of twenty-one people I knew there; but alcoholism, emigration and skippering has got rid of an awful lot MORE people I knew, very, very well ! ".... I went through some tough times with them, to be honest. Took a toll on an awful lot. I was lucky. I was always pretty strong, strong constitution and that, while other people were getting TB and things like that there. I was always able to work, and always able to get work, basically because of my size. It did count. Unless you were six foot and sixteen stone... Any subby would have said [to me], " just jump in the van " [because I looked physically strong]. I had no problem getting drunk, every day, for twenty years. Because I had the experience of a trade behind me, most of the work I was ever on, I had the strength AND the intelligence to do it. So, I was always kept on any job I was ever on. The alcoholism was the only thing that brought me down, as far as work was concerned. The subbies wanted you there seven days a week. You could be the greatest worker on earth, but if you were there only one day a week, you weren’t making him [the subby] any money. I had no problem getting work, but that only meant that my problem got worse, because the longer I went without any family support, without the support of a woman, or anything like this here, the more frustrated I became, the more my self-esteem lowered. Still, even on the streets... There used to be a shop down the street there called Kemps... and I’d work all week, and I’d get my money every day. I’d be on £ 48 a week, for six days. I could eat a breakfast, but I could never consistently eat a dinner. I might eat two dinners a week, even working really heavy. With this Saturday morning shift, I might have £ 18 left on a Saturday dinnertime after finishing work, and I’d go down to Kemps - a pretty good second-hand shop - and I’d get myself a jacket, trousers, socks, shirt, and I’d head up to Prince of Wales Rd. and have a bath [in the public baths]. I’d have a razor, always carried it in my pocket. A razor, a toothbrush, and a packet of toothpaste. And a bar of soap. I can remember the police stopping me in the middle of the night, and I remember one copper saying, " What sort of a fucking drop-out are you, carrying a toothbrush around?. [Laughs] You’re only a pseudo-drop-out, you’re not a proper drop-out at all." The one obsession I had, was cleaning my teeth every morning. When Saturday came, I tried to tidy myself up, try and hold SOME semblance of dignity, so I could go out on a Saturday. I had this pre-conceived idea, bred into me at home, that you went out smart and tidy and clean on a Saturday night, and on a Sunday. I kept that up as much as I could, over the years. But, those clothes I would then wear to work on a Monday. It was a time when it wasn’t very hard to get clothes or anything like that. The work was there. I remember skippering in Arlington Road - down the road there - myself and a Sligo bloke. Now, they were gutting the whole inside of the house out, but we had nowhere else to go, so we found it very, very, difficult to leave this place. Anyway, there was a digger actually in on the ground floor, so we said, " Right, we’ve GOT to go now, this it. We’ve got to accept that we CAN’T stay in here any more; the machine is actually working down on the ground floor!". So, we went up Camden High Street then, and just outside the station, a guy pulled up in a car and he says, " D’ye want to go to work, lads? ". We said, " YEAH, where? " He said, " Bognor Regis.... Get in the back of the car ". So, the two of us got in the back of the car, as we stood. We had no baggage, we had NOTHING. And we took off, three weeks before Christmas, for Bognor Regis. We arrived in Bognor Regis - we had a wonderful view - it was a sewage plant. The game was: there was a caravan there [to use as living quarters] and we got £ 8 per day and £ 5 for Saturday, £ 3 from the Saturday going toward the rent of the caravan. What he [the sub-contractor] said to us was, " Right, I’m off back to London now, lads, I’ll be back up next Saturday, and I’ll bring you up your week’s wages ". Which he did. We worked all week, and on the Saturday he arrived and he gave us £ 45. So, we headed off to Bognor Regis. We had a bath, and I remember buying a suit for a pound. I bought shirts and stuff like that, to try and pull myself together. Got a bit of food and what have ye, and came back to these caravans. Two weeks later, time is ticking on toward Christmas. He was supposed to turn up the next Saturday, but he never showed up. We weren’t that worried. It ticked on then till the break-up of Christmas. And everyone else on the site, main contractors and all that, packed up, which left me and this Sligo guy on the site, alone. We were expecting this guy to come with two weeks’ wages, so that we could get back to London, back to Camden Town, or whatever... But he never showed up. Everybody disappeared off the site. The snow came down. And we stayed