Grace Swordy: Deborah what did you have for breakfast this morning?

Deborah Caulfield: I've had two hard boiled eggs and some mayonnaise and some watercress. Very unusual but I brought it with me. I wanted something easy that I didn't have to cook. Lots of protein and set me up for this.

GS: Nice and nutritious.

DC: Yes Yes I love eggs, bit overkill really.

Yuenya: This is for the Accentuate History of Place project, we're at the M Shed on the 5th of May. My name is Yuenya and Deborah can you state your name and spell it out for us?

DC: I will, well my first name is Deborah D-E-B-O-R-A-H and I have two surnames, confusingly, Actually I have three. So my official name that are I use on bank accounts and official documents is Sowerby spelt s o w e r b y. That's my married name but for quite a large aspect of my life, my artwork and my online stuff, I use my pre-married name which is Caulfield c a u l f i e l d. There’s an interesting … no single question has a straightforward answer. I was actually born with a different name entirely. I was born Cohen which is a Jewish name c o h e n which is on my birth certificate. When I was about 4, 3 or 4 for some reasons my parents, my dad, decided, I think he wanted to break away from his Jewish roots and all of that and change the name. So that's how I ended up with Caulfield.

Yuenya: Can you us the tell us your middle name for us?

DC: Well Deborah, again see nothing’s straightforward, Deborah is my middle name. My first name on my birth certificate is Olwen except it isn't Olwen it's Alwyn. It's a Welsh name, my mother’s choice. There are two versions, there’s the female version which is O-L-W-E-N and a male version which is A-L-W-Y-N, and she thought that was much nicer and gave that to me. Nobody could pronounce it, growing up, which has caused me all sorts of grief, and so aged 16 I just dropped it. I’ve been Deborah ever since. I think it's a very nice name, nice and Jewish as well.

Yuenya: Can you tell us when you were born and when?

DC: Ok I was born on the 11th November 1949 at Forest Gate Hospital in East London.

Yuenya: Could you provide us with the background for yourself?

DC: Well that's... so yeah, I was born in the east end of London. My parents … It's difficult to know where to start, I’ll just jump in. My parents were really young, my mother was, I think, 21 my dad would be about 23, when they had me. So I was their first child, and they both came from very large families. Working class families, lots of deprivation, and lots of, yeah poverty, I guess, particularly I think on my mother’s side. And they had me and they were - really, polite way of saying - ill equipped for parenthood, had very volatile relationship, lots of family conflict.

Obviously the Jewish aspect, although they weren't strict, they were Orthodox Jews (dad’s family) so it was not accepted, not acceptable really to marry outside the Jewish faith. Although one of my aunties, one of my dad's sisters, already had (married outside the faith). There was lots and lots of conflict, huge huge family split because of it. So that was what was going on and then, as I say, my parents had a very tempestuous, very volatile relationship. Lots of arguments and fights, physical fights. They both had quite strong tempers. My mother, particularly, had the kind of personality where she was constantly finding fault, finding life difficult. She wasn't the sort of person to sit down and talk about things. She would just scream and yell. So there’s lots of fighting, lots of punching, beating up and screaming, and at least once she ran away, took me up north to her mother's place on a train journey, I remember. So that was all - that was all going on. They both left school at 14. It was war time, so they had no youth really, no real education. They met at a factory where they both worked in London.

When I was 6 months old, that was one of my first illness, when I was six months old. It's a bit of a mystery as to what happened. I haven't actually gone into my medical records to see if there's anything there, but basically I had a year in hospital with some kind of kidney type of thing. My mother was really cagey about answering questions as to what happened but putting all the things together I suspect it was really... we're talking post-war, poor people, no refrigeration, not very good diet, really poor environment. When I did ask her what happened once, she said to me “It was probably something to do with that dog.” I said, “What dog?” And then she went off on some kind of, “They all said I shouldn't have a dog and your auntie Jean said ‘a dog for a dog's body’.” So I think, ‘Oh right, there's stuff there. But I never got a straightforward answer. (sound of cleaner in background). So I don't know, I do wonder actually whether she poisoned me, either deliberately or accidentally. But by all accounts I went from being a really healthy child to projectile vomiting and was in Kings College hospital actually for a whole year. Obviously I don't remember any of this, I've got photographs. So that was that. I don't really know what happened. I presumably came back, and lots more arguing and fighting, moving around, disruption and so on.

Then when I was 2 1/2 I fell down the stairs in my Jewish grandmothers’ house. It was a big, well, a three-storey house, it wasn’t big, but a three-storey Victorian terrace house. My grandmother lived downstairs. On the two top floors my Auntie Jean, one of my Dad’s sisters, lived with her family and children. So, apparently, we were visiting, I think my grandmother used to look after me quite a lot because later on it became quite clear that my mother, although she'd had children she didn't particularly want them around. So she’d palm them off as much as possible. So I think I was looked after as it were. Probably by anybody, but probably my grandmother. Anyway, so I was there on the first floor, on the middle floor playing with my cousin apparently, and I fell from the top. It was a straight staircase and went tumbling down the whole lot. And it seems that I fractured my spine, but it didn’t... it took a while for it to be diagnosed. I don't know how long, probably a few months. So it became clear that something serious had happened, and I had TB spine, tuberculosis. And at the time there was a lot of TB. I had uncles with TB. So I might have got it anyway, but anyway. So ended up with TB spine, in hospital, at the Black Notley hospital in Braintree in Essex not far from Chelmsford. It's not there now but there are still a few bits of it still online. It was one of the these, one of the many open-air hospitals at the time because TB was very very Common. So I had TB, went into the hospital, flat on my back, contraptions, and collars and stuff like that. I’ve got lots of photographs from my parents visiting me. I was discharged from there, cured. Went back home, within a few months I’d had a relapse and was really sick again. My spine had collapsed and I could barely sit up, let alone stand up and walk. I've got some really brilliant photographs actually, horrendous, horrific photographs of me looking really quite wasted but smiling.

And so I was sent to, this is 1955 and I was 5 years old, that's when I was sent to Chailey Heritage, in the summer of 1955. And was put on a plaster bed it was called, and stayed in bed for another two and a half years or so. I’m not sure what to say about that really. I mean, basically, Chailey Heritage, you know, at the time it was a massive, massive institution. It was probably mid 50s, its heyday, if you could use the word heyday. It's all there on the net, it was on three sites. It had a hospital site, it had a girls’ site and a boys’ site I think, effectively. Anyway, I was on a hospital ward. There were quite a few wards. There were three hospital wards, four wards, no, there was a babies ward, a toddlers ward, a boys ward, and above the boys ward on the first floor was another ward, which is where I was.

