Droitwich woman, 83, granted 'police officer for a day' wish
She met Sgt Cathy Atkinson, tried on modern-day kit, got her fingerprints taken and fired up the blue lights and siren on a patrol car, before the police station team sang Happy Birthday."We hope we gave Jean an experience she will remember forever," PCSO Bushell said, after the visit on Monday."It was lovely hearing all the stories from her days in policing and seeing her reaction to trying on the uniform and sitting in a police car."Ms Mulcaster started her career with Worcester Police in 1962, before it became part of West Mercia Constabulary.She served for about 10 years before she retired in the 1970s to take care of her children.She met her police officer husband Bob while serving and their son Alistair has followed in their footsteps, taking up the same career.
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Daily Mail
32 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
My mother gave me away to the cleaner's sister at six weeks old. She never wanted me - I cannot now grieve her death: After a loveless childhood SUSANNAH JOWITT admits the unthinkable
My mother gave me away to the cleaner's sister at six weeks old. She never wanted me - I cannot now grieve her death: After a loveless childhood SUSANNAH JOWITT admits the unthinkable For the past few weeks, I have been wearing a necklace that was a gift from my mother, Juliet, on my wedding day. She repurposed a brooch she herself had inherited into a pendant for me: a finely-wrought gold dragon holding a glowing red little ruby in its mouth. It's beautiful and I have felt strangely compelled to wear it day and night, despite the occasional prick from the brooch pin stabbing into my neck. Ironically, this sums up my relationship with my mother: small elements to treasure, offset by real moments of pain. My mother died four weeks ago, aged 84. It was a relief for her and for us. She was miserable, veering vertiginously between Alzheimer's and clarity, physically dizzy and wobbly, then bed-bound, increasingly dehydrated and, eventually, she went past the point of no return. For a week after her death, I felt strangely light and liberated, no longer bearing the guilt of her misery, the shocking expense of her 24-hour care and the terror of how long both would continue. And yet the relationship continues to prick and please. Not once have I felt a moment of pure grief, not even when I read the astonishingly kind letters people have written. All are lovely; all say what a shock it must have been and what a hole she will leave in my life – but those from the friends who knew me better also include a degree of nuance that changes the whole picture of conventional grief. Susannah Jowitt with her late mother, Juliet, who admitted five years before her death that she had given her daughter away for the first year of her life Juliet was not, you see, a conventional mother. She gave me away for the first year of my life – until Christmas Eve 1969 – not actually meeting me until I was a year old. None of us know how long she would have continued to avoid my existence, because all the witnesses to that time are dead; my brother and I only found out this tale five years ago, on the night of my father's funeral, when my mother had a few too many sherries and told me. She admitted quite openly that the only reason I came back when I did was because her mother had been coming to stay for Christmas. My grandmother didn't know she had outsourced me to our cleaning lady's sister at six weeks old. So Juliet had to quickly reclaim me before her own mother found out what she'd done. And, in reality, what had she done? There was no neglect, no abuse, no need for social services. My mother simply hadn't wanted me – and when she was pressured into having me because everyone said my brother couldn't be an only child, she was determined to do things her way. So, on the night of my father's funeral, as if she were recalling her life story to a professional biographer, she told me all about it. 'I just never wanted children,' she said, 'but in those days no one ever admitted that, so I toed the line and got pregnant – but on my terms, right from the moment the doctor told me I was expecting. 'I demanded, and got, a prescription of three Valium a day to keep me calm for the whole pregnancy.' She planned my birth, in the late 1960s, with the precision and, some might say, callousness of a First World War field marshal sending young boys over the top of the trenches: all theory, no empathy. 'I had a very strong epidural so that I couldn't feel a thing and you were born unseen by me because I was hiding behind a large book, deliberately chosen for its size. The midwives had been firmly instructed to take you away and look after you for the four days that I was in hospital, so I didn't actually meet you. Juliet with her children in 1978. Susannah's mother was unable to love her or her brother. She certainly couldn't bear physical contact with them. Both remember seeing other children being hugged by their parents and thinking: 'Ohhh, so that's what hugging is!' 'You were then taken straight to a maternity nurse where you spent the first six weeks of your life.' At that point, I was meant to come home but, when it came to it, Juliet still couldn't face seeing me. She was also clearly suffering from monstrous – and undiagnosed – post-natal depression. 