A Mile in My Shoes

 You know, you think about so many different things. You think about all the wrongs that you’ve done and all the sparring that you’ve done, and it’s like down to this one moment. Now. But then the moment you step through those ropes, like everything that’s going through your head literally vanishes and everything is silent. You know, you have people cheering, but within your own thoughts, you can’t hear anything but what’s going on right in front of you. My name is Ramla Ali and I’m a Somali boxer. Within the last year, I’ve competed in nine international tournaments and won four golds and one silver became the first person ever to compete for Somalia at the World Championships. And should I qualify for Tokyo, I’ll be the first person ever to compete for Somalia, which fingers crossed. Yeah. So it’s twelve going on thirteen that I first walked into a boxing gym. And all I remember was just like angry men punching the bags and, like, the smell of, like, sweat, bit of feet. And it was so intimidating. And I remember walking in and the coach said to me, what do you want? And I said, well, I want a box. And he laughed and said, girls don’t box. I’m the type of person. If you tell me that I can’t do something, I have to prove you wrong. So I just it was out of sheer pride that I just kept going back. My mum always thought that I was, um, going to the leisure centre when I was going to the gym. Um, and that’s just the way it stood for a really long time. I was born like Muslim, and both my parents are like practicing Muslims. And yeah, me and all my brothers and sisters, we practice as well. Like at the moment I’m fasting and I’m still training, so it’s really hard. Um, but yeah, I always thought she wouldn’t be accepting of it because of my background. I got to the national finals and the finals were taking place in York Hall, which is a famous boxing landmark within London. So York Hall is like two roads down from where we lived. And I told my mum that I was going for a run. So I went to York court. I competed and went back home. And, you know, I just won the national title, but my mum just thought I went for a jog. So bizarre. I’ve been boxing in secret for about ten years before she found out. Yeah, it’s a really long time. So I was born in Somalia, Mogadishu, which is the capital of Somalia, um, sometime in the nineties, I believe. I say like I believe because, um, as a, as a refugee, as most refugees don’t really know our date of birth. So don’t know the, the day, the month or the year that I was born. So it’s like a guess. I have three brothers and two sisters. I had another brother, but he, um, unfortunately died in the war, which is the reason why we came to the UK. So from Somalia we fled the war. Um, we went by boat to Kenya and then from Kenya we came here to the UK. I, I almost actually died on that journey. I had um, contracted nit like head lice. And, you know, nobody was a medical expert and someone who encouraged my mum to put rat poison in my hair. And so she did. And I got really sick vomiting everywhere, lost a lot of weight and almost, yeah, almost died. But I didn’t because here I am. Growing up in London, you were always ashamed of being an outsider, like a Somali or, you know, someone that wasn’t born in London, especially because I was bullied a lot in school as well. I didn’t want to add to the bullying, you know? Um, so yeah, I was always I was bullied for being overweight in school. My mum never knew about the bullying because obviously things like, you know, bullying or mental health, which is so bad and it should change. It’s not a thing that we really talk about in my community. So I just didn’t tell anyone. Um, yeah, but she bought me the membership to the leisure centre just to help with my self-confidence. She, she knew without me talking about it from there. And the rest is history. When I initially made the decision to represent Somalia, Richard, my coach said that, you know, it’s important that you put it out there. You can’t just represent Somalia. So what I decided to do is I did an interview with a Somali news channel. I was so scared because I knew my mum would see it. That piece went out and my uncle saw that piece. He rang me up and he told me how proud he was of me. Word for word, he said, it breaks my heart to know that you’ve been doing it in secret for so long. And he said, what’s the issue? You know, why are you not going for it? And I said, I’m, you know, I’m scared of mum. And he said, don’t worry, I’ll talk to your mum and I’ll make sure that she’s on board and she’s supportive. And I think for my mum, like she was always worried about what other people would say about me. But the moment she knew that, everyone was like supportive and, you know, rallying behind me. And that’s when she became my biggest fan. Well, she’s she’s never come to see me fight because everything I do is international, you know? So I’m trying to rack up the points, uh, you know, to hopefully go to Tokyo. But she made an agreement with me and she said, if you qualify for Tokyo, I’m getting my ticket and I’ll see you there. So obviously that’s like a huge incentive to work really hard and try and qualify because she’s never seen me box. A lot of people ask me why smiley and not England and two reasons. Firstly, um, I feel like because of the stop and start in my career, I’ve wasted so many opportunities with England. When I told my mum that I’d be representing Somalia, she was so happy. And for me that’s the best feeling ever. Sport is about inspiring like the next generation and especially like young girls in Africa. They don’t feel like they can do certain things, like representing Somalia, you know, shows them that anything is possible. If I can represent a country like Somalia and be the first person ever to do so, then you can do it Two. By three to two. Blue corner. Ramla. Ali. I believe that my drive and determination comes from my mum, and she’s probably the single most strongest woman that I know. She’s had to go through so much. She obviously lost the child who was my brother. He was fourteen at the time, yet she’s just seen so much and how she holds herself still and how strong she is. That’s probably where all my drive has come from, and the fact that she’s always told me to give one hundred and ten percent in everything that you do. Yeah, I owe it to my mum. She’s a she’s a superwoman.

There’s nothing like growing up in Brixton. Brixton has always been a very vibrant, very unique place.

I go by the name of Sutara now, Sutara Gayle, but my original name is Lorna, Lorna G, Lorna Gayle.

I was born off Acre Lane, born in a house off Seneca Road. You know, I grew up around here – my parents are Jamaican – grew up in a Jamaican family and aunts and uncles and the hustle and bustle of beautiful, rich, colourful life.

Being in a neighbourhood like Brixton, where we as the second generation are growing up – we’re learning our own things, and we’re getting on with our lives and picking up different experiences along the way, too. So mixing them together. It was very, very rich, very rich indeed.

