this is a photograph of me. this is a photograph of us.
I left Cornton Vale last Thursday feeling exhausted, emotional, and proud. I felt I had been part of a team that successfully delivered a drama residency in a context which I had no previous experience of. I felt proud as I feel that I brought my practice and my understandings of performance and integrated them into a challenging environment.
Driving home was a strange experience. I sat in the passenger seat pretty silent for most of the journey home. I was tired. I was also wanting to just be in my flat, with a cup of tea, and chatting to my flatmate. I felt guilty for wanting this. As we had left the prison, I knew that the women we had spent our time with had been walked back to their houses and were about to eat a meal, then to be placed in their cells. We were leaving what felt to be an eerie and silent place, but it had been like that each evening, but this evening it felt more resonant with me. I was leaving to go home, they were settling down for another night of their sentence. It was here that I realised the things I would miss if I were imprisoned, it was here that I appreciated that I was going back to my home, but it was also here that I, for the first time in the week, considered how prison is a prison, and you can’t walk away. You can see the world passing by from your cell window, with bars that block you from the outside world. You see people go about their daily lives and not enough acknowledge that over four hundred women live on the other side of that metal fence.
The next morning before heading to the Academy I sprayed some aftershave and I thought of those seven women, how they couldn’t spray perfume and how I could. I thought of how I wanted to call my mum and see how she was doing, and they couldn’t, how I could walk freely down Sauchiehall street and they couldn’t.
Spending that time in Cornton Vale, and studying this module this term has probably been the greatest gift I could have asked for on leaving the Academy. I have never been more challenged by my education and by my personal responses to what I was doing and who I was working with. There are some things from this term that I feel will stay with me for the rest of my life, and these I hope I will carry from day to day. I never imagined that I would meet such a diverse group of women, they did not match the street stereotype of a woman in prison, they, like us, are just another human being.
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