For the past 30 years, Geoff has found support through Cambridge Cyrenians’ accommodation and mental health services – something he states has truly changed his life. Grateful for the help he’s received, he expresses his journey through poetry.

Geoff shares his experience in his heartfelt piece, Cyrene, which you can read below.

Cyrene by Geoff

“I’ve been thinking I must choose my boyfriends more carefully. And here I am with a penniless poet who lives with the Cyrenians.” Thus a truly beautiful, womanly woman – a true artist. “Haven’t you got a friend you can move in with?” The pained query – she would not visit me on home turf – was one of many. But decades on – still a poet but not penniless, I still reside at the same address.

I had moved back to what was my home city from unfashionable Hull. True, I had made friends – I was the last significant new acquaintance of Philip Larkin. (We were both Bessie Smith chauvinists.) But nothing expansive was going to happen to Adult Education in Hull. So I took unanimous advice and returned to familiar Cambridge.

My experience of ‘home’ is not happy: I dread ‘settling down’. So after ‘B&B’ and various bungling ‘Friends’-style houses, I mercifully fell in with the Cyrenians. (As I had with the International House – Methodist-run – in Hull.)

The warden realised I would get on with one resident. And so it proved. There were problems with other residents. Middle class, educated at Trinity no less, I was an outsider. I rode with some real surliness. Then and there I began to realise I have always been an outsider – and always will be. The perspective clarified dramatically.

I became something of an authority figure. Class resentment and inverted snobbery played their part in this. But jobs in factories and on building sites had taught me that some friction and intolerance are everywhere. Genuineness is the best passport.

Certain rites of passage none of us can avoid. With a cadre of several youngsters on board I had to weather teenage rebellion. Fortunately, wiser heads were vocal on my behalf. These too made for quite a spectrum. They included a shellshock case – Dunkirk – who had attended Haileybury the Catholic school Atlee went to. The decades had not restored any capacity to look after himself. No recovery! More standard cases – teenage rebels – were set on modest careers as factory engineers. And there was a certain criminal quota.

It made sense to move me – amongst others – to a long stay house. We now had a front door key. But again I was initially a painful outsider. This was now clearly a fundamental fact about being me. Equally it is a relative matter. (The ‘average man’ is an abstraction. ‘Joining in’ is a relative matter.) The ‘house intellectual’ is a distinction for good and ill. The new address was a more permanent port of call. My room had belonged to someone who had to be moved downstairs – which they resented. A man destroyed by a Japanese POW camp was doubly incontinent. (One could smell as much at the front door. No wonder the artist refused to call.)

In the previous house I had shared a double bedroom with someone who boasted of putting a knife through a policeman’s face, claiming being high on heroin and cocaine as an extenuation. One resident had attacked another in the mistaken belief he was a child molester. But such incidents resolved themselves. (The reader may have seen the Chaplin sequence where two miners out in Alaska fight because of starvation. Or have read Conrad’s “An Outpost of Progress”.) Such groundswells of resentment suggest basic human nature is pervasive. Ibsen did not invent it.

I fully understand the incredulity at my choice to be a Cyrenian resident. Accepting that whatever I do will lead to controversy is harder. But there is no refuge from the fray of life – or people’s projection onto others of what they desire for themselves.