HarperElement
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This edition published by HarperElement 2018
FIRST EDITION
© Petrina Banfield 2018
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Source ISBN: 9780008264703
Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008264734
Version: 2018-06-21
Happy memories
SYLVIA ELLEN LOCKYER
Firstly I would like to thank my wonderful agent, Laetitia Rutherford, for championing me and getting me to dig deeper every time I send a draft her way. I am so grateful for all the help, support and encouragement she’s given me over the years, as well as her gentle humour in steering me away from some of my wackier ideas and onto sensible projects instead.
Huge thanks also to the lovely Vicky Eribo for the opportunities she’s given me as well as her warmth and support, and to the rest of the team at HarperCollins.
I am obliged to David Chave for being an enthusiastic and helpful sounding board, to Liz Foster, Derek Sims and Hannah Brown for giving feedback on the manuscript, and to my late aunt, Sylvie, for her insight into nursing and hospital procedures in years gone by.
Lastly, thanks to my amazing family for their unwavering love: Irene, Philip, Paul, Pete, Jean, Toria and Alex, and to my three children, Hannah, Daniel and Lexi.
Contents
I was thirteen years old when I first discovered that my father spent his childhood in care. Until then he had never spoken to me about his past and, as children are so adept at doing, I somehow picked up that it was a subject to be tiptoed around, without ever having been told. The truth came out one Sunday afternoon after I plucked up the courage to ask for the names of my paternal grandparents, so that I could complete a genealogy project for school.
Perhaps he felt I’d reached an age of understanding because after a moment’s hesitation he told me that he knew very little about his parents, who had died long before I was born. Even this snippet of information was fascinating to me and I listened eagerly as he told me about the grandmother I’d never met – a petite Irish woman who had experienced too much pain and not enough love. By the age of twenty-five she had given birth to five children.
The shadow cast by childhood trauma stretched far into the future though, and in 1941 three of her children were taken into care, including my father and his twin brother – the youngest, at six months old.
Ever since hearing my father’s story I’ve been captivated by the idea of the corporate parent; society waiting with a safety net to cradle those most in need. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be part of that narrative. I finally applied to become a foster carer in 2006.
On my initial ‘Skills to Foster’ training course, the tutor told us that three fates awaited unwanted children of the distant past: death by exposure, prostitution or Christian adoption. We learned that homeless children and orphans in Britain were first ‘boarded out’ with foster carers in the latter part of the nineteenth century and that hospital almoners were the forerunners of modern social workers. But it was only in 2014, in trying to reassemble the scattered fragments of my father’s childhood puzzle, that I learned more about the almoners’