One of the wheelchair brigade (1970)
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sutcliff_spaceWe owe this one totanaqui, digging in the depths of the digital archives: thank you again, Tanaqui, for taking the trouble to find it.
"One of the wheelchair brigade" is a 1000-word article by Rosemary Sutcliff published in The Times (her usual newspaper, according to her godson Anthony Lawton) a few days before the UK passed the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, a bill that expanded basic services for people with disabilities. In it she describes her own condition and some of the problems it caused beyond just the physical.
You can read a quick explanation of the Act on health.org.uk. Details of the encounter with the patronizing lady can be found in Sutcliff's later "Emotions in Focus" piece. Her memoir, Blue Remembered Hills, is also a good place to learn more about how her disability affected her life (though if that sounds depressing, rest assured the book is anything but.) And I assume it's just a coincidence, but 1970 was also the year Sutcliff published The Witch's Brat, starring one of her most visibly disabled heroes: Lovel, an infirmarian monk with a congenital hunched back and club foot, who invents a medieval version of physical therapy for an injured patient.
ONE OF THE WHEELCHAIR BRIGADE
The child who contracts Still’s disease – alias juvenile arthritis – today, stands, with modern methods of treatment, a good chance of coming through it without much permanent damage; but in my day very little was known about treating the active stages of the disease, and not all that much about dealing with the legacy of damaged joints that it left behind it.
I am not, strictly speaking, wheelchair bound; I can peddle around the house and the smooth bits of the garden under my own steam. But for all out-going occasions, my wheelchair is is very much the quickest and simplest, even when it isn’t the only, way. With it I can go shopping, visiting, even for holidays abroad, without it I can do none of these things. Therefore, for all practical purposes, I count as one of the wheelchair brigade.
To be wheelchair-borne carries certain bonuses. People open both sides of double doors for you. A crowd watching a coronation or the opening of a flower-show, or merely a hole in the road, will generally let you through to the front. Given a willing pusher, it is nice to be able to go round an exhibition comfortably sitting down, while everybody else has to toil round it on their own aching feet. But though we tend not to talk about them much, being disabled has its disadvantages, some of them not always obvious to the rest of the world. One of these is that it’s expensive. I make a rather better income out of my writing than do the majority of novelists, but because I am disabled I have to have, and pay for, domestic and personal help that I should not otherwise need.
Just about half my net earnings go straight out again in wages and salaries and National Insurance stamps (S.E.T., a gracious government allows me to reclaim). And out of the remaining half, of course, comes the extra running costs of the larger household. I have to run a car, because I cannot cope by public transport. Holidays have to be taken in more luxurious style, and therefore less often, than if I were able to take them on a shoestring. Even a visit to the theatre means front row seats because I can’t fold up at the knees. Holidays and theatres are not, I admit, a strictly necessary part of life, but after all, most people have them, or some other form of change and relaxation for the recharging of their batteries, and the disabled have at least as much need as anybody else.
I am one of the lucky ones. I have a career which is a joy and a fulfillment to me, although sometimes rather too much like hard work; and for just so long as I can keep up the output, and no longer, I can afford to run my home, and have a holiday abroad every year or two, and the feminine pleasure of a new frock at reasonable intervals. But this is because I am one of the lucky ones. The less lucky simply cannot afford to be disabled: something has to go; and since the disability cannot, all too often everything but the grim necessities of life have to go instead.
Other problems and disadvantages are less tangible, but even the smallest of them can be extremely frustrating. Inanimate objects roll just out of reach as though they had some devilish life of their own. Difficult steps or narrow doorways bar the way to places one desperately wants to go into. At any of the stand-up types of social gathering, one’s face is on a level with everybody else’s navel, and this presents problems; the women come and, according to age group, squat on their heels or pull up a chair if they can find one, exclaiming how nice it is to sit down for a moment; but the men come and bend over one, so that to hold a conversation one has to stare straight up towards the ceiling and get a crick in one’s neck; and the general sensation of being a very small mushroom in a very tall forest is distinctly claustrophobic.
But these are small surface irritations, the spots on the measles as it were. Something that goes far deeper is the disabled person’s need to be accepted by the rest of the world, not as a distinct species, but merely as another person who happens to have a disability. The world has advanced a lot in its treatment of the disabled, but not enough. Too many people are still embarrassed by a disability, too many people still assume that to have what Michael Flanders calls an impediment in one’s feet must also mean that one has an impediment in one’s head, and will be unable to say for oneself whether one is sitting in a draught or takes sugar in one’s tea.
This, naturally, does not apply to friends, but even from strangers it can be humiliating and enraging, and badly sap the self-confidence which most of us have had some difficulty in building up anyway. The only time, I think, that I have ever been really wholeheartedly rude to anyone, for I am a peaceable soul, was when a kind and well-meaning American woman in the foyer of an Athens hotel enquired, not of me but of the friend who was with me, whether I was enjoying my holiday and whether I could walk at all. And as I felt too sick to enjoy my dinner afterwards and spent the rest of the evening shaking with something that felt surprisingly like shock – it’s odd how unnerved one can be by one’s own behaviour – it seems likely that I suffered from the encounter more than she did.
So – there it is. Being disabled feels remarkably like being normal with certain limitations imposed from outside and abnormally high overheads. It is only other people who occasionally make us feel as though we belonged to a separate species. It would be nice if the rest of the world, instead of only the more intelligent and intuitive part of it, remembered that.
tanaqui, digging in the depths of the digital archives: thank you again, Tanaqui, for taking the trouble to find it."One of the wheelchair brigade" is a 1000-word article by Rosemary Sutcliff published in The Times (her usual newspaper, according to her godson Anthony Lawton) a few days before the UK passed the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, a bill that expanded basic services for people with disabilities. In it she describes her own condition and some of the problems it caused beyond just the physical.
