Doorway - Our Guests

Mick's lived in Chippenham for a number of years. A war reporter with an obsession to capture the horrible realities of human conflict in words and pictures, he was a front-liner in Afghanistan.

Fellow members of the war reporting fraternity would instantly recognise him as one of their own by the evidence etched into his camera hand; scars made by shrapnel and the windforce of passing high velocity sniper bullets which missed him by millimetres."You don't need to be hit by one of those" he says. "They create so much velocity, they can mark you without touching you."

The mental scars are more difficult to see. Mick's luck ran out in Afghanistan. He was working in a trench with his best friend, a French photo-journalist, when he felt what seemed like a warm rain, an incongruous sensation in a boiling hot desert.

"When I looked up, I found it wasn't rain, it was blood." Mick recalls. Looking around, he saw that his friend had been decapitated. Even for a professional who had made his reputation by reporting on the personal, human cost of war, the horror of that moment was too much to bear.

Mick's descent into drugs and eventual homelessness started at that moment.

Homelessness - with the exception of loss of health - is the most awful situation many of us can imagine. We don't want to think about it because we don't need to think about it. It can't happen to us, because to accept that the order of our lives could, through some unforeseen disaster, be destroyed.

Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghan National Army
(photo courtesy of Andre Paquin @ www.World66.com)

That's why talking to Mick is uncomfortable; he doesn't dovetail with our preconceptions of a homeless person. An none of us like to have our preconceptions challenged.

After his friend was killed, Mick began acting very strangely. His photographs became more personal, more horrible. "I seemed to focus on death, especially how the war took its toll on the very young" he says. "I became distant, sleeping in tents, raging at editors who were increasingly telling me that my work was too real for their readers. My capacity to absorb drugs - coke, heroin, anything - was impressive. I should have noticed just how good I was becoming with substances. I didn't. I came home with no job, nothing."

Arriving in Chippenham, Mick also discovered that he was good at disguising his homelessness. "You would never have guessed I was homeless, I developed a large amount of front" Mick says. "I guess it was due to pride. And anyway, I didn't consider myself to be homeless, even though some nights would be spent on the streets."

Mick is an example of how Doorway is helping homeless people turn their lives around. He is now drug free and enjoying fatherhood once more.....

Mick is also helping others locally who are having problems with drugs and substance dependency.