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Lifestory Showcase - Chappell
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When I was fourteen in 1943 it was still wartime and I had no thought of leaving school. I don't think I had ever really thought about it, I was happy at school, it was all that mattered to me. Easter came and went, a few friends left school, I sat tight and sat my final exams in the top class, and was given a bit of extra time to finish my papers and came out top for General Knowledge and fourth from top of a class of forty children.
Mr Allen the headmaster, asked mother to visit him, as he had been asked to send a report to St. Loyes Rehabilitation College for disabled trainees at Exeter. He suggested I leave school at the end of the summer term for as he said, “If she stays at school, she will miss her turn of going there”.
So very reluctantly I left my beloved school and Miss Durrarit who had taught the infant children there for many, many years. I would go back to see her, and years later 1 came to realise how she had always watched over me so lovingly. I remember always going to her with my troubles all through those seven lovely years. I left school only to return many, many years later.
But on New Year’s Day 1944, 1 remember the letter coming to say I had to be at St. Loyes College, Exeter on Wednesday 5th January. So away I went, mother took me there by train and had to leave me there alone for the first time in my life. I was not yet fifteen years old and had left home with a suitcase and a tricycle.
Life had really begun. The first day at St. Loyes I shall never forget, and the following twenty-one months I shall also never forget for it really was tough. I was taken to an office in a workshop where there were women and girls learning dressmaking and one, Dorothy, making some most beautiful felt toys.
I met a Miss Molly Sable in the office, then before I knew it, (‘horror of horrors’) she was showing me how to make woolly balls on two rings of cardboard. This I had been doing all my life at home, along with embroidering little messages to my grandmothers. Mother through the years had done everything she could to help me steady my hands. But ‘woolly balls’ when I had been told I was going away to be trained. I was homesick and frightened of this woman.
Just in front of me sat a young woman who was in the big dormitory with me the night before. She was very like me and her name was Jenny, (Jenny Wilkinson). She told me that she rode a tricycle like mine and here she was very busy using a ‘typewriter’. I had never even seen a typewriter before.
I thought, if only I could have had one of those at school, how much easier it would have been. Writing so big, ‘sprawling’, slowly and painfully had always been my biggest handicap. I could never keep up with everyone else, but the teachers (God bless ’em) had always marked my work with all the rest.
The next day, I asked if I could use a typewriter. Miss Sable said “Yes” and I had to address some envelopes or do some other menial job. Somehow during the day I remember typing a letter to Mum. After that I informed the ‘dragon’ that I wanted to train to be a typist like Jenny over there. She laughed at me and told me to go and sew two woolly balls together and make a little doggy with them, with beads for eyes and two felt ears and a smaller ball as a tail.
The following weekend, mother arrived, by train and bus, with a great big heavy German made typewriter. She must have gone to work extra hours or made a dozen dresses to get the money to buy this. So having done nothing else but type all day Sunday, I must have got someone to take it to the work-room on Monday morning to present it to the ‘dragon’. I can still hear her sneering at me.
“You will never be a typist”, she said, “But you can play with it in your spare time, but not in here. We have decided to put you in the dressmakers’ workshop”. “If I could have been a dressmaker”, I told her, “I would not be here”, for my mother was a very good dressmaker whom I had watched and tried to copy all my life.
Incidentally, being under sixteen, I was there for education arranged by Dorset County Council and poor mother would have to go work (housework) for six mornings every week to earn £1. This would be collected every Monday morning before she went to work otherwise I could not stay there.
My father was in the Army and Derek was still a little boy at school. I was given 2/6 (12 ½p) pocket money on Thursday. The war time food was atrocious and I was covered in spots, boils and scabs the whole time I was there.
After being at St. Loyes for about a month getting nowhere fast. I saw a doctor or specialist of whom knew nothing. The next day, I was told to get on my tricycle and go to O.T. This meant absolutely nothing to me, I had never even heard of O.T. yet alone Occupational Therapy. “Where and what was it?” I asked.
I was told where to go and found a very nice person waiting for me, with a foot-loom all threaded up and all I had to do was pedal away and thread a shuttle back and forth with a lot of pretty colours. How I enjoyed that and could not wait until the next morning to go again for the weaving was growing, even if I was pulling the edges in. I was supposed to be only going there in the mornings, but I used to shoot off up there in the afternoons.
There was another typewriter there and the O.T. took the trouble to show me a lot more as to what it could do. I was getting on well with my own typewriter, but no more was said about training me for typing or anything else. Then I found out what I had been doing. “Weaving, Miss Sable, I want to be a weaver”. I was now weaving a floor rug. “Nonsense”, she said, “No one could make a living at that.” “I can.”. I said, “and mother is going to help me”. She would not listen.
I had to be at her office door first thing the next morning and she whisked me up to the Men's Department and into something called the Production Shop. Her orders were I could only go to O.T. in the afternoons. I sat at a bench with a lot of older men and I was shown how to pick up a little tiny golden, put it under an electric machine and bore a tiny hole in it.
With my wobbly spastics hands, it was a wonder I did not bore right through my fingers. I never like to use the word ‘boring’, but that was. What was it for? I never knew, something to do with watch and clock repairs. I think. That was what everyone else was doing in that shop. However, after a few days, I just refused to go there, l wanted to get on with my weaving and typing.
So not to give in to me, the ‘dragon’ had the machine and little gold bits brought down to the dress making work-room where she could keep an eye on me.
I cannot remember ever doing it correctly, for one thing it was too small and too dangerous for me to handle and I wasn’t interested in it anyway. The battle went on until one day when she was supposed to be out all day, I took my knitting and did that. By the time I left home, I had just about conquered knitting and was making myself a jumper. It was now almost finished after many months of struggle.
