I had a phone call on Friday night, too – but in my case it was more like angel voices. It was Richard again – to tell me that he has fixed up a meeting in London for Nasreen and me, to talk to a human rights lawyer. Not someone from the Home Office, because there might be a conflict of interest there, but a woman at the Foreign Office, an expert on international law, who might be able to come up with some help on Nasreen’s asylum case. He’d even remembered and made the appointment for the 31st, which is in half term. I asked if I could mention it to Caroline, you know, my friend from home who works at the refugee centre in Hounslow. I went to school with her – she was a couple of years older, but I knew her well because her mother was one of Dad’s churchwardens. She came to stay with me one weekend in our first year, do you remember? We thought she was very grown up and serious because she was at Oxford and reading Law and already doing her finals, and then she got drunk in the college bar and snogged Simon Shepperton. Well, she’s a solicitor now, and knows quite a lot about asylum and refugee law, and Richard said of course, bring her along too. Nas and I are going to meet him in Ipswich and travel up on the train together – he said to meet by the statue of Sir Alf Ramsey, which is just on the way to the station.
I can hardly believe he’s doing all this for Nasreen – it’s so brilliant of him! I said thank you on the phone of course, but I just wanted him to be there, so that I could give him a hug.
Love,
Margaret xxx
FRANKIE’S
DOMESTIC PLUMBING AND HEATING SERVICES
114 Hume Park Road, Moss Side, Manchester M15 5TX
25 May 2005
Dear Miss Prichard
I have been instructed by your landlords, Fallowfield Properties Ltd, to carry out necessary repairs to the central heating system at Flat 4b, 85 Gainsborough Road, Moss Side. I will need to have access to the premises in order to carry out this work. I should therefore be grateful if you could contact me as soon as possible, so that we can arrange a date and time, at your convenience, when you will be able to be present to let me into the flat.
Yours sincerely,
Frankie Scott.
I’ve been meaning to ask you, Richard – what on earth’s going on? What has become of the celebrated Slater nose for picking the issues that cut the mustard? You’ve been well outside off-stump recently, mate.
First it was VAT on, er . . . ladies’ sanitary items. (Bloody ’ell, I can’t even sit through an advert for them myself. The merest glimpse of a laboratory bottle of blue liquid has me grabbing for the remote.) All that little fol-de-rol earned you was an unholy association with those harpies whose natural territory it is, and believe me when I say that they are not image-enhancing bedfellows – vociferous Iraq war objectors, to a woman. And then greenhouse gas emissions! Come on, Richard! Of course we’re all committed to boosting renewables and meeting Tokyo targets on emissions – you know how hard it is to fault the Rottweiler’s green credentials – but it isn’t turning out to be that easy. So drawing public attention to the slow rate of progress is, well, frankly just plain rude. Like pointing out when your aunty’s slip is showing, or your constituency chairman has got gravy on his tie. Take my word for it, that is not the road to Whitehall.
Michael.
Michael Carragan (Labour)
Member of Parliament for West Bromwich West
You are right of course, Michael, I have been straying most grievously from the path, and I must get back to some serious ducking for good-publicity apples. But in the last few weeks I find that I have been applying additional, and for me completely novel, criteria in the issue-selection process.
On a not wholly unrelated subject, I have arranged to meet Margaret and her asylum-seeking Albanian friend next Tuesday, and take them down to meet that human rights lawyer at the FO, Liz Thompson. Probably a fool’s errand. But even if it’s not exactly designed to win me plaudits at No. 10, it might just temper the icy blast of disapproval from another quarter.
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
Well, I suppose the odd diversion is harmless enough – but for God’s sake keep one eye on the ball.
Michael.