13:40 (recording breaks)

GC: This is the second part of the interview with Deborah Corfield. I'm the interviewer Grace Swordy. It is the 11th of May 2018 and we're recording for the Accentuate History of Place project. So Deborah we are going to pick up where we left off last Saturday so if you wouldn't mind, could you tell me a bit more about your working life in your 20s and what you are doing and what that was like for you?

DC: Well I had no thoughts, no concept of a career. I really just bumbled along. Had never had any career guidance. It’s really strange actually, I don't remember anybody talking to me about ‘What would you like to do with your life’. I was really conscious that I'd come from, my parents were very working class, and by the time I left Chailey in July 1966 things were really difficult at home. I had two younger... a brother and sister. My dad was well into MS. He was a full-time wheelchair user and he was really struggling to hang on to his job which was a very physical job at Fords. And that was what dominated home life really, was money.

GC: So were you motivated to find a job that would pay you well?

DC: So I was just really conscious and I was always conscious growing up that my parents didn't have much money. So I just kind of absorbed that, so it was money and work. We didn't have conversations about it and certainly at Chailey... when I think back, I’m sure they don't do that now, but it was all or nothing, you were at Chailey and everything was decided. There was no freedom, it was a routine. And then suddenly none of that mattered anymore. You were going to leave and that was that, that was the end of that and off you go. I'm sure there were a few people who thought about ‘How is she going to get on.’ But they certainly didn't understand what was going on inside me, which was a lot of angst basically and fear. So, I did get this place at Art School and I think looking back everybody imagined that everything would fall into place and at any point in my life when things might have fallen into place the opposite happened. Things generally fell apart. I somehow pick myself up and carried on again.

GC: Did you expect to work in the arts?

DC: I didn't. I didn't expect anything. I really was a rabbit in the headlights, sort of just literally struggling to keep going. Not so much keep going but survive, just coping literally minute by minute. So I did this year at college and in many ways... I started it then, I had to stop because I was too exhausted I was literally ill with the travelling. Then my mother argued for taxis. She wasn't a particularly motherly mother, but she did realise that I was stretched physically. I didn't really know what that meant because, you know Chailey was a small place and I was so cosseted and so carefully watched over in a sort of hands-off sort of way. That suddenly to be totally responsible for myself was really hard. So my mother went to the local authority and had arguments with them and eventually they paid for taxis. Now you think that's a pretty standard expectation, but then it wasn't. She had to fight for that. Because I wanted to be able to go on public transport, because of the sense of freedom that it gave me. So we had a taxi to the station, home end, and then a taxi from the station to college, and that lasted for probably two terms, and it was exactly what I needed. It was a really good mix. But I felt different. Some people made comments about ‘Oh she's arriving in a taxi’. I didn't know how to respond I just pretended I didn't hear. There was no way I was going to get into a conversation, so there was always that. In fact probably it’s been an ongoing thing that people are not going to know about me, they are not going to understand and I'm not going to tell them. So they're just going to have to… I’m going to have to put up with people coming to the wrong conclusions and they're going to have to put up with the fact that I'm a bit odd. But that flexibility... by the summer term I guess I built up my strength and I said I don't want a taxi anymore. I wanted to be like everybody else.

GC: At that point did you have an understanding that the taxi was something that was enabling for you?

DC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be normal, like everybody else. I didn't want to stand out but I really couldn't cope. Fatigue I think has been one of the main things I've had to cope with. Just the fact that I got really, really tired and then would get typically a cold or something in the winter and it would last straight through until past Easter. I would just get drained, but didn't know that's what was happening. I have to hand it to my mother, she could see that that is what it was. And sorted that out for me. But I didn't really know, it's hard to participate, it was just surviving. It was the relationships that were so difficult. The fear that people wouldn't like me, the fear that people would discover that I was different. It was just a nightmare really and then I was getting into... well then my dad died in 1968.

GC When you were still...?

DC When I was at college. And that I guessed changed everything at home. My mother went bananas. For her it was freedom, freedom to flirt and live her life and she pretty much decided then it was her time to enjoy herself. Eventually I left, went to London, eventually scraped a few pounds together, renting a bedsit in North London. It was obvious I needed to get a job. It never entered my head that I wouldn't get a job. There were certain things I wouldn't do. I wouldn't work in a bank and wouldn't work in insurance company. And I think I told myself it's because you were sitting there all day in silence writing things on piece of paper, particularly numbers, which I didn't particularly like, numbers. But anyway, I spent two or three days literally pounding the streets, answering adverts, making phone calls, on and off tubes and buses, going for interviews, going to employment agencies. Really, really hard work and then eventually I found a job in a shop. A very small fabric and haberdashers shop off Oxford Street. I got the job, not particularly good money but it was a job. I absolutely loved it. I loved it because - I was on my feet all day that was hard but actually better than sitting down all day, it turned out. And there were some days when I literally didn't know how I was keeping going. We didn't even have a staffroom. You just went out at lunch time, I was on my feet from 9 till 5:30. Then I kind of met my husband. I knew him because he had been at Chailey, he was 6 years older than me. (I was aware, that he was Head Boy. He’d had that swanky Elvis lookalike kind of thing) and then through a mutual friend, because we had kept in touch, a few of us. I had two friends in London which is really how I ended up in London. If they’d lived somewhere else I probably would have gone there. So we’d kept in touch. Chailey, it still does, at the time had a tradition of annual… what they call old scholars days, reunions. That was a time when the older ones of us who were still there met up with those who'd recently left. We kept in contact,.

To cut a long story short, I met Ian and we got married in 1970 and for me it was ‘Thank goodness, now I’m anchored down and I'm not going to end up being an unmarried mother’. Which was my big fear and not altogether unlikely, to be honest. Because I had no sense of boundaries. No sense of, ‘This is the sort of person I want to be, so I’ll do this rather than that’. And my friend, who I spent a lot of time with, she’d been at Chailey, she’d been sexually abused by her father. It was common knowledge, can you imagine? We all knew. And her father was horrible. He was a really nasty bully of a man. And this friend of mine was a really lovely person but had really quite loose morals. She suggested that a good way to meet some boys and have drinks bought for you would be to stand outside, I think it was Piccadilly Station, in Piccadilly Circus, ‘You just stand there’ she said and it's only a question of time before you get picked up. Just imagine, so of course this is what happened.

