Hello to you all!
It's funny how life works out. Three years ago when I became disabled, and the pain was literally crippling, I didn't lose the will to live, or anything melodramatic like that, but I did withdraw almost entirely into myself. I wasn't bitter, I was just overwhelmed with the reality of the situation, and felt so vulnerable. I developed agoraphobia - that's obvious now, but at the time, it seemed reasonable behaviour for me to shake when someone knocked on the door, or when I saw someone outside I didn't know, worrying if s/he'd come to the door and want something. Getting up and answering the door was painful anyway, but that didn't account for the feelings I had when the door opened and I was expected to let someone in, or go out myself.
Without Lins and Richard I simply would not have coped, especially in the first 18 months. After specialists and therapists - of ALL kinds - tapped and prodded and wrenched in a couple of cases, looked in my mind and muttered imprecations, and I undertook every NHS test known to humankind, and came out with conditions as wide and varying as the stars, I felt a real despair. I kept writing, churning out fiction, but it was a time-filler, because I had nothing to frame my days but what came from inside my head. I even began to lose interest in Education, which was a sure sign of mental illness for me. Education had always been my life.
During those three years I was chief administrator for an international refereed e-journal and spent a lot of time copy-editing, reviewing, corresponding and chasing up writers and reviewers. I enjoyed it, but my heart wasn't really in it. A little like the albatross that I shouldn't have cut down from my neck, but I wasn't up to the job because I didn't love it. How could I be involved in something educational and not love it? I resigned. The first time I had ever done anything like it, but it was inevitable. I don't regret doing it although I wish I hadn't let the people down.
Then Lins and Richard bought me a piano, which was the beginning of a spiritual revival, I think. The music I could still play brought back early memories of giftedness and contact to a universe outside the world of pain I had constructed for myself. As always in my life, music has been a life-saver, and Bach most of all. I played gradually more and more, realising that I still could, and from that gaining a lot of inner strength that seemed to have been stripped away by circumstances.
When I came home from China, I think I was really quite ill emotionally and psychologically. I believe it's called counter-culture shock. I think it was more like post-traumatic stress disorder myself. I slept badly, had nightmares, or dreams of longing to be back in a place when I felt valued, working for the best boss in the world - Dean Tian - and always receiving constructive, helpful and above all appreciative feedback. On the streets, however, and in my flat, I saw and experienced the poverty, the social unfairness, fielded the intrusive phone-calls at all times of day and night, feeling as if I didn't belong to myself anymore. I saw haggard old men and women, filthy, somehow vacant and past a point of no return in their humanity, lying or sitting on the street begging, being ignored, isolated, marginalised. Yet my students were all bright-eyed and bushy tailed. God, how I loved them! They were the lucky ones, but even they had stories to tell about their backgrounds which moved me in ways I didn't want to understand.
I will never forget the tale told by a lad in a colleague's English class. When he was seven, living in a tiny mountain village, there was a time when he was the only child there, because all the other children's parents could afford to send their children to school. He roamed the hills by day with only a dog for company. He said he was very lonely. No child should be that lonely. Some things are just wrong. His dog, he said, was his best friend for a whole year, and sometimes he would long to be able to go to school like all his friends, but he knew he couldn't. And yet he resolved that somehow, one day, he would go to college in the distant city of Guyuan. And there he was, proud and small and compact, standing like a banner to his truth and resolve in that college in Guyuan... I wept then and I weep now. Such courage and fortitude in the face of such hardship! I don't know I'm born.
Daily I heard stories like that over the six years. They wormed their way in and took root. I don't think they did harm, but I'm not sure I'll ever recover from them, or indeed whether I should.
It was a strangely split existence being in China. I loved it and I hated it. I loved the people, almost without exception (a rare thing in my life because I am often so judgemental in my private life), but the injustices, the unfairness of it all, the ideas I'd had all my life that somehow out there life was fair, you just needed to get stuck in and somehow things would resolve. I know only now that development work is one of the most complex undertakings, and certainly I believe that people who do it for the time that I did probably need more support from their organisations than they may be getting. That's not criticising anyone. I wonder, though, whether it was wise of me (and ultimately I take full responsibility for what has happened and what I have done) to stay for so long without ever really processing what was happening, or talking with people who had done it before and knew what to expect. I really was an innocent abroad in so many ways.
