Читать книгу Children Belong in Families - Mick Pease - Страница 10

You were just another authority figure telling him what to do.

When Eddie rounded on me I felt as if I were staring into the eyes of a cornered beast. His reaction took me completely by surprise with its sudden ferocity and venom.

“Who do you think you are? Do you think you are bigger than us, cleverer than us?” I could feel his breath on my face as he jabbed and prodded at my chest.

“Eddie . . . Eddie . . .”

“You want to watch out, that’s all. You want to watch your back, I could have you, I could break your arms!”

“Eddie, there’s no need to . . .”

“And those kids of yours, you watch out for those lads because if I catch them, I’ll break their arms and all!”

That was it. Nobody threatened my boys. A red light flashed in front of my eyes.

“Why you . . . !”

Eddie broke away, stormed out of the TV lounge and down the stairs. I followed him, enraged. I wanted my pound of flesh.

To think of all the time I had invested in this lad. I had drawn close to him, connected in a way that none of the other staff had been able to. One of the supervisors at the care home had noticed it.

“Mick, whatever it is you are doing with Eddie, just keep doing it. I don’t know what you’ve done, but you are the first member of staff he has ever opened up to.”

“I’ve just spent time with him, that’s all,’ I replied, rather pleased that my efforts had not gone unnoticed. “Drawn alongside him, kicked a football around, gone running.”

“Well, however you’ve done it, you are the first person ever to get through to him,” the supervisor said. “Keep it up. It’s good work.”

Now, here was Eddie scuttling down the stairs with me in pursuit. My blood was up. When he turned I let him have it, not physically, but verbally, all my anger, all my frustration. How I felt, how he had let me down. How disappointed I was, how hurt I felt. Me, me, me.

Eddie hauled his hurt and anger away into the night and as my pulse and breathing slowed, it suddenly hit me. What had I done? I was the first person Eddie had ever trusted and I had thrown it back in his face. I told him how angry I was, without any consideration of his feelings. I had belittled him in front of other people, made him feel worthless.

We were residential houseparents in a care home at Sutton Coldfield in the English Midlands. Princess Alice Orphanage was established in 1883 by National Children’s Home (NCH),19 an organization with Methodist roots. It was laid out on the “cottage homes” model, with houses grouped around a large green. It had an imposing clock tower, a chapel, and, originally, workshops to teach the children useful trades. At first, the children lived in single-sex “family groups” of up to thirty, each supervised by a “house-mother.”20 During the Second World War, the number of children swelled to over 300 as orphanages in the cities closed under the threat of German bombing. By the time we arrived in 1979, the numbers had dropped to around 120. Some additional children’s houses had been added in the 1950s, but by that time, trends favored smaller groups. Typically, there would be ten to twelve children in a house and the accommodation was now mixed sex. We had up to eighteen teenagers in the adolescent unit.

We were impressed. There was plenty of space, the green acted as a play area, and the way the cottages were organized made sense. As you looked around the green you could follow the progression from babies in one house to toddlers and preschool children in the next, then five- to seven-year-olds, then seven- to ten-year-olds, and on it went with accommodation for adolescents. It was all very neat, all very sequential. At that time, we saw nothing wrong with it.

Already the tide was beginning to turn against large residential care homes. Local authorities were looking at adoption and foster care as alternatives. The older and larger orphanages were expensive to maintain. They had funding problems. There had always been informal alternatives to residential care. People often took over the care of children of deceased or absent relatives. Funding was temporarily available in the form of “parish relief” for abandoned mothers or single parents. Yet for generations, poorer people lived under the shadow of the workhouse.21

The practice of fostering developed during Victorian times, where a child might live temporarily with another family until a more permanent arrangement could be found. By the end of the nineteenth century, the UK’s poor law authorities and voluntary agencies increasingly used fostering or “boarding out” as an alternative to orphanages or the dreaded workhouse system. The Victorians drew a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. The workhouses were not penal institutions but were often made as sparse and unpleasant as possible to deter “the indigent” or “the work-shy” from becoming a burden on the parish or the state. Generations of the working poor lived in fear of ending their lives in the workhouse. Conditions were equally grim for younger people in these institutions so it is hardly surprising that the first orphanages were greeted as welcome alternatives.