GC: Was it a fun time of fife?

DC: Well obviously it was quite exciting I was 18/19 And it was like ‘Wow ok we’ll do that then’. I didn't have a better idea. She was ,I suppose, I wouldn't have used the phrase, I regarded her as streetwise and street was the word. That’s where she lived most of her life was on the streets. There was one lost night, we went somewhere I can't remember where to this day, I was feeling that I was in danger, that I was at risk, that phrase wouldn't have entered my head, but that's how I was feeling. I was hanging around. It just felt like this is not going to go anywhere good. So anyway, I met my husband and that instantly, that anchored me down.

GC: Was he aware of that as well? How did your relationship form with your husband?

DC: I think two disabled people. Both Ex-Chailey, as it turned out, he had all his hang-ups. And I think getting a girlfriend, settling down, it's what every young person wants. He actually had done well. He’d gone to teacher training college and had gone into computing right at the beginning. He was doing programming and systems analysis and he wore a suit to work and worked for the Hospital Computer Centre. So he was really in the world. He had a life and he shared a flat with one of his work colleagues.

That was... so, I had my job and it was all really interesting and it was self-contained. It was a small company, it was a small shop, a really small shop and looking back it was safe. I met some nice people in London, really cosmopolitan. Looking back that really suited me, that variety of people. Someone from Ghana, someone from France, someone from Portugal you know it was London I really loved all that. It was a really really happy time, I had a little bit of cash.

My ex-husband was a complete control freak about money, kept accounts, kept daily in his little notebook. I was really looked after but not constrained, providing I did what I was supposed to do, but that emerged later. So typically, I look back and I can't think … in that year that I worked in that shop, it must have rained but I can't remember it, because in my mind it's just sunshine, and the emerging in my lunch hour and going down to Selfridges or going over to John Lewis. All the shops, and going to Bond Street and for the next pretty much six or seven years was working around the West End in one way or another. I have great affection for it. So I did that, haberdashery and fabrics and mail-orders. A good mix of practical, social and a bit of numbers because we didn't have automatic cash register you had to add everything up with a 36 and 2/3 percent purchase tax. It was a really good mix for me. A very good way of learning to be in the real world and leaving Chailey behind and meeting other people.

GS: In terms of the future did you have an aim or something you were working towards?

DC: I wish I had because what drove me and which has always driven me and it annoys me when I think about it. Which is ‘I'm sure there's something more’ I'm sure there's something, ‘ok I've done this now what else is there?’. That's really what drove me, probably boredom, just always wanted something else. What else is there, that kind of ‘ok that's quite good, maybe there's something else now’. But never kind of consciously thinking of anything like progress. But I guess that was it really, just wanting more interesting, more responsibility. And also just meeting people, becoming more aware of what was out there, what was possible. So constantly overreaching and never … I can't think of a single time where I thought, ‘Oh this will do, this is a nice cushy number’, because for me a cushy number meant utterly boring. I didn't know that. I think if I knew, looking back, about the sort of person I've been, ‘Oh I'm the sort of person who gets bored’…

So we got married and my ex got a new job and was asked to go and work abroad. It was an international systems program company. Systems analysis, systems design. Looking back, he wasn't bothered about getting married, I think he just wanted a girlfriend, wanted regular sex you know, didn't want all the other stuff. But the company would pay for me to go abroad but only if we were married. So we got married and it was a really dismal stingy, miserable wedding to be honest. In Camden, Haverstock Hill. We lived in Kilburn, it was Haverstock Hill registry office, really sad little occasion. His mother couldn't come because she was in hospital . She had really bad rheumatoid arthritis and was having a spell in hospital. It's one of the biggest sadnesses, regrets of my life, that we didn't wait. There was no reason to get married then, it was just Ian saying ‘Oh well if we’re going to do it, we should to do it now, then.’ She was in hospital and she didn't say, ‘Oh can't you wait?’. Anyway we didn't, we had a weekend in Blackpool because that's where his parents lived up there, Lytham St Annes and we had a weekend in Blackpool and we both went back to work on the Monday. What I remember about that was they had a collection at work, I had an ironing board . I think I must have asked for an ironing board as a wedding present and I remember it was quite a joke, people saying, ‘Oh I can’t imagine you doing ironing and housework.’ And I was thinking, ‘that's all I've been doing since I was 13, you have no idea.’ My mother was a real slave driver. We all had to do the housework, shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and fetching and the carrying. That was part of work, it was part of helping my parents, it was the one thing I could do. I didn't quite know what they all meant. ‘What do you think? who’s going to do it then?’. I don't know if that was a class thing, I have no idea. But mostly when I became aware that people are having thoughts about me I would just shut it down quickly I didn’t want to encourage people to think about me, find out things.

GC: Were you really close to people at that time?

DC: No, this has been a theme, that distance, kind of... I didn't know how to and I didn't want to... I guess I was frightened of people. People seem to be really overpowering and hard to keep them away from me, and the therapist now is saying, ‘Well, no wonder, it's a safety thing’. And I think that started long before I went Chailey because my parents were so, so violent. Particularly my mother, so violent. Shouting in your face kind of thing and so angry, I guess that's where that came from. And I imagine people have found me contradictory because I'm really sociable and outgoing. But what I think, what happens is they misconstrue that and they expect that that will follow through, but it doesn't, I just shut down.

So there’s been loads and loads of occasions where people have got very friendly with me and I've just got really angry with them and ended up hating them, partly because I found them boring. I guess I was not really aware of how I was coming across, being this kind of smiley friendly person. Pretty contradictory and probably dishonest really. I guess I wanted people to like me but I didn't really know what I was doing. So anyway we got married, we got a flat.

GC: And was that in North London as well?

DC: Yeah yeah, it was a converted house and we literally moved from flat A to flat B across the landing, which was nice. He got this job and went to Finland, in Helsinki. I had no idea what to do. That was quite hard because suddenly I was on my own.

GC: Were you not working?

