Читать книгу Children Belong in Families - Mick Pease - Страница 9

Then if she dies, at least she’ll die at home.

Matches, fire, smoke. By the time Mrs. Gardner reached her kitchen, the whole thing was alight. They knew something was wrong when I dashed into the lounge and dived under the table where the television had pride of place. The table was covered by a cloth so I cowered beneath it.

“Hey up,”8 they must have thought. “What’s he done now?”

Only set fire to the kitchen, that’s what. Mam had taken me around to Billy Gardner’s house. I must have been about six or seven. While she was talking to his mother, I went into the kitchen with one or other of his brothers and sisters. There I found something I loved to play with, a box of matches. What’s more, something to ignite, dishcloths hanging up to dry on a rack that stretched across the kitchen. Within seconds the room was full of choking smoke.

Mrs. Gardner soon put the fire out, but it could have been a lot worse. As a boy, I was forever getting into scrapes. I loved playing outside, soccer, cricket, throwing stones—particularly throwing stones. My father was a bricklayer. He always kept a stock of window panes handy to replace those I had broken or been suspected of breaking. “Who’s broken that window? It must have been that Mick Pease . . .” Rather than pay for the damage, my father kept panes he had picked up from work. I hadn’t always broken them, but I got the blame.

My mother caught me once throwing stones against the wall of our house.

“What are you doing?”

“Throwing stones up again’ a-wall . . .”

“But there’s a window up there, you’re going to hit it.”

“No, I won’t, I’m just trying to see how close I can get without hitting it.”

My mother was furious, “You dare do that again!”

“Alright, I will,” so I threw another.

“Right, you get yourself in here!”

“Why? I only did what you said, ‘Dare do that again . . .’”

Of course, I knew very well what she meant. I chose to interpret it differently. In training and advocacy, I use this incident to reinforce a serious point. When we deal with issues affecting children’s lives we must choose our words carefully and be absolutely clear in what we say and how we say it.

I was an energetic lad. I was always playing in the street, in neighbors’ houses, and I liked to talk. Boy, could I talk! Nobody would tell me anything in case I spread it around. We were the last family in our street to get a TV set. I was cock-a-hoop to find out we were getting one at last only to learn that the whole neighborhood knew about it already.

I asked Mam and Dad, “How come everyone else knew we were getting a telly and I didn’t?”

“If we’d told you, it would be all around t’town by now.”

“But you didn’t tell me and it’s still all around t’town!”9

Many of my childhood experiences informed my later work. I grew up on a council estate in the north of England, what would be termed a public housing project in the United States. The houses were all built between the wars. They represented an improvement on the Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses and back-to-backs where most industrial workers lived.

It was a rough, tough place but with a strong sense of community. People looked out for each other, cared for one another. Whenever money was tight, as it often was, they would borrow a cup of rice or sugar, or a few shillings from neighbors and friends to buy food until the next payday. It was a close-knit, white working-class, blue-collar community. There was high unemployment. Those in work earned low wages through manual labor. There were problems with drink and domestic violence. Gangs of lads would intimidate youth from other areas who dared to come onto our estate. It was largely low-level violence, pushing someone off their bike, a quick scuffle with fists. Sometimes it got more serious, as my teenage sister was to find out.

Despite all this, it was a great place to grow up in many ways. In those days, even in cold, wet northern England, people would spend more time outdoors, chatting to their neighbors. As I go around the world, I encounter both rural and large urban communities which are still like that, very much like British society in the 1950s. People chat with one another across a yard or over a garden fence just as we did in my mining community back then. There are kinship structures and community links that play a very positive role in the work we now do with vulnerable and abandoned children.

Although we had a strong sense of community, it was also a very deferential society. People knew their place. It was drummed into us in school, in the factories, mills, and mines. We had low expectations and adhered to unwritten rules and codes. Certain things went unmentioned or were whispered behind closed doors. A teenage girl might disappear for a while only to turn up several months later. They had been “staying with an aunt.” They had been ill, had problems of some kind, had to go away. We were never told why. Only later did we realize that they were pregnant. They were sent away to avoid shame on the family. British society has become far more liberal since then, of course, but we encounter these attitudes today too in our work around the world. People are marginalized or outcast because they are thought to have brought shame or dishonor on their families and communities. People are isolated because they are different or because they don’t conform.

