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
