As a child living in a small Wimmera township, I was entirely ignorant of homelessness, despite jocular references to the prospect of 'sleeping under a barbed-wire fence.' I felt sorry for poor Louey Tong, the Chinese vegetable man, who lived alone in a very basic hut, but was not old enough to ask myself questions about loneliness, exile, and financial struggle.
I don't know that mature people asked many questions, either: at least Louey had a roof. And people were more used to variations on the theme of home then: my family and I lived with my paternal grandparents for the first six years of my life.
My ignorance continued. When I was a young woman living in Melbourne, homelessness, then appearing to be a relatively minor social problem, was usually associated with men who were chronic drinkers. For them there was crisis care provided by either the Salvation Army or Ozanam House, named for the Blessed Frederic Ozanam, who was professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, but also a tireless worker for the poor, and founder of the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
How things have changed, and how much I have been forced to learn. Much learning took place in the London of the 1990s, when I observed people sleeping under bridges, on doorsteps, in cardboard boxes. How they survived the winters, I never knew, and I suppose many didn't. And since the beginning of Greece's financial crisis in 2008 and the influx of refugees from the Middle East, similar scenes can now be seen in Athens. Life in difficult times is usually easier in the provinces, but there are even some homeless people in Kalamata these days.
The causes of homelessness are many and varied, but the problem of unemployment is a major factor, and is often the trigger for others such as drug abuse, a decline in mental health, and a breakdown in relationships that, in better circumstances, do much to provide stability and security. Unfortunately, the depressing statistics related to homelessness seem only to increase.
Homelessness itself may not be a permanent condition, but the number of people regularly sleeping rough in Greater London has grown by 18 per cent in the past year, and it is estimated that there are at least 307,000 designated homeless people in the United Kingdom. Greek figures are not reliable, but it is thought that there are 40,000 homeless people in the