This was a fun one to start the weekend on:
On Saturday, I took the picture below. It shows a six-year-old girl who lives in temporary accommodation in Marlin Apartments in Stratford. Newham council uses rooms in the building as temporary housing for homeless families and my word – what a shocker.
The building is infested with bedbugs, rodents, cockroaches, weird, tiny flies and god knows what else. The girl in the picture and her family have lived in a single room in Marlin for 3 years. For that whole time, the bedbugs, doubtless fleas and other crawlies have been chewing away at this little kid. They’ve been all over her body – not “just” arms, face and feet. From the looks of things, they plan to keep going until they finish.
The girl has scratched and scratched, and is covered in scars and marks. Her mother showed me boxes of creams, prescription eczema treatments, soothing ointments, emollients that she couldn’t really afford and all of the rest.
“They don’t work,” Mum told me. She was pretty clear why – fumigation or no, the bugs kept coming back. Needless to say, the scratching wasn’t helping the girl recover.
In the interests of putting distance between the bugs and their snack, Mum had taken to sleeping on the hard floor with the little girl and her younger sibling. The family had stopped using the sofa bed in the room, because the bugs live in it.
I didn’t have a chance talk to Dad, because he was out delivering takeout around the city to those who felt they must have it right then. A number of people who “live” in Marlin are Uber drivers, or people who deliver food around the city on motorbikes – those lucky punters who get up every day to live again the gig economy dream.
The family gets some universal credit, because Dad isn’t paid enough to live on. He certainly can’t pay a London rent. That’s why the family is grinding it out on the floor in Marlin, losing an endurance test with insects.
His young daughter, meanwhile, appears to be paying for the city’s cheap eats with her skin. I can only conclude that we’ve reached a point where society considers that sort of thing the acceptable price of being able to get McDonald’s delivered to your door at all hours.
In which case – talk about taking one for the team.
She isn’t the only one in Marlin with bites, of course. Here’s a little girl with a faceful of welts – people say it is common to find these on kids in the morning:
Which is not to imply for a moment that the rodents are missing out. Here’s a picture of a mouse bite on a toddler’s leg. On Friday, the mouse climbed over the little boy and bit.
He’s just a little kid.
I have a lot to write about the Marlin apartments situation. There is the gross overcrowding, the people sleeping on hard floors with only a thin duvet between them and the surface, and the maggots crawling in the entranceway.
There is also the fact that uber-dolt Rishi Sunak is partying it up in Disneyland while people in low-paid and insecure jobs sleep 3 and 4 to a lousy (literally) bed, or on smaller and smaller parts of the floor when the bugs get ahead in the land grab.
There are a lot of questions to be asked re: who is responsible for this and who is going to fix it. I asked Newham council for a view today, but alas, did not get a response to that question. There’s probably also a question here for the rest of us re: whether feeding kids to vermin is acceptable collateral in the greater ongoing human quest for cheap taxis to parties and round-the-clock fried-eats deliveries. Let me know if it’s time to abandon hope.
Dickensian conditions linked to poor living standards, poverty, overcrowding, etc. in 21st C. UK. Maybe it’s Scabies? You have to get some stuff, called Derbac, a mate of mine had it in the late 90s when it was going around the crusty traveller scene (the ‘great unwashed’) , then I recall he gave me what was left of the bottle and I poured it over my head in the shower cos he’d had Scabies and I had nits (it was the dreads). Was very common in Bradford in the 1990s, and probably in the 1890s too. Awful for kids getting stuff like that though and living in poor conditions. When I was a kid in the 60s childhood diseases were fairly common, (measles, mumps, german measles, chicken pox, etc.) and Impetigo was going around, I caught that. And the nit nurse (“Nitty Nora”) would visit schools every year to inspect the children’s hair/heads, but all that was 50+ years ago.
God, yeah the nit nurse. And I remember scabies – foul as well. Great days we have here. Hope Sunak’s enjoying Disneyland. Maybe they could keep him there as understudy for Dopey
I’m not keeping pace, wasn’t aware he was visiting Disney land, hadn’t noticed his absence. Still, he’s got the visit of Saudi Prince Al Cut Throat to look forward to.
I genuinely don’t understand how this country has gone so backwards? It wasn’t so long ago the slum clearances happened, and the building of the big council estates, and the birth of the NHS. Now as Trev says, back to Victorian poverty and diseases. These children are the adults of tomorrow, our next citizens. I’m sure they’ll remember all this. How can the government, and Newham council, think this is an acceptable way to house families even for 20 minutes?? Never mind years. It’s truly sickening.
I’m even more grateful now, for my forever home in my social housing over 55 block. I pray these people get help soon, though there’s nowhere near enough housing to go round…
It’s a good point you make about the adults of tomorrow. So many of the kids I see in these places have issues like this or development delay – stiil no speech at all at ages and 3 etc. There’s a whole generation of kids now who have not had a good start at all.
And where’s the help for these kids, the speech therapy, extra tuition, and more? Gone, with “government cutbacks”. Vomitable
Yep, that’s a big issue. In my experience, schools and sometimes nurseries pick things up (ie notice them and raise them as issues), but then there’s the question of regular speech therapy and other support, which is thin on the ground. I spoke with the parents of a boy of 5 on Saturday – they’re also living in Marlin. He’s non-verbal and has an autism diagnoses. I doubt they’ll have money to spend on dedicated speech therapy and support.
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