'Nowhere else to go'

In 2012, Max Rashbrooke spent three weeks living in a Wellington boarding house, writing about the experience for the Listener. The place he chose, Malcolm’s, has since closed and Healthy Homes legislation has come into effect mandating insulation and heating standards for all residential properties including boarding houses and hostels. We are republishing Rashbrooke’s story from 2012 in light of the Loafers Lodge fire that killed at least five people on May 16. Loafers Lodge is not Malcolm’s, but it also housed a community of vulnerable people. A decade on, Rashbrooke’s experience still resonates

- Max Rashbrooke

Every time I entered my room at Malcolm’s the smell of mould hit me: an overpoweringly damp, fetid, vinegary odour that seemed to infect everything it touched. It was a good match for the room itself, a sad amalgam of dirty mold-spotted walls, filthy carpet and decrepit furniture. It made me feel beaten, broken down, already depressed – even though, unlike anyone else in the boarding house, I had an escape route. I was, thankfully, there for just three winter weeks researching a book on New Zealand’s rich-poor divide, trying to understand something about the places where the unfortunate fetch up and, in doing so, get stuck.

Malcolm’s, in the inner-city Wellington suburb of Brooklyn, had been recommended to me as a typical boarding house. To ensure I fitted in, I had stopped shaving for a week beforehand and had pulled out my worst clothes: a shapeless old padded coat, some ripped jeans and a pair of trainers coming apart at the seams. Thus prepared, I walked up to Malcolm’s, a large and – outwardly – rather handsome three-storey 1930s villa. I knocked on the front door and it was opened by Malcolm, an immensely tall fellow, stiff, upright and rather faded, like an old British colonel fallen on hard times. His long face was bruised looking, with sunken, bleached-white eye sockets. He had one room available, at $150 a week. After I’d given him the money, he made out a vague receipt, in the wrong name, and we had a desultory conversation. Then he gave me a padlock for the door, warned me the room leaked a little – adding, cheerfully, “but you won’t drown!” – and that was that. No tenancy agreement; no real paperwork; no bond; no checks or references or meaningful questions; nothing other than a room for $150 cash.