Adoption became increasingly common during and after the First World War and the first official legislation to regulate the process was passed in 1926. This process continues to the present day with successive legislation aiming to correct previous imbalances or to protect the rights of the child. There have been seismic changes in social and cultural attitudes, of course, particularly from the 1960s. Back then adopted children were largely the offspring of unmarried mothers who gave up their children rather than face the social stigma. As social attitudes shifted and as divorce and remarriage became more common, legal frameworks adapted to reflect the change. The number of adoptions in the UK peaked in 1968 and has declined steadily since, reflecting dramatic social change. A child adopted in the UK today is more likely to have been in local authority care because they are considered to be “at risk” of neglect or abuse.

For a variety of reasons, the days of the old-fashioned orphanage were numbered. Society had changed and the institutions had failed to keep pace. We were blissfully unaware of the changes looming for institutions like Princess Alice Drive, as it was then known. We could see that money was tight. We could see that funding and sponsorship would decrease. We could not foresee that the home would close in the early 1980s. As far as we were concerned it was a steady job and one we were likely to enjoy. Brenda did much of the cooking and the caring, we got on well with the domestic staff, a truly great bunch of people. We kept records, arranged visits, and protected the children’s welfare. We chased after them when they ran away. There was space for our two boys to run around and we had accommodation. We thought we had it made. We had a regular wage, a roof over our heads, and were perhaps, at last, fulfilling our mission to help others.

As it turned out, our time at Princess Alice Drive proved to be among the hardest of my life. It was the closest I ever came, according to both Brenda and John Ellerington, to a nervous breakdown. The confrontation with Eddie nearly pushed me over the edge.

We entered residential childcare by a roundabout route—Bible college.

“Leaving t’pit? What are you doing that for? Where’re you going?” asked the men at the coalface at Kellingley Colliery.

“Bible college. The Birmingham Bible Institute.”

“Bible college? Hey up Mick the Vic’, we knew you were religious, but we didn’t know you wanted to be a proper vicar!”

Mick the Vic’ was my nickname at the coalface and in the pit-head baths on account of my faith.

“I don’t want to become a vicar.”

“What then? A missionary?”

“I’m not sure I want to do that either.”

“Then what are you going to Bible college for?”

If I was honest, I had no idea.

All I did know was that I had a sense that I wanted to make a difference, to do something with my life that involved more than working, earning money, and going on vacation. It started at one of the Bible conventions we attended at Filey on the Yorkshire coast. I first met Brenda there and we continued to attend during our courtship and early years of marriage. Each year, from 1955, some 8,000 people or so would gather at Butlins vacation camp in the second week of September for what was then a unique blend of fun, fellowship, and Bible teaching.22

Ours was a vacation romance. Filey Week, the late 1960s, and I was bowled over by a girl from the southwest three and a half years my senior. She was pretty, she was bubbly, she was friendly. There were only two problems. She was older than me, a big deal for teenagers in those days, and she lived hundreds of miles away.

Brenda returned to Devon after the vacation and left no contact details. There were no cell phones, internet, or social media back then and many people didn’t even have a landline. From Yorkshire, I went through directory inquiries looking for families with Brenda’s surname, Down. It turned out to be a common Devon surname. I worked through the list, calling from a public pay phone in the street. Eventually, with a huge sigh of relief, I got a positive response.

“Brenda Down? Yes, we know her, she’s Tom Down’s daughter and he’s one of twelve siblings. That’s why there are so many Downs around! Why are you looking for her?”

It took Brenda fifteen hours on a private hire bus to get back to her parents’ farm from Yorkshire. She was greeted by her mother’s abrupt inquiry: “There’s been some fella here trying to contact you. What’s all that about?”

We started dating. Brenda made the long journey north to visit me. I traveled to Devon for long weekends when my shift patterns allowed, a round trip of 700 miles. That’s a long distance in UK terms. None of Brenda’s friends ever moved far from their farms or villages. It was a big deal for a girl from a remote dairy farm to marry a miner from the north of England. There were strong cultural differences and very different dialects and accents. I spoke with a very “broad Yorkshire” dialect back then. My parents took to Brenda immediately, very pleasantly surprised that this neat, sensible, and levelheaded farmer’s daughter had taken a shine to their son. Ever deferential, my mother took her aside. “We’re pleased you’re seeing our Mick, but you’re too good for him, you know.”

