Woman's Hour - Simon Levy verdict; the partition of India in fiction; mudlarking

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

A serial sex attacker who had a 'morbid fascination' with sex has been jailed for the rest of his life after he was found guilty of murdering two women and raping a third. 40-year-old Simon Levy killed Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in March 2025 and Sheryl Wilkins five months later. Earlier that year, he raped a third woman in the same Tottenham car park where Wilkins was later found dead. Levy will never be released but his sentence comes after police and the Crown Prosecution Service apologised over a series of disastrous decisions that left him free to roam the streets. To discuss the implications of this case, Anita Rani is joined by deputy assistant commissioner Helen Millichap, director of the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, and author and journalist Joan Smith.Events of the past are often recounted through facts and dates but how do those legacies play out in the years, decades and generations that follow? Fauzia Musa joins Anita to discuss her debut novel, The Strangling Fig, why her own anxieties around motherhood inspired its inception and how the three generations of women it follows navigate the legacy of Partition.Why are Black American women spending thousands of dollars to fly halfway across the world to access healthcare in South Korea? Why has it become synonymous not only with beauty innovation but comprehensive healthcare? We speak to US journalist Brianna Holt and Meike Schleiff, associate professor at UCL’s Global Business School for Health.Lara Maiklem has been appointed - what's believed to be - Britain’s first 'mudlark-in-residence' after 20 years of finding lost treasures. Lara Maiklem, 55, says she fell in love with the activity when she moved to Greenwich, south-east London. Since then, she has found thousands of objects, most of which she stores in her guest bedroom as a mini museum. Standouts include a Tudor child’s shoes from the late 1500s, a Tudor dagger, Roman game counters, a complete Roman pot and an early 18th-century wine bottle. She joins us in the studio to share how mudlarking has changed her perspective on London - and life.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Simon Richardson

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck. Odu brings your business together on a single platform, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's ODbolo.com. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning and welcome to the program. When politicians and law enforcement agencies repeatedly tell us that violence against women and girls is a priority,

how could a convicted sex offender be left to free to murder to women in London? We'll be discussing this and, of course, would like to hear your thoughts. Black American women are taking their healthcare into their own hands and booking flights to South Korea to get better treatment, as they're not taken seriously or are dismissed by doctors in the US. Mud larking on the banks of the River Thames. That's Finding Things in Mud. We'll be joined by the mudlarker in residence to talk treasure.

And a debut novel that explores the relationship between three generations of women in one family set against the backdrop of the partition of India. Fosia Musa will be here to tell us about the strangling fig and what she discovered about her own grandmother that in part triggered this story. So this morning, I'd also like to know if you've discovered anything about your grandmother that surprised you. Did you learn about her unfulfilled potential? Did she have to quash her desires and dreams to become a wife, a mother?

Or did she have a life before that that you had no knowledge about until now? Stories about your grandmothers, welcome and of course your thoughts and opinions on anything else you hear on the program. Get in touch in the usual way. On most smart speakers, you can say Alexa Ask BBC Sounds to send a comment. You can text us on 84844. You can email the program by going to our website. site or you can WhatsApp us on 0300-100-444. But that text number once again is 84844. But first, as you will have heard, over the last 24 hours, a serial sex attacker who had a morbid fascination with sex

has been jailed for the rest of his life after he was found guilty of murdering two women and raping a third. 40-year-old Simon Levy killed Carmenza Valencia Trujillo on March 2025. And Cheryl Wilkins five months later. Earlier that year, he raped a third woman in the same Tottenham car park where Wilkins was later found dead. Levy will never be released, but his sentence comes after police and the Crown Prosecution Service

apologised over a series of disastrous decisions that left him free to roam the streets. Walt, discuss the implications of this case. I'm joined by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Helen Millerchap, Director National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and public protection and author and journalist Joan Smith. Morning to both of you. Helen, I'm going to come to you first.

When politicians and law enforcement agencies repeatedly say that violence against women and girls is a priority, how can a proven sex offender be free to murder two women in London? It's the right question to ask, of course, and this case is devastating. And I know that some of what is being heard about this case by women and girls, in London particularly, but potentially and obviously nationally as well,

is going to make them wonder about safety. It's going to make them wonder about trust in the police. And awfully it might make them less willing to come forward to us if they're experiencing sexual assault or any of the range of sexual harms we know were experienced here by the women involved. And can I just say before we go into the thing I'd love to be able to talk about a bit, which is what are we doing and how we do see this as a national emergency? with a continuing amount of pressure from us to get things better,

to just acknowledge the undeniable harm to the women affected by his crimes. I just wonder if you mention our listeners and what people must be feeling right now. Do you, like many women listening today, have your head in your hands as well? I think that's quite a fair description, because as well as being a police officer with a very important role to try and make sure that we are doing everything possible, to still listen to everything being said to us about where the system is currently failing, but also my responsibility is to keep trying to encourage people to report, to come forward,

and where they may legitimately not have the faith to come to the police, there are many other services who can give immediate help. Well, earlier this morning on the Today program, we heard the response of Mina Smallman, mother of sisters, Bieber Henry and Nicole Smallman, who were murdered in North London in 2020. Let's have a listen to what she had to say. He was on the sex off. Lenders list. So that should be high priority. And the system failed. The problem is that there is

no joined up thinking. You know, the attacks and the way he attacked people and how many women he attacked, his hunting ground was London transport. He knew he could just get on a train and attack women willy-nilly. This is ridiculous. Met knew he was dangerous but failed. The courts knew he was dangerous, but they let him out. They put him in, but they let him out. He actually attacked a female prison officer. How on earth do you get out of prison and you have sexually assaulted a prison officer?

