Plymouth Keys

by Jane Seale

I’m 52 now, but I still look back fondly on my student days at Plymouth Polytechnic in the mid 80’s. Those days at Poly represented a certain kind of freedom for me- freedom to express my growing self-confidence, freedom to go out and party, freedom to get a Captain Jack burger from the Barbican (best burger joint in town) after a night out in the Quay club ….and so on, I was no different to any other student of my time. Several of my significant Plymouth memories however, do not involve an excess of alcohol or burgers- instead they involve keys.

In my first year at Plymouth Poly I ended up in lodgings, quite a way out of the city, in Plymstock. Being a country girl at heart, I quite liked the fact that I could take a short bus ride from where I lodged down to Wembury beach. It reminded me of home. So it was natural that when mum and John came to visit me, I would take them to Wembury beach too. 

We spent a lovely couple of hours sat on the sand and walking along the shore. When it was time to head back, we strolled back to the car only for mum to innocently ask; “where are my car keys?” For those of you who know mum, you will know that this was not an unusual occurrence! However, normally looking for mum’s keys involved searching around the house. This time, it involved scouring a whole beach. Luckily we were able to re-trace our steps and find the keys buried in the sand where we had been sitting. As always mum was a picture of calm and serenity- somehow assured in her knowledge that we would find the keys. She never ceases to amaze me at how unalarmed she is at the prospect of having to walk back from some remote place she has parked, because she has mislaid her keys. The last time she did this to me, was a few years back, when we were walking up some ancient Dorset hill fort a few miles outside of Blandford. The grass was really long and Sheba was enjoying jumping through it as she chased rabbits. When once again mum announced that she could not find her car keys, she simply turned around and walked unhurriedly back the way she had come. I was busily calculating how long it might take us to walk to the nearest place of habitation. Unbeknown to me, mum was busy calculating where she had stopped along the way to take photographs. Sure enough, at the bottom of the hill, she stops by some field flowers and there, in a clump of tall grass are her keys!

In my second year at Plymouth Poly I shared a flat with two friends, Julie and Kathryn (Ryn for short). Early on in the academic year, Julie had made friends with a chap called Alan who shared a flat with his two mates, Mike and Nevil. The six of us became inseparable on weekends, partying away at the Students Union and one another’s houses. On one occasion, we were at the boys’ house when Julie, Kat and I took it upon ourselves to purloin one of their door keys. It sounds rather childish now, but it gave us weeks of fun at the time. The boys would ask us if we had their key and with straight faces, we would deny all knowledge. Eventually they stopped asking, still puzzled where it had gone, but unable to figure out what had happened to it. That was when we struck. It was Nevil’s 21^st birthday and we were, as usual, all going out to party and celebrate. 

Before we hit the town, we invited the boys around for a drink and sat them down on our sofa with Nevil in the middle and gave him his present. I shall never forget the look of ‘oh you got us’ on Nevil’s and Mike’s face as Nevil unwrapped his key-to-the-door!

Towards the end of my second year, the key came to represent less happy memories. One night, at a nightclub my purse got stolen. It did not have a lot of money in it- but it did have the key to my bedroom in my flat. So I was locked out of my bedroom for a night until I could get a lock-smith to come out and cut me two new ones, one for use and one for spare. Unfortunately, a while later my landlady evicted me because she did not like the fact that Mike spent so much time round my place. Although I was compliant enough to give her one key back, as an act of symbolic defiance, I kept the spare one and took it down to the Hoe late one night and chucked it into the raging sea. What I rebel I was (not!).

In my third year at Plymouth Poly, I shared a flat with Mike and for my 21^st birthday we decided to get engaged. We invited my old school friends from Blandford down for the weekend and planned a big party in the Students Union (classy!). Before we went out for the evening we were all gathered in the flat, chatting, eating and getting ready. There was a knock on the door. Nothing unusual in that. Except when I answered the door, who was standing there, but my adoptive father, Bob, whom I had not seen or heard of in over five years. Since he and mum had got divorced, he had never been very good at being a consistent presence in mine or my brother’s life. Tonight, of all nights he had decided to drive all the way down to Plymouth to surprise me with a birthday card and present (a necklace with a key pendant to represent coming of age at 21). I am afraid I was not very hospitable to my surprise visitor. I gave him a drink and explained that I had a party planned with all these people and so could not spent time with him. Shortly after he left, and I don’t think I ever saw him again. That was 31 years ago. So 29^th November 1986, was the night that one man left my life for good and another man entered it for good. Keys let people in and they shut people out. You have to use them wisely.

