Present
: Alison, Susan, Pat, Pat, Margaret, Ding, Emily, Persephone
Apologies for absence
: None
Witch House: current occupancy
Room 1: Carole
Room 2: Lauren
Room 3: Nasreen
Room 4: Joyce
Room 5: Helen
News of residents
Nasreen moved in on Saturday. Unfortunately, Housing Benefit have informed her that as an asylum seeker she will have no entitlement to any of the usual state benefits. She will receive a £35 weekly voucher for food, but nothing towards her rent.
Helen has been very distressed this week, and cutting up quite badly; she had to go into A&E for stitches on Sunday night (thanks to Alison for driving her there). Her GP has got her into some group therapy at the Young People’s Psychiatric Unit, specifically for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Carole’s application for move-on accommodation from Suffolk Churches Housing Association was unsuccessful, but they have suggested that she apply again the next time their lists are open.
Persephone has had a session with both Joyce and Helen to cleanse their auras. She is currently doing a course on Indian head massage, and suggested that several of the residents and ex-residents might benefit from this therapy.
News of former residents still receiving support
Marianne is doing well with her job at the chemist’s, although Mr Singh is still keeping her mainly in the toiletries section.
Finance
This was Ding’s last report as treasurer. There are currently no voids, and no rent arrears, except for Nasreen. Ding reported that since voids and bad debts have been so low this year, it should be possible to fund Nasreen’s rent out of the 5 per cent voids allowance which is written into the budget, at least for the immediate future. This was agreed to.
It was decided to make the Lottery grant application for a new washer-drier. The old machine is now out of its extended warranty, and is not likely to last much longer (especially in the light of Carole’s unsuccessful application for rehousing). It is already putting grey fluff on everyone’s things.
Thanks were expressed to Ding for three years of excellent work as treasurer of WITCH – and to Margaret for taking on the job.
Any other business
Emily asked whether she could go on a welfare rights training day in April on understanding disability benefits. Ding confirmed that there was sufficient money left in the training budget to pay for this, and for any collective members who might also wish to attend. After some discussion, however, it was decided that the training budget was not appropriate to pay for Persephone’s Indian head massage classes.
Next week’s meeting
: 8 p.m., at Persephone’s house.
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
Suffolk IP2 3DA
Mrs Barbara McPherson
Director of Recreation and Amenities
Ipswich Borough Council
Civic House
Orwell Drive
Ipswich
Suffolk IP2 3QP
26 February 2005
Dear Mrs McPherson,
I am writing to you to raise my concern about the problem of dog-fouling in the small park between Gledhill Street and Emery Street. As you may know, there is at present only one bin provided in the park for dog waste, and it is a long way from the Emery Street entrance. Dog-owners who leave the park by that gate do not always bother to walk back and dispose of their dog’s waste in the bin. At least one additional bin would, I am convinced, make a big difference. The park is used as a play area by many local children, and this form of pollution is not only unpleasant and a nuisance, it is a hygiene issue.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Hayton.
The Hollies
East Markhurst
28 February 2005
Dear Margaret,
Thank you for your lovely long letter. You write such nice, chatty letters, it’s almost like having you here with me. I’ve read it two or three times through, so I’ve really had my money’s worth. I’m glad you and your landlady are getting along, and that you’ve found these new ladies in the housing group to be friends with, too. I did worry about you at first, you know, all alone in a big new town like that. But you’ve always been good at making friends, right from a little girl, so I know I shouldn’t have fretted. The very first day you started nursery school, I remember I went with Mum to meet you at three o’clock, and the first thing you said when you saw us was, ‘I’ve got a new friend and she’s called Horatio.’ It took us three weeks to work out what her name really was – though your mum said Carnation wasn’t much better than Horatio!
Your mum still phones me. But I’m using the frame to get about, and with the phone being in the hall, it takes me a while. So many times I seem to get there and the person rings off just before I pick up. I need to lean myself up against the frame, so I can free my good left hand to lift the receiver. Or if I do manage to answer, it will just be somebody selling something – as if I needed a conservatory at my time of life! Or life insurance – there’s not a lot left to insure, I told the girl last time, but she didn’t laugh, I suppose she was scared of being rude. I’ve told Mum to let it ring a nice long while if she calls. I suppose she’s too busy to sit down and write a letter – most people are these days. There’s always some Mothers’ Union meeting, or choir practice, or the church magazine to get out, or just someone round at the vicarage needing tea and sympathy. It’s a full-time job for her as well as your dad, I always think. I sometimes wonder how these lady vicars get on, because I can’t see their husbands taking on all the parish jobs, somehow, can you?