DC: No, I gave up my job. Looking back, Ian was very much… I looked up to him. Somebody who knew how to do it. He was sorted, he was earning good money. He was obviously more intelligent than me, cleverer than me. So whatever Ian was doing must be right. To be honest … We were away probably a good two and a half months, a couple of months. I gave up the job and by then I was fed up with it anyway. To be honest I was just fed up, I was bored with it. So we left, went to Finland came back just before Christmas and then immediately after Christmas, I went to look for another job. Although I don't think Ian was particularly putting much pressure on me, because compared with the money that he was earning it was just pocket money, it was peanuts. It was barely £11 a week. It was just what one did. You kind of got a job, I guess I did like... I wanted to have a job. Didn't think about should I or shouldn't I, of course I did. But thinking about it, he didn't put a huge amount of pressure on me, but there was an expectation. And I got a job in a market research company, it was all done on index cards. I had no idea what I was doing, hadn’t got a clue about it, and after few more weeks for some reason I was made redundant, we were all made redundant. That was, again, off Oxford Street. I went job hunting again, this time it was an office and it was at Debenhams central buying office in the West End, that was retail. I was some kind of Clark. I answered the phone and wrote things down, it all seemed really quite pointless. Compared to the shop which is all about people and was transactional and it was stuff, haberdashery and people were making things. Working in an office was really abstract and boring. It was in the hardware department, so it was all about lawn mowers and fridges. I had no interest, but somehow, I stayed there for two years and by then I'd started drawing again, I picked up drawing. I used to go out in my lunch hour actually, sitting in various squares around London’s West End and draw. And after work I started going to galleries. I’d walk through the West End and go to what was the Museum of Mankind or the Royal Academy. When I think about it, I just sort of drifted into that, I got very interested again. And actually Ian was really encouraging and somehow or other I decided to go back to Art School.

GC: How old were you then?

DC: I was about 22. I wasn't enjoying my work. When I was working for Debenhams one of the display managers - it was a strange structure in a place - he found out that I could draw and he asked me if I could draw the displays so he could send them to his various managers and say ‘This is how I want it done’. That's how I got into it, that's how I realised, ‘Oh yeah, I really can draw’. So that's how that happened. I thought maybe I could do more of this, this is quite nice I'm enjoying this, I’d quite like to do more of that. Anyway, so I ended up looking at art schools and I was still, even then, held back by my lack of O levels. Which was a real shame because if I’d had another couple of years at Chailey … because after I left they changed it so you stayed on until you were 18. But then it was, 16 ‘Out,’ no discussion. If I'd had another couple of years I think I could have got ... I did get two, got Art and English, I got good grades as well but everything else was just a flop. Geography, history, maths, there’s no chance. But I think if I’d stayed on… So, I was held at back by lack of O Levels, and they all wanted 5 O levels. So I ended up at this easy to get into place in Hammersmith, ‘Hammersmith College of Art and Building’ it was called, that later merged with Chelsea School of Art in the final year. I had three years there and that was lovely, but you know still quite stressful.

Roundabout towards the end of the first year things in the marriage had always been difficult, we’d had lots of arguments, I would get really upset with Ian. Dissatisfied, loads of fights and generally I was aware that I was, I didn't say it at the time, but I was obviously depressed. I felt wrong. I was having a lot of pain, a lot of neck pain, a lot of back pain. I wasn't sleeping. I had headaches. The GP has prescribed me some anti-depressants so I was beginning to think that I was quite mad, that there was something seriously wrong with me. So, I didn't want to go to my GP because I didn't like him and he gave me these Mogadon antidepressants which I think have now a really bad reputation. I got some really strange side effects that I didn't like. My sleeping was all over the place, then he prescribed me some sleeping tablets and I was getting into a right mess, not sleeping through the night, waking up in the morning really tired, thinking ‘I’ll take a sleeping tablet’. It was getting really out of hand’.

GC: He didn't give you anything for the pain itself?

DC: I probably didn't even mention my back pain. It was all in my head and he just thought I could do with some antidepressants. I used to listen to Capital radio a lot, which in those days had just started. They used to have regular phone-ins on various sorts of things, health issues. A woman called Anna Raeburn, who nobody has ever heard of, fantastic journalist, who was very open about sex and stuff. And because of all the adverts I became aware that there were various agencies, voluntary agencies, drop-ins for people with issues, and all I knew was the name of an organisation called Release which actually is a drug organisation. I'm not sure if it’s still there, it was a drop-in. I decided that I would go to this organisation at Ladbroke Grove, something like that. and I walked in one day and said: ‘I don't know why I'm here, but something is wrong’. And a lovely woman, I think she was just a volunteer, a psychotherapist of some kind, interviewed me for quite a while, seemed like a long time, probably about an hour. And said: ‘My god, no wonder’. And she got me to the Maudsley Hospital. She got me an appointment at the Maudsley Hospital.

GC: And you told her about your back pain and your neck pain?

DC: No, for me it was all, I was just mad. I was just unhappy and in a mess. I just felt in a mess. But yeah there were physical things, because I remember her saying it would be good to talk about it, to sort out what's physical and what's not, what's body, what's mind. So, I must have mentioned it because somehow or other I've got the idea that I’d had this strange life and that was probably something to do with why I wasn't feeling that I could manage life and cope with people. I was very, at the time, really angry, really angry with my mother. Really, really angry with my mother.

GC: Did you see her much?

DC: Not really, every few months. But we would be in touch a lot by phone. So, there was still that pull there, that tension there. She was really demanding, she wouldn't let me go so it was difficult, but I imagine, I think what happened was I was sensing that in my social relationships something wasn't right. I didn't feel I connected with people, probably felt that people didn't like me. Just the whole business of different types of relationships and I think there was probably... I was feeling conflicted about wanting to immerse myself in a whole range of relationships and see people outside of my marriage. Just realising I couldn't, so in many ways I was quite lonely and disconnected. So I got this appointment at the Maudsley and had an assessment, a couple of assessments, and ended up going to psychotherapy. It was group therapy. It was classic group therapy where people talk about whatever they want to talk about. The therapist hardly says anything, just makes these little, just sits there looking down, looking at his lap with his hands folded and people just talk or not, and occasionally he would lift his head and say something and then go back down again. It's really quite funny looking back.

GC: Did you find it useful?

