YouSaid · the spoken record

Baroness Lola Young

lines on the record: 55
first: 2025-01-06
most recent: 2025-01-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Suppose the simplest thing to say would be, you know, hang on, hang on and whatever happens, try and be open to seeing opportunities where you might not think there are opportunities. So don't sort of close down. Other people will want to close down your options, so don't close them down for yourself. You kind of like just sort of think more broadly, I guess.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Government were kind of lined up there, and it was like, gosh, you know, I'm in here. How did that happen? So it was a bit of a sort of. Well, it was definitely a moment. Let's see, it was definitely a moment. And I guess I took advice from various people who were in there already, who said, well, look, you know, you can approach it this way, you can approach it that way. I listened. One person said to me, I sat and listened for a year, literally before I said anything because I wanted to make sure I got it all right. Because all eyes will be on you as a black person speaking in this venerable institution. You've got to make sure you're all right and everything. So yeah, it was a very steep learning curve. But I say a steep learning curve that's lasted for 20 years.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, the route I came to was through applications, so it wasn't a huge, completely out of the blue shock, except that it was because when I applied, you know, you apply for something, you have your interviews, you do all the business and you think, oh, well, you know, didn't get in or whatever. But eventually I was accepted. And the introduction is thankfully mercifully a very short ceremonies, but you have to put all the robes on and swear an oath of allegiance and all of that stuff. So it was both it was very moving in lots of ways because when I looked up to the gallery, all my friends were sitting up there, sort of hanging over the edge, you know, listening to my words. And I looked around the House of Lords and there were all these spaces that I recognized from the television, labor was in government then. But Margaret Thatcher and the former conservative.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of what I would say was upper middle class people that were my relatives apparently in Nigeria. And so, and of course, for a wedding. They're all turning up in their finery. Yeah, so it was quite a difficult, it was quite difficult trying to reconcile those contradictions that I experienced there with that experience of being with people who had a very different outlook in terms of their wealth and political attitudes, I guess. Yeah, that's very different.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's a, as you probably know, everybody knows Nigeria has very profound problems and challenges. And so in the end, this was smoothed over because I said, look, my father is waiting for me. And so, can I at least get a message to him? And then they said, well, who's your father? And then I was allowed out to go and meet my father. So it's like, you know, The other kind of real tension. All senses of the word was that my relatives were from a completely different class In London. Know, and especially when I was brought up with Daisy, it's hard to pinpoint, you know, a class grouping for Daisy and her family because they own the house in Tupper Park where we live, but they weren't Well off, she was a widow, and you know lots of different factors make it quite difficult to pinpoint in class terms, but certainly wasn't.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh gosh, again, a huge mixture, you know, because on one level, there's this amazing excitement about the motherland and all of that. And going to a country where you didn't stand out, although I thought, you know, you wouldn't stand out because you'd just be one of millions of black people. But I found it really, really tough. And in fact, because there was some kind of issue around my vaccination status, the immigration people We're on the verge of telling. Well, they told me I'd have to go straight back to London. So what kind of irony is that for the first time I go to Nigeria, the land of my forefathers and foremother's birth? And then I get told, oh, you've got to go back where you came from.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you were lucky, somebody might ask you to explain something while you felt upset about something. But most of the time, people either didn't notice or didn't realize or whatever what was going on. So yeah, it was quite tough.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also metaphorically in South Africa. So we wanted to say, well, we'll join that struggle on our own terms. Know, tried to do so through the union and called for boycotts and all the rest of it. But it was quite a tumultuous time within the union and we tried to make out our feelings and experiences felt. But it was a very one of those instances where you kind of link arms and stand together In common cause, and that to me kind of forced me to articulate some of these experiences in ways that I hadn't done before, not just in ways, because I hadn't been, I'd been in this kind of, if you like, all white world where you're kind of...”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that kind of confirmed that I wasn't going mad or I didn't have a persecution complex or something because everybody had these kind of instances they could cite. So there was that. And then there was people seem to think I was good at doing committee work. And so they asked me to chair it. And I was like, what? So that to me was amazing because, you know, to be the chair of this committee. So equity was very prominent at the time in terms of a lot of turmoil caused over the apartheid South Africa rules about who could go and perform there, what kind of audiences you would be able to perform in front of and everything. So we wanted to take hold of that cause because it directly affected us and our brothers and sisters and cousins. Literally”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess it was, first of all, it was being with all other black people. Know that black and brown people. So we didn't have to explain what we would call the microaggressions of racism to each other because we all knew and lived it and experienced it.