Issue 113 / April-May 2021

34
RECOVERY
When Damien John Kelly House, an
abstinence-led residential recovery centre,
was established in Wavertree in 2019, it was
met with scorn and disapproval from local
residents. Two years on, the house is a core
part of the Wavertree community, offering those
in recovery a chance to reconnect with society
through a programme of arts, creativity and sport.
Paul Fitzgerald speaks to its residents and those
behind the house about its continuing journey.
all fuming here. There’s a school over the road from it, there’s a nursery
round the back of it. You’re going to have druggies robbing and making
more crime for the area.”
“We’re
“We feel like every garbage comes to Wavertree.”
“It’s the last straw that broke the camel’s back.”
In a 2019 article curiously headlined ‘An abandoned pub, a drug rehab row and the long decline
of one of our most famous streets’, the Liverpool Echo spoke to business owners in the Wavertree
area following ferocious local outcry at the suggestion that a residential centre for recovering addicts
could be granted planning permission at the old police station on Wavertree High Street. At one
particularly ill-tempered planning meeting, objectors railed against representatives of what is now
Damien John Kelly House, with shouts of “shame” and “disgrace”. One dissenter going as far as telling
them to “Burn in hell”.
When the Liverpool Watch Committee declared Wavertree to be a safe place for policemen to live
in the late 1800s, the decision was made to close the old lock-up on the village green and build a new
station on the high street. A warm office for the officers and a good amount of hard brick cells for the
regulars. Short-term stays for long-term guests. And on just a two-mile stretch containing more than 30
pubs, regular guests were in plentiful supply. Those who lived in the neat terraced streets of Wavertree
were a community of thousands, the great majority of them railworkers. The work was hard and the living
wasn’t easy, but people supported each other in whatever way they could. Such was, and is, working-class
life in Liverpool.
It’s understandable to see why the Wavertree residents of today were originally in such objection to the
idea of recovering addicts moving into the area. They were right. Their area has declined. Pubs and shops have
closed, there’s very little footfall compared to even recent times, and local businesses were already struggling
long before Coronavirus came to stay. The community felt fractured, lost to the wealth of investment in the city
centre; like so many across the city, they felt abandoned.
On top of this, and as with so many of us, they didn’t understand what happens to addicts in recovery, or
even what the word means in the context of addiction. Through fear, ignorance and the stigma still attached to
addiction (or more likely through a heady combination of all three), they perceived the opening of Damien John
Kelly House to be a further threat to their weakening sense of community. What they didn’t perceive, certainly at
that time, was that it could become a valuable asset, something to help grow the community from within and create
new opportunities for all.
Damien John Kelly House is an abstinence-led residential recovery centre. The residents are there because they
want to be. Some, but not all, have completed a 12-week rehabilitation, but it’s not a condition of acceptance. They’re
not in active addiction, but are seeking the next stage: recovery. If their recovery is robust and reliable, if they’re
familiar with mutual aid groups and the personal work they need to do, they can be welcomed into the programme.
Like the concept of community, recovery is not an end-game or destination, more an ongoing process, fluctuating
and growing at each turn. Recovery is reconnection; with yourself, with family, community and society. It is based on
honesty, on acceptance and willing. Especially willing. Recovery can only begin with willing, just as addiction begins
with trauma. There being no such thing as a ‘gateway drug’; trauma, all too often, is the true gateway to addiction.
Recovery never really ends.
To look at the old police station today, you wouldn’t know its current use. There are no signs, no banners. No visible
celebration of their purpose. But then, we don’t generally put signs on our homes to proclaim who we are and what we
do. And Damien John Kelly House is, first and foremost, a home. People live their lives there in ways they could have never
imagined when in the deepest recesses of addiction and life had left them broken. They thrive and flourish there. (When
I left after one of my visits for this article, I noticed the motto in Latin on the frontage of Wavertree Town Hall: ‘Sub Umba
Floresco’ which translates as ‘I Flourish in The Shade’).
Damien John Kelly, who the house is named after, was a catalyst. He brought people together. As an integral part in
The Brink – Britain’s first dry bar – Damien instilled a sense of hope in people who, like he had done, were turning their lives
around. He was a powerful force for change in people, an example and an inspiration.
PJ Smith, Recovery Lead at the house, was just one of the many people who turned his life around with the support,
guidance, love and encouragement of Damien.
Writing of his friend and mentor in a previous issue of Bido Lito!, he noted how he gave people “the impetus to change their
own lives. Instilling hope in people… He didn’t change his life by magic. He faced himself head-on. Sheer courage and willingness.
He always used to say, ‘If I can do it, anyone can’. He’s right, y’know? Hope rather than despair.”
This community is just a fraction of the huge legacy Damien Kelly left when he died suddenly and tragically in his sleep in
2019. In many ways, he lives on in the lives of those he never met.
The first part of becoming part of a community is to know that community and, with that in mind, the two disparate groups
came together as one at an open-door event when Damien John Kelly House opened. Residents and staff were on-hand to welcome
them, answer any questions, dispel a myth or two and, at the event’s conclusion, even to accept apologies from some of the most
previously vehement objectors. Honesty, acceptance and willing.
“We had over 300 objections when we started this,” Head of Services Jacquie Johnston-Lynch told me. “And now we’re in
demand,” adds PJ.
In more ways than one. The charity Action on Addiction reports an 86 per cent spike in those seeking help compared with this time
last year. As demand for addiction services grows, opportunities for post-rehab recovery support remain depressingly, worryingly and