Helen, what lessons must be learnt from this case? So there are lessons about how we treat victims when they come forward. and I'll go into a bit more detail if that's all right about that. But there are also lessons about how we can't rely on a victim coming forward necessarily to understand the risk posed by people. That puts pressure on victims. The police and law enforcement have to get much better at detecting predatory behaviour, not only through the reports that come from victims, but the ways we join the dot on the reports we may already have in a system that, as is described, is not sufficiently joined up,

but also the things that we might be able to spot if we do good basic police work in the public spaces, be it transport, be it parks, be it, you know, nighttime economy premises, where people, women, girls may be telling us they feel less safe. We are already doing work like this. It needs to be scaled up and it needs to be deeper work. But, for example, plainclothes officers going to places where we know women feel unsafe or where we've seen a spike in relation to the kind of offences we're talking. about watching people, watching presentry men, intervening before harm happens, because we do know

the volume of these issues is high, and our ability as a system which is a certain size to deal with it, part of the issues we're seeing in this case as well, is a real challenge, as the Commissioner outlined this morning on the other programme. Why? Well, because if you think about, for example, the number of monitored sex offenders and how that brilliant legislation that encourages the collaboration to monitor risk in communities. Ever since that legislation has been in place, we are expanding that group of offenders

and we are a system attempting to manage in collaboration. It's not just the police, obviously, it's probation partners as well, a really large number of people making it really incumbent on us to spot the risk within the risk and really understand where the highest harm is. The answer here is obviously good law enforcement and policing where we can, but it's also about prevention. And I think it's about trying to make sure we're working across the system to take out these behaviours and to make sure that these crimes don't happen in the first place. I'm always trying to talk about the whole system. And it's easy to say that. You need to

break it down. What exactly do you mean? It's education. It's spotting things before they get to an escalated level and dealing with them. But it's a challenge with the system the size it is. What's your reaction to this case? What are your biggest concerns? Well, it's three and a half years since the government announced that violence against women and girls would be part of the strategic policing requirement, which means that it's put on the same level of priority as terrorism and organised crime. And can we imagine anybody who's a suspected terrorist being arrested so many times for so many offences,

getting bail time after time, you know, the court accepting excuses he didn't turn up, I think, on three occasions for court hearings and he said he wasn't well. He said he had mental health issues. Why was he not arrested? It's a whole system failure. But it's also political failure. So yesterday, I think for a lot of women was incredibly distressing hearing that this was happening because we all, in London, we all use public transport. And what was the Prime Minister talking about? He chose to talk about disposable barbecues and the problem of all that. And there should have been a statement right at the top that what is happening to women is an emergency, as Helen has just said, and that, you know, we are taking active steps to address this.

So how does the criminal justice system need to change to recognise the risk posed by repeat perpetrators? Well, I think what this exposes is the failure, the sheer numbers of these dangerous men and the difficulty of monitoring them. So the probation service, I think, is currently looking after working with 244,000 people. That's a huge workload. And there's the question of what happens if someone breaches a protection order or, you know, a woman whose ex-partner

has come out of prison is not allowed to go near her. The National Audit Office looked last month at what happens when a woman reports a breach of an order. And in about half the cases, nothing happens. And so, you know, women are being told, don't worry, you know, he'll be monitored, he'll be subject to exclusion orders. But nothing happens when he re-offends.

So I think it is a whole system failure. But it's also about the real absolute importance of believing victims and also just believing how bad these men actually are. Helen, it's five years since the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. And police told us then that it was going to be a turning point for restoring trust in forces across the UK. It just hasn't happened. And I understand why you are saying that so directly to me and I absolutely say that there is so much further we need to go.

But I also want to take an opportunity to talk about some of the work that is going on. And it has surfaced in this case as well. So by no means finished in terms of what's required of us. But victims feeling that they are taken seriously across the range of sexual offences that we're talking about here, which can include everything from non-contact sexual offending right through to rape. And making sure that whether you are the first responder,

the call handler, the neighbourhood officer, who might be the first person, a victim comes to disclose what's happened, is entirely able to correctly handle that in a way that makes a victim feel believed, gives them confidence that they are taken seriously and is acted upon quickly, particularly in circumstances where you may say the individual single incident, is at a certain level in our threshold of crime. But if you take it together with other things that might have happened in the same place

or potentially the same perpetrator, when you look at the whole pattern and make the links, which I know in the past we have very definitely failed to do, you start to get a sense of how you see the wood for the trees here and really start to target the most harmful perpetrators. Well, that's incredibly important because there are two things I wonder here is that, you know, senior officers like you understand patterns of crime. I wonder whether it's filtered down to, you know, the ordinary detective constable or PC who's called out to a crime.

But the other thing is escalation because all of these offences are serial. A man very rarely commits a rape or a sexual assault and then goes back to leading a completely blameless life. These are men who actually continue to commit these offences and they escalate. And if the criminal justice system lets the women down, they escalate to things like murder. I mean, Simon Levy didn't start out as a murderer. He started out as somebody who assaulted women, who raped women, and they develop a sense of impunity. I'm sure you've seen this, Helen, that men who are being arrested, being asked about crimes, and then nothing happens, they develop a sense of impunity. And that's why I argue that in some ways the criminal justice system is actually creating serial offenders.

