WE ARE WALKING THROUGH

We are walking through the line. Where rough-cut grass meets the manicured surface. We are crossing over it like a tumbling forward, because the surface is so smooth and regular on the cut grass and our feet are not used to it.

We are walking from “Memory Gardens” across the field and into the landscaped surface that leads to the big house, where NCH Head Offices are located.

From the garden that we have occupied for seven years, the sun bounces off the reflective surfaces of spottless windows from this main building and at certain moments of the day depending on where we are, we need to shield our eyes from the glare.

This is the first time in seven years that I have taken this five minute stroll with other members of this Autistic project. This is because I want to show Margaret, Molly and Eloina where to pick up the keys from the Head Office in order that they too can access our now permanently locked garden as a place to be, quietly on their own, as in fact was the original purpose of the garden, before the locks went on. It`s strange then that we can stroll through this backway from the garden to the office where no lock could be workeable, yet must pick up a key in order to be officially allowed in- like gaining access to a country with a passport.

At first we didn`t know why the locks had so suddenly come on and why we were being edged into a position of “strangeness” in relation to this space so that our eventual eviction seemed even to us eminant rather than negotiable despite the staged consultations in the early days in the big building, sitting at desks, behind those reflective windows that are just too far away to see out of and into the garden. The garden which has only now just been acknowledged by NCH as a real place because our removal is suddenly and uniquely for them, part of their work-day task. So it figures that we are a sum that needs to be properly calculated, a piece of work. Maybe a logistic nightmare. We and the garden have become one. Never have we aquired an identity so totally and so quickly. We have become “Memory Gardens”.

But this is not our nightmare. The garden we occupy is about the day-to-day things that are necessary to do on a regular and on-going basis.Which are necessary to do in any place. In shops down a highstreet, in homes or small-run businesses. In the hairdressers opposite where I get my hair cut. In building works- the knocking down of the nearby Arsenal stadium- turning it into flats and building the stadium elsewhere. In the NCH head office. That opens at 8.30 in the morning everyday and closes at 5.pm. Opening the gate, putting out the sign, making the tea, putting toilet paper in the loo.- soap and water to hand. Sweeping and washing down surfaces. Putting out chairs. Then the activites, the sessions: moving bricks and pieces of wood around into shapes, enclaves, pathways and bridges. It`s mundane stuff that needs doing and we do it. Others do it. Moving things on in stages.

We light fires. We may cook peanuts on the fire, prune plants or rake up leaves. Pick beans or light candles. This all depends on the weather. We are always somewhere between a cloudburst and a fine day. It also depends on who is there, on moods, on what comes to hand and in which particular direction we turn to on that day.

Today we are stepping over the line and Margaret who has taken many pictures up until now, of close-up moments of natural interest; patterns of leaves, branches, painted tiles, coloured cloth hanging from trees, now puts away the camera when we are on the other side of the line. We have been listening to birds; the call of nature or a “bloody racket”. But some kind of silence falls on us now.

We are lookng up at the large building and we are dishevelled. Intruders at odds with something that rebukes us. We are bounced back on ourselves and because of this there is all at once an atmosphe- like a slow renderning or an infinitely subtle dawn where the gradients are so finely sewn together that it is not possible to capture one moment as discreet along a natural transition to another. Time is going backwards or forwards or perhaps not moving at all. We are not shifting it on in stages like we usually do.. The ground is shifting of its own accord, making of this slow dawn appear a superimposition in the late afternon. Taking a photo would be making things less real, not more real, like screaming very loudly in order to get the attention of an ant. Is an ant really small or is it just far away and impossible to get close to however far and however fast you may walk. Perhaps we are on the edge of the horizon to one another, NCH and “Memory Gardens”.

Yet all at once there is a recognition amongst us, of the enormity of what this situation holds.There is a sense of an occasion.

This crossing of a line from where we have been day after day, year after year to the moment of aprehending the building, the lawn, the flower-beds, the peopleless space where conferences come and go as events in which intelligent, caring people come and take notes and leave again now with a further training and meals on top of that. My sister even went for a course here and did not even come over to the garden afterwards, not realising it was the same place at all. It is not the same place at all. It is just part of the same land.

We are walking from the one to the other. And the foxes we see, the cats, birds, maybe even the worms that pop up when we dig, have walked, flown crawled and munched their way through from one location to another. Across a border which they never once knew was there. Or whether it was there or not, this did not matter to them.They did not have the understanding of a border. Just as the kids who hop over the wall at the front exit and into the shed, breaking the flimsy padlock that NCH puts on our shed door as if snapping candy, do not recognise such borders. Are they home –makers or home-breakers?. They never once disturb the sculptures- just using the shed to smoke a joint, eat sweets, drink fizzy drinks, collapse into piles of laughter, scratch names and slang words on to the wooden panels of the shed before somehow getting back over the wall and staggering home.

