Some wonderful things and a terrible thing

The same week I started my own company, I found out my wonderful mum has cancer. Neither one feels real, still. The last couple of months have been extraordinary in many ways - indescribably brilliant and horribly difficult - and I wanted to write a little something about that. About how both can be true at once. About finding the good in the bad, trying and failing to balance life and work, and, as cliché as it is, how other people’s love and kindness powers you through both the best and worst of life. It takes a village, as they say.

It’s been 12 weeks now since we found out cancer was a possibility, 10 weeks since she was admitted the first time, 8 weeks since we found out it was stage three, 6 weeks since I came home to isolate with her, 5 weeks since her emergency surgery, and 2 weeks since she was discharged. We were told before she went into surgery that there was a risk she might not make it through. It was the most terrifying day of my life. Her consultant called in the late afternoon to let us know she was OK and I garbled some thank yous and burst into tears. The NHS are unbelievably brilliant. There are truly no words. Heroes, every one of them.

She was kept in for nearly three weeks post-op because of some complications, but she’s been conscious and positive and whatsapping since the day after her surgery. I’ve been sleeping in her house the entire time, but wasn’t allowed to see her as she was in a Covid-19 Green Zone. I’m thankful they kept her safe, but it’s jarring, because walk through town or scan the local facebook groups and you’d think the whole country had decided Covid was over. Masks off, let’s party! But I wasn’t allowed to see my wonderful mum, going through cancer treatment and recovering from major surgery, for three weeks. And worse, when chemo begins soon her immune system will be compromised, yet a member of my own family refuses to get vaccinated. We are living in a world of extremes and I’m losing the patience to navigate it.

With all of this going on, the timing was not ideal to launch my new company, but the course had already been set and I’m certain she would have been mad at me for postponing it for her sake. So since June 2021, RivelinCo officially exists. I am enormously proud of it. For years I have dreamt of someday running an arts centre, partly inspired of course by the best job I’ve ever had - at the Albany in Deptford - and collaborations with other equally brilliant places like ARC in Stockton and Cast in Doncaster. When we moved from London to Sheffield I missed the Albany immensely and desperately wished there was a version of it in our new city. Finding nothing quite the same (don’t get me wrong, Sheffield has some of the best arts organisations in the country, but just nothing that quite did what I dream of doing) the search for a potential venue began - with no money at all, just some big ideas. Before the pandemic hit I’d spent hours pleading with the owners of the old HSBC Bank in Hillsborough to take a punt on me rather than sell it off as flats. They weren’t all that interested – for landlords money talks and I didn’t have much to offer, and then Covid happened and the opportunity disappeared altogether. It took a lot of frustration, failure, and working for free but the arts centre dream still didn’t fade - if anything it lit a fire in me. Two years later - still buildingless but intentionally this time - RivelinCo was born: a neighbourhood arts centre without walls, based in Hillsborough, Sheffield.

We're named after our local river, the Rivelin, for lots of reasons, the main one being the concept of ‘confluence’. It is the word for when rivers meet and become something bigger together: it felt like the perfect analogy for a collaborative, community-centred endeavour. I hope we will always stay true to that ethos. Our first major projects are with Age UK Sheffield, a collaboration that came about thanks to a chance meeting when I became a school governor at a local primary school. Two years and several pitches, proposals, and business plan drafts later, I’m delighted that we’re delivering a project together this summer and will hopefully be working together for many years to come. An older people’s charity and an arts organisation, running intergenerational cultural activities together. In a park, beside a library. In collaboration with lots of other arts organisations, charities, artists, community groups, local businesses, even the football club. This is what I’d imagined. Suddenly the arts centre dream feels more real.

(A side note: unbelievably, this all happened during a pandemic. Covid-19 has been devastating for so many, and I do not want to belittle it. But I did also want to make a small point of what has been possible during it. It was immensely frustrating to see some large, well-funded arts organisations with their doors closed - not supporting their freelancers, not supporting their communities - when all this work was happening on the ground. When other theatres, arts centres and small companies became food banks, vaccination centres, delivery drivers, community hubs, support systems. When freelancers were the people raising money for other freelancers to stay afloat. And then to watch CRF funding go to ‘shut up shop’ buildings in the hundreds of thousands. It doesn’t sit right.)

Of course the Albany is not the only RivelinCo influence. There's a little bit of Slung Low in there, a little bit of Deveron Projects, a little bit of Entelechy Arts, Common Wealth, and Civic Square. A little bit of my local library growing up, the village hall youth club I went to as a pre-teen, and the arts centre that never was, when we tried to save our local working men's club from demolition last year. I am thankful to so many wonderful people. I am certain none of this could have happened without the patient ears and kind hearts of Malaika Cunningham, James Blakey, Rachel Nelken, Aja Garrod and Sarah Sharp, amongst many, many others. Without much-needed advice from kind-hearted industry stalwarts like Annabel Turpin, Gavin Barlow and Alan Lane. Without the money, support and understanding from my Clore Fellowship and every Fellow on that journey with me. Without the unending enthusiasm from local business owners, artists and neighbours, and the unending support from my best friends. And of course my (long-suffering!) partner Tom, who is the kindest person I've ever been lucky enough to know.