We married in 1971. We rented a very small terraced house in a run-down area. Brenda found our routine very different from anything she had known in the farming community and even more so when the children were born. I often worked nights. I worked hard and I worked long hours and gradually we were able to afford our own property on a new housing development. Brenda has always been a homemaker, neat and efficient. She was in her element. She had grown up on a farm amid the muck and dung, with animal feed bags for doormats, her father preoccupied with his dairy herd. Then she moved to a poorly lit terraced street with her new husband working long shifts down the mine. At last, now she had a home of her own and space and time to fix it how she wanted. Mark was born in 1973, Kevin in 1974. We had a regular wage and a decent home.

Then everything changed. I left my job, sold our house, and we went to Bible college.

The nagging itch was there for some time. Brenda felt it too. At the Filey Weeks, there would often be an appeal from the platform speakers for people to dedicate themselves to the mission field. Missionaries would visit our churches and echo that call. That was the atmosphere we imbibed. I sent off for prospectuses and brochures from various colleges, only to shove them in a drawer and forget about them. The following year the nagging sense returned with a vengeance. What’s more, Brenda agreed. She needed no persuasion. We both felt it was the right thing to do.

I opened the drawer, opened the brochures, and sent off letters of application.

I wrote first to Elim Bible College, the seminary for my own denomination. They turned me down. Of course, they dressed it up in spiritual sounding language. “We do not believe it is the Lord’s will for you at this time.”

Of course, I knew the real reason. I was uneducated. I had no qualifications. All I knew was how to play sport and dig coal, to repair heavy mechanical equipment down the mine.

I was the first in my family to get a coveted grammar school place. My parents were so pleased they bought me a bicycle to recognize my achievement. Grammar schools were intended for those expected to go on to university or into “the professions.” To get there you had to pass the eleven-plus examination. Otherwise you would go to a secondary modern school or a technical college.

I hated school. I was always the boy who left the school grounds without permission to retrieve the ball when it was kicked or knocked over the wall. I’d then be sent to the headmaster to get caned on the bottom, hands, and knuckles. Then, the year that we were due to sit the eleven-plus examination, the system suddenly changed. It was decided to conduct an experiment. Rather than sitting the examination, pupils would be assessed by the accumulated average of their grades across the year. Somehow, I had scraped through! I was off to Castleford Grammar. I had arrived and I had a bike to prove it.

In the event, I struggled at grammar school. I had no interest in Latin or the other subjects on the traditional curriculum. It’s a shame I didn’t pay more attention to languages though, given my later travels. After a French test where I scored seven or eight marks out of a hundred, the teacher took me aside.

“I gave you five of those because you’d turned up and put your name on the paper.”

I was good at spelling and English, brilliant at sport, but that was about it. One year my science teacher wrote in my school report, “He is lazy.”

“Well, that’s it then,” my mother said on reading it. “It can’t get any worse than that!”

The following year, with the same tutor, the report read, “He is bone idle.”

I had done it! I had exceeded even the damning report of the previous year. I had graduated from being “lazy” to “bone idle” and was very proud of myself.

Eventually, the school conceded defeat. It was possible to leave at fifteen in those days and they told me that I was wasting my own time as well as everyone else’s. I would be better applying to technical college. There I could learn a trade and prepare for work in the foundries or mines. So I applied to Whitwood Technical College, only to be refused entry. My cousin Catherine worked in the office there and saw the reference the school supplied. She told my mother in embarrassment that it was the worst she had ever known them receive.

We contested the decision. The College relented and let me in. For the first time, I began to do well and before long I was an apprentice mechanic at Kellingley Colliery.

