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Who By Fire

Tag Archives: buses

Buses, Bad News and Bank Holidays.

27 Tue May 2014

Posted by Kara Chrome in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#107days, (un)accountability, buses, Down syndrome, Special Needs Education, true stories

I hadn’t intended to post this week, what with it being half term, but this story seems timely.  It comes from London, the land of LB’s beloved red buses.

Myself, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with London buses – the old Routemasters were an almost fairytale part of my childhood, associated with Christmas trips up to Town to see the lights in Regent Street, meet Father Christmas in Selfridges, and buy hot chestnuts from brazier-barrows.   On the other hand, when I lived in London, and had a complicated journey to work, it was axiomatic that one would wait ages for a bus, then several would come along at once, and not a single one of them able to get you there on time.

Buses aren’t the only things that cluster, of course.  Superstition says that troubles come in threes – and not just British troubles; as the French proverb says, “Jamais deux sans trois”.  So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, after I posted the stories of Dude Chris and Dude David, that I was sent another, about Dude Abdulkarriem Al-Faisal.

Dude Abdulkarriem lives in North London.  He is 19 and attends Haringey Sixth Form Centre.  And one Friday, he left his favourite basketball cap in a classroom.  I don’t know how much of a fuss he made about this.  Maybe he kept reverting to it, as dudes sometimes do when things in their world are out of kilter, or maybe it wasn’t the first time he’d left something behind at school, and he was cool with the idea that he would get the cap back the following week.  Unfortunately for Dude Abdulkarriem, that particular weekend was a Bank Holiday, so it lasted longer than usual.

Abdulkarriem, however, is a resourceful dude.  When Monday came along with no classes, he decided to retrieve his cap anyway, slipped quietly out of his house and set off for school.  He made his way there without mishap and found a window that he could climb through.  Which he did, setting off the alarms.

Meanwhile, the Al-Faisal family had realised Abdulkarriem was missing, and were out searching their local streets for him.  After two fruitless hours, frantic with worry, they phoned the police to report his disappearance, and were told that Abdulkarriem was being held in police custody for questioning, having been arrested at the school.

His mother went to the police station, where she found Dude Abdulkarriem in a cell: confused, in tears, and minus his shoes and coat.  He had been handcuffed after his arrest, and subsequently fingerprinted, swabbed for DNA and all his details entered into the UK National Criminal Intelligence Database.  He told his mother that he had been kicked by the police officers, forced to the floor, and that an officer had put a knee in his back; which sounds like face-down restraint.  

It took nine hours, and the intervention of a lawyer and the school’s Head of Disability and Learning Support, to get Abdulkarriem released, and only after he had accepted a caution for burglary.  Although a caution is not a conviction, it does form part of a person’s criminal record.  It can be used as evidence of bad character; it shows up in disclosure and barring (CRB) checks; it can prevent a person from being able to travel to some countries that take a dim view of anything less than squeaky cleanliness in prospective visitors.  Cautions are supposed offer a swift, proportionate response to low-level offending where the offender has admitted the offence, and are a convenient way of reducing the burden of procedure and paperwork on police and courts alike.

A caution, once administered, cannot be appealed.  The only way to have it set aside is to challenge the caution via Judicial Review, but that has to be done quickly.  Any application to the court for Judicial Review has to be made within three months, and before you can make a claim, you have to notify the police of your intention and the grounds for your claim, and give them a chance to rectify matters first.  The time-frames for sorting things out are very tight, but if the police refuse to do so, the court can order the caution to be expunged from the record, along with fingerprints, DNA and any other information.

For a caution to be correctly administered, the police must be certain that:

– the evidence of guilt would give a realistic prospect of conviction at trial;
– the offender admits the offence;
– the offender understands the significance of a caution and gives informed consent to being cautioned.

If evidence does not meet the standard normally required for a prosecution, a caution cannot be given. A caution is not appropriate where a person does not make a clear, reliable admission of the offence, or if they deny intent, or if, owing to their mental health or intellectual capacity, there are doubts about their ability to give informed consent.

Perhaps the police didn’t observe anything that would give them reason to query whether Dude Abdulkarriem had the necessary intellectual capacity.  If that’s the case, I fear greatly for the detective powers of the Metropolitan force, since Dude Abdulkarriem is visibly chromosomally advantaged.  And even if the police did fail to notice the obvious signs of Abdulkarriem’s condition, they must have been made aware of it by his family, teacher and lawyer.  Dude Abdulkarriem carries an extra chromosome, and he has the distinctive morphological and facial characteristics that go with having Trisomy 21.  Characteristics that are easily recognised by just about everyone, since T21 is the commonest chromosome disorder.

It is usually known by the name of the doctor who first formally described it.

Down Syndrome.

