Looking Back, an Essay.

On a day long ago, just before the introduction of the National Health Service, I was born in a nursing home in West London. This marked the start of a life, that has either been in the last throes of a dying system, or been in the vanguard of something new ever since. Indeed this was a feature for most of us post war babies, or Baby Boomers as we were called.

In England, the world we Boomed into was one of austerity and rationing. We grew up with our relatives remembering and still grieving in some cases, for the losses of WW2. No one was untouched, but as children our worlds were made up of a life that took rationing and rebuilding for granted. We learned to tiptoe around the grownups sensitivity’s and put down their peculiarities to The War. And so we immersed ourselves in our imaginations, fed by remarkably rapid changes in the world around us.

If we had grown up in historic times, we would have been witnessing the Roman’s dramatic impact on rural tribes…creating new environments and new ways of living. The Plantagenets and Tudors continuing to generate social hierarchies, the 1600s escalating global explorations followed by colonisations and imperialistic invasions and subsequent seizing of lands. The wiping out of indigenous cultures and peoples becoming part of the process. By the 1700s we would have seen the emerging of science, and the Industrial Revolution. With great changes in people’s working lives, the shifts had been from subsistence to accumulated wealth, from the excitement of discovery to the drive to subsume and oppress.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, we witnessed technological revolutions and massive shifts in sharing information. No nations were unaffected by two World Wars. While some of the anger and shock was directed towards a determination that this should never happen again and the United Nations was formed, that was only part of the global agenda. Greed and an unwillingness to share power and wealth became quite starkly obvious, and the polarisation that was started with the Roman invasions re-emerged.

As post war children, we probably absorbed this mostly by osmosis. We were growing up with remembered values from the previous generations interrupted lives. Our games were from traditional playgrounds but created with a landscape of wrecked buildings as the norm. If we were lucky we had access to ‘Recs’, or Recreation Grounds, and parks, otherwise we played in the yards or streets. Little toys echoed wartime military vehicles and our comics and story books continued the theme of valiant heroism or boarding schools portraying a world unknown to us ordinary children. Animals featured heavily with lead figures and stories being the closest some of us would get to actually getting near to them.

Growing up in the nineteen fifties was an exercise of avoidance and challenge. We worked hard to avoid upsetting our parents or those in authority, and the challenge was to be able to inhabit our own worlds without exposure to censure. A difficult balancing act.

By the time the sixties came along, not only had Rock and Roll crashed into our lives, but we were ready for a social revolution! The music was vibrating, the clothes were liberating, recreational drugs were around and we all wanted to go to San Francisco and wear flowers in our hair. And strangely women were burning their bras!

Freshly arrived back to England in the mid sixties from the States, there was a lot happening over here. My American sojourn had been very mixed, starting in a small Township in Quebec, Canada, where my family had settled when my Dad had immigrated in 1951. As so many immigrants, we did it in stages, parents settling first, then bringing me across. It was quite exciting after the austerity of London to grow up in a land with wide open green country, where a language other than English was part of the norm, and where sugar wasn’t rationed! (Even as an older person, the allure of maple syrup still calls.) Our family grew with the arrival of my little sister. And I got a bike for Christmas that year!

Then my Dad was promoted and we resettled down to the the States. Another different world. One of confusion and contradiction. We moved around until he was finally settled in Virginia, and my own internal world short circuited. There was a long spell in hospitals, culminating in what had been a State Asylum. Happily by the time I was sixteen, my family had sprung me and we came back to London.

Here everything was so small! People didn’t seem to understand much of what I was saying with my American twang, and most of what they were talking about was quite alien to me. A brief spell in the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital for resocialisation set me up for Technical College, a return to education having been hospitalised at fourteen.

If I had been given a choice, I would have gone to art school, but instead possibly moved by some residual institutionalisation and an interest in medicine, I ended up doing a Pre Nursing Course. Amazingly, the Maudsley shrinks supported this and after my course finished, off I went to Guildford to start my training as a State Enrolled Nurse. This led to a further training for my State Registration and a prompt mental health breakdown as I took my finals from psychiatric hospital and passed!

My family had relocated back to Washington DC while I was in my second year of training but then returned to England soon after, sadly this time without my Dad who had died ridiculously suddenly and young. By the time I had been released from hospital, I was a well qualified nurse with no job. Nobody wanted someone who had my history.

Thereafter followed several years of existential searching. In the early 70’s mental health was a taboo. So having no means of support and relying on my scrabbled drive to survive, I spent the next few years in a strange world of betwixt and between. Friends were always important even when confused by glimpses of my hallucinatory reality. Any contact with psychiatrists always directed me back to nursing, even when I repeated my wish to be an artist. An impasse given my state of mental health.

