SCOTLAND ZEN and the art of SOCIAL WORK Read online

Chapter 7

  Monday 12th May

  Emotional symptoms include depression, not only because of the burden of having a progressive disorder, but as a direct result of the damage to certain brain cells. This depression is not relieved by drugs.

  Monday morning, first shift done, John’s in school and the girls are at their dance class for two hours. Beds have been made and the washing hung out in the back garden. Strangely the small routines of my life give me comfort today. This is probably because my mind is on my impending visitor.

  Tommy no-name is due here any minute. He called me on Friday and made the appointment for today, not wasting much time is he? Childcare must be in a lull right enough. He might not be able to help, but it’s got to do some good to talk, and it will certainly be nice to look at his handsome face for a while.

  I watch out the window in time to see him park his car. Then starts a pantomime I’m glad I didn’t miss.

  He closes the car door with one hand and has his briefcase in the other. He then locks the car and drops the keys in the gutter. He puts the briefcase down and picks up the keys then starts to walk towards the gate. Remembering the briefcase he goes back, unlocks the car, puts the case inside and closes the door. He starts to walk again, turns back, locks the car door and finally makes it to the gate. If I didn’t know he was a professional social worker on a routine visit I would suspect he was a tad nervous.

  Very interesting!

  Her house is lovely. It’s cool and comfortable and child orientated, I can’t help the child care observations. There are books everywhere, on shelves, on the windowsills, on the fireplace, and in neat piles on the floor. I have a quick rifle through some while Mags makes us a coffee. There is a mixture of adult and child fiction, travel books, comics, and magazines.

  This is great, I love reading, and some of these novels I’ve got at home. I knew we would have things in common. When Mags comes back into the living room with the drinks, I’m on my knees raking through some travel magazines. She smiles and settles gracefully on the floor beside me and I’m sure the front of my shirt is fluttering. My heart is beating a bit fast at her casual nearness. I look at her carefully, she looks relaxed and innocent and I realise she has no idea the effect she is having on me. I create a bit of space and try to calm down and we naturally start to talk about books and Mags’ kids and how she encourages John to read and listen for pleasure, not just for school, but sometimes she finds it a bit like knitting fog. She tells me about John, who was slow in learning to read in primary one. When his teacher put pressure on him to work harder at it John said,

  ‘I don’t ever have to learn to read this, my Mam reads me stories.’

  His teacher was not amused and accused Mags of undermining her teaching.

  ‘You really canny win with teachers these days,’ she says.

  She talked about her need to read travel books and brochures and how she would love to travel even just in Europe before she gets too old and jaded to enjoy it.

  We reminisce about playschool days and the birth of the playscheme committee that I advised on. It was a fairly revolutionary scheme for it’s time, in that it was undenominational and multi-cultural by Carfin standards. There were three Pakistanis four Protestants and one wee Lithuanian girl. The rest were Catholic. It’s a very Catholic town.

  Mags remembered one infamous incident, when a mother brought her little daughter to the playgroup for the first time. She explained that her family had just moved to the area and her daughter Sharon had not had time to make any friends yet. She said she would like Sharon to play with some Catholic girls.

  There was a stunned silence from the mothers on duty that day. This was just not the done thing. When Mags got her voice back she had explained that religion was not discussed in this setting and Sharon would have to learn to mix with all the children.

  This poor mother was completely puzzled and said,

  ‘Well I would like her to have at least one wee pal to start school with in August, she’s going to St. Bernadette’s.’

  This seemed fair enough but the incident became a committee legend.

  The segregated school system throws up a lot of heartache for Scottish children and families. John’s best pal in playgroup was Heather Smith, also their next-door neighbour, so basically they had been close together since birth. When they finished playgroup, they were sent to different schools. Sharon cried every day to go with John, and refused to wear her school tie because it was different from his. She made herself quite ill and one day she ran away from her school and sat pathetically on the front step of St. Bernadette’s waiting for John to come out. There were no search parties or sniffer dogs looking for her, we all knew where she would be. Sharon had to settle in the end, she really had no choice.