 

Margaret and Makaton

25 Fri Apr 2014

Posted by Kara Chrome in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#107 days, buses, learning disability, schoolroom centre stories, true stories, voices of disability

I said it at the time, and I’m happy to repeat it decades on: I don’t think Margaret had a learning disability.  But she came to the Day Centre, because she didn’t talk.  She couldn’t read or write, although she could count by holding up fingers and making tally-marks.  And she was totally deaf.

By then in her late forties or early fifties, she lived with her widowed mother in a ‘wee place west the country’, but took the public bus, on her own, every weekday morning from the family steading to the bus station in town, where she was met by a member of the Day Centre staff and escorted up the road.  This was not because she was incapable of navigating (you couldn’t deviate one iota from the usual route without Margaret pulling you up), but because it was not thought safe to let her cross busy junctions alone, as she couldn’t hear traffic approaching from behind.  Woe betide the designated staff member who was late of a morning to meet her.  Margaret would greet them with much finger-wagging and pointing at her watch, and on arrival at the Centre would clype on them without compunction, repeating the scold-and-point routine before holding up a number of fingers to indicate how many minutes she had been kept waiting.  She would not be satisfied until the miscreant’s tardiness had been noted.

At the Centre, everyone knew that Margaret was phenomenally observant, frequently drawing staff members’ attention to things she considered of importance by repeating precise, stylised hand-movements.  She had a wicked sense of humour, and would quietly point out to everyone but the victim if someone had sat in something sticky or was heading for a pratfall.  She was also very good at interpreting people’s moods from their body-language, pulling a face the minute they walked through the door to indicate that someone was out of sorts, or clapping when she perceived they were happy.

One morning when I was on escort duty, the bus was late.  As Margaret descended the steps, I pretended to scold her, wagging my finger and pointing at my watch, holding up ten fingers.  Margaret laughed and made a disclaiming gesture, then pointed at the bus, waving an admonitory finger at the driver.  I pulled a pretend-sceptical face, and she hauled me over to the bus, still alternately pointing at the driver, and waving her hands about.  The driver looked at us, one eyebrow raised.
“I was telling Margaret off for being late”, I said, feeling a little foolish, “but I think she’s saying it’s the bus’s fault”.
The driver looked at Margaret and shook his head.  “Ma bus?”, he said pulling a mock-indignant face at her, shaking his head and indicating the vehicle.
Margaret’s hand-waving intensified.
“Aye, ye tell the lassie,” said the driver, imitating the hand-waving and nodding. “It was a’ they sheep in the road held us up.  Yes.”
I gazed at him.  “You understand what she means by those gestures.” I said.
“Oh aye,” said the driver.  “Ah’ve kent Margaret fer years, an’ her an’ her mither hae their ain sign-language.  Ah’ve picked up a bittie – no’ much, ken, just enough tae hae a wee chat aboot the weather or that.  An’ ye like a joke, don’t ye, hen?” he added to Margaret, directing a different movement towards her.  Margaret beamed at him and clapped her hands.

The walk up to the Centre that day was done at top speed, and not just because of the late bus.  As soon as I could, I buttonholed the manageress.  “Did you know Margaret and her mother have a private sign-language?”  I said.  “Do you think we could ask her mother to clue us in a bit?  Quite apart from making it easier for us if we could explain things in advance to Margaret, I’m damn’ sure it would make life pleasanter for her – you know how anxious she gets when she doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

The manageress sat down at her desk and picked up the phone.  After a fairly brief conversation, she replaced the receiver, and her face was grim.  “It gets better,” she said, teeth gritted in a sarcastic rictus.  “According to her mother, Margaret was also taught formal sign-language about ten years ago, but since nobody’s bothered to train any of the new staff in it these last seven years, she doesn’t use it any more.  God, that poor woman.  I’d lay you money she’s been trying to tell us all sorts, and we’ve not had a clue.  She must think we’re a proper bunch of ninnies.”  She paused, and then her eyes narrowed and her jaw set.  “I’m going to talk to the supervisor.”

The story that came out at the next staff-meeting with the supervisor was not an uplifting one.  Born into a hill-farming family during the Second World War, and profoundly deaf since birth or babyhood, Margaret’s failure to learn to speak had allegedly been viewed as a family shame. “Teuchters!”  said the supervisor, with a sort of complacent contempt.  “Didn’t want to be seen oot wi’ the dumbie – she was never let put her foot over the farm gate ’til she was past seven.”
“So she didn’t go to school?  She didn’t learn BSL?”
“Och, no – her feyther kept her home on a Section 22.” (S.22 was the provision in the 1945 Education Act that allowed for education ‘by other means’ than at school).  “Social services didn’t have much to do wi’ Margaret until he retired from farming.”
“So what about this sign language that her mother says she learned a few years back?”
The supervisor’s mouth settled into a disapproving, downturned line.  “Aye, that was a notion from someone in the Speech Therapy department.  It wasn’t proper sign language, though.  Margaret’s never learned proper signing.”

