146 Unit 10 | The story of my life Look at the picture on the right. How could having an animal help a homeless person? You are going to read an extract from the book A Street Cat Named Bob. It’s an autobiographical story about James Bowen, who has a rough childhood, becomes a drug addict and ends up on the streets of London. But then he befriends a street cat, and this changes his life … Read the following episodes from James’s past and put the paragraphs in the right order. READING 25 a b A The answer to how people like me end up on the streets is always different, of course. But there are usually some similarities. Often drugs and alcohol play a big part in the story. But in an awful lot of instances, the road that led them to living on the streets stretches all the way back to their childhoods and their relationship with their family. That was certainly the way it was for me. B Life in Australia was pretty good. We lived in several large houses over the years, each of which had vast garden areas at the back. I had all the space a boy could want to play in and explore the world and I loved the Australian landscape. The trouble was that I didn’t have any friends. C Predictably, I got into drugs, at first sniffing glue, probably to escape from reality. I didn’t get addicted to it. I only did it a couple of times after seeing another kid doing it. But it was the start of the process. After that I started smoking dope. It was all connected, it was all part of a cycle of behaviour, one thing led back to another, which led back to another, and so on. I was angry. I felt like I hadn’t had the best breaks. D Around my 18th birthday, I announced that I was going to move back to London to live with my halfsister from my father’s previous marriage. It marked the beginning of the downward spiral. E By the time I was in my mid-teens, I’d pretty much quit school. I left because I was just sick to death of the bullying I encountered there. I became a tearaway, a wild kid who was always out late, always challenging my mother and generally thumbing his nose at2 authority, no matter what form it took. F I went to stay with my half-sister in South London. My brother-in-law wasn’t too happy about my arrival. As I say, I was a rebellious teenager who dressed like a goth and was – probably – a complete pain in the arse3, especially as I wasn’t contributing to the household bills. In Australia I’d worked in IT and sold mobile phones, but back in the UK I couldn’t find a decent job. Eventually, my half-sister kicked me out. I started sleeping on friends’ floors and sofas. Soon I was leading a nomadic existence, carrying my sleeping bag with me to various flats and squats around London. Then, when I ran out of floors, I moved to the streets. G I found it very hard to fit in at school, mainly, I think, because we’d moved a lot. The chances of settling into life in Australia disappeared when I was nine and we moved back to the UK. I enjoyed being back in England and have some happy memories of that period. I was just getting back into life in the northern hemisphere when we had to move yet again – back to Western Australia, when I was around twelve. H I lived quite a rootless childhood, mainly because I spent it travelling between the UK and Australia. I was born in Surrey, but when I was three my family moved to Melbourne. My mother and father had separated by this time. I Things headed downwards fast from there. Living on the streets of London takes away your dignity, your identity – your everything, really. Worst of all, it takes away people’s opinion of you. They see you are living on the streets and treat you as a non-person. They don’t want anything to do with you. Soon you haven’t got a real friend in the world. 2 to thumb your nose at sb./sth.: jmdn./etw. nicht respektieren 3 to be a pain in the arse (infml.): eine richtige Nervensäge sein Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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