DC: Was it useful, was it helpful? I think it was. Mostly because the therapist who was absolutely lovely, really lovely, really kind of Bohemian, young, newly qualified. He became a big shot psychiatric consultant in somewhere or other. What I got from that, what I remember thinking at the time and immediately afterwards, it gave me a vocabulary which is an odd thing to say, but I think it was a way of thinking about myself and what had happened. I guess there was a context, it gave that space to consider that things had happened to me that contributed... I guess more self-awareness. But one thing it actually got me was a sense of responsibility for turning up. Sounds really odd, because they're really big on showing up and on time. So I had a really clear sense of that but the biggest thing that I remember at the time, because I would go on about ‘Oh I'm a bad person, I'm horrible, you know, the way I behaved they should send for the police’. I guess to be honest I was getting these messages from my ex-husband who was being very critical. I had chosen someone who was effectively like my mother, who felt better by being horrible to somebody else or putting somebody else down so he did put me down a lot.

GC: How did he feel about you going to the therapy, to this group? Did he understand?

DC: I think he was completely neutral about it probably. No, actually thinking about it, because I was the one who had a problem and that continued, that was a theme throughout my marriage. ‘There isn't a problem Debbie unless you say there's a problem, then there's a problem’. For him it was all my fault anyway. The reason we were arguing, shouting, not getting on, it was all down to me. So yeah, go off and, as the GP had said, become a better person. That’s what the GP said, ‘If you take these tablets you will become a better person’. So I was just, I just wanted to be a good person. Clearly, if I was getting in tempers and strops then there was something fundamentally wrong with me and I needed to learn how to behave properly so I think that's what I was doing. The clearest, biggest thing I got out of it, and it was probably a good two, two and a half years weekly sessions at the Maudsley, and the group members changed but by and large they stayed the same. So the biggest thing was that, ‘Oh I can decide how I want to be.’ That was a really big revelation, huge. It was just a beginning, I could change. I could be what I wanted to be and I could change. I wasn't this fixed person. So that was really big and really important but there were still secrets. I didn't like to tell anybody that I went to psychotherapy. I called it an encounter group because encounter groups were quite big at the beginning of the ‘70s and I'd heard this phrase, and I told everybody that's what I was doing. I thought that was really a bit hippy, you know.

GC: But you saw it as a positive thing that was maybe going to affect your life?

DC: Completely, absolutely. Although there was an element of, ‘Where's this going, what is it doing’. It seemed to fizzle out. It was really open ended. I remember that we were not encouraged, in fact we were fairly discouraged from meeting each other outside of the group, but we did because there were some quite strong, some strong characters, personalities. I remember finding it difficult. There was kind of a duality, a kind of conflict, ‘oh this’ I was thinking, ‘oh this is nice’ but also thinking I'm not liking this.

GC: You mean outside of the group?

DC: Yeah meeting up at the pub. I was always aware I was holding back. I wasn't who they thought I was. I wasn't being authentic and that was a necessity… because that’s still the case, there’s still a bit of me that is hidden and, I guess, repressed. And finding other people really scary and having to manage all of that. Just that feeling they were going to do something to me and usually they did. People got cross, got pissed off with me, disagreed with me or found me annoying. But there was one person that I became really good friends with, kind of, that we clicked and actually getting to know her through psychotherapy was really important because she talked about how she felt and had had a completely different upbringing. I remember thinking how interesting that was that she was having similar thoughts and feelings about people and similar difficulties but had had what seemed to me a normal upbringing, hadn’t gone to Chailey, hadn’t had all that medical stuff. And I thought this is really significant here. So, it was things like that that helped me to feel that maybe I wasn't that different, but I always felt different. So, we got on, but then the group finished and whatever it was that kind of connected us sort of fell away. So I didn't see any more of her. And by then art school was coming to an end, with no real conclusion.

GC: You didn't know what you wanted to do?

DC: There was no conclusion, it was, so that's the end of those three years, what now, what will I do? What we did was move from a flat in North London to a house in South London because my ex-husband's job had changed . So we were on the move. We had had really bad problems with sound proofing in our flat and it was a nightmare so we needed to move. College came to an end and we moved down to Morden into a house which I just thought was wonderful. It was, you know, really exciting, I was really pleased about it. Although as soon as though we were married, which by now was getting on for six years, so it’s 1976, one of the first things Ian had done was march me off to the family planning clinic to go onto the birth control pill, which had just come out. So I never knew, as well, what effect that was having on me, really didn't know. And he insisted ‘We’re not having children’. But friends of his, particular people that we knew, were having children. So I got the idea, and I was going home every so often to various family weddings, cousins were getting married and having children. And I remember thinking that ‘Wouldn't it be nice to be part of a family, that would be really nice.’ So I was thinking that way and people I knew of my age and older were having children. So anyway, the idea formed in my mind and my ex-husband was completely against it ‘There's no logical reason to have children, Debbie’ he said.

GC: No logical reason?

DC: That's what he said: ‘No logical reason at all’. And I remember thinking, ‘Then what is the point in being married to you?’ I didn't say it but that was my thinking. So then, it was, ‘If I'm not married to you then what the hell is going to happen to me?’ I was going to have to have children otherwise there's no point in being married, and if there's no point in being married then I don't have a life anyway. It was decided, and then of course Ian being Ian, it became his decision and his project. And he said if we’re going to have children then we need to get some genetic counselling. He had spina bifida, it was quite mild spina bifida but it's quite a significant disability. We knew at the time that it was inherited, so off we went for genetic counselling which was rubbish really. It turned out there was a 3% risk.

GC: That it could be passed on?

DC: Yeah. We never talked about it because Ian didn't talk about anything. I'm horrified when I think about it. There was this assumption ‘Yes we'll go ahead’ ‘Jolly good’ ‘But what can we do?’ ‘They can do scanning’ Ultrasound was really new, quite pioneering and carried a risk. And amniocentesis. But obviously this is what we’ve got to do. So we did all of that and I remember going to antenatal and them saying ‘Oh my god we've got no idea what's going to happen to you’ because of my spine. I had several vertebrae fused, a serious curvature. They had no idea, but nobody had any particular reason for thinking something awful was going to happen, I was just an unknown quantity. And I actually had a ridiculously normal pregnancy, with no blood pressure issues, no nothing, just a lack of space. Lots of heartburn. Perfectly normal, perfect delivery, perfectly healthy daughter.

GC: Were you worried at the time?

DC: No. Not in the slightest. I was anxious but then I was always anxious anyway. The thing I was really anxious about was being a good mother. I had read quite a lot of child psychology. I've forgotten this until quite recently. I’d read quite a lot of child psychology books. It was part of my way of trying to figure out about myself and the impact of what had happened. So by then I knew about parenting, I knew about separation. I wasn’t a big fan of Spock. I read round it all. I knew that nothing was inevitable, that you could do it well. You could be a good… you know it was a job, you could do it well, you could do it badly, you can do it conscientiously and of course I was going to do it the best that I could.