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could get into a teacher training college without a high grade A levels. And that was kind of what I thought I'd do by default. Because I really, really wanted to, but in the end, I didn't. I just said, Oh, what the heck? See what happens.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, there is that thing that I write about where my social workers say, Oh, what do you want to do? And I say, I'd like to go into publishing. And she said, Well, that isn't the kind of work for a girl like you or something like that. She said, oh, that. Got for you, it's for middle class girls. You know, she might, she just basically said, Oh, you can forget that for a star. So that was very dispiriting. But I'd once said I'd like to teach PE and because I was good at sports, I think that they kind of fell on that and said, right. There was a different, again, you know, what do you call it? Higher education was a very different scene. Then the polytechnics were polytechnics. Colleges, you know, if you wanted to go and study teacher training, that wasn't even a degree course.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt a complete failure, to be honest. And I felt I'd let people down because there were people who had an investment in this little black girl, well, not so little then. It was about 16, 17, no, 17, 18, you know, an investment in me doing well. I was going to be, you know, that child from care who managed to go to university and all the rest of it. And it all fell flat. I did feel particularly low Many of my friends got the grades they needed, and so they were scattered, you know, into these universities around the country I sort of felt that I was. A failure, and that not only an academic failure, but it was a kind of failure of character. You know, I didn't overcome these hurdles after all. And so, you know, yeah, it was a very down period. As for what I wanted to do.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is. It absolutely is, as I say, still kind of still go to match it, well, still go to matches. I do go to home matches as soon as I could afford to go on the season ticket waiting list. I went on it.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a player, you know, it just wasn't going to happen. So I thought, well, now I'm the girl who lives next to that wonderful stadium, not just the girl who lives in the black girl who lives in the children's home. So that's how it all started.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like, well, this isn't. So I can be. The black girl who lives close to the arsenal And who, one of the team or one of the reserve team, delivers our green grocery. So, you know, because it was all very local at that stage And there weren't any black players, God, anyway, virtually, but there certainly weren't at that stage in the arsenal because we're talking about. Again, you know, mid 1960s. So then I became, instead of being that stigmatized for my own self-identity. And to a large extent, I kept the secret, you know, because it's like girls. Well, girls and women weren't supposed to be into football in those days. A complete non starter as a spectator, as a fan, as a”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hopeless, really. I guess I would say I was on a really low point. Things had suddenly hit me. Maybe it was a delayed grieving, I don't know, but anyway, but I felt. Inside, I felt stigmatized by this life that I'd live. You know, it was like, why was it me who was shoved around from home to home? Why was I living in a children's home in Hertfordshire walking in dangerous places? You know, what was all of this? And so it played out as school. People were really nice to me. I had loads of friends. I wasn't bullied. But it was like, you know, can you come round to my house for tea? Oh, well, I've got to get a note from your parents first that they write to social services and say, and maybe the even social services will come around and check your house and blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's this whole stigmatization of being in care. And then there was the Arsenal Stadium at the end of the street.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, that's kind of better than the other lot. But anyway, that's another conversation. Yeah, it was interesting because actually we did a gig at Southbank Center last night on black arsenal. It's been, it's amazing. I mean, the book is amazing, so I wasn't that surprised that the book has been selling really well. But the events that I've seen have all sold out within hours, live events. So there's something really interesting there about black identity. But as I say, that's kind of another conversation because my root into Arsenal was really about geographical location. So at the time I moved into Hybrid, when I finally got a space in a home in London, in proper London as opposed to Hertfordshire, I was quite depressed and feeling very kind of.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But how can we not keep saying that to children and young people in the system and say ask them, how can we support you? What would you like to be done that would make your life so much better and easier given that you've got these somewhat difficult circumstances that you've been thrown into? How can we make that? Life is supportive and productive and positive as possible. So I think that is really about giving much more voice to those children and young people, not in a patronizing pat you on the head and say thank you very much. We talked to you to us, Wayne, but to be actively involved in designing their future. So that in summary is what I'm thinking about at the moment.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that helps them, but if you don't have that support, then that makes it very difficult. So there are some initiatives which aim to address that issue, but I think my summary would be to say that yes, we've changed some things for the better and some things we haven't, but I would like to think about how we can talk about the whole issue in a different way. And maybe that's about, yes, we have to acknowledge that you stand a higher chance of going to prison, having mental ill health, sleeping rough, etc. All those negative things that can happen to you as a result of having been in the care system.