The same for my feet. I didn't know the damage I was doing them by walking so far in Beijing and so frequently, with poorly padded/supportive shoes. If only I'd known...
But I didn't and that's something I have come to terms with. Life happens. Things don't work out the way we expect or want them. It's just how it is. Accepting that is the first step, so I understand...
During my very long convalescence of the spirit Lins helped me by encouraging me to venture just beyond my comfort zone. Small steps so to speak. She never became irritated (if she did, she didn't show it), but instead used her remarkable gifts of teaching people with special learning needs. I knew she was doing it and how, but it still worked. I owe her so much. So much. I tell her, but I wonder if she really knows.
Early this year I contacted a woman in Germany, Anke, who had written a book about being incarcerated by the Stasi in the 1980s along with her husband (in a different prison of course) both of whom were mentally and physically tortured over the period of their imprisonments. She had tried to escape from East Germany to the West. I found the book profoundly moving. Probaby it spoke to me partly because of the theme of incarceration, but it gave me an impetus I needed. I wote to her to thank her for her remarkable writing, and how it had affected me. She wrote back almost immediately, and since that time in February 2009, we have exchanged more than a 1000 letters. She and her husband are coming here soon, and I am looking forward to meeting them at last. I know that my correspondence with Anke has helped me to knit parts of myself together again, and given me a new sense of purpose. She is a remarkable woman.
And a few months ago, Lins suggested that I apply for a job with the Open University. I had actually already done so. I had an interview in September, which I was absolutely sure I had done really badly in, but in fact I got the job - Associate Lecturer on the Course, Education for Development. I am absolutely loving it. It's early days but I really do relish the contact with students (13 in my group), also with other tutors, and the breadth of ideas I am coming to grips with on the course material. It's a new life. I am also more in contact again with the Bath Action Research group. And long may that continue.
On that theme, when Jack Whitehead retired from Bath University in August of this year, I helped (a bit) to put a book together called "Validations", which contained about fifty messages for Jack about how he had influenced their education. (See external url.) Robyn Pound was the prime mover in that project, with Marie Huxtable, two other good friends. The book remains one of the things I am most proud of having been involved in in my life. Jack is (he will never retire!) the most influential educator I've ever known. He was the person who took the clay and moulded it into a sculpture that was fit to be seen, and that grew in the imagination. And he has done that and does that with so many people. One look on the website for Action Research (can't put in a website anymore, not allowed) will show you that. Jack has, like my sister, this gift of seeing what it is the other has the potential to do, and then facilitating that process. That's like the gift of life itself. It is life at its best, I know that.
I do like living in Flamborough. When my mother died last year she left me the house, which was so kind of her. I have a comfortable, warm, pretty house to live in, strewn all over now with pictures of China that I am so happy to look at - it took two years before I could bear to see them on the walls. The landscape here is some of the most beautiful I've ever seen - and I've been to New Zealand, so I know what I'm talking about (hi there, Pip and Bruce!). The people here are remarkably kind and thoughtful. I have considerate neighbours, who drop in now and again to check I'm alright - as I remember neighbours from the villages of my childhood, when communities were tighter knit than they are said to be now. One of the great strengths of Flamborough is its people. That together with the scenery make it a dream place to have a house. I live opposite my sister, who comes in to see me most days. Ali (brother) and Tannya (sister-in-law) live in Bridlington (just down the road). They've just come back from the holiday of a lifetime - Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Hawaii. They're coming round soon to download their pictures. Apparently they flew in a helicopter over The Grand Canal. Now that's amazing!
About a year ago I received a wheelchair from the local NHS wheelchair unit, and that really began the regime of freedom that I am living now. I was able to get out on my own, although I was still loathe to go through the door, trapped by my own fear and darkness. I made excuses to myself - didn't like exercising, hated being visible in a wheelchair (which was partly true, but I'm coping with that now). Eventually I did go out, though. My first trip was to the local library, which felt like the climb of the century - it's practically all uphill into the village. I will never forget the feeling of elation of being able to do it, of being independent again, of being able to join the real world instead of the virtual world I had been living in.
I was also confirmed in May this year, which has been a revelation. I was baptised last November and had a few classes with the local vicar, who is fantastic. Getting to the stage of being baptised, of accepting some of the tenets of the church has been a long and arduous process, and it hasn't finished. There are many beliefs I find untenable in fact. I read Richard Dawkins' book about the God Delusion and am fascinated by the lucidity of his arguments. However, something draws me to the church and to the ideas. Mostly through Bach's sacred music, I have to confess, which has been a lifelong obsession since the age of seven. I see the confirmation as the logical outcome of events when I was very young. I think I've always been coming to this point. Now the question is, where next?
