Penny Wilson

Several months have passed since I last wrote.
I haven’t been idle. In fact I have returned to face to face work in quite unexpected way.

From the first sessions that we started to run on this cluster of estates I was aware that there were issues that ran very deeply through these communities.
I didn’t have a budget for lots and lots of Playwork hours. I did have time to focus of the work myself.

This gave me an interesting problem. How do you help a group of kids to liberate their own playing when the adult community is so hurt that they protect their children from the playing of play workers. On other estates we had met with hostility, refusal police reports, official complaints, threats of violence cold bleak refusal to cooperate, bland indifference. Mostly these initial reactions melted into either a benign disregard or a warm welcome.
However on this estate there was always a problem. The children were always allowed , even encouraged to play. But the adults would always be an eyes length away. The loose parts would always be wrong. The things we did with the kids were never right. The children we worked with were always the wrong ones. The children were not encouraged to play outside and when playing in the community centre there would be a string of urgent concerns. The children should not have hot chocolate to drink. Sugar, safety concern s for hot liquids? We could feel or find no rationale, no logic no consistency. If we bang to find a little relaxed comfort, then we found that a kind of pseudo racism appeared. For ages we had to over staff the project to keep the balance of Asian and non Asian staff feeling supported. The inconsistency of the responses gave lie to the racism. There would be hot words coming from parents and children while the same children rough and tumbles and tickled and giggled with a young Bengali play worker..
The fabric bundle of sari materials was scoffed at by the children. ‘paki material. I’m not using that.’ yet the sari was in continual use. It was a tent, the boys dressed in it. The girls buried themselves in it’s soft pink and gold folds.

I had been given this cluster of estates to work on because of a reutation that they had for intensive drug use. Gang violence , racism, hard to reach families and appallingly low social indices. But my initital work with adults here , funded by the social cohesion work of tower hamlets council.

Explore social cohesion agenda

When I started to work a colleague sent me a link to Mile End by Pulp. So grim. I had lived in this area and brought up my children here and I still rushed though or around the ugly estates. I didn’t know them they were the unknown. The badlands. Alien to my comfortable victorian terraced house.
Yet here I found a tight knit group of people straight from the pages of family and kinship. Doors were left unlocked, women popped in and out of each others homes. Co-patented children, took care of each other. Laughed and cried and had funerals and weddings and confirmations. Black and Asian families were there too, and known and lived alongside as neighbours. The stories we’re all of playing out on the square, watching out for the kids , parties in the squares in the middle of their homes. Of holidays spent together in caravans and the macrame of friends and family ties.

I found here what every family dreams of. A place with good neighbours of many generations, who have lived together and known each other for decades, who shared space and understanding and trust, who lived in, what I realised, was a smallish village. It should have been like heaven, if it hadn’t, for some reason, seemed as if there was some sort of a he’ll upsetting the apple cart.

I am still working here.
I have enough hindsight now to have a little wisdom and a bit of understanding though we must never be complacent or smug. I learn and understand more of every second of every day I am with these wonderful people.

It has bugged me that for the first time in many years, I have not been writing my Playwork experiences up.

But somehow I have not been able to unjumble the words. I am loving this experience in the same way and with the same intensity that I loved to manage the inclusive Adventure Playground.
Perhaps that makes me more than a little afraid.
Perhaps I had thought I had escaped to the physical and emotional safety of a desk and screen. though it is true that one is exposed there to rude, arrogant corrupt and idle officials and heartbreakingly inert organisations.

But that keyboard work is always removed from the personal finger on the pulse. It’s easy to blame the gross mismanagement and dishonesty of the systems that claim to be there to serve… But this work takes place at the place where corruption and mismanagement impact upon people. Here, we make eye contact.
This is where it all stops being hypothetical.

I will try to write this up regularly.