Woman's Hour - Posy Simmonds, Chelsea Flower Show, Emmerdale, India election

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

People in the UK have a worrying lack of knowledge about what constitutes a crime when it comes to the sexual abuse of children, according to a YouGov survey commissioned by Barnardo’s. The children’s charity has been working with ITV’s Emmerdale on a story-line about a teacher who grooms and has sex with a pupil. Jenni is joined by Amanda Naylor, Head of Child Sexual Abuse at Barnado’s and Cris McCurley, a partner at BenHoareBell Solicitors in Newcastle to discuss adults in positions of trust and how the Sexual Offences Act 2003 relates to them. The Chelsea Flower Show has started. Women and children are at the heart of one of the gardens that has achieved gold. It’s a recreation of a village in Zimbabwe with crops rich in vitamins, minerals and nutrients especially good for women, teenage girls and children under five. Siobhann Tighe has been to see it.Today India learns the outcome of its general election. For the first time ever more women are likely to have voted than men. Political parties sought to appeal to women, offering educational loans, free cooking gas cylinders and bikes for girls. Eight percent of parliamentary candidates were women. In one party, the Trinamool Congress Party (TMC), 41 per cent of its candidates were women. Jenni is joined by the BBC's India correspondent Yogita Limaye in Varanasi and Dr Champa Patel, Head of the Chatham House Asia-Pacific programme.To mark the opening of a new retrospective of the work of Posy Simmonds at the House of Illustration in London, Jenni talks to its co-curator Paul Gravett, to comic laureate Hannah Berry and to cartoonist and winner of last year’s Observer Cape graphic short story prize, Edith Pritchett. How did Posy become a trailblazing female cartoonist in a male-dominated field? And what impact has her work had on the next generation of women cartoonists and graphic novelists?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Thursday the 23rd of May. As we await the results of the world's largest ever democratic election, 900 million people registered to vote. How many of the voters in India were women and what will have drawn them to the polls? The influence of Posy Simmons on the cartoonists and graphic novelists who came after her.

A retrospective of her work opens at the House of Illustration in London. And gold at the Chelsea Flower Show. The cam-fed garden is inspired by the farming women of Zimbabwe growing plants for the health and well-being of women and children. Now, if you've been watching Emmerdale recently, you'll have been following the story of Maya, a teacher in a secondary school, and one of her pupils, Jacob. They'd been sexting each other and kissing before Jacob turned 16. Then, after his 16th birthday, they had sexual

intercourse. Here, Jacob discovers that she's been reported to the police. Why would you do this to me? Seriously? Did you really think we were going to let you go with her? I want to be with her. She'd have been hundreds of miles away by now if she could have been. No, you don't understand. She came back for me. She came back for a passport and a big bag of cash. We read the emails. Jake, I know you don't want to believe it, but she was manipulating you. I'll never forgive you for this. Well, the producers of The Soap have been working with the advice of Barnardo's, who've conducted a poll to find out how well the concept of position of trust is understood when it comes to an adult grooming a child regardless of the child's sex and age.

Jacob, obviously, is a boy, and when the sex takes place, he's over 16, the age of consent. But nonetheless, mayor's actions as a teacher are illegal. Well, to unpick the law and the results of the poll, I'm joined from Newcastle by Chris McCurley, a solicitor and member of the Law Society's Access to Justice Committee. She's in Newcastle. Amanda Naylor is head of child sex abuse at Barnardo's. Amanda, why did you feel it important that the pupil in this storyline should be a boy? Well, Emmerdale had approached us at a time that we'd recognised that boys were very under-identified in terms of being referred to our child sexual exploitation services.

So in terms of research, around a third of boys are suspected to be being sexually exploited out of the population. So two thirds girls, one third boys. But we weren't seeing that in our services. And so we applied for some funding from the Home Office. And we're successful in working with a group of boys who we found actually in the criminal justice system. Who themselves have been sexually exploited. And what we really wanted to look at is why those boys have been missed in terms of their own experiences

and why they were only picked up when their behaviours started to become aggressive and violent or criminal activity that they were doing. And basically those boys spent a year teaching us around how boys express vulnerability, why boys don't tell us they're being exploited, and why adults refuse to see it even when they do try and tell. Now, Chris, police records show 290 incidents of this kind of abuse in 2016-17.