For me, quite early on in my teenage years, I found out about the blues dance. So I used to rave with my friends at that time in the early 80s. And we had the Front Line down on Railton Road, which is a place that I loved to go and just see – it was like a whole different life.

Patois – performance

Home life was church; my mum was a very strict Seventh-day Adventist. So from Friday, sunset, there was not much you could do – very, very restrictive. And for me, that was the raving times. I was like, oh, that was a bit of a conflict girl.

What I used to see on the Front Line, with these guys and these women just looking so beautiful, their jewellery and their clothes just so sharp, and, you know, and their wigs and everything. And then the guys were just oh, suited and booted with their fancy cars. And I just thought, yeah, I want to be a part of that.

You know, there was a time where I used to just kind of watch the guys on a mic. And I – that was another thing. I was like, oh, yeah, I want to do that; I can do that.

I started to listen to the deejays in Jamaica, you know, Josey Wales, Brigadier Jerry, all them, and Charlie Chaplin, them and… and then I just started writing some lyrics. And then I felt ready, prepared, to go a mic and I started going on a mic. And that’s how it all started for me. That’s how the whole business, music business started for me.

Patois – performance

And then that’s how I made my first record. And then my second record was a track called Gotta Find A Way, which was my biggest tune that I’ve made to date.

And it was just about the struggles, you know, the struggles growing up, the – you know, the identity, the being told what to do. Around that time, there was the sus laws, and I remember, because I was out on the street a lot, I saw a lot. And a lot of what I saw was police brutality.

I myself had experiences with police, getting involved in just petty crime and I remember how they used to talk to us. Like we were a piece of dirt. I remember it so, so clearly. So it was hard for us to have respect for them. The racism was just blatant. It wasn’t undercover like now it was out there, the National Front used to come outside of my school, Stockwell Manor, and give out leaflets and everything, and nobody said anything to them.

We always had to fight. There was no smooth sailing. To be able to learn how we wanted to learn, learn how we were capable of learning, fight to be seen, to be heard. And this is why I think I found solace in the street people. They had a freeness about them.

Around the time when my sister Cherry got shot – it was like, she got shot September 1985 – spirits were rising. There was a lot of unjust, there was a lot of unemployed, we had the 81 uprising so people just wanted to be seen and wanted to be heard, and just wanted to be, things to be fair. And so when this happened with my sister I think it just ticked everybody. It just ticked it over, because here was an innocent woman, was never known to the police. They bust in to her house, you know, kick down her door with their dogs, saw this woman and shot before asking any questions.

I mean, everything about this was completely brutal. They had so many reasons not to do this – why not to go into this house. They knew that there was a woman there living with children, young children. But they decided that this is what they wanted to do, and this is what they’ve done.

So within no time whatsoever, the crowd gathered. People just heard, and people just came out to support and show their complete outrage. That’s how the second uprising happened.

But I think people just so angry, and I don’t know what I would have done if I saw that police who shot my sister at that time on that day. I couldn’t say what I would have done.

We was protesting, we was marching and I remember being on Railton Road. And on either side of the road, there was two cars on fire. We were trying to get through this fire because the only way we could have gone, and police are behind us, trying to – just running, people are running. It was complete mayhem. So we’re trying to get through this place now to get to the other side.

And all of a sudden, I felt a force that I’ve never felt in my life. And that force, it was the firemen. They put that hose onto me, well to a group of us. And I was literally pinned to a shop window. It took me, it actually got me off my feet. It actually got me off my feet. Ohhh.

There was a couple of people just like laid out. It took us a while to actually revive ourselves. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah.

It was just one experience that I’ve encountered on this on the streets of Brixton, you know, and I have no regrets. I marched ’81 and I marched in ’85. And each time we marched, there have been some changes. Very, very small or very, very minute. But there have been changes – I’ve seen them.

And so for that reason, I have no regrets of, of what we had to go through. And I understand what the younger generation now has had to go through.

So they need a reshuffle of the police force. There’s good and bad in everything and everyone, you understand, but there’s some bad apples in those and those bad apples allowed to continue for many, many, many years. There needs to be some kind of real change.

Treat all nations equally. That’s all, because I’m sure that’s what God intended.

Kevin I still talk about my old job in my sleep. My wife has to wake me up and say, no, that’s a long time ago. You don’t do that anymore. My name is Kevin Cook. I’m a stay at home dad. And, um, essentially I said retired for twenty six years. Not by choice, but it is what it is. Before my injury, I was living the American dream, married two kids and doing the job that I truly loved. Everything that I could have wanted was all lined up. As a kid, I always took apart toys and put them back together. And so hands on was my ticket the beginning of my sophomore year. They stuck me in a welding class right then and there, I knew exactly what I wanted to do as a living. I took a lot of pride in my work. I was always intrigued with fire. Welding is about sixty zero zero zero degrees. I mean, that’s pretty hot. It’s very hot. As a welder. Your clothes do catch fire periodically. You get dingleberries. So you wear cotton overalls so they’ll just smolder. But I wasn’t fearful of catching fire. Company. I worked for this job alone. We burned about thirteen zero zero zero gallons of diesel every day. It was a twin engine scraper. Caterpillar six fifty seven. It’s the largest scraper they make. They had me come to repair the rear fuel tank. It was cracked. And so I did everything like I was supposed to and I started welding. All of a sudden, the tank started spraying out diesel right where I’m welding. Basically, it engulfed me and soaked my overalls with diesel and then lit me on fire. I was laying down and I thought, ah, I ruined my perfect work record, never having to go see a doctor for an injury or anything. I was disappointed about that. I was disappointed I couldn’t make my camping trip. Then I realized how bad it was. I remember being taken out of the helicopter and getting into the tub room, and they’re like, okay, can you tilt your head back? We gotta intubate you. And that’s all I remember. Coming out of the induced coma. My recollection was having to ask, what happened. I was eighty five percent Burn literally head to toe. I kept on complaining. There was something in my right eye, and the wrapping around my face and head was too tight. My cornea got burned, so that was scar tissue and the tightness on my face was just the skin contracting. A good friend of mine would come in and give me a haircut once my eye was, you know, grow my hair back and everything. And she would massage my neck and I could feel it pulling on my nose because the tightness of the skin, the pliability, is not there at all. I’m about five, ten, five eleven, but when my legs contracted, I’d say I was probably like five five. And I did eventually have to have my legs released behind my knees. My wife struggled with it a lot. She had a hard time with it and couldn’t deal with it. About a year after my injury, she goes, I don’t love you anymore. It was extremely hurtful. I was angry at her, but did I blame her? I wouldn’t say I blamed her. We all deal things in our own ways. Nobody got in line for this. Eventually I got to the point where I was like, how am I going to get back into the dating life? I was like, you know what? I need to get out there in the community that views like I do the burn community. What better?

