Tuesday 27 October 2009

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Sunday 25 October 2009

Putting the Clocks Back

In our family we could never remember whether the clocks went forward or back. Fortunately there was a little picture on the front page of the "Evening Mail" which reassured us.

I've always thought how socially levelling and democratic the whole process is: those with plans for good and bad, and everything in between, have to bow to the changing of the clocks. If they don't, that revolution might start too soon or too late, or that important meeting might be missed....

Friday 23 October 2009

Rose and William 1

From 2002-2008 I ran a voluntary agency which provided support and advocacy for asylum seekers and refugees. In this post I'm offering the first part of a story about one of our clients. All names have been changed.

Rose and William I

It is dark, wet and late. Rose hammers against the glass of the front door. William is there, she must see him. Rose is angry and anxious. Where is he? Is he still there? What is she doing here, not only at this innocent looking door of an ordinary house, but in this damp town where the sun only appears as an insincere apology between the showers, cynically warming the streets and the people in readiness for the next soaking?

She has not always been here.

She is born in K. a town in a large oil-rich African country whose citizens rarely see any benefits of the oil revenues which flow to the government and the multinational corporations who extract and export the commodity upon which the global economy depends for its smooth operation. She attends a girls’ boarding school and studies accountancy. Rose then goes to university and gets a diploma in management.

While Rose is at university, Horace, the man she will later marry, enters the UK on a visa to live with his mother who is settled in the UK.

Horace returns to K. and he and Rose are married in a traditional ceremony where Horace’s family give a dowry to Rose’s family. A paperless contract. Horace then returns to the UK and Rose joins him a few months later using a visitor’s visa. They stay with Horace’s mother-in-law in one of the northern towns which used to be a centre of the cotton industry, now desperately trying to re-invent itself. The cotton mills still stand, but the cavernous halls where machinery once thrashed and thundered now shelter “retail units” selling scented candles, tea towels and wicker furniture.

Rose overstays her visa. The relationship cools. Rose says that she and her mother-in-law don’t get on. Horace leaves, saying he is going to Ireland. In fact he returns to Africa. Six months after his return, Horace dies suddenly. Rose is not sure how he died, but tells an Immigration Tribunal that she thinks he may have been poisoned.

Horace’s mother returns to Africa, and Rose intends to do the same but is warned against doing so by her brothers and sisters. She tells the same Tribunal that Horace’s family blame her for his death and that Horace’s mother thinks that Rose is a witch who ensnared her son and took advantage of him to get to England.

Rose is stranded in England. She is also pregnant. Two weeks after Horace dies, she gives birth to a son, William, in the local general hospital. The child is named after Rose’s father.

She is housed temporarily in a hostel and someone in the church that she attends tells her that the only way that she will get any kind of money or housing is to apply for asylum. That’s what happens in the UK. So Rose, helped by the church’s pastor, makes the journey to Liverpool and declares that she is in need of protection from the British state authorities. She receives accommodation for William and herself, and regular support payments from the UK Border Agency. This provided by a local authority in a town a short distance away from where Rose had previously lived.

 

When she is interviewed by the UK Border agency, she says that her asylum claim was prompted from being unable to return to the house which she had once occupied with Horace and his mother. She is also afraid that Horace’s family would try and claim William as “one of theirs” and that they might try and take him forcibly from her. Rose also recalls that her brother had been shot and killed some years previously – the police had suggested that this was some kind of gangland pay off for her brother trespassing on another gang’s territory. Rose is unsure of any of the facts concerning her brother’s death, but says that this is another reason why she is afraid of returning to Africa.

Her asylum claim is refused. Rose’s lawyers file appeal papers with the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal but decline to represent her at the appeal hearing as they have been refused an application for legal aid as her case has less than a fifty per cent chance of success. The immigration judge who hears her appeal finds that her story is largely credible and carefully considers the issue of the possible outcomes for Rose if she were to return to her home country with a child whose guardianship could be claimed by Horace’s family. The state apparatus of that country has a poor record in safeguarding children’s rights, according to the information which he has before him from internationally recognised sources such as Amnesty and the US Department of State. However, he is not convinced that Horace’s family present a real threat to her in the way that she claims and dismisses her appeal as it does not meet the criteria for recognition as a refugee under the Geneva Convention.

Rose continues to live in her accommodation and receives support from the UK Border Agency as she has a dependent minor child.


(To be continued)

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday 22 October 2009

Discharged!

Good, good news! No more Warfarin! I've been taking it for six months since I developed a clot in my right leg in April, probably due to a return flight we took to Rome. My leg swelled with an excruciating pain. My GP sent me immediately to hospital where I had an ultrasound scan and a DVT was confirmed.

Question: why is this known as a "deep vein thrombosis" in everyday parlance, but is referred to as "deep venous thrombosis" in the medical books? Anyway, it's goodbye to regular blood tests and rat poison. I was always surprised at how busy the hospital anti-coagulant clinic was. Why were there so many people with problems of the blood?