Where I grew up, outsiders were rare. Someone from a neighboring town or village would attract attention. It was even more uncommon to see someone of a different race or ethnicity. I can remember the first time I saw a black person. A woman near us was rumored to be dating a black man. I must have been about seven or eight years old and remember waiting near her house with my friends. We had to see for ourselves. Now I know what it is like to go into regions where I might be the first white person people have seen. They want to hold my hand and touch my skin to see if it is different to theirs. Every stranger can become a neighbor. What is familiar to us is unfamiliar to someone else. Our work is all about context, contact, communication, community.

Knottingley was a grim industrial town on the River Aire in Yorkshire, England’s largest county. The southern and western parts of Yorkshire were industrial powerhouses—coal, steel, textiles. To enter the north of the county was to enter another world, to experience the stunningly scenic Yorkshire Dales and Moors. Once a thriving inland port, Knottingley was still an important center for boat-building and glass and chemical works. It was close to what became the UK’s last working deep coal mine, Kellingley Colliery, where I had my first job.10 The three cooling towers at nearby Ferrybridge power station were the tallest in Europe and could be seen all over the county. This was the industrial north at its grimiest and most Dickensian—smoke, soot, grit. Small wonder the health authorities wanted to take my sister out of this environment when they found she had chronic asthma. Nothing could have prepared her, or my parents, for the impact this would have on our family.

George Pease met and married my mother, Ada Cassidy, during the Second World War. He was serving as a soldier and she worked in the NAAFI,11 the organization that provided tea, toast, and cheer to British forces. George was one of two sons born to William and Alice Pease. William’s mother died in childbirth and his father didn’t have the necessary support both to work and care for a child. So my grandfather was sent some distance away to be bought up by his Aunt and Uncle Tasker. William never knew his father, nor whether he had other siblings, but retained the Pease family name. Alice’s mother also died young. Her father remarried and because her stepmother didn’t like Alice she sent her away to work as a domestic servant to another family.

My parents were Pentecostals and very devout. The Pentecostal movement started almost simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1900s. It featured fervent and lively worship, spiritual gifts, and a strong emphasis on prayer for healing. In the UK it grew and spread in working-class areas like ours.

To grow up Pentecostal was to inhabit a highly charged spiritual atmosphere and a life that largely revolved around church. My father was church secretary and Sunday school superintendent. When he wasn’t working he was doing something at the chapel. My mother, although no less fervent, used to complain at times that church always came first. In bad weather, he was unable to work and no work meant no pay. Even so, he would diligently set money aside for The Bible Society, for The Leprosy Mission, for church funds and missionary work around the world.

“We can’t afford to keep ourselves,” my mother would say. “Let’s look to our own family first. The church can have its share later.”

Yet he would carry on regardless, funding missions with his hard-earned “brass.”12

I always knew we had little money and must have made things difficult for my parents with my relentless moans and requests for this and that. I couldn’t understand why my father insisted on helping all these other people!

If the community I grew up in was close-knit and insular, the church culture reflected that too. Yet there was also an outward-looking aspect, a concern for others that went beyond our small, grimy town and into the world beyond. My father knew he would have little opportunity to travel, but he did what he could in the only way he knew. He gave money we could often ill afford to causes he believed in. He was a gentle, faithful, and diligent man. We were all thrilled when he later received the British Empire Medal for “services to industry.”13 My father eventually became clerk of works for our local government authority. It was his job to independently assess the quality of structural, mechanical, and engineering works. Nominations are made without the recipient knowing in advance. It was testimony to my father’s hard work and attention to detail that architects and civic and community leaders all combined to put his name forward.

Mam was a very different character to Dad. She was sociable, friendly, and loved to talk about family, friends, and church. She took an interest in people. She never studied after leaving school and helped in the family bakery where she learned how to bake. I always remember listening to her sing as she baked and cooked. She often baked for people who were sick or going through difficult times. Mam had a strong sense of duty to her parents and siblings. Three of her brothers saw action in North Africa during the Second World War. Her father was Irish and lost both legs in a mining accident. Little wonder the last place she wanted me to work was down the mines!

Churchgoing was more common in the UK in those days, even in poor working-class areas like ours. There were Anglicans and Methodists, the Salvation Army and Congregationalists. Even non-churchgoers sent their children to Sunday school, largely to give themselves a break. There were a lot of good folk involved with the churches and chapels even though the surrounding culture did not conform to their ideals. It took me a long time to realize that some of my “uncles” and “aunts” were not blood relatives at all. Rather, they were people my parents knew through church or were other neighbors and friends. We needed their support. I was eighteen months old when my sister Pamela was sent away to hospital on the coast.