Jill My name is Jill Sproul. I worked first as a bedside nurse in the burn center, then the assistant nurse manager. Then I was the nurse manager for twenty years. I got burned at the end of second grade. It was March twenty seventh, nineteen seventy two. We were camping. We had the best parents. They always were doing so much, so we were going to surprise them and cook breakfast for them. My sister was trying to light the fire pits that they have at campgrounds, put a lot of newspaper in there and was trying to light it, light it, light it. It wouldn’t light. So we’d seen my dad put lighter fluid on and it just magically lights. So we were going campsite to campsite to find the lighter fluid. We found a liquid can unmarked. My sister, she was twelve and I was seven, so I was standing next to her and she poured it in. It was actually gasoline. So with this huge explosion, it went back into the can, exploded in the can, was right next to me and kind of right next to my face. We went to the emergency department. I had my favorite Snoopy sweatshirt that I loved. I had this like, plastic Snoopy. So it kind of melted into my chest. And I remember being so hysterical that they were cutting off my favorite sweatshirt. I was burned about sixty five percent of my body. And my mom was very concerned about the bullying, staring. Would I be treated badly or differently? So she kept me home from school for a year. I could see the shock on my friends faces when they came in. Everyone was pretty protective of me. People weren’t bullying me. My friends were still my friends. It didn’t really hit me till high school. Like, wow, your looks really matter. And I was continuing to have reconstructive surgery. So every year I looked better because I had to rebuild my nose, give me eyebrows, redo my chin a million times. My eyelids. All my friends were dating and they all had boyfriends. And people used to always say. You’re beautiful inside. You’re such a nice person. So it was hard. Back in the eighties. There was really an emphasis to be super, super thin. So I thought, if I’m skinny enough, people won’t see the burns, which was completely ridiculous. So I started starving myself and going on all these crazy diets. When I got to college, I dated, but no one that I really wanted to ever be with. I hit thirty five and I’m like, my biological clock is ticking. I’m never going to find someone. I really had resigned that, you know, it’s just not in the cards for me to date or to ever get married. I’ll be married to my career. And then I met Kevin.

Kevin How did Jill and I meet? She was the manager of the burn unit here at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center when I met her. I was like, wow, she’s got everything going. How outgoing she is, how accomplished she was in her job. She knows what she wants. We became extremely good friends.

Jill Kevin and I went to a world burn, and we hung out at the conference the whole time. I gotta tell you, the guy was so quietly confident, but not arrogant. He was so attentive. Like I’d say, oh my gosh, I forgot to get a Diet Coke. He had cargo shorts on. He’d pull one out of his pocket. And then I said, oh, shoot, I need to get silverware. Oh, I got you some. I was like, who is this guy?

Kevin After that World Burn Congress, everybody was like, are you guys hooked up or something? And it’s like, no, we just talked all the time.

Jill We started dating and we both felt like we were sixteen again. He would make me feel like I was the sexiest person alive. I was telling everyone I found my soulmate, I want to marry this guy. And then, oops, here comes Tyler. I got pregnant. We got married after we had Tyler and then we had Megan. I’d never felt so right about a person in my life.

Kevin I actually got butterflies like I was in high school when I first started dating. So I knew it was the real deal. Do you remember me expressing that right?

Jill Yes, I remember we were like little kids. I call him Kevo. I don’t think he likes it.

Kevin That doesn’t bother, I don’t care, you call me whatever you like. Calling me Kevo. I sometimes call her Jill or Jill the pill or I don’t know.

Jill He calls me babe a lot.

Kevin I say.

Jill Babe.

Kevin Babe.

Jill He calls me babe a lot. Having someone love you that much. You know, we’re both disfigured, and I don’t see his scars. To me, I thought he was the hottest guy because of who he is as a person. He’s kind, he’s outgoing, he’s funny. I really felt like, wow, I hit the jackpot with him.

Kevin Getting ready for bed is not so simple as just jumping in bed. Put your head down, go to sleep. Because when we sleep, our eyes don’t shut all the way because of the burn contractures. I have a Cpap, but I still wake up in the middle of the night with it torn off. I have to sleep on my right side so I don’t snore so bad.

Jill But then your hip hurts you.

Kevin Jill. She has to put, like, lacquer lube in one of her eyes.

Jill And tape it shut.

Kevin We have our struggles. We have gone to bed. It’s just not that simple.

Jill The burn community has been such an integral part. Some of our best friends are burn survivors And that was a theme with a lot of the burn survivors, both male and female, that they’re never going to find someone. And I think that’s true. If you’re not burned, people are worried, am I ever going to find my soulmate? But there’s always hope that you can have the life that you want to have. And even if you have to date a lot of toads, you will find your Prince Charming. What would you say?