Michael Carragan (Labour)
Member of Parliament for West Bromwich West
Dear Becs,
Poor Cora was in such a flap tonight! She’d got herself into something of a scrape at work. They are having this refit in her bank – she was telling me about it the other night. Apparently there’s a lot of noisy hammering and drilling, and it makes it very hard for them to make themselves heard when they are speaking to the customers. Cora has evolved this rather bizarre staccato delivery style, to get out what she needs to say in between the bursts of noise from the drills. She had me in stitches demonstrating it.
Well, today she said this customer came in, a young man whom she vaguely recognised as having been in a couple of times earlier in the week. Anyway, he came over to her and sat down (they don’t have a counter, they each have their little area with comfy chairs), and instead of saying anything, he wordlessly handed her a note on a piece of paper. I suppose when you work in a bank you are always expecting to be robbed, so of course Cora immediately assumed that her worst fear had been realised, was far too scared to read the note, and just pressed the emergency button discreetly concealed in the arm of her chair. This activates a flashing light in the office of the branch manager, Mrs Davies, as well as sounding an alarm – not, unfortunately, at the bank but in the main headquarters of the Suffolk Constabulary.
Only then did Cora’s eyes focus sufficiently for her to read what was written on the paper which the man had given her. Rather than ‘Hand over all your cash, I’ve got a gun’, it merely inquired politely, ‘May I extend my overdraft limit to £250 please?’ When a special armed response unit arrived within minutes, Cora had rather a lot of explaining to do. (Presumably hammered out in quick bursts between the resumed drilling.)
Margaret xx
My bank don’t like it when I try to extend my overdraft either. But calling in armed police does sound like rather an over reaction.
Becs xxx
42 Gledhill Road
Ipswich
29 May 2005
Dear Gran,
How are you getting on? How’s the ankle? Mum said that Kirsty has been coming in to do some extra hours over these last few weekends, or otherwise I should have tried to get over again myself, to help with your dinner and anything else you might need doing. But I’ll certainly come next weekend, if that’s all right, and I’ll remember to bring back those clean sheets. Can you put any weight on your ankle yet? And have you been doing those stretches from the sheet the physiotherapist gave you at the hospital? Or is it still too painful?
I am packing up a few books to send you, while you are still not very mobile. They are just some old ones of mine which I enjoyed and I thought you might too, to provide some variation on what Kirsty brings you from the library. I expect you have already read all the classics that I’ve got, so I’ve chosen a few recent novels, mostly funny ones that I thought might cheer you up. The Kate Atkinson, especially, is a favourite of mine.
It’s my half term holiday coming up this week. On Tuesday, I am going to London with Nasreen from the hostel and Richard Slater – the MP, you remember – to talk to a lawyer from the Foreign Office who might be able to help Nasreen with her claim to be able to stay in Britain. It’s Mr Slater who fixed it all up. It is very good of him – he seems to be taking a genuine interest in Nasreen’s case.
Nasreen came into school this week, on Wednesday, to talk to the children about her religion. We have been doing this project on Islam, you know, and there are hardly any Muslim kids in Year 3, only the doctor’s twins in Mrs Allen’s class, and it didn’t seem right to put them on the spot. Nasreen went down really well. The children loved her, and they had lots of interesting questions – although David Goldberg did ask her whether she had ever known anyone who was a suicide bomber, which was a bit embarrassing. I found out quite a lot, too. Because they can’t go out to a mosque, Nasreen’s family just pray at home, or sometimes they get together with a few Muslim neighbours if it is a special festival or something. The men and boys pray in the sitting room and the women and girls pray in the hallway. It seems odd to observe this segregation even though it is just the family most of the time, but I suppose it is the tradition. I wondered if being asked about home would be upsetting for Nasreen, but actually she seemed pleased to be able to talk about it, quite proud in fact, and not sad at all.
