“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
