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