What law is broken if a teacher, say, has sex with a pupil, even over the age of consent? Well, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which has been amended many times to widen the scope of what abuse of trust means, makes it illegal to have sex with somebody who is between, well, somebody who is under 18 and who is in your care in certain professions. So the offences include having sex, trying to get someone to have sex, watching sexual acts. And the teachers are obviously a very clear category, but there are other categories as well who are in positions of trust and care. What other jobs would you include in that?

Also included are hospitals, clinics, it applies to social workers. It's currently limited to regulated settings so it could be a regulated apprenticeship for example but casual work experience wouldn't count for this. So although the age of consent for sex is 16 we put people in a position of trust, literally, with our children and we trust them to take care of them and look after them and not to abuse them. But for teachers, they're in direct contact for children for very long periods of time, can be an intensive relationship, pupils can develop crushes, and these incidences should be prosecuted, I think. So at 16, you're still legally a child.

Now, Amanda, Barnardo's commissioned a poll by YouGov to see how people responded to the scenes in Emmerdale. What most surprised you? What most surprised us, really, was the terms that were being used. So the fact that a quarter of adults think it's every young boy's dream to have sex with an older woman and they use the terms of having sex without thinking around the power differentials and what we analysed and came to conclusions around that was we don't see boys as vulnerable as girls and that's a real issue because anybody who has a 16 year old boy knows

that yes they're exploring they're becoming a young man but at the same time they need safe environments they're hyper sexualized and hyper masculinized and and actually we need to be looking at them at the young people at the development stage they are and giving them safe non-sexualized environments to learn and grow and school should absolutely be one of those places. So Chris how do these cases play out in the legal system? Would a woman grooming a boy be seen as reprehensible as a man grooming a girl? I think it very much depends on the circumstances. And typically we see a lot of cases reported of much, much older men grooming and having sexual relationships, which are on the verge of consensual with young girls. But I think it's right what's been said about the majority of people thinking that it's every young boy's dream to have sex with an older woman.

It's difficult to find figures for this, true figures for this. Andrea Durham at Durham University did some research in 2015, but it was by a Freedom of Information Act request, and she found out that 100-plus teachers had been reported, female teachers had been reported. And quotes in her research suggest that about 19% of breach of trust is committed by women. I think it's very sensationalised in the press,

but I think it is less sensationalised in the courts. I know in a recent case, a judge in sentencing a teacher said, I accept it was consensual, what 15-year-old boy wouldn't want to accept that wonderful offer? Which I think really spells it out. So Amanda, hearing that from a judge, what have you found is the impact of this kind of abuse when the victim is a boy? So that's really important

because I think we think boys just get on with things. What we recognise is boys don't just get on with things. They do things differently to girls and their behaviours are very different. So with girls we might see internalised behaviours, we may notice mood changes, they may talk to their friends, they may talk to their parents but often very internalised behaviours. With boys we see externalised behaviours, they become angry and confused and their behaviours are sometimes seen as deviant. And so instead of asking boys, what happened to you, which is what we do to girls, what's happening?

Why are you feeling like this? We ask boys, what's wrong with you? And suddenly we add that level of shame and guilt that it is your fault, actually. You're a boy. You should have been able to say, no, you're strong enough. Why did you get yourself in this position all those assumptions that society lays on boys makes them silent and makes them not tell us or ask us for help and working with the boys within ben idol services has really shown us that if we don't ask boys what's happening to you and we

don't intervene in situations like that. The consequences for them in terms of potentially the criminal justice system, drugs and alcohol, use as coping strategies, anger and violence, breakdown of families, these are all very real things happening in families right across the country right now. And Chris, what kind of sentences could people found guilty of this crime expect? I think people could be very surprised. The sentences vary very widely. Like, for example, in a non-consensual rape, the maximum sentence is life.

Many of the sex gang groomers got into double digits with their sentences, even where the young person considered them to be their boyfriend, for example. But in these breach of trust cases, the maximum sentence in the Crown Court is five years. In the Magistrates' Court, because it can be tried in the Magistrates' Court, the maximum sentence is 12 months or a fine or both. But the reality is that there's a significant disparity. Some get prison, but a lot get suspended sentences. Some get community-based sentences.