My biggest fear was that I wouldn't love my baby. I think because I had not been loved, quite clearly I hadn't and not just me, my brother and my sister hadn't been loved. I hadn't seen much of that, so there was a big doubt as to whether I would. But I had some faith that I probably would and I wanted to. I wanted that, so of course when she arrived, she was absolutely delicious. I fell in love. Absolutely besotted, totally besotted. I thought she was completely delightful. It was hard work and scary but that was it, that was my job then. It was just a question of doing it as well as possible and keeping up with her. Just finding her completely, just so interesting and exciting but at the same time being scared that something awful is going to happen to her. That I would lose her, that I would cause her harm. Just a general sense that something bad is going to happen. That was how I've lived my life and I still have that. Now I recognise it as a thing that is not connected with anything that's going on. It will just suddenly... I will think ‘Oh my god’. There's a panic, a terrible panic. Because there is nothing going on in my life. I don't have to do anything now, and yet it's still happening. So clearly, I can see, it just flares up and I just have to... and there was that... You know I was a mother, my whole life was with other mothers and finding my ex-husband completely pointless and superfluous. It was really awful.

GC: Was he part of your daughter's life in those years?

DC: Not really. He was very distant. He was kind of interested because he had to be, but he wasn't that bothered to be honest. But anyway of course we had to have another one because there's no point in just having one, that would be silly. And so around about the 18-month mark ‘we’ decided that we would have number two and got pregnant really really quickly and again have a ridiculously… uncomfortable pregnancy, but perfectly normal, perfectly normal delivery really quick, quick short labour. And so, my son was born two and a half years after my daughter and then life did change because he was really difficult. He was big, he was difficult feeding, difficult sleeping, so we didn't get a full night's sleep for a whole year. It was a nightmare to be honest. I had really overstretched, hadn’t anticipated being so tired. And Katherine waking up at five o’clock in the morning. So in a real sense it was real teamwork. We didn't talk about things, but he just slotted in did what he could. He was really, really good. And so most of time I just had this baby attached to me and again, you know, he had nothing going for him. He was bald, he was blotchy, he was spotty, he was tense. Not like Katherine who was just… probably because the pethidine. I had no gas and air no nothing with him because I was out in the corridor. He was very vocal, very physical. Being quite big I found him really difficult. But I absolutely adored him and he was really tactile. Whereas Katherine was really intellectual and kind of distant and would look at you sideways, ‘Who the hell are you’. Whereas Sam was clingy and huggy and kissy and just needy, and just what I needed as well really. So, he was very difficult, and then he moved early and he crawled early, and he walked at 10 months and he was a complete nightmare and he’s been a complete nightmare, until about 2 years ago, to be honest. But we were just completely besotted with him. I’ve got these two opposite children but they kind of anchored me and really was a way of me, I guess, forcing me to... I guess they motivated me. I had responsibility to them so I became quite brave I think. I guess I found strength and resources through having them.

GC: Was it physically difficult?

DC: Well I had really easy pregnancies but throughout those I was tired and tiredness had been the main theme. Certainly the first 14 weeks of both pregnancies were really hard. So I didn't have morning sickness but I felt sick and I couldn't eat or drink, and went off my food. In both pregnancies I lost weight. I gave birth and I was lighter than I‘d started, and needed to sleep. Although Ian was really good he found it really difficult when I slept and got really angry and gave me time limits. So I would say ‘I'm going to have to go to sleep. I’m just going to have to go to sleep’. And Ian would say, ‘OK well I'm going to call you at such and such a time.’ Because he really couldn't bear me being in bed during the day. The tiredness is just... although that kind of wore off. And I did all the breastfeeding stuff, that got better. And then when I got pregnant with Sam it came with it came with absolute a vengeance. I could only drink water really.

I was just a wreck. I was a complete physical wreck and there was one point just before Sam was walking I had really bad pain and ended up… I went to the hospital and basically they said we can't see anything wrong, what the reason for the pain is. It was obvious all that lifting and fetching and carrying stuff. But with him, by three or four months he was too big really for me to carry, but I did. But then I hurt my back, I could hardly do anything. I’d obviously strained my back. That was a bit of a scare. So, from that point he had to do everything. He would climb into the car. But he was a really physical, really strong little boy that wanted to do everything himself. He wanted to do everything himself, so get himself into the car, get himself up into the car seat, because I couldn’t I put him anywhere. He managed to climb out of his cot really early so we didn't bother with the cot sides, forget all that.

So yeah physically I really, really pushed myself hard. Then all those childhood years, I was constantly getting ear infections and eye infections and flu on a regular basis. So, it was really really hard and then, we were living in South London in this 30s house that was our little house. Katherine went to nursery and then she started school and of course she did really well and Sam was going to playgroup and I thought ‘This is my life’ and met some people and I’d joined a book group.

GC: You weren’t working?

DC: I wasn’t. I didn't want to. This was my job. I had no thoughts about that because this was my job and I was really conscientious, very conscientious. I had the Penelope Leach book. Was very interested in their development. It was all serious stuff, decisions to be made. Their health and wellbeing, it was a lot to think about. I didn't have any room for anything else. I was doing a little bit of drawing here and there. Gave up completely the idea of being an artist because I didn't have time, this was my job. So, Katherine was just coming up to five, four and a halfish and Sam was two. Then Ian announced that we were moving because his head office where he worked was relocating and it was either get a new job or move, and they were giving a very generous relocation package. I was devastated. I was absolutely devastated and tried to argue that we shouldn't move. I didn't want to move. And then he got ill round about the October (1983) with some mysterious abdominal thing. He woke up one morning absolutely writhing in agony and that was quite scary. An ambulance, he went to hospital. Lots of investigation. There wasn't really anything. It was some sort of intestinal thing probably linked to his spina bifida. But it was quite scary. He lost quite a lot of weight he was in hospital for quite a while, was seriously dehydrated. And then Sam… Katherine was fine about it because she could articulate everything. If she couldn't talk about it she would draw a picture about it, so you could always engage with her. Whereas Sam didn't talk, whereas she was speaking very early on. Absolutely couldn't wait to talk, was really verbal. Sam wasn't verbal. He could understand things and he had the odd word but didn't speak. So, he reacted quite badly to Ian suddenly not being there. Anyway, but that was hard to cope with, that was really hard to cope with. The doctors kept saying ‘We don't know what it is’. And I was imagining the worst because that's what I do, I imagine the worst. Also friends were really good. I had some good friends who were very helpful, lots of advice. My instinct, my feeling was that the kids needed to go and see where their dad is, ‘this is ridiculous’. And everyone saying ‘No (intake of breath), no you can't do that, you can't let them see him.’ Because he had lots of things attached to him and he was a mess and I'd talk to him on the phone and he was ‘No it's not a good idea’. And I knew they were all wrong, Come on, you’re in hospital. It didn't make sense. Anyway, I took them down there in the car, that was hard work. Two under-fives in the car and buggies. Anyway, Katherine was completely fascinated and wanted to have a good look at his scar and everything. And Sam, you wouldn't know that anything was going on in his head but he was much happier now that he could see Ian, see where he was. So I felt really pleased about that and he was noticeably less stressed. Just kept on being his usual self and into everything. It was such a shock, I remember thinking, this whole move thing, it put it all into perspective. And I just thought I’m just going to have to get on with it. We put the house on the market and I was showing people around but inside I was thinking, and I remember saying to Ian, ‘Why am I showing people my house’. I think about it now, and it was really devastating, it wasn't just the house, it was the neighbours, Katherine’s school, it was everything.