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those of us who can remember anybody who can remember being 18 years from an older perspective, you know that although you're legally an adult, you're still kind of, you know, trying to make your way through the world, trying to understand what's going on around you. And those people who have some kind of support from adults.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a very good question because lots has changed and things have improved in some respects. But then lots of other things feel horrifyingly familiar. And so I've spoken to quite a good number of young people and young people in the care system today or care experienced young people who've moved out of the care system and are sort of into the big wide world as it were. some of the emotional stuff around abandonment as you might expect is very kind of similar there's what is referred to today as the care cliff which seems to be just as bad in its own way as it was for me so the care cliff is you know like 18 years off you go”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those situations in South Africa in particular. So that was really much more my sort of, if you like, my sort of black identity was linked to that idea, that notion or that reality about the oppression of black people in different parts of the world.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I would say about identity, if you like, is that in a curious kind of way, I was into the African diaspora, although I couldn't have articulated it as such. But to me, there was this very strong common cause. Americans and black South Africans. And I was always quite a precocious reader. So I would read the, you know Richard Wright and James Baldwin and others about the civil rights movement. And I would watch intently documentary programs and read newspapers that we had in the house.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bit of a generalization because, of course, there are different cultural groupings within Nigeria. That have different kinds of values and traditions and heritage. So the idea that I'd get anything like that kind of, what's the word induction, if you like, into that kind of those cultures was just not on the cards What I did do was, I very strongly identified with the people we now call African Americans. Me, you know, at that time, what was really important was what was, yes, what was happening here. But for me, was very much refracted through the lens of what was happening in South Africa in terms of apartheid and in the USA in terms of the civil rights movement And so”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That how would I be even able to do that unless there had been a very determined effort on the part of my foster mother, on the part of Daisy, to say, well, look, you know, this is your heritage and blah, blah, blah, blah, and so on and so forth. Again, it's hard for you to picture what this was like. you know, the kinds of films and jokes and television and newspaper articles we were immersed in during that period. As I say, we were still watching Sanders of the River about, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen some of those movies from the 30s. Horrendous today, or even things like Zulu, you know, the Michael Cain film. These films kind of completely undermined that sense of equality and equity and inclusion that we like to talk about today. But in terms of a Nigerian identity, even to say that would be”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, oh, that's an interesting one. So if I take sort of the blocks of that, first, it's interesting that you say white liberal family because I don't think that would be how you would characterize them if you kind of saw them. And even that kind of, because there was still this kind of deep seam, as I say, of... Deep seam of different levels of racism So yeah, so obviously I'm not going to go into detail about that. A lot of that is in the book. But in terms of, so I don't think I ever identified as Nigerian.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I might have said eventually, oh, I've moved house, but I'm not sure that they knew I would be almost 100% sure that they wouldn't have had an inkling of... Significance of it, well, why would they? You know, they were all. As I know, they were all settled with their parents in sort of conventional household.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That kind of happened more or less straight away. I had to be, I can't remember what the section of the act is, but I was taken into care straight away and I moved around quite a little bit before they could find somewhere for me to. So it was a nerve wracking moment, but I think, I mean, there's a part of me that thinks that I was a bit numb. That sort of thing if you're sort of doing as you're told, you're preparing for this or you're doing your homework and you're sort of carrying on on one level as though nothing has changed. Of inside, there's you're trying to suppress a sort of turmoil within you so that you can function. And I'm not even sure that My school friends realized what had happened.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both at the same time, I think the shock was profound because, as I say, although I knew that she couldn't live forever and she was already quite old, and also she'd been ill surprise in that sort of sense. You know how it is when you're used to people being there and then all of a sudden they're not. And at the same time, you've then got your whole status has changed because you're no longer Daisy's foster child A child in the care system.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, in the years of my consciousness, let's say from four till seven, I would have seen her maybe five or six times. That's not conducive to building a relationship, so yeah, it's difficult.