The Visible Invisible Girl

She didn’t do sport...she painted hockey balls.
She would sit in a little office – the PE teacher’s, presumably – and they would give her a small, rusting pot of white paint, a brush and, on the floor there would be a basket of these balls, scuffed and mucky.

And as we put on our games kit, grabbed sticks and clattered and chatted up to the sports field; as we battled it out on the hockey pitch, all flying hair, dirty knees, ruddy cheeks, she would stay inside and paint them.

It was something we all had to do, every now and then. But it's all she ever did. You can’t entirely blame the school. I don’t think the teachers knew what to do with her. So they did what they tended to do in those days: kindly shut her out, shut her away.

Maybe she wasn’t bothered; maybe doing sport never occurred to her. Maybe the very idea of it was snuffed out by a pitying, patronising ‘can’t do’ society before any spark of desire could be kindled.

She was with us only for a half-term, a term at the most, and none of us made friends. I’m appalled when I think about it. She was a kind of distant celebrity of sorts - we’d never seen a girl our age in a wheelchair before.  So we stared at her when we thought she wasn’t looking, we whispered about her. 

Girls are cliquey at that early-to-mid-teen age. We were half-scared and no-one thought to encourage or explain. We even made jokes about being envious: we hated hockey - she didn't have to do it. And the barriers between us just grew and grew.

I don't know anything about her. I don't even recall her name. None of us, not even the teachers, I think, made any attempt to see beyond the contraption she sat in. She was ‘normal’ but she was different, she was strange, she was a visible, invisible girl, she was ‘handicapped’. 

That word. That awful word. I recall our primary school music teacher using it once before we got on a minibus to go on one of our sing-a-long excursions. We enjoyed these - it was a perk of being in the choir. We'd go round old people's homes, mainly, at Christmas time, and they would clap and sing along with us, and give us sweets.

This particular trip though was to a home where most of the elderly residents had severe disabilities. Again, there was no real explanation, no preparation. The teacher simply told us they were 'handicapped' and we were not to make jokes. We arrived nervous, we sang bug-eyed and left guiltily appalled, giggling and hot with embarrassment at what we'd seen. Forgive us, we knew no better.

And so, for us, 'handicapped' came to mean people to be scared of. It meant flailing limbs, it meant shouting, it meant sadness, it meant gawping, it meant looking away, it meant shame, it meant being ashamed, it meant pity, it meant people not fit to live among us, it meant people to be locked up.

That attitude still festers. My God, it does.

How do I know this? Because so many years later, I had you - my own disabled boy. And it became such an important thing to show you off, to make sure you were seen and heard, so that those people....especially the older generations - the ones who knew nothing...those who said to me 'isn't it a shame', and those ignorant others, those who pulled their children away from you, were made to see it wasn't a shame at all; that a different kind of life, a different kind of living could be just as happy, as fulfilling, as full of opportunity. 

I thought about the girl, in the office, painting, for the first time in an age recently, watching a BBC film about  Dr Ludwig Gutmann, founder of the Paralympic Games.

Gutmann. What a man. He fled Nazi Germany after putting his own life at risk to save others and, once in Britain, fought to change the attitude to paralysed servicemen returning from World War II – men who would have been heroes if they’d been killed in battle, but instead faced a half-life, hidden away in institutions until they did the decent thing and politely died.

They were inconvenient, they were an embarrassment, they were unemployable, they were better off in care homes, away from society, so as not to offend delicate eyes.

 There are such parallels here, between how the establishment regarded those soldiers and how, in many ways, we treated all our disabled - more shockingly, how we still continue to treat them.

We might deny it. We might protest it's not so. But it is so. It is so. From the easily-rectified issues of access to the unseen, unwitting, day-to-day prejudices that make life difficult and, in some cases unbearable for those who are subjected to them.

And equality of opportunity? Well, let's just say there's a long, long way still to go. 

Gutmann gave his brave soldiers the will to live, the strength to be bold, the optimism to see there was a future, after all. And it is thanks to him and to all the others, the pioneers and campaigners who refused to stay out of sight, out of mind, that we have come as far as we have. We no longer, I’m sure, keep young girls cooped up in offices painting hockey balls just because they happen to need a wheelchair to get about.

Gutmann described his soldiers as 'the best of men'. We should regard our Paralympic athletes in the same light. They have climbed mountains to get where they are. They are not victims to be pitied but examples to us all. They, above all others, can surely show that anything is possible...for anyone given the proper opportunities.

They are doing much more than battle for gold.

They are dashing to smithereens the perceptions of many who still, albeit unwittingly, see the disability rather than ability, who still think 'it's a shame'......
And they are inspiring those young people who might, in the past, have been told ‘you can’t’. 

* An abridged version of this article appeared in the Yorkshire Post on August 29.

A Bus to Andromeda

I think he might have been some kind of hitch-hiker, of the intergalactic Douglas Adams variety.

He had long, long frizzy hair, a cropped beard, black-rimmed specs, a long dark coat, voluminous, ballooning, satin burgundy trousers elasticated at the ankle, a rucksack. And he carried a light saber. An official one...it said 'Star Wars' on the handle.

It was difficult to tell his age - mid 30s, early 40s. He was travelling alone and as he sat on the bench, the saber propped carefully by his right knee, he hummed quietly. And it doesn't do to start conversations with random strangers, especially when they're armed. So that's all I know about him.

He got on the No 27 bus to Andromeda.

This bus exists. It runs every half-hour or so....and I've seen it enough times now to know it isn't actually a figment of the imagination.

It grinds up and down Rue Luxembourg and it seems ordinary enough - mucky, a few dents and scratches, growling engine; grumpy with pedestrians and pedestrian crossings, grumpier with cars and cyclists. You can get one of those fold-out Brussels city maps with its route clearly outlined in pale blue...starting near the city centre and veering across town to the eastern suburbs.

So far, so mundane.

 But there's more to it. Oh much more. Of course there is.

I have a theory that just around the corner, out of sight, somewhere on the ring road, when no-one is looking, it shifts a cosmic gear and, in defiance of all logic, of all laws of physics, in a cataclysmic flash of warp speed, it sets off on its speed-of-light journey, it leaps for the stars.

I think however hard you look though you will never see it happen Thomas. However determinedly you stare and stare and stare there will be a moment when you are distracted, a tiny moment, and when you look again, it will be gone, wiped from memory, wiped from time. That's just how it is.

But early this morning, using binoculars, I saw its destination...............2.5 million light years away, a vague, dirty grey smudge in a black, glittering sky, just up left from the Square of Pegasus, down right from the bright 'W' of Cassiopeia.

Our sister spiral galaxy, our closest neighbour..

Andromeda.

I wonder what the fare is....

A group of school children - they must be after-school clubbing - is playing playground games.
They wear high visibility jackets and kick up clouds of dust as they run, in rings, holding hands, round and round.
They tug and pull each other and then two form a pair, link hands aloft, forming an arch and the others  form a chain running underneath. Isn't that 'oranges and lemon's?
They have hoops, they have batons and they have beanbags. Of course they do. They look like Tumble Tots. How many ways can you carry a beanbag Thomas?
Always something.
But this is how it is.


group of tourists trudge after an umbrella, almost two by-two. Cameras around their necks, bags of mementos.
Their chocolate will be melting.
The sparrows are bold as brass.
They hop about, just inches away, squabbling, pecking, and having dust baths, pock-marking the sandy path with their little bodies, rubbing, scratching.
Brussels its on its lunch break and the park is full, tourists mix with families mixing with workers escaping air conditioned offices. Again we bake, and the plash of spumy water in the fountains only serves to intensify the arid, hot air.
People don't know how to dress for this - it's unexpected, to locals and tourists. There are shorts, jeans, sweaty, crumpled suits, loosened collars. There are silly, floppy hats on plump ladies, there are old men in baseball caps. There are tights and bare legs, there is pasty, there is tanned, there is burnt, there is roasted. There are miniskirts, sandals, wedges, flipflops.  There is gorgeous, ridiculous and everything in between.
They crowd on shady benches eating sandwiches. A few brave the full sun, but
The water in the fountain is green, but it runs clear...as water dribbles at the edges, in the nooks of the walls, the sparrows flock to take tiny sips.

A man sits next to me with his sandwich and takes a bite. The sparrows notice and hop closer. He notices too and throws them crumbs which they fight, bricker over. The victor hops away with his spoils.
Ludicrously there is a big screen showing the Mannekin Pis playing electric guitar.
This city.

Paris....

Mona Lisa, what have they done?
I bet you and your beguiling smile never saw this coming.

Do you enjoy it? It is, after all a hero worship of sorts, a kind of mad pilgrimage..
There's nothing in your eyes to suggest it's bothering you, no sign of tiredness, of world-weariness at your predicament; nothing in your demeanour that betrays a desire for it all to stop, for them all to go away.

Indeed, perhaps you revel in it. Perhaps you hear the incandescent cries of great artists turning, writhing in their tombs as their works go un-noticed, unappreciated by the hordes who blindly stampede past in your direction?  Perhaps you enjoy their outrage. 

Oh, I came to worship too, of course - but found I preferred to step back, seek a space, a wall to lean on, and watch the watchers watching you instead for a while.

Single-minded, unswerving, blinkered, they thundered for your presence chamber...all the nations of the world, it seems; their target set, their aim true, heading your way...countless languages, countless tongues, melded and stirred into a meaningless, senseless noisy thrum.

They move in a speedy current, carried along by each other - and I see why Giotto, why Botticelli, why even the blessed Fr Angelico - who have the unhappy circumstance of being on the route to your domain - might grumble. How it must wound to be so ignored! For them, THEM, to be relegated to 'D-list', dulled by your red carpet A-List celebrity....

I see you, first, from quite some way away. It is a disappointing anticlimax of an introduction - you over there, me over here and in between us the mass moves, convulses, clamours. The air smells of sweat.

There are many, many smaller versions of you in the viewfinders of cameras and smartphones, held high by their owners. Each device identifies a face, your face, boxing it in red, zooming in, beeping, pinging, buzzing as the auto focus finds its subject.

There are even flashes where none are permitted - but I see little evidence of your modesty being protected. There are security guards present, though none runs to your aid.

I move closer, join the throng. We bump, push, pull, nudge; there are exchanges, exclamations. It is like the Tube: there is no consideration for personal space, there is no eye contact for that would then require an acknowledgement, politeness. It would demand an 'after you', or a 'please, go first'.

There is a sense of urgency, of neediness, impatience. Each wants a piece of you all to themselves at the speed of a shutter. But do they think you will run away if they are not fast enough!

You seem to bear it well, in your bulletproof case, aloft, aloof. But this melee cheapens you, for all your reputed allure.

Too many want to see you, the hordes must be satisfied - and quickly - and it's clear your custodians have decided there is no time for contemplation, for consideration, for dignity, for respect.

They need to keep the queues down - so you have become the 'wham, bang, thankyou ma'am' of the Louvre.

Doesn't this horrify you? It should. Your name makes superlatives drip from the tongue, you are myth, you are legend, you are wife, temptress, secret-keeper, enigma, there are a million facts, a million figures, a million stories. You are Mona Lisa....

But you have become a cheap thrill, La Gioconda, for a quick-hit, list-ticking mob who - and you must believe this - seem to care not a jot for the genius of your creation. You think they love you? That they are lost in you? They do not. They are not. Why would they behave so if that were the case.

I've watched them. Point. Snap. Done. Next....

And those who do care...do pity them.  Those who have come to see and wonder, who arrive, throw up their palms in helpless futility at the snapping hordes and turn on their heels, preferring not to meet you at all rather than to meet you like this.

You don't believe me? Your eyes tell me you know better. Well wear your smile then Mona Lisa. Enjoy the mob.

Pretend it is not the case that you are betrayed...

Echoes and Soul Music

Three talented, bright young things....on clavichord, oboe and viol, playing Bach and Heinichen -  soul music of an entirely different kind.

Outside the city is crazily hot, crazily busy - but in here, in the faded glory of the Brussels Conservatoire, the world stops. It just stops. There is nothing but the music. And the three young musicians watching each other, in absolute synergy, catching each others' eyes, smiling, anticipating, teasing. A joy to watch, a privilege to listen - €7 for goodness sake.

They were magnificent. And I wish, as I always do at such events that I had pursued the instruments I played so half-heartedly as a girl - the recorder, the clarinet, the classical guitar, the piano...all cast adrift for easier, more social pleasures.

In one of the auditorium boxes sits a boy with a man I assume is his grandfather. He's about 10, big-eyed, long-limbed, rangy. A fidget before the music began, unable to sit still - scratching, chattering, pointing, arranging and re-arranging himself across the threadbare chair.

My first thought was that his hair was like yours (oh always the unwanted but unconscious ever-sought comparisons Thomas)...those tufts at the crown that would never lie flat despite all the coaxing and combing.

As the musicians walked on to the stage to rousing applause his grandfather turned to him and whispered and the boy stilled. I bet grandad wanted him to be inspired.

I kept glancing his way..and as the minutes passed the yawns got bigger, his head slumped lower, until it dropped. Something about the way he rested it on his long, folded forearms, reminded me of you too.

And as often happens when pressed into a chair, no distraction but the music, it takes just a simple echo, and the mind flees, and plays and replays....

 I think I always knew that we wouldn't have you forever. Don't tell me how I knew...I don't think I acknowledged it to myself until afterwards. No doctor ever said your time was limited. You were rarely ill, you were as strong as an ox....yet those blue episodes..... 

I remember when we arrived home from Bamburgh without you...and a friend had waited hours and hours for our return and as she took me in her arms, a broken mess, my first words to her were 'I knew, I knew...' So I must have known. I must.

I think of all the times before when, in the quiet of an early morning, I would lie awake, waiting, listening. 

This is how it would go: first, as it started to get light, a thud as you negotiated yourself out of the bed and on to the floor. Seconds of silence then a faint shushing as you bottom-shuffled your way across the carpet followed by a real crash-bang-wallop as you started on your toy box, emptying it all, picking out your favourite, and giving it hell for leather. 

This until you got bored. Then you'd fumble with the doorknob, find your way round the bedroom door, bottom shuffle along the hallway to the kitchen, dragging along your best toy to the washing machine, throw it inside, and generally just bang it around.... 

I loved this, that you made the decision what to do and when. That your first port of call was the washer! I loved listening for a few moments to your 'free will' in action, waiting to see what you did next, before getting up to start the day proper...and finding you something more sensible to do.

But sometimes this didn't happen. You would sleep in and I would lie there thinking...not today Thomas, not today. And of course it never was....

And then it was.

Do you know how many times I thought about it how it might happen? Even though all common sense and reason screamed it never would. Do you know how many times it came into my head while sitting at my desk, or in the car...sitting in concerts like this, scenarios of how it might be...and what if I were far away? 

Do all parents carry such dark morbid thoughts with them or was it my subconscious preparing me for something it knew would come? 

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I do know that it's a struggle to get through such searing music without a runny nose. I do know that pulling one's self together so you can just get out of your chair at the end sometimes takes a physical effort far greater than anyone can imagine. I do know that even now, it still lands like a left hook far more powerful than any super-heavyweight could muster.

When the concert ends and there is the rumble and roar of several hundred bodies on the move all heading to the same tiny exits, I watch as the boy in the box leaps into life.

I see him again in the corridor and, despite the call of his grandfather, he races past us, bumping and shunting people in his rush to the exit. I want to ruffle his hair as he speeds past.

I feel my arm reaching out, my hand uncurling...and stop as reason and rationality kick in.



Brussels Conservatoire concert, Bach & Heinichen, given by Les Timbres (Benoit Laurent, oboe; Myriam Rignol, viol; Julien Wolfs, clavichord).
http://www.les-timbres.com/
http://www.conservatoire.be/accueil.html

Tram 94

The woman on the tram says I should get a dog.
'Tres gentile, tres aimable,' she says to me, the Yorkshire terrier pup in her large expensive handbag sniffing my knuckles.

I have thought about this. But I'm not inclined. The not-having-anything-to-be-responsible-for is...important, actually. For now.

We'd started chatting when I asked her about the dog. I tend to do this. Throw myself into conversations in French inevitably tying myself in knots, grasping, reaching for a word, mouth opening and closing like a trout, as my victim, polite yet ever more embarrassed, patiently waits.

She is giddy to have met someone from Yorkshire - the origins of her beloved pup 'Pepe', as she sees it. She asks me if I like Brussels, and we talk about the shopping, the parks, the weather, the people.

Then there's a pause, a sense of conversation over. We both turn away and the packed tram bucks and veers along Avenue Louise. Everyone too hot, everyone holding themselves in, everyone trying not to move, trying not to make themselves even hotter, one woman holding a small, buzzy, battery-powered fan to her face.

For the umpteenth time I pine for grey Yorkshire mizzle...and I'm thinking of a cool Dales shower when suddenly, surprisingly, the woman, who I'd all but forgotten about, leans for forward and takes hold of my wrist.

'Guess how old I am!' she challenges.

This shouldn't happen, should it? The potential to be offended - the potential to cause offence! No-one, certainly not a complete stranger on a tram in full earshot of the public, should ask a question like that! Certainly no woman who doesn't want to risk being shot down in pieces.

I look at her, trying to decide whether I misunderstood. But she is smiling, encouraging, willing me to speak. So I refuse to guess. I tell her it is simply not possible. I do guess, though, inwardly...sixty-something. Early sixty-something.

Bright eyes, twinkly. The sleeves of her pressed, white, linen suit halt at her elbows revealing tanned, freckled forearms, manicured nails, shimmering-pink polish. She has a dainty silver diamond cross around her neck. Her dark hair is styled and teased to the nape of her neck, a few tendrils around her face. A little too much make-up for such a hot day. But yes, she is beautiful, I think. She has something, a glow.

'J'ai soixante-quinze ans,' she proclaims, quite loudly actually, certainly loud enough to turn the heads of other passengers. 75 then. Wow. 'I am lucky, no?' she says. No smugness in her manner, none at all. No vanity, just joy. She does look incredible. The inner cynic scrutinises for scars.

I can't believe I say this...but after some appropriate oohing and ahhing and agreeing, I ask what her secret is. We journalists tend to blurt this one out. We ask it of people hitting 90 or 100, of couples celebrating a golden or diamond wedding. As if there is some magical formula... when the reality is there is no answer. We all muddle through. We all cock it up. We all find a way..

She reaches for the puppy and pulls him onto her knee, talking more at him than me, stroking his back, firmly. 'I wake up in the morning you know, and I look in the mirror and I smile at myself - and I really mean it!'

She waves her hand with a Flamenco-like flourish. 'There! That is what you have to do. Easy. No?'

I'm at a bit of a loss. Wishing she'd speak a bit more quietly. She continues. 'Terrible things have happened to me....truly terrible. But this is my life, I am still here!'

There can't be a soul aboard this tram by now who isn't listening in.

She goes on: 'If you are lucky you know how to be happy...I know how to be happy, that is why I look so young!''

Blinking good genes too, I'm thinking. I'm also thinking 'how, on the 94 tram, did we get to this?' Yet there is something incredibly uplifting in this woman's vivaciousness, her assuredness..

I say 'terrible things?'...and she waves me away with a smile and the slightest irritated shake of the head. Not to be discussed then. Certainly not the place and, one tram stop to go, not the time either. Or maybe she thinks I'm missing her point. A man behind her catches my eye, rolls his eyes. He thinks she's bonkers.

Pepe the pup pants and does his hot dog routine. The tram welcomes and disgorges more passengers and we talk of other things, mundane stuff: the best clothes shops, restaurants, holidays. Then it is our stop, where the tram terminates, at Place Louise, where Tiffany and Versace rub brickwork with Chanel and Dior. I'm here to meet a friend and her little boy for a burger.

At the stop I can tell she wants to be off. 'It was lovely to meet you,' I say. I'm about to say more when she grabs my arm, pulls me to her, air-kisses both cheeks, waves au revoir, and vanishes in a click clack of slingback heels, little Pepe bouncing and bumping along in the bag beside her. Her strong perfume coils around for a while until a gust carries it off...

Later, after the burger, in a cafe off the cobbled streets of the Sablon, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto through the speakers, I am surrounded by lively chatter; French and English mostly. It passes over like comforting background music. I dip in and out.

My coffee is in a big bowl with no handles, so you have to grasp it in both hands - comforting, drinking like that. There are three older women at a table opposite eating beautiful salads, drinking rose. They look in their 70s which probably means they are 110.

The tram woman lingers. I want to know about her. I wonder, in retrospect, whether her gaiety was all too frantic, forced.....masking something else.

I wonder whether she means it all, or whether she's fooling us, fooling herself..

Or maybe I'm seeing things that were not there. Maybe I'm wrong to doubt her. Maybe she lives by every word, every day.

I hope so.