GC: And Ian was happy about the move?

DC: I don't think... it was just what was going to happen. For him it was the right thing to do, it wasn't even the right thing, it was going to happen. It’s only now I realise that it was his decision based on what was good for him. But I think he was the breadwinner, we were just going to have to move. Dreadful house hunting with two small children. The whole thing really was a horrible period. Packing up, moving, saying goodbye. I was grief stricken, absolutely grief stricken. The decision about which house was a weird decision. All our decisions were weird. Deep down inside me I think that I didn't have a right to preferences, it was all down to him. He felt we were making joint decisions. He maintained we were making joint sessions but I just gave in. So, we ended up in this house, big house, big modern house that had been extended, loads of rooms, in Woodley which is just the other side of Reading in this suburb of Reading. I didn't know a soul. Katherine didn't have school because they had a completely different system. I had them both at home, they were fighting, it rained for six weeks. Ian was leaving really early because the firm hadn't quite moved, so he was going back to Wandsworth. The whole thing was a nightmare. But I had a really nice friendly neighbour who was very well connected in the community. And I remember she introduced herself and said, look we’re here whenever. So, I think it was probably after about 10 days I put a note through her door. I said ‘I'm missing my old friends, I could do with some new ones.’

And that's when things took off. She was, ‘Right there’s this you can go to, and that you can go to, there’s the library, there's that, there's that’. So, I decided, I just gradually sorted things out. The hardest thing was that there was no school, no nothing. Because she worked in this playgroup, she helped to run a playgroup, which was all the thing then. I managed to get Katherine in a playgroup once or twice a week, she’d been going to nursery class, but anyway. She went to playgroup which was the other side of the park, so we could walk there. I managed to get Sam in there and he promptly ran away. He walked out. He just decided he wanted to be home. That was the thing, he was continually running away from school, coming home.

I remember at the time thinking, in the first few months, I could feel something that changed in me, that I was never going to be the same again and I was always going to be quite hard. I don't know what or how things would have developed, how I would have developed, but for suddenly to cut it all off like that. I realised, ‘I've got to be, I have to be really hard-nosed about this. None of this means anything to me and I don’t give a shit about this house.’ The house was just bricks-and-mortar, I thought. I'm never going to get attached to a house again and I never have. It was quite a conscious thing. It was a mechanism, it was a coping thing. I'm just going to have to get on with it as though I care. It's got to be done. Eventually things fell into place, they went to school and that's when things really start to get hard. But I got very involved with the peace movement - it was the mid ‘80s, the arms race. Just before leaving Morden, around about 1983 I had, because of the nuclear arms build-up and the 4-Minute Warning, it was really really real. I thought ‘Oh my god I've just got these two children and you're about to blow the world up.’

GC: Were you going to meetings?

DC: Initially, I just joined CND, got the newsletters. So when I move to Woodley absolutely, started the peace group and it just built up from there. And that became my life the next 10 years, really was involvement with CND. I was out several nights a week, campaigning and demonstrating, everything. That's where I kind of developed politically. And I was always aware, I was worried that I might be very overprotective, that the children could become my life. I was thinking ‘That wouldn't be a good idea.’ And that was probably me reasoning, a bit of reverse psychology. It was me thinking there's got to be more to life than children. But that's not how I had read it in my head. It was, it wouldn't be good for the kids to just have a mother who was doing housework type stuff. So probably quite a good idea if I had another interest and ... And because I really enjoyed that. I got a lot of skills, a lot of press work, did lots of leaflets, did everything that I could. Started running workshops, going to CND conferences. Really finding out about getting things done. There was a point where, coming up to about 8 years if that, because it was Reading and quite smallish, a counter culture, I got involved in other organisations, Women's centre, and became a real community activist and went to things, got interested in running organisations. The whole organisational thing, got very interested in that. Then decided ‘well perhaps I could do it as a job’. So I was thinking a job would be a good thing particularly by then, thinking ‘This marriage, I just need to get out of this, I need to earn my own living. I'm going to have to support myself, and I need to start thinking about how I'm going to do that’. And so I remember saying to Ian ‘I need to get a job’ and he said ‘Well you can work in Waitrose’ which I found really insulting. I said ‘I can't do that. I can't do physical stuff. I'm not going to be able to do that’. And I remember thinking I'm going to have to use my brain and I didn't feel there's enough going on in there, didn’t feel I had the skills. So I decided I needed to get back into education and I had been thinking for quite a few years on and off about going to university. Because by then you could pretty much.

