The Albino Sparrow

The Albino Sparrow

Helena was worried that she would be sent back to Germany. The walls of her living room had pictures of grandchildren smiling into their future and oblivious to the past. Beside the photographs were Helena’s paintings of Scottish landscapes that had been her background for seventy years. Her country, Scotland, had welcomed her and embraced her. Her mother had reported every week to the local police until it was decided. You are no longer aliens, you have the right to stay. You are home. Helena’s mother had been liberated by the Americans from a camp in Poland, married a German, had her children, her husband died, she sought refuge in Britain, and ended up in Scotland. Home at last – relief.

Helena feeds the pigeons although she knows she shouldn't. She describes the albino sparrow that visits the garden and the joy she gets from seeing it feeding on seed left for the birds. After a lifetime living on farms, she respects nature and the need for shelter, food and company. It worries her the albino may not be accepted by the other sparrows.

My mind slips back 30 years. It was a fresh spring morning in central Edinburgh. A green spring was in the leaves and in my step. I was here to train for a war, one borne out of ideals and ideas that began in a match factory but spread to coal mines, shipyards and factories. Like purifying flames cleansing society using the oxygen of publicity and social conscience. One hundred years before, a new weekly paper launched a campaign that sparked a revolution using the words of Victor Hugo;

“I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the great and the feeble to the strong... I will speak for all the despairing silent ones."

Around about the same time a certain P T Barnum was three years from a fatal stroke. The “greatest showman on earth” had also been elected as the Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1875. In this role he worked to improve the water supply, introduced gas street lighting, and tackled alcohol and prostitution issues. He also identified American psychologist Bertram Forer’s subjective evaluation phenomenon before Forer did. So, it is more widely known as “the Barnum effect”. Barnum statements continue to be used to this day by mentalists, spiritualists, clairvoyants and politicians. Essentially, they are a series of general statements that just about everybody thinks applies to only them. A gigantic fishing net full of haddock, each thinking “how did they fashion this perfect snare to entrap me?”.

Maybe Hugo had done nothing more than produce a Barnum statement. Who wouldn’t be in favour of speaking up for the “despairing silent ones”? In sunny Edinburgh I was aware that the desparing ones were on the brink of another attack from a government that had already swept aside generations of voices. Mining was collapsing, shipbuilding was sinking and car manufacturing had hit the brakes. For public servants, “market testing” would be mean the next item on the agenda. Government departments would be fileted and offered to the private sector on a plate. Privatisation was coming down the tracks. “Providing cheaper and more efficient public services is the right thing to do”. Barnum would have been proud.

At the same time, Helena had been hanging out washing on the farm in Aberdeenshire. Her mother was still alive but spoke little about her life in war time Poland. Whether she had been regarded as an economic migrant or a refugee from her damaged country, she had landed at Greenock with her three children. The little card gave her alien status with the right to stay in the United Kingdom along with three children, unnamed on the card. As long as she attended a nominated police station once a week she was permitted to stay. At 6 years of age, Helena along with her older sister and brother, had travelled the width of Europe to seek sanctuary. She had been born in Germany but the Aberdeenshire community had been welcoming and understanding in the post war atmosphere.

I walked up the steps and the sun bounced off a brass plaque announcing the offices of The Scottish Trade Union Congress. I was here for a seminar hosted by the Council of Civil Service Unions. There was a flip-chart, an overhead projector, a fax machine a large beige room with a conference table, chairs and coffee. Scrawled at the top of the flipchart was “Market Testing”. I was all set for a day of briefings and discussions that would be slightly more interesting than my day job. We discussed damage limitation, how to protect the jobs and livelihoods of thousands of people. People with rent to pay, children to feed, pensions to keep. The sun beamed through the window as if trying to set the flip chart alight. Public services were being attacked on all sides and all we could do was dig trenches.

Brendan O’Neill was a Union employee. A full-time official who supported the elected members and officers with the day to day functioning of a Union branch. Brendan had earned respect for his wise and considered counsel. He was in his early thirties and had a deep voice that cut through a noisy background with reasoned authority. I remember this day because of a dramatic intervention made by Brendan. He was not in the room during a group discussion on market testing. Suddenly the door opened and Brendan flew in clutching a fax. He held in his hands a legal decision that indicated that the “Transfer of Undertakings and the Protection of Employment” (TUPE) Directive would be applicable. I had no idea what he was talking about, “why is he so excited?”. The significance of the shiny fax was lost on me. But the policy director of the Council of Civil Service Unions had heard of it and would have dismissively consigned the fax to the bin if Brendan was not holding onto it with clenched fist.