'I couldn't bear it and your father was going on a business trip to South Africa for six weeks, so it was decided by everyone that I should go with him, feel better from the winter sun and recover my joie de vivre,' she told me. 'And I thought it was unfair burdening your brother's nanny with a five-year-old and a newborn, so we came up with the plan of parking you with Mrs Pybus's sister in the village.' Me being lodged with the sister of Mrs Pybus, our elderly cleaning lady, worked like a dream. Juliet came back feeling so much better, in fact, that she decided with my father it would be better for everyone if I just stayed where I was. 'You were apparently happy,' she told me, 'and I was happy. And if I was happy, your father was happy.' Throughout her tale, she refused to tell me the name of the woman who cared for me in this year. No doubt many of you will find the thought of this distressing. But even as my mother told me, I wasn't shocked by her revelation. In fact, many pennies dropped. So this was why my mother and I had never bonded, why we were civil strangers until the day she died. What was more unexpected was how settled I felt within myself when she told me. All my life, I had punished myself for never being enough for my mother. Nothing I did could ever please her. Nothing I ever achieved made her proud. She seemed so resentful of me that I became convinced I was adopted – once going through her files trying to find evidence. I read book after book about Greek demigods and princesses being swapped at birth and brought up in commoners' households. I was sure this was what had happened to me. In my 20s, my godmother, who must have known what happened (sadly she died before I knew myself), once tried to give me a hint about that missing first year, saying: 'You should never underestimate how little you and your mother ever bonded, so it's no surprise that you can't seem to get along now. But she loves you really.' This, though, I would contest. My mother couldn't love me or my brother. She certainly couldn't bear physical contact with us. Both of us remember seeing other children being hugged by their parents and thinking to ourselves: 'Ohhh, so that's what hugging is!' My first memory of her touch is when I was about five and I stepped off the pavement without looking. She grabbed my hand and wrenched me back as a lorry swept past. Much more than the relief at having been saved was the shock of the feel of her hand: her strong, capable, slightly rough fingers, so genetically like my own now. If I close my eyes, I can feel it still. But I think my mother's lack of love went deeper than a mere horror of tactility. She was always jealous of the love my father, Tommy, was able to show me (despite his own consistent failure to actually be there for us as a father) and my brother and I both think she only really ever loved him. In essence, I believe she was jealous of me, full stop, which in retrospect was shown most clearly when I had my own children and so manifestly, abundantly loved them from the moment they were both born, 24 and 22 years ago. 'They each have you wrapped around their little finger,' she would comment acidly and regularly. 'I know and I love it,' I would respond, to her fury. I would never want to exaggerate the lovelessness of my childhood. We kids were never neglected, were given birthday presents and parties, and although we were very rarely taken on holiday by our parents because they couldn't have been less interested in doing so, all the middle-class conventions of parenting were otherwise observed. But sometimes, despite the material comfort, this sheer lack of maternal feeling had unintended consequences. While I was fine – happy, I think, and flooded by cuddles and warmth with Mrs Pybus's sister – during that first missing year of my life, it was a different story for my brother. He called me a few weeks after the revelations of that night of my dad's funeral in 2020. 'I'm struggling, Zannah. I am just so angry. Especially with Daddy for letting it happen.' My brother was four and a half when I was born and had, unlike my mother, met me in the hospital when he and my father visited. He remembers looking down at the little bundle that was me, swaddled, and thinking that while I wasn't much cop yet as a playmate, that maybe I had potential. But then I didn't come home. And no one said anything about me. He thought perhaps I had died. He didn't know but the unspoken message he got was that somehow, if you weren't up to the mark, you'd be – as he said – 'disappeared'. This breaks my heart a little whenever I think about it. On one level, I received the same message; it would certainly explain why I was such a desperate show-pony throughout my childhood; always showing off for attention, for a tiny scrap of love, anxious to be brilliant enough not to be sent away again. 'Susannah was like an eager little puppy,' my father once told my husband. 