I enjoyed working down the mine. I liked the banter, the strong bond and camaraderie between men who worked in hard, physical conditions. I enjoyed the challenge of making equipment work in the dank, dark conditions far underground. Kellingley was known for the width of its coal seams, at around six feet among the widest in Britain. Neighboring pits had seams just eighteen inches to two feet wide. To work them, miners lay on their sides to pick at the coalface. Kellingley was fully mechanized, but conditions were still challenging. The floors of the seams were so soft that the metal props sank into them. We often worked in cramped spaces. The place was tough and the talk was ripe. I was no prude, but for a young man with evangelical convictions, the language and stories could get a bit much. Men teased others during late shifts that colleagues from earlier shifts were even now around at their houses visiting their wives. If you were different in any way you became a target. You might be deemed too fat or too thin, too short or too tall, or you had spots, ginger hair, very curly or straight hair, wore glasses—whatever it was, your colleagues homed in on it. It was incessant. It could be harmless and funny at times. Often it was merciless. You had to be resilient and confident in yourself. You had to stand your ground. Many couldn’t face the relentless baiting and found other work.

This was the work and world I knew, so to leave all that and apply to Bible college was to enter a completely new dimension. Undeterred by Elim’s rejection, I persisted. The more applications I made, the more rejections I received. I began to lose hope. Perhaps I had got it wrong. Then, one day, success—an acceptance letter arrived. We were going to the Birmingham Bible Institute.23 Perhaps our calling was reaching fulfillment.

Birmingham Bible Institute valued fire and fervency. We certainly had plenty of that. I’d burned Mrs. Gardner’s curtains and worked in the intense heat of the coalface. The Institute was founded by a colorful Presbyterian minister called Henry Brash Bonsall. He preached an old-fashioned hot gospel. One tutor paraded around in a sandwich board calling upon people to repent. Brenda was required to enroll alongside me and took her two-year course over three years due to family commitments. For all the fervor there was certainly some academic rigor. We had to learn some New Testament Greek and church history, the kinds of subjects I had balked at during my school days. Most importantly for what was to come, it taught me how to study. Nobody had shown me how to approach a textbook, how to make notes in lectures, how to research and present my arguments, so I asked Pamela’s husband, Brian, to help me prepare for study.

We loved the community life at the college, the close fellowship with other families. We made long-lasting friendships. The discipline of study stood us in good stead too for what we were to do later, but even as stalwart Pentecostals, we found the fieriness and fervency hard to take. Not only was it presented in a style more fitting for the 1930s or ‘50s, but everything seemed bound by petty rules and regulations.

“Why didn’t we see you at the early morning prayer meeting, brother?”

“Because I’ve got young boys and they were up sick in the night.”

“The meetings must come first, brother.”

“What, with young children running a temperature? You have to be kidding!”

We lived at the top of a tall Victorian tenement block, sharing a confined space close to another family studying at the Institute. Our room was a combined kitchen, dining room, lounge, and bedroom. It was so cold in winter that the glass door on our wall cabinet iced over.

Our two boys slept in a small separate bedroom and had to run all the way downstairs to play outside. Sometimes the other family would leave their belongings on the landing and our lads would play with them or throw them down the stairs. Like me, Mark and Kevin loved the outdoors and loved playing sport, but whenever I kicked a ball around with them on the grass or we tried to play cricket, someone told us to stop.

“No ball games. You know the rules.”

“I’ve got two young lads here. What am I supposed to play with them?”

“Frisbee.”

“Frisbee? How come it’s alright to throw a frisbee around on the grass but not kick a ball about?”

“Those are the rules.”

So, here I was again, up against petty rules and regulations. We were adults and yet we felt treated like kids. When our third and final year came we were still no wiser as to what we were going to do at the end of the course. We became close friends with Richard and Paula, a couple at the Institute, who suggested we apply for a position as residential care helpers at Princess Alice Drive.

Paula said to me suddenly, out of the blue, “You’d make a good social worker.”

“What do social workers do?” I asked. By this time, I was twenty-eight years old.

Richard and Paula’s background lay in probation and social work and they felt we were ideally cut out for work of this kind. Again, it was an example of someone coming along at the right time and providing a prompting and direction when we most needed it. Without it, we may not have gone into the children’s home and from there onto my social work training and the work we do now.

We learned a lot at Birmingham Bible Institute. We learned how to live in close proximity to other people and how to study. I passed my O level English at the Institute, the first academic qualification I ever gained.24 We were also exposed to other cultures and made friends from around the world, some of whom we still see. During a road trip to Greece immediately after the course, we saw poverty at a much deeper level than we had seen in the UK. Passing through the former Yugoslavia we saw people living in crumbling houses and primitive conditions, working their meager farms by hand. It was still the Communist era and we experienced the bleakness and drabness I would not see again until my trips to Romania after the fall of Ceaușescu.