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The beginning, but a kind of groundswell of political talk about immigration. And so on, which continues obviously. So there are all of these things going on in the background. Back to your question about relationship with my mother. As I write, I just remember this thing and I can always see this of me sort of running to keep up with her as she was tall. Actually, she was from her passport says she was the same height as I am now. And I'm quite tall. So I do remember as being tall and running to try and keep up with her. But a lot of the, I don't know how many meetings we had, but it wasn't very frequent. It was maybe once or twice a year. Well, no, probably two or three times a year up until I was seven. So if you think about that.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I sort of, you know, when I look back, I think, well, not only are we talking about Windrush being in the air, as it were, we're also talking about not long since the end of the Second World War, still rationed when I was born. We still had objects and artifacts left over from the war. It was a period where empire, you know, people were talking about, oh, okay, the end of empire is, if not imminent, it's not going to be that far away, but not necessarily ordinary people, as it were. But, you know, these kind of conversations politically were going on. So all these things, there was the huge sort of conflict still going on in various parts of the world and nothing was settled around the Middle East. Sounds too familiar, doesn't it? And all of this was the backdrop. Plus,”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and again, obviously, this is me looking back and thinking how I thought, trying to think how I thought then. And so, okay, so before I got the records in my memory, I'd seen her, you know, two or three times a year. And then when I got the records, that turned out to be largely true because they kept a note of when she called. So, you know, and social worker would say, you know, mother visited. And I could tell some of the judgments, the social workers were making Of her from just little pointers in the records, like, and they did this with my father too. So I remember there was one instance where it said father visited. Okay, I get what you're saying, man. And then they were judgmental. And some of it you can see the underlying racism. If I say it's to be expected, that doesn't mean I'm excusing it or saying it's okay.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, eventually she wasn't her teacher when I knew her, but yeah, so yeah, so she was there. And then, but, and of course I wasn't thinking at the time in terms of is this person from the Caribbean or are they, you know, from Nigeria or Ghana or whatever? So to me, yes, she was a black teacher, but I didn't have a sense of what her heritage might be. I got to secondary school. In spite of it being a large school over a thousand pupils, I mean If I sort of scratch my head, I can think of maybe two or three black students and maybe a few more, handful more who were of South Asian descent. But by and large, I mean, you know, we were instantly recognizable because we stood out so much in that. In that space, yeah”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we said that she felt that she had to do extra specially well because, you know, for my benefit. And of course, I didn't know that or think about that kind of thing at that time. It's an amazing and wonderful kind of thing to treasure, really, that she felt that because she was, I think she was the first blackhead teacher in London.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was his mum Yeah, she was a teacher in my primary school I did eventually meet her sometime later. And when I was an academic and she said that, you know, obviously she always noticed me in the class.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were mainly adults, right? So there weren't that many children coming over during that period as I saw it. So in my class, actually I could name them both. There were two mixed heritage children, one boy One of whom was adopted actually. And that was it. I think there was one other maybe who preceded me. But there was a teacher, Beryl Gilroy. Now, I don't know if you, do you know Paul Gilroy?”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, no, I mean, so if we think, so when I was at primary school, I was in primary school from 1956 to 1962. So shortly after Windrush, if I can use that as a kind of global term. And of course, Windrush, particularly at that time, referred to people from the Caribbean, mainly from Jamaica.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That into, oh, right, okay, so we're really clever, and that lot are really dim. That wasn't how it kind of panned out. But by the same token, I guess Impart counteracted some of the blatant and also the slightly less blatant racism that was around the sort of sense that I didn't ever think that my blackness made me intellectually or socially inferior. Problem was that I didn't have parents and I eventually, you know, when I lived in children's homes, I was stigmatized with being in the system in that way. So the racism was there. But it didn't make, it wasn't that sort of undermined my sense of. I was. I guess that sounds a bit pretentious for a child to be thinking that way. But in some respects, I had to grow up quite quickly. Prefer, yeah, self analysis, as it”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents, Kayan, who was brought up with me, her parents, they were all students, you know. Students who were postgraduate students. So they were studying law and medicine and pharmacology and subjects like that. So she said to me on several occasions that she thought that Africans were more intelligent than white people.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything happened to her, or if I was naughty, would she, you know, opt to send me away somewhere. And so the relationship, again, was very complicated. But I did have enough of a sense of, you know, we weren't rich or anything like that, but we weren't desperately poor either. So she had very little income. But I was aware that she had very little income and not much financial support from my parents. But I was always fed and kind of clothed. I was clothed, but hand me downs from other people. And that was kind of okay. But yeah, it was a complicated relationship. But there was this curious thing that she had because, as I think I mentioned, she was one of, I think, two foster mothers. In the area who would actually take And I don't know whether it was because the black families that she knew were mostly Nigerians.