Tribute to Helen Bamber
In the media 29 August 2014
The Room to Heal community is deeply saddened by the recent death of Helen Bamber but also hugely inspired by the life that she has led.
Helen supported Room to Heal in the very earliest days of the project’s infancy, understanding how the cultivation of community could provide a hugely powerful and positive healing resource for torture survivors living in exile. Helen has been in many ways the mother of Room to Heal, as our community has taken shape, and is remembered with huge love and admiration by many members of our community, who also knew her through her work at the Helen Bamber Foundation.
Helen’s passionate, tireless, generous and loving spirit will continue to inspire everyone at Room to Heal, as we feel she would have wanted.
Our Founder & Director Mark Fish remembers her here:
I miss Helen
When I leave the Foundation at the end of the day on Wednesdays and Thursdays
I cycle past Durham road on the way home
And I often get the urge to ride up the street to Lennox House
The old people’s home where Helenshe spent the last 14 months of her life
Just to see her again one last time
I still find it hard to accept that she’s gone…
I miss Helen
I miss Helen just sitting there
In the office in Museum Street
I miss her voice and her eyes
And her sheer presence
I miss the fullness of her
I miss her roundness and her shape
Sitting there on the edge of her seat
I miss her tiny feet and small shoes
And her impossibly unblemished skin
Her bouffant hair
And her cape and her umbrella
I miss the sheer physicalness of her
So much energy and life packed into so small a package
I miss Helen
I miss her laughter and her bright smile
And her sense of mischief and fun
Her fierce intelligence and her wicked wit
Her tenacity and fighting spirit
I miss Helen
I miss Friday night whisky sessions seated at the round table in her office
And dinners at the Thai restaurant – where a waitress would ceremoniously present her with a special cushion to park under her bottom
So that she could eat comfortably at the table
I miss her stories and her vivid memories
The FEPOW – the old Far East prisoners of war who she met once a year in Berwick-on-Tweed without fail
Until there were none of them left to meet
Her glamorous aunt – from whom she said she got her fashion sense – who died in the bombing of the Café Paris during the Blitz
The running battles between anti-fascist groups and the Mosleyites on the streets of East London in the 1930s
And her girlhood crush on Barry Sherwin – the leader of a street-gang who she hung out with – on the banks of the River Lea in Hackney
I miss Helen
I miss her extraordinary capacity for love
Her love for her clients
And for her fellow workers and colleagues
And for her friends and family
Even for the drivers’ of her beloved Green Tomatoes taxis
I miss Helen’s love
I have been inspired by it
I have grown through it and I have been changed by it…
And I will never forget her…
I miss Helen