Sheba's Story - The Friendly Enemy

by Jenny Galuschka

My new Lady was OK.  I’d got fond of her quite quickly.  That was all down to the walks, of course.  In the first days when I lived with her, there would be breakfast, and then walk.  Then came my midday dental chew and walk. Later there was my evening meal, followed by a walk.

As time went on, other things were introduced. Sometimes I had to be a Good Girl through meetings. Once I even found myself in a place called a vestry! When I got bored with that, I trotted out onto the nice red carpet, where I lay down in comfort, and watched the Lady and the other people standing up, sitting down, and singing.  They were all very obedient.  I thought they did well.

So life was pretty relaxed for me, until Lily came.  Can you imagine? Another bitch, younger than me, smaller than me, and on my territory! I was very angry, and let her know it.  My Lady and Lily’s Lady made us walk up and down together, They insisted we sniff each other. Not my idea of fun, I assure you! Then they expected me to allow Lily to sit in my kitchen!

Of course, there was no way I could tolerate that.  I attacked as soon as Lily sat down. As I was on my lead, we were soon pulled apart, to the sound of some very cross words from my Lady.  Finally, the two Ladies made a line of chairs to divide the kitchen into two, with Lily on one side, and me on the other.  It looked like this:

                                                            Chair

                                                            Lady                       Me

                 Lily                                     Chair

                                                       Lady Table

I lay on my tartan bed and sulked.  Lily curled up in her round brown bed, and lay still.  Slowly, her scent permeated the kitchen. To my amazement there was no fear in it, no aggression. That was one relaxed, calm little bitch!

We were fed on either side of the chair-line that evening. Then Lily disappeared to go upstairs with her Lady. I relaxed, and I too slept. Maybe, just maybe, I could make friends with this peaceable, curly-haired little schnauzer. Maybe we could hunt together. I could show her the best smelling-places. We could form a pack.

I dreamt of a hunt and a teamwork kill; crunching bones between my teeth, play fights and chasing games.

Blea Tarn

by Pat Holt

Have you ever watched Countryfile – the BBC’s long-running TV series about the British countryside?If so, you will know that the programme usually opens with a breathtaking sequence of aerial shots, mostly taken in the Lake District. Alan and I used to watch this each Sunday, and I invariably gasped at the sight of a lone swimmer making his way across a beautiful lake. There were no other people to be seen; no boats, no buildings, just a perfectly unspoilt tarn, surrounded by mountains.

Every week, I said how wonderful it would be to swim in this glittering expanse of calm water. Each time, Alan nodded patiently, knowing how much I love wild swimming.

Early in 2014, in response to viewers’ requests, the Countryfile team decided to reveal the names of the locations used for the opening credits. So at last we knew the name of the lake: Blea Tarn, in a remote area just off the Langdale Valley.

Fast forward to 30 June 2014, and we were in the Lake District, staying at Rosthwaite in Borrowdale.

With some difficulty, Alan had planned a visit to Blea Tarn.

We were up at 5am and by 6.45 we were on our way by taxi to Keswick, where we caught a bus to Grasmere. There we met another taxi driver, who took us along miles of steep, narrow, winding lanes. He remembered the crew making the Countryfile film sequence and knew the area in detail, so he was able to leave us at the roadside in an out-of-the-way spot, quite close to the tarn.

It was still early in the morning and there was no-one else around. Bees were buzzing among the wild flowers, in the warm sunshine. Blea Tarn was still, quiet and even more lovely than on TV. We were both delighted.

Hastily, I changed into my swimwear, and struggled barefoot across the sharp shingle at the water’s edge. Before long, I was swimming out to the middle of the lake. I could hardly believe this was really happening. Alan was laughing, taking pictures and movies too.

The water was cool and the gleaming surface held a perfect reflection of the Langdale crags and the blue sky. The only ripples were the ones I made myself.

Alan had literally made my dream come true! This is one of the most wonderful gifts I have ever been given.

