Bernadette was a volunteer for many years at ALM, in fact right back in the beginning. Alongside Tony Edwards, Pat Williamson, Margaret Wiechers, Shirley Johnson, Julia McLaughlin-Cook and others, under the guidance of Anita Bunting, kept the casework office running. There were thousands of refugees who have passed through that office and been looked after and guided by the people there.

Most of Bernadette’s work took place in the downstairs front room, where people from around the globe would present themselves, usually in halting English, with problems ranging from lost ID cards all the way to homelessness. The range of difficulties could have been overwhelming but Bernadette just got on with taking the details and getting to the bottom of peoples issues. Ever cheerful she would emerge for a bit of advice or a break and then plunge back in to the unknown. It takes a very special person to take on the difficulties the asylum system presents, but she did so, cheerfully and, if she was unsure, might hesitate for a second and then just get back to it. Her attitude was always, I’ll just do the best I can.

Some years before stopping volunteering, she moved from active casework, to maintaining the database records and along with Julia, kept all the paperwork up to date. When we moved to a new database in 2018 and away from our paper based system, that brought a natural end to what was at least 15 years of volunteering at the centre.

I miss her light and cheerful presence. Without Bernadette and others like her, Asylum Link would not be the place it is, driven by a different vision of the world, based on fairness and compassion, and she has left her mark on all the people she helped through the years as well as on those who remember her.

Ewan, Asylum Link Merseyside