Today it’s seems apt, to tell you why I support RMT
In the midst of a slanging match, where everyone I know keeps calling them greedy and selfish I want to tell you how people who were more than likely RMT union members (and a single kind member of the public stranger) saved my life
to start I will say, RMT isn’t a union full of drivers, it encompasses all kind of transport and maritime jobs too. But today I am talking train people. Not drivers but conductors, collector’s, cleaners and others.
five years ago in summer of 2017 I was a 21 year old law student, almost twenty weeks pregnant, stressed, anxious, manic and floridly psychotic
flittering between the people I loved, pretending to stay over here there and everywhere I evaded my friends, family and now husband
driving for hours and hours every night to escape the voices I was hearing that came from the old ladies where I lived. My lack of sleep only fuelled my mental illness. And I finally conceded, listened to the voices and planned my suicide, and if that was not successful my abortion.
I travelled by train through the night alone. I was cold. I had a changeover and one hour wait at 11pm, And a ticket officer saw me, after her shift as she got off another train, she decided on getting home late to her own family because she spent twenty minutes finding me a fleece blanket and making me a cup of tea. this woman deserves more.
the early morning arrived. I had got to London. I went to Paddington underground, I was naive and very sick - a busy train station is not the place you go to end your life.
It was incredibly busy, I lent myself over the platform edge, locking eyes with a driver who reminded me strangely of my grandad, as a gentleman with the quickest reactions I’ve ever encountered grabbed my right arm and saved my life. Train drivers deserve more, for being the collateral in ending I’ll peoples lives with their machinery.
after this I carried on my way, found an abortion clinic in Richmond who undertook second trimester terminations and I went home. By train. In a heatwave. After surgery. That very same day.
it was summer, it was full to bursting. I was I don’t know what. I couldn’t get to my bag. My tummy hurt, my boobs were leaking, I thought I was going to die. I went to the bathroom, and the cleaner got me sanitary towels from her own bag as i had none. she deserves more
when I got home, Geoff, the ticket man, who has worked in our office all of my living memory watched me hobble off the train. He told me I looked peaky, but I said it was just my perioud, but he said he’d not long seen my mum, walking the dog, and knew she’d loop round again, soon so he waited for her, and called her across the way, she in turn called my dad and we all went home in the car. Geoff the ticket man deserves more.
these people face job loss, danger and decimation of a service that keeps us going
these people were beacons of light in the most harrowing time of my life.
the changes to train travel will cost lives.
they will stop people accessing rail, and I stand with RMT