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to describe what the emotional connection was for me because on the one hand I had that security for the first 14 years of my life. So she died. But it was security, but not quite secure because I always had this feeling that I might be sent away somewhere because I knew that my parents weren't going to be looking after me. That became abundantly clear when I was quite young. And particularly once they'd left this country to return to Nigeria, that wasn't going to happen. And obviously I was aware that my foster mother, I mean, look, she was, what, in her mid-60s when I went to her as a baby. And I could see that she was an old woman, you know. So I knew she wasn't going to last forever, as it were. So there was that sort of element of what would happen to me.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I feel like every time you ask me a question, I say that's complicated or that's, you know, because it is, do you know what I mean? It's like, and also, you know, somebody asked me the other day, did I love my foster mother? And I'd not sort of thought about it in those terms. So I had to try and think what are the components of love and therefore did I satisfy all those criteria. What I want to try and convey to people is that...”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I did actually because of the time, as I say, and salad kind of warned me, you know, with this example of one office had lost all the records because washing machine in the flat above had leaked and everything had gotten flooded. And so, yeah, but again, you know what it is, Habiba, there's this duality, there's this, oh, it'd be so disappointing if I don't find my records at the same time as, oh my gosh, what happens if I find my records and there's stuff that I really can't take. So, you know, I was in a position of both desperately wanting to have them, but also at the same time, you know, approaching that with some sort of trepidation”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had that right. And so that's one of the tiny things I hope I can contribute to that if there are any people out there who sort of think, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that that was right. Now, the other side of that is because I grew up in the 50s and 60s. For computers and digitization and all that stuff, the likelihood of those records being intact, I guess, gets slimmer as time goes on because they would have been most of mine, well, some of mine were handwritten, some of them were typewritten. And they're photocopies. So I don't know what the chances of survival are, you know, you were in care in the 1940s or before that. I don't know what the chances are of retrieving your records intact, but it's still worth go, I think, if you can take it.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think what it was, you know, so I think the conversation with Sal must have been in the around 2010, something like that, or maybe a bit earlier, a bit later. Not so great on dates once, when I haven't got them in front of me. But the point was, I think, that if you were older, if you were in the care system before that law came into force, then you probably wouldn't know about it. So it came into force in 1989. It was something that adopted children had had the right to look at their records way before that. But it was only in 1989 that it was decided that children who'd been or people who'd been in the care system would also have that same right. So in a way, it's not surprising. And I could bet you that there are still people who of my age and maybe even younger, maybe even people in their 50s and 60s who still don't know.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's fun, isn't it? Because you sort of think, well, if I do walk like him in that example you've given. What does that mean? Is that the person sort of putting on you their interpretation of how you're walking? Because is it that you really is so genetically sort of inside you that you can't help but do that? I mean, I do notice that when you see young men or young women walking with either parent, they do kind of fall into their rhythm. But as you say, you didn't even have that because at the age of two, I guess you could barely walk. So, yeah, that's difficult. Yeah.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, you know, it's interesting you say I had a relationship with my mother, but the nature of that relationship was so distant, so stretched as to be almost meaningless, but not quite because obviously it can never be totally meaningless. Oh God, it's so complicated, Habiba, but I had various people say to me who knew my mother or knew my father or knew both of them would say, oh, you look just like your father. I don't know what else it was. It was certainly intriguing, but in a funny sort of way, not quite meaningful enough to say that. So, yeah, it was quite complicated, as you might imagine.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not in my memory anyway. And if I did, it didn't travel around with me. So these little passport photographs and the accompanying photograph of some kind of social event were the first that I can recall of ever having seen of my mother. And of course, by the time I received them, she died. So yeah, it was, I sort of, you know how sometimes when things happen, you kind of split yourself in two. There's the part of you that is full of emotion and thinking, my gosh, what is all of this about? How can I get through this? And then there's another part that says, oh, that's interesting. It's a bit like a scene from a play, you know, sort of you open an envelope and all these items sort of fall out and you're aghast when you see them. So yeah, I had that kind of sort of split moment of opening that and seeing what was inside.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT