Local lives
The life and times of Helen Plumber, a volunteer at Oxfam on Marylebone High Street
Interview: Jean Paul Aubin-Parvu
Portrait: Orlando Gili
My father, his parents and grandparents all lived in Marylebone, up by what is now the flyover on Marylebone Road. There were lots of cousins, aunts and uncles also living in the area, with many of the family working on the railways in some capacity.
My father and his parents actually got bombed out during the war. The bomb didn’t hit their house, but it took out the surrounding area and so they had to move out to the suburbs to live with relatives.
I was born in Edgware—famous for the terminus of the 113 bus—and spent my first few years up in Harrow. My family then moved back to this area for a few years, just off Sussex Gardens, but when I was 11 years old we moved to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. I love Guernsey. A lot of my family are still there and I go home whenever I can. I have a foot in two camps. Guernsey is home and London is home, I couldn’t really put one over the other.
Flying became my hobby growing up and I was the youngest person ever to get their private pilot’s license in the UK. But that was really as a result of a quirk of law or a loophole. At the time you could take your flying test in the UK at 16 but you couldn’t fly solo until you were 17 and you need some solo hours to get your license. In the US you could go solo at 16, but you couldn’t take your flying test until you were 17. So, I did my solo hours over in America and then had my pilot’s license forward dated to my 17th birthday. I read a couple of months ago that somebody may have broken that record, but I’m not quite sure how, unless they’ve changed the law.
I flew a lot both to the UK and France. Sometimes we’d fly from Guernsey to Cherbourg, have lunch, then fly back. I also did a short aerobatics course in a Pitts Special plane, doing hammerhead turns, loop the loops and inverted flat spins where you just fall out of the sky like a stone—it’s quite impressive.
Having studied for a degree in economic history at Liverpool University I decided to switch to law and spent two years at the law college in Guildford. After my Law Society finals, I moved to London, did my articles and stayed at the same firm. Clifford Chance is one of those big international law firms, a factory farm of lawyers. I did finance law and was there for around 15 years until I was lucky enough to take early retirement.
One day I walked past Oxfam on Marylebone High Street and noticed a sign outside asking for volunteers, so I went in and signed up. I could tell you that I have a highly developed social conscience and want to give back to the community, but what keeps me here is it’s just so much fun. I do two afternoons a week and get to work with smart, funny, interesting people from every walk of life. Everybody has a story to tell and we have a lot of fun, with plenty of friendly banter.
Getting to play shop for two days a week is like a childhood dream come true. I deal only with books, which is great because I could never pass a bookshop without going inside. We have a specialist who goes through our book donations to pick out any that are collectable, so anything valuable will usually have been taken out by the time I get to them. I divide my time between sorting the donations according to genre, down in the stockroom, and filling the shelves upstairs in the shop. Every few weeks we try to refresh the books on the shelves.
Sometimes I get to curate specific collections, which we put up when there’s room. In recent months I’ve been gathering books and memorabilia that could be termed ‘nostalgic’, including old Blue Peter annuals, Asterix and Tintin books, old comics and a great collection of model railway magazines from the 1970s.
At this shop customers seem to be particularly hungry for designer clothing, but within reason we’ll basically take anything that we can make money on. One thing I should say about donations is that Oxfam does the gift aid scheme, so if people can donate something that can be gift aided then obviously, we get more out of the donation.
At the moment, our focus is on Christmas and we have advent calendars, cards, decorations and Christmas books, and upcycled items such as shopping bags made out of saris, which make ideal presents. We also have the Oxfam Unwrapped scheme which is great: you can buy gift vouchers, worth as much or as little as you want, for a specific purpose. For example, buying bikes for children so they can get to school, or equipment or animals for farmers, that sort of thing. If you are looking for an unusual Christmas present, I think a pig or a goat really fits the bill.
One of the most unusual items donated to the shop was a rare, beautiful and quite large framed historical map of Peking. We knew it was valuable and that we might not be able to sell it in the shop and so we sold it at auction for £1,500. We also had a big sculpture of a brain that was knocking around for a while.
Last Christmas, a lady came in with a bag full of jumbled up bits of wood that she thought made up two children’s toys. That was all the information we had to go on. It turned into an episode of the Krypton Factor with three of us scratching our heads. There was me with my law degree, a colleague with a PhD in quantum mechanics and another chap with at least two masters degrees trying desperately to work out which bits of wood went where. Given the amount of brain power, we took entirely too long to establish that it was in fact a doll’s crib and high chair.
Many people think of Oxfam as a charity that only deals with disaster relief and emergency response. I think it can get quite depressing in that respect, because the world is continually lurching from one disaster to the next and we’re continually asking for money for a specific disaster or humanitarian crisis. That’s a very important part of what we do: bringing hope to people in dire need. But Oxfam is a really optimistic organisation, because at its core it’s an anti-poverty charity. If you look on the website, you get deluged with really upbeat stories of people who, with Oxfam funding, have managed to bring themselves out of whatever troubles they were in.
I came back to Marylebone 30 years ago because my father kept telling me it was an up and coming area. I suppose it has finally up and come. I sometimes think it’s a bit too chic for me these days and I’m expecting the locals to tell me that I don’t really fit in anymore. But although Marylebone has changed a lot over the years, some things have stayed the same. And I really like that. The same guy has cut my hair for 30 years and some of the businesses have been here for as long as I have.
I like to while away an afternoon at the Wallace Collection and also spend a lot of time in Paddington Street Gardens. Those are the places where you’ll find me the most. Or else I’ll be busy gardening. I am a keen gardener but have very limited space. My courtyard doesn’t get any sun, so I have to grow all my plants on my doorstep, which is south-facing. I also grow a few food crops, but they are only good for summertime, because you can’t really grow cabbages and potatoes on your doorstep.