Anyway I had this idea and couldn't decide what to do and then I found a youth and community degree course at Reading University. And I thought ‘Well that sounds really good, I'm kind of doing that anyway’. Found a sponsor at the women's centre, got through all the assessment bit, was offered a place, ready to start. I think this was probably about ‘91/’92, and I was very early 40s. Thinking... really looking forward. I just really felt that I had a career possible. And I had been saying to Ian - I never kept anything quiet from him, he knew – ‘I've got this thing, gone to the interview, I got the place.’ And I said I was going to be starting, and we need to talk about how it's going to work because it's going to be placements, things are going to change. And he said, ‘What! What are you talking about, going to university?’ as if it was all suddenly something that had come up overnight. It had been going on for months. He said, ‘Well, I'm not doing any more than I'm already doing, so you can forget all of that’. And I just took him at his word, so instead of saying ‘Don't be silly we'll sort something out’, I was just really angry at his closing it down. I’d said, ‘There are going to be times I'm not going to be here when you come home’. He said, ‘It’s just unthinkable. Don’t be stupid Debbie.’ So anyway I couldn't think how it was going to work. So I just wrote and turned the place down and got really angry. And thought ‘Well I'm gonna have to do it some other way then’. And by then I knew about the Open University, ‘Well I’ll do that then’. And by then about the same time, I was learning about equal opportunities and social justice. I was doing quite a lot of stuff to do with voluntary organisations. Going to all the workshops and all the training I could get on. And one of them was a disability equality training day in ‘92 and I went on that and it absolutely blew my mind.

GC: Let's pause there.

GC: Let's carry on. We were talking your involvement in social justice and equality and peace groups. I'm interested in how your involvement starts to shift towards disability politics and activism and your understanding of your role in that, why you saw it as important. So I guess my first question is how did you start to get involved in disability activism and politics at that time?

DC: It started with the disability equality training day and for me that was... I always enjoyed going on training and a lot of them were free. At the time I was just, I was still , I was one of the trustees of various organisations. The women’s centre in Reading, the Women's Information Centre. I would go to these events where there were lots of other voluntary organisations. This day came up. It was organised by Reading Voluntary Action which is CVS, a council for voluntary services, which brought together all the voluntary organisations. It was a training day for voluntary organisations and as a voluntary organisation the women's centre had an invitation to go. ‘Who would like to go?’ I'd taken on some kind of idea of revising the equal ops policy. And had just been asking myself, and knowing that disability has something to do with me. But I wasn't quite sure and it was around those questions, ‘What does it mean to be disabled? How are you qualified as a disabled person? Am I a disabled person? Are you disabled if you just wear glasses?’ All those kind of little conversations happening. So anyway I went along and it was an all day thing at the Civic Centre in Reading. Didn't really pay much attention to what it was going to be like. I always enjoyed those things. So the thing that I remember most about it was that it was run by two disabled women.

GC: Can you remember who?

DC: Ann McFarlane and Alia Hassan. They're still around. Ann lives in Surrey, Surbiton, New Morden, Surbiton and Alia, I think her name was, lives in, I think. Southampton. I didn't know, but it turned out there was a lot of disability equality training happening. There were a lot of really empowered disabled people who had become active, so groups were forming. Organisations were forming. The social model of disability was really taking hold. And I hadn't been aware of any of this. It’d been going on since the late ‘70s with UPIUS, the union of the physically impaired whatever, they had between them come up with the social model of disability and writing books and all the rest of it. I was completely unaware of any of that, I have to say. So the person who organised this training was very plugged in. She was a really clued up person around equalities issues. And she’d found these two trainers and there they were. Sat down, and there they were, these two women, wheelchair users, middle age women, one was quite young. So that immediately was phenomenal. I'd never seen it. It wasn't just ‘Oh there're some disabled people’ and I hadn't seen many disabled people that I didn't already know. But they were upfront and they were running the thing.

GC: This was mid-90s?

DC ”November 1992. The event was ‘Perspectives on disability’. So they introduced themselves, they introduced the day. They introduced the social model of disability. And they had an overhead projector with slides. I remember little stickmen diagrams to explain the social model and the medical model and she started talking about charity and these tea cups and all of that. It was like ‘I know that, it was like, this was my life. This is what happened to me’. And by the end of the day I had thought, ‘I can do that, I can get a job’. Because I was seriously beginning to think, wondering, ‘Can I really?’ I was very achy and tired. And I wasn't sure because obviously was finding things difficult, even just fitting in as a volunteer. Was already realising then I got tired and achy. I still had the kids and the house and all of that and Ian's meals to cook and his washing to do, [laugh]. So none of that was going to change.

So just learnt about that. It was all about society and disabling barriers. I hadn't decided at that point which Open University course, because there were hundreds, I could have done any of them and I wasn't ruling anything out. But I’d seen this course, The Disabling Society’ as part of their health and social welfare lot. I'd seen that, that was a possibility, and by the end of the day I thought ‘I'm going to do this course’. Because I'd become really fascinated, and it was literally that I hadn't wanted anything to do with disability because it was medical. Before that I thought ‘Oh God, I can't be bothered’. That was why I was so uneasy about having to address any of it. ‘I can't be doing with all of that’. And then and on this day, so finding that it was a social justice issue was like ‘Wow, I’ll do that’. I was bored with the peace stuff. We’d signed various agreements (e.g. INF Treaty). I was bored with it and I was not enjoying it anymore. All the peace groups had closed down we had peace now. And we had the first Gulf war and I could see I wasn't getting anywhere basically. I needed to have a sense of achievement and I wasn't getting it. And I didn't want to keep on doing the same thing just chasing nuclear convoys around the country. I needed a job. I needed to be able to earn a living. So I did the course signed up for it, it was a 9 month course. I don't know what Open University courses are like now but you got assigned a course tutor, and you had telephone contact, and some courses had various tutorials. We just had phone tutorials because we had people all over the country. I remember the name of my tutor was Sally French who is still around, a proper academic, disabled person. She was my tutor. I couldn't have asked for anybody… well, any number of them. The course had been written by, various people had contributed to it, Mike Oliver, Jenny Morris, Vic Finkelstein. There were assignments. The first assignment was about the social model of disability and amongst the resources there were tape recordings. They had obviously done interviews with disabled people looking back at their lives. I went on to do several Open University courses and they're just so brilliant. This pack would arrive and it was so well researched, so well written, so well structured. And these assignments, you knew what you had to do and it worked. But I literally cried my way through that course because it triggered off so many things. It taught me about disability, it taught me the social model. It taught me all that I needed to know forever. About the structures, about a disabling society basically. It gave me that, but it also... I could study, I could learn. I could write assignments and get high marks. That was really fantastic because it was like ‘Oh, maybe I have got a brain, maybe I'm not stupid’. So that was interesting. I had to do the exam which was a nightmare. I’ve never been good at exams. So did all of that. So probably before the second assignment, there would have been four assignments…

1:35:40 [recording stops] Starts again at 1:36:00 until 1:40:39 – Not transcribed