Helen. I don't think I would accept quite that categorisation, but the parts of that that I most definitely agree with is that unless every person in the workforce who is child, with the very solid responsibility of receiving a disclosure from a potential victim of a crime like this, that in my mind there is no such thing as a lesser sexual offence or a so-called less serious sexual offence. And I think part of our system in the past has put false thresholds in between the categories of offending here. And we're working so very hard through Operation Ceteria to recognise that if you absolutely take a suspect-focused view of the crime in front of you, consider what else that suspect might be in terms of posing a risk wider than what you have immediately in front of you. That is the answer to some of this. And I'm determined to make sure

that that sort of philosophy, which is academically driven, it's informed by the voices of victims, survivors and the specialist sector is applied to the much wider range of offences that we've got so that all of them feel sufficiently serious to the officer. And as Joan suggested, is it being filtered down? Is this message being heard by everybody? Well, I think we're starting to, and I And I know that it will be patchy because I think one of the reasons, the centre that I'm now that have the privilege of being director of in its first year, the whole purpose of that is to set a single good standard nationally for Chief Constable and forces to follow and setting up what we expect to be the standard around this so that literally every person is doing the right thing, not just a patchwork of good and less good, variably. I'd also like to ask about the use of technology to help stop perpetrators slipping through the net. Yes, so there's lots of different forces are doing very good work on this. And I think this programme may even have covered some work that the MET has done.

And that is to try and make sure that if you apply technology, for example, algorithms, to identify that even where you haven't got a case that's necessarily charged or even convicted, we know, don't we, all the deep and important reasons why some cases don't get through to the court system. But it doesn't mean the risk is any less and it doesn't mean the harm is any less palpable in terms of. of how we must try and monitor and control a potentially risky offender. So we are using that technology to try and come up with stacks of risky Vorg. We call them Vorg perpetrators. So that regardless of a life case,

regardless of whether you're being able to put something through the court, you can join all of the dots and apply all sorts of, we call it Achilles' heel tactics. So whatever method we can use to try and bring the perpetrators offending behavior under some level of control, which could be really thinking about the proactive ways we want to put positive obligations on offenders to stop their offending, not necessarily a criminal justice outcome.

So protective orders are also an example. And also finding them responsible for other crimes is also the kind of thing that we can do when we find that stacking working well in forces. Joan, what questions should we be asking about a system that's designed to protect women? Well, just exactly how it protects women. How, I mean, the Commissioner this morning was talking about the sheer volume of men who are having to be to be monitored. And so these are men who are on the sex offenders register,

who've committed multiple offences against women, who've come out of prison. What exactly does the monitoring consist of? And, you know, we know that from the National Audit Office that some men who are supposed to be wearing tags, I mean, the National Audit's Office thought about 9,000 men who should be wearing tags and not wearing them. The government says it's only 5.5,000,

but that's still only 5.5,000. Helen, at the centre of this, we've just got to come back to trust and women. I mean, what would you say to women who look at the big picture and decide it's just not worth reporting a violent or a sexual attack? Because they just feel the justice system doesn't work to protect them. And I understand that that might be how some people feel. I would urge them. And I hope that by listening to my determination on this point to really support national policing to make the improvements necessary,

to recognise where I am saying we are training officers better, I am ever hopeful that the reaction that a victim gets when they come to us is excellent and consistently. excellent, but and if a victim of a crime like this is not ready to come to police, there are all sorts of other ways that they can get immediate help. The sexual assault referral centres will collect forensics, will provide medical and therapeutic support, and will allow us to identify, even though the victim remains completely anonymous, anything that the policing can take from that and give the victim a choice potentially later down the track to come to us.

I'd like to thank you both for coming in and speaking to us this morning. Thank you, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Helen Miller-Chap, Director of National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Prosecution and Author and Journalist, Joan Smith. Thank you. And if you've been affected by anything you've heard in this discussion, you can go to the BBC Action Line website where you will find links to support.

84844 is the text message. And here is some more of a statement that the CPS sent us about the case of Simon Levy. We recognise the level of concern around this case and we have carried out a detailed review of our handling. We accept that there was relevant information regarding bail that was not provided to the court when bail applications were being considered.

Our actions fell short of the standards that victims, families and the public are entitled to expect. In particular, there were points where we could and should have taken a more robust approach to representations about bail based on the information available. We cannot know what decisions the courts would have made had different or stronger representations being advanced,

but we recognise our responsibility and we are sorry for the shortcomings we have identified, we are taking action to strengthen training, case oversight, and our approach to bail and risk in serious sexual offence cases. That text number once again, 84844. Now, events of the past are often recounted in facts and dates, but how do those legacies play out for the families who are there and what marks do they leave in the decades that follow?

This is a central question in Fosia Musa's debut novel the strangling fig, in which three generations of women navigate the lived and inherited impact of the partition of India. When Ashraf's father is murdered on the eve of partition in 1946, his death ripples through the family and follows their immigration to America, where half a century later, Sahar is visited by the ghost of her grandmother Ashraf. Fosia, welcome to Women's Hour. Thank you so much. First of all, big day, debut novel. Congratulations. Thank you. You started this work a while ago.

You wrote this over the course of seven years. So take us back to where it started. I started working on this novel right after my daughter was born. I was suffering from postpartum depression and anxiety, but I wasn't really sure. I hadn't been able to name that. I had a lot of fears that I would be replicating the relationship I had with my mother, which is loving but also really complicated.

And similarly between her and my grandmother. And so as part of that, I started to channel that, those questions into writing. And I thought I'd start working on a memoir about the lives of the women of my maternal family. And as I started working through that, talking to different family members about what our history was, I learned about our family history leaving Hedrabah after partition. I had known about partition as like a historical event, but I had. had no idea the relationship that really quite catastrophic event had on my actual family. Isn't it interesting that people, that we don't talk about it?