Helen has been quite poorly, so for the past week or so we’ve all been taking turns going in to sit with her at bedtime, until she gets off to sleep. It’s quite a commitment, but it’s worked well so far: she hasn’t taken an overdose, or even cut herself at all since last week. And it’s only Monday to Friday, because she is still going into hospital over the weekends. On Wednesday evening I went into the hostel office to do the bank reconciliation, and I met Alison in there – she is one of the support group. She was on her way to sit with Helen, and meanwhile she was sorting out some problem for Lauren, another of the residents, talking to the social worker on the phone, and smoothing over whatever it was beautifully. Alison is so organised and super-confident, always completely on top of everything – I really wish I could be like that! Anyway, she offered to help with the bank stuff before she went up to Helen (Alison used to be treasurer when WITCH first started), and we got chatting, and she mentioned she had a hospital appointment the next day, and not very tactfully I said, ‘Oh, what’s wrong?’ and she said, ‘Nothing really, I’m pregnant.’ And of course I had no idea what to say. I mean, normally you’d say ‘Congratulations’, at least to someone older and married, but there was something about the way she said it, and she’s well into the middle zone, and she’s got three big kids already, I think she said the youngest is in Year 5. So, because I couldn’t think what else to say, I found myself asking her when it was, and if she’d like me to go with her, and she looked at me and said, ‘Thank you, that would be great.’
Well, I wasn’t sure what I was doing really, going along to hold the hand of somebody practically old enough to be my mother. But in the car on the way to the hospital Alison started talking, and she seemed to have thought it all through, very matter-of-fact she was, and she said she was going to ask for a termination. She hadn’t intended the pregnancy, and she was talking about her kids. How the eldest boy, Robert, has got GCSEs next year, and how the autistic one, Edward, has been hell to live with just recently, and how disruptive it would be to have a baby in the house. She didn’t mention her husband at all, so I didn’t like to ask what he thought about it. Sitting in the waiting room at the maternity ward was awful. Everyone else seemed to be in couples, sitting holding hands and looking happy, and I thought how Alison had probably sat here before, with her husband, when she was expecting her other children, and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. It was actually quite funny, though, because they had told Alison to drink plenty of fluids beforehand and come with a full bladder, because of the scan, and then we had to wait a long time, and poor Alison was bursting, so we daren’t even have a cup of tea from the machine.
Eventually they called her in, and she asked if I would go with her, and the woman doctor got her on a bed and put vaseline on her tummy and rubbed the scanner thing around a bit, looked at the screen, and hmmed to herself. Then she said, ‘Wait here, I’m just going to fetch another doctor because I want a second opinion.’ And we were left there for what seemed like ages, with Alison all cold and vaseliny and still dying for the loo. When she came back, with a male colleague, they both moved the scanner about and studied the screen, and then they nodded to each other, and the first doctor (the woman) said, ‘There is an eight-week foetus there, Mrs Whiteley, but I’m afraid we can’t find any heartbeat.’ It was suddenly all just too much for Alison, after all that being brave and sensible and strong, and she just burst into tears. And the male doctor looked at her notes and said, ‘But I thought you were planning on having a termination anyway?’ as if to say, in that case what possible reason could she have for being emotional, she should be glad she’d been spared the difficulty! Well, I’m afraid I couldn’t restrain myself then, Gran, even though I’m sure Alison just found it embarrassing. I had a real go at him. I actually asked him how he would feel if he’d just been told that his baby was dead inside him! And poor Alison now has to wait for a miscarriage, which can’t be a very pleasant prospect.
I hope you don’t mind my telling you all this, Gran, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. There is one more cheerful thing to tell you, though. Cora decided to do some evening classes with Persephone, who is one of the women from the hostel support group, and the classes were on herbalism. I thought it was an odd choice, because Cora isn’t usually interested in all those alternative therapies, in fact she goes to her GP and demands antibiotics if she gets so much as a cold. Well, it turned out that Cora thought herbalism meant how to
grow
herbs! I would love to have seen her face when she got there expecting gardening, and it was all these women talking about healing, and rediscovering the ancient lore of their grandmothers. (Not that you ever brewed up many herbal potions, at least not that I remember, Gran! A cup of tea and a hot water bottle was your usual prescription!)