‘You just feel so light!’: two wheelchair users – one 81, one 25.

‘You just feel so light!’: two wheelchair users – one 81, one 25 – on welfare cuts, housing and the joy of swimming – The Guardian

A lot has changed for people with disabilities since the 1950s, when the then seven-year-old Alice Moira was given her first wheelchair – not least the fact that it was made of wood and she couldn’t push it herself.. “At 10, I got pushed out of school because I’d not learned to read. My dad managed to get somebody in Moorfields eye hospital to have a look at me, and they came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with my eyes, part of my cerebral palsy. My eyes didn’t get steady enough for me to see words continuously until I was 17. By the time I left St Margaret’s my dad, along with some other parents of children with cerebral palsy, had set up the Spastic Society [now known as Scope] which had started to open schools, so I attended those until I was 19.”