Cardiff couple invited man in for Christmas, he stayed for 45 years

Christmas is often considered a time for goodwill, but a young British couple’s act of kindness 50 years ago changed their lives forever.

On 23 December 1975, Rob Parsons and his wife Dianne were preparing for Christmas at their Cardiff home when they heard a knock on the door.

Standing in front of their door was a man with a garbage bag containing his belongings in his right hand and a frozen chicken in his left.

Rob studied the man’s face and vaguely remembered that it was Ronnie Lockwood; someone he saw occasionally at Sunday School as a child and was told to be nice because he was “a little different.”

“‘Ronnie, what’s wrong with the chicken?’ I said. ‘Someone gave this to me for Christmas,’ he said. And then I said two words that changed all of our lives.

“And I’m not exactly sure why I said those things. I said come in.”

The couple, who were just 27 and 26 at the time, felt compelled to take autistic Ronnie under their wing.

They cooked his chicken, let him wash it, and let him keep it for Christmas.

What began as an act of compassion grew into a unique friendship of love and reconciliation that lasted 45 years until the day Ronnie died.

Rob, now 77, and Dianne, now 76, had been married for just four years when they welcomed Ronnie into their home.

Ronnie was almost 30 at the time and had been homeless since the age of 15, living in and around Cardiff and moving from job to job; Rob sometimes saw him at a youth club he ran.

To make him feel as welcome as possible, they asked their family to bring him a gift for Christmas, from a pair of socks to some “scented scents.”

“I can remember him now. He was sitting at the Christmas table, he had gifts in his hands and he cried because he had never experienced such a feeling of love,” Dianne said.

“It was truly incredible to watch.”

The two planned to let him stay until Boxing Day, but when that day came, they did not dare throw Ronnie out and sought advice from the authorities.

Rob said the homeless center told them Ronnie needed an address to get a job, but “to get an address, you need a job.”

“This is Catch 22 with a lot of homeless people.”

Rob said that Ronnie, who was placed in a care home when he was eight years old, disappeared in Cardiff at the age of 11 and that he only discovered what happened to him while doing research for his book A Knock on the Door.

He was sent to a school 200 miles away that one report called “a school for abnormal boys” and lived there for five years.

“He didn’t have any friends there. He didn’t have a social worker who knew him. He didn’t have any teachers who knew him.”

Rob remembers Ronnie often asking, “Did I do something bad?” He said he asked. something they believe he picked up from his time at school.

“He was always worried that he had offended you or done something wrong.”

They said 15-year-old Ronnie was sent back to Cardiff “without anything”.

The couple said Ronnie was a bit awkward at first because he struggled to make any eye contact and conversation was kept to a minimum.

“But then we got to know him and we actually started to like him,” they said.

They helped Ronnie find a job as a waste collector and took him to buy new clothes after learning that he was wearing the same clothes he was given at school as a teenager.

“We didn’t have kids of our own, it was like dressing your kids for school, we were proud parents,” Rob said.

“When we left the store, [Dianne] “He said to me: ‘He’s got a job as a garbage man, so we dressed him up like the front man of the Dorchester Hotel,'” laughed Rob.

Rob, a lawyer, was waking up an extra hour early to drop Ronnie off at work before he went to work himself.

Rob said that when he returned home, Ronnie would often sit there and just smile, and one night he asked: “Ronnie, what’s got you so amused?”

Ronnie replied: “When Rob drives me to work in the morning, the other guys say, ‘Who drives you to work in that car?’ they say. And I say, ‘oh, that’s my lawyer.’

“We don’t think he was proud of being driven to work by a lawyer, but we don’t think anyone ever took him to work on his first day of school,” Rob said.

“And now he’s almost 30… finally someone is knocking.”

Ronnie had many rituals that they were used to; including emptying the dishwasher every morning; Rob would act surprised so Ronnie wouldn’t be disappointed.

“It’s hard to look surprised when you get the same question on Tuesday that you asked on Monday, but it was Ronnie.

“We did this for 45 years,” he laughed.

“Obviously he had difficulty reading and writing, but he was buying the South Wales Echo every day,” Dianne added.

Ronnie would buy them the same Marks and Spencer gift cards every Christmas, but he was equally excited for their reactions every year.

Ronnie spent much of his free time at the local church, fundraising for the homeless and preparing services, arranging the chairs “meticulously”.

Dianne remembered coming home one day with a different pair of shoes and asked: “Ronnie, where are your shoes?”

He told her a homeless man needed these.

They said, “That’s the kind of person he was. He was amazing.”

One of the worst times was when Dianne was sick ME, also known as chronic fatigue syndromeHe remembered there were days when he couldn’t get out of bed.

“I had a three-year-old little girl, Rob was working away,” Dianne said.

But she said Ronnie was “phenomenal” and had come around, making milk bottles for their son Lloyd, helping around the house and playing with their daughter Katie.

While they acknowledged the dynamic had its challenges, including struggling with Ronnie’s gambling addiction for 20 years, they couldn’t imagine their life without him.

“This isn’t something I would recommend as a strategy,” Rob said, “but Ronnie has enriched our lives in so many ways.”

“He had a great heart, Ronnie. He was kind, he was annoying,” Dianne said.

“Sometimes I was his mother, sometimes I was his social worker, sometimes I was his caregiver.

“Someone said to them [their children] “One day your friends came home and said ‘how did you deal with Ronnie’ and they said ‘well we don’t think much about it, just Ronnie’.”

Rob added: “Our children had never known life without Ronnie. He was there before they came, and he was there with his own children when they left.”

Only once, several years after moving in, did the couple consider supporting Ronnie’s independent living.

As their two children grew older and space felt limited in their one-bathroom home, they approached Ronnie’s room and suggested he buy an apartment with them.

But as they walked in, he repeated the familiar question: “Did I do something bad?”

Rob said Dianne dragged him out of the room, burst into tears and said: “I can’t do this.”

A few nights later, Ronnie walked into their room and asked: “The three of us are fast friends, aren’t we?”

“I said, ‘Yeah Ronnie, we three are good friends,'” Rob said.

“And we’ll be together forever, right?” he asked.

“And there was a momentary pause, probably too long, where I looked at Di and said ‘yes Ronnie, we’ll be together forever.’

“And so were we.”

Ronnie died in 2020 at the age of 75 after suffering a stroke, and the couple say they miss him terribly.

Only 50 people were allowed to attend his funeral due to Covid but Rob joked “the tickets were hotter than a Coldplay concert”.

They received at least 100 sympathy cards “from Oxford University professors to politicians to the unemployed”.

After his death, a new £1.6 million wellness center added to Glenwood Church in Cardiff was named Lockwood House after Ronnie.

However, the old building and the new building were not a good match and they needed extra financing to complete the renovation.

“But they don’t need to worry,” Rob said.

“It was the same money Ronnie left in his will, almost down to the penny.

“Finally the homeless man put a roof over all of our heads.”

“Isn’t this wonderful, I think everything is as it should be,” Dianne said.

“People tell us how it happened – 45 years later – but the truth is, in some ways, it just happened one day at a time.

“Ronnie brought richness to our lives.”

Additional reporting by Greg Davies