Kevin I mean, I consider it a tremendous blessing in my life. If I didn’t get injured, I wouldn’t have met Jill and we would not have had Tyler and Megan. Before my injury. I didn’t have the time of the day for my kids and family, and I when I worked all those hours, we would work one hundred hours in a week. A hundred hours after the injury, it flipped around. Now I have all the time in the world with my kids. And that’s another thing I noticed. Like after my injury, my empathy level just maximized. We had the TV on earlier and it was a tear jerker. I think it was a commercial. It was a tear. Had me pulling on my tears. It’s a good thing though. It is. You know, there’s not enough empathy in this world, in my opinion.

And you want a pair of my shoes, right? This is a one off shoe. You won’t ever get another pair of shoes like this. Yeah, this is one off. Look. All suede. These are one of my favorite pair of shoes. My real name is Joshua Barrington. Windy. My street name is Barry G. And yeah, I grew up in Brixton. I grew up on the front line. Brixton front line, we used to call it. That’s our hang out point, you know. And my mum used to have a shop on Brixton front line. So all the guys used to hang out on the streets. I knew everyone because they used to come in my mum’s shop. So I knew that old Brixton, basically we was like a family. Everybody knew who everybody was. I know your mum, you know my mum. My mum would know your mum. Oh, yeah. You know, I don’t go to Brixton Market on a Saturday morning because when I come out of my house, it take me and my mum an hour to get down the road because she’s chatting to everyone. You know what I mean? Because as soon as she knows everyone, she’s passing me. She’s talking to everyone. So yeah, it was a very tight, packed community in Brixton. There was no jobs, really. We were free to the point where, you know, we had house parties to survive. Most people used to just have house parties to have to, to generate money. They call it blues dance. So that was black people’s things. When we was growing up, everybody had a blues dance or a house party on the weekend, and everybody would go out and, you know, you pay your little pound to go in. And it used to be fun. We never knew there was no work for us. That was our living, you know, that was our little hustling to keep us surviving. That’s all we that’s all we could do. You know, reggae music. We had so many sound systems. Soprano b d Eunice Ital rockers. I used to have a big valve amp, a three hundred watt valve amp in my house. I couldn’t really play it. My mum and dad used to go crazy and I said, my friend George in Brixton Market. And I said to him, George, I got a valve amp. Do you want it? He says, all right. I says, you can start a sound. and he’s starting to sound called Nasty Rockers now. Nasty rockers. It went a long way because it ended up as Nasty Love, a worldwide sound that started all of that. Oh yeah. That was a blessing to know you started all of that. Coming up to nineteen eighty one, the riots, living in Brixton, it was like it was nice, but it was disturbing because you wasn’t free. We used to get so victimised by the police. I’d be walking down the road, the police car. Pull up. Two of them. Jump out. Search me. Used to happen to me three or four times a day. We used to give all these police officers nicknames. They used to call one of them the runner, because he’d always chase you down, you know, and he could run. So we all gave him a nickname, you know? But the police presence was terrible. Really, really bad. I mean, everybody felt intimidated. They’d pull up in their big vans and jump out on you and put you up against the wall and go through your pockets and, you know, arrest you for things you didn’t do and try and put a charge on you. It kind of got overbearing. There’s a lot of talk. And why the riot started on the day of the right. It was a sunny day. We was all standing on the front line in the day, out there, hanging out on the streets. We’ve got a friend named biscuit. That’s his nickname. And all of a sudden we looked down the road and we could see biscuit running up the road like running, running, running, running. When we looked behind him, we saw two police officers chasing him on foot, a van coming up around and road chasing him too, and all of a sudden the van rolled the pavement and hit him. It was like, oh, it was just the tension was hot that day. Very, very, very hot. It was like my emotions, every. Everybody’s see my shoe? We actually couldn’t believe what we was actually witnessing and the sight of it. I’ll never forget the sight of it when the van hit him and seeing him roll underneath the van. That was it. That’s what started the Brixton riots. That was the last straw for us. That was the breaking point. To know that you actually had to run over one of us to catch us. We started to smash up police cars. We bottled them. We everything we like. We weren’t having no more. I won’t say I felt fear, it was just like we didn’t fear the police. My mom was. She was fuming. Oh yeah, she was fuming when it happened. Yeah, she was all she was all for us rioting, you know, because she knew what we went through. Yeah. Brixton. It was a wreck. After the riot. We we really did burn, burn shops and cars and Yeah, we knocked out so many shop windows. It was unbelievable. It was like one of them mad Max movies sort of thing. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t a nice look after. But they it needed to be done. It needed to be done to let them know that if they’re going to keep doing it, that’s what that’s what’s going to happen, you know, because we can’t keep standing there being victimised and intimidated. And, you know, you know, we couldn’t take no more. We had to put a stop to it to let them know, we know we’re going to fight back now. We’re going to fight back. We’re not just going to stand there and let you lot keep doing what you’re doing to us as black people. So, you know, we had to send a message to them and it like, yeah, enough is enough now, isn’t it? I think black people’s lives in England nowadays has deteriorated so much. Why I say that? Because they’ve stripped us of everything. They’ve stripped us of our community centres, they’ve stripped us of our pubs and our wine bars. They stripped of everything. Basically they took. They’ve been stripped of Brixton Market. I go to Brixton now. It doesn’t feel like Brixton Market no more. It’s all little restaurants and little cafes. It’s not like when you Brixton Market, it’s just pure Jamaican food and yam and bananas and fish and pure Jamaican food. It’s not like that no more. My vision for justice, for black people, for black people to uprise and uplift themselves and be something. I don’t think we’ve got enough lawyers. I don’t think we’ve got enough doctors. I don’t think we’ve got enough any profession as a black community. I just wish I could live long enough to see us unite as one, because as we united as one properly, we’d be so powerful. That’s why the government tries to keep us divided, because they know how powerful we’ll be if we stood together. So they’ll do anything to keep us apart and keep us against each other. This is where they win. But we need to stop tearing each other down and looking down on each other and look up at each other and say, you know what? Let’s rise in it instead of downgrade. When I see that, I’ll be happy. I love being black because the culture of black is versatile. We like all kind of musics. We like all kind of races. You know, we’ve got a culture where it’s enjoyable. You see, we love to have fun. That’s what I like about our race. We love to have fun. We love to party. You know, we, we we we just we’re just that way inclined. We’re a very bubbly race. Carnivals and parties and boat trips and coach trips and yeah, we love to party. That’s our culture. So yeah, it’s beautiful to be a part of the black community. I love that we could evolve to a higher standard in life.