Thank you National Health Service!

I've just received in the post a book called "Obsolete - An encyclopedia of once-common things passing us by" by Anna Jane Grossman. It is what it says it is: a list of things which have been rendered passé by, mainly, technological innovation. 

I saw the book last week in a store in Berkeley, California, where we had gone to try and recapture the heady sixties vibe of counter-culture and revolution. We didn't find it -  it's disappeared from the streets of downtown Berkeley, and the college campus, anyhow. Anti-war protest is probably now a web-based movement, exploiting the same technologies which have given rise to the changes mapped in Ms Grossman's book. Well, the real point I'm making is that I couldn't afford the book when I saw it (sorry, Moe) and had to wait until I got home to order it from Amazon. And this is one of the obsolete phenomena that Ms Grossman doesn't chronicle: the once endless wait to receive a book that one had ordered from one's friendly local bookstore. 

In the sixties and seventies ordering a book was like this: you told the bookseller the author and title of the book you wanted. The bookseller then checked through the bulky tomes called "British Books in Print" (these later existed in a microfiche version, proving that the technology of information storage was already downscaling). Then he/she filled in an order form and gave you a carbon copy with the promise "That should take x weeks". We'll send you a card when it's in.

And you waited, and waited and waited....

You knew that the book physically existed somewhere in a warehouse in the British Isles, but there didn't seem to be any direct link between that paper order slip and the act of retrieving the book from the shelves of said warehouse.

And you waited, and waited and waited. Eventually, if you found yourself in town with nothing better to do, you might call into the bookshop and breathlessly ask if the book had arrived. Of course, there were two possibilities: it hadn't yet come, or it had arrived several weeks ago but the shop had forgotten to send you the card they had promised....

Note: Read David Lodge's novel "Changing Places" for an English academic's view of the University of California at Berkeley as a hotbed of countercultural action in the sixties.

Wednesday 21 October 2009

August 5th 1967

Today my beloved aunt Clara died, age 72.

In the school holidays she used to take me to town where we had a kind of routine: we'd go to a cafe where she would order a cup of tea and I'd ask for a Coca Cola. "What is that?" she once asked. "It's Coca Cola" I replied. The we went to the News Theatre to watch Laurel and Hardy, and, best of all, Zorro. Zorro was shown episode by episode, week by week, so we had to keep going back so that I could find out what had happened in the story.

The problem was, how to tell Dad. We didn't have a phone and Dad was at work, anyway, when Mrs T. called at our house with the news about Clara. Mum decided to wait until he came home and then tell him his sister had died. 

This prospect filled me with a sense of dread. I didn't want to be at home when he got back from work. So, about four o'clock I got on the bus for the short ride to the library. I skimmed through a few books and calculated how long it would take for the bad news to be broken and for Dad to take it in, with whatever reaction it was going to have on him. After about an hour, I left  and got the bus back home.

Dad was sitting in his usual chair. 

"I'm sorry about Auntie Clara", I said.

I don't remember what he said and I don't remember anything about her funeral. All I remember vaguely is Mum clearing out her flat and paying someone to take away her stuff.

And then I remember staring to read "L'Etranger" (The Outsider) by Camus as part of my A-level French course. The beginning of that novel, where Meursault's mother dies "yesterday" reminded me of Clara's death. Like Meursault, I didn't know what her death had meant, just that it was a death like any other....

A few weeks later, Dad and me are taking a bus ride, perhaps out to the Lickey Hills, and he says, "I expect you're glad that you saw Clara the week before she died, aren't you?'. 

"Yes", I reply.


Tuesday 20 October 2009

2nd December 1968

The tiny outhouse is uncomfortably cold as usual, the water supply kept  from thawing by a paraffin lamp hung from the cistern. I silently curse my parents for this. We are in the age of moon landings, heart transplants and LSD and yet I have to put up with this. 

When I've finished, my feet slide and slip to the back door. I go inside and up to my room to finish my homework, a French translation going the hard way from English to French: "It would have been possible for my father to find work had he but the slightest inclination to do so". That means at least a conditional tense and a subjunctive mood, well spotted, Etchells! I can see the red ticks in Mr J.'s corrected version already.

I move to my window and ponder further before committing my translation to paper. To the left, If I'm in luck, I shall see a vertical shaft of light, maybe five feet by six inches on the far wall of Mr Bradford's workshop. The light comes from the ceiling lamp in the entrance hall of his house and shines through the workshop door which has been left thrillingly ajar. One of the things that used to excite me, and still does, although Tchaikovsky and Charlie Mingus played on my Dansette tend to move me more nowadays, one of those things was to stand at my window and see this shaft of light become broken up by the shadow of Mr Bradford as he climbed the stairs to his workshop.

Three, four, five, six seconds of flickering blackness animated the wall until Mr Bradford switched on the room light, and the vertical movie disappeared and the magic was gone. Then Mr B., who was a dentist would sit at his workbench and settle down to making a pair of dentures from the wax moulds he got his toothless patients to bite on.