The Forgotten Home Child

by Genevieve Graham

  Those children who did survive their indenture were deeply affected by the experience, and many chose to keep their stories to themselves as Winny and Jack did. Many carried with them a lifetime of trauma, and that anguish reverberated as they married and started families of their own. One descendant described their father as loving, but said that he had a lifelong feeling of inferiority. Another said their grandfather was an angry man with no love to give. As I wrote about Winny and Jack in their later years, these were the emotions I kept in mind.

  Despite being rejected by both England and Canada, more than thirty thousand British Home Boys fought in the World Wars. The incident with Jack, Edward, and Cecil in the Italian countryside in 1943 is lifted from the pages of history. The 1st Canadian Infantry Division and the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade were both involved in Operation Husky, the seaborne invasion of the island of Sicily. Though the role of Canadians has been marginalized—some might even suggest forgotten—The Canadian Encyclopedia includes a sweet tribute to our boys:

  On 18 July, the Canadians met their heaviest resistance to date at Valguarnera. Fighting before the town and on adjacent ridges resulted in 145 casualties, including 40 killed. But the Germans lost 250 men captured and an estimated 180 to 240 killed or wounded. Field marshal Albert Kesselring reported that his men were fighting highly-trained mountain troops. “They are called ‘Mountain Boys,’ ” he said, “and probably belong to the 1st Canadian Division.” German respect for the Canadian soldier was beginning.

  But that respect was nonexistent on the farms where they’d been as children. Throughout the writing of the book, I couldn’t stop wondering how anyone could possibly treat children that way. Master Warren, of course, was the epitome of the baseness of human nature, but what about the Renfrews and the Adamses? Perhaps the hardest part of writing this story was trying to put myself in their place and understand where their callousness and cruelty came from. To do that, I looked more deeply at the harsh and unforgiving life in rural Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there is no excuse for what they did, I came to understand how it could have happened. Canadian farms were rural, isolated, and failing. The growing season was short, soil and water were unreliable, and the Great Depression was grinding the country into the dirt. Families already struggling with extreme poverty tried to have large families in order to work the farms, but in such terrible, remote conditions and without proper medical care, the child mortality rate was alarmingly high. So when these struggling farmers saw advertisements for British Home Children and realized they could pay so little to get help on their farms, they quickly sent in applications. They weren’t thinking about children, they were thinking of workers. That’s all they wanted, and they wanted them desperately. The sending agencies couldn’t keep up with all the requests—at one point Dr. Barnardo said there were seven applications for each child.

  An unidentified British Home Boy ploughing a field at Barnardo’s Training Farm in Russell, Manitoba, 1900. The 8,960 acre (or fourteen square miles) industrial farm started in 1887 with accommodations for one hundred boys and closed twenty years later. (Library and Archives Canada / PA-117285)

  The children, meanwhile, were told that going to Canada was the chance of a lifetime. As Winny’s story illustrates, many of them came from poverty-stricken families that could no longer support their children. In the mid-1800s, the child mortality rate in the UK was 26 percent (compared to the 0.5 percent of today). Children started working very young, toiling in terribly dangerous jobs underground, in chimneys, in factories, as matchmakers, as beggars, and worse. The streets were crowded with small, filthy urchins, their faces drawn with hunger. The workhouses were filled to bursting. Imagine Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Annie—but without the singing and dancing, as Jamie says. There was no future for them in England. Canada was supposed to be something completely different: a land of opportunity, offering adventure, income, and hope, not to mention clean air to breathe. The reality was quite the opposite for most. About 75 percent of the children who came here experienced abuse and neglect.

  Which means that 25 percent did not, and that was also apparent in the survey responses I received. Plenty of descendants acknowledged that while many did suffer, their relatives viewed the emigration plan as an escape from a life that was not unlike those described in Dickens’s novels. Because their ancestors came to Canada, their children, and their children, were given a better future. I chose to tell these happier stories through sweet Charlotte. However, despite the economic opportunities she enjoyed and the love she received from the Carpenters, her character highlights one of the great myths about this chapter of history: That these children were mostly orphans. In fact, only about 2 percent did not have parents. The majority were surrendered to shelters like Dr. Barnardo’s Barkingside Home for Girls—often temporarily, while their parent(s) got back on their feet—or they were forcibly removed from families deemed unable to properly care for them. Just like with Charlotte, the children were deceived into believing they were unwanted or that their parents had died. Many of them never knew that their mothers and fathers were still very much alive and continued to search for their children for the rest of their lives.

  While rare, reunions did happen, as they did in Charlotte’s case. And while these children, now adults, at last had some of their most urgent questions answered, it was far too late. I’ve read heartbreaking newspaper stories of siblings reuniting after forty, fifty, even sixty years, all across Canada. Sisters Mary and Marjory Johnson were finally reunited after sixty years, but by then, Marjory had Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember Mary. Brothers Joe and Dennis Waterer met again after more than half a century of separation, only to discover they had lived ten minutes from each other for years. In Montreal, Daisy Bance and her younger brother Albert were reunited after eighty years when they were eighty-five and eighty-four, respectively.

