Penny Avant

Record on 07.01.2019 by Carmen Talbot.

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

Um my daughter – I’ve got three daughters and two of them have been really active with refugees, um actually going to north France and building things and shelters and things. And they are over here now but they… one of them organised, um, a flash mob in Truro, um… with a singing group that they sing with, so I learnt the song and rushed down, and I have a mobility scooter, so my bag fitted on the back of my mobility scooter. It says on it ‘we could all be refugees’ and the whole idea was the get money and really raise awareness as much as anything else. And it was enormous fun and a little bit scary, but it was fun. And the moment when you start the song… and we were in a market and people ignore you, and then they can’t ignore it anymore because one person starts and you all move in… but there’s always one or two who just carry on buying meat or something, um… pretending that nothing’s happening which was really odd, but people were very generous and actually stopped and talked and things and so I left it, but I found it quite difficult to carry it round and there’s something about actually making a statement and speaking which doesn’t come normally… come naturally. And I quite often find I’ve got it inside out and then I think but why… there’s something that stops me, us, people from challenging and saying things. When my daughters were involved in France there was another thing that inspired me – they were involved with a… a… an organisation called Hummingbirds who… they called themselves… it was one of these groups that just joined up because there was this need and they called themselves Hummingbirds cos there’s this story about a forest fire and a little hummingbird who spends ages zipping to and from a lake and just taking drops of water to try and put the forest fire out. And all the other animals are saying ‘for goodness sake, you’re wasting your time’… the little hummingbird says ‘but every little helps’.

And so there we were with all those refugees and things, and I know it’s still all going on but at that point I think we hoped it might not, and so they are kept each other going… it was a bit like you saying its quite inspiring when you’re with a group that’s likeminded, um and the bit about the Hummingbirds was really important and they were… they’re still out there now – they’ve had to change direction a bit but they’re still working with refugees and so I still collect for them and things. And I even went to see our MP who is somewhere near falling off the righthand side of the Tory party and I… it was a waste of time but I thought I had to do it.