'No matter how often you kicked her, she always came back, tail wagging, for more.' Susannah is relieved that her mother's death was peaceful In my 30s and 40s I learned to put a label on my mother. Juliet was, I was told by various friends who had similar mothers, a classic example of someone who had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, dominated by an obsession with her own importance, her place at the centre of every story, craving constant admiration and lacking in genuine empathy for others. A relationships expert later told me that my father was also clearly narcissistic, so my brother and I were doomed. When it came to family, my mother probably had the emotional intelligence of a five year old. She could be charming, able to win people over easily – until things didn't go her way, at which point she would literally stamp her foot with her arms in the air and have a tantrum. So when my father died in 2020 and I found out the truth about my start in life, I actually felt profoundly sorry for her; a feeling that has persisted right up to her death and beyond. She hadn't been capable of motherhood, therefore who was I to condemn her or even label her as a narcissist? It would be like beating a puppy for refusing to stop chewing things or, in the case of the famous fable, like condemning the scorpion for stinging the frog that is carrying it to safety: it was just in her nature. Then, when she got Alzheimer's, her infantilisation really took hold. She had missed my father desperately when he died at the age of 86. They'd been married for nearly 57 years. But, when she became ill, she stopped missing him as a husband and talked about him like a hero-worshipping child talked about their idol. He had been charming, though flawed, but she could no longer see that: in her child's mind he was perfect – a perfect, gentle knight. Next to such a paragon, her living children – never even in the same league as her husband –were sorry compensation. Indeed, whenever I called her she would take a long time to answer and, when she did, sounded weary and almost resentful. Sometimes she would press the wrong contact in her phone and, meaning to call her best friend Susie, would get me by mistake. She always sounded so disappointed by this and would soon ring off in favour of calling Susie for real. I realised this was not behaviour she reserved only for me. When I was once staying with her, the phone rang and up popped my brother's name on the screen. Having been perfectly lively with those of us in the room, she grimaced at the sight of his name, took a deep breath and composed her face into lines of bitter suffering. 'H-h-hello?' she quavered, as if she was already on her deathbed. It was a masterful performance and I realised it was one she gave every time her disappointing children rang. All in all, it's no wonder that both my brother and I have had a conflicting mix of emotions since she died, but no real grief. It's her funeral tomorrow and I suspect that while her friends – who all adored her for being the fiercely clever, witty, talented, purposeful and intensely strong-willed friend she was for them –will genuinely mourn her and even cry a little, my brother and I won't quite. One thing I am heartfelt about is my relief that her actual death was so peaceful. The day before she died, at the age of 84, I had been rehearsing for a performance of Fauré's Requiem with the City of London Choir at the Barbican. I knew this to be one of her very favourite pieces of music, so I recorded some snatches of our rehearsal that afternoon, including the final movement, In Paradisum, and FaceTimed her with them. Her last word to me was 'wonderful', with a tiny smile. She died at 6am the next day, having not really spoken again. She may not have been very wonderful to me in my 56 years but I'm glad, when we parted, that we were joined by that word and that smile.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Families face £1,076 bill per child for summer holiday childcare
Families paying for childcare over the six-week summer holiday now face a bill of £1,076 per child on average – a rise of 4% on last year, a report has found. Councils have reported a shortage of holiday childcare places – especially for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), according to research by the Coram Family and Childcare charity. It suggests families in the UK pay on average £1,076 for six weeks at a holiday childcare club for a school-age child, which is £677 more than they would pay for six weeks in an after-school club during term time. The research, based on surveys of local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales between April and June, suggests the average cost of a holiday childcare club has risen by 4% in a year to £179 per week. Wales has the highest weekly price at £210, followed by England at £178 and Scotland at £168. There is significant variation in holiday club prices across England, ranging from £196 per week in the South East to £162 per week in the North West. The report also found that the average cost of a childminder during the holidays is £234 per week in the UK. Inner London has the highest childminder price at £306 per week, compared to the South West where the childminder cost is £191 per week. In England, only 9% of local authorities said they had enough holiday childcare for at least three quarters of children with Send in their area. This figure falls to 0% for three regions in England – the East Midlands, the East of England and Inner London, the report said. The charity is calling on the Government to provide more funding, training and support to holiday childcare providers to meet the needs of Send children. The holiday activities and food (HAF) programme – which funds local authorities to provide holiday childcare, activities and food for children eligible for free school meals – should also be maintained after March 2026 to ensure disadvantaged children have childcare during school holidays, it added. The expansion of funded childcare – which was introduced by the Conservative government – began being rolled out in England in April last year for working parents of two-year-olds. Working parents of children older than nine months are now able to access 15 hours of funded childcare a week during term time, before the full rollout of 30 hours a week to all eligible families in September. The report said: 'It is encouraging to see increasing recognition that childcare is essential for facilitating parental workplace participation, with the continued expansion of funded childcare in early years, support to develop wraparound childcare before and after school, and the introduction of free breakfast clubs. 