They became best friends. One snowy night, as the girls drew the beds into the center of the dormitory, Pamela climbed into Heather’s bed to keep her friend warm. When she woke up in the morning, Heather’s body was as cold as ice. She had died during the night. Pamela was eight years old and her best friend died in bed beside her.
My parents knew none of this. Pamela wrote home using a standard form of words, a template provided by the hospital staff. She found a whole sheaf of these letters in a drawer after our mother died. Each one was almost the same as the others and almost exactly the same as those the other children wrote. Often the main text was written up on a chalkboard for the children to copy down. My sister says that anyone seeing her writing then, at the age of seven and eight, would assume it was written by a younger child. The inmates were only taught for two hours a day and at a very basic level, how to write their names, how to copy letters. Was it assumed that there was little point in educating them any further? They were not expected to survive.
My sister does have fond memories of some of the staff, particularly the matron who treated her kindly when news came that our Great Aunt Marie and then our Granny Pease had died. I was born at our Great Aunt Marie’s house. Our parents could not afford to rent somewhere of their own at that time. So my grandfather’s sister and her family took them in. Pamela remembers her hearty kindly laugh. It remains with her to this day and was one of the memories she clung to at the hospital—a warm, resonant laugh, the sound of family, the sound of home.
My mother’s recollections of the matron were rather different. After four years without Pamela, my parents decided that enough was enough. She had to come home. The matron traveled to Yorkshire by train to persuade my mother that Pamela should remain in hospital.
“You do know that if she comes home it will be the death of her,” the matron said. “It’ll all be your fault.”
“Then if she dies, at least she’ll die at home,” my mother retorted.
Whether it was at our mother’s insistence or, as Pamela believes, because the hospital needed the space, my sister came home. If the pain of separation had been intense, that of reunion was almost equally strong. Pamela was a very sick child. Worse, she came home cowed and institutionalized.
It was many years before any of us heard the full story of what had happened, but we felt the effects of it. Pamela was distant, reticent, subdued. She felt unable to ask for anything, shocked whenever she heard me asking for treats. She would rather steal than ask. She would sneak into the pantry and take cookies or candy. This was just one of the effects of life at the hospital. No one dared asked for anything.
Pamela would chuckle to herself when my mother warned me not to ask for things whenever we went to anyone’s house. We had to wait until it was offered. We should never ask.
“But how will they know what I want if I don’t ask?”
Pamela smiled at my childish logic but was inwardly terrified at the prospect of ever asking for anything or telling anyone how she felt.
Talking to Pamela years later I recognize all too well the classic symptoms of institutionalization. It is something I have seen time and time again around the world. I see children who have lost the ability to laugh or cry, who keep silent for fear of the consequences. I see children who have lost all spark and vivacity, children who turn in on themselves and find it hard to engage with others, children who are no longer children. They spend their time people watching just as Pamela tells me she did. They quietly observe what’s going on to assess how best to survive.
For some years afterward, Pamela was convinced that if she did anything wrong the authorities would come and take her away. A doctor summoned her into his office the day she was discharged from hospital. Her parents were coming to fetch her, he told her. They were taking her home.
“But let me tell you this, Pamela Pease, if you tell anyone what has happened here, we know where to find you. We can come and take you back at any time.”
She was also convinced that I “wanted her gone,” that I resented her and wanted her to go back.
Pamela had good reason to think so. I did resent her. This sister I had only known from a photograph and from parental absences was now back and taking center stage. I was only around five or six years old when she came home and was used to being the focus of attention. She was a sickly child and I thought my parents handled her with kid gloves. She was always ill and lost a lot of time at school. I feigned illness to get attention or threw myself down the stairs in an attempt to avoid lessons. Whenever my sister became upset she would pant in short, choking gasps, a kind of asthmatic attack.
“Look 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.