The first memory I retain,

not the ones handed down to me in black and white,

of going missing as my mother and nan

were shopping in Abingdon

and after going spare and wondering

how they were going to break the news

to my father, only to find me

giggling away to myself in the coal shed

that joined the house, having apparently walked

home alone…

…the memory I have that still hurts in my mind,

that has seared so much into the very fabric

of who I am, past that early mini explorer, escape artist,

joker in coal dust and blackened smile,

is one of exclusion.

 

The refusal of sanction to join a class,

a new way to learn before school,

despite having played all morning

as a four year old in the sand pit on a bright May day.

I had let the sand fall through my fingers

and smiled at what I thought were my new friends

and even though my pal Bunda Laggy

was there as well,

I felt as though something new was happening,

the next great adventure was underway…

 

…I remember the heat

as my cheeks went scarlet when my

Mother was told in no uncertain terms

that there was no place for me,

I wasn’t welcome at the school,

I didn’t fit in and they suggested a school

that I could start the following September,

almost forty years ago, a few miles away

down in Moor Green Lane.

 

It was that heat, of early embarrassment

and childish rage that I find drives me

to make sure, where I can, people are not excluded,

but even then some piss me off and I have to

remember my promise, that everyone has a voice

that deserves to be heard;

even if it full of crap, let the people hear it,

for they are the ones who decide…

 

Exclusion, nobody should ever be excluded,

for the baring of one human being

on the grounds of a tainted personal opinion

without the facts to back it up

and the general consensus of the people

is not a system, it is a judgement,

and one even then that is flawed, corrupt

and one that causes shame.

Ian D. Hall 2015