  The Protestant school intake is so small, that some years, different age groups are taught in the same class. Most of the Pakistani parents in the village didn’t like this idea and opted for their children to go to St Bernadette’s, and some positive discrimination got them in. It’s often decided by the mothers in small communities that the easiest way to overcome religious prejudice and old-fashioned bigotry is just never to mention the subject, ever. Seems mad, but they just get on with things and it mostly works. There is still, unfortunately, in the wider west of Scotland a great deal of ingrained religious tension and violence. This is mirrored in the football teams. You could still be murdered, literally, for wearing the wrong colours in the wrong street, and parades of Hibernian or Orange loyalists a couple of times a year, bring out the worst in normally easygoing, peace loving people and of course the marching season helps to helps to keep the hatred alive. Belfast at least has the political element to argue about but in Scotland it is pure religious hatred, a legacy handed on from one generation to the next. The playgroup is still running successfully, although Mags resigned from the committee after three years of hard work.

  ‘OK Tommy, enough of all our yesterdays,’ Mags says ‘What about my Uncle John Coyle?’

  This was it, what we’re here for, concentrate Tommy.

  ‘Okay,’ was all I could manage, how literate, how articulate.

  ‘John was in hospital for a long time. It wasn’t as if we forgot about him, but he was never talked about much,’ she said.

  Mags told me that she remembered Uncle John before he went into Hartwood. He was a nice quiet hardworking man. He worked in the offices of the Shotts colliery, and had been a miner his younger days. When he was about forty five, he seemed to have had some kind of shaky nervous breakdown, stopped work, and moved in with his sister Therese. Therese and her husband Stephen looked after him for two years before he went into Hospital.

  ‘I know your Uncle’s name but I didn’t ever meet him. What’s this all about Mags?’

  Mags was quiet for a few beats, then she smiled her lovely sunny smile, with a lot of fantastic white teeth, and said,

  ‘I really have no idea Tommy, but I’ll try to explain.’

  We both laughed, and suddenly she noticed the time,

  ‘Panic stations, my god, come on the girls finish dancing in ten minutes,’ she shouted.

  I couldn’t believe it. We had talked for nearly two hours and hadn’t really got to the point of the visit. We jumped up and headed for the door.

  ‘I’ll give you a lift to the centre, you’ll never make it walking or even running,’ I offered, although it flashed through my mind that my car was so untidy some might think a family of gypsies were camping in there.

  Miraculously, Mags didn’t bat an eye at the state of the car and told me quickly on the journey what the Priest had said at John’s funeral, her sister’s blankness, her mother’s evasiveness and her Father and Uncle John’s early deaths. She said she felt something vaguely sinister or secretive was going on. She has heard of Huntington’s Chorea, most people in Carfin have. Some old folks call it the ‘shaky sickness’ and she is very suspicious that John died from this.

  ‘The only way I can
possibly help is to give you a bit of support and encourage you to discuss things with your Mother, or have some kind of family conference,’ I said.

  It sounded feeble, and that’s how I felt. She may not be aware yet how serious this could be. We made it to the centre just as some other mothers were arriving. As Mags was getting out of the car she said,

  ‘Will you come for another visit, Tommy?’

  I said, with a ton of regret,

  ‘Look, believe it or not, family problems like this are best dealt with by families, they beat social workers every time.’

  ‘Move your car swiftly then, I don’t want to be the talk of the week.’ With this she smiled briefly, jumped out the car and hurried away.

  The rest of my morning was busy and should have been routine, but everything was an effort and a problem as I kept thinking about Mags. I browsed through the book she let me borrow, a book of travel in Valencia. It was a good excuse for me to contact her again. Mags has never been out of Scotland, but she said she was determined to take the children to Spain one day before they get too old and sophisticated to want to spend holidays with her. She has lovely dreams of white villas with cool blue tiles and wooden shutters, and a bar where she can drink Sangria, read a book and watch the kids playing in the warm sand.