Staff are on hand to offer workshops one-to-one counselling sessions and frequent motherly chats 24 hours a day Their

Staff are on hand to offer workshops, one-to-one counselling sessions and frequent motherly chats, 24 hours a day Their selflessness amazes the teen-agers “I’d never work as a day supervisor,” says Jane. “They work their guts out.”The girls, who come from cities all over Britain, say the supervisors are like parents: “They make us keep strict rules: no alcohol, no boys either. We have to be in by midnight.” The girls moan – they more than occasionally miss the neon lights and humming sounds of the busy night outside – but nearly all choose to stay. Most have missed a caring upbringing and thrive on the “nesty” feel of the place.Each resident has their own room; warm, light and furnished with Habitat- effect bed, desk and chairs Humming in the corner of Jane’s room is a fridge Residents are responsible for feeding themselves Separate fridges solve the problem of dishes going missing. The rest of the room is filled with the usual teenage stuff: hi-fi, television, Body Shop products, posters of pop groups The mess and the sight of soft toy souvenirs reassures. The rent is £4.90 a week; food is paid from individual social security payments. The feel of the place is part girls’dormitory, part hotel, part home.Not that everyone fits in.

“About one in 20 leave,” says Trudy Souter, project manager of the Middleton hostel Most leave because they cannot accept the rules. Some come back.Sylvia, a slight 16-year-old, says: “I might have been dead by now if it wasn’t for the YWCA.” Over the past couple of years she has slit her wrists and taken overdoses At home, her parents took to watching her like hawks. But at the Middleton YWCA there is an understanding that staff will not enter a resident’s room without permission, even if they are worried about the mental state of their “inmates” If you want help, come to us, is the stance So far, it works. “I’ve decided I like living,” Sylvia says.Jane, a stoic 17-year-old, thought she was “special” when she first came to the YWCA.

She thought she was the only one around who had been physically and mentally battered by her alcoholic mother, slept on the street and hidden in safe-houses since the age of 13 She found she wasn’t. Now she plans to go to college, study social work, then use her own experiences to help other young women “I know enough to work in a place like this. I know what it is all about,” she says.Tracey Robbins, 23, is a volunteer for the YWCA community project 10 minutes’ walk up the road She watches the two girls with undisguised fondness. She wasn’t dissimilar when she first turned to the YWCA three years ago, an altogether too familiar victim of circumstance and creeping inner-city decay: “I was a depressed, newly divorced single mother living in a council house,” she says.

Now she is forceful and confident, with a new partner and lots of friends. “I’ve had to buy an answering machine.”She and a team of volunteers run the community centre – a Seventies shack, which is cold, run-down and reminiscent of a disinfected school. But her optimism is such that she hardly notices the surroundings When she does, she makes changes “We’ve just painted the ladies’ loos bright pink,” she says. Now, single mothers and homeless young women are the priority.