When they got married my parents were told that they would not be able to have children. It was medically impossible. So they did what Pentecostals do. They devoted themselves to prayer. They called for the prayers of the elders of the church and of the congregation. During one prayer meeting, a minister prophesized that their prayers would be answered. They would most certainly bear children. Imagine their delight when Pamela was born in 1947. Imagine their anguish when they learned she had chronic asthma and was not expected to live.

I grew up without my sister at home. I was only aware I had one because of the photograph on the parlor wall. It showed a bonny toddler on the street outside our house, a pint of milk behind her on our doorstep.14

“Mam, Dad, who’s that girl in the picture?”

“Your sister.”

“Where is she? Why isn’t she here?”

“She’s away. She’s ill.”

Mam and Dad invariably changed the subject. Perhaps they wanted to spare me the pain they were going through. Around once a month, on a Saturday, my father would set off to visit her in the children’s hospital near Liverpool. Sometimes my mother would go too. They could not always afford the fare for the two of them. I would be left with the Elleringtons, friends of my parents from church. I struck up a lifelong friendship with their son, John, who later became one of my charity’s first trustees. We often got into scrapes and John sometimes hid in the outhouse with his ferret to avoid Sunday school.15 We were both rebels even then. Yes, we both continued with church and owned our parents’ faith for ourselves, but we were not afraid to question or challenge anything we felt was ill thought through, unnecessary, or unhelpful.

It was the early 1950s and Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was still in its infancy. Founded in 1948, the NHS guaranteed treatment “free at the point of delivery” to everyone, irrespective of income, social level, or circumstances. It made, and still makes, an immense difference to people’s lives, particularly those who are disadvantaged or on low incomes. Back then, however, officialdom and deference were still big factors in British society. What the man with the suit and tie or the nurse in the uniform said went unchallenged, even when the consequences were clearly less than ideal. The authorities said that Pamela had to be taken away to save her life and away she went. She was away from home for three Christmases, effectively four whole years.16

Officials told my parents that Pam would die unless she left our dirty, smoggy town. My parents had little choice. I’m told they could have faced criminal charges at that time if they didn’t comply. We were poor. Where could we go? We didn’t know anywhere else and our support networks were all very local. There seemed nothing for it but for my sister to go to that children’s hospital on the coast to benefit from the bracing sea breeze.17

Astonishing as it may sound to us today, as late as the 1950s some children’s respiratory hospitals still operated a drastic system recommended and described in 1919. In order to provide ventilation, children slept in dormitories which were deliberately kept draughty. Pamela’s dormitory had brick walls no more than a yard high. The rest of the space up to the roof consisted of wire netting. The floor was concrete and the children slept on iron beds. The idea was to strengthen their lungs and stiffen their resistance to cold and hardship. In the winter, as snow and sleet blew through the wire mesh, the children would pull the beds into the center of the room and huddle away from the wind and ice. Pamela recalls how they were taken on walks along the seafront in order to benefit from the sea breeze and then put to bed for two hours during the day to recover.

Playtimes were restricted to half an hour a day, parental visits to an hour at most. Hugging or kissing was discouraged. To reach the hospital my parents caught a bus, two trains and another bus, only to sit at a table with Pam for an hour. When my father had to work on Saturdays our mother would visit accompanied by an aunt as she lacked the confidence to travel by train alone.

Children were not allowed to cry. If they cried or complained, they could be locked in a room with barred windows. Pamela remembers staring out through the bars, crying for our father to come and take her home. There were no beatings or threats of physical violence, but children were “sent to Coventry” for any misdemeanor.18 This punishment involved complete isolation, effectively a form of solitary confinement. For a specified period, the child would be treated as though they did not exist. Any child who tried to contact them would suffer the same penalty themselves. Pamela recalls several occasions where she was shut away in a cupboard or small room, without food or drink, and not allowed to go to the bathroom. Once, she was so thirsty she drank her own urine.

One day Pamela escaped. She passed through the dormitory, into the corridor and out through the front door unobserved. The train station was only a few hundred yards away. She reasoned in her young mind that if only she could get on a train it would take her home. She boarded the first train to arrive and hid in the baggage compartment. By then, her absence was noticed. The nurses raised the alarm. Police delayed the train and searched each carriage. They found Pamela hiding among the luggage. Why had she run away? She did her best to explain. The hours locked in silent rooms, the punishments, the restrictions, the abuse. No one listened. She was taken back to the hospital and found herself in a locked room once more. She lost all track of time. It was light when she entered the barred room, then dark and quiet, and light once more when they let her out.

