Last night’s soup run was frenetic, challenging, adrenaline-filled and hugely uplifting for me. Ironically, the thing that hit me the hardest was the simplest of things that passed unnoticed to everyone else there, in the midst of the ambulance for the guy with the head injury lying motionless on the floor, the almost-fight and the guy who wanted to end it all right then and right there in front of us.
Let me take you back 3 years…
In my first week at Simon On The Streets as our Operations Manager, I went out to do some evening outreach with Jamie, one of our workers. I decided that if I was going to manage a team, I needed to understand first-hand what it was that they were dealing with. We quickly bumped into Karen, a hard-nosed, angry-looking streetwise girl in her 30’s who seemed to have what my Mum would have called “a massive chip on her shoulder”. Karen made it clear she didn’t want to interact with me, but needed to talk to Jamie urgently about something. I wasn’t someone she trusted or was about to share with. So, I hung back and followed Jamie and Karen from about 50yrds, trying hard not to appear as a threat to Karen in any way; this tough Glaswegian woman made me feel that if she decided she didn’t like me, she wasn’t going to mince her words telling me.
We made it as far as the old bus shelter on Boar Lane. As Jamie and Karen stood and I hovered in the background looking more than awkward, I heard her ask Jamie “Who’s she?” Jamie explained who I was and why I was there and Karen turned and said “not many managers do that, you’re alright, you”. She moved to sit on a bench and as she sat, looked back at me and hutched up just ever-so-slightly in a gesture that said, “you can sit here, but I’m not going to ask you”. In silence I joined them and let Karen continue to talking to Jamie. As time passed she began to include me and we got talking. Karen had children that were now lost to her and we found common ground in sharing stories about our kids and what they meant to us. Karen asked me if my daughter had long hair and I told her she did. She went on to ask if I plaited it and tied it with ribbons and bobbles.
Karen knew how to plait hair in a way that I didn’t, but it took two people to do it. “Here”, she said “I’ll teach you” and undid the matted dirty brown strands that were held together in an elastic band at the back of her head.
Now, in truth, I’m ashamed to say I gulped. I am known for being a little fussy about being clean and this was the kind of situation my nightmares are made of. But what could I do? To refuse this very personal offer of human contact and trust would have damaged everything we had spent the evening working on, and flattened any feeling of value and worth that Karen was getting from the time we were spending together. My guess is that there aren’t many opportunities that Karen gets to feel that she has skills that she can teach anybody, let alone get the chance to do so. So, I swallowed it down and prayed it stayed there, and I took hold of two strands of her hair and Karen showed me how to make hair look like a rope. When we had finished she told me “Go and do this with your girl, she’ll love it ‘cause she’ll have to help you do it, and tell her I taught you”.
And so I did. My little girl loves making her hair into a rope with me, and knows all about the lady called Karen that showed me how to do it. For the next 3 years I didn’t see Karen but continued to ask Jamie how she was doing. Let’s just say she’s had her ups and downs.
Last night, I saw Karen again for the first time since that night. She looked angry and determined to talk to another service user and I decided that it wasn’t the best time to approach her. After all, I felt sure that if she recognised me, she would come over if she wanted to say hello. I turned to Clive and told him that I felt it was a shame that after that night 3 years ago, she probably wouldn’t realise who I was.
I found myself with Karen and Jamie later on and I asked her how she was. She gave me a sideways glance that said “and who do you think you are?” and carried on talking to Jamie. When the chance arose, I said “do you remember me Karen? I am the lady who plaited your hair in the bus shelter years ago”. My heart pounded as I told myself not to be so stupid, with all the things in Karen’s life, why would she remember that?!
But Karen stopped and turned. She looked at me for a second and her face broke out into an enormous (if toothless) beam and she grabbed hold of my hand. “I remember you! Do you plait your girl’s hair like I showed you?” I told Karen that I did, and that every time we plaited it together we talked about her. Karen’s anger and tough-girl expression disappeared and she cried. She told Jamie and me how bad things had got for her and that she had started to self-harm again. When she had finished, there was little else I could find to say, but Karen untied the same matted and dirty hair, turned to me and said “Here, let’s show him how we do it!” and so I took the same gulp I had taken three years ago and prayed that it would stay down again, and we plaited.
When I left last night I thought hard about what had happened and why it was that Karen had remembered it so clearly. Karen survives a life littered with violence and abuse, she uses drugs and alcohol to blot out the trauma of her past, and when she can’t get the money to make that possible, she prostitutes herself for the price of a bus ticket to make enough for the drugs that make it all go away. The hour I spent with her three years ago in a bus shelter in Leeds may well have been the first time in Karen’s life that someone did something “girly” with her “just-because”. It was a woman to woman interaction that disregarded class and status and upbringing, but that was about child-bearing, the thought and experience of losing the most precious thing in the world, and the need for someone to understand.
So, in amongst the ambulance for the motionless guy with the head injury, and the man who wanted to end his suffering then and there, and the younger men who were trying to establish a hierarchy through threats and punches, it is Karen who stands out to me from last night, and who I will think about most in the coming days.
As you go through your week bustling hurriedly from meeting to meeting in West Yorkshire’s cities and see these people why not give them a smile because a little humanity can mean more than you or I can imagine.
As long as I live I will remember how to plait hair into a rope, and I will always tell Karen’s story as I do it.