It’s inky and oily at night, the water is black against the lights and it’s almost viscous the way it kind of slops over things. It does take on a really different quality at night but the smell is always the same, this kind of I feel like it’s a metallic sort of dirty smell like it’s washing London clean, cleansing it.

If I think about what I’ve seen and what I’ve encountered there, whether I was on the lifeboat or just walking around, you know, sometimes it’s particularly initially when you first see something that’s untoward or sinister, it’s always hard to believe it at first and then you think oh no that is really happening, that is really something and then you act, act on it. And I often felt that too, particularly at night, when things were happening there was a real um not a magical quality to it but a strangeness.

I don’t think there is something personified in the Thames in the sense that it doesn’t know what it’s doing but at the same time, there is that element of chance and there is that element of circumstance and fate and timing and those are always present on a lifeboat, you know, any rescue situation is always a series of events that takes place, culminating in someone needing urgent help and there are often things that could materialize and change on a pinhead really.

My name is Sian Philips. I used to be a volunteer lifeboat woman and a fulltime mechanic for the RNLI –the Royal National Lifeboat Institution- on the river Thames. It’s a very romantic thing isn’t, the RNLI, I think I always remembered the story of Grace Darling, as a child, this young woman who rode out with her father to try and rescue peope from the shipwreck on the North East coast of England. She was a real hero, in the true sense, you know. And I grew up with stories of sailors and seamen and my grandmother always used to talk about lighting candles in the attic, she lived right by the harbour, so that the sailors could see the land.

The first memory I ever had is a really young one and I was at Barafundle Bay, which is a really famous beach in Pembrokeshire, it’s a beautiful beach and I must have been two or three and I got tumbled around in the waves and my Dad pulled me out but I went straight back in, you know, I wasn’t sort of fazed by it.

I thin it’s the sense that you’re reacting against something, that you are having a really physical relationship with the waves and the water and that you have to hold your own, and that was something I was really good at, as a young woman I was really independent and strong and yeah I definitely had a relationship with the sea and he water and I think eventually, I need something like that to stay in London and the Thames just became my ocean in the city, if you like.

Comforting, it’s always been comforting for me to be near water. But also quite disturbing and quite difficult – and in that way it really reflects the ups and downs of life, the Thames. There’s lots of people enjoying London and having a great time but it’s also got an underbelly of pain and sadness as well.

I can remember helping people who were extremely pleased to be helped and also people who clearly didn’t want to be helped. And I did become quite interested in the act of suicide and what motivates people to do it and I think that a lot of us did, in the initial stages of putting the lifeboats on the Thames, that was one of the biggest challenges for all the crew members was understanding the psychology of suicidal incidents so what what’s motivating these people, how can it be stopped, in some cases why doesn’t it stop, why are there some people who just keep doing it? These questions are very difficult to answer I think and require a huge amount of empathy ultimately from everyone involved, in order to really try and understand each person individually and what’s brought them to this situation. What am I dealing with here, what can I see in front of me, and your brain is processing everything really quickly. Some people probably too shocked to speak, some people just inconsolable, some people feeling maybe in the really extreme sad cases that they’d quite like to just be left, you know.

March was very cold, it was a very very cold day and we were called to a man on the south side of the river, around about Blackfriars Bridge. And he was face down in the water and um we pulled him out and he was completely you know completely unconscious and myself and the paramedic who was a volunteer that day resuscitated him and he asked me why I’d saved him and I remmebr him saying that he didn’t deserve it. I don’t think I said anything but I think I just continued to be with him and hold his hand. If I said anything at all I would have disagreed, I know I would have done that instinctively but whether I decided to say that or not, I think sometimes a physical gesture is more powerful and I think I just held his hand and made sure he was warm, because he was very cold, kept him warm.