There were twelve girls in Pam’s dormitory. She was the only one to survive. Time after time the staff carried a small body to the morgue. Occasionally, some of the other girls managed to sneak in and hide underneath the bed where the body of a friend lay. So intense was their need for attachment and love. A close bond developed between the girls. While they were together, they were safe.

Pamela bonded particularly closely with a girl called Heather. They became best friends. One snowy night, as the girls drew the beds into the center of the dormitory, Pamela climbed into Heather’s bed to keep her friend warm. When she woke up in the morning, Heather’s body was as cold as ice. She had died during the night. Pamela was eight years old and her best friend died in bed beside her.

My parents knew none of this. Pamela wrote home using a standard form of words, a template provided by the hospital staff. She found a whole sheaf of these letters in a drawer after our mother died. Each one was almost the same as the others and almost exactly the same as those the other children wrote. Often the main text was written up on a chalkboard for the children to copy down. My sister says that anyone seeing her writing then, at the age of seven and eight, would assume it was written by a younger child. The inmates were only taught for two hours a day and at a very basic level, how to write their names, how to copy letters. Was it assumed that there was little point in educating them any further? They were not expected to survive.

My sister does have fond memories of some of the staff, particularly the matron who treated her kindly when news came that our Great Aunt Marie and then our Granny Pease had died. I was born at our Great Aunt Marie’s house. Our parents could not afford to rent somewhere of their own at that time. So my grandfather’s sister and her family took them in. Pamela remembers her hearty kindly laugh. It remains with her to this day and was one of the memories she clung to at the hospital—a warm, resonant laugh, the sound of family, the sound of home.

My mother’s recollections of the matron were rather different. After four years without Pamela, my parents decided that enough was enough. She had to come home. The matron traveled to Yorkshire by train to persuade my mother that Pamela should remain in hospital.

“You do know that if she comes home it will be the death of her,” the matron said. “It’ll all be your fault.”

“Then if she dies, at least she’ll die at home,” my mother retorted.

Whether it was at our mother’s insistence or, as Pamela believes, because the hospital needed the space, my sister came home. If the pain of separation had been intense, that of reunion was almost equally strong. Pamela was a very sick child. Worse, she came home cowed and institutionalized.

It was many years before any of us heard the full story of what had happened, but we felt the effects of it. Pamela was distant, reticent, subdued. She felt unable to ask for anything, shocked whenever she heard me asking for treats. She would rather steal than ask. She would sneak into the pantry and take cookies or candy. This was just one of the effects of life at the hospital. No one dared asked for anything.

Pamela would chuckle to herself when my mother warned me not to ask for things whenever we went to anyone’s house. We had to wait until it was offered. We should never ask.

“But how will they know what I want if I don’t ask?”

Pamela smiled at my childish logic but was inwardly terrified at the prospect of ever asking for anything or telling anyone how she felt.

Talking to Pamela years later I recognize all too well the classic symptoms of institutionalization. It is something I have seen time and time again around the world. I see children who have lost the ability to laugh or cry, who keep silent for fear of the consequences. I see children who have lost all spark and vivacity, children who turn in on themselves and find it hard to engage with others, children who are no longer children. They spend their time people watching just as Pamela tells me she did. They quietly observe what’s going on to assess how best to survive.

For some years afterward, Pamela was convinced that if she did anything wrong the authorities would come and take her away. A doctor summoned her into his office the day she was discharged from hospital. Her parents were coming to fetch her, he told her. They were taking her home.

“But let me tell you this, Pamela Pease, if you tell anyone what has happened here, we know where to find you. We can come and take you back at any time.”

She was also convinced that I “wanted her gone,” that I resented her and wanted her to go back.

Pamela had good reason to think so. I did resent her. This sister I had only known from a photograph and from parental absences was now back and taking center stage. I was only around five or six years old when she came home and was used to being the focus of attention. She was a sickly child and I thought my parents handled her with kid gloves. She was always ill and lost a lot of time at school. I feigned illness to get attention or threw myself down the stairs in an attempt to avoid lessons. Whenever my sister became upset she would pant in short, choking gasps, a kind of asthmatic attack.

“Look what you’ve done! You’ve upset her now. You’ve brought on one of her turns!”

“She’s putting it on. Can’t you see? She’s just shamming to get me into trouble!”

We were constantly fighting, constantly rowing. I was jealous of Pamela and she was jealous of me. I could play out longer in the summer—heat and hay fever meant that she stayed indoors for most of the summer months. I would also argue with my mother and answer her back. This would lead to blazing rows that subsided as quickly as they had started. Then we carried on as if nothing had happened. This also shocked Pamela. Years of enforced absence had taken its toll. She had only known the briefest contact with my parents, mostly one or other of them, rarely both together. Always in public, under scrutiny, across a table in a cold institution and behind closed doors.