So to return to where we were. The line between cut-grass and un-cut grass. Where “Memory Gardens” leads into the Head Offices of National Children`s Home, a national British charity with projects throughout the British Isles, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Put simply NCH would like us to leave because they fear bad publicity. They fear this bad publicity because they have discovered “Trace elements” of Legionaires disease in the water supply of the adjoining Familly Support Unit which mysteriously closed down, almost overnight, back in July and is the real reason why we are now in consultation with NCH over how and when we too will leave. Of course during the consulatation process we have put forward many ideas for how we might stay: using alternative access routes via another adjoining Mental Health project whom we have links with, working with NCH to create an Autistic Day centre in the empty Family Centre. All were turned down and we never knew why- we had not been told about the Legionaires but unstead were asked casually if we used the water much. “No” we said, proud of our compost loo put in because it`s better for Autistic kids to use a loo on site then off-site-. Our non-reliance on the creature comforts of electricity and water in this “Outdoor Living” club saved us for the time being but clearly embarassed NCH who just wanted rid of all possible liability- that if we got ill or died from dodgy water that they would pay.

Yes, they could have just evicted us but how do you tell an Autistic Project to go nicely when the proffessional diagnosis for this condition points to rigidity and possible trauma on the interuption of such routine? After all they are a National Charity dealing with vulnerable people. We were thus, by default in a “priveledged” position of seeing and knowing too much just by being there and doing the mundane everyday domestic things that we have always done. Eloina pointed out, “we have grown into a giant mushroom” with many spores throughout the nearby vicinity- in local mental Health Projects, Autistic organisations, parents who rely on the coffee breaks our clubs allow, adults who cross London with care-workers to drink tea, make fires and balance bricks, nearby allotments and people on the edge, with a need to light fires, community colleges and ecological organisations. NCH can not do what they would so like to do- just pluck us out. The mushroom is never just in one place at one time. Even when gone it is there. Even when there, it is just water held in a shape and then re-constituted elsewhere. Yet what is startling is how unedible we appear to be to them even though it is people just like us who they are dealing with day in and day out in their many projects across the land. Stand-in actors play the part of autistic adults or teenage mothers on the covers of their magazines- this is because they cannot use the true “face” of the people concerned- again for liability reasons. Faced then as they are now with our group, literally in their back garden, is a considerable mishap in the scheme of things- people high up are saying “It should never have been allowed to happen” “How have they managed to move on to the land and to be there for seven years?”. “It`s impossible”. It`s a media disaster in waiting. People are losing their jobs over it.

We arrived one day to do abit of Gardening after I`d accidentally wandered on to the disused plot and suggested to the owners-NCH- that we`d clear it up abit every Friday afternoon and maybe grow some tomotoes. Letters kept arriving through the post-box of the Head Office which I would send, always addressed to different chief executives as the turnover of staff erased one portion of time from the next. There were regular up-dates; “Now we have panted some herbs, now cleared the ground and laid down turf. We have put up a shed. Now we have a constitution. We`ve bought a lawn-mower and some tools and have insurance cover for their use. We are setting up a youth club to run seperately from the adult club” and so on.. It must have made boring reading to people who are juggling large sums of money, following government policies, implementing practical regime change in counties and in Health care and Service Providers which it is under their jurisdiction to overhaul, roll out and embed at a local and national level. There are meetings, figures of speach, presentations and awards. Some people fall by the wayside, others are promoted. So the wheel turns. Somehow we do not figure or only in a rushed off email when someone at a Conferance happens to wander down through the gardens inbetween speaches perhaps with a cup of coffee in hand. Crosses the line in reverse of the walk that we are now taking from the garden to the head office, and peers bleary-eyed through branches, at wire and bead mobiles hanging in the trees, bricks stacked so that they are not exactly a path, not exactly a standing object, paintings-almost primitive- on the white-washed wall- and a slow frown chances across their forehead. Something does not resolve- like a missed frame that makes a T.V programme suddenly invade the gastric juices of one`s stomach and one nearly loses balance, before, in a blink the picture re-congeals and one is sitting on the sofa where one always was, not lost within a moving frame, back at the conference. Nothing in any case registered for long enough for anything to be done about it. A queezy feeling that could have been put down to the wine over lunch was not enough reason to get us off the land.

Traces of Legionaires disease in the Water supply was on a different scale. It was more than a case of flatulance.

The Legionaires issue was only let slip when I met with a Land-surveyor from NCH and he was for one time not affectively “gagged” because another woman, higher up in the order of things, had at the last minute absented herself from the meeting. He was the first to say “If I were you I wouldn`t use the water, not even for watering plants because...”

The fear of bad publicity had prevented them giving this piece of quite important advice.

Crossing the line- seeing the reflecting surface up close that had bounced back our every move rather than risk us peering through the window. Things fell into place.

We knew why we had been there all along: waiting for that moment when the reflectivity no longer works for an instant. NCH, a National Charity, rather than protecting vulnerable people, would choose not to tell in order to secure a clean image. Even if it came to death from a disease which is only treatable when it is known. Better not to tell, so long as the documentation is in place and there is therefore no liability.

At that moment we walked right through the image and we saw into what is refleced out. Our responsiveness and our responsibility as adult human beings came together in the moment.

As we faced the building we felt pity for some of the employees inside.

Our specific situation looked out into other capacities and became a tool for awareness.