ABSTRACT
It is easy looking back to find a pattern that led straight to social work, but the only thing that I was clear about when I left school for university was that I wanted none of the career options open to girls at the time: teaching, nursing or working in a bank. The steps I took were mainly leaps in the dark in a direction of travel, but with no sense of a clear destination. Looking back, I think there were different influences that led me to choose social work as a career and shaped what I see as the core of social work
My father died in a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan towards the end of the Second World War, and so I was brought up by my mother in a one-parent family. From about the age of 9 years onwards, we lived on a council estate. Like our neighbours, we came across ‘the welfare’ from time to time because this was the only means to access means-tested benefits. I still have two pictures in my mind fifty years later. The first picture is of the ‘welfare lady’ from the transport company where my father had been a bus conductor, visiting us to see if we ‘needed anything’. I soon learnt this didn’t mean that you could ask for what you thought you needed, even though my mother was reluctant to ‘be beholden to anyone’ and subsequently kept any request to the minimum. Instead, the welfare worker decided what you ‘needed’ and this came in the form of a grant for clothes or shoes for us children, if you passed some sort of hidden test. Although she tried to be sympathetic and providing support to the widows of employees was good employment practice, the feelings my mother and I had were of deep shame and humiliation each time she came.