I would come across almost identical situations as a social worker. Introducing a child to a foster family requires careful management. So does the process of reuniting a child with its biological family after a period of absence. What I experienced as a child when Pamela came home is exactly how many siblings react when an absent brother or sister returns. Family life changes during that period; sometimes other children are born or one parent leaves or dies and another appears. It’s as if the child reenters their family stuck in time, the moment they left, and expects it to be the same. We had no help from social services or anyone else. We struggled through and learned to adjust. When I was nine we moved to Grandad Pease’s house after he was killed riding his motorcycle home from church. The backdraft from a passing truck caused him to lose his balance. He struck his head on the drainpipe of one of the closely packed row houses. Grandad’s house was larger than ours, we had more space, but times were still tough.

Pamela’s childhood and teenage years were traumatic. Illness, separation and then, aged fourteen, she was beaten up by one of the gangs that roamed our estate. She crawled home in agony and subsequently had to have a kidney removed. She nearly died. A lad from our church visited her, left a note. They became friends. He helped her learn to read and write properly, eventually married her and supported her through her long years of recovery. The years of separation left their mark.

People ask whether my sister’s experiences influenced what was to become my life’s work. Was I on some kind of moral crusade? It did not feel like that at the time. Besides, I was later to work in institutional childcare without for a moment doubting its suitability or effectiveness. It is only in hindsight that I fully appreciate what it must have meant for Pamela. Perhaps that’s why I feel so passionate about these issues, what it means for many children with similar experiences of loss, abuse, and neglect. Maybe that’s why I sometimes get emotional when delivering training for potential foster parents, social and aid workers. This is not a job to me, it’s a way of life, one that makes more and more sense the older I get. I increasingly appreciate just what it means for children who are so cruelly ignored, used, and abused.

Mam and Dad did their best for Pamela when she returned. My father made her a wooden doll’s cot, the first gift she could ever remember that was entirely her own. He made it so well that the couple next door later used it for their baby. Pamela treasured it, the first thing that was ever hers and not for sharing with the entire dormitory. At last, she was safe. She was home.

8. A common expression in the north of England, it can be used as a greeting or as a way of drawing attention to something.

9. One of the most distinctive features of northern English speech is the habit of reducing or not pronouncing the definite article “the.” Instead, it is replaced by an abbreviated “t” sound, produced simultaneously with a glottal stop. In some cases, there is barely any discernible sound there at all and it appears to outsiders that the definite article is missing entirely. English readers from outside the UK may be familiar with it from the novels of Emily Brontë and D. H. Lawrence.

10. Kellingley Colliery opened in 1965 and closed in 2015. It was the last deep coal mine in Britain with shafts around half a mile deep.

11. Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes.

12. A colloquial Yorkshire term for coins or currency in general.

13. The British Empire Medal, BEM, is awarded by the Queen for “hands-on service to the local community.” For a list of UK honors, see UK Government, “Types of Honours and Awards.”

14. Most people had milk delivered in those days. The early morning British street scene was one of a bottle or two of milk on each front doorstep.

15. British readers will associate such things with northern stereotypes, but people in the north of England often did keep ferrets, homing pigeons, and thin whippets, a dog rather like a small greyhound. The ferrets were pets but originally used for “rabbiting.” The ferret would be sent down a warren to drive out rabbits which would be caught to augment the family diet.

16. Pamela’s story appears in Morris and Priestley, Journeys of Hope, 125–36. Additional material from interviews by Philip Williams with Pamela and Brian Miller and with Mick Pease on December 5, 2017.

17. In the November 1919 issue of British Medical Journal, the UK’s chief medical officer, T. Hartley Martin, wrote: “The treatment of surgical tuberculosis needs an open, barren, flat shore, exposed to the winds, with a fresh and equable temperature, moderate humidity and abundant sunshine . . . in the wards the majority of the children rapidly become accustomed to the open-air life, and although . . . the wards cannot be heated they [children] do not appear to feel the cold and make light of what is often a hardship to the nursing staff . . . The most marked results of the open-air life are shown during the first few months of stay in hospital . . . [children] soon become rosy-cheeked and contented, the appetite improves rapidly” (quoted in Morris and Priestley, Journeys of Hope, 135–36).

18. “Sent to Coventry” is a British colloquialism for being shunned or ostracized. It is said to derive from the civil wars of the 1640s when Royalist prisoners sent to the town by the Parliamentarians were shunned and ignored by the townspeople.