The Road to Islington

I was recently chatting with two women at the college where I work.  One is a professor of Anthropology, the other an English professor.  I run the Foundation.  Quite by chance, we discovered that the three of us had lived in Islington, London.  Different times, different circumstances.  We plan to meet at a wine bar in a couple of weeks to share our stories.

So, it got me thinking.  How did I, a Connecticut-born, Jewish-Quaker child who grew up in Australia, end up living in Islington?  It was a circuitous journey to be sure.  Here’s some things you need to know.  My parents were radicals during the McCarthy era.  They thought protest and independent views were what America was all about, including believing in some of the premises of Communism, especially “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  Many of their friends were called up to testify in the House of Un-American Activities.  My mother hated capitalism, although she wished my father was rich.  He, on the other hand clung to the American dream and believed that he would ‘make it rich’! He never did, although as a loving, good person he was a Nobel prizewinner.  They were in terrible debt, so I guess they both really bought into the American dream.  I have vivid memories of my parents hiding in the bedroom as we answered the door to debt collectors come to repossess couches, tv sets and other furniture they couldn’t afford.  We were trained early on to say, “My parents are not home.”  It bought them more time but made me cautious about money and debt.  They were adventurous, too, so Australia became the perfect choice to drag their four resentful children.  Despite the fact that we were Jewish, the Australian government, desperate for white people, paid our passage on a freighter and living expenses for the first few months in a migrant hostel until my father found a job.  Which was lucky because my father only had $43 in his pocket when we arrived in Sydney.  And that’s another story.

And so I went to secondary school and uni in Sydney.  After earning my BA with Honors in Sociology, I was offered the opportunity to continue straight to a doctorate.  Suffocating in the small town atmosphere of Sydney in the 70s, I chose to get a job, save money and see the world.  That decision changed the trajectory of my life.  Right out of uni, I was hired for nine months as a ‘Research Officer’ for the Commonwealth Inquiry into Poverty in Australia.  A big title for a little graduate.  I produced a final report,

 

saved money, and was therefore free to travel.

First stop, Israel, where my parents and baby sister had immigrated four years earlier. (Longer story. Separate blog.)  Although my relationship with my mother was filled with buried minefields, I missed them all terribly.  But after a month in Israel, I felt I would lose my mind if I lingered and so flew to London.  No plan.  No job.  No place to live.  I was 22.

I lived in London for four years during which time I had some tempestuous relationships, worked in a school for severely disabled children, and earned a Master’s from the London School of Economics.  I remember being cold, depressed and poor. Half of that time was spent in Islington.

When I first arrived, I madly scoured Time Out for a place to live, and found a room in someone else’s apartment.  I moved in, and proceeded to look every day in The Guardian for jobs.  I found an ad for a social worker attached to a school for severely mentally disabled children, applied and was hired.  During the six months it took for my work permit to come through I traveled.  I met my Aussie traveling partner through an ad.  She was as strong and independent as I was petite and weak.  We were an odd couple indeed.  We ended up hitch-hiking around Europe, staying in St. Andre, France, then on to Spain, Morocco, and back to France, where I fell in love with a Dutchman.  The Dutchman and I ended up living together in London after my work permit came through. 



 

At home in Islington

In London in those days, and probably still, flats were passed on from generation to generation.  No one moved, no new flats were built.  We finally found one that was partially underground and barely saw the light of day.  It smelled moldy and was always, always dark.  I would dream I was lying on Bondi Beach and wake up in a terrible sweat because there was no air circulating.  We kept the lights on all day.

When my Dutchman’s friends offered to let us rent the first floor of their 2-story house, which they were planning to remodel, we leaped at the opportunity.  It was on Upper Street in Islington, and above ground. 

It was two unconnected rooms, a small toilet and a hallway.  No kitchen.  No shower.  No bathtub.  Knowing it would be remodeled shortly, we put a temporary hot plate in the front room, along with a rickety old table, a few chairs and an old couch and baptized it a kitchen, dining room and living room.  We named the second room a bedroom which we shared with mice, rats and spiders.  We used the tiny sink in the tiny bathroom for cooking, brushing our teeth, and sponging ourselves.  When we wanted to take a shower or bath, we scheduled it with the family upstairs.  There were six of them and two of us.  They had priority.  We put coins in the water heater and waited, naked and shivering for the water to heat up.  The family kept promising the remodel, but in the two years we lived there, it didn’t happen. 

During that time, I worked with the parents of the severely handicapped children.  Armed only with a BA and 9 months of research experience, I was clueless.  My sociology thesis had been on the ‘streaming’ of primary school kids (i.e. putting kids in A, B, C, or D streams for their entire primary school career based on how smart or dumb they were determined to be at six), and its detrimental effect on young children. My first professional job was studying voluntary organizations in Australia and whether they were making a difference in the poverty level of their clients. I knew nothing of the sorrows of parents with severely handicapped children.  I did end up producing, with a colleague, a pamphlet for the parents that told them point by point their rights. 

 

With support from my wonderful boss at the school for the disabled, I enrolled in the London School of Economics to get my Masters in Social Work, on a full scholarship.  Thank you Alda Hoskings!  I wish I had told you back then what a great mentor you were to me but I was young and ignorant.  You died shortly after I moved to Los Angeles.

As a social work student intern, my placement was at the Islington Area Office that dealt with the daily catastrophes of the locals’ lives.  Islington at that time was a working class neighborhood.  As a student intern I was supposedly supervised, but arrived in court alone to argue for taking a client’s children away from her.  Her two girls had complained to me that she never fed them.  They said they wanted to be taken away from her because she was always drunk, and they hated her violent boyfriend.  I prevailed in court, just 23 years old.  A month later, my supervisor sent me to visit the mother, alone.  She threw a lamp at me, and at the time, I felt she was justified.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I spent a lot of time at various pubs with the social worker team, where we debriefed daily. 

After work, I shopped for groceries at a variety of little market stands (there being no ‘supermarkets’ per se) and schlepped back groceries by bus.  My boyfriend and I ate out as often as we could afford it, mostly Indian food, since ‘bubble and squeak’, meat pies, and fish and chips wore very thin, very fast.  I remember Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.  We waved as the Queen was driven by Upper Street, right past our un-remodeled kitchen/dining room/living room.    

 

 

 

First day at LSE, I met a young man on a motorbike with whom I ended up having a wild affair. He was Winston Churchill’s nephew.  Seriously.  My relationship with my Dutchman was over.

I studied social work and economics at LSE with Professor Jalna Hanmer (who is still alive and still a radical theorist).  At LSE, I bonded with the Irish, Scots and Welsh students.  Professor Hanmer was American so I paid close attention to everything she said.  The way she explained the inequities in our society stuck with me all these decades later.  I told her that I wanted to return (having been absent for 16 years) to the land of my birth.  She said “having an MSW is a highly regarded degree in America and will help you to find a job.”  I earned my MSW and moved to Los Angeles.  I got a job within three months of my arrival.  Thank you Jalna!

The rest, as they say, is another blog.