Exactly. It's really crazy that, you know, we have such a, the South Asian diaspora is global and vast. And yet these stories are just lost and just not really explored. And you're studying for a PhD in creative nonfiction at the moment. So why did the story need to be a novel? I think there were a lot of going back to your point about how we don't talk about it within our families, especially that particular generation that was affected. There were a lot of gaps in people's understanding of the impact of protection on our family. Some people in my family were like, well, it was something that happened, but we were privileged, and so we were protected from that.

But yet my aunts were saying that, well, my grandmother and their mother only got married at 35, which is really late for that generation. Because all the different families that would usually have, you know, suitors and trying to do the matchmaking, those families had had to disperse. And so during that period of time, my grandmother ended up actually having a really amazing artistic career, teaching fine art, being a Bollywood singer. But then once our families had settled, some in Pakistan and in Islamabad, others in the U.S., and the family finally was like, okay, it's time for you to get married. And so that career had to end because she married someone who's a bit more conservative, my grandfather. And so a lot of that storyline is inspired in my novel, but the characters also are their own people. I guess the most fictional and fantastical element of your book is Ashraf appearing to her granddaughter. And we're not quite sure if she's a ghost or an apparition.

And at one point she's identified as a gin, as a supernatural being from Islamic mythology. So why did you use this device of magical realism to tell this part of the story? I was really interested in the idea of what we feel, but what we can't see. And so that's sort of the nature of inheritance, right? And, you know, we call it inherited trauma or generational trauma. But, you know, there's so much research that is done on how our DNA is shaped by the things that have happened in generations past. And so I was really curious about how can I actually create a device or a character that is the manifestation of what we can't always see but we can feel? and in a way I wanted to trust the reader to be able to discern for them like is she really an apparition or is it something or is she something that Sahara has to sort of only Sahara has a relationship to this because she's the one that's supposed to that's sort of chosen to heal those wounds for her family.

Can I share something personal with you? Yes, please. Because I've, you know, I've gone on this journey and discovered the history of partition in my own family and it was when I learned the story of my grandfather was married before he married. my nan but she died those first wife and first two children died during partition and i never knew her name i'd never seen a photo of her and all of a but i felt her in me and that moment in my life and i just wonder you know how this is might have changed it changed who like discovering what happened to the women discovering her seeing her breitemcora her face her name it really like fundamentally shifted something inside me and i can't quite understand how um and i just you know

wonder whether something similar happened. Yes, it definitely did. I have chills hearing your story. I've had a few instances. So a friend of mine had gifted me a session with a Reiki healer a few years ago. And I went and the woman who was really kind, she was like, you know, why are you here? And I was like, well, I'm really struggling. I'm working on this novel.

I'm really struggling with a particular character, the main protagonist. and I just don't even know if I should continue on this writing this book. And so I lay down on this table and she works for magic, which is really just sort of moving energy around and kind of seeing where the body is holding particular energies. And I was just lying there and I suddenly felt and saw my grandmother in what some people would deem the third eye. and my grandmother, who I had, again, also a loving, warm relationship with, but she could be quite cold, withholding, mercurial. She just said to me, Fosia, this is not your story to tell.

This is our story to tell. So you need to actually just get out of the way. And when she said that, I immediately just felt a lightness of suddenly like, wow, it's the ego that has been getting in the way of like, is my right? good enough, is the story good enough? You know, how to technically work through a character. And suddenly I just felt like, wow, this is a way to commemorate her story and our family story, but it's not about me.

And it gave me a perspective on my grandmother that I'd never had before. I was able to look back at her life the way she had behaved with me, with my mother, with the different people in our family, and see it from a very different vantage point. Could you read something, an extract from the book? Yes, I'd love to. Thank you. And this is a conversation between Sahar and her grandmother Ashraf. And it takes place a little later in the novel when Sahar is at the college in New York pursuing studies in both history and painting. You give us some context, do you know? Yes. So Sahir has become, she's learning to be an artist at university. And Ashraf in the past, she was also an artist, though she was not able to kind of fulfill her creative ambitions. So as an apparition now, she's, vicariously living through Sahar and trying to influence her in terms of what she should be working on. So this extract kind of looks at some dialogue between them and the tensions that exist between both of their ambitions. Are you listening to me?

I am. Sahar rolled up the sleeves of her vintage pinstripe button up and crossed her arms. In a calm tone, she explained, my graduate thesis on the sari explored partition's impact, remember? Now I'm interested in exploring the outcomes of 9-11. I've even got this idea about Muslim futurism. Like, there's no mainstream work of art that captures that kind of world. A unified Islamic society post-Western domination. You'd be into that, right?

Ashraf's head shifted side by side, creating a multicolored configuration out of her frustration. How can you take off partition like it's on a checklist of horrors? With a steely gaze, Sahar responded, I'm not, but I won't limit my worldview to fit yours. I've honored your history. Now let me explore mine on my own terms. Ushruff, the color returning to her face, arched her shoulders and raised her neck high amidst defeat. Your own terms. Fine. But don't disappoint me. With her last remarks, she vanished.

Sahar let out a long sigh of relief. She put on her apron again and got back to the painting in front of her, lifting newspaper cutouts from a shallow tray and pasting it onto the canvas. There is no time to dwell on her grandmother. She had work to do. Pressure. I mean, she says, I've honored your hair. history now let me explore on my own terms. What does Sahar mean when she says that to her grandmother and the weight that that carries? I think she recognizes that she's living in a different time. She's literally living in a different generation. She's living on a different continent.

