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| This post contains lots of cats. But not in a good way |
Since my last post, I’ve been continuing to reminisce about my past as a social worker. Social work has changed a lot since I started in the mid 1970’s, in some ways for the better, in other ways for the worse.
When I started, our local social services office would
receive a request for assistance, the case would be allocated to a social
worker – and, er, that was about it. Unless there were very clear identified
needs, for example a need for residential care, for aids to daily living, or a
child subject to some form of abuse, the social worker would just tend to, sort
of, bumble along, visiting the client, as they were referred to back then,
developing a relationship, maybe sometimes doing something practical, like
helping them claim benefits.
Most clients did not have any sort of formal care plan.
Occasionally, in supervision, your team leader would ask you what you were
doing with a particular client. Then you had to think hard and say something
that sounded worthy and useful.
My first caseload was very mixed. I had a few children and
family cases, some elderly people, some people with physical disabilities, a
few people with learning difficulties or mental health problems, and one or two
who defied categorisation.
Margaret was one of the latter. She was in her early
sixties, and lived alone in a local authority house in a small village a few
miles outside Charwood.
I was never clear about how she ended up a client of the
social services department. It may have been a referral from the local housing
authority, who was certainly concerned about her ability to manage her tenancy.
It may have been because of complaints from neighbours.
It’s possible she may have had mild learning difficulties,
although she had no formal diagnosis. She had lived all her life in that house,
taking over the tenancy when her parents had died over twenty years previously,
and perhaps they had been her carers. She certainly had no obvious mental
illness. But she was deemed to be a vulnerable person, and hence worthy of
having a social worker, even if that social worker was unqualified and
completely inexperienced.
Or maybe it was because she was a witch.
She certainly looked like a witch. She had snaggle teeth, a
long nose with a wart on the end, and matted hair. It was thought that the last
time her hair had been washed was over 20 years ago, when she had had to go
into hospital when she’d had a fall. I could believe it; her hair had become
felted. She had probably also not had a bath for twenty years, and her face and
hands were black with dirt.
And she had cats. I never knew how many cats she had, and I
don’t think she knew either, but there must have been somewhere between 20 and
40. They lived in the house, never leaving it, and freely interbreeding. She
seemed to have no arrangements for their toileting, with the result that they
defecated anywhere and everywhere.
See if you can imagine the experience of visiting her house.
I always went in through the back door, which was never locked.
The hallway was comparatively free of cat faeces, as she tended to keep them in
the living room and kitchen area. But she made up for this omission by having
piles of newspapers at least 4 feet high lining both walls of the hall. As she
lived and slept in the living room, she never went upstairs. I have no idea
what the bedrooms were like, as it was impossible to go up the stairs because
each step was piled high with old newspapers.
I was told that a previous social worker had attempted to
clear the house of newspapers by diligently putting them into an outhouse, but
Margaret had then brought them all back in because she was afraid they’d get
damp outside.
Festoons of ancient cobwebs hung from the ceiling, some
hanging so low you risked getting them in your hair unless you ducked.
Having negotiated the hallway, you finally entered the
living room. Winter or summer, Margaret never opened the windows, so the
temperature in there could get quite high during the summer months. But not as high
as the stench.
It was impossible to tell what the original floor covering
in the living room was, as it was completely covered with cat faeces to an
unknown depth. My shoes tended to stick to the floor as I walked through. There
was an audible noise as I picked my feet up step by cautious step.
The smell was almost unbearable. In those days I smoked a
pipe, and used to smoke furiously throughout my visits in a futile effort to
mask the ghastly smell.
Margaret would be sitting at the head of a table covered
with old papers and cats. Her matted and filthy hair was partly covered with an
equally filthy headscarf. She generally ate white bread straight from a bag
during my visits, tearing it into smaller pieces with her black hands before
putting it into her mouth. Sometimes she would offer me a biscuit. I always
declined.
During the summer months she would be surrounded by a halo
of flies.
I never sat down in her house. This was partly because any
seats were always covered with cats, but mainly because they were so filthy that
I would have needed a change of clothes afterwards.
So what social work tasks was I undertaking with Margaret?
Did I try to improve her living conditions? Not really. Her
file catalogued the efforts previous social workers had made, all of which were
futile. Margaret did not want to change.
Did I support her within her community? I guess so; people
seemed reassured that a social worker was visiting her. But if they hoped that
it would effect any perceptible change, they were sadly disappointed.
Issues of capacity were barely talked about back then. Apart
from her appalling living conditions, I never had any feeling that Margaret was
not mentally able to make decisions about her lifestyle. Nowadays I could
explicitly assess her capacity, and conclude that she had the right to make
unwise decisions, but there was no legislation that covered Margaret’s
situation in the 1970’s.
She appreciated my visits, and liked to talk to me, so I
suppose I fulfilled some welfare purpose. Again, nowadays that befriending role
could either be provided by a voluntary organisation or supplied via a personal
budget under the Care Act. But back then, the main resource was social workers.
One thing I learned from Margaret was not to be phased by
extreme housing conditions. In later years, when people complained of patients
living in squalor, I set Margaret as the benchmark. That was squalor.
During the two years Margaret was on my caseload, I achieved
one traditional social work task; I arranged for a neighbour to be paid as a
home help in order to do her shopping once a week. So I suppose I did do
something to improve her life.