Some get prison sentences all the way up to the maximum five years. I'm thinking about one particular case, Matthew Dawson, earlier this year. A 24-year-old teacher had sex with a 17-year-old pupil and he was given a 12-month sentence. So there is the possibility of a prison sentence. Amanda, just briefly, who are you hoping to get your message out to? To everybody, because it's everybody's responsibility to support and care for children. We want teachers to be really thinking around their boundaries and behaviours. We want parents

to be noticing if things are going wrong and also if maybe adults are potentially grooming families as well as children. We know people in positions of trust often befriend families in different ways. We want people to be aware and be asking boys how they are on what's happening with them. Amanda Naylor and Chris McCurley, thank you both very much indeed. And we would like to hear from you. If you've had this sort of experience, whether you were a boy or a girl when it happened, let us know. You can send us a tweet or, of course, you can send us an email. We'd really like to hear from you.

Thank you both. There's still to come in today's... Oh, no, sorry, wrong page. Here we go. If you were watching the Chelsea Flower Show on television last night, you'll have seen one of the winners of a gold award, which celebrates the ingenuity of women who farm in Zimbabwe to grow nourishing food for other women and children.

The designer, Ghislaine Rickards, has recreated a typical rural Zimbabwean plot. The crops are rich in vitamins, minerals and nutrients, especially good for women, teenage girls and children under five. And the garden also celebrates the work of a charity called CamFed, which is about educating girls. Well, Siobhan Tai went to see the show and asked one of the women who's travelled over from Zimbabwe what it meant to her to receive the award in the Space to Grow category.

Ah, when we got there, gold! You should have seen the Zimbabwe dance. We danced there and we were ululating. My name is Nikio Makove. We are here showcasing the gardens that women in the rural Zimbabwe come up with. Not only to bring food to the tables of their families, but to support children to go to school. Sorry, we're just pushing through the crowds here to actually get into the garden. Going up the path, and the path is red.

It makes you think of Zimbabwe, it makes you think of African soil, doesn't it? Absolutely. The soil is spot on. It's so atmospheric. It's absolutely 100%. It's instantly recognisable as Africa, so I was pleased with that. I'm Jelaine Rickards. I'm a professional garden designer and I'm based in North London. And the colors are amazing because you've got the red soil but you've got the red of the tomatoes the green of the okras and you've got the orange of the pumpkins and the orange and the darker orange of what are these? These are nasturtiums and they do grow them to eat as flowers

and you can eat the leaves just like we do in the UK but also they help to take away blackfly and greenfly from other crops. And then of course everyone in your team, they're wearing these beautiful, colourful Zimbabwean batik jackets. Yes, we had them made especially for the show actually because we wanted the crowds to easily be able to find us. Well, they will, that's for sure. Also supporting somebody who makes these in Zimbabwe

and then exports them, so we wanted to promote that too. So we've got some huge leaf plants here. I mean, the bananas and the ansetti down there, which are big and purple. It gets a blue backdrop to highlight the vibrancy, and I wanted to encapsulate the vibrancy of the people that I met there and I've balanced that with some smaller leaved ones so we have citrus here we have grapefruit and oranges as well as some ground cover the leaf shape of the sweet potatoes is very interesting so there's a whole range of different plant shapes going on

here. Banana trees? Banana trees absolutely that's one of the things that I saw there well I actually was lucky enough to see banana tree with fruit on it I couldn't get that here but yeah. And tomatoes? They grow loads of tomatoes there when I went to visit a female farmer who set up her own business there she had rows and rows and rows and rows of tomatoes just like this. And types of corn and types of maize and a crop that we don't have here in the UK. Yes we have in showcasing the front of the garden there which has caused an awful lot of interest is sorghum which is a grain and lots of people have been asking about that but that's one of the staple foods out there.

So yes I'm here at Chelsea Flower Show. I've never been here before, but I've seen it plenty of times on the television. There are lots and lots of people. The sun is out. People are wearing their sun hats. Walking along the main avenue, and just off the main avenue, is the garden put together by the Duchess of Cambridge. And there are lots of photos of her visiting it the other day with her family. Big cue to that one.