She's really preoccupied with her most recent past and lived experience, which was 9-11, and the shift in culture and politics in the U.S. that has had and continues to have. towards Muslims in particular. And yet she also feels the pressure from her grandmother to really communicate the struggles of partition and the impact it had on women in particular. So I think she's sort of torn. And yet as she starts to mature,

she starts to find more agency in her capabilities to communicate the work that she wants to. As you grew up in the States, but you live here, I just wonder what the conversation around Partition, is in the States compared to Britain, because obviously you can't talk about partition without talking about Britain. Of course, yeah, it's a great question. I don't, from my lived experience, partition is not something that has been talked about loads in the US in terms of popular culture or popular media. I think, that being said, I did have a resource that I use, which is called

the 1947 Partition Archive, which comes out of California. It was a kind of volunteer project collecting stories from different people from the diaspora, from their grandparents, great-grandparents, to make sure that those stories are captured. It's now in a really incredible book. So that was something that I think is newly being surfaced and really trying to get people galvanized around. Here, I've also been surprised in the UK how little people know about partition, especially with the role that Britain played in. in this actual event. And that's been really fascinating because my husband is British. He's been brought up here.

But he also wasn't taught this history in school. And you will know this as well. So I think there's an education for us as the diaspora to have on the impact of this. Even if your family wasn't impacted, you know, Indian Pakistan were one country. Muslims, Hindu, Sikhs all lived together. and now we have a whole new world order based on a few ill-informed decisions. And the way it happened and the speed in which it all happens. Exactly.

I want to start with where we began at the beginning of the conversation where you said, you know, you had your daughter and thought, am I going to have the same relationship, this complex relationship? I think that, what a way to intro where this conversation has led. So having written the book, what conclusions have you drawn? drawn and how do you feel about, you know, now that kind of is a huge question, about how you will mother this little girl? For those who will hopefully read this book, the ending was really powerful for me to write because it gave the characters an ending that I'm not sure I'm going to get in real life myself. And throughout the process of writing this book, my daughter was so a part of it because she would see me writing in bed.

I take time away from parenting because I really felt like I needed to finish drafts. I had, you know, time pressures around it. And so she knows that this story exists and that she's so much a part of it because it's sort of, you know, a fictionalized version of our family. But also that we have a different dialogue than the women of my family have been able to have for no fault of their own. And so I think in a way the future generations are always, the ones I really get to carry the how how things can be different. Yeah. I mean when I kind of did my went on my own journey, I realized that I are probably the first generation with the resources to actually be able to talk about it and maybe deal with it in some way. Absolutely. Why have you

called it the strangling fig? So the strangler fig is a parasitic tree that's really ubiquitous across South Asia. It's you will have seen them. They're really big, beautiful trees, but they have vines that that wrap themselves around the tree and suck up their resources and then become the tree. And I felt like that was such a powerful metaphor for what this novel is about, where you know, our past positive and negative can sometimes really take up all of our resources and really if we don't really contend with what has happened before us can consume us. It is a very powerful metaphor and a powerful book. Fosia, thank you so much for coming in to speak to me this morning.

Her debut novel, The Strangling Fig, is out today online and in bookstores. Thank you. Thank you so much. 84844. I'm going to read out some messages, actually. I was asking people to tell me about their own grandmothers and what little they knew. Messages saying, my grandma is quite a legend. I was quite a legend.

When India was going through independence, it was dangerous for many Anglo-Indians to create a life and safety for her family. She moved to England with a man she didn't love, leaving her four-year-old, my mum, with her parents until they had a stable enough situation for everyone to join them.

It was eight years until she saw her daughter again. Even 70 years later, she would weep at the cost but never regretted it. What a sacrifice. Indeed, another one here. I never knew my maternal grandmother. She was killed in Auschwitz

in 1943, 44. But what I do know is she had the presence of mine to save the lives of my mother, her sister, and her granddaughter by telling the Nazis the girls were over 16 years old instead of 13 plus. So saving and enabling the next generation to come, this meant they were selected for work details instead of the gas chambers.

My mum died last Friday, age 98. Thank you so much for these messages. Keep them coming in. 84844. Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck. Odu brings your business.

together on a single platform, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's O'Dbolo.com. Now, last week was listener week. And one listener wanted to discuss the noises men make from sighing to passing wind. So we asked, do men make more noises than women? We heard from the writer Tim Dowling and Janet Street Porter. I think women's default position is not to draw attention to themselves and it certainly was mine every time that I got out of the car and I did a little bit of a fart as I got out, I'd pretend the car door was squeaking and I think that men have this thing where they want to occupy the space and I think that men have a tendency when they go into

a space to kind of own it. It's unconscious. It's not deliberate. It's a kind of dominant thing. So if they load the dishwasher, they do it more noisily, if they're cooking, there's more clonking and clanking. And that goes to as far as their bodily functions too. I mean, I'm not blaming men. I just think it's a kind of default thing. I don't know. Sometimes I think I just do it because my dad did it. You know, and you get to a certain age and you just behave the way your dad did at that age.

