Oxford, my home
Oxford, city of elegance and charm, of wit and learning, city of beautiful buildings and many churches, city of streets crowded with people of every race, culture and religion.
People come to Oxford to study at her famous colleges – not forgetting Ruskin College, which offers so much to the poor. There is a place here, too, for street people begging from doorways. There is much suffering and surviving, and mixed up with it are the street performers, dancers and musicians. There is always street music in Oxford, of every style from scruffy to sophisticated. Thames Valley Police, made famous by television’s Inspector Morse, are seen to be doing their job and, from South Park on a clear day, I can see the ‘dreaming spires’.I now live in a convent just off Cowley Road – both are exciting places, each with a different ethos. Cowley Road has many restaurants and cafés, and a variety of shops. There are ‘crack houses’ and gangsters, and drinkers lurching along. There are elderly people and sick people. On the whole, different cultures live together, not brilliantly, but certainly making an effort to communicate. There is music at the Zodiac in the evenings, and, after dark, the hint of danger hides and attracts young people.
The convent of All Saints Sisters of the Poor is the hub of Helen House, the first hospice in the world for children with life-limiting illness and their families; Douglas House, for an older age-group, recently opened by Her Majesty the Queen, again the first of its kind; and the Porch Steppin’ Stone Centre, where the homeless, the addicts, the alcoholics, the unemployed, are given a meal and a training.
The garden, though smaller now, still has a certain quality and beauty. The big rambling building of Cotswold stone houses St John’s Home for the Elderly and All Saints Convent, and adjoining it is the beautiful chapel. This is the heart of my Oxford. Here I remember days with my dogs – beautiful days – and days in the Oxford hospitals with chest problems. Here I presented the TV programme ‘Raising Lazarus’, and wrote a book entitled Pavement for my Pillow. I was amazed at the response from Oxford residents. And I was amazed when I received my BA Hons degree, and letters from all over the world addressed to me – wow!No longer do I walk the streets with no place to go apart from the public toilets where I injected my drugs, and doorways where I drank alcohol, degraded by my own actions. Instead I was brought to Oxford, for me the City of Recovery. Here I attend daily meetings for recovery from my past. After four years as a novice with the All Saints Sisters – tough going (harder than the streets) – I made my First Profession on 29 November 2003, taking the vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. Yes, there are dark days, but they shrink to nothing when I think of all that I have been given in this city and now try to take out from the convent where I live, to share with others.
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