The Long Way Home

The savings from ten years of work were gone. Everything he had built was gone. He stood in the empty rooms and tried to make sense of it.

That was four years ago. What followed was a period he describes simply: "Every day just rolled into each other." A tent near Rakaia Huts through a Canterbury winter. Then a granny flat, until the daughter of the landlord came back from overseas and he had to move on. Then a garage. Each move bought a little time, and little else.

What made it harder was that Davey was not someone who had ever asked for much. He grew up in Sydenham with three years of schooling, raised in poverty between the railway yards and two bridges. He figured things out with his hands. He worked in steel. He raised two sons largely on his own. For years, he ran a programme at a local school supporting kids in difficulty, the kind of kids he recognised from his own childhood. He had built a quiet, purposeful life. Then it was taken from him in an afternoon.

The timing, as it sometimes does, aligned. Pathway had a home available. Davey needed one. He was, by his own account, a man who had learned not to expect help without conditions attached. When help arrived without strings, he was not sure what to do with it. He has been in his home now for a year and a half.

Davey has made the place his. The garden is kept with precision. He tends to it daily, and when older neighbours on the street can no longer manage their own sections, he does those too. He has rearranged things, fixed what could be fixed, made the space reflect who he is. He had been evicted with less than 24 hours' notice more than once, by landlords who saw him as temporary. Pathway's position was different: the goal was to keep him in the property, not to find a reason to move him on. "I like my home," he says. Not with sentimentality. Just as a fact.

Davey is older now and has had two heart attacks. He knows he does not have unlimited time, and what he is thinking about now is what he can leave behind. He always has projects on the go. His mind works that way: he sees a problem, turns it over, and starts figuring out how to fix it. Some are practical, some more inventive, all of them aimed at making things better for people who need it. He has also been volunteering at a community garden, helping to lay concrete and tend the beds. He is doing all of this, he says, for his grandchildren. To create something that might still be there when he is not.

Stable housing did not give Davey these goals. He had them already. What it gave him was somewhere to work toward them from.

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