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Angela Florence Wheeler was born on 25th April 1954 in what was then the Crown Colony of Jamaica. One of her earliest memories was of the independence celebrations in 1962. She was the third of six children born to Sebastian and Victoria Wheeler. The oldest of the family was Christine, who was four years older than Angie. She was closely followed by Meshach and then there was a three-year gap before Angie arrived. Angie had two younger sisters, Phoebe and Sonia, four and eight years younger than her, respectively. I think there may have been another brother or sister between them, who died in childhood, but I’m not sure. And then, there was Joseph – more about him later.
This chapter probably shouldn’t really be described as part of my memoirs, because of course I wasn’t there. The particulars of Angie’s childhood and early adulthood in Jamaica are derived from what she told me about it – and the stories that she used to tell our children – and also from talking to Phoebe and Joseph. Joseph spoke movingly at Angie’s funeral about their childhood together[i], which was when I fully realised all that she had done for him. I’ve probably got a lot of the details wrong – I don’t know a lot about life in nineteen sixties Jamaica – but the main thrust of the story is correct, and I hope it sets the scene so that you can see what a very special person Angie was.
Angie was very close to her younger sisters, who looked up to her as a role model. Christine seemed to them to be one of the adults, while Angie understood them in a way that nobody else could. Her favourite sibling, however, was her younger brother Joseph. Although Joseph was only two years younger than Angie, she became like a second mother to him because he suffered from cerebral palsy – he was what we called in those days a spastic. He had only limited control over his limb movements and was unable to talk. Angie was devoted to him and determined to find a way of helping him to gain more independence. In particular, she was sure that there must be some way of enabling him to speak.
Angie loved helping her mother around the house and she loved even more helping to look after the younger ones; and most of all, she loved to care for Joseph. She worked out a sort of sign language to enable him to communicate with his family and a few close friends. There was no school that could – or at least, no school that would – take him, so she shared her school books with him and taught him to read. She was very ingenious and managed to rig up a stand for holding a book steady in front of him while he painstakingly worked at persuading his obstinate hands to turn the page.
Of course, since he could not speak, it was impossible to be sure that what he read was what was on the page, but Angie was confident that he understood what he read. Why else would he burst out laughing at the exploits of Winnie-the-Pooh or cry about the fate of Hans Andersen’s Little Match Girl?
Angie’s family were Methodists and her parents insisted that the children all attend church and Sunday School regularly every week. Angie loved singing the hymns and she was proud when the Sunday School Superintendent presented her with her very own Bible. She kept it in the drawer of the little cabinet that stood on her side of the bed, which she shared with Phoebe. This cabinet was the only place that was private from every other member of the family, and it was where she kept all her most precious possessions: the small bamboo plate that someone had given her at her baptism, a china jug that had belonged to her grandmother, a toy rabbit with floppy ears and most of the whiskers worn off, and a small collection of books.
Angie loved playing at school with her younger sisters and Joseph. She would be the teacher and would line them up sitting on the floor of their yard while she wrote on the wall of the house with a piece of chalk – always (or almost always) remembering to clean it off again before her father returned home in the evening. He took a dim view of graffiti – even of the improving sort that Angie indulged in.
Angie didn’t have a lot of time for playing, though, because she had to help her mother with the household chores – which were all the more because of Joseph’s disability. I remember her telling the children about washing by hand – boiling up the clothes in a gigantic pan on the stove, and hanging them out in the yard to dry, and starching the boys’ shirts and the girls dresses. Even Joseph used to have a job on washing days: he sat out in the yard keeping watch and ringing a bell if the rain started. Nobody seemed to know where this bell had come from. It was a large, brass instrument fastened to the side of the house, with a long rope dangling down. Joseph was able to hold the rope and ring the bell by pulling hard on it. He was very proud to have such a responsible duty. Angie told me that her father said the bell had once been a ship’s bell, but he hadn’t been able to explain how it came to be in their family.
Joseph couldn’t walk, so his parents – and then later his older brother – carried him everywhere. That was easy when he was small, but as he grew older he became too heavy for his mother to lift easily. Eventually they managed to obtain an old second-hand wheelchair for him. It was too big for him and gave him rather a bumpy ride, but he was delighted with the new mobility that it gave him. Angie loved pushing him around in it. Now she could take him with her when she and Phoebe went out to play on the beach or on the piece of waste ground at the end of their street.
Angie loved to sing. She sang while she worked, turning the mangle for her mother or holding the pegs while Christine hung up the clothes to dry. She sang the hymns that she learnt at church. One of her favourites (and a favourite with Joseph too) was This, this is the God we adore[ii]. He remembered this, years later, and we sang it at her funeral.
When Angie was only twelve, she volunteered to help to teach in the Sunday School. Miss Webster, who was in charge of the youngest class, was delighted to have an assistant, and soon Angie was playing at teaching for real. She began to think that she would like to be a teacher when she grew up – and Miss Webster encouraged her in the idea. By that time, her older sister, Christine, was working as a secretary and Meshach was study hard, with the aim of becoming an engineer. When Miss Webster suggested to Angie’s mother that perhaps her daughter had the makings of a teacher, Mrs Wheeler agreed readily with the idea. It would mean Angie going to college, but with three incomes, the family would be able to afford it and teaching was a respectable and worthwhile career.
But then something happened to change all Angie’s plans. Joseph was taken ill with a chest infection, which turned into pneumonia. He was taken into hospital and, for several days, the family feared for his life.