There's a champagne and Pimms bar, which is very appealing on an afternoon like this. My name's Charlotte Watts, and I'm the Chief Scientific Advisor at DFID. I was committed, firstly, to using the garden to provide an opportunity to talk about the life-changing impact that you can achieve through keeping girls in school, giving them an education. And part of the plot is a mock-up of a school room. You've got the chalkboard and you've got the African games and you've got the instruments, you've got the drums. We've got everything. We've even got over here little pockets of peanuts so that the kids,

when it's like at lunchtime, they can have a snack on peanuts because this garden here is growing edible crops. And if you're in a rural school in Africa, your school lunch will come from the plots that have been grown in the plot next to the school. And women come and cook lunch for the kids to make sure they've got a nutritious meal at lunchtime, which we know aids with concentration. Tell us what's in the garden then, especially from a nutrition, mineral, vitamin point of view, and why it's so important.

What we've done here, we've bred the plants for particular properties, and the properties we have here is not only about improved vitamin content, but also that there's greater resilience to water shortages as well. And is this different from genetically modified crops? Yes so none of these are genetically modified so what this is doing is essentially just speeding up the process that farmers have used for generations to improve the type of crops that they grow. For example we've got biofortified maize, we've got biofortified sweet potatoes, we've got biofortified sweet peas. And what these crops enable us to do is, just when people are

having their lunch, when they're having their supper, they're getting increased nutritional intake. So things like vitamin A, that is really important to improve night vision, it helps reduce diarrhoea in children, iron, which we know can reverse iron deficiency and improve physical and cognitive function. And instead of taking a vitamin pill, what we're doing is getting these into the food system and then as people eat these enhanced crops, they're getting the nutritional intake that they need. So the idea is that you're making available super seeds to farmers to buy at the market, to plant in their gardens and so there's going to be more vitamins, minerals, nutrients in their crops. Exactly, you've summarised it really well. And across Africa, not just in Zimbabwe, women

are in the garden earning money from the soil, they're the ones planting the crops aren't they? Yes, I think it's something that not everybody appreciates about agriculture in sub-saharan africa is many farmers are women and often they have small plots but they are agricultural business women and and that's one of the other core messages of this garden is educate a girl but also give her the skills the expertise to run her agricultural business. Big television crane has just gone past. Hi, I'm from Radio 4. Can I just ask what you think of this plot? I think it's rather lovely actually, yes.

I like the fact there's lots of fruit and vegetables. Well, I think it does capture Africa and African gardens, which would have more maize growing as a staple food. Have you been to Africa yourself or African countries? I'm a family name, I'm Zambian, born and bred. You're Zambian? I would recognise this as the same. Especially when you see it's dry today and you can see it starting to crack in places and then you think, I remember that.

I think it's really cool actually really is potatoes tomatoes it's lovely pumpkin I can see over there beautiful I've come here especially because I was born in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe really so the yeah the color of the soil is very particular it's murram so that redness and I like the fact they've used the the art and the colours of the blue colours and in the school set up at the back yeah that that type of painting is is very typical painting yeah it's just lovely gorgeous I mean it's just yeah and all that sort of fecundity in in Africa the richness of it, I think it really brings it to life.

It brings back lots of very nice memories. Nostalgia. Yeah, exactly. People are coming also to see plants that they've never seen. What are they saying to you? They're saying, wow, this is wonderful. This is beautiful. They've seen some of these crops in a shop, in a supermarket.

They've not seen the plant itself. And for me to tell shop, in a supermarket, they've not seen the plant itself and for me to tell them that this is peanut, I said oh so this is peanut, where we get peanut butter? To tell them that this is a sweet potato, they've seen sweet potato in the shop but they've never seen the plant of a sweet potato. Actually I would say, I want to be honest with you. Many of my colleagues were not expecting the gold. But for me, when I came here on Sunday and I looked at the garden, I said to myself and to everyone, this is a gold.