The biggest influence of course, and without whom RivelinCo definitely wouldn’t exist, is my mum. She gave me the most wonderful childhood in the most difficult of circumstances: when my dad left we lost our house and business, and ended up in a crap house on a crap estate in (what used to be) a crap town. My mum worked all kinds of jobs: factories, cleaning, home care, and then eventually found a job she loved, as a teaching assistant at a primary school. She worked daytimes, evenings, and weekends. She must have been exhausted but she was always so positive, still made time for us whenever she could. We hadn’t been on a family holiday since I was 7 because we couldn’t afford to, but she would take me to all kinds of local places – beaches and adventure playgrounds and farms and forests to explore - so I never once felt like I was missing out. We were poor and happy. Both can be true. She taught me to be kind, confident and determined. She encouraged me to follow my passion for the arts, for travel, for adventure – even when every other adult in my life was telling me it was unrealistic or impossible.

She’s carrying that same positivity and determination through her cancer diagnosis. After her surgery, when she had to stay in the hospital for a week, and then another, and then another, she took it in her stride and made friends with patients and staff. She overheard a nurse speaking Zulu and struck up a conversation (using Zulu words she learned from me when I went travelling across South Africa at 18) and learned how to use google translate on her phone so she could have a conversation with a Lithuanian patient who spoke no English. She exchanged books and numbers, and instructed me to deliver biscuits and thank you cards to each of the wards she left. I’m certain they are all glad to have met her. She’s helped me find the positives in her diagnosis too – over the last few weeks we’ve been looking through old photographs together, and she’s been telling me what she knows about our ancestry. Our family has always felt small, just me and my brothers and my mum, my nephew who lives up in Scotland, and until she passed away, my Nanny. We do have uncles and cousins, and we get on fine, but we’re not close and rarely see each other outside of weddings or funerals. So suddenly opening up a whole world of family stories and memories has been fascinating. Learning about great, and great great, grandparents and family scandals and what we’ve all had in common. Finding photographs spanning from wartime – my grandad was an RAF navigator – to the early nineties. Mum and I have even begun mapping a family tree together, an amazing gift we can offer to my nephew when he grows up.

When times are tough my usual coping mechanism is to throw myself even more deeply into work. Work 10, 12, 14 or more hours a day. Keep making exciting creative stuff happen. Work late, stay up late, repeat. Because I love my job so much it can be a wonderful, welcome distraction to only think about that, and not about real life. To solve problems in my work, rather than sit with unsolvable ones at home. But in this circumstance, for the first time, I couldn’t take that option. I had to sit with it. I had to be away from my desk, go home, deal with the problem head on. Thankfully, the people I work with have been the most understanding and flexible, removing any guilt from my sudden changes in availability. It was pals and colleagues scattered across the country who saved me from going into overdrive. Those very same people I already named. Making arrangements at the hospital, sending care packages, checking in, offering support or distraction, making me laugh, asking if I’m OK. One friend even made sure I had a professional to turn to, if I needed it - something that wouldn’t have even crossed my mind to arrange for myself. My partner’s support too knows no bounds - I regularly kick myself that I am lucky enough to spend my life with him. I feel lucky to have such a fantastic support network, and if anything, all of this has made me much more aware of the urgent need for more care in our industry. We persevere through such a dangerous lack of work/life balance, and disregard the vital importance of care and wellbeing at work all too often. Too many of us pour our hearts and souls into jobs that don’t pay enough and don’t value us as human beings. True care and kindness - for our team, our collaborators, our community, and for the planet - is something I want to build into our ethos at RivelinCo from the very start.

I have always been drawn to jobs which involve care. Working with young people and older people, working with schools and libraries, working with diverse communities, and people who live in places or circumstances like I did growing up. I think it’s another thing I inherited from mum. Maybe that’s why, when she got sick, I took on the caring responsibilities at home. Or maybe that was always going to happen anyway - the statistics say that caring responsibilities almost always fall on the women in the family. I don’t want to put down my brothers, they’ve been great and offered to help where they can – but ultimately it was my Mum who cared for my Nanny, and it is me that will care for my Mum. The feminist in me wants to fight that stereotype. But if I’m really honest with myself, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

The cancer is not over, and the company has just begun. The next few months will be more highs and lows: RivelinCo will go into rehearsal for our first production - I won’t be producing it, but that means I’ve been able to employ a brilliant freelancer – a silver lining. At home, chemotherapy will begin. I will flip between caring daughter mode and company director mode. My wonderful mum is not the first person I know to go through this, nor will she be the last. But she is my everything. She is my biggest inspiration and my best friend. She is the reason I do my job, and the reason I am the way I am. Cancer is evil, and things right now are a bit messy and hard and sad, but somehow also rewarding, silly and fun. We have spent more time together recently than we have in ages, and that is a gift. Ultimately it is the positivity and determination that she taught me and my brothers that will get us all through.