there in that caravan, right through from about the 22nd of December, till January, in that POXY CARAVAN. Looking at each other, getting on each other’s nerves. We had no money, we had no food. We had no belongings, we had absolutely nothing, only each other’s frustrations. That’s all we had, in this caravan, in a sewerage plant. Shite, to look out at, floating by you. So, we just had to slim down a bit - for want of a better phrase [i.e., they went hungry]. There was half a bottle of Tizer there, and I suppose you could say that we celebrated Christmas with half a bottle of Tizer. Yeah, so that was the craic with that. The next thing that happened, was that a Kerryman arrived, the first man back on the site, and he said, " Youse are back early, lads !..." And we said, " WE NEVER FUCKING WENT! " We told him the tale, anyway, and he opened his wallet, and all he had in his wallet - he had been home to Kerry for Christmas and had come back over again - was a £ 10 note, which he gave to us, for us to get to fuck out of Bognor Regis. That’s what we done. We got back to Camden. Never got paid. Another one was; I got mugged, just before Christmas and I wound up Guy’s hospital. And they stuck [a photograph of ] me in the South London Press [to try and identify me]. I had lost my memory - I had been kicked senseless. I was mugged, and they took all my money off me. I didn’t know who I was, in Guy’s hospital. The Borough police came in and they were trying to find out who I was. But I was all busted up, black eyes and all that type of stuff, y’know; really in a bad way. And they took a photograph of me, but it was all a mashed face. Nobody would’ve recognised me, anyway. But at least they went to the trouble of putting the thing in the paper. So, nobody recognised me. My memory came back, after about 72 hours. After three days, I got my memory back again and I knew who I was. They kept me in there for about a week, and then they let me out. It was just before Christmas. So, the welfare woman in the hospital sent me down to Tooley Street. There was a hostel there in Tooley street; it was called the Tooley Hotel, in those days. You used to get tickets to go to the cafe next door [for food]. This was about 12 days before Christmas, when I went in there. So I went down in there, and there was a woman in there and she took pity on me, and she says, " My God, you can’t go out like that !". Because I was all mashed up - my face was all mashed up. So, she says, " you can stay in here, like ". Well, I couldn’t go out and look for a shift somewhere, or I couldn’t go out and work in a kitchen or anything like that, the state my face was in. It was an awful mess. " I’ll tell you what I’ll do ", she said, " I’ll give you a couple of pound a day, for going around making the beds in the hostel ". Y’see, there’s always decent people in the world, to help pull you up out of it. So, she was getting me a few bob for making beds in the hostel. So, I survived that one as well. But the beds was all loused up, so I had to go around loused up. That didn’t worry me too much. Basically, some of them [Christmases] were a case of getting over them. I can remember, on building sites, it was okay for men who worked on their cards, because they looked forward to Christmas [they got holiday pay]; but I can remember the fear coming around those men that were working casual [who were paid daily, and got no holiday pay]. Like say, they were breaking up on a Friday and only getting one day’s wages, and then there’d be no work for 15 days. And yeah, it was a long drag. It started going into the second of January and the third of January... Say the first of January hit on a Friday, well you were shit upon altogether, because you would go back on the 4th, which would be the Monday. What a stretch out that was, and nobody signed on in them days, so it was just a case of doing without. I spent many, many, years like that, doing without, sleeping in skippers around Camden and Kentish Town, Holloway Rd., Archway. [Eventually] I had a breakdown, and I wound up in Harton Hospital in Epsom. I was on the streets for about seven years and it was taking its toll on me. It was on the grapevine that Charing Cross hospital had closed down and had been taken over by St. Mungo’s and I went down there. It was a Scots guy, he started up St. Mungo’s at that time, and I went down there. And he said I could stay. It was £ 13 p.w. for full board at that time, which was bloody good. I could earn that in two shifts. At that time, I was feeling that BAD... There was a lot of suicides. These thoughts were crossing my head; " what’s the fucking point of all this shit ?". Y’know what I mean, like? Seven years on the streets, believe me, flattens any ego, any ambition, any ANYTHING you might have. I thought, " what’s the point to all this bollocks?". So anyway, I went to this doctor down there in Mornington Crescent, an Asian doctor, and I told him this. So he gave me a sick note, and a bottle of these tablets called Triptaphen, a kind of tranquilliser, to calm me down. The sick note was no good to me because I didn’t work with DHSS at that time, nobody did; that’s only a recent thing, this social security thing, signing on and all that. And that’s usually to do wi’ the high rents, housing benefit covering that. But uh, I started taking these tablets, two at a time, and still drinking. I knew nothing about the effects of mixing tablets and drink, thought they were just like taking an ‘Aspro’ or something like that. But they did have some sort of effect on me. They calmed me down, but I carried on drinking with them. And I got into such a fucking state on them... I was in St. Mungo’s and the bloke who was in charge of it, he phoned up some hospital. I think I was hallucinating, between these tablets, and the alcohol. Apparently, they took me to the Middlesex hospital, or somewhere like that. And I seen a psychologist there, and she said, " What you need is a break from all this stress of city life... You need a break. I’m thinking of sending you out to the Horton hospital in Epsom; there’s an alcohol unit there". At that time, all alcohol units were inside mental hospitals, not like today, when they’re more in the community. And I can remember, I said, "yeah". Because I didn’t care WHERE I went, because I wasn’t able to COPE anymore, with another day of this CRAP, the crap I was getting myself into. And I didn’t know how to stop it, caught in some sort of a... I just couldn’t get out of it, between the alcoholism, the homelessness, living in hostels. And everybody had the SAME problems and they were all seeming to be tough guys that was MAKING it. And I WASN’T. None of them ever showed any feelings. Within myself, I thought, Christ, I must be a right fucking failure, altogether. I mean, I don’t talk like the rest, I don’t think within me the way the rest of them do. It [living on the streets] doesn’t seem to bother them. But I know that as the years has gone on, it has bothered them, and buried them. It’s always bothered me. I went down to this hospital in Epsom, and they put me on what are called Hemeneverin - they were only new, at that time. They were like pigeon eggs; they were 500mg and I was put on two o’ them, four times a day, which was 4000mg... It was some dose! This was a sort of substitute for alcohol. And they used to give it to junkies as well, as a substitute for whatever drug they were on. I was on this stuff for about two or three weeks and I’d never felt anything like this bloody stuff in my life, y’know. I felt at peace. I felt at ease. It calmed me right down. It was a ‘weaning’, a reducing regime.... I think that it was the first three weeks that I was in this country, that I was actually free of alcohol. I had never ever experienced this. I was calm. And it was a mixed unit, and there was women in it and all the rest. There were nurses there who were very skilled at knowing that you weren’t feeling yourself, that your self-esteem was very low. This was the first human contact that I’d had with women for quite a long time, and it immediately struck me: fuck me, bhoy, where have you been?... Sitting on an ARMCHAIR, after seven years [on the streets], and thinking to myself, where have you BEEN ?. But, I wound up in that hospital, and I can remember, after a few weeks, I was weaned off it, and they’d given me 21 vitamin injections in the backside. Goes to show you the difference in the governments. At that time, when there was a Labour Gov., you got 21; today you get ONE, and slung back out on the street. I got 21 vitamin injections, and, d’ye know, I started to feel physically well, plus, there was all this community of women around. This was the first contact I’d had with - what’s the word I’m looking for? - NON-AGGRESSION is the word I think I’m looking for, non-aggression, in a long, long time. A sort of peaceful environment, without any aggression, or threats of aggression. I remember the first day; I woke up, and a thought went through my head, Oh my God, ...this is it. This is the end of the line. You’re in a mental hospital, now. You’re in the fucking NUTHOUSE ! Where can you go from here? Y’know, what’s your family going to think?, and all this bollix. Never mind about how I was feeling, I was still worrying about what people were thinking, families, and that sort of thing: what’s the neighbours going to think... Danny Fisher has wound up in a fucking nuthouse. And all the stigma of all that. It took me a while to get over the stigma of that. I can speak about it today, but I wouldn’t have told you about it, eighteen years ago, or whatever it was... I came out of that, and I went back. Into Camden. Because the resource was always there. The tactics were: get back and get a shift, start drinking again, and the same old cycle went on. And that went on for quite a long time. I met a Cork woman in the Elephant [& Castle] and I spent nine years with her. And she died. That was my first experience of a long-term relationship. She died after nine years. Then, I met a Manchester woman, and I lived with her for about a year. And various other odds and sods along the way; but those were the only long-ish commitments, that I’ve had in my life, as far as women are concerned. But she died. And I started thinking; what is this fucking life all about, again, and all this. I went home, then, to Northern Ireland. When she died, I was sort of blaming it on Inglann, then. I had a flat, then. She had a good job. She worked for the ‘Daily Mail’. She was the ‘Mother of the Chapel’ down there, a sort of shop steward. I was drinking then, but not to the extent that I was, when I was on the streets. I’d drink at the weekend, drink too much at the weekend, then try and sober up for the rest of the week, bollix around, go to work. And as time went on, the work started to get slacker and slacker and slacker. I think I signed on, at the finish, and got the rent covered; that’s WHY I signed on, because I knew, coming from Northern Ireland, I have a National Insurance number... I knew the years was ticking away, and I had no contributions on, and I had to come in out of the cold, and straighten this up a bit. Let the DHSS know where I was. Because, I knew that if I expected to live any length, or if I ever wanted to go home and live in N. Ireland, that they’d have to have some record of me being on the dole or something, rather than somebody who has just disappeared, altogether. That got me back in the fold. And so, I signed on for that reason, and because it helped to pay the rent. She died in 1988.And I thought, right, this is IT. I didn’t like the flat at all, there was too many memories in it, of her; and all her clothes was in it. I was walking down the street one day, after the funeral, and I met this guy, this Belfast guy, who’d just come out of prison. He said to me [that] he’d nowhere to go, and I said, " y’have now ", and I handed him the keys. I give him the address of the flat and I told him, " You can have the fucking lot, I’m not going back near it ". And I never took one thing out of it, only the clothes I stood up in; and all my suits and everything was in it. I went down and stayed with Bob, a sailor I knew; I stayed with him for a few months, and then I went back to Northern Ireland. I got a job at R. J. Maxwells, and I worked there for a year. I don’t know what sort of an attitude I went back with, but I think that I went back with the attitude that... I think that I had been gone about 18 years and I went back home... with the attitude, thinking that everything had stood still since I’d left. I was in a for a big shock when I went back. My whole family had , obviously, to develop their way through the ‘troubles’, develop their way through their lives; and get married and have bungalows, have families. I was sort of stuck, as a forty year old man. And I thought, what am I doing HERE? I don’t belong here, either. These people had worked their way through the troubles, had helped each other out, to build bungalows, to baby-sit each other[’s children], and I had had no part of any of this. The house which I had left, which the family lived in, when I came over here, had been all renovated. They’d done that among themselves, renovated the whole house, got grants which they get over there; they’d put showers in, they’d put bathrooms upstairs, they’d put bathrooms downstairs, they’d built an extension onto the back of it. And I thought: I don’t belong in this place. I was lost again. I was totally lost again, among those people. I went to work with an asphalt firm, R.J. Maxwell, worked in Belfast a lot, and worked on carriageways, coming out of it. The people I was working with, they looked upon me as an oddball. Most of these people, they had lived in their own communities all their lives. They didn’t know what to make of me at all: " That’s that smart fella back from Inglann [laughs], without a pot to piss in. !". I carried on there, but my drinking... the habits I had picked up in Inglann, like the drinking habits, there’s no way I was going to get away with them at home, y’know, within a family and that. If I walked into a pub drunk, say, in Lisnabraw, or some of the places that - in my teens - I went to school in... Most of the town, had grown up and now they owned the butchers, the hardware shop... If I walked drunk into a pub, Jimmy Peterson would lift up the phone and phone my brother. And if my brother wasn’t home, he’d put the phone down and he’d drive me home. He wouldn’t sort a say, " You’re barred! Get out you bastard, you’ve had too much to drink !". He would take me to the house and put me to bed. Because that’s the relationship neighbours have, there. Not only that, there was other things. The mother was still alive, IS still alive. And I’d go out and get DRUNK on a Saturday night. I’d be in the pub early on a Saturday morning, eleven o’clock. And I’d drink at the rate I’d be drinking here [in England], so come four, half four, five, I was drunk as a stick. The habit that I had, was to go home and go to bed then. So, I’d go home, in the middle of Northern Ireland, at half four, five, in the afternoon. And the whole family on a Saturday afternoon, is all sitting around, y’unnerstand, and I’d just walk past them, straight up the stairs and into bed. So, they had a bit of a conference, and they said, " Well, what are we going to do about this bhoy ? ". So, it was put to me to stop this kind of behaviour; but I was so fucked up and screwed up in the head at that time, within myself, that the only friend I had, the only thing that calmed me down, was alcohol. I know alcohol stopped me from feeling bad, so that was just what I used it for, to calm me down, sedate myself. I was using it for that reason; but there’s after-consequences come from the alcohol. It’s a very clever sedative, when I think of it, now. I couldn’t get away from the habits I’d had here. They didn’t work there [in N. Ireland]. I remember, one Sunday, I went out on the pretext of going to Mass. I didn’t go to Mass. I went down to Jimmy Peterson’s pub in Lisnabraw, which opened early on a Sunday morning. And I went in there, and I’m drinking all day. So, it comes rolling round about seven o’clock at night; it must have been summertime, the sun was shining. And I thought... Oh, I’ve learned the ways of back yonder. I’d learned their ways. And I says, oh, I’m not going back in the house, while the mother is still up. Y’see, the idea there, was, you go back drunk when the mother’s in bed. I had known that, before I left [Ireland], but I had need of a refresher course, to get around these things. So, I’d had enough to drink - it was around eight o’clock at night, and this was Lisnabraw, Co. Down. So, I says, I’ll go over here and lie in the park [laughs]; I goes across and lies in the park, anyway, and I lie down on this grass. Lovely. Just lying down in the sun. But I must have fell into a deep sleep. The next thing that happened was this car drove past - there was a road through the park - and I must have been a coupla feet off the road, lying on the grass. The next thing, I could hear this car, and a screech of brakes, and out jumped this man and woman. I was sort of half-drunk, and I thought, oh, I’ll just play dead here for a bit... and this woman flew over and put her hand on my ear and said, "He’s still warm, Sean, he’s still warm". And I said, " what’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you?" [And she screamed] " HE’S ALIVE, HE’S ALIVE!". She said, "what are you doing lying there?". I said, " I drunk too much, I’m just having a lie-down " and she heard me say ‘lie-down’ - it’s an Inglish phrase; maybe I said it with an Ulster accent, but it’s an Inglish phrase. And she said, " I thought you were a corpse! I thought you’d been shot and dumped. You frightened the living daylights out of me !." "Anyway," she said," what’r’ye doing sleeping out? This is not Inglann, y’know. Nobody sleeps out round here, only dead people. Nobody lies out around here, only corpses. ...D’ye want a lift home?". And they give me a lift home. I remember thinking, fucking hell man, what ‘m I going to do? What am I going to do? Is there no place on earth where I can survive? So, I came back to Inglann, again. Stayed with an old friend of mine, down the old Kent rd., an old seaman, whom I’d known for years. And within a short space of time - I’d been back here a month - I met a Manchester woman and moved in with her, stayed with her for about a year. But my alcoholism was still there, and it wasn’t working with this lady, because this lady had been through all this shit before. She just put it to me, point-blank, one day. She said, " Danny, you are going to have to look at your drinking. You’re a nice fella when you’re sober, but you’re not reliable, or anything like that there. I can’t trust you in a relationship ". So, I thought, fuck me, I AM going to have to do something about my drinking. I wound up in Drink Crisis - this is about 1990. Went to the Drink Crisis centre in the Elephant & Castle, went in there for a month. This was the first time in quite a long time that I’d stopped drinking. They weaned me off alcohol with substitutes. I was in there about a month and they said, right, you can move on to another stage, a sort of dry house. You can have a look at why you drink. The PHYSICAL side was sort of sorted out after a month in the Drink Crisis centre, so I went in this dry-house. And I was wonderin’ why I FELT the way I did, and THOUGHT the way I did, about myself. Because I just felt like shit all the time, and there must be more to life than feeling like that. Not that drink made it any better. it just DILUTED it a bit; [with drink] it didn’t feel quite so shitty. Then I went in to the Alcohol Recovery Project in Camberwell, which is a re-hab unit; you live-in, there. There’s counsellors there, and you mix with other alcoholics, male and female. This was the first time I got to talk to counsellors, talk to females, and drag up relationships with strangers, in many, many years. I was unmasked. No alcohol. No nothing. And it was quite difficult at the beginning, but gradually, as I went along, it got better. I went through that stage, which was thirteen weeks done. They then moved me on to their second stage, which was in New Cross, and I went up there. Stuck it about a month up there, then I had a phone call, from Shirley, the Manchester woman; and me and her had an argument on the phone. And I just crashed the phone down and went into Peckham, and got mad roaring drunk for five days. And I thought: well, this let’s me know how well I am able to manage my feelings. This is what they’d been talking about in these alcohol recovery places. I thought: this hasn’t worked. Again. Like doing some more of what doesn’t work, don’t work! Just doesn’t does it? I went back again, but I had learned the route. I learned that you need a detox, to get into this recovery project. So, I went over to the East End and went into the Salvation Army detox, spent seven days in there, detox-ed again, and they referred me to their second stage, which is a Salvation Army second stage. And I went in there, sort of sneering with contempt, with all these Salvation Army blokes running around, singing every morning and all the rest. That’s where my life changed. In that programme. As much as the Salvation Army is what they are, they have a lot of contacts all over the world, with alcohol agencies, and they have the best alcohol recovery programme going. I done seven months, in there, actually done the programme twice. They had a garden there. The idea was: you done your therapy in the morning - say a three hour group, up to 12 - had your dinner, and then you went in this workshop out the back, working lathes. [You] generally worked around the house, put the house together, put the garden together. There was some good tradesmen there, proper painters: " Hey, you’re a painter, get in there and paint that wall ". This was the first time I’d ever worked for no money and I fucking HATED this. And I resented this, and most of us were all the same, muttering under our breaths, " Fucking Salvation Army, getting this all done, using OUR skills and OUR training...". This broke my habit of subbies [casual labouring], or went a long way toward it. As time went on, the therapy started to work. And I started to learn, that I’m responsible for my life. I’m responsible for how I think. If I choose to feel like crap, that’s my choice. If I choose to feel okay, that’s also my choice. I started to take responsibility for my life, for my thoughts, for my feelings, for my actions. And own them. Not blame them on my family, or on my history, my culture. Because that’s not going to save me. The only thing that’s going to change that [is]... I’VE got to change. I learnt that, in that programme. I got peace of mind. I learnt something that made me able to calm myself down, without any external influence, or any alcohol, or any tranquillisers; without anyone, or anything. I moved to an internal universe, rather than the external. Because the external was weighing me down. Every day that I slept out was in my memory. It was like a wardrobe full of coats I was wearing every day. I was just putting on another coat, and the weight of all them coats every day, was just working on the outside. I started to work on the inside then, more on a spiritual level. And from that day on, my life has changed. By that bit of therapy. Y’see, the thing is, there was no-one when I was young, same as there is today, no-one to point you in the right way, and say, look, you’re responsible for you. You can’t say that to a child, because a child is dependent. There’s lots of factors. It was appropriate for the age I was. I had the head of an old man, drinking, before I went into therapy. I felt like Methuselah, as far as my head was concerned; but emotionally, I was a baby. Because I didn’t work my way through my emotions. I sedated them, masked them. As they say in these programmes, I had to feel what was going on within me. I’m glad I did it, because I can cope with most things now. Every day is a new experience. I’m glad to be alive, every day, now. Every day, I used to wake up, I used to dread it [waking up], to be on the streets somewhere, or lying in a doorway, a derelict building. And I used to go like that [shields his face with his arm], with my arm over me; God, another day to face. NOW, I jump out of bed in the morning, take it on. It’s just down to me. It’s not down to anyone else. Whatever comes in to me, is up to me to manage. That’s not to say that I’m going to be crisis-free in my life. Just, I’m maybe going to be a bit more skilled at managing them. I’m working in Deptford - voluntary [work] - at the minute. There’s a few things I want to do after this year. And yes, I’m feeling quite alright.   other interviews...