Crip's Column
View from my wheelchair - Victoria Brignell on life as a disabled person.
Who do you think I am?
- Posted by Victoria Brignell
- 08 December 2006
Our latter day Anthony Blunt examines her double life
One of the highlights for me of this year's BBC autumn season was the latest series of Who do you think you are? Celebrities are given the chance to explore their family tree and discover secrets about their ancestors, often with surprising results.
Let’s face it, who would have thought that Barbara Windsor was distantly related to John Constable? (Windsor was delighted to unearth the connection but would East Anglia’s most famous painter be equally thrilled, I wonder?)
I sometimes ask myself the question, "who do you think you are?". It’s easy for a person in my situation to become confused about their identity.
Like a modern-day Anthony Blunt, who filled the role of surveyor of the Queen’s pictures while simultaneously spying for Communist Russia, I often feel like I lead a double life – although I have rather less knowledge of art history.
On the one hand, I’m part of that socially-excluded group called "disabled people". For the last 23 years I’ve been a wheelchair user and a tetraplegic – paralysed from the neck downwards. I need 24-hour care, seven days a week – and a substantial amount of funding from social services to pay for this.
I rely on others to carry out the most basic tasks for me, everything from washing and dressing through to feeding and wiping my nose. I rent a housing association flat and receive regular hand-outs from the benefits system in the form of disability living allowance.
Eleven years after the Disability Discrimination Act reached the statute book, I still don’t have access to numerous shops, restaurants, theatres, cinema screens and Tube stations. And when I’m out and about, there are still occasions when people talk to my carer and completely ignore me.
On the other hand, I come from a prosperous, white, middle-class family. I attended one of the leading grammar schools in the country. I went to Cambridge University and served a year on the students’ union executive. I read Classics, a subject normally associated with public school toffs.
I’ve had the opportunity to travel widely in Northern Europe, including Sweden, Denmark and France. I now work for the BBC and my income is well above the national average. I’m a governor of a primary school in West London and chair the curriculum committee. It’s hardly the CV of a marginalised individual.
So what does that make me then? Am I a victim of discrimination or one of life’s fortunate people? Am I near the top of society’s ladder or somewhere close to the bottom? Am I a member of an oppressed minority or part of a privileged (some would say over-privileged) elite?
Well, I suppose the truth is that I am both. My identity is a complex and multi-faceted business. Being severely disabled yet also having a decent education and interesting career means I defy the simplistic categories society has traditionally liked to use to pigeon-hole people.
It also has an effect on my personality. At work I have to be authoritative, in control and prepared to make decisions, but at other times I have to beg for help and am at the mercy of others’ actions.
If a carer falls sick I have to ring up an agency and beg them to send someone to cover at short notice. More than once in my life I’ve had to beg social services to give me sufficient care funding to lead an independent life, and at some point I will inevitably have to do so again.
Perhaps this dichotomy in my experience helps to explain why there are days when I feel confident and assertive, and others when my self-esteem plummets and all I feel like doing is hiding under my duvet.
If I sometimes find my identity perplexing, then other people are often perplexed even more.
I remember a morning a couple of years ago when a carer from an agency was helping to get me up. (One of my regular carers was away on holiday). She had never met me before and the agency had only given her the scantiest information about me.
Once in my wheelchair, I asked her to help me ring a taxi. "Are you off to a daycare centre?", she asked. While trying hard not to laugh, I explained that no, I wasn’t off to a daycare centre, I was actually off to work. She looked rather bewildered but eventually seemed to accept her revised perception of who I was. The idea of my BBC office as a daycare centre amuses me still…
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