Fourteen-year-old Angie spent a lot of time at Joseph’s bedside. She watched and listened and learnt a lot about hospital life – and about human nature. She admired the nurses – most of them – who worked tirelessly to care for their patients. She saw how some of them took time trying to understand Joseph’s sign language or asked Angie and her mother to explain it to them. But she also saw that some of them seemed to be embarrassed at Joseph’s involuntary movements and grunting attempts at speech. Some seemed to be trying to avoid being the ones who had to help him out of bed to visit the toilet and some even got angry with him for wetting the bed when he had been unable to attract attention.
One day she overheard one of the nursing assistants talking to the mother of another patient on the ward. The mother looked at Joseph and said, ‘it always seems to me that it’s a pity that children like that survive. You can’t help thinking that it would be kinder to put them out of their misery at birth.’
Angie could hardly believe what she had just heard. What right had this woman to come in and pass judgement on her brother’s life like that? What did she know? Didn’t she realise what a happy life he led – when he was not languishing in a hospital bed with tubes down his throat? But it got worse.
‘Yes. Poor little mite,’ the nurse agreed. ‘His family are very dedicated to him, but it’s hard not to think that maybe it would be better for everyone if he didn’t pull through.’
Angie looked at Joseph and held his hand very tight. Didn’t they realise that he was listening to them? Did they think he was deaf? More likely, they thought he couldn’t understand what they were saying. So many people assumed that, just because he could not talk, Joseph could not understand speech either. But Angie knew that he understood everything.
That was the day that she changed her career plans. Instead of being a teacher, she was going to be a nurse – a good nurse like the ones that she had seen working extra hours to make sure that all their patients were comfortable and well-cared-for – and she was going to see to it that nobody on any ward where she was working would be allowed to talk like that about any of the patients. She was going to make sure that every patient was treated just the same, whatever other people thought about their value or the quality of their life.
So, when she left school, Angie went to train as a nurse. It meant going away from home, which was hard for her and harder still for Joseph and her younger sisters. But she came back to visit as often as she could and they all knew that she was working to make things better in the end.
As well as working and studying for her nurses diploma, she tried to find out about ways of helping Joseph to find his voice. She was convinced that there must be some way of helping him to learn to control the muscles in his mouth and throat so that he would be able to make intelligible speech, but it was so difficult to find out what that might be. She discovered that there were people called Speech Therapists, who trained children to speak; but when she approached one of them they said that Joseph was too old.
In any case, speech therapy was expensive and Angie’s family could not afford it. By now, both Christine and Meshach had young families of their own to care for, so the only income was Angie’s father’s wage and whatever Angie was able to spare from her own meagre student nurse allowance. But she was determined not to give up. She continued to read about Joseph’s condition and to speak to doctors and nurses at the hospital where she worked. She became more and more convinced that speech therapy was the answer – if only they could afford to pay for a therapist to give Joseph a trial!
Once she was qualified, Angie renewed her efforts on Joseph’s behalf. A therapist from the hospital agreed to visit him at home, in her own time, and assess his problem. She reported that she thought that probably something could be done to help him, but that it would most likely take a long time. He would need many hours of therapy and he would have to work hard in between sessions to practise the skills that they would teach him. She could not afford to do this unpaid, but she would show Angie some exercises that she could teach Joseph to do and, you never knew, maybe once he got started he might manage to teach himself. He was clearly a bright boy.
Angie worked hard to help Joseph – and he worked hard as well – but progress was slow. Angie also taught Phoebe some of the exercises so that she could help Joseph when Angie was not around. After nearly a year of trying, Joseph’s speech had improved to the extent that his family could understand a lot of what he was trying to say, but to strangers he still appeared to be talking gibberish. He just couldn’t manage to get his voice to make the sounds that he wanted it to. Angie became more and more convinced that he needed professional help.
At the same time, Christine was working on another way of helping Joseph to communicate. She had given him the old second-hand typewriter that she had used to practise her secretarial skills. He found it difficult to use and often got his fingers caught between the keys, but little by little, he started to use it to write short stories and poems. He was very proud indeed when one of his poems was included in the church newsletter.
Angie came to the conclusion that she as never going to be able to save up enough to pay for speech therapy for Joseph from her wages at the hospital in Jamaica. Every time she began to think that she might be getting there, some extra expense would crop up – like when his ancient wheelchair eventually broke beyond repair and the family had to club together to buy a replacement. So, she started looking into ways of increasing her income. Eventually, she decided that the best way to do this would be to go abroad to somewhere where the wages for a qualified nurse would be higher. The obvious option was to go to Britain, which many Jamaicans still viewed as the mother country. She spoke the language and had been born a citizen of a British colony.
So from now on, her savings were directed towards the cost of travelling across the Atlantic to a new home, where she hoped she would be able to earn enough to pay for Joseph’s therapy and also to find out about any new treatments for cerebral palsy that there might be. At last, she had enough to pay for an air ticket to London.
Flying was unheard of before in her family. Her grandmother was determined that aeroplanes were the work of the devil and no good would come of them. Her mother was very anxious and kept asking her why she did not go in a Banana Boat, as so many of their friends had done back in the fifties. However, this was 1975 and air travel was becoming cheaper, while the number of boats crossing the Atlantic was diminishing. So, Angie became the first person in her family to fly. Joseph, Phoebe and Sonia were so excited about the prospect that, for a while, they forgot to be sad at losing their favourite sister. The whole family came to the airport to see her off – waving to her as she boarded the plane and set off for a new life on the other side of the world.
[i] You can read about Joseph’s speech at Angie’s funeral in Despise not thy Mother, chapter 16.
[ii] You can find out more about this hymn here: http://www.singingthefaithplus.org.uk/?p=1147
[i] You can read about Joseph’s speech at Angie’s funeral in Despise not thy Mother, chapter 16.
[ii] You can find out more about this hymn here: http://www.singingthefaithplus.org.uk/?p=1147