Barry Morgan began to realise he was different when he was 7:
“When I was about 7, I began to realise that, you know, sort of, how can I put it, being pushed around in a pushchair still at 7. You see the other kids of your own age, running and playing about, and I couldn’t. That’s when you sort of realise that ‘something wrong here’, and you get frustrated, because you want to go and run down the road, and you scream your head off to do it and you can’t do it.”
“The sick one”
Desmond Cox was called “the sick one”:
“The reaction is what I still get towards some families and friends, who’ve known me from the past. I’m classified as ‘the sick one’, whenever they come. I was the sick one. At first it used to annoy me, but now I laugh, because I know some of them don’t know better, because some people don’t know me, myself, they automatically think, that because I’m the sick one in their head, I don’t do anything…”
The stares of strangers
Antonia Lister-Kaye hated the stares of strangers. She had a particularly traumatic childhood experience in a posh tearoom in York:
“My grandmother, she used to love Miss Welch’s tearoom. It was a very, very genteel place, where the ladies with hats had coffee and tea and very delicate butterfly buns, and I think my grandmother was always putting off taking me there…
“Anyway she did take me there, and something awful happened. She also sold fine china, and the window was full of very, very fine china, and I stumbled, and I fell into the window, and broke everything in the window; and it wasn’t on purpose.
“My grandmother had to pay for God knows what, for what was a disabled child’s stumble really, and everybody looked at me in… absolute horror. They always looked at me in horror anyway, but I mean it was the extra-special horror. It was a very upsetting experience, because mostly I would deny being upset, otherwise I’d be upset all the time about people staring at me, and remarks being made, but I did care very much about that, because it was so humiliating.”
Being stared at still happens in later life but Antonia has learned to deal with it:
“Just the other day at a petrol station I was getting petrol for my car, and I always find this rather difficult. I get sort of tangled up in the pumps with the tubes, and there was this woman, about my own age, I suppose, looking out of her car, absolutely fascinated. She desperately was willing me to fall over, I think, and she just couldn’t take her eyes off me, so I really felt annoyed. So, I went across to her, and I said to her, ‘Did nobody ever tell you a very long time ago when you were a little girl that it was rude to stare?’”
Spending power of disabled people
Melvin Walton was singled out even when trying to enjoy the simple childhood pleasures of going to the sweet shop:
“I remember the first time I went in a shop with one of my young friends, and somebody said: ‘Oh, what’s he come in the shop for? He won’t know anything about it.’ And again, one of my friends said: ‘He’s got as much right to come in the shop as me…’
“And my delight was always going to get my Milky Bars, once a week I’d have them, and my bottle of lemonade, my raspberry lemonade.”
Alan Counsell also experienced this ignorance in much later life:
“And when we went to the estate agent, to buy this house… He wouldn’t look at me, he wouldn’t speak to me… All his comments went to Katherine, and in the end I said to him, ‘Why are you speaking to my wife, and not to me?’ And he didn’t know what to say! I said, ‘Well, you need to very careful because I have all the money. She’s got nothing!”
Disabled people’s choices are often not respected, as Sheila Bingham found:
“I went into a shoe shop. I wanted a pair of shoes. My daughter and grandson was with me. I was pushing the grandson in the pram. He was only tiny, and I said, ‘Can I have that pair of shoes in the window?’
“And the lady went to Sylvia, not to me, and said, ‘Do you realise, does your mum realise, those shoes are for men?’ and Sylvia said, ‘Ask her.’ She was talking as if I wasn’t there…”
One of the reasons perhaps for businesses’ reluctance to accommodate disabled customers may come from an assumption that disabled people have no money to spend. But the total spending power of families with at least 1 disabled person is estimated at £274 billion a year.
Tony Wilson was not allowed to handle his own money as a young man in his twenties:
“When I went to Mrs Spencer, she told me I got a saving book for it. I didn’t know I even had a saving book, a Post Office saving book, I didn’t even know that. Didn’t know I had one. But she said, ‘You’ve got some money in it, so I’ve got…’ so she said, ‘I’m going to give you, the money is £10 a week, I’m going to give you £5 still…
“But she said, ‘The other £5 is going to go into your savings,’ and that’s where it went, you see. That was because over the number of years I think… When it was handed over to me from Mrs Spencer I had over £1,000 in there… I thought, ‘That’s a bit of luck then, innit?’”
Special prices
Disabled people’s consumer experiences are often characterised as “special”. These special needs products often have very “special” prices!
Barry Morgan found the label ‘special’ created a divide between disabled children and their peers.
“Having looked in the special needs catalogues, they don’t have Postman Pat and Fireman Sam and the Flintstones, and all these things, and Paddington Bear and Rupert Bear and all these sort of things. They didn’t have these sort of things in the special needs catalogue, and I thought, ‘Well, that isn’t right…’
“And the other thing that I’d objected to was the amount of money that people charged, you know, under the badge ‘special needs’. And that really sort of, how can I put it. rankled with me. Because I’d got a disability, I didn’t have special needs toys and I felt that, probably, normal ordinary toys would be far more stimulating than special needs toys, if there was a way that youngsters could use them…”
The quotes in this blog come from Speaking for Ourselves, the oral history of people with cerebral palsy.
Alex White writes 
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