The turning point was when I came out as a lesbian. While not an immediate fix it helped to have a secure anchor. Though still caught in the spider web of a fragmented mind, I was able to sense a filmy presence of myself as a person. Several years in and out of hospitals eventually came to an end. My last experience with a psychiatrist was more than helpful. He removed all medication, and talked to me positively, encouraging me to find my own way forward. By that time I was chronically homeless, so following the trail of many emerging lesbians before me, I moved to Brighton.

And yes, dear reader, I found the women. Specifically, I found the Women’s Liberation Movement, feminism and lesbians, and my way back as a nurse. Initially as a blood taker, then as a Relief Sister in a nursing home. It was familiar and comfortable in this rapidly changing, exciting new world.

There I met a woman who I fell in love with in an old fashioned sense of commitment and a shared future. We moved to Wales and spent several years finding a means for alternative living, ending up on a small holding in Anglesey. Sadly my naïveté did not allow for a violent breakdown in the relationship and after a brief spell being nurtured in a religious community, I returned to Brighton.

After taking a couple of evening classes, one of my tutors encouraged me to apply to the University of Sussex as a mature student. Apparently my nursing qualifications were enough to satisfy the admissions criteria. I was astounded, but thought there was nothing to lose, and sure enough they accepted me! So many years struggling in and out of mental hospitals left me with a curiosity about that whole dance with madness. Added to that I was flummoxed at how discriminatory attitudes against people perceived as ‘different’ in some way can be so widespread. So of course, I studied Social Psychology with the added bonus of doing it in the (now defunct) School of African and Asian Studies. This linked into the evening classes I had taken on imperialism, poverty and power.

I had access to counselling through the University and for the first time was able to be supported without having to negotiate the minefield of psychiatry. The next few years were a joyous adventure and I used the opportunity to start to pull together the strands of my fragmented mind.

Because I was still living in standard rented housing in town, rather than living in student accommodation on site, I was able to continue my exploration of the Voluntary Sector, at that time extremely strong in Brighton. New feminist groups were forming amidst a range of community resources with a lot of Local Authority support. Liberation politics for women was alive and thriving throughout the country, and debate and arguments featured as this evolving movement grew.

Then, having deferred for a year to explore communal living in the country(!), I came back to complete my final year. All of this time, I had continued to work part time because the basic grant didn’t fully cover my cost of living in town. But midway through, an old nursing injury to my back suddenly erupted. Having gone through most of my lifetime struggling with mental health issues, just as I was enjoying finding an equilibrium, my life took a completely new direction. I was spitting nails! Happily some very close friends gave a massive amount of practical help to make sure I was able to turn in my essential course work. And so I got my degree, not the level I had hoped for, but it was the first in my family!

The next few years were an exercise in frustration physically although my life carried on happily. I was able to work, though my nursing days had finished, and continue studying. There was a part time counselling course based in South West London, which radically, was self directed by the students. So much so that those of us on it when the College proposed changing its policies, walked out taking the course with us. The tutors supported us and we did the second year ourselves, organising the venues, and the course work. This was so successful that the University of London scooped us up for our final year and popped us into the Institute of Education. We all qualified and ended up getting our Certificates from a university rather than a college.

By this time, my work took me to London. Delivering mental health support was thriving in the London Borough of Lambeth, with three centres and a full compliment of staff. I was recruited to work in Brixton, and was part of a team developing new therapeutic practices.

The move from Brighton was hard, but Lambeth was a lovely place to live and work. Plus, I was able to train to use a video camera, which was an unexpected bonus.

My Manager encouraged me to get involved with the Trade Union, and very quickly I was elected as a disabled representative on their National LGB Committee. My jobshare partner and I were the first nationally elected ‘out’ Disabled Lesbians within the Trade Union Movement both in this country and internationally. It was a rapid learning curve and my life for the next seven years was very guided by that work. A bonus was going on the training course for trainers at the TUC training centre. Another door was opening. Over the years, I have built on that with a City and Guilds qualification as an adult further education arts trainer.

Unfortunately my increasing mobility difficulties meant I could no longer continue to manage the difficult access in the mental health centre, so I was redeployed to the Housing Equalities Department, as the Disability and Elderly Equality Adviser. The Trade Union had provided some excellent training and the cross-over with my work in equalities was a massive bonus.