Because I said, if you wanted to see beauty, I've seen beautiful flowers, I've seen beautiful shrubs. But what this garden is portraying, what is behind the garden, the spirit of womanhood, what women can do when they're given a space to grow, I say this is a winner. Thank you, Imakova, from CAMFED, ending that report by Siobhan Tai. Now, still to come in today's programme, the influence of the cartoonist Posy Simmons as a retrospective of her work opens in London

and the serial, the fourth episode of Gurren. The results of the Indian election are coming in and so far the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, leader of the BJP, is said to be taking a commanding lead. The election was the biggest democratic exercise ever, with some 900 million people registered to vote, and for the first time, more women are believed to have voted than men. Why have the numbers increased significantly, and what will have driven so many women to the polls? Well, Dr Champa Patel is head of the Asia-Pacific program at Jatam House in London.

Yogita Lame is the BBC's India correspondent, and she's in Varanasi, the prime minister's constituency. Yogita, what's the atmosphere like where you are right now? Well, I'm actually at the counting centre in Varanasi. So this is normally a big market for agricultural produce. But for the past four days, instead of storing food grain, they've been storing electronic voting machines. And, you know, that's where the people of Varanasi have cast their votes. And those are being taken into the counting centre. And, you know, then we are basically finding out the results. As of now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is leading in this constituency by nearly 290,000

votes, something which was in line with expectations. In the city of Varanasi, most people have told me that they expected him to actually win quite comfortably. But also the trends we're seeing on a national scale seem to suggest that he and his party could be back with a sweeping majority. Yogincha, how high was the female turnout? Have you been able to assess how many women actually did vote? So there were seven phases of voting in all. And we do have numbers that came from the Election Commission of India for the first four phases,

which suggested that the female voter turnout this time was 68%. That was around the same as the male voter turnout. But what's essentially happened and what's different this time is that in many states, it seems to be that there have been sort of more female voters who've come out and cast their vote than men. Champa, if I can bring you in here, why do you think women have been turning out in greater numbers than before well i think there's two things the two main parties congress and the bjp have massive grassroots organizational capabilities so they've obviously been you know putting out their local kind of volunteers to try and canvas the vote but the election commission itself has also tried to

increase the female vote through some of the initiatives they have, such as the systematic voter education and electoral participation program. So as part of that program, boosting electoral participation among women was one of their major objectives. But I think the interesting thing is

that you're also seeing increases in the youth turnout. And in certain states like Kerala and Karnataka it looks like the elderly vote is up as well so it's a trend that started with the 2014 elections but I think you're going to see that increase in years to come as well. And what would you say women and young people have been looking for from the parties? Well, I think there was a recent survey done that said 70% of women put safety of women first. I'm sure people are very aware with some of the high profile stories that come out about sexual violence in India, such as the gang rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012. But there are countless cases that nobody ever hears about. So I think safety for women is a key consideration.

The other is safety of girls. Sex selection, you know, aborting female fetuses is still high in India. So I think there are concerns around, you know, how are girls protected within India? But also because people want jobs. So I think it's also that Modi hasn't delivered on the economic premises he set out in 2014. But women are an important part of the workforce, and they want to know that there are economic opportunities for them. But I think we shouldn't see women in a country as diverse as India. There are many different blocks, and there'll be women who are wholly supportive of

Modi and buy into his personal appeal. And there'll be others like tribal communities, low caste communities, Muslim communities who may be fearful of the BJP and more likely to vote for the Congress party. So I think it very much differs depending on where you sit in Indian society. Yogita, how would you say the parties have gone out to appeal to female voters? So I think, you know, the one thing about both the parties is while they had, you know, they had things to say in their manifesto, which would be sort of targeted at women, I don't think any of the campaigns really sort of focused on women's issues separately. You know, as far as the BJP was concerned, it was sort of a pretty basic and national issue that they picked up,

which was of national security. And that was, you know, because of heightened tensions with Pakistan earlier this year. And many of the people I spoke to, including women, actually, even here in the city of Varanasi, said that they feel safe under Modi's leadership. And that's why they voted for him. even here in the city of Varanasi, said that they feel safe under Modi's leadership. And that's why they voted for him. The Congress Party, you know, has always maintained that if it comes to power, it wants to bring in reservation in India's parliament.