We were reluctant to leave this gorgeous place, but eventually we headed back to Borrowdale, crossing Stake Pass and walking along Langstrath Dale – an energetic walk of about ten miles.

I will always look back at this day as one of the best of my life.

Equality?

by Jenny Galuschka

The County Council had decided in its wisdom that each of its social services local offices should employ a voluntary work officer to recruit volunteers and work with the voluntary sector. North Dorset resisted as long as it could, but in vain. The Thatcher government had convinced itself that volunteers and voluntary organisations were an inexhaustible free resource and deepest blue Dorset was unlikely to see things otherwise.

Now here I was, on this late July morning in 1983, arriving to begin my tenure. As I walked through the heavy outer doors, one of the social workers was strolling down the stairs, obviously an emissary from his peers.

“You know, we don’t want you here,” was his greeting.

“Yes, I was told,” I briefly replied, and turned away from him to ring the bell for the receptionist. I think he slunk back upstairs.

This little episode says everything about why I never wanted to be a social worker. The interventions at their disposal focus on the individual rather than the institution, system or culture and they almost never have the resources to achieve all that they would like to do.

After a brief chat with the area director, I found myself allocated to one of the two teams, and in my first team meeting. At this time, my ignorance about what social services departments did, and why and how, was profound to say the least. Team meetings didn’t help a lot, because at that time they consisted mostly of a description of new referrals and their allocation to the different professionals in the team.

As well as social workers, there were occupational therapists, assistant occupational therapists and one officer who specialised in working with people with sensory impairments. The occupational therapy staff and the sensory loss officer could offer items of equipment to aid mobility and activities of daily living, as well as access to other agencies’ services, such as home adaptations and guide dogs. What others had to offer was, to me, more nebulous. Social work was apparently judged by whether the client had “moved”, although how that was judged or measured was far from clear. (We say “service users” nowadays, because the word “client” had acquired such stigma.)

In public, we talked about promoting independence and enabling people to live in their own homes but it didn’t take an awful lot of intelligence to work out that this was a politically correct way of saying that we wanted to spend as little as possible on residential and other support services. This is not to say that individual workers were less than caring. Their requests for volunteer support showed that they thought with compassion and imagination about their clients’ needs. I was gradually being accepted as having something to offer.

In the autumn of 1984, I began the final half-credit course of my honours degree, “The handicapped person in the community”.This, together with the huge effort to implement the Mental Health Act, 1983, brought into sharp focus the fact that everything a social services department did was either required or permitted by an Act of Parliament. Anything else was “ultra vires” (beyond our powers) and hence illegal.

The exercise of our powers, however, was capricious. The attitude to inspecting a playgroup was laughably lackadaisical and beyond counting toilets never extended to suggesting that they could offer more or better activities. The registration of childminders was reactive, and child care for working mothers was virtually unobtainable in rural areas.

The same attitude applied to the registration of disabled people, the publication of information for disabled people and the duty to provide accessible premises for disabled people. When I pointed out that a disabled person would not be able to get through the front doors of the area office, the admin manager told me “Oh, we don’t get many disabled people here.”

The result of this laid-back attitude was that there was no strategic plan to identify and meet needs – this was before Community Care Plans became mandatory – and families were often in crisis before another agency triggered a referral.

The perspective of my colleagues was, “You can’t change society, so you have to change the individual to fit into society.” (The 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act clearly meant to change society!)

This meant that they really didn’t like my hero, Vic Finkelstein, then a tutor in disability studies at the Open University, who even then was saying things like his 2001 statement that “society is disabling us and therefore it is society that has to change”.

His argument was that a medical model of disability located the problem in the individual and caused it to be seen as a personal tragedy. This model failed to take account of the fact that changes in attitudes and/or environement and resources could remove any barriers to an impaired person having a full and useful life. In a 2001 lecture he pointed to the examples of Admiral Lord Nelson and President Franklin D Roosevelt. Neither is ever referred to as a disabled, even though the first was a partially sighted amputee and the second unable to walk. (He suffered a paralytic illness at the age of 39.)

People with impairments, according to Finkelstein, become disabled because society oppresses them, This was a very challenging message for professionals with only a narrow range of interventions at their disposal, and neither the skill nor the inclination to engage with other agencies that should be helping, but weren’t.