'There is no longer an assumption that parents and employers are able to fit their work around the school day, or an expectation that they will do so. 'However, outside of school term time, the situation is very different. 'Holiday childcare remains the unspoken outlier of childcare policy and the gap that parents must bridge every school holiday.' Lydia Hodges, head of Coram Family and Childcare, said: 'The need for childcare doesn't finish at the end of term. 'Holiday childcare not only helps parents to work but gives children the chance to have fun, make friends and stay active during the school breaks. 'Yet all too often it is missing from childcare conversations. 'Whilst the increase in government-funded early education has reduced childcare costs for working parents of under-fives in England, prices for holiday childcare are going up for school-age children. 'This risks encouraging parents to work while their children are young, only to find it is not sustainable once their child starts school. 'Availability of holiday childcare is an ongoing issue and without a clear picture of how much holiday childcare there is in each area, we cannot be sure that children – particularly those with special educational needs and disabilities – are not missing out.' Arooj Shah, chairwoman of the Local Government Association's (LGA) children and young people board, said: 'While councils recognise the importance of ensuring there is sufficient provision available for children with Send, it can be difficult to ensure the right provision is available, particularly given the challenging situation that many providers face at the moment. 'Councils work closely with providers to improve access to holiday childcare provision for children with Send but without investment and recruitment of quality staff this will be difficult to deliver.' A Government spokesperson said: 'We recognise the school holidays can be a pressurised time for parents, which is why this government is putting pounds back in parents' pockets both during the holidays and in term time. 'We are expanding free school meals to all children whose households are on universal credit, introducing free breakfast clubs in primary schools, and rolling out 30 government funded hours of early education from September – saving families money and helping them balance work with family life. 'We are also continuing to fund free holiday clubs through the Holiday Activities and Food programme which provides six weeks of activities and meals for any child from a low-income family who needs it.'
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
The joys of mudlarking
Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? 'Vapes,' says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. 'Lots of vapes.' Mudlarking – the practice of scavenging at low tide for washed-up historical treasures, oddities or mundane objects – has become a well-gatekept hobby over the past five years. More than 10,000 people are now on the waiting list for mudlarking permits. Of course, anyone can go down to the foreshore to look around and turn pebbles over with their shoe, but even if you flout the rules, mudlarking is no longer the grubby, lawless enterprise it used to be. The first mudlarks were criminals, but quite pathetic ones. Writing in 1796, the founder of the Thames River Police called them 'the lowest cast of thieves'. They rode the coat-tails of more daring plunderers who looted the coal-barges and ships carrying sugar, rum and spices from the West Indies. Mudlarks would wade in the shallows and pick up bags of stolen goods tossed overboard, which they transported to land. Some poked around with sticks looking for bits of coal, but mostly they found scraps of rope, bones, rags and broken glass which sold for next to nothing. The Victorian anthropologist James Greenwood classed the mudlarks he saw as 'gaunt, old-fashioned children', 'stalwart, brawny men' and 'tottering old women': 'each may be seen daily battling with the rising river for a crust'. The women were often eccentrics or drunks, dressed in rags and disappearing without a trace. A police report in 1841 describes the arrest of Katharine Macarthy, 'the dread of the Thames-police', who, on multiple occasions, 'embraced the officers like a bear, and, after half smothering them, has left them as muddy as herself'. These descriptions form a sharp contrast with the Rab jackets and Toast jumpers down on the foreshore today. In the mid-19th century, a pair of mudlarks capitalised on the Romantic fascination with the past. Billy Smith and Charley Eaton created somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 forgeries inspired by real artefacts, which they sold to museums and private collectors. Secrets of the Thames displays a trio of 'Billys and Charleys': a statuette of a king of mysterious origin; Jonah in a skeletal whale; and a Roman medallion with a nonsensical inscription (Billy and Charley were illiterate). These forgeries, aged