A gentleman who’s actually a member of Parliament, and his office was in the same building as the pharmacy I worked in, and his wife came and and said, um, my husband wants to do the ring test on your baby to see what you’re having. And I said, go for it. You know, put out the stomach. It’s all there. Go for it. And he predicted that I was having a little boy. His wife assured me that he had never been wrong. He’d been doing it for thirty years. And when I gave birth to a little girl, the man was devastated. I’d just about had to take the nappy off to prove it. You know that Nick was a little girl. But I’d love to be able to reach that man now and say you were right and put his record back to being perfect. My name is Dianne Lawrence. I’m sixty years old and I’m a mother of two sons, and my eldest son is transgender. Nick, from a very early age, was very tomboyish, didn’t like girly clothes, didn’t like frilly things. As a matter of fact, I actually had to pay him once to wear a frilly shirt to impress his auntie. I had no idea what Nick was going through as a teenager, but I was aware that she had issues with her emotions and ups and downs. I put a lot of it down to teenage hormones. You know, you do get a bit out of whack. I tried to feed him vitamin B, but he thought I was going to turn him into a drug addict. That was hilarious, that argument. Yeah. I just didn’t realize that my situation with Nick was probably worse than what was normal. But none of my friends sort of had girls that age, so I had nothing to compare it to. Nick opened up to me about being lesbian when he was around fifteen or sixteen. I was a little bit devastated when he told me about it. I didn’t understand it, so I had to do a lot of research into it, I suppose, just to educate myself, because I’d already suspected it before he came out and told me he was very harsh. The way he told me basically said I’m gay, mum, deal with it. Nick was highly and always has been highly intelligent, but couldn’t settle to any particular career. We tried a few different things personal trainers, you name it, all sorts of jobs. He got offered an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic and he just hit his stride. Just loved it. That was really the start for Nick because right up to that, being gay, there’s still a lot of prejudice out there about, you know, girls working in men’s worlds and things like that. I know he’s been on the teas, as they call them, the injections and that for four years now. But he put off telling me because I was in a major stress situation myself, and he didn’t want to add to my stress. That’s what a gorgeous kid he is. He, um, put it off as long as he could, but he said he had started to see changes in himself and he thought, if I don’t tell mum real soon, she’s going to get one hell of a shock. So yeah, he came over and sat me down and told me it was a bit nerve wracking for me. I just thought, what next? You know what’s going to happen next? And Nick explained it all to me. He was just brilliant and at the end of the conversation, I was quite happy to see that the path he was going on seemed to be what he wanted. One of the biggest annoyances that Nick has, if people call him a her or call him by his original name, which was Nicole. But I’m the only one in the world that’s allowed to call Nick a girl or her, which I frequently do. And when I’m angry at Nicole, always comes out. I was pretty upset in a sense, that I’d lost my daughter to have my own little girl. That was. That’s my every mum’s dream, and to have grandchildren and all that sort of things. That was very hard for me to to deal with, but I couldn’t show that to Nick because Nick had enough of his own things to deal with. He didn’t need to deal with a mum that was losing the plot a bit. I just kept it to myself and and dealt with it in my own way, which I always have done. I do have some awesome friends that I did discuss it with. I thought, what if they don’t accept Nick the way he is? I think I’m really blessed to have a really magnificent group of friends because everybody was just so supportive and they said, well, yeah, if that’s what makes Nick happy and makes you happy, makes everybody happy, that’s good in a way. I know I did think to myself, I was glad my dad had gone, like my mother died when I was very young, so I never had a mum, but I don’t think my dad could have dealt with it. He never even knew that Nick was gay. I just. He’s a real old time Australian bushie, you know. Farmer Shearer and I. I have no idea whether how he would have reacted. Nick warned me right from the start, told me stage by stage what transition would happen and usually in what period of time, you know. So, um, I’ve had no surprises as such. It’s been interesting to see the changes, like the hereditary side of it, where as a female, Nick had a full head of hair, magnificent head of hair. But now as a man, he’s taken up the genes from the men’s side of our family, and he’s going bald. He said he would like to get more masculine facial features. His body would grow. It would become more more masculine. Like it’s got really nice big shoulders and big muscles. And, um, his facial features, he’s got a much stronger jaw. It doesn’t have the nice cheekbones anymore. They’re gone. He’s got a beard, which I don’t like. If he ever goes to sleep around me, I’m going to shave it off. But that’s his choice. And weirdly enough, his feet grew before this happened to Nick. Or Nick decided to go down this journey. I had never heard of it. I’d seen because Nick is gay. I’d been out in the gay group with Nick. You know, I’ve gone to the court with them and Connies, and, you know, I mixed with all their friends. They’re all awesome people. And you do see people that, like men dressed up as girls and they’re. Oh, I can’t think of the word transvestites. That’s the word transvestites. But I’d never heard of transgender before. Nick has just changed so much. He’s so stable as a person. There’s not this flighty up one minute down the next, and no raging hormones. I suppose it was just because Nick was so frustrated with his life. I think the way it was Nick set up trans men were because there was nothing here for the young ones coming up as far as Is transitioning. Nic transitioned fairly late in life at early thirties. Some translate even later, but generally the kids today are knowing in their early teens that they want to be a boy or a girl. And Nic found that there was no support or anything in WA. So Nic thought, well, I’ll do it myself. Now Nick’s making speeches. He’s doing lectures to university students. He did a lecture recently to a stadium full of professors and psychologists and that teaching them about transgender. And I was like, wow, that’s my kid. Just so confident. I just love to see him doing that. The person that Nic used to be as a girl, that person could never have done anything like that.

My name is Kali. My full name is Kaliyugan. I’m a Tamil from Tamil Eelam in Ceylon. I came as a refugee to Australia four years ago, now I’m settled in Perth. I was born in an island village called Kites, it’s a very small island community where almost everyone is related to each other. When I was a child, the civil war in Sri Lanka was getting intense, there was heavy fighting. If you’re a Tamil at that time, you’re seen as a Tamil Tiger, which is the rebel group that was fighting for an independent Tamil state. Even as a child, there are things I couldn’t say because it was quite dangerous. I would sometimes sing the Tamil revolution songs and my parents were always scared.

My family moved to Germany, we ended up living there for seven years until our asylum claims were rejected and we had to return. Myself and my younger sister we were so happy, we were just so excited and then we reached Sri Lanka, it was hot to… it was really hot and I showered three times a day and the people were very different, it was an entirely different culture, so it took a while for me to adapt to my own country.

So in 2009, there was the end of the conflict in Sri Lanka. The situation became very dangerous for any outspoken individual, doesn’t matter if you’re a Tamil or a Singhalese. The government was still very paranoid and you could disappear, they, you’d get shot, you can get kidnapped or you can get, even officially get arrested and officially put in a prison where you just end up there forever. My family was very fearful of my safety and I um I left to um Singapore with the plan to stay there for a while, for couple of months and see how the situations are like in Sri Lanka. I ended up in Malaysia, things were different in Malaysia, there were some crack downs on asylum seekers and refugees. I had an opportunity to come to Australia the first month when I left Sri Lanka but I didn’t take it, I didn’t want it because I was quite angry at that time, I was angry at everyone especially white people about all the things that was happening, I was blaming all people for what was happening, why I had to leave, I was quite arrogant and said to myself ‘I’m not going to a white man’s country.’ There were other options, I could have gone to Europe but I didn’t have any money, I lost everything, I didn’t have a visa, I couldn’t apply for refugee status from Malaysia, I couldn’t do anything.

