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The punishment block is aptly named Bleak House, and known just as Bleak. Several of the solitary cells inside this separate compound, hidden behind … - Polly Toynbee
" "The punishment block is aptly named Bleak House, and known just as Bleak. Several of the solitary cells inside this separate compound, hidden behind the coal sheds, were opened for me to inspect the inmates, a procedure that made me feel extremely uncomfortable. ...
Inside one cell a big, red haired girl sat on her bed, the only furniture, and the officer said she was there for her own protection. She can hardly have been twenty, but her arms, legs and face were covered in old scars. New stitches stood out on the pale flesh from a long cut across her arm. She cut herself often. She was also agoraphobic and didn't want to leave the cell.
"I'm glad you've come to talk to me," she said warmly as I sat down beside her. She sounded like a young child.
"No one's been to talk to me all day. I don't want to be free but I'd like to be in mental hospital, where I was before. But they sent me out, so I stole a social security cheque and went straight to the police, and then I got put here." Her mother had been in the same mental hospital. Her father and two uncles had killed themselves, and she had slashed herself countless times. Her father had assaulted her when she was six and when she was sixteen. She, too, though visited by a doctor every day, as are all Bleak inmates, said she was receiving no psychiatric treatment, and no drugs.
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About Polly Toynbee
Mary Louisa "Polly" Toynbee (born 27 December 1946) is a British journalist and writer. She has been a columnist for The Guardian newspaper since 1998. Toynbee previously worked as social affairs editor for the BBC (1988–1995) and also for The Independent newspaper. Before joining the BBC, she had written for The Observer and The Guardian. She is vice-president of Humanists UK, having previously served as its president between 2007 and 2012. She was also named Columnist of the Year at the 2007 British Press Awards. She became a patron of right to die organization My Death, My Decision in 2021. She was a candidate for the Social Democratic Party in the 1983 general election. She now broadly supports the Labour Party.
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Alternative Names:
Mary Louisa Toynbee
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Additional quotes by Polly Toynbee
This is where the housing pressure-cooker explodes. This is Manchester's civil court, like others all across England, where people are made homeless, hundreds every day. Those unable to pay rocketing mortgages have houses repossessed here. Tenants unable to cope with stagnant incomes lose their homes here when budgets no longer cover rising rents. From here, court bailiffs are sent to remove them.
The great scandal is the spiralling number of tenants evicted on "no-fault" section 21 orders: these allow a landlord to turn someone out even if they have always paid their rent on time, however many years they have been there, however well-behaved they have been.
[A reopening of a water fountain in London, Wimbledon] I was there because the fountain was erected in 1868 in memory of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Toynbee, otologist and ear-syringer to Queen Victoria: he died young in his laboratory experimenting on himself with chloroform for tinnitus. He was a radical local campaigner who fought to save Wimbledon Common from the rapacious Earl Spencer's attempt to privatise and enclose it. He set up the Wimbledon Village Club, a working men's institute for edification, entertainment, refreshments and a library, in much community use now. Family history records that his rigorous selflessness included dragging his nine children across Wimbledon Common on Christmas Day to make them donate their Christmas dinner to a Travellers' encampment. The plaque on the fountain says that working men of Wimbledon and those "interested in the public good" paid for this memorial.
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