in acid and stained with mud, have become artefacts in their own right. There's something cartoony and slightly impish about them. I get the sense that their makers had a grand old time cheating suckers. The most common items you'll discover on the foreshore are what appear to be clay cigarette butts. These are the broken stems of tobacco pipes, used once and then tossed from the old pubs along the river. Some were re-purposed for curling wigs, for enemas and tracheotomies, as catheters, for stabbing or for loading into pistols (one of Queen Victoria's would-be assassins tried to kill her with a pistol loaded with pipe fragments). While finds such as these help us piece together a richer image of what everyday life was like in the past, they also give the impression that the Thames has always been a bit of a rubbish dump. The Romans built the city's first sewers, which ultimately discharged into the river and its tributaries. In medieval London, a public toilet was built over Queenhithe dock to be 'flushed by the Thames'. The Great Stink of 1858 was a problem centuries in the making. The summer heat turned the polluted river into a gutter of viscous sludge – what Benjamin Disraeli, then chancellor, called 'a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors'. Today, you can still find the bones, teeth and hooves of butchered animals whose carcasses were dumped in the river until the late 19th century. You couldn't pay me to swim in it, but the Thames has also long been considered a holy place. Statues of Roman gods and goddesses are found on the foreshore – some merely lost or discarded, others thrown into the river as deliberate offerings. Rosary beads often turn up; one in the museum is a striking memento mori, a skull on one side and a beautiful woman's face on the other. Our forebears saw the river as a threshold between life and death: a destructive force of flooding, drowning and disease, but also a place where people were baptised and reborn as Christians. It's the river where Stanley Spencer depicted Christ preaching at the Cookham regatta, and where Francis Thompson imagined 'Christ walking on the water,/ Not of Genesareth, but Thames!' Little pewter pilgrim badges depicting the martyr St Thomas Becket are frequently unearthed by mudlarks. It's not certain, but this suggests a religious tradition of tossing them into the Thames on returning from a pilgrimage to Canterbury. One badge in the museum is shaped like a peacock, now missing the figure of Becket riding it, perhaps symbolising the immortality of his soul in heaven as the peacock's flesh was thought to be incorruptible. Around 500 years later, someone else has thrown a peacock into the river. This time it's a small statue, a Hindu offering, perhaps from some time after Yogiji Maharaj blessed the Thames as a sacred river in 1970. Spectacle frames c.1600. © LONDON MUSEUM It doesn't take much time on the foreshore to understand why people have viewed the river as a sacred place. Down at Queenhithe, I listened as a tinny recording of 'Baby Shark' travelled across the water from Bankside. The sounds of wheelie suitcases being dragged across the Millennium Bridge occasionally gave the sense of camping out beneath an overpass. But there was still a solemnity to being there beneath the city. On a sunny day, the ripples of light on the water have a mesmerising beauty. The Thames Clippers occasionally send gentle waves against the remains of the timber boatyards and churn up the mud, loosening whatever has been lodged there for who knows how long. It is perfectly ordinary to pick up a piece of green-glazed medieval pottery that no other human has seen for centuries. I ask Sumnall, besides vapes, what traces will be left of our time? Troves of little keys, she says. But 'it's not the key that's the significant thing': it's the love-lock it belonged to. These locks are periodically cut off bridges and disposed of, perhaps melted down for sheet metal, leaving our descendants without a crucial piece of the puzzle. It would be a mawkish legacy, but we do and say many mawkish things in private. Thinking about my love life coming under the scrutiny of future archaeologists would make me seize up with humiliation. There are several gold rings in the exhibition, engraved with the messages 'for love I am given', 'have my heart' and 'none other'. The words are hardly anything more than the sayings on candy Sweethearts, but they weren't meant for my eyes. Each ring was laden with feeling to the person who gave it, who had it rejected, who chucked it into the river with a broken heart or to cope with grief – or who drowned with it. One thing is notably missing from Secrets of the Thames: human remains. The intention of the Docklands exhibition, Sumnall tells me, is to fascinate. It's one thing to use the human body – a real human's body – to edify, but another entirely to entertain. Nonetheless, 'if you don't find anything else, you will find bones', one mudlark tells me. For me, it was deeply unnerving, casting about all those decayed bones on the foreshore. At first glance, they could be driftwood, battered and smoothed by the river. Some are brown, some blackened, but they're unmistakably bones. Though most belonged to animals, you feel you never quite know. Secrets of the Thames left me thinking about how little humans change, how familiar and, well, human the people in the past seem. But with my modern naivety and squeamishness about death, I suspect they'd find me rather strange.