After the rigidity of the Bible Institute, the broad lawns and cottage-style accommodation at Princess Alice Drive seemed heaven sent. The home was in the leafy suburbs of Birmingham, near Solihull, where the James Bond actor Roger Moore once had a house. There was plenty of space, a great atmosphere, and wonderful people to work with. We were on our feet at last.

We had much more to learn. Residential social care proved to be our toughest test yet. The children came from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds. Many had suffered abuse and neglect. The teenagers were the hardest of all—unruly, rebellious, and prone to breakouts, vandalism, and sometimes violence. Eddie was one of the hardest to reach. He was slightly built and unkempt, rarely spoke and hardly ever made eye contact. He seemed to slouch and shuffle around, dragging his own pain. We shared a common interest in soccer. He was a big fan of West Bromwich Albion, nicknamed “The Baggies,” one of the leading Midlands teams. Whenever I mentioned them his eyes lit up, he lifted his gaze and become animated. We discussed individual players, league results, goals. He was a lad transformed. I often jogged around the grounds and nearby streets. One day Eddie asked to come with me. I agreed. We went out jogging together regularly after that, not talking about anything in particular, simply enjoying the fresh air and exercise. People noticed a difference. Eddie was coming out of his shell.

One day I returned to Princess Alice Drive from visiting a teenager in hospital to find Brenda concerned and agitated. There had been an incident in the TV room. The teenagers were playing loud music. They refused to turn it down, became boisterous and aggressive. Things got out of hand. They had set fire to the litter bins and trashed the room. I was told Eddie was the ringleader.

“Eddie?” I was annoyed and aghast. I hadn’t expected this kind of behavior from him. Not now I had got through to him, befriended him, won him around.

I set off to give him a piece of my mind.

In front of a number of his friends, I said, “Eddie, what’s all this about? You should know better.”

It was then he turned on me. It was then that I made my biggest mistake.

“You realize what just happened, don’t you?” the supervisor said as we met in his office some days later. “Eddie trusted and opened up to you. He shared the angry feelings he had about life and his family and you threw it back in his face. You belittled him in front of the others. That’s why he erupted. He thought you understood him, that he could trust you as a friend. Now you were just another authority figure telling him what to do.”

I put my head in my hands. The supervisor was right. It wasn’t that Eddie should be allowed to get away with setting fire to the bins and stirring up the other kids. My mistake was in the way I had challenged him, how I had abused his trust. If there was one thing I was to learn from my time in residential care, my subsequent social work studies, and work in child protection, it is the importance of significant relationships. Strong, significant relationships provide an anchor for children in biological families. They provide an anchor for children in substitute families too or any other context we might think of. It applies the world over. Strong relationships give us the security we need. Without people we can trust to protect, guide, and provide for us, the world becomes a scary place. Even as adults we need to feel safe. Relationships provide this sense of security. Through relationships, we learn to handle the adversities, difficulties, and complexities of life. As children, we do that with parents or primary care providers. If they do not provide this support consistently, we struggle to cope and provide for ourselves. What starts as an innate need for food, warmth, and protection as a child continues into adulthood. We require affection, security, guidance, the provision of physical needs. I have never forgotten that incident with Eddie. I tell it in training and briefing sessions to this day. It was one of the biggest life lessons I ever learned.

19. National Children’s Home is now called Action for Children. It now looks for family-based alternatives to residential care. See https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/.

20. Higginbotham, “Princess Alice,” lines 15–16.

21. The workhouse developed as a form of poor relief from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward. After the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act the system became a deterrent against would-be paupers and claimants. Conditions were made as grim and Spartan as possible. See Higginbotham, “Introduction,” lines 30–50.

22. Filey Week, see New Horizon, “History,” lines 5–10.

23. Now Birmingham Christian College, see http://bccoll.uk/about-us/.

24. The General Certificate of Education (GCE) Ordinary Level was the standard qualification before leaving secondary school in the UK for many years and generally considered equivalent to the US High School Diploma.