Community Voice: Life always has stories

By Elaine Brown

Elaine Brown is a member of our Community Research team, working on a number of research projects across London. In the second in our series introducing the Community Researchers, we meet Elaine and hear her story.

Jamaican born, an early British arrival, I grew up in Balham and ran wild on Wandsworth Common. We were the only black family on the road. I, then, two years later, and my brother, were the only black children in our primary school; I fielded so many questions I didn’t know the answer to and spat back responses to the many insults directed our way. 

My mercurial father was adventurous and would load his three children into the car and drive in any direction of his Sunday feeling: Brighton, Bristol, Birmingham. I too, mercurial, adventurous. We were lucky to own the house packed with a family to each room, sharing the bathroom, kitchen and card games every Friday night. His disappointment of failing the 11+ I knew so little about! My parents were keen that I should pass the exam but had no clue about how the process worked and trusted that the teachers would make sure their child passed; my father was, after all, an important man. I don’t remember any help or advice being given, it was just ‘words spoken’ by teachers and excitement in the air.

Parties, so many parties as each group of new folk arrived, settled, made friends, found commonality. Weddings too, and the trials of the Hot comb pressing sizzling oil into my ‘bridesmaid’ scalp; to this day I have to know that the hairdresser knows I need full attention. Being the oldest in a house full of siblings and children, I learned observation and assistance and had my own little life that would change by the middle of my teens, with the full understanding that I was not like ‘them’. By this time, my language development was exceptional, I’d read every book the local libraries held and gained much from the streets too, though not from my own culture, as mum would have had my head off if I slipped into the vernacular.

Thanks to a bursary, I began working in childcare at 16, and two years later chose to work as far from home as possible. Haringey council placed me in a Hertfordshire residential children’s home, where I came across a similarly aged worker washing a child’s hair with the plaits still in. I had never known anyone having their hair dealt with in this way, and it explained much about the child’s difficult relationship with the one South American worker who would release the hair first, then comb and plait it. Then the father, whose first task fortnightly was to comb his three-year-old son’s hair, no matter how he cried. These two, one mixed race, the other African, were the only two children who looked different from the other 20 residents. My surprise and understanding of the father/son connection never left me.

Years on, back working in Brixton, in my own family we juggled marriage, childcare, different work patterns and running a dance group at the newly opened Battersea Arts Centre. I did a one-year course at The Tavistock Clinic then qualified with a Certificate of Qualification in the Social Work (CQSW), which meant progressing into having a greater impact on children’s lives. New skills, insight understanding and working with a wide range of professionals doing the best we could – and if we were lucky, we got it as right as we could have. The failings were also spectacular and sometimes ended up as news headlines. 

I’ve worked within the residential, fieldwork, secure, private and agency sectors in inner London, home and shire counties, and counted myself lucky in most of those environments. I have come to see that many of my childhood observations of others afforded me a path of sharing, striving, cooperation, problem-solving, adventure and ‘making things right’ – which was how I fell into TSIP. I saw something I felt wasn’t right, commented and was afforded the opportunity to develop new. I had not entertained the idea that I had anything left to contribute and hadn’t expected a new working life. New is challenging, uncertain, scary and maybe, tantalising, rewarding, life-affirming.  Turning away keeps you the same and things the same, and less the same as new is always moving, onward. Without changing we have little chance of keeping ‘ours,’ for it too, moves on. Guess who’s changing now!