Thank you to all the visitors to Erewash Museum who added their stories to those featured in the exhibition. Special thanks to SJ for sharing her story.

SJ visited the Unexamined Lives exhibition with S her young son and baby daughter. She lives locally and is a regular visitor to the Museum.

I had brought paper and coloured crayons with me and S soon settled down to some drawing while his mum talked about the problems she experiences both as a mother of two small children, and as a mixed race woman.

S has been diagnosed as autistic. He has a high level of special needs. He is often sick, not sleeping, wakes a lot, he has speech and language support and physiotherapy. He is at mainstream nursery and she does have some friends in a baby group but since Brexit things are difficult.

SJ is from the West Midlands and met her husband, an Ilkeston man, at University. He has a history degree, and further academic qualifications. She trained as a Social Worker and got a job in Nottingham. Now with her family responsibilities she can’t do that work but does work part time from home on a flexible basis for a family member, fitting this in when the children are in bed.

Her present home, a house over 100 years old, is the first proper home she and her partner have had together.

SJ has noticed that there has been an increase in racism since the vote to leave Europe. The ‘climate’ has changed and people seem to have an increased confidence to be racist. Unwelcome Social media comments have increased and SJ has recently severed friendships because of this issue. She feels uncomfortable in Ilkeston and would like to move to a more multicultural community – she is thinking she would like to move and live in Beeston or Nottingham.

S did a couple of drawings – he chose different coloured paper and different coloured felt tips, one picture was a banana which he likes to eat, the other was a tall yellow mountain. I drew a stick figure of S half way up, climbing the mountain, S doesn’t like to draw himself.

Subject gave verbal permission for these notes to be used by the project.
CH
—

‘Unexamined Lives’ is a ground-breaking local and social history project funded by The Heritage Lottery. It has ‘captured’ the lives and times of ‘ordinary’ people living or having a connection with the villages of Ockbrook and Borrowash in the 20th and 21st C.

As this acclaimed three year project comes to a close we’re celebrating with events and an exciting exhibition at the Award Winning Erewash Museum, Dalby House. This late Georgian house with Victorian extensions, formerly a family home and a school opened as a Museum in the 1980’s and has recently undergone a major refurbishment and extension with a ‘state of the art’ Old Stables Learning and Visitor Centre.

As part of our celebrations writer Chrissie Hall will be leading two half day creative writing workshops in the Museum. You’re invited to join us. We will view the exhibition and get to know some of the fascinating stories of ‘ordinary’ people of the present and the past whose lives have been recorded by the Unexamined Lives project. Using the exhibition for inspiration we will hear about some of the ‘lives’ captured by the project and find out how our own lives, and those of our families, have contributed to the local and social history of our times. We will soon discover that there’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary life’, we are all ‘extra-ordinary’!

These events will be free, friendly and inspiring; no experience of creative writing is required.

Please contact the museum to book your place by tel. 0115 9071141 or by email museum@erewash.gov.uk