And he had a range of noises for everything from exasperation to mild confusion, disgust. And, you know, when he'd bang his thumb with a hammer, he had this, all no words involved, all non-verbal, just noises. And I've sort of picked them up and they are very, I think they're very handy. But I think he also, I'm very self-conscious person. But as you get older, you just forget to be self-conscious. And you can hear more from them and all the other listener week discussions by listening back to last week's episodes on BBC sounds. Now, a new destination in medical tourism is gaining momentum among black American women. women who are increasingly booking flights to Seoul South Korea,

saying at home they feel they're often dismissed and not taken seriously and misdiagnosed. So why has South Korea become such an appealing option with a growing number of people travelling there for a wide range of procedures? To discuss this, I'm joined by Brianna Holt, an American award-winning author and journalist whose work explores culture, identity and race. She's based in New York City. So thank you for getting up so early, Brianna. And with me here in the studio is Mikey, Ash,

Life, Associate Professor at University College London's Global Business School for Health. Welcome to both of you. Breanna, I'm going to come to you first because you wrote about this in The Guardian. So why are Black American women spending thousands of dollars to fly half way across the world to access healthcare? What's going on? Yeah, and thank you for having me here this morning. So Black women in America have historically been neglected in medical settings and have long reported feeling dismissed, not believe or not taking seriously. and some of the women I interviewed and talked with said they had to repeatedly advocate for themselves,

convinced doctors that something was wrong. I think also when you think of American history, you have to take into account that there's historical exploitation of black women's bodies that played foundational, non-consensual roles in the development of modern Western medicine. And so throughout history, black women have been routinely subjected to medical experimentation,

forced procedures, you know, denial of bodily autonomy, and that has modern repercussions, like medical mistrust, maternal mortality, pain management bias, things of that matter. So when I spoke with William Ban, he's the co-founder of Pometti, which is a preventative health platform in South Korea that connects international patients, clients, to appointments in South Korea. He told me that his clients directly have told them that they just want to know what's going on in their body and that a standard annual physical in the US doesn't really give you that whereas a Korean healthcare checkup, you know, same day, one location across multiple organ

systems and get results all in one day. Mike, I'm going to bring you in. South Korea has a reputation for cosmetic procedures, plastic surgery, but these women and others aren't just looking for cosmetic procedures. So what is taking people there? What's the service that they're getting? Absolutely. Yes, so really what they're buying is concentrated attention, someone who will listen to them, provide some broader spectrum, preventive, proactive exploratory care that could be screening, blood panels, and just sort of an opportunity to not, as Brianna said, be sort of jostled through a system and not really paid attention to, but to actually be able to have a concerted care in one setting. And just to say that being heard in health care is not just like a one-off kindness. Like that's part of how we measure quality care. And that's really what women are seeking when they're going there. Brianna, why are they getting that in South Korea?

What are they doing differently? I think what's going on differently is that it's preventative, proactive health care that's happening in South Korea, at least what was described by the people that I talked to. it's proactive. In Korea, patients can get these comprehensive screenings and testing for a fraction of the costs in the US. It's often completed more quickly and efficiently. And instead of having to prove that something was wrong

before even getting a test, they feel like this healthcare can be used to understand what's happening in their bodies before there's even a serious problem. What makes the Korean healthcare system able to offer this level of service, Micah? Sure. So the Korean system was developed,

to support, first and foremost, their own population. They have almost universal medical insurance coverage for their population, and they have, especially in Seoul in the capital, a really high capacity for doing diagnostic screening. They have a pretty low doctor-to-patient ratio compared with other OECD countries, but they're able to do really high throughput of these sort of visits. And so they deliver,

the care privately. So hospitals are competing with each other. They're trying to provide timely, you know, coordinated care that patients would choose to come to them versus to another health system. And so now they've built an international model to cater to outside patients built on their own system. And targeting areas, places where there's the main sort of steepest disparities, Brianna, in the U.S., that like most documented gaps in clinical attention, So like in specific conditions, can you tell us exactly what those are? Yeah. The ones that I think of that come right up the top of my head is cardiovascular disease,

high rates of hypertension, issues related to gynecology. So black American women face disproportionately high rates of cardiovascular disease. It's the leading cause of death among the group. And they also have the highest prevalence in hypertension in the world. Yet studies have found that they are more likely to experience delays in diagnosis and treatment. And according to the CDC, black women are nearly 60% more likely to have high blood pressure than white American women. On top of that, when you think of gynecology, black women are more likely to experience delayed diagnosis and delayed treatment or endometriosis, fibroids. And then there's breast cancer where the disparity is especially striking because black women aren't dramatically more likely to develop breast cancer.

but in recent American Cancer Society data, it shows slightly lower incidence, but they have the highest breast cancer mortality rate. And so these gaps are driven by many different factors, a combination of structural inequalities, implicit bias, differences in access to timely diagnostic testing, like we mentioned earlier, that we see South Korea is much quicker and proactive in doing. And of course this is an option only available to women who can afford it, right? Time, money, commitment. Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is something, it still is a privilege. A lot of the women who I talk to discussed that it's cheaper for them still to go to South Korea when it comes to the cost of the flight and stay.

If they do not have insurance or great health insurance in the U.S., the cost of appointments, it overall is cheaper to go to South Korea. It is a privilege to have the time to do so, to be able to spend one to two weeks abroad, even the privilege to maybe go alone, not maybe everyone doesn't feel comfortable flying alone. And so, yeah, it definitely is, you know, a give or take. Are there any downsides to this, Micah? Sure. So it's complex. And I think we can think about it from two sides, sort of for these patients that are traveling around the world to get the care.

And as you both mentioned, the inequities, not everyone can do. this. That's a huge issue. Secondly, also, if someone's going for, you know, preventive care and getting these broad spectrums or full-body CT scans, whatever, which are much more accessible and affordable in South Korea, if they're going for a particular concern, if they're trying to get to the bottom of an issue that they've really been struggling with, those kind of things can be life-changing, life-saving. And also, if they're just going and maybe getting some extra things on the side, there's a risk of sort of over-screening, over-diagnosis, of sort of finding things that then the patient has to deal with, the anxiety, the follow-up, all of that. And that links with a third point, which is around continuity of care. So even if someone gets some care in South Korea, eventually either they're going to go back home and then have to try to navigate the follow-up, even if they have evidence now still getting that care.