I mean, participation in India's parliament of women is still extremely low. It's only about 12% female participation, which is lower than many of our neighboring countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. And so they've, you know, always said that one of their, so the big issues or one of the big things that they will follow up on is trying to bring 33% reservation in parliament for women. In fact, you know, the Congress party is one of their big faces, Sonia Gandhi, it was almost a pet project for her. About 10 years ago, she managed

to get it passed through one house of parliament, but it never did go through the other house. And then the bill sort of lapsed. You know, but it's interesting, I think, you know, Mr. Modi's tenure in government has sort of given us really mixed signals about what this government wants to do for women. You know, one of the big things to come out was that they passed a bill which gave women six months maternity leave, made it mandatory for companies to give women that, which was seen, of course, as a very female-friendly move. But then as far as women's entry into holy places

or the Muslim practice of triple talaq, where a husband can divorce his wife simply by saying the word talaq three times. You know, when it was a Hindu issue, they have sort of a different view. But when it was a Muslim issue, they seemed to take a slightly different stand. And that's why I say sort of mixed signals that they are sending out to women. So, Champa, finally, who have been the female candidates who stand out? Well, I think there's a number of female candidates that are interesting. But I think if there's two that provide a stark contrast to each other, it's somebody

who we might call, you know, describe as a progressive candidate, Atishi Malina, who's contesting in East Delhi for the ARM Admi Party. She's been widely praised for her contribution to reform in government schools in Delhi as an advisor to the government. But she's also been subjected to terrible misogynistic and casteist abuse on the campaign trail. So on the one hand, you have progressive candidates such as Atishi, but then you also have really controversial women candidates such as Sadwi Paragya Singh Thakur, who's standing for the BJP in Bhopal. Now, she's a Hindu holy woman. She's a member of the RSS, the Hindu Nationalist Volunteer Organization. And her nomination has been heavily criticized and been seen as controversial because of her links to 2008

bombings, which were done by Hindu extremists. And recently, she also quoted controversy because she referred to Mahatma Gandhi's assassin as a patriot. So I think it shows, you know, as your other speaker was saying, that there are very mixed messages here if you look across the kind of selection of candidates, because people are standing for very, very different things. Well, Dr. Champa Patel, Yogita Limai, thank you both very much indeed for being with us. And we'll keep an eye on the results, presumably later today. Thank you both. Now, Women in One is a series of short interviews with women Abigail Hollick bumps into all over the UK. She met this woman at the flea market in Abergavenny, and she was giving apples from her garden to a market stallholder to sell.

Abby asked her how she was feeling. I'm 88 years of age, and I'm still active, but I had an operation that went wrong. That's why I'm in a scooter. But I still get round. I make jam and chutney and stuff like that, you know. I like to cook. I was born and bred in a pub, and I took it off my father because my father was taken ill,

and we had it for eight years. But what with the being sociable, drinking with the customers and everything i had to give it up you were drinking too much for sure well i mean working you're going to be sociable aren't you so i'm drinking with them as well like you know so we had a good time and i've been married now it's the second time marriage and we we'll be celebrating 55 years of marriage this year. It can't be bad. How do you find the scooter?

It's a bit of a menace on times because, you know, people, they don't look where they're going on the phone all the damn time and, you know, they just don't know, they don't realise. And in this town, it's terrible, really, to try and get around in a scooter. Narrow pavements and all these cafes that are outside on the pavements, you know. People have got to get on the road if I'm coming through with a...

And it's dangerous for them, like, you know. But there you are. This is how things are. It's nice to be talking to somebody that cares for the elderly. And did you have any children? I've got one boy by my first marriage which we never see in the UK they don't want to know about me they've got two grandchildren and they don't want to know me

so I'm not worried, I've got over it now but the second boy he works in the market here he puts all the tables and the chairs out and cleans the place so I could say 55 years of happy married life So what's the secret to 55 years? Well love and caring, good eating. I do not believe in all this crappy stuff. This week we had roast beef

so it was Yorkshire pudding, three eggs, beautiful Yorkshire pudding. With that we had slices on Sunday slices on Monday we had cottage pie on Tuesday and I've got pastry made to make pasties for Wednesday and that piece of meat cost me seven pound now they say they can't manage on the money that they're getting my pension is one pound 55 a week but I'm still happy when my husband was a nurse in the mental hospital for over 30 years. So he can put up with me. Abigail Holligan Abagaveni. Now tomorrow a retrospective of the work of Posey

Simmons will open at the House of Illustration in London. You may have seen her work in The Sun in the 1970s or in The Guardian from the late 70s. There was The Silent Three, Gemma Bovary and Tamara Drew and the last time she appeared on Woman's Hour was last year when we talked about her graphic novel Cassandra Dark. She explained how she creates characters in the graphic novels.