I arrived in Indonesia, in Jakarta, I was taken in a four-wheel drive by this Tamil guy who spoke really fluent Indonesian. They put me in a safe house for seven days, with a bunch of other people I didn’t know and then this one night they called and said we are ready to go, just pack your stuff. We were told seven days, everyone thought ok this is just gonna be a short trip and then the weather was so bad and they said oh, we’re expecting another fifty people when we were already forty-eight. So the seven days became nine days and thirteen days and fourteen days and what happened was when we anchored, the anchor came off, so we had to wait in the middle of the sea. They decided to cut off the anchor and they said no it’s alright we’ll get a new anchor, in the next trip of the small fishing vessel. I was sleeping on top of the boat, I was looking at the sky, it was awesome especially when the weather, when the sea is calm it’s really nice, you see the stars, it’s like cotton, you’re on cotton, you’re on top on cotton, moving around. I was still awake and I could see fishing vessels approaching us. For some reason they came towards us and I think they didn’t see us, so they turned around and I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know if I should tell people, I know we were expecting people but I don’t know what actually happened, I know they had phones and stuff on the boat, I don’t know why they didn’t contact. So they disappeared but then the next morning they said oh the fishing vessel came but the weather was bad, they couldn’t see us, they will return but on the way the weather was bad, they capsized and seven people died and then everyone just freaked out and people were talking about the seven people like some of the people knew those people and it was good in a way I didn’t know anyone so was less intense for me but was still a bad experience. And then they all talked about this guy who died who waited in Malaysia for ten years, who registered with UNHCR trying to get resettled via UNHCR and eventually he gave up and he just, yeah he died after the ten years and that struck me so hard I was like, shit, so 21^st day we saw this landmass and then people just started cheering and everyone everyone just changed suddenly, everyone just became so happy and so I still remember the picture where I saw the land mass and it was just amazing.

So I was in immigration detention for 17 months altogether, I was in three differentv detention centres, so after Christmas Island I arrived in Perth detention centre and then I was moved to Curtin detention centre. Curtin is the place where I felt like I needed help so until that I did need help but I was ignoring the fact. Curtin was a bit too intense, it was too isolated, it was too inhumane to ignore. I’m not sure why I said yes to the mental health nurse when I was offered but as soon as I arrived I couldn’t even speak to that guy, I just started crying. When the mental health started ok just tell me about yourself and I couldn’t say a word and I was quite angry when he said ‘how can I help you?’ I said ‘you can’t help me, you can’t do shit about this man.’ And then he said I am, I probably won’t be but I can listen to you – and I’m still friends with that mental health nurse, we kept in touch when I got out of from Curtin, he was flying out at the same time, on the same flight, and he was very happy to see me, I could see it in his face, he was so happy. He offered to sit with me, next to me was an immigration officer and my friend was gonna buy me a beer but then he put the wallet in the luggage and the immigration officer bought me a beer because they were asking how long it’s been since I had a beer and it’s been 17 months. So he bought me beer and we were having a good chat with that guy, and that’s how I arrived in Melbourne.

Next morning I love walking, so I went outside the house and went to the shopping mall and I still thought I was in detention centre, I didn’t know how to cope I couldn’t get my English out, I was walking a lot, I was touching things I was quite fascinated, just like I had to remember my culture when I got back from Germany, I had to remember what freedom was like, this time it was so intense because I forgot. It took me quite a while, I think I’m still getting there. I remember spending New Year’s Eve in Melbourne with a friend of mine, and there was all this fireworks and people being happy and I just couldn’t be happy, I still have issues in places like big celebrations, I just can’t be happy because that just reminds me of other people stuck, without that happiness and freedom.

My name is Gary Mansfield and I’m forty seven years of age. I can remember the first time I was arrested, I was thirteen and we went over to the junior –it was on a Saturday or at least school was shut so it may even have been during holidays but me and two of my friends we was just we was over the school field, just kicking a ball about, the ball went up on the school roof. So one of ems climbed up there and said that the skylight was broken, so we’ve also climbed up there so there’s three of us. We’ve seen the skylight, we’ve pulled it open but one of my friends climbed down and then the other one climbed down then I said ‘the caretaker’s coming’ so directly underneath the skylight was the cloakrooms so they’ve they’ve sort of climbed up on top of the coat hooks and I’ve pulled em out.

We’ve jumped down, we’ve run off, we didn’t do any damage, we weren’t sort of mischievous in that way. Got outside, the caretaker had called the police, they put us in the car, the local cop come around and we was all panicking a bit and he said like we’re getting arrested and I said but we only went up there to get a ball and it was already the skylight was already broken off kilter so we just opened it up. Yeah they tried to do us for burglary, like burgling the school but that was my first erm yeah my first experience of being arrested, going to court and erm even meeting me dad actually.

Cos me mum was so upset when I got when she found out I got arrested, she contacted my dad who she was sort of I’d only see him once every couple of years, you know, I’d see him in passing if I happened to be in the house when he popped up. My dad was a he was sort of like on the fringes of criminality himself anyway, she got him to take me to court. He he played up a bit in court, he was quite impressive in court actually I didn’t have a solicitor he represented me. So – I mean we all got found not guilty. Yeah I was quite impressed he was putting up good arguments and having pretty much an argument with the judge anyway, yeah looked up to him for the wrong reasons really that you should look up to your dad for.

Sort of went off the rails after that sortof tryna I was I figured it was something in my genes you know, like coming down the family tree you know I just was sortof I figured maybe I was born that way or destined to be like it. But erm I think that was probably the changing point from being a mischievous lad to going down the criminal line. I’m not blaming him, I had all these decisions, I just took the wrong one and rolled with it from there and it sort of rolled downhill really.

