People cry out for help - Sunderland will answer

Yesterday at 01:00 AM

Our very own Damian Brown tells his own story of childhood food poverty and why YOU can make the biggest difference to so many lives this December.

When I was 10 years old I burgled a house.

A neighbour had been abusing his long-suffering wife and she worked up the courage to escape. She hid bin bags full of her and her children's belongings behind the garden wall of another neighbour, and when her husband left for work that morning she left the house moments later, kids in tow, grabbed her bin bags and jumped in a waiting taxi that took her to a safe space. We lived alone, my father and I, himself and my mother resembling a tornado of violence if they stayed together in the same room for more than ten minutes. Violence, fear and anxiety were a normality in my childhood.

We quickly went into the back yard – the mission was on. My dad hoisted me onto the wheelie bin beneath the neighbours shed and I clambered onto the shed roof, dropping down into their garden. I tested the door – it was unlocked. I'm going in, I said. He threw me a handful of plastic carrier bags and told me to shout and run at the first sign of trouble, then took up a guard position on the front porch on the other side of the house, watching for the husband in case he returned home unexpectedly. We had arranged a cunning and clandestine warning system to use in the event of an emergency: my dad would shout my name as loud as humanly possible.

As I crawled on my belly through enemy territory my heart was pounding — equal parts excitement and fear. I was Action Man. I didn't want to stand in case I was seen through the windows. But I wasn't there for people's belongings. I didn't go in there to steal electronics or jewellery or on the off-chance there was cash lying about. I was after something much more valuable – food.

The back door opened to the kitchen and I made straight for the fridge. Opening it up, I found a treasure trove. A fridge and a freezer full of food. The lady and her children had no use for it anymore, but we did. My father was blinded by a factory accident in his youth, and employment was tough to find so we lived on benefits, benefits that left us a choice between heating, electricity and eating. From memory, we were subsisting on £30 per week. It was rare indeed to have lights, heat and food simultaneously.

I was busy emptying the freezer into my Food Giant swag bags when I heard a noise behind me. My heart in my throat, I turned to confront the animal I had failed to notice on entry. This fierce guardian, a tiny kitten surely no older than two months, stared at me with adorable curiosity. I checked for a food bowl and found it empty, so I filled it with milk, screwed back the lid and then that went in the bag too. The milk, not the kitten. I do hope it led a full life, though I never saw it again.

On I went from cupboard to cupboard, filling the carrier bags with everything and anything edible. I took three bags back into the garden and hoisted them over the fence. Empty bags came back over in return and back in I went. It took around 20 minutes to clear the cupboards, fridge, freezer, but each minute passed like an hour. I will never forget the sensation.

Use by dates and quality and brands were irrelevant; this is the kind of house raid you could expect to see in a movie set post-apocalypse. I felt like a survivor, and the truth is that's what we were.

That night we laughed together, my father and I, sat in our cold little kitchen in a run-down estate that has since been bulldozed, the oven on with the door open to warm the room. All that remains of that defining moment of my childhood resides in my memory, and it is a warm one. Despite the struggle, despite the fear, despite the clear risk to both of us, we had succeeded in our mission.

By candlelight we ate like Kings that evening. As an added bonus I had found two 4-packs of tinnies for my old man, and he let me have a shandy to reward my good work. We even took a photo on an old disposable, a picture that has since been lost in the maelstrom of time. I remember this objectively shocking event in vivid detail and with no small amount of fondness.

My father is dead now. He died in 2019, riddled with cancer and gasping for air. We had moved South for work, and he had worked 14+hr shifts for twenty years before his death – he was not a lazy man. Like so many others, he had simply been a victim of circumstance, and the times and the place in which I grew up – Seaham in the late 90's – were not times of plenty for many.

