The Magazine

I have lived with lodgers all my life. My widowed mother took people in and then, when I left home, I shared working life running my own B&B alone with up to six people a night staying with me. I lived overseas and worked as a social worker where I got to know about troubled lives. My Christian upbringing taught me about social responsibility.

Since retiring, I have continued to have lodgers and latterly these people have come to me through Christian friends. The first unusual one was a couple who were stateless and had been refused asylum in the UK. They were born in North Korea, taken over the frozen river into China as children and given to Chinese families. They met and married as adults. Because of fear of being sent back to North Korea they paid to be trafficked to a free country and came to England. When their application for asylum was refused, Christian friends of mine took them in initially which is where I first met them.

Despite the asylum failure meaning they could not work or claim benefits, through devious means they got jobs and took themselves off to Manchester to be independent. When they left Norwich, I told them that if they were stuck to let me know. Two years later at 5.30am I got a phone call to say they were being threatened by the triads and were frightened.

Instantly I told them to come here. It was illegal to shelter them, but they stayed with me a year and happily were baptised at St. Stephen’s before returning to China. The original cause of their fear had been removed and ‘documents’ had been bought. They were a great joy to know and now, eight years later, I’m looking forward to visiting them in Fiji in December.

The next tricky one was man in his 40s, a recovering addict who had work but nowhere to live. He had a lot of support from his church, but he started to drink and out of respect for me, moved on after three months. Now, five years later, I hear that he is doing well.

The third was someone I knew from the Magdalene Group and had nowhere to go to for weekend home leave from prison. We got on well, but she had seen some of her old friends who gave her heroin, so she left the night before she was due to return to prison. Life isn’t easy for addicted people, but some can kick the habit.

I still have a lodger – without problems! My Christian faith makes me feel it is immoral for me to live alone in a three-bedroomed house. I learned early on not to expect lodgers to do house work. They don’t share the whole house, have their own bedroom and bathroom and we share the kitchen. The main rules are: do your washing up straight away (which means I must do the same!) and clean the bathroom. Ultimately being the landlord, you can ask them to go but happily I have never had to do this!