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 was it. Nobody threatened my boys. A red light flashed in front of my eyes.
“Why you . . . !”
Eddie broke away, stormed out of the TV lounge and down the stairs. I followed him, enraged. I wanted my pound of flesh.
To think of all the time I had invested in this lad. I had drawn close to him, connected in a way that none of the other staff had been able to. One of the supervisors at the care home had noticed it.
“Mick, whatever it is you are doing with Eddie, just keep doing it. I don’t know what you’ve done, but you are the first member of staff he has ever opened up to.”
“I’ve just spent time with him, that’s all,’ I replied, rather pleased that my efforts had not gone unnoticed. “Drawn alongside him, kicked a football around, gone running.”
“Well, however you’ve done it, you are the first person ever to get through to him,” the supervisor said. “Keep it up. It’s good work.”
Now, here was Eddie scuttling down the stairs with me in pursuit. My blood was up. When he turned I let him have it, not physically, but verbally, all my anger, all my frustration. How I felt, how he had let me down. How disappointed I was, how hurt I felt. Me, me, me.
Eddie hauled his hurt and anger away into the night and as my pulse and breathing slowed, it suddenly hit me. What had I done? I was the first person Eddie had ever trusted and I had thrown it back in his face. I told him how angry I was, without any consideration of his feelings. I had belittled him in front of other people, made him feel worthless.
We were residential houseparents in a care home at Sutton Coldfield in the English Midlands. Princess Alice Orphanage was established in 1883 by National Children’s Home (NCH),19 an organization with Methodist roots. It was laid out on the “cottage homes” model, with houses grouped around a large green. It had an imposing clock tower, a chapel, and, originally, workshops to teach the children useful trades. At first, the children lived in single-sex “family groups” of up to thirty, each supervised by a “house-mother.”20 During the Second World War, the number of children swelled to over 300 as orphanages in the cities closed under the threat of German bombing. By the time we arrived in 1979, the numbers had dropped to around 120. Some additional children’s houses had been added in the 1950s, but by that time, trends favored smaller groups. Typically, there would be ten to twelve children in a house and the accommodation was now mixed sex. We had up to eighteen teenagers in the adolescent unit.
We were impressed. There was plenty of space, the green acted as a play area, and the way the cottages were organized made sense. As you looked around the green you could follow the progression from babies in one house to toddlers and preschool children in the next, then five- to seven-year-olds, then seven- to ten-year-olds, and on it went with accommodation for adolescents. It was all very neat, all very sequential. At that time, we saw nothing wrong with it.
Already the tide was beginning to turn against large residential care homes. Local authorities were looking at adoption and foster care as alternatives. The older and larger orphanages were expensive to maintain. They had funding problems. There had always been informal alternatives to residential care. People often took over the care of children of deceased or absent relatives. Funding was temporarily available in the form of “parish relief” for abandoned mothers or single parents. Yet for generations, poorer people lived under the shadow of the workhouse.21
The practice of fostering developed during Victorian times, where a child might live temporarily with another family until a more permanent arrangement could be found. By the end of the nineteenth century, the UK’s