You can read a quick explanation of the Act on health.org.uk. Details of the encounter with the patronizing lady can be found in Sutcliff's later "Emotions in Focus" piece. Her memoir, Blue Remembered Hills, is also a good place to learn more about how her disability affected her life (though if that sounds depressing, rest assured the book is anything but.) And I assume it's just a coincidence, but 1970 was also the year Sutcliff published The Witch's Brat, starring one of her most visibly disabled heroes: Lovel, an infirmarian monk with a congenital hunched back and club foot, who invents a medieval version of physical therapy for an injured patient.
ONE OF THE WHEELCHAIR BRIGADE
The child who contracts Still’s disease – alias juvenile arthritis – today, stands, with modern methods of treatment, a good chance of coming through it without much permanent damage; but in my day very little was known about treating the active stages of the disease, and not all that much about dealing with the legacy of damaged joints that it left behind it.
I am not, strictly speaking, wheelchair bound; I can peddle around the house and the smooth bits of the garden under my own steam. But for all out-going occasions, my wheelchair is is very much the quickest and simplest, even when it isn’t the only, way. With it I can go shopping, visiting, even for holidays abroad, without it I can do none of these things. Therefore, for all practical purposes, I count as one of the wheelchair brigade.
To be wheelchair-borne carries certain bonuses. People open both sides of double doors for you. A crowd watching a coronation or the opening of a flower-show, or merely a hole in the road, will generally let you through to the front. Given a willing pusher, it is nice to be able to go round an exhibition comfortably sitting down, while everybody else has to toil round it on their own aching feet. But though we tend not to talk about them much, being disabled has its disadvantages, some of them not always obvious to the rest of the world. One of these is that it’s expensive. I make a rather better income out of my writing than do the majority of novelists, but because I am disabled I have to have, and pay for, domestic and personal help that I should not otherwise need.
Just about half my net earnings go straight out again in wages and salaries and National Insurance stamps (S.E.T., a gracious government allows me to reclaim). And out of the remaining half, of course, comes the extra running costs of the larger household. I have to run a car, because I cannot cope by public transport. Holidays have to be taken in more luxurious style, and therefore less often, than if I were able to take them on a shoestring. Even a visit to the theatre means front row seats because I can’t fold up at the knees. Holidays and theatres are not, I admit, a strictly necessary part of life, but after all, most people have them, or some other form of change and relaxation for the recharging of their batteries, and the disabled have at least as much need as anybody else.
I am one of the lucky ones. I have a career which is a joy and a fulfillment to me, although sometimes rather too much like hard work; and for just so long as I can keep up the output, and no longer, I can afford to run my home, and have a holiday abroad every year or two, and the feminine pleasure of a new frock at reasonable intervals. But this is because I am one of the lucky ones. The less lucky simply cannot afford to be disabled: something has to go; and since the disability cannot, all too often everything but the grim necessities of life have to go instead.
Other problems and disadvantages are less tangible, but even the smallest of them can be extremely frustrating. Inanimate objects roll just out of reach as though they had some devilish life of their own. Difficult steps or narrow doorways bar the way to places one desperately wants to go into. At any of the stand-up types of social gathering, one’s face is on a level with everybody else’s navel, and this presents problems; the women come and, according to age group, squat on their heels or pull up a chair if they can find one, exclaiming how nice it is to sit down for a moment; but the men come and bend over one, so that to hold a conversation one has to stare straight up towards the ceiling and get a crick in one’s neck; and the general sensation of being a very small mushroom in a very tall forest is distinctly claustrophobic.
But these are small surface irritations, the spots on the measles as it were. Something that goes far deeper is the disabled person’s need to be accepted by the rest of the world, not as a distinct species, but merely as another person who happens to have a disability. The world has advanced a lot in its treatment of the disabled, but not enough. Too many people are still embarrassed by a disability, too many people still assume that to have what Michael Flanders calls an impediment in one’s feet must also mean that one has an impediment in one’s head, and will be unable to say for oneself whether one is sitting in a draught or takes sugar in one’s tea.
This, naturally, does not apply to friends, but even from strangers it can be humiliating and enraging, and badly sap the self-confidence which most of us have had some difficulty in building up anyway. The only time, I think, that I have ever been really wholeheartedly rude to anyone, for I am a peaceable soul, was when a kind and well-meaning American woman in the foyer of an Athens hotel enquired, not of me but of the friend who was with me, whether I was enjoying my holiday and whether I could walk at all. And as I felt too sick to enjoy my dinner afterwards and spent the rest of the evening shaking with something that felt surprisingly like shock – it’s odd how unnerved one can be by one’s own behaviour – it seems likely that I suffered from the encounter more than she did.
So – there it is. Being disabled feels remarkably like being normal with certain limitations imposed from outside and abnormally high overheads. It is only other people who occasionally make us feel as though we belonged to a separate species. It would be nice if the rest of the world, instead of only the more intelligent and intuitive part of it, remembered that.
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Date: 2021-10-03 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 07:14 pm (UTC)I am struck by this sentence: "I have a career which is a joy and a fulfillment to me, although sometimes rather too much like hard work; and for just so long as I can keep up the output, and no longer, I can afford to run my home, and have a holiday abroad every year or two, and the feminine pleasure of a new frock at reasonable intervals."
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Date: 2021-10-03 09:00 pm (UTC)Rosemary Sutcliff
Date: 2022-05-29 04:10 pm (UTC)Re: Rosemary Sutcliff
Date: 2022-05-31 05:44 pm (UTC)