Alan Counsell contributed to the Speaking for Ourselves oral history of people with cerebral palsy at the British Library Sound Archive.
Alan has been a writer, teacher and trainer, but he was nearly denied an education because of his difficulties in walking. He went to school thanks to the moral (and physical) support of his family.
Being carried to school
“The Headmistress at the school had refused to take me, and my Grandmother was formidable, absolutely formidable, where I was concerned: and through that visit I got to go to school, with the rest of the family; and my brother, can you imagine this, I thought nothing of it until I got older. I was five; my brother was about nine. He did, he used to carry me on his back to school in the morning. Came for me during playtime, that means he carried me around because I couldn’t walk; carried me home at lunchtime, carried me back after school after lunch, and carried me back after school in the afternoon. That’s a bit much, you know, for a nine-year-old, to carry a five-year-old, and he did that every day and never complained.”
Career options
“I wanted to be a librarian, and the careers officer Mr Jolly said, ‘No way, no way could you ever do anything like that,’ and what came back was a voice from the side, and that was the headmaster, who said, ‘Now then, how can you say that, because you don’t know our Alan: he can do whatever he wants.”
‘Sub-normality hospital’
“In the end, I got into trouble one day, big trouble, and I was absolutely furious because of my own experience. I couldn’t stop thinking that had the education authorities have had their way, when they said I was mentally defective, I could have ended up as a patient in that hospital; and that was a rather daunting thought: and they had a block, a ward, called ‘H Block’, and, you know, they had ABCD wards. H was a ward for low-grade patients; that meant their intelligence was very low, and they also had behaviour problems.
“Many of them had to be restrained for a time; every student had to do at least one month on H Block, and my first day there I just lost it. I went into orbit, oh, terrible. We had to feed the patients, and the staff on the ward got, er, a main course, and a dessert and mixed them both together, and fed it to the patients. I couldn’t do that. I kept thinking, ‘This could be me’, you know, ‘this, this could be me’. There’s no way I’d want my food like that: so I refused to do it…”
In 1969, Alan became a teacher. He continues to have a keen interest in education, through visits to schools and through his writing and training.
Alex White writes 
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