A year ago, I moved into what I hope will be my home for the rest of my life. I became an almshouse resident. The announcement of my implied reduced circumstances provoked some interesting responses: from family, joy that my recent hard times were over; from acquaintances, a range of reactions: embarrassment, shocked disbelief, scepticism. Even some thinly veiled envy. Who’d have thought?
What kind of person ends their days in an almshouse? The key word is need. It might be financial, it might be social, perhaps both. Some people are quite alone in the world. Some reach old age with a negligible pension, or no roof over their head. My own story was the result of a perfect storm of disasters, a confluence of my husband, beset with early-onset dementia, needing expensive full-time care just as I was let go by my publisher and my career went into free fall. To misquote Wilkins Micawber: ‘Two moderate freelance incomes, result, felicity. Sudden reduction of income to zero, result, misery and terror.’
This was the point at which I thought of a very special almshouse, the London Charterhouse, and though I mistakenly assumed I had little chance of being awarded a place there, I began the application process.
Three years on, here I am, a Charterhouse Brother. Some days I pinch myself. But even more surprising has been other people’s perceptions of my turn of fortune.
First, there have been the frankly embarrassed. For some, it is as though by effectively admitting to penury I have violated a taboo. Just as a bereavement can leave sincerely sympathetic people tongue-tied, so, I’ve discovered, does relocation to Queer Street. What can they say? ‘So sorry. We had no idea.’ Or ‘I do wish you’d said.
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