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.
4. Following the Call
Don’t let it die!
“So João, what would you recommend I do if I want to work with street kids and in child protection here in Brazil?”
João Bosco de Carvalho, an experienced Brazilian children’s worker, raised his eyebrows. A sardonic smile spread across his face.
“Learn Portuguese?”25
We both laughed but recognized the serious point. It wasn’t what we wanted to hear but knew instinctively that it was right. We had both seen too many well-meaning aid workers or missionaries bumbling along with no grasp of the language and culture.
We learned Portuguese. Rachel Thornton, a languages student at Leeds University, gave Brenda and I some coaching before we set off for Brazil in 1997. Rachel met her husband Richard while they were both missionaries in Brazil. Richard later worked as an accountant and they returned to Brazil for a few years through a job exchange. They joke that I was to stay in their spare room so often during my regular visits to Brazil that they named it “The Suite Pease.”26
We also enrolled on an evening class. For over a year we grappled with the grammar and pronunciation. Our good friend and collaborator, family lawyer Ranjit Uppal, laughs as he tells of how truly impressive our grasp of the language came to be. One afternoon under a blazing Brazilian sun, as Ranjit and his wife Raj accompanied me on a training and advocacy visit, I confidently ordered a light meal at a restaurant. One by one the plates kept coming. Soon the table was groaning under the weight of main courses and side dishes. Instead of ordering the lightest option, I had ordered a banquet!
If I was to struggle with language on my later visits to Brazil, I was struggling with accents during our last months in the English Midlands. I have often joked that I knew our time there was at an end when I heard Mark and Kevin picking up the regional accent, the slow, almost lethargic “Brummie” drawl.27 It was then I knew we had to move back to Yorkshire. I wanted my lads to have the “broad Yorkshire” accent and to support Leeds United!28
It was more than homesickness and regional pride that drew us back north. My time working at the residential home was the toughest of my career. The incident with Eddie had affected me deeply. The kids were lovely in so many ways, but for me, unruly, cheeky, and hard to deal with. We were on call 24/7. I was nearing burnout.
Once a week I rang John Ellerington at a public call box at a prearranged time. He did not have a telephone at home. In the cold and wet he walked faithfully to the call box to listen to me unload. He remembers hearing the dejection in my voice. What were we doing in Birmingham? We knew few people. We had no family there, few friends.
“I’ve a mind to jack it all in, John,” I told him. “Come back up north. Go back down the pit.”
I did once ask the pit managers if they would have me back. We even put our names on a public housing list and the boys on a school list expecting to return to Yorkshire. Once again, things worked out differently to how we had planned.
“Living in” at the children’s home was very stressful. I could cope with the early afternoons.