I got into fake clothing, selling fake clothing, at the time it was like Lacost and Pringle and all them sort of clothes were coming in. And one of these guys he was as far as I knew at the time he was having the labels made up and one time he asked me if I’d go and drop a load of these labels off to these guys in Birmingham. So I’ve met him in a service caff, picked up the bags off of off of his mate, like two holdalls, but then as I’m putting them into my car and just getting into my car, I’ve seen this Vauxhall car being chased by a police van. All of a sudden the cars come to a standstill and the van as well so I’ve I’m in mine, I’ve already started the engine and I’ve looked round, expecting to see a couple of scallywags sort of jump out the car to get chased by the police and there was this blonde woman and she just come running towards me with these armed police behind her and she’s shouting something at me and then she she pulled something out the inside of her coat and I didn’t know what was going on. She’s gone to open the door and then I’ve seen she’s got a warrant card in her hand and she’s shouting and screaming at me but it was like although there was a lot of shouting and screaming you know cop with a gun cop with a gun cop with a gun it had gone quite silent you know inside my head and everything was in slow motion and they’ve they’ve like arrested me you know I’ve figured out I just been nicked with a couple of three four five hundred pounds of these dodgy labels. And when we got there, to the local police station in Essex, she said I was being charged with being knowingly concerned with the importation of diamorphine. And I had no idea what diamorphine I even asked her there and then, the first words I said to her ‘what’s diamorphine?’ and then she said heroin.

Then it ended up going to court and I just stood up in the dock and I told them I had no idea it was drugs and I just put all my faith into the system. After several hours of deliberation, the jury come back and found me guilty and a couple a weeks later I went back to court erm to be sentenced and I knew that the absolute minimum I could get was fourteen years. And that’s what I got. And I ended up going to a category B prison which was very violent you know alarms going off every day, stabbings at least once a week, it was yeah it was a godawful place. And then you start becoming hard to what’s happening around you, you know someone was saying they’re gonna go and cut someone and you say why and they say oh because he’s he sortof badmouthed me and you sortof justify it and you know I was getting involved in the violence myself, I was having fights and I was constantly thinking about these guys who had stitched me up I’d I’d not heard anything from em since, I was just thinking how I can get some sort of revenge, how I can find out where they are, all sorts of stuff was going through my head, some quite psychotic stuff and it’s crazy and it wasn’t until about a year into that that I just looked at meself and I didn’t like the person that I saw, you know, I could see the bad parts of me and I just wanted to make myself sortof a better person and it was all, it was all down to the experience of coming into art.

By now it was 1995. Computers were just coming around so I wanted to learn how to use a computer. I didn’t know how to type, I didn’t know where the keys were on it but because they run courses which were six months a year or whatever, one was still six months so in the meantime, just to get into the education department, I joined the art class. Once I got into art it was just some other way of channeling me anger and frustration although it wasn’t you know I wasn’t doing any drawings of sortof crazy stuff you know painting in black all the time or anything like that it was just some other, somewhere else to channel what was going on in my mind, or even forget what was going on in my mind and then I remember just sitting there and thinking that I’d fallen in love with art. But these guys who put me in prison were just constantly popping into my mind.

In the end I’m thinking well they’re getting in the way of me progressing my life, like my past is holding me back from going forward so I set myself a goal that I would give everything on this art course, I’d give everything I could and if I got a distinction in that, I will go and try and get a degree, get a university degree you know, just go for it, with art.

And I absolutely knocked it out the park and I said that’s it. I’d become sortof I’d become a preacher for the art you know I’d be tryna get people into art as well, like a sort of born again artist you know. I’d be telling them about Matisse and why he used the colours he did and why he done this and why he done that. And then I done drawings and get them involved in drawings. Or they’d ask me to do a painting for their kids, even if it was a Disney painting I’d say to them well I’ll draw it but you paint it with me and they’ll sit there in my cell, I’ll have some broken nosed hairy arsed armed robber sitting in there painting a Disney picture, turning round going this is really nice, really comfortable doing this, innit. And he’d be talking to me and asking me questions about art whereas before you couldn’t look him in the eye without him wanting to stab you in the face cos he’s a complete lunatic. I’ve got him sitting there painting Dumbo paintings you know asking me questions about different artists, it was just making him think something different.

I got a boy just started senior school and a girl in the second year of junior school. I’ve just been so scared that especially my boy could end up like I was, that I’ve been overly strict on him. I just started telling him –luckily my little boy he was he was playing with some lads out in the street where we used to live. The other two lads got in trouble, were climbing over into gardens and someone said I’m gonna call the police. My boy he didn’t climb the garden, he’s a completely different person to what I was. He that shook the life outta him, he come upstairs he said oh they’re gonna call the police and it it was just completely opposite to what I was at that age. I said not everyone is nice, there are some bad people out there. I said I met some bad people once and they told the police bad thing about me. And my boy said did they put you in the police car? I said yeah they put me in the police car but they also put me in prison, for a long time, because they didn’t believe that I didn’t know what it was. I said, and that’s the trouble, if you mix with bad people, bad things could happen. And I’m hoping that just that sentence alone would resonate with him. I can’t say it won’t happen to them but I’m doing everything in my power for that not to happen. I’m lucky enough that I’ve got a great partner and our children they’ve got a very good outlook. They’re very kind, they’re very caring for other people, they’re very good kids.

I will look at people now and everyone has got a story, everyone’s got a little something inside them and we all do things for a reason. Because I changed so much as a person, when I meet my old friends, who are criminals, you know a lot of them are still active criminals, they can’t believe I’m the same person. That’s a –it’s as bad sometimes telling old friends I’m an artist as it is telling new people I’ve met that I used to be a con because either way, I got to justify why I done it and how I got to where I am now, no matter who it is. And I’ve just found since that I don’t need to justify it, I just changed.