School Dinners

Angela Smith: Fed Like Pigs


Angela was born in 1962 in London. Her parents came to England from Guyana and settled in Walthamstow where Angela lived with her eight brothers and sisters. At age five Angela went to a local special school. Then from the age of ten she attended two residential special schools run by the Spastics Society (now SCOPE), in Lincolnshire and Kent.

Here Angela describes her painful experience of meal times at college.

  • Angela Smith
  • Angela Smith
  • Angela Smith
https://howwasschool.allfie.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/fed-like-pigs.mp3

Transcript

They made us eat off this hideous contraption, a metal plate on a clamp, that was clamped to the table and the food was all mushed up and you had to eat off it like a pig out of a trough, I'm not joking. The Matron said we could all go to hell because she hadn't got the money to pay staff to sit and feed us, so she said 'If we don't like it, we can go to hell', so I starved myself. It's terrible. So that was the first time in my life I stood up to non-disabled people and they changed after that, the plates were taken away and we all were fed like human beings.

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