And also, potentially, if they want to go back to South Korea for follow-up care, that's a challenge. But I think also there's a challenge for South Korea because if resources are now, if doctors and hospitals are catering to this new population that absolutely need the care, there's no doubt about that. They're also potentially siphoning away capacity, attention from their own population. And so I think in the medium term, we may see some challenges there as well. Brianna, what would you like to see done to address the disparities back home in the US? Yes. Yeah, I mean, there's so much that has to change when it comes to bias, when it comes to our systems, and it definitely is larger than an individual problem. And so what I really hope to address the disparity within that you may be experiencing, I hope that this phenomenon really empowers black women to advocate for themselves in medical settings and to really prioritize seeking care from doctors who take them seriously. I think as soon as you realize something is off, and, in an appointment, at an appointment about the way you're being treated, find someone who will do a better job because there are American doctors out there who are willing to listen to you,

who will not rush you, who will look at you without bias. And I understand, you know, advocating for yourself in a setting where you are not the trained expert can feel scary, especially when it's the trained expert who is dismissing you are not taking you seriously. But I hope this phenomenon in power is black women to remember that they are the experts of their own bodies. And the same could be said for women in the UK as well. I want to thank you both for speaking to me about this. So interesting. Thank you to author and journalist Brianna Holt and Micah Shalife, Associate Professor at University College London's Global Business School for Health. Thank you. 84844 is the text number. Now, when you think of the River Thames, what comes to

mind? Maybe it's the buildings along its banks like Tower Bridge or the House of Parliament or the river taxis or floating bars. But have you ever thought about what lies in the river's depths and what might be found if you step onto the foreshore and scour the mud? Well, my next guest has. Lara Meklam is a passionate mudlarker and was recently made what's believed to be

Britain's first mudlark in residence after 20 years of finding lost treasures. Lara, welcome to the programme. Thank you very much for having me. Congratulations. Recently appointed mudlark in residence by Southwark Cathedral. What does that mean? Well, anyone who knows Southwark Cathedral knows that it's right on the river, right on the banks of the river.

So it really is the river's own cathedral. And it makes sense for Southwarking to have a mudlarking presence in it. So for the last few years, we've had a couple of mudlarking cases. We've had mudlacking festivals and talks and walks. And I've been involved in all of that. And they honoured me, really, with this weird and wonderful title, the mudlarking residence. I love it. But let's back up a little bit. What is mudlarking? Where does it come from? Mudlarking is simply put, the River Thames is tidal, so it goes up and down. And the weird thing is that people who, even people who live in London, some people don't even know it gets up and down. But when it goes down, twice a day, you can get down onto the bed of the River Thames. And you can start to look around for all the objects that people have lost or thrown away over 2,000 years plus. So you find the most incredible things. Because of course, London has been so. heavily, densely populated and there's basically a lot of stuff in there. If you get your eye in, I've been on your social media and you're Instagram. All I can see is pebbles and all of a sudden you pull out this amazing artifact.

Let's talk about women and mudlarking. What do we know about women? Were they more likely to mudlark? They were. Well, the word, nobody really knows where the word mudlark comes from. But it was first mentioned at the end of the 1700s to describe a form of criminal. really. They really were the lowest of the low. So there were people who really couldn't do any other work other than scour around in the mud looking for things that they could sell or use. So rope and wood and coal. And these people are usually women or children or old people, the people on the very fringes of society. And they could earn just enough to keep themselves out of the workhouse. And so they were wandering around in the mud with no shoes on every kind of weather you can imagine. And if you can imagine that, and the river at the time really was just a moving cesspit.

But that was better than being... Sell it to us. Yeah. Better than being in the workhouse. So yes, it really was women, children and old people. Fast forward to today. And it is more sort of people who have an interest in history. Yeah.

I mean, you've got an active... You've got a very switched on audience listening. So do we know any stories of any female mudlarkers? We do. There was a very famous one called Peggy Jones. And she was a Georgian mudlark, actually. scouring the foreshore around Blackfriars, around 1805. And people would come to Blackfriars Bridge to watch her

because she was a bit of a local celebrity. And she appeared in a magazine around 1820. It was a magazine of curiosities. And she would be seen down on the river, scouring around with no shoes on, feeling with her feet in the mud, for bits of coal that have fallen off the coal barges. And she'd collect them up and she'd clean them

and she'd go up into the city of London because that's where she lived. They described it as miserable lodgings on Chick Lane. And she'd sell them for eight pence a bucket, which was around today about five pounds. And then later, poor old Peggy would be seen rolling around in the streets, drunk and inebriated because she was, you know, in those days, everybody drank. And she had a miserable life. Then Peggy vanished. Nobody knows what happens to her.

She was probably, she either died in her miserable lodgings and just was another body in a mass grave or. She was washed away by the river. But we know an awful lot about Peggy, which is unusual for the time because she appeared in this magazine. She had red hair. And it was Peggy Jones. She was in her 40s. She didn't wear shoes.

She used her skirts gathered up as a sort of bag to collect these coals. So it's unusual that we know so much about her for someone of that kind of class and sort of level in society. One of my favourite museums in London is the Docklands Museum because it tells you the story of London through the docks and the river. but I've never considered the history you can learn from the mud. So how has mudlarking changed your understanding and appreciation of London? Absolutely. It really has because it's addictive for a start going down there because it's like a great big, lucky dip. You never know what you're going to find next.