In a novel you might say you know he was a tall man wearing a long ginger overcoat well you don't have to do that at all. You just draw the person. And also in a graphic novel, you have to keep on drawing them, making various expressions. So it takes a bit of time to begin with, kind of working out what happens when she's very grumpy or angry or yelling. So a lot of things go on in a notebook. Well, there's no doubt Posey was a pioneer in cartoons

at a time when the art form was dominated by men. What influence has she had on the generations that followed her? Well, Hannah Berry is the UK Comics Laureate, Edith Pritchett is the winner of last year's Observer Cape Graphic Short Story Prize, and Paul Gravett is one of the curators of the exhibition. How did it come about, Paul? Well, the first exhibition, actually, first retrospective, was in Brussels in 2012, which I curated.

And it seems strange to me that we hadn't had a proper celebration of Poesy's genius in the UK. And in 2014, the House Illustration was founded. Posey was very active as an advocate for a home for illustration, which is the first one we have in the UK. And then it very obviously came together when a book I've just written coincides with the exhibition, a monograph, her first book about her work and her life. Hannah, as Comics Laureate, what's so important about Posie Simmons to you? I mean, she's almost the matriarch of British comics. I always think she's this incredible...

The Grand Dame. Yeah, the Grand Dame. She's this incredible character, this central figure that has been... I mean, she's been in comics as long as I've been aware of comics existing. And she's somebody that we all... Well, I'm assuming we all aspire to be. Just need the relevant skill and wit and charm and patience. And they're not easily come back. Not at all, no.

Not necessarily. Edith, when were you first aware of her? I think I first came across her books when I was about 14. It was Tamara Drew in my parents' house, and I remember picking it up and flicking through it, and it's so beautifully drawn and also a little bit saucy in places, so I remember thinking, I must read this. But were you already beginning to draw

and wanting to copy the kind of things that she was doing? I actually think I'd always kind of, because I'd always been good at drawing, but I'd done kind of very square, boring, charcoal pictures that I wasn't terribly interested in. So I remember reading her work and being so kind of excited by the idea that this was how you could, you know, draw. This is how you could tell stories and, you know, utilise any skill set I may have. Now, Paul, I know that you've got very early work and comics she produced as a teenager in the exhibition. Yes. How would you describe those early pieces?

Precocious and actually with all the skills that she's gone on to develop. I mean, she's very cleverly, in one of the things she's done, she satirises a women's magazine. It's called Herself. And she does everything down to the horoscope, the advice columns and the adverts brilliantly. She did them while she was at boarding school and got into trouble, so she was actually confiscated. So she's had a cheeky, a very observant skill from the very beginning. What do you reckon inspired her to become a cartoonist in the first place? Well, she wanted to be a painter, really. She grew up in Cookham, the home of Stanley Spencer,

and she was hoping to get into art school to do that but she didn't get in unfortunately there was no illustration department at central in london so she took graphic design and from there she realized that she could combine her skills with drawing and writing in cartooning and comics and uh that is really one of the secrets to her success, that she's visually and verbally so fluent and so rich with references and understanding that her work is some of the best in the world. Anna, how would you actually describe her work and the style in which she works?

