Homeless at 16 - I wish I'd known help was out there

Nearly 30 years after a family breakdown led to him leaving home and sleeping rough, the TV presenter Matty White recalls the lucky break that helped him to turn his life around

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When I was 16, I left home.

It wasn't a choice I made - it was a family breakdown. We grew up in a council flat in Coventry in a normal working-class council estate, rough in parts but full of good people doing the best that they could. Mum had me at quite an early age by a man who soon disappeared. I was maybe one year old when she met the man who would raise me and who I had always known as Dad.

On my 16th birthday, all of that changed. I found myself homeless, living in the back of a yellow Mini Metro in the back of a pub car park, sleeping in the woods or frankly anywhere I could get my head down for a bit. I'd left school, so some friends tried to help me, but a lot of their parents told them to stop letting me come round the house. When you're homeless, people instantly assume the worst.