The tide was turning in Local Aurthorities and consecutive Governments cut back the budgets. In the mid nineties my unit was closed, and though I was kept on as a central housing policy adviser for another year, equalities fell off of the agenda and I was made redundant. Although the Disability Discrimination Act had been passed, this was just before it was legally implemented, and I failed the medical for a new job with another Council. No other employment was forthcoming and with no work I had to resign from the union National Committee.

And so I ended up back in the Voluntary Sector! The next few years were a rush of activity as Disabled People’s Organisations fought back against Council cuts to their budgets. We ended up occupying our local Centre for Independent Living for nearly five months in protest against the closure. All to no avail. Gradually the organisations were picked off until the only one still open in the Borough had a direct link to the Council Officers. To this day, Disabled People’s Organisations had been systematically shut down all over the country, and activists moved on.

Looking back, I am reminded of the musical Camelot. ‘For one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot’. I was in the States to witness the growth of the Civil Rights Movement and the breakdown of segregation. The shooting of President Kennedy happened while I was in the State Mental Hospital, but we still felt the shock of that violent act. His brother was shot while I had gone across briefly after my Dad died and then Martin Luther King Junior. That violence was so at odds with the move for peaceful change.

The post war period in this country was optimistic. A time for reconstruction, a time for growth. As cities were rebuilt, housing was a priority. The National Health Service was thriving and the health of the nation was improving. Class restrictions were being challenged and social mobility was starting to become a reality. Gradually barriers were being challenged and social action was bringing about changes. We welcomed our Commonwealth cousins to strengthen our workforce and our cultural landscapes became more multiracial. Then successive governments eroded these advances. Peaceful Hippies gave way to angry Punks. The people were becoming angry, dissatisfaction was personified in strikes and riots.

To me, the rise of a vibrant voluntary sector was symbolic of the rise of a social conscience against inequality. But it was also a response to a growing social need as statuary services were being cut and not replaced. However, at its height in the eighties and nineties, it was a glowing beacon of hope. Not everyone was cynical or bowed down helpless in the face of growing need. While today, I can recognise that similar sense of outrage against injustice nurturing a desire to make a challenge for change and move alongside others who are struggling, it is different in this millennium.

The opportunities that information technologies give us to share news and events also supplies instant news. With social media being so widely used, it also provides the means for an instant response. There are many advantages to this, and had the horror of the Holocaust and Death Camps been revealed in detail before the end of WW2, the war may have been over sooner. We will never know.

The Haters, who are always with us, have given themselves permission to use this instant media access to spit their vitriol, but there is more to this innovative power than that simplistic abuse. In common with other artists, I have used electronic devices to develop my art, and will continue to do so. Posting work on the internet means it is instantly accessible, but more than that, it creates an archive.

With that technology, if I had been sat at the side of Pythagoras, there would have been a record of the notes he played, and photos of him with his followers and friends. The faces and words of so many people through the centuries would have been recorded, and their day by day experiences not lost. Although the printed word and artists impressions help to give us insights, this current generation will have a unique record of their lives.

Thinking back to my parents generation and the loss of our elders, as ordinary people we are often reliant on photos, letters and stories to help us remember them and their lives. As someone who lived in a multigenerational house, at times chaotic with very little space, I remember a lot of laughter and story telling. The only echoes of those times now lie in the memories that we have tucked away and is gradually fading as more of us pass away.

It is very similar to thinking back to the Camelot days. Yes, there are records, but they don’t tell us the whole stories. What it was like to have hope in our hearts, and conviction that we were part of something bigger than ourselves. That somehow, by moving alongside of each other, we could make a difference and alter the tides.

If there is to be a social revolution my hope is that it will come via the inherent collective belief that wrongdoings need to be stopped. If education was enough as a motivator, this would already have happened. Clearly more is needed. The exposure of secrecy to hide the truth of daily living has given a crack in the structure of oppression. Increasingly as more is exposed, then public outrage is being inflamed.

I believe art can become an important tool in this process. Whether it is looking back and using history as a comparator, reflecting on current practices, or looking to the future, our practice becomes a record. By using our art work as a basis, the Feminist trope, the personal is political will serve to give a social reflection through time. This is almost inevitable as more people globally gain access to information technology.

At the moment voices are still being lost, and opportunities denied. Not everyone has access to the internet and computers. We do not live in an egalitarian world, either in a micro or macro sense. There is little point in listing inequalities and injustices at this point, they are too numerous and deserve a vehicle of their own.

I will simply echo, the personal is political. I believe that nothing or anybody is truly lost. Even if my art reflects only my selfish interests and needs, the act of creativity in itself generates a life beyond me. It doesn’t need to be seen or heard, but somewhere in the ether, a pebble has been dropped and vibrations created. Hopefully they will resonate and do no harm.