And I should say I don't metal detect, I don't dig and don't scrape. I like to wait for the river to deliver what it's ready to give up. And it delivers the most incredible things and along with them come the stories of ordinary people. because the things that I find tend to be the things that people have lost, they're broken, their unwanted things, they're not things that can appear in a museum. So they tell the story of forgotten people, forgotten stories. The sort of people who, the poor people, the poor people who London was really built on their backs.

They're not the people who streets were named after and had statues built of them. You know, they're just ordinary people like my ancestors. And you get to meet them through mudlarking. It's like reaching back through time. you know, honestly, just shaking hands with these people. What drew you to it? Escape, really. I moved to London. I grew up on a farm.

I love my own company. I'm quite a solitary person. I moved to London and I wanted to escape the chaos, just find somewhere that I could go. I searched the parks. I searched the gardens. And one day I found myself on the river and realised there is this streak of solitude and wilderness

that runs through the city that people sort of don't. don't go to as much. And as soon as you go down those stairs onto the river, you're in another world. You're miles away from all that chaos up on the, you know, on bankside or wherever you happen to be. And it just became my escape. What a lovely way to describe it. So take us out of the studio, take us out of our lives, wherever anyone listening might be right now, and give us a virtual tour. How do we get our eye in? What do we look for? Well, you have to your tides, that's the most important thing. Tides today were about 9.30. I've got them memorized.

Of course you have. They're at 1022, so it's a bit late today. You have to know your tide. You have about two to three hours either side of the tide. There are river stairs all the way along the river and they're ancient river stairs. They've been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. They used to be a lot more. But they're still there. You can get down onto the river. It's not, it's called mud larking. In central London, it's not that muddy. It's mostly gravely. It's quite safe so long as you're sensible. A good pair of shoes. Keep your eye on the wash and the wake from the boats because when the clippers go past, they really do throw up awake. But that's what's digging out the stuff that we find. So there's huge amount of erosion

going on and it's throwing up all these objects onto the river. And then you just have to breathe and relax and forget your problems and just focus on the floor. And you're looking for perfect circles and straight lines because Mother Nature doesn't make perfect circles and straight lines. I like the bit where you said forget about life and just focus. Sounds very mindful, meditative. It absolutely is, you know. Tell us about some of the treasure that you found. What's, what have been your real big finds? I have found, I mean, I found the most incredible things. I've found, you know, I've found gold. I've found silver. I found a lot of coins, you know, a lot of people, they think that's treasure. But, you know, mudlacking, you're never going to get rich from mudlarking.

You don't actually own the things that you find, I should say. What do you do with them? The Port of London Authority owns them. Anything over 300 years old and of historic importance you have to report. And that's under the terms of your mudlarking licence because you do need a mudlarking. So, yeah, so I found incredible things. I've found Roman game counters, Roman hairpins. How would you know, a Roman hairpin?

That is, they tend to appear in one particular place, which is known as, It was known as the Roman hole, actually. The Port of the London Authority is filled in the hole now, but that's where all the Roman things were washing up. So these beautiful bone hairpins, a lot of them wash up. I spent a lot of time in museums. I've got a weird and wonderful library of strange people. You know what you're doing.

I'm a bit of a nerd. Yes. How do you get a licence? You apply to the Port of London Authority's website. You can apply actually the... The waiting list has actually closed. It's got 10,000 people on the waiting list at the moment. Right.

It's currently closed. Might have a few more after today. And you found a Tudor shoe? I did. I brought it with me. Oh, can we see? Oh, it's writing for you here. The beauty of the Tens is that the mud is anaerobic.

So it preserves organic material like leather, wood, even fabric perfectly. Can I touch? Can I hold it? Wow, I'm going to reach across. Right, here we go. You love to describe it whilst I'm... This, that's incredible. It's a tiny little shoe.

And when I found that and I pulled it out of the mud, I looked inside and I could see the imprint of the first little owner's feet on it. And just to give you some idea, I bought a bigger Tudor shoe, these are the sort of shape of shoes that Henry VIII wore. But can you see that footprint? Yes. How extraordinary. That's the person who wore it 600 years ago.

How did you, and you discovered that? How did you know it was Tudor? Did you have to get it? Again, it was where I found it. And then I did a lot of research. It's very, very similar to the ones that they found on the Mary Rose. But it's a tiny one. So it would fit to, I don't know, about six, five.

It's tiny. Yeah, it's really small. It's so precious just to be able to hold that. Thank you so much, Lara, for coming in and inspiring us and giving us an insight into a whole other slice of London history and mudlarking. Thank you so much. And thanks to all of you for your messages. I'm going to end with some about your grandmothers.

My grandmother used to go to a boarding school where at night they would sneak out by using the glow-in-the-dark dots they'd painted on the creaking floorboards. Another one here is saying my grandmother, who's born in 1819, into a working-class family of 10 children, was a wonderful woman who joined simple domestic activities and bringing up her family. But I always remember her saying that she had two ambitions.

One was to become a teacher and the other to learn French. Thank you for sharing these stories. I'll be back tomorrow from 10 a.m. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. This Cultural Life from BBC Radio 4. I will never go into anything so deep like that again. The world's leading artistic figures reveal their creative influences. Disobey, disagree, disavow.

I'm John Wilson, and my recent guests have included the scopedor Anish Kapoor, photographer Annie Leibovitz, the actor, Kristen Scott Thomas. It has made me good at telling stories about people have a secret suffering. and former children's laureate Frank Cotterall Boyce. If art's got one function, it's to point to what's wonderful and say, look, this is your world, it's insane. Listen to This Cultural Life on BBC Sounds.