Kirsty, the young lady who is coming in to help me, is really kind. She comes every day except Sunday, and she is supposed to get me up, help me wash and dress, and get my breakfast. I feel really guilty, because I’ve been so used to getting up early, seven o’clock prompt, ever since your grandad was alive, and of course in hospital they were always round with a cup of tea ever so early too. Well, Kirsty comes at nine o’clock, which is when she starts work, and that’s fair enough, she has her own little ones to get up and fed and off to school first. But I feel so idle just sitting in bed until she comes, so sometimes I have a wash and a piece of toast before she arrives, and then hop back into bed when I hear the gate. Then I have to pretend to be hungry when she makes my breakfast later. (I can tell you, love, because I know you’d never say anything.)
There are lots of things I can manage one-handed, the kettle and the toaster, and saucepans – you’d be surprised what you can do when you have to. But tin openers are impossible, and peeling potatoes. Often I get Kirsty to peel me some veg for my tea when she’s there in the morning, and she’ll leave them in a plastic bag in the fridge. Or else I’ve started to buy those bags ready peeled and chopped from the chill section in the Co-op. There was a man on the television saying how bad they are for the environment – all that packaging and whatnot, and I thought to myself, I know someone who wouldn’t approve, then. But I think you’ll forgive your old one-armed gran, won’t you? Anyway, as far as cooking tea goes, I often don’t want so much these days – it’s getting older, and not being able to get out and about to work up an appetite, I suppose. And having two breakfasts most days helps too!
I hope school is still going well. Do you still take the children out on nature rambles when the weather warms up? I used to love nature rambles more than anything when I was at school.
What’s ‘The West Wing’, by the way? Is it something I should watch, do you think? Would I understand it? I am so grateful that you started me off watching ‘Friends’. I used to really look forward to my Friday evenings, and I was so pleased when Rachel decided not to go to Paris in the end. She and Ross make such a lovely couple, don’t they?
Love from your Gran xx
Dear Becs,
I’ve just got back from my first call-out on the Witch House emergency rota, and I know we are meant to be hot on confidentiality, but you live miles away, and I’ve got to tell someone. It was Helen, she’s one of the younger residents, nineteen I found out tonight, though I’d have guessed much younger to look at her, she’s dead skinny and really sort of fragile-looking. She sounded really weird on the phone, said she’d taken an overdose, so I just phoned Alison first (because she’s said she’ll go with me the first time or so) and then got straight on my bike. The house is only five minutes away.
When I got there Helen was just sitting on her bed, looking sort of dazed. She’d taken a lot of her anti-depressants, plus a few aspirin. She hadn’t taken the whole bottle or anything – she’d been meaning to, she said, but then she’d changed her mind, and stopped and called me. She seemed really scared. I rang for an ambulance, but I hadn’t any idea what to say to Helen, so I just held her hand and hoped Alison wouldn’t be long. Then we heard Alison’s car, and as soon as she got there she took charge. She was super-efficient, just as if this happened all the time (and from what Helen told me later, perhaps it does). She asked exactly what Helen had taken, how many and of what, and wrote it down, and put the bottles and packets in a bag. Then she took Helen into the bathroom and got the toothmug and made her drink about ten mugfuls of water, until she was copiously sick, clumps of undigested tablets all down the sink in this watery vomit. Then we got in the car – Alison phoned to cancel the ambulance, which still hadn’t arrived – and we were at A&E within ten minutes of Alison’s arrival on the scene. Blimey, I wouldn’t want to be her kid’s teacher at a parents’ evening, if she had any kind of bone to pick!
Mind you, after all that prompt action, of course we then sat there waiting for forty minutes before we got to see a doctor. He gave Helen another emetic and she was sick again (he made her hold a stainless steel bowl, and she had to be sick there with everyone watching), but there was nothing more to come now, so I don’t think it did any good. It seemed to me like he wanted to punish her for wasting his time with something that was her fault when he’d got all these other people waiting – I guess maybe he’s met her before up there. But it’s not her fault. She’s depressed, she really is ill, just like all the others. Then he checked her pulse and blood pressure, and shone one of those little torch things into her eyes, and told her to see her GP in the morning for a check-over.
Alison drove us back to Witch House, and she had to leave, but I said I’d stay a bit, so Helen and I made a cup of tea and took it up to her room. Her stomach was really sore from all the vomiting, but weak and milky seemed OK. Anyway, she seemed to have sort of unfrozen, if you know what I mean, and she started talking, and I ended up staying until – well, what is it now? – quarter to three! Her dad abused her, it’s horrible. Started when she was still at primary school, eight or nine she was, and it didn’t stop until she finally got up her courage to leave, and came to Witch House, nearly two years ago. She just packed a few things, and got on the bus, and went to the CAB. They sent her to WITCH, and luckily there was a space straight away. She didn’t speak to her parents for about six months, and when she finally got up courage to ring, her mum just pretended everything was normal, and asked how she was, and where she was living and stuff. She even goes round there for Sunday lunch sometimes now – her mum is always on at her to go – and no one ever asks her why she left, and she hasn’t said anything, and they all pretend they are a normal happy family. Her dad’s an orthodontist, and probably plays golf, and goes to church on Sundays. But it’s eating Helen up, you can see. She says the mornings when she wakes up and can get up and shower without a huge effort of will are few and far between. She didn’t say so much about – well, you know, the suicidal feelings and the self-harm, and of course I wasn’t about to ask. And here am I, getting back on my bike and pedalling back to my normality, my pain-free, livable life. I know it’s a cliché, Becs, but I literally
cannot imagine
what it’s like to be Helen, I really can’t.
Anyway, sorry to load all this on you – you’ll open this in the morning, I expect, and what a cheery start to your day that will be! Hope your dad isn’t too bad, by the way.
Love,
Margaret xx
Dear Becs,
I’m really sorry about that e-mail last night. I guess I was all wound up, and just needed to tell someone. Just ignore me. I’m quite calm again this morning. And I didn’t even ask how you are, or what’s going on with you. How is Campbell? Still tucked up in your bed and sleeping like a baby?
No, I haven’t found anyone round here to tempt me out of my nun’s habit yet, nor even worth setting my wimple at, to be honest. The male staff at school are all either married or ancient or both, and as my main social life at the moment (apart from chatting to Cora over our still highly carnivorous suppers) is WITCH – and, well, to be honest, I’m not going to meet any men that way, except maybe the odd violent ex-husband, and perhaps a psychiatrist or two.
They are really a brilliant lot of women, though – if a little, um, motley. The two Pats I’ve told you about, and Alison, who is a kind of absolute monarch manqué of collective working (‘
la commune, c’est moi
’). She’s a medical research scientist in the daytime – probably gets the bacteria whipped into line in the petri dishes. Ding (yes, that really does seem to be her name – but of course one doesn’t like to ask) comes over as a bit ditzy, but to be fair to her she kept the account books in the sort of good order that would make a Swiss military tattoo look slipshod. Susan is very quiet, about my age I think, and Emily is older, must be close to retirement I’d say, and she and Pat T. are the paid workers at the house. No one gets a surname, it’s all first names except the Pats get to be Pat T. and Pat W. respectively, to avoid descent into complete chaos. But my favourite is Persephone. She’s an unfeasibly tall Jamaican woman, invariably swathed in some flamboyant African print like a furled oriflamme around a flagpole, the effect sometimes even topped off by one of those turban thingummies, and she’s into alternative everything. Her laugh could fell trees, and she laughs
a lot
. She came to Britain as a kid with her mum, two of just twelve passengers on a cargo ship which, serendipitously, was carrying bananas. It is the one disappointment of her life that in forty years no one in oh-so-polite Ipswich has ever asked her whether she came over on the you-know-what. Pat and Pat call her Percy. On Planet Pat everyone has to have a masculine abbreviation for their name. If they start calling me Gary, I swear I’m leaving the group.