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.
3. Life Lessons
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