When he died, he died poor. As soon as he was unable to work due to his debilitating health issues he was made redundant and placed on a state pension. He had £600 in his bank account and the process to move him on to Housing Benefit was delayed to the point where he never received it. The Housing Association that he had privately rented from up to this point, Paragon Asra, didn't care that he had £600 to his name – one day we checked his account and they had taken it for rent, despite being informed by me of his condition and the delay from the Department of Work and Pensions in arranging his financial support. The man I spoke to on the phone that day, some trumped-up middle manager in a job he couldn't do properly and on a wage he didn't deserve, laughed at me when I suggested they provide special dispensation for my father's case: to wait only two weeks for a payment, and to not leave my father dying and hungry.

When my father passed, it took all of my self-control not to find that man who had contributed to my dad's suffering, and teach him what suffering truly was. That's for the best, I suppose, but scars take many forms and they were formed nonetheless.

So why am I telling you this? Because to me this has always been a monument of my past, and one of the finest examples of how poverty creates suffering and desperation.

The Sunderland Community Soup Kitchen Fundraiser exists because in thirty years very little has changed. In some ways, it has even gotten worse. This nation faces a crisis of child poverty and homelessness the likes of which many people even 15 years ago could never have believed possible.

There is a great absence of compassion in this world. To my eyes it grows darker by the day, and slowly, inexorably, the lights that people turn to to guide them through this long night have begun to flicker and dim. Organisations break down, costs and red tape prohibit well-meaning people from bringing hope to the hopeless.

So we can be thankful then, at least, for Andrea and her cohort of angels that put the time, effort, care and work in to nurturing that dying light, that beacon in the darkness. It is people like them that hold back the night. It is people like them who put their arms around the shoulders of people cruelly abandoned and shunned by society. It is them to whom we owe a duty.

It can be really easy to put a few quid into a fundraiser and feel that your work is done, that you've done a good deed. And you have done a good deed. Those funds are of immeasurable value, they are more than money; they are life. But what I would like you to do, if you can find even the price of a sandwich to give, is to not only give that now for this undoubtedly righteous cause, but to take a moment after you have done so and consider why you did it. Consider why you have to do it. Consider why anyone has to. Consider humans, consider society, consider compassion and charity. Think deeply on it. Let it wash over you and if you don't like the feelings it can invoke I do not blame you, because they can be like hooks in the tender flesh of your soul and they may overwhelm you. Yet still you must look, and look deep. Do not ever look away from your people, because the one thing that unites us all is the collective spirit that connects us all, and it is that which enables us to feel empathy and sympathy and compassion and mercy, and to do good works.

We share this world. For all of our faults and inadequacies, for all of our disagreements and the darker aspects of our nature, we are fundamentally connected to one another. Christians consider this to be the Spirit moving among God's people, and I believe that to be true, but that is merely one of many ways of explaining the often unspoken bond between all humans. You may be of any faith or none, the matter is not relevant to the task. Your people cry out for you, and who would we be if we did not answer that cry with full hearts and the humility to recognise that but for a sleight of fate it could be any one of us starving on the cold ground at a time when we are surrounded by the gross commercialism that pervades this holiday season? We would be less than human. Less than we can be.

Many of you will give to this fundraiser and I wish to thank you for that. I hope that in so doing, you find your connection to something far greater than yourself. I hope that recognise the dire need for you amongst your people.

I hope you realise that the difference can be made by you, and that you can carry the humility and blessings of service to humankind in your heart for the rest of your days. Most of all I hope that you can take a well-earned rest this Christmas in the knowledge that you did your part, that when you heard the cry you did not look away, but rather turned to face it and challenge the injustice that rots the foundations of our society.

Please, give anything you can. If you have money, give it. If you have time, give it. But most of all give your heart over to this, and do not forget that we are, all of us, in this together until the end.

May God bless you all and bring you peace, and show you his works in your own actions and those of others. May he bless Andrea and the whole team at the Sunderland Community Soup Kitchen, and those who are alive and warm today because saints live among us.

- Damian.