I mean, she's got this fantastic observational style. The characters that she produces are so, they're so rich and they're so acute and so shrewd. I mean, you can look at her books and you can recognise her comics and you can recognise people in them immediately just from the attitudes they have, the words they say, but just the slight poses. They're so, they kind of reverberate they're very easy to

Do you have a favourite character? I've just, I really love Cassandra Dark, I know it's the last one but I really, she's such a great character. What do you love about her? I quite like the fact she's so cantankerous and yet kind of lovable with it, she's

got her own charms and I think this is part of Posey Simmons' skill, is that she's able to do these characters who are... It's not a mockery. They're caricatures of people that you can recognise, but there's nothing cruel about them. They're all very... They're all just humans, but she sort of very casually gives them enough rope to be able to hang themselves. Edith, to what extent do you think you might have been

inspired by her technically? I think a great deal. I think she's encouraged me to maybe be a little less lazy with my drawing. I was looking at Cassandra Dark recently and these kind of beautiful scenes of crowds outside Piccadilly Circus and these kind of beautiful scenes of crowds outside Piccadilly Circus and the kind of light from Fortnum's coming down. It's just beautiful. And I was thinking, I was like, God, you know, just so artfully rendered.

I would have just scribbled in the background and be like, and it carries on back there. So I'm just, you know, the attention to detail, the kind of tiles in the background of a kitchen, you know, cafetiers, just so such kind of specific. You've got to get all those notebooks and do it the way that she does it, every single bit in a notebook as the character develops. She published, Paul, work in Guides to Women's Rights.

She did in the 70s, that's right. The Sun ran quite a racy cartoon, as I recall it, at the same time. How did this, I would have said feminist, justify doing both? I think, well, she got a fantastic break to be given a daily cartoon in The Sun in 1969 when the paper launched. And she was able to, over time, subvert the requirements, as you might imagine, of the humour in The Sun so that some of the sexist elements could be directed back at the character, this lecherous bear, he was a naughty bear, by the dolly girl character who was the victim much of the time early on.

And so she was able to turn it around. Also, of course, her own developing career meant that she could then move to The Times and Natalie to The Guardian, which became her permanent home, which is much more in tune with her political beliefs and aspirations. And so she was able to move on after that period.

And certainly with her Guardian strips, she was able to satirise the readers themselves. As Hannah was saying, we recognise ourselves in Posey's comics, sometimes uncomfortably, of course, with all our contradictions, all our aspirations for moral standards or doing the right thing, often not doing the right thing. And her three couples, not just the Webbers, but the Wrights and the Heaps in that long-running series on the women's page,

just came alive and still stand as one of the masterpieces of British comics. I know, Hannah, that you know her personally. How has she supported young women coming up behind her? I mean, well, part of that is her being so visible as a prolific and fantastic female creator, which I can't stress how important this is to be able to see that as a young female comics creator, which I can't be, I can't stress how important this is to be able to see that as a young female comics creator, to know that there are women who are so successful. I mean, first of all, when I started out, I didn't believe that there were so many,

I didn't believe that there were female creators, I couldn't see them. Now I know that there's an even, I would say an even number of male and female creators um i mean if you if you pop into the to elka for the east london comic arts festival in next month you'll see there's a there's a very sort of uh equal balance but at the time and from from the outside of the comics world it looks as though it's very it seems to be very male oriented very male skewed um so to to have uh to have somebody so visible is as as I say, as a matriarch, to be able to follow is very important. What would you say the industry is like for women now? I mean, I look at the papers every day and I see a lot of men's names doing the cartoons. What's it like for you, young and upcoming?

I think that's very true. But I'd like to think that all these men are kind of uh an older generation and there's definitely lots of young women on Instagram and different kind of social media platforms who are kind of uh uh coming through and making themselves seen um so I think yeah I think it's but you get paid if you're doing it on Instagram? No, you don't. Unless you're kind of a massive following. I mean, I think it's more to do with kind of exposure and kind of hopefully seeing, being visibly popular, having a kind of a positive influence on somebody hopefully paying you.

I was talking to Edith Pritchett, Hannah Berry and Paul Gravett. And I must tell you that we have had sad news today about the British writer and illustrator Judith Carr, who wrote When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and, of course, created The Tiger Who Came to Tea. She's died. She was 95. And Rock the Boat tweeted,

Jenny, please, if you can, mention thanks and farewell to Judith Carr. An interview with her a few years ago stopped me in my tracks. Now do join me tomorrow, if you can, when we'll be exploring the subject of infidelity from an historical, cultural and psychological perspective. How have our views changed over the centuries? Are women judged more harshly than men when they transgress? And how do you negotiate this rather tricky terrain if you decide to go for it? Join me tomorrow, usual time if you can, two minutes past ten. Bye-bye. The deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.