IT is estimated thousands of people across Britain have no home and are left sofa surfing just to stay off the streets. MARION SAUVEBOIS speaks to Dave Rogers who, until two years ago, was one of Swindon’s hidden homeless

FOR years Dave Rogers made little of sofa surfing, burrowing in a corner of a friend’s living room for the night, or occasionally sleeping on a park bench when his usual armchair was snatched up by another poor soul.

Stumbling through each day in a drunken haze following the breakdown of his marriage, he never saw homelessness creeping up on him.

And yet, within days of leaving the marital home, he had joined the legions of ‘hidden homeless’; the invisibles hopping from couch to couch, falling unnoticed through society’s net.

“When I moved out it was the first time in my life I had never had an address,” recalls the 51-year-old from the Town Centre. “I was staying with my mates a few times a week. I had a roof over my head for 300 days of the year and I just didn’t realise that made me homeless. A couple of times I had to go down to the park but usually I had somewhere to go.”

Dave had struggled with alcoholism for most of his life when his marriage ended six years ago. Although the split was amicable, he explains, he found himself without a home of his own and relying on the kindness of friends for a place to sleep.

“It was not too difficult,” he shrugs. “I didn’t mind sleeping on the settee for a couple of nights a week. I was lucky in a way, one of my mates had a place in Old Town, he liked to drink too and he didn’t mind me crashing there – it was company for him. I don’t think I realised what was happening. I just got on with it and the drinking helped. It was a constant.”

He soon established a routine, whiling away the hours chugging beer in local pubs and rotating between friends’ floors or sofas each week to “doze off”. In hindsight, he suspects his determination to “get on with it” and unstoppable spiral into addiction to blur the edges prevented him from seeking help sooner or truly taking stock of his precarious situation. His own sense of pride prevented him from reaching out to his parents, he admits.

“I didn’t realise how bad it was,” he confides, flicking his hand as if brushing away a painful memory.

“If I had fallen over and gone to A&E, maybe I would have done something about it but I had somewhere to sleep most of the time. I knew I could go to my parents if I needed to but I’m quite strong-willed and I wanted to get by on my own. I never really felt I needed to sort it out. I had my system.”

Dave found a modicum of stability when he got into a new relationship and his housing arrangements improved to a degree. His partner was in poor health and he acted as her carer, staying over to watch over her a few nights a week. When she was taken ill and hospitalised in July 2014, his own health took a turn for the worse. The decades of binge drinking had finally caught up with him.

“I had an appointment at the dole office, it was November, and the man told me to go to Carfax Street. If I hadn’t I might not be here now.” He was on the verge of liver failure, doctors warned. An hour later he was rushed to A&E and remained in hospital for three weeks.

“I dropped down to 10st on hospital,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know if they ever expected to see me out.”

This was the wake-up call he so urgently needed to face the reality of his circumstances. There and then he vowed to fight his destructive addiction to alcohol. His partner’s fast deteriorating condition was also a major incentive to get his life in order for her sake.

After his release from hospital, he contacted a council housing officer and discussed his options. He was put in touch with Swindon homeless charity Threshold Housing Link. In January 2015, two days after his 50th birthday, he moved into its emergency hostel at Culvery Court.

“It was do or die at that point; either give up or sort yourself out,” he continues. “I knew I had to do something if I wanted them to let me see her in hospital, I had to stop drinking. And Culvery Court is a dry hostel so I went cold turkey. I’ve been teetotal since. I knew I could have gone back sofa surfing but at 50 I realised I couldn’t do that forever.”

His partner passed away a few months later from a blood disease. Thankfully he was by then on a strong enough footing, her death did not tip him over the edge as it once might have done.

Dave was eventually offered a place in one of Threshold’s shared move-on houses and is now on a waiting list for his own council home. The years of alcohol abuse have taken an irreversible toll on his sapped body and severely restricted his ability to work. He now suffers from portal hypertension, a common complication of cirrhosis of the liver but his quality of life has improved beyond measure, he insists. He has now rebuilt bridges with his estranged daughter.

Even now, he still struggles to comprehend how he could have been oblivious to the gravity of his situation for so long. Yet, he doubts he could have acted any differently.

“I suppose by putting me up like that, my friends were killing me with kindness. It’s a Catch 22. I would not have been able to do it without Threshold’s help. It’s been years and they’re still there for me. It’s very reassuring.”

By speaking so candidly about his journey, he is keen to dispel the myth that only a certain cross-section of the population is at risk of one day being homeless, or that rough sleepers are somehow at fault for the dire straits they find themselves in.

“I can happen to anyone,” he says firmly. “I didn’t realise I was headed in that direction. I had a job, a wife and child, my mates around me. I had an illness, I was addicted and I had actually found a job where being a heavy drinker was not unusual and was acceptable.

“There is nothing to be ashamed of and you can come back from it. Hopefully now I will get my own place and get back into work. I would like to travel again. I’m positive about the future. I’m actually living now and I have a lot to look forward to.”

To get in touch with Threshold, become a trustee or make a donation visit www.thl.org.uk.