The manageress, to her eternal credit, did not give up.  The following day, she called Margaret’s named social worker, who came out to visit the Centre, carrying a bulging wallet file.  We asked about the sign language.  The social worker shuffled the papers.  “Noo, she didn’t learn BSL…  she would have had to go to a residential school and her family were against her being admitted to what they thought of as an asylum…  er…  felt strongly she would be safer and better cared for at home, rather than among strangers…  Ah, speech therapy, let’s see…  hmm, Makaton, it says.”  She smiled brightly.  “I’ll arrange for the Makaton specialist to contact you.”

The Makaton specialist was a woman in her thirties, who sat down facing Margaret and began talking to her, simultaneously making gestures similar to Margaret’s own.  Margaret responded animatedly and emphatically. After ten minutes or so, the Makaton specialist said, “She’s very fluent.  Nice flow, excellent consonance between her signing and her facial expressions.  You say she hasn’t used this with staff for years?  Wow.  She has an a-ma-zingly good recall of sign vocabulary.”  She sighed.  “The thing is…. Makaton is a copyrighted sign-language.  It’s a modified version of Signed English – simplified BSL signs in spoken-English word order, but you’re not supposed to use it unless you’ve been properly trained in it.  And you’re not supposed to teach it to other people unless you’re an accredited Makaton trainer.  I’ve done the user training, but I’d be infringing their copyright if I taught it to you.  And the user-training courses are quite expensive.”

I looked at the manageress.  We both knew fine well, as did the Makaton specialist, that there was no money for training apart from the already-allocated YT budget.  I took a deep breath.  “Look, I’m a linguist.  That’s what I did my degree in.  I understand about language structures.  All I need is a cheat sheet for the signs, and I can teach myself.  What on earth is the point of Margaret having been taught a language that nobody else here knows?  She needs us to be able to understand her.”

The Makaton specialist looked doubtful, frowned, seemed to reach a decision.   “I am not really supposed to pass these on to you,” she said.  “But if they happened to fall out of my file…”  – she pulled at a stapled sheaf of photocopied papers, which slithered on to the sofa – “I couldn’t be held responsible for what you might do with them.  Just don’t let anybody from the Social see them.  And if they do, you didn’t get them from me.”  She closed her file, shook hands with Margaret, and left.

The sheets were covered with a series of simple line drawings, somewhat reminiscent of the illustrations in the Good News Bible: stylised figures – mostly torsos – with blank ovals for faces unless a particular feature was needed to illustrate the sign.  In that case just the required feature – isolated eyes, or mouth, or nose – was shown on the drawing.

I  began to flip through them, but Margaret took them from me, searching the pages.  She pointed to a drawing, and began acting it out, moving her fists back and forth alternately at waist level.  I looked at the sheet.  Under the drawing, it said, Bus.  I nodded, repeating the sign.  Bus.  Margaret riffled through the papers, then began making the fluttery waves near her head that I had seen the bus driver copying.  Ah, I thought.  I bet I know… and yes, there was the blank-faced figure depicting the gesture, labelled Sheep.  I began to giggle, wagging my finger and pointing at my watch.  Margaret’s face cracked into a huge grin.  With a flourish, and perfect punchline timing, she stuck up both hands, palms inward, fingers stiff.  Ten.

Oh yes, I thought, mentally doffing an imaginary cap to the bus driver.  Margaret likes a joke.

Who In These Realms Of Love

01 Tue Apr 2014

Posted by Kara Chrome in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

#107days, #justiceforLB, buses, Connor Sparrowhawk, Eddie Stobart, lorries

People on the autism spectrum have a gift known as ‘hyperfocus’.  They can concentrate for extended periods, and to the exclusion of all other matters, on the things that really interest them.  Connor’s areas of meticulous and detailed interest included buses and Eddie Stobart lorries.  But his interest in the vehicles did not preclude an interest in, and empathy for, the people behind the machines.

Three years ago, Edward Stobart Jnr, son of the eponymous founder of the haulage firm, died aged 56.  Connor posted his thoughts on the Carlisle News and Star website:

I’m really sad that you died. Eddie Stobart is my favourite thing in the whole wide world. I’m wearing an Eddie Stobart right now.
Love Connor. x
Posted by Connor Sparrowhawk on 1 April 2011 at 14:29

Connor, I’m really upset that you died.  We hope that one day soon there may be a ‘Connor’ Eddie Stobart lorry.  I wish you were here to see your name on a bus livery right now.
Love, K.  x
Posted by kara2008 on 1 April 2014 at 02:29

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