Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.1      Finding her Feet

1.1.1    An Unexpected Reunion

1.1.1.2  We are the Wombles

An hour later, she returned to her rooms upstairs and was surprised to see a package wrapped in gift paper nested on a table amidst now scattered papers. Scrawled across the top was a message handwritten in English, in thick marker pen:

“To my fellow Womble.”

My, now that did bring back memories. In her first year at university, inspired by some of her parents’ stories, she’d picked as an elective a course from the department of politics being given by one Dr. Lewis Sharpe entitled “effective political activism”. Students arriving at the first lecture had been met with the sight of two men outside the doors marching in a circle holding placards, angrily shouting slogans such as “Hell no, we won’t go”. Both looked unusual. The loudest of the two, bellowing with a cheerful grin, was Nordic pale, nearly 2 meters tall, and had muscles so well defined that even lions would walk softly around him.

The other figure, whose placard saying “Down with Sharpe!” had a beheaded stick figure graffitied onto it in red spray paint, seemed far more threatening. Not because he had black skin and was wearing a hoodie. Not because his appearance was threatening - he was shorter and far more slim than the other man. It was something intangible. The intensity of his gaze, the expression twisting his face, and the tone of voice that dripped venom. Hatred seemed to splash out from him in waves, so that everyone gave him a wide berth as they scurried in through the double doors of the lecture hall.

As bells from local churches sounded the hour, the door slammed closed and every head turned to see the slim protester heading down the stairs between the slanted rows of seats towards the podium at the front. But something was different. He’d discarded the hoodie, revealing neatly styled corn-rows. He was wearing a well-tailored suit. And he was relaxed, grinning and unthreatening. Discarding the placard against the podium he turned to face the audience:

“Good morning. I am Dr. Sharpe. What you just witnessed was an example of ineffective political activism. Yes, it caught your attention briefly, but not one of you decided to boycott the lecture because of it. Over the next twelve lectures I’m going to tell you about things that have actually worked. I’m going to give you ideas, and I’m going to give you the tools to generate your own ideas, to test and improve those ideas, to get others involved and to execute them without ending up in prison or harming innocents.”

“By the end of this term, if you pay attention, then when you get angry about something you won’t need to feel helpless; you will feel confident that, if you choose to, you can really make a change.”

He laughed. “That doesn’t make me very popular with my fellow faculty members; they don’t like students having power. But it is something I feel passionate about, so to let you know where I’m coming from, why I’m doing this, I’m going to start off by telling you a story about myself.”

He clicked a button on the podium to lower the lights in the hall and put up a slide showing some stuffed animal-like puppets from a British children’s television show.

“Anyone recognise these? Back in 1973 they broadcast a TV series The Wombles, about a group of small creatures living on Wimbledon Common in London, who survived by taking the rubbish discarded by humans and recycling it into useful things in unexpected ways.”

“Well, in 2011, when I was 13 years old, an unarmed black man named Mark Duggan was shot multiple times by armed police officers and killed. The police said he was a drug dealer and a gang member. Others said he wasn’t. The police said they thought he had a gun and tried to resist. Others said he was just running away, and that the police tried to get rid of witnesses and were covering things up. Anyway, I and a lot of other youths living in Hackney and other parts of London got as mad as hell and decided we weren’t going to take it anymore.”

“But we didn’t have a plan, let alone a good one. We had no identity, no cohesion, no leaders. It was just a bunch of us acting together as a mob. Mobs don’t make good decisions. It started off as a riot, progressed to smashing things up that were totally unrelated to the police, and ended up with looting. Not my proudest moment.”

“And in the morning the police were still the police. The politicians and public knew we were angry, but they’d already known that, and now they saw us as greedy looters and stupid vandals, rather than as victims, which made it easier for them to ignore what we wanted. The only thing that really changed was that the streets in our neighbourhood were now covered in rubbish and broken things. It looked terrible.”

“My dad, he was born in Jamaica and was brought over to England by his parents in the 1960s. My god he was pissed at me. He showed me the newspapers, showed me how things were. And as we looked together on the internet, we came across a link to a new hashtag. #riotwomble”

Dr Sharpe brought up a slide showing a page from an archaic social media firm.

“It turned out that a bunch of locals were using social media to arrange meeting up the next day with brooms and black bin bags, to tidy the streets. Doesn’t sound particularly appealing, does it? But here’s what they did differently. They linked it to the idea of The Wombles, these smart, friendly creatures with very human feelings and failings, that everybody was familiar with and liked. By giving the project an identity, they gave it cohesion. Someone who sees themselves as ‘acting like a Womble’ rather than as ‘a person wandering around with a broom facing an impossibly large task’, has a different mindset. It guides them on what to do not just when faced with a bit of litter, but on lots of small things, from how to tell a joke to how to deal with a setback.”

“Remember: don’t think just about what people need to do. You have to frame it properly.”

He’d been an amazing lecturer. Some of the students, the ones most enthused by him, had gone on afterwards to create a group which put his theories into practice. They called themselves The New Wombles, and she’d made some incredible friends from among them.

She’d been young, confident, and certain about what the future held in store for her - marriage and a career in music, just like her parents. She hadn’t realised, at the time, how lonely her later life would be and how much she’d come to look back on that carefree period as the best days of her life.