I really get on well with the congregation, who have provided me with a great deal of spiritual and organisational help. We have a new curate, a woman, which I am really happy about. It is good to see the Church of England promoting women as priests. The current struggle in the Catholic church appals me, and I find it abhorrent the ways in which women are discussed by some ostensibly holy people. It's fairly high church, but I love the ritual. I love the dark gloom of the high arches, the way light streams through the shadows and illuminates the stain-glass windows. I love the poetry of our vicar's sermons - real poetry I mean, not just poetic. He presided at his daughter's wedding and wrote her a poem, that contained this, alluding at first to Andrew Marvell's father who was a parish priest here in Flamborough in the 17th century:
The son writes on, summoning what was stored,
Unrecognized, by decades of Marvells
Up to his inner eye, out through his pen:
Fog-fingered churchyards, cowslips on grassy banks,
The way a far hill dulls to blue at dusk.
He walks again beside the crumbling coast
And beachcombs his father’s skittered certainties;
Picking some up, he turns them in his gaze;
He lets most go to tumble in the tides,
But some he smoothes into his elegant verse.
(Peter Pike, “Beachcomber”,2009)
Sometimes life is unutterably beautiful.
I've been visited over the last three years by really good friends, Cherry, Kate, and Pip and Bruce from New Zealand (hi again!), Lewis who was on VSO with me, who has now married a Chinese woman in Beijing and is doing a Ph.D. at Leeds University, and Jan, an ex-colleague and close friend from Wiltshire. And this year, Marie, Pete (from AR days in the 1990s) and Jack all came and stayed for a weekend, which was so enlivening, as their company ALWAYS is. Some people are drainers of others' life-energy. I am so lucky to have friends who are so life-affirming.
In the summer Lins, realising that I needed to move out of my comfort zone in a big way, when asked what she was going to be doing in the summer answered, "taking you anywhere you want to go!" What a woman! So I travelled down to Bath and visited those friends I spent many happy years with before and during my time in China, and also other friends like Jan. It was such a joy to see her and her family again. She had transformed an outside-office into a unit for me, with toilet facilities and everything, and there I stayed for a few days. It was such a marvellous experience after living in only four walls for so long.
I also visited Pat, a friend I met through the action research group over 20 years ago, with whom over the years I have shared so many discussions about writing, texts, our own fictional and academic writings. I hadn't seen her for about two years. I used to come back from China every six months and it had become customary to stay with Pat either before coming back here to Flamborough, or on the way back to China. It was a joy to see her and John, her husband, again. It seemed as if I had only been there the previous week.
On the way back from the south, we went to visit my friend Brenda in Church Stretton. Brenda was the Senior Mistress at the school in Wenlock where I first taught and a real inspiration, and we had kept in touch ever since. It had been some years since I'd seen her, however. It was a real treat.
Apart from a trip to York the previous summer (again engineered by Lins and Richard) I hadn't been away from home at all for nearly two years. It was about time!
And now the job, and loads to do! I like my life now, although I find the exercising REALLY boring. I am enjoying the challenge of a new job that demands new skills in using technology that I had always thought was just beyond me. Learning again is exciting and energising. I wrote getting on for half a million words in those three years. Lots of short stories and two and a half novels, academic papers for EJOLTS (the journal I was concerned with) and so on. It was worth doing, but it wasn't about growing.
And now it’s all ahead of me. I’m preparing for my first tutorial, trying to come to terms with some technology with which I’m completely unfamiliar. It’s a question of spending time just getting used to what can be done with it, but I really love the way it has opportunities for democratising learning. I think it’s going to be a question of learning a lot before I see everything that can done with it.
As for the pain it is there, it is draining and to some extents dictates what I can do on a daily basis, but it is not and will not become the centre of my life ever again. Immersing myself again in the learning and aspirations of others is a marvellous antidote to pain. I am lucky that mine is kept at a level at which I can do that.
I intend to keep a closer eye on the site, and hope that if you’re reading it, you might want to respond. Please do. It would be good to hear from you.
Best wishes, love, warmest regards, from Moira x
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