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Dear Penny,
It’s 1967.
This is your first sad time, and it’s best you keep crying. You’re learning that friends leave, but also something about them stays with you, I promise you.
Laura is strong. You love that, don’t you? At 12 years old, she seems so grown-up.
She makes you laugh in that hospital when your knees are hurting. She steals an extra sweet from the treat tin to make you feel better. She tells you how clever you are as she plaits your hair, which she says is beautiful. She helps you with your times tables, which you hate, and your spelling, which you love. She Reads aloud The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, encouraging you to do the same – how thrilled you are when you learn it off by heart and Laura says ‘you’ll do more of that one day’, and you believe it.
You know she’ll be with you in the grim times. Like when she dies, and then a year later, when Dad dies too.
Disabled Life: Crippled by Confusion, Banished by Barriers
Penny Pepper wears her bloody, beaten heart on her tattered sleeve in this powerful snapshot of the constraints imposed upon disabled people
Dear Penny,
It’s 1970.
Despite what the doctors say – and do remember that they often say silly things – you’re doing okay as you come up to your 10th birthday. You fought back. But I know you’re sad because they made you give up horse-riding. But it’s good to remember this means you’re able to be with your favourite teacher, Miss C. She sees something in you, and sets off a strength that’ll last a lifetime.
You like her necklace, shaped like a star, which hangs on a gold chain. You like her clothes – there’s something neat yet trendy about her. And when you learn the evil humans can do, it’s good it comes from Miss C. You know about the Second World War, and that there are other wars still going on. Some of them affect Miss C, who is sometimes upset. Dad’s old books show photos of dead naked bodies. You know that was to do with the Nazis, and Miss C tells you about the wicked men who killed her family, including her sister, who used a wheelchair. You’re shocked, but you realise this is growing up. You now use a wheelchair, too, so Miss C takes you to her flat for tea while the other kids ride horses.
You’ll never forget how happy you felt when she said ‘Penny, you could grow up to be a poet’.
Indifference for the Disabled: A Traumatising Night Affecting My Every Day
In her monthly column, Penny Pepper describes the aftermath of a terrifying break-in, which she fears may have been a disability hate crime
Dear Penny,
It’s 1973.
What snuggles you have with Amy in that cold hospital. You don’t realise how precious you are to her. How you try helping her with spelling. Amy tells you, together in the dark, that she knows how babies are made – that a man’s thing goes into a lady’s thing and it feels nice. You laugh ‘til you think you’ll wet the bed. Amy says it makes magic happen; that if you touch each other in a certain place, you’ll discover this magic, too.
The time comes when your heart breaks again. Amy will have a wonderful, if short, life, and, as happens with many of us, will rise above negative expectations. Before she dies, she falls in love and has a child, which was the thing she really wanted.
Amy is lost, but what she gives you is the beginning of what every girl should know and, in those days, what very few disabled girls knew at all.