Flip-flops at two in the morning, by Rhiannon Gomersall
An original contemporary newspaper feature.
At 1.47 on a Sunday morning, outside a kebab shop on Quay Street in Chenoweth, a young woman in a sequinned dress is sitting on the kerb, crying, with one shoe in her hand. Nobody in the passing crowd stops. Then a woman in a navy jacket crouches beside her, unzips a rucksack and produces, like a magician, a pair of flip-flops, a bottle of water and a packet of tissues.
‘What’s your name, love?’ she asks. ‘Right, Kayleigh. Let’s get you sorted.’
The woman in the jacket is Geraldine Tallis, who is sixty-three, a retired dental receptionist and, every other Saturday night from ten until four, a member of the Chenoweth Night Volunteers. There are twenty-two of them. They are unpaid, untrained in anything dramatic and almost entirely unnoticed by the town they look after. They would like to keep it that way.
‘We’re not heroes,’ says Ray Obi, who coordinates the rota and drives a delivery van during the week. ‘We’re just the people who don’t walk past.’
It is a modest description of a demanding job. Over a single night I watch the team hand out forty-one bottles of water and nineteen pairs of flip-flops, sweep up broken glass outside a nightclub before anyone can step on it, sit with a teenager who has lost his friends and his phone, and wait, for an hour and twenty minutes, in the rain, with an older man who has fallen and cut his head, until an ambulance arrives. Nobody thanks them for the glass. Very few people even see it being swept.
The figures behind this quiet work are striking. Since the team began five years ago, local paramedics estimate that the volunteers have saved them more than 300 call-outs, simply by getting people home, warm or sober before a minor problem became an emergency. The police inspector for the town centre calls them ‘the best thing to happen to Quay Street in a decade’. Ray shrugs when I mention this. ‘Put the kettle on and lend someone your coat,’ he says. ‘That’s the whole training manual.’
It is not, of course. Every volunteer completes a first aid course and learns how to calm an argument before it turns into a fight. Geraldine has been sworn at, been thrown up on and, once, memorably, been proposed to. She laughs about all three. What she does not laugh about is the night two winters ago when she found a young man alone by the harbour wall, soaked and silent, and sat with him for three hours, talking about football, until he agreed to let her phone his sister.
‘I don’t know what would have happened,’ she says quietly. ‘I don’t need to know. He went home.’
At four o’clock the team gathers in the doorway of a closed bank to count what is left in the rucksacks. Then they walk off in different directions, back to beds they will stay in until lunchtime, back to jobs and grandchildren and Monday mornings. On Quay Street the shutters come down, the gulls arrive for the leftover chips, and by eight the pavements are clean, as if nobody had needed help at all.
The Chenoweth Night Volunteers are described as quietly heroic. How does the writer try to show this?
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