the story of my children

I was seven years old when my father died. His body was brought home to lie in my
gran’s front room. I believed he was my uncle, and could not understand why I had to
kiss him every morning and at bedtime. I led the funeral procession, and said goodbye
for ever without knowing who he really was. At the time my aunt and uncle were acting
as my foster parents after a period of being looked after by my beloved gran and being
cared for in a hospital when she could no longer cope. It was 1950 and I was rebellious,
described as “impossible to manage” by my foster parents. I felt unloved and unwanted.

It wasn’t until much later in life that I learned my father, who had mental health
problems, had been in what was then known as the county asylum for much of the first
seven years of my life and when I was just a few months old, my mother had been
imprisoned for shoplifting and child neglect. It was decided that I would never be
returned to her, or told the truth about my parents.

Social workers, please learn from my experience in care

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As I became ever more difficult to control, I was assessed as being in need of prolonged
psychiatric and social work help with an urgent recommendation that I should be
removed from my foster parents and live where I could experience safety and stability –
the Caldecott Community. Located in a magnificent country mansion in Kent, it had
grown from a nursery in London in 1911 to an innovative therapeutic environment
headed by its founder, Leila Rendel. It offered a place of safety to distressed children,
with the opportunity to grow and take a place in the world.

This was well before the recommendations of the Curtis Report in 1946, which insisted
that children’s homes should serve as “places of safety and refuge” for children needing
assessment, care and protection. In 1947, with the help of the Nuffield Foundation,
Caldecott set up the first assessment centre with the intention of providing evidence and
experience for local authorities. Before this, children’s homes were mainly provided by
voluntary organisations such as Barnardo’s and the Children’s Society, whereas Rendel,
along with Barbara Dockar-Drysdale of the Mulberry Bush in Oxford, proposed a much
wider and therapeutic response – the first of the children’s therapeutic communities.

Writing at the time, Rendel was clear, she said: “It is useless to camouflage a children’s
home or foster home as a ‘home from home’. That it could never be. For these children
of misfortune, there could be no adequate substitute.”

It’s true the Caldecott environment was never “homely”. That was its joy and salvation
for children like me who felt out of place in a conventional family. It could cope with our
impulse to break out, to run away, to act out feelings of anger and distress. We needed
to be able to breathe, and do all these things without fear of sanctions, to be
understood and cared for whatever we did.

The community met these needs exactly. We had space to express ourselves through
education, art, literature, music, sport and work in the garden. We rode horses and
bikes, went camping and stayed in youth hostels. We made friends, sometimes for life.
The discipline, timekeeping, rituals and continuity created the sense of safety. All of this
was a far cry from the suffocation I experienced in the domestic family environment.
Although my foster parents were blood relatives, I had nothing in common with them,
and reacted against their attempts to control me.

During my eight years at Caldecott I thrived on the environment, the opportunities for
self-expression, especially through music and drama, and learned how to manage my
uncontrollable temper, night fears and dreams, and attempted self-destruction. I
responded to the discipline, which was reasonable and fair (not hysterical as at home),
and the routine of regular meals, clean clothes, and feeling of being important to my
peers and those around me. I was rewarded appropriately for success, and my failures
were understood. It did not matter that affection was not overt, this would have
frightened me, and many others, who had already learned to distrust adults at an early
age. The sense of belonging was most important.

Don't force young people out of children's homes at 18

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Returning to the family home at the age of 16 was a great challenge for me and within
months I was literally thrown out into the snow with nowhere to go. By then, I had
learned enough skills to survive and never returned to live with the family again. It
would be good to record that I lived “happily ever after” but some of the damage left
scars that have never healed. Only in recent years have I fully come to understand the
truth about my background and parentage, and this has helped a great deal in resolving
some of the questions. The sense of loss and abandonment has never left me.

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In the 1950s Rendel identified not only the needs of the children at the time but in the
future, setting out a strategic plan for the future with children always at the heart. An
individual response, assessment, fostering where appropriate, a variety of facilities
ranging from small family homes, to larger creative environments for those children who
needed more space. Finally, support and aftercare for as long as needed.

Rendel, Dockar-Drysdale, and others believed that some children are so hurt, so
damaged, so vulnerable, that an escape from family life – not a return to it – is what is
needed. For those who cannot return to families and for whom fostering is not
appropriate, skilful preparation for an independent life in the community is a vital part of
any programme. Research for the NSPCC has shown that about half of the children who
go into care because of abuse or neglect suffer further abuse if they return home and
and later have to return to care.

It’s hard for me to be objective given my own experience, but I think the organisations
that have developed the concept of a more personal approach in smaller living units,
while retaining the concept of community, have been and are the most successful.

This is an edited extract from a piece originally published in the Therapeutic Care
Journal.
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