  Because of stories like these and the unflagging determination of the children’s descendants, awareness is growing. The monument Chrissie shows to Winny and Jamie in Park Lawn Cemetery in Etobicoke was erected in 2017, and it is one of quite a few British Home Children monuments across the country. Lori Oschefski, CEO of the British Home Children Advocacy and Research Association (BHCARA), discovered the two mass graves of seventy-five British Home Children. After raising $16,000, Lori and other BHCARA volunteers identified the remains of every one of those children using archival records, death certificates, and cemetery plot cards. These children have been traced back to their families and connected to their family trees on Ancestry.ca. The following year, in 2018, September 28 was decreed National British Home Children Day in Canada. In 2019, more than two hundred major landmarks across Canada were voluntarily lit up for one special night to mark the 150th anniversary of the first shipload of children to arrive in Canada.

  Lori Oschefski, CEO of the British Home Children Advocacy and Research Association, unveiling the monument for two mass graves of British Home Children discovered in Park Lawn Cemetery, in Etobicoke, just outside of Toronto. (Judy Preston)

  Thanks to the growing accessibility and popularity of genealogy, we now know that approximately 12 percent of Canada’s population—more than four million Canadians—are descended from British Home Children. Whether they chose to come to Canada or not, those children were integral in building our nation, which has now become what it was supposed to be then: a vast, welcoming land of opportunity. Because children like Winny chose to keep what they considered to be their shameful past lives to themselves, their contributions and sacrifices have been forgotten. It is their ancestors who are shining light on those dark times and by doing so, showing their respect and love. Now it is up to the people of Canada to remember these children and make sure they are never forgotten again.

  Acknowledgements

  In order to write a story based on more than a hundred thousand -children’s lives, I had to rely on a lot of people. It doesn’t matter if those people were “onlin
e” contacts or if I met them in real life: every one of them had an effect on The Forgotten Home Child.

  First of all, I would like to thank Ms. Lori Oschefski, genealogical researcher and tireless advocate whose work is recognized worldwide. In 2008, Lori discovered that her mother had been adopted. The news was shared somewhat reluctantly by her mother, and when Lori looked into the reason for the adoption, she realized her mother was, in fact, a Child Migrant of the Salvation Army, brought to Canada from Britain as part of the Child emigration scheme in 1924. From there, Lori found fifteen other British Home Children in her family tree. Moved by years of research, she founded the first national organization in Canada for the British Home Children in 2012: the British Home Children Advocacy and Research Association. Since then, the group’s army of volunteers has registered more than seventy thousand British Home Children’s names and histories on their extensive website. After filling her email and messenger inbox with my questions, I finally met Lori at the site of their award-winning “Breaking the Silence” exhibit in Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto, and she took the time to show me individual children’s trunks, books, photographs, and letters. She was passionate, patient, and determined that I should be armed with everything I needed to tell this story.

  She also directed me to the British Home Children Descendants’ Facebook pages, of which there are a few both in Canada and in the UK. Those pages were full of more people wanting to help me. Since I live in Nova Scotia, I reached out to that group in particular, and they immediately invited me to their annual reunion. They showed me the posters made in a school competition intended to create awareness for British Home Children, and they walked me to the dedicated park bench they’d recently had installed. They even asked me to cut their ceremonial reunion cake! Thanks go to Chairperson Gail Bennett, Vice-Chair Catherine West, Secretary/Treasurer Betty Blaauwendraat, and Directors Carolyn MacIsaac, Charlene Ellis, Edith Selwyn-Smith, Jeanette McNutt, Cecil Verge, Bill Hill, and Susan Mosher. While I was there, I handed out copies of a survey I had put together in advance, wanting to ask deeper questions about their ancestors and bring more authenticity to my characters’ lives. By the end of that reunion, I had about thirty completed surveys. I gave the group extras to hand out, and I shared the survey online, and within a week I had more than two hundred responses. In addition, other British Home Children Facebook groups contacted me, offering whatever help I needed. Without the generous input from all these generous people, I couldn’t have truly understood as much as I did, and I’m grateful to every one of them.

  From the beginning, my editor at Simon & Schuster Canada, Sarah St. Pierre—with whom I am extremely honoured to be working—saw something special in this manuscript, and she and Assistant Editor Siobhan Doody put their hearts into helping it take shape. I knew right away that I wanted to write a past and present timeline because it was critical to the message of the story, but I had never written anything like that before and was somewhat at a loss about how to handle it adeptly. Together, I think we achieved everything we’d set out to do and more. I couldn’t be prouder of this book. I am truly grateful to the entire team at Simon & Schuster Canada for supporting me along this journey. Thank you to President Kevin Hanson, VP Editorial Director Nita Pronovost, Marketing Associate Alexandra Boelsterli, Publicity Assistant Michelle Skelsey, Director of Sales Shara Alexa, Sales Rep Sherry Lee, Manager of Library and Special Sales Lorraine Kelly, Editorial Intern Aneeka Sihra, and everyone who believed in this story. Thanks also to Elizabeth Whitehead for designing the stunning cover.

  To my agent, Jacques de Spoelberch, thank you for your tireless efforts on my behalf. I am so honoured to be represented by you.

