My name is Angel Garden and I’m a filmmaker and comedian. Comedy has always permeated my work from Yam, my first feature film to the Beehave online political satire series in New Zealand and even down to some pieces my husband and I made when trying to warn people about the inherent dangers of the Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School in particular and NZ private schools in general (Wayne and Shane, Oops and the Safe to Tell teaser).
This is something that Thetis Mercurio, well known anonymous Steiner critic loved about my work. We met in person a few weeks back and she was funny, intelligent and generous. She was so positive about what we were doing, it was quite wonderful.
Thetis Mercurio* already knew of my situation with our Steiner school, how our kids - and ourselves - had been traumatised by those events, how we had found ourselves in a total legal vacuum, how we were fighting to get justice and how our case was currently on the desk of the Human Rights Tribunal.
During our meeting she also learned of my severe mobility impairment and the fact that I had come back to my home country to try and save my mother’s life who had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer - a decision which led me to live with my husband and three children in a small caravan on someone’s land, as there were no houses we could afford near my mum.
Thetis Mercurio* said she wanted very much to help us and recognised how important it was for our children to feel positive about schooling again. She mentioned the school her son went to after his negative experiences with Steiner and seriously considered I should take a look at it for our eldest daughter.
When I had an opportunity to travel back to her area with my husband, we arranged to do just that, staying at Thetis Mercurio* and met her husband and children. Knowing how much stress we were under, she suggested that her son to come to the house we had just moved to so he could tutor our children and perfect his foreign language skills in the process.
Having had an "interesting" experience with a teenager au-pair in the past when our youngest had been born extremely prematurely, we were reticent, but Thetis Mercurio* vouched for how reliable her son was, although we did stress how in the middle of nowhere this house was and he was fine with the idea. Between this original meeting and the day he arrived, events took a turn for the worse with my mum and I had to travel back to be with her. I contacted Thetis Mercurio* to tell her of the change in situation, stressing that things would be even harder at home now and was she absolutely sure her son was ok with it. She stressed that “he is here to help”.
During that time, an opportunity had arisen to write an article for the Local Schools Network forum. Thetis Mercurio* had been asked to write an article but knowing we were trying to get our case known to a wider public while it was before the Director of the Tribunal, she offered that I write it instead, as she firmly believed that what was happening in New Zealand was relevant to understanding what could happen closer to home. Plus there was small press coverage of a ground-breaking case against Norwich Steiner school, which looked in many ways very similar to what had happened to us. Writing this article was hard. I had to juggle family life, my mother and of course my impairment all at the same time, but I struggled on.
So Thetis Mercurio's* son arrived and I left the next day to look after my mum, leaving him with my husband and children. Steve, my husband, was extremely busy that week but from what I can tell from reports, her son was having a good time, although he was a little bored. He later told me that he had been well fed and looked after. I was just so grateful that Steve had some support, and I was looking forward to being able to spend some time with him as a result.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that Thetis Mercurio's* son had planned on staying with us for a month, barely a week had passed before he expressed his desire to leave. Teenagers eh? He wanted to go back the same day as I was coming back to save us a trip to the airport (which is a 3.5 hour round trip). Regretfully, Steve didn’t outright tell him no, to pick another day, as I wanted above all to avoid having all the kids in the car, especially meeting my four year old after being away for a week and having a long car journey in the heat, as I had just realised that, in spite of all efforts, my mother could not be saved. Instead Steve tried to convince him to stay a little longer, that things would be different and easier once another adult - ie, me - would be here. He agreed to “think about it” and Steve left it at that, expecting him to come back to him with his decision before taking any further action. If Steve had made it clear that that day was out of bounds because I didn’t want to endure a journey back with kids that hadn’t seen me for a week, maybe none of this would have happened. As it stands, Thetis Mercurio's* son didn’t discuss the matter further as he'd said he would, and got himself a ticket back that day.
This caused problems while I tried to figure out what to do. He couldn’t move his ticket forward, even by a day, because he’d also booked a train ticket, so I decided to leave a day early, making sure my mum had the care she needed, so I could spend 1.5 hours with my husband to discuss what we would do next about my mum and our situation in private, without having to deal with our children at the same time. As Thetis' Mercurio's son was leaving, this was now the only possible chance for me to express some of the feelings I'd built up while looking after mum, without the kids being around.
We discussed at length with Thetis Mercurio's son what had happened and both Steve and he agreed that they should have discussed matters more and not taken things for granted. Thetis Mercurio's* husband agreed on the phone to cover half of my rebooking expenses if Steve drove to the airport again the next day with his son. I was concerned about the mess the house was in and didn’t want to lose Steve for over 3 hours the next day and be forced to tidy the place up - remember, I’m disabled. So we offered Thetis’ son a choice: get up ridiculously early and take a train to the airport, a shorter hour and a half round trip for Steve to the station, or help Steve tidy up before you go and get driven to the airport. He chose the latter.
Everything seemed fine. Matters were cleared up, everyone appeared to be in good spirits. Tidying up occurred, Thetis Mercurio's* son was driven to the airport and he chatted to Steve about his home town and the school Thetis Mercurio* was convinced would be good for our eldest daughter. They parted at the airport on good terms, agreeing once again that they should communicate more in the future to avoid a similar cockup. He then promised to call when he got back home to let us know he arrived safely.
That was the last time we heard from any of them. Texts to the husband were never returned. Enquiries about what to do about the phone Thetis Mercurio's* son had ordered were ignored. Requests for help via email about the article Thetis had asked me to write went unanswered. Trying to call led to the line being cut and to voicemail thereafter.
