|
BACK FROM HELL
by Andrew Tyler, December 1991.
Gill McCabe
"Big Gill McCabe had already spent 10 years sleeping
rough in and around London when we first met in the summer of 1985. I
remember Gill, then aged 24, as a hefty woman, heavy in the back and
rump, who walked with a quick, intimidating swagger. She wore heavy
boots and faded jeans. A couple of teeth were missing at the front and
her dark eyes were ringed with purple. Looking again at those 1985
photographs, she evinces nothing so much as disarray; a shout for pity.
She had arrived here through a combination of a bad beginning, her
personal fallibilities and a political social culture that is expert in
the production of can't and crocodile tears but not much else for her
sort. Some people ride through bad times. They have the resources or the
good fortune. Others like Gill McCabe, fizzle out. Unless miracles
happen.
"At her new single-room council flat with her new
boyfriend Essex-born Steve Tranter, she recounted how it happened. Soon
after our last meeting she'd tried to beg from a group of black
Christians who were evangelising in Covent Garden. They were from North
West London teaching mission called SCHOLAR and their leader Errol
Williams, spoke to Gill about the rat race and how to escape it. Soon
she was enrolled on a SCHOLAR course that offered instruction in self
awareness, positive thinking and social skills - some 20 sessions. Other
enrollees paid for their instructions, Gill got hers free, Errol also
bought Gill fresh clothes and drove her to classes. (She was still
sleeping rough at the time.)
"It was a couple of weeks after the course started
that her cancer was redefined as a cyst; homeopathic tablets she says
have since virtually eliminated it. Then she met Steve, a former
landscape gardener whose marriage and job had busted apart, so that,
like Gill, he was sleeping rough in Lincoln's Inn Fields. They decided
to reclaim her old flat and face what duffy had to offer. But the place
was uninhabitable. That's when Camden Council moved Gill to her present
block in King's Cross. She moved in as a sober woman.
"Gill McCabe is as amazing as anyone by the
transformation in her life. 'It's brilliant, isn't it?' she says, as we
sit together on the one item of furniture in her clean, freshly wall
papered flat: a sofa bed. 'SCHOLAR gave me a certificate for finishing
the course. You can see it if you like, I've got it here.'
"There is colour in her cheeks and the tremors have
gone, but, with her improved circumstances, there is the recognition of
just how weary her years on the road have made her. 'We had to give a
presentation at the end of the course where we said we were in life. I
said that I was at rock bottom, which was true. I'm coming up now,
although I still need loads of time to get myself stable, to make this
place into home. We are going to get some proper furniture when we can
afford it and finish the decorating.' A sceptic might say Gill has
exchanged one addiction for another - boozy recklessness for submission
to the Jesus cult. That is probably true - although she is not half so
zonked out on her Lord as some you see. But, in her case, at least, it
is a less malign and hurtful addiction. And more than that, she at least
stands a chance of realising her old-fashioned dream: to make herself a
life of mundane domesticity." |