At the level of community development, where I was able to carve out a professional space, promoting the well-being and independence of disabled people was also challenging; the younger adults (as opposed to older people) were all so different in their needs and aspirations, and the children and teenagers, despite the 1981 Education Act, were often away at residential schools during term time, or so severely disabled as to need very skilled medical and nursing care.

It wasn’t until I moved to a job at County Hall that I discovered that the County Council did have a service that addressed inequalities of opportunity in employment. This brought together both local and central government support. The local input was from employers who were willing to give disabled people a chance, and Dorset County Council staff who liaised with them. The central government support came from the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) which helped people feel less worried about giving up the long-term rate of Incapacity Benefit, and so being worse off if their bid for independence failed. DLA was not means tested and was not affected by employment.

There was also an employment support allowance, paid to the employer, which could be tailed off as the disabled person’s productivity increased.

The numbers placed each year were consistent, but seemed to me disappointingly small. Then there was a huge breakthrough for a group of mostly men, who learned IT skills at their day centre in Weymouth, and went on to get jobs and in some cases set up their own companies. I never did learn the full details of how they broke through the anxiety-and-discrimination barrier because the centre manager was very bitter about having “worked himself out of a job”, and so not available for interview. The men themselves may have been exceptional – I rather think they were – but unfortunately their example surely acted as a deterrent to other managers who might have enabled  other groups of people to acquire marketable skills, rather than serving as an example of good practice.

It did however give me an idea. It occurred to me that, contrary to the current views of the British Association for Supported Employment, it must be exceptionally difficult for some disabled people to move directly from never having worked to full time employment. I thought we could help by breaking this down into smaller steps which could include any mixture of training, work experience, voluntary work, job coaching and mentoring. With support from the European Social Fund, the council’s Community Employment Service, led by Mike Powley, (later made an MBE for his work in this field) set up a scheme called “Stepping Stones”.

This was both successful and popular, even with people who did not progress all the way to full time employment. For some, voluntary or charitable work represented an improvement in social opportunities and quality of life. And of course, we celebrated those who went all the way. Mike was made an MBE in 2003.

To return to Finkelstein’s social model of disability, this had become widely accepted and taught by the time of his death in 2011, and could hardly be contested in austerity Britain, But even when this horrible era of cuts and anti-disabled propaganda ends, equality will not just automatically come. We will have to work at it. To fail to plan for that is to plan to fail.

After the Rapture

My post on the facebook page of the Churches Network for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma read:

"Please does anyone have a photo of a Light and Life gathering that they would be willing for me to use in the book? The copyright has to belong to you. Thanks!"

Within a few minutes, this was the reply:
"Only this one, taken just after the rapture!😂"

Divine Providence

by Terry Hurst

Back  in 1997 I was working as a sales rep.One day I was driving towards Slough, nothing out or the ordinary just another day. Then to my surprise, someone said, "Turn right". I was alone in the car, the voice said again, "Turn right", so I did.

When I’d done so, the voice said, "Take the next right", so I did. I pulled over and turned the engine off.

I wondered to myself, “Am I hearing voices? Am I going dinelo (mad)?” The voice answered and said, " Turn the engine on, go to the end of the road and I will open your eyes for you, do not be afraid"

I felt calm yet excited, I turned the engine on and drove to the end of the road. I soon came to a bridge that went over the motorway. I crossed it to be led down a narrow hill. As looked down I couldn't believe my eyes...... about 200 trailers (caravans) a very large tent similar to a circus tent.
I parked up in the field realising this was a Christian event. In fact this was my first of many meetings with the Life and Light Gypsy church.

I stayed for two hours and had lunch with a few of the pastors.

One thing that convinced me that the Lord had indeed spoken to me was on seeing a converted transit van with a couple inside, When I went and spoke to them, I recognised them instantly. Three years earlier when I was the London north west district president of the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs I took a group of teenagers in a transit van to Southsea. We had a roof rack loaded with stuff. As I parked up we we were a bit worried in case it all got stolen.

A lovely couple kept an eye on it as I took the teenagers to the fair. Yes a lovely couple in a converted transit van!

Little did I know that we would meet in a field years later

God bless.