Miss Sable arrived back unexpectedly, walked straight up to me, and ripped every stitch out until the wool was just a heap on the floor. I did not see much more of Jenny afterwards. I think she must have left the College around that time. However many years later I met her again and that scene with the knitting was what she most remembered about me..
VJ Day came along, now the war was over with Japan as well as with Germany. Exeter had been very badly bombed and there were American GIs, soldiers and sailors all around us, and we used to get E.N.S.A. Concert Parties to entertain us at the college every week.
On Saturdays I would go off shopping on my tricycle into the city with my friend and namesake Marjorie who had a hand propelled wheelchair, we went every where together and would often go to the pictures. In those days we had queues of people who would queue for hours for anything, food, buses, trains and at the Savoy or Gaumont cinemas. However any disabled person from St. Loyes could go in front of hundreds of people, be helped or carried to our seats and our chairs and tricycles stored away.
There were no vandals in those days anywhere. Everyone would help everyone else, if any disabled person tried to stand in a queue, they were soon told by everyone else to go up to the front. If you got to the railway station the whole train would be kept waiting until you and your luggage were all aboard and you were comfortable.
There was no putting anyone into the guards van like cattle, as happens today. At this time a new occupational therapist, Miss Osborne, had just arrived and a new building was built as an O.T Dept. for many wounded servicemen were at a nearby hospital and they were being brought in every day for therapy on their shattered limbs.
After the knitting incident I took myself up to the Superintendent's Office. He was an ex sea-captain, now in a wheelchair, and he understood through my tears, that I was beginning to feel a failure since I had been there sometime, while others had been coming in and going out into world. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said. “"Weaving”.
“Why not?” he replied. I was sent to Miss Osborne and told to stay there at the loom. She listened to me as I told what had happened. The rest of that day, must have been a bit hot all round. The three of them were shut-in together. The next day Dame Georgina Buller, who had founded the College for severely disabled people with her father’s money, (the General Buller of the Boer War fame), came to see me herself and between them all my future was sorted out.
A few days later, I remember being told that Dorset County Council had agreed that this is what I should do, and they would lend me the money to buy a loom. An advertisement was put into the paper and a loom was soon found for £10 and the D.C.C. agreed to pay.
Miss Osborne and I had a day out, we went by train to Okehampton where we found what to me was ‘a little old lady’ trying to sell wool on coupons and whose shop looked very bare and sparse. We were taken through to the back of the shop, where there were several looms for us to see.
She told in that before the war she and a gentleman had these looms and used to weave lengths of tweed, dyed from bracken, they were known as the Dartmoor Weavers and she gave me a pattern book. There was the loom that I needed, and we were left only to arrange transport for it. The next I knew was the loom arrived at the College with several other looms and weaving equipment and a note to say that she wanted me to have the loom is a gift as she felt that I would make very good use of it. All the others .looms were a gift for the College.
Miss Osborne, said that the £10 from the Dorset County Council would buy the first lot of materials that I would need. The following week, mother came and spent it with us, learning how to make and thread the warp on the loom a mammoth task that I could never do.
I stayed there a little longer, while mother returned home, bought an old hen-house and converted it into a workshop. I and the loom arrived home. A few pounds of Rug wool and warp came through the post and we were in business. The wool was three shillings a pound I remember. I had been loaned £10 from Dorset County Council to buy a loom, not materials or workshop, and within six months of returning home to Ferndown, the D.C.C requested £10 from mother. No one ever inquired whether I had used it or not.
So began another era of my life, I was home again and in my own workshop not yet eighteen, Derek was going on to Grammar School, the war was over, Dad was out of the Army, and Mum was helping me not only to set up the loom but also to finish off and tidy up the rugs to make them saleable. A local ironmonger had offered to sell them for me in their shop and also from the van on their country runs. Mum was also going to work and trying to keep the family together.
A lot had happened us all in those years, everything had changed, including father. He and I could never get on, he still wanted to hide me and treat me as a child. “That nipper!” he always called me. I rightly or wrongly fought back and defied him. Every time I went out on my tricycle to Guides or with friends, he would carry on at mother, saying it wasn’t right and he was sure a one wanted me with them. I was a damn nuisance in his eyes. He just could not understand me going anywhere with anyone else, especially as they were all strangers to him.
I would go and see his brother Uncle Ted and Aunt Vi and their children in Wimborne every other Sunday for the day. They would borrow a chair and take me to hear the Salvation Army band in the summer evenings, and play cards with me during the winter evenings. Then I cycled home the four miles in the pitch dark and I did that for years; to keep out of my father's way.
He was being very cruel to mother because of me, and poor Derek had a very traumatic childhood. He too would disappear all the hours he could. Dad was off out to pubs and elsewhere in the evenings, mother was amongst all the trouble arid strife for many years, but was loyal to us all.
I have always had and still have, one big fault, no matter how I try to remedy it. That is a ‘very bad, hasty, nasty, temper’ which has and does cause all sorts of problems. I can make no excuses, it's nothing to do with my disability it's just me. I have caused upset and trouble with it all my life and still do, whenever I disagree with what mother is doing or saying. I have rarely shown this side of myself to other people outside of the family.
I have always tried to lead a Christian life in other ways, asking God and my Saviour to rid me of this temper and the tantrums which just flare up like a fire over nothing. I end up absolutely hating myself, convincing myself that no-one loves me. I know is not true, but I still get frustrated and cruelly impatient with myself and my mother, the one who has always helped me through every moment of my life. I can only say, I am very ashamed of myself, as she could have done the same as father, going off and leaving the three of us just as Derek was leaving school.
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