  My family is always, and will always be, my biggest support, and I hope they all know how much that means to me. Writing is a solitary sport, and to attain the clarity I need, I often withdraw. It may sometimes be slightly alarming for them to walk into a dark room, lit only by the pale glow of my computer screen, but I love that they know to leave the lights off for me.

  If you’ve read my acknowledgements before, you know this is where I thank the love of my life, Dwayne, just for being him. For taking care of me in every way, for doing his best to fill in plot holes when I panic, for my nightly reminder that the day is done when he gently slides a glass of wine beside my elbow, for keeping me fed and balanced, for asking me how my day went, for just sitting with me and providing that perfect sense of quiet calm we all need and deserve. Back in 2007, he was the first person to tell me that if I wanted to be a writer, I should be a writer. Even when I didn’t know if anyone would ever want to read what I wrote, he knew what his encouragement meant to me. So if you enjoy my books, you can thank him!

  And if you are reading this, then thank you. Thank you for choosing to pick up this book and spend your valuable time reading it. I hope it provided you entertainment; I hope it taught you something that matters to you. I hope that when you close the back cover you wander off with a hunger for more. Because that’s what happens to me. Know that when you write a review online or if you recommend my books to a friend, I am truly grateful. If you invite me to your book club either online or in person, I am thrilled. Personal notes, emails, and messages can and have made me cry because it’s an amazing feeling to know I am touching people I’ve never met through these stories. Please keep those coming—and I promise to keep the books coming as well.

  The Forgotten Home Child

  GENEVIEVE GRAHAM

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  TOPICS & QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  Did you know who the British Home Children were before reading this book? How does this chapter in history shape your understanding of Canada as a British colony and as its own nation?

  Winny’s family moves from Ireland to England for a better life, but they experience tragedy, poverty, and hunger. Compare and contrast her early life with Mary and Jack’s, and discuss the different events that drove them to the streets along with so many other children. What might this say about the economic reality of England at this time?

  In the present-day storyline, Winny says that Dr. Barnardo “was a well-intentioned man with a good heart.” After reading this book, what do you think of Dr. Barnardo and his Homes, and later, his plan to send children to Canada? Was there any merit to his actions? Where did his plan go wrong? And why?

  Winny and her friends were told that Canada was a land of opportunity and that there were families waiting to take them in as their own, but in most cases, this was far from the truth. Why do you think there was so much hostility toward the Home Children? Do you think Canada is more welcoming to newcomers now? What prejudices still exist today?

  Canada was a country struggling through the Great Depression and on the brink of another world war. Did knowing this historical backdrop change how you saw the actions of Mistress Adams and Mistress Renfrew? In what other ways does the author complicate our view of these families and even elicit our sympathies?

  When Winny arrives on the Adams farm, she finds solace in picturing the faces of her friends. Discuss the importance of remembrance in the novel. What are some other key scenes where Winny or Jack remember their friends? How does this act evolve throughout the novel? For instance, when is it healing? And when is it too painful?

  Mary and Winny are closer than friends; they see each other as sisters, and Winny goes on to adopt Mary’s son, Billy, as her own. Consider the theme of family in the novel. What other close ties beyond blood relations do we see? What do these portrayals say about the value of family and belonging?

  Both Mary and Quinn die as a result of their mistreatment. In the author’s note to readers, she shares that Mary’s and Quinn’s experiences were not uncommon. How did learning this change your understanding of this history?

  The Home Children make their own trunks at Barnardo’s Homes to bring to Canada. Winny keeps hers for her entire life, but Jack abandons his. Beyond being luggage, what is the role of the trunks in the novel?
What do they come to symbolize?

  Why does Jack connect with the messages in The Communist Manifesto? How does this reference contextualize Jack’s personal story within a larger socioeconomic lens?

  Winny often says that the loneliness was the worst part of her experience. How does her past continue to isolate her from those she loves in her later years? How does seeing the British Home Children memorial in the Park Lawn Cemetery change that? What might this tell us about the importance of historical commemoration?

  When Winny goes to adopt Billy at the maternity home, the matron recommends not telling Billy that he is adopted. Discuss the portrayal of adoption by comparing and contrasting Charlotte’s and Billy’s experiences.

  At their graduation from nursing school, Winny and Charlotte are called “the future of Canada.” When war breaks out, Jack, Edward, and Cecil enlist to fight for Canada. How were the Home Children fundamental to Canada’s growth and nationhood? How does their mistreatment complicate their sense of identity?

  In what ways did the war change Jack’s life when he returned to Canada? Consider the novel’s references to communism. Do you think Jack achieved the equal and fair treatment that he sought while reading The Communist Manifesto? Why was Jack still unhappy?

  Winny tells Jack that she feels like home when she’s with him. Discuss the meaning of home in the novel. What does the word come to symbolize?

  Winny and Jack carry the shame of being a Home Child for their entire life. How did their experiences affect their ability to love, trust, develop relationships, and lead normal lives? How did their trauma affect them differently? Discuss the lingering effects on their own family.

  Why does Winny open up about her past after so long? How does sharing her experiences help Chrissie work through her own grief and bring Winny, Chrissie, and Jamie closer together?