It’s almost six years since Glenn Bryant stayed in with me here on Linda’s Book Bag to chat about his first book, A Quiet Genocide. Now Glenn is back with a highly personal and affecting guest post to celebrate the recent publication of his latest book Darkness Does Not Come At Once. As soon as I read the blurb of Darkness Does Not Come At Once, I had to invite Glenn back to the blog

Darkness Does Not Come At Once was published by The Book Guild on 28th April 2024 and is available for purchase here.

Darkness Does Not Come At Once

Meike is seventeen and she uses a wheelchair. Already in life she’s accepted that she’ll always somehow be ‘different’. But overnight, different becomes dangerous after the government announces disabled youngsters under the age of eighteen must spend the war in specially designated institutions.

Suddenly Meike is on the run in the rural lanes she calls home, bordering Berlin. It is 1939 and the whole of Germany, it seems, wants to fight the world.

Quietly, members of Meike’s family distance themselves, but two unlikely allies stand by her. One is an elderly woman and a lifelong Catholic, forced to question her faith; the other is a fifteen-year-old boy Meike hardly knows. They begin a search for answers as they scramble to find Meike and, in a country they no longer recognise, themselves.

Talking about the world’s largest minority of people.

Why are we still afraid?

A Guest Post by Glenn Bryant

I have a question for you, if I may. Please do not worry. It is simply a, ‘Did you know?’ question. Okay.

Did you know that, from 1941-45, the government of Germany murdered some six million members of Europe’s Jewish community? Yes? Yes.

A second question. Did you know that, from 1939-41, the perpetrators of the above were effectively in training? As a commentator of the time described, they ‘made murder their profession’, killing an estimated 300,000 people with growing efficiency. Yes? No?

Hopefully, some of you are still answering, ‘Yes,’ but, from experience, I expect that there will be many more answers, ‘No.’

Okay.

Today, 85 years on, perhaps the real question should unpack, ‘Why don’t we know?’ The answer is that it’s because those 300,000 victims had a mental or a physical impairment. For the purposes of this piece, they were ‘disabled’.

Disability has not been a topic which has been discussed as frequently, for example, as women’s rights, or civil rights, or gay rights, which, thank goodness, are happily debated pretty openly today. Long may that conversation continue to happen even more openly. And yet disability rights has always lagged behind. Why? It’s a good question.

Honestly, I don’t have an answer, or certainly not an easy one. Two overarching thoughts. One, do both the public and private sectors deem physical access too much time and effort? If yes, at what greater cost to society? What kind of society do we want to share?

Second, perhaps we, societally, find ‘disability’ too unpalatable. It’s one foot in the grave, but perhaps we then quickly return to the above issue, ‘What kind of society do we want to share?’

It’s very easy to think ‘disability’ will never happen to us. And absolutely, it may not. But let’s look at the evidence. Today, in countries where life expectancy tops 70 years, we can each of us, on average, expect to spend eight years as ‘disabled’, or 12% of our life.

‘Disabled’ people today form the largest minority globally, 15% of us or one in six, some one billion people. Recently here in the UK, it was one in five. Today in the UK, it’s one in four. Again, we can look in the mirror and consider, ‘What kind of world together do we want to live in?’ A great question, albeit an almost infinite one.

The way my brain has always been wired, in search of a big answer, is to distil it down to the simplest terms. The world I want to live in is one of happy acceptance. A world of inclusion. Where everyone can get involved, or not. It’s their choice. But. I don’t want the world, in any way, to take that choice away from the individual.

From 1933-45, Hitler and his National Socialist government wanted to remove that choice so entirely from Germany’s ‘disabled’ community, that he wanted to remove them entirely from this world. From 1939-41, he was very successful. He oversaw the murder of 300,000 members of that community. We will never know the precise number.

Today, people with an impairment can expect to have ‘poorer’ outcomes in life, next to somebody without an impairment, in key areas: health, education, work, prosperity. In August 2023, a UK report by the House of Commons found that ‘disabled’ people scored themselves 6 out of 10 for ‘Happiness’, next to 8 out of 10 for people who identified as able-bodied. They regularly felt lonely, 13% next to 3%. And they were far less likely to be in employment, 54% next to 83%.

But if we never embrace this imbalance, how will we redress it? That’s my question.

Attitudes have improved, in my experience, in the past 20 years. And I privately wonder how vital the London 2012 Paralympics were, even if only subconsciously, in helping change attitudes. But ignorance, even if polite, and misapprehension can still be commonplace, so breaking that vicious circle through the continued sharing of knowledge and understanding remains so important.

Let’s end with a personal experience. Some 20 years ago. I went for a working pub lunch with my then boss. And he was more than my boss. We were good friends. We spoke a lot.

I told him I had started seeing someone, a girl. Maybe she wasn’t quite yet my girlfriend, but it felt that one day she really might be. I liked her. I hoped she liked me.

I added that she used a wheelchair. I wasn’t really sure why she used a wheelchair. We hadn’t talked about it. After all, at that point, we were only dating.

‘Well…’ my boss said, searching in his face for a reply. ‘She’s like half a girlfriend.’

What? Is he joking? 

Tell me you’re joking?

He’s not joking, I realised.

I only ever saw him once after that.

And by the way, the girl did happily become ‘my girlfriend’ and today super happily remains my wife. The world I want to live in is one where she is free to shine.

****

Thank you so much Glenn – for your wonderful post, your humanity and being prepared to share your story with us alongside history. Having experienced just one afternoon in a wheelchair recently following an operation on my foot, I can only begin to understand the difficulties of those living permanently this way. Doors were impossible to open at the same time as pushing me. I became invisible or a nuisance. In my case it was physical doors causing an issue very briefly. I have a horrible feeling that we still have some way to go to achieve a world where we are all free to shine but I’m right with you in the aspiration.

About Glenn Bryant

Glenn Bryant is a former daily news journalist who today works as a senior copywriter for a financial technology company. Darkness Does Not Come at Once is his second novel, following A Quiet Genocide, published in 2018.

He is a registered carer for his wife, Juliet, who has a spinal cord injury. They live happily in South Oxfordshire.

For further information, follow Glenn on Twitter/X @glennmbryant and find Glenn on Facebook and Instagram.