Welcoming the rejected.

`We have drugs in waves, and it's very bad at the moment,' says Ann Panks who, with her husband Terry, runs Copperdale, a hostel for young men in the heart of Wythenshawe, a suburb of Manchester. `A lad who once lived here died just before Christmas of a drug overdose and eight weeks before that his brother died in the same way. They were 23 and 20.'

In this area of high unemployment, poverty and crime, Copperdale stands for the belief that no one should be written off. The boys who live there have experienced rejection, crime or brutalization--often all three.

Charlie arrived from Ireland a heroin addict. `I was asked to take him by the sisters at the convent down the road,' recalls Ann. `He was related to one of them. I was worried because he had been stealing to finance his habit, and had been involved in a big robbery in Ireland.'

Little by little Ann and her helpers `weaned him off the habit'. `He wasn't expected to give up overnight,' she says. `We understood that, and once or twice he went back, though never as bad as in the first place.'

Ann's approach with Charlie, as with all the residents, was to try and `actively channel a feeling of love towards them--not the sentimental love that is easy and soon gone, because sometimes you have to be very hard and stop them doing things.

`If they feel that you value them as a person, that's the start of them thinking that they have got something worth offering to other people,' she continues.

Charlie is now about to start a training course to become a youth worker. Ann is convinced that he'll do well: `He's a very understanding boy, having been through such a lot himself.'

Tony, who now works with Ann and Terry Panks, was 18 when he first came to Copperdale. He was full of anger because his mother had committed suicide when he was a child. `Tony and his brother were the ones to find her,' Ann recalls. `They blamed the father for it.'

As he grew older, Tony began to steal as a way of hurting his father. He arrived at Copperdale on remand.

`During that time I did my best to show him that he mattered, that he had a worthwhile future,' says Ann.

On one occasion some friends convinced him to ride with them in a car, denying it was `hot'. The police stopped the car a few blocks later, and it was indeed stolen. Tony was sent to prison for six months and came out `really bad'. But, remembering some of what he had heard at Copperdale, he slowly sorted out his life and got a place at university.

Tony is now living in Copperdale and is in his final year of a degree in community studies and social sciences. `He's marvellous,' enthuses Ann. `He just talks to the boys. He understands where they are coming from, and they can identify with him. He's telling them that they are valuable and that they can overcome their inner hurts and aggression.'

Perhaps Tony and Ann's greatest gift is that they make everyone, no matter how recently arrived, feel part of a loving family.