We couldn’t understand what could have happened to deserve such a silent treatment. We were all the more shocked because Thetis Mercurio* had offered her place for my eldest daughter to live in for a week with either myself or Steve while she attended the school’s one week trial. What that offer still on? We had no idea, although since they refused to talk to us, we assumed that it was off.
As we mentioned earlier, my daughter had been badly hurt by a school to the point that she had become school phobic. This offer of an alternative school felt like a beacon of hope. Believe me, it must have been pretty amazing to make us even think of moving back to our home country. Thetis Mercurio's* son talked to our daughter about the school during his stay, he told her it was the main reason for his visit. She had even made a small book with the school’s name on it - a possibility of a new beginning. But now that had been taken away from her with no reason given. Just silence.
Considering the stress I was under with having to deal with my mum, I just couldn’t understand why we were being treated so badly by a family that were apparently so keen to help at first. Yes there had been a hiccup during our stay but it had been resolved - or so we thought. It was the blanking treatment that was so shocking, no hint had occurred during any of our communications that these were people who if you didn't do exactly what they wanted would just dump you, and yet, that's apparently what they'd done. Of course I'm only guessing because they didn't feel they even owed us an explanation! Very strange behaviour.
My growing distress was alleviated by a comment Steve made at dinner once: “No wonder Thetis Mercurio wants to remain anonymous”. This made me laugh so much and relieved a lot of the tension. It also made me remember something: when she handed me the writing assignment, she told me “make sure you say all Steiner critics are whistleblowers”. But our current situation made me wonder about the whole idea of anonymity and what people can do when they’re anonymous, as Thetis Mercurio* had just done. It just focused my mind on some of the problems with anonymity, because Thetis Mercurio wasn't even a real person, so it felt impossible to call her behaviour out.
So I wrote my article based on this premise, asking whether there is a difference between a critic and a whistleblower, and whether anonymity causes problems, because complaining about a school without naming it can end up actually protecting the school. I compared this with Jo Sawfoot’s case against the Norfolk Steiner School, so public and yet so under reported and suggested that journalists might be reluctant to write about a subject like Steiner where people remain anonymous since there hardly is any proof to rely on and having to report in the national press on avatars might be a disincentive.
I wasn't expecting everybody to agree with me, but I wasn't prepared for what the Steiner critics did next. Alicia Hamberg, a close friend of Thetis Mercurio*, attacked us in the LSN article's comments, claiming that we were “targeting” people, demanding evidence from them and making them “feel guilty” for not doing it, and that we were only interested in promoting our project. I think she may have taken offence to this sentence “Help the Steiner Movement go public today and submit your evidence”, the last one of the article which was 0.8% of the entire piece. A bit tongue in cheek, since they are about to get public funding, see?
Alicia Hamberg continued on her own blog but no matter how hard Steve or I tried to explain ourselves, the situation got worse and worse. Everything we said was twisted and turned against us to the point that us getting kicked out of the Steiner school was our own doing, and all our evidence was fake, even the messages of thanks for warning prospective parents about that school. Our work would even damage the Steiner critics movement for years to come. We were just mobbed on Alicia Hamberg's blog The Ethereal Kiosk and during all that time Thetis Mercurio* never came forward to explain why we’d actually written that article and how important it was for us to publicise the fact that the Human Rights was considering our case.
For someone that is so prominent online, not shy of tweeting about the colour of toilets in a Steiner school, Thetis Mercurio* didn’t post a single comment.
So we got very badly attacked, our experience, our work, our ethics, everything. Mobbed by the very people we thought would understand us and our situation. We tried to be polite, we tried to be funny, we even regret having said a couple of things, but who hasn't regretted saying something in the heat of the moment while feeling under attack? For some hard to guess reason, it became important for the Steiner critics to attack one of the handful of people who actually have evidence of wrongdoing at a Steiner school. I guess Alicia Hamberg said it best herself “But the huge danger of Waldorf education is bad education and covert indoctrination. […] it’s all in the ‘philosophy’. And that’s what I personally find interesting — far more interesting, and damning, than Mrs Sawfoot’s story.” - a story, I must remind you, of actual evidence that a school had lied to a government body about how they handled a situation with a child.
Another comment Alicia Hamberg aimed at us could so easily have been said about the Thetis Mercurios* : "don't trust these people who are pretending to help and then do the ‘do this or else’ routine we’re seeing". Thetis Mercurio* and her family did make such an effort to involve themselves in so many areas of our lives so quickly, initiating so many things at a time when we were very vulnerable, and assuring us they could handle it all. Their behaviour after their son left us beggars belief and I find it very hard to forgive them for the hope they planted in my daughter's mind only to take it away so abruptly.
Perhaps that's another problem caused by anonymity. By shrouding yourself in a fictitious avatar, you could forget that although your name isn't real, you and the damage you might cause, are. Thetis Mercurio* is obviously representing the well-known trickster side of Mercury at the moment, that silver-tongued charmer who talks his way into situations, but when they turn even a bit difficult, is never there to clear up the mess.
But there was at least one positive outcome to the original article we wrote and all the vicious attack it spawned: someone familiar with the Norfolk case was minded to look at our original evidence and said it was so similar that he sent us Jo Sawfoot's court case papers to publish on our site for all to see.
Although this episode added so much to all of our stress, there’s got to be some comedy in here somewhere and when I find it, it’ll make a cracking documentary!
* NOTE: since writing this article, the person behind the anonymous avatar Thetis Mercurio has revealed herself to be Melanie Byng.
* NOTE: since writing this article, the person behind the anonymous avatar Thetis Mercurio has revealed herself to be Melanie Byng.