Helena had married a local farmer and was steeped in the Doric stronghold. The rich Aberdeenshire soil had provided generations of families with life. It was hard and the fruits produced by their labour not always bountiful. For years it seemed as if one harvest would stumble to the next. Many would cross the fields to the sea and harvest the silver darlings. Later, oil would create a far stronger pull in order to satisfy the hungry tractors that replaced the horses. Helena’s mother had witnessed the horrors of war, starvation and encampment. She hoped that her children’s young ages would mitigate the exposure to the worst of the sights and sounds. As she grew into her new home, she felt grateful in the knowledge that she had done the right thing. Nearly seventy years later her Alien’s card would be handed to me, still with its photograph of a young beautiful Polish woman. There were no photographs of the children.

Brendan was right. TUPE would become famous, in employment law circles, as the UK version of a European Union Directive. It halted the policy of privatising anything in the public sector that looked profitable. It prevented the harvesting of low-lying fruit at the expense of jobs, pay, holidays, pensions, working hours and other hard-won conditions. This directive removed the incentive for private companies to take on public contracts because it entitled working people to retain all of their existing terms and conditions. There was no scope for profit. The workers of the European world breathed a collective sigh of relief. Workers' rights had been protected by Europe against a predatory government that sought to sell off the family silver; melted down and siphoned upwards.

For Helena, it never crossed her mind that her right to stay in her home country could ever be challenged. And she was correct, Poland and Germany were part of Europe. She had the right to live in any one of 28 countries which included her beloved Scotland. She was content with a long happy life and the sparrows that had the freedom to visit her garden. Then one day a wind rushed in. Just over half the voting public had decided that being part of the European community was not such a good idea after all. For the first time that she could remember she felt different, unwanted and disempowered by her own country. It does not matter how many times her friends told her “there are too many foreigners here, oh! But we don’t mean you”. She felt insecure and terrified that she would be sent to Germany, the country of her birth. Alone, without her husband, family, friends and unable to communicate. Still attached to the branch but feeling like low-lying fruit.

Helena, in her desperation, sought help. The Citizen’s Advice office had told her that there was nothing they could do for her. I told her there was nothing I could do for her as the coordinator of a health and social care drop-in centre. Not in our remit, sorry.

For 35 years I have been aware of the protections afforded by TUPE. Employment rights are so easily taken for granted when they are guarded by laws. Victor Hugo had been inspired by articles written by a crusading journalist, Annie Besant. She listened to the matchmaker girls and women of the Bryant and May match factory. She publicised the shocking conditions they toiled under. Fines for petty offenses like talking, being late, dropping materials, and taking unauthorised toilet breaks. The money was deducted from their pay, such as it was. The campaign resulted in the first organised strike action in modern times. Their conditions improved and efforts began to introduce laws that would improve the lives of millions of ordinary working people. This policy of balancing the rights of citizens with the economic drive for profit has flowed across the decades and countries. It has been a fundamental strand of European law and regulation and has protected citizens against sporadic attack by UK governments.

I listened to Helena. She told me the story of her mother and how she had arrived at Greenock one wet Thursday morning with her bundle of children. She had survived a Polish internment camp, had lost her husband but had been offered work in Scotland and a safe place to live. I was ashamed, angry, and upset that it had come to this. Helena wanted the security and re-assurance that she was a British citizen and could not be forced to move somewhere else alien to her. With her German birth certificate and a copy of her mother’s alien card, I sought help on her behalf. Surely this can be resolved by someone, an expert in this field. The likelihood of exiting the European Union raised the possibility that Helena would be deported. No amount of re-assurance from friends, politicians or from me could erase that possibility with absolute certainty. After an appeal on facebook, we found our expert who was familiar with the hundreds of pages of forms that needed to be completed and submitted to The Home Office. Months later we received news. Yes, the situation could be resolved; first, provide evidence of seventy years life in the UK, secondly, submit the alien identity card. Then, and only then, apply for a British passport. It would take months, maybe a couple of years. And it would cost around four thousand pounds. There was light at the end, but of a very long and expensive tunnel.

So, for what it is worth, these are some of my experiences of living as a European citizen. I am grateful for the protection that I have received, the wars that never happened, the jobs that I have had, the opportunity to live and work in another European country, the joy of Cycling from Germany to France for a day out without the need for border checks, the ability to drive from the republic to Northern Ireland to take a ferry home and most of all, for the chance to meet my German wife while she was on holiday in Ireland. In Scotland I have been privileged to work with Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Swiss people, French people, and many more from many places. They have all enriched my life and I hope I was able to help them.

Helena has still to decide what to do and whether she can afford the cost of proving who she is. This is about her identity, who she is and what she has contributed to her community. I hope she can spend her final days in the knowledge that she is not defined by a Home office process but by the person she is. By what she means to her husband, family and friends. And by what she meant to a brave young mother who brought her here for a new, better life. I hope she keeps looking out for the albino sparrow.