Listen to thisI was very new to child care. It was a long time ago. The kids in the program were many, but in those first days they conglomerated in my mind into a big plural noun, impossible to individualise. My staff colleagues (if colleagues was not too presumptuously convivial a concept) were the first to emerge from their own collage as single beings – themselves inscrutable, riddled with idiosyncrasies and prickly thorns of habit and defensiveness.
The first to be so recognised was the linen mistress! Her job was unimaginable. There were over 150 children and her small room was the Grand Central Station of all clothing, bedding, towels and footwear. Her day (depending on whether it was Monday or Tuesday or whatever) started with the solemn triage of separating washing, mending, replacements – and a fourth category of “items requiring further enquiry”. It was these last which terrified us most, for they were all attached to awkward questions about how things got torn, stained, swapped or lost – and the quality of our practice, in her eyes, was largely determined by the answers we were able to give! You can understand that, through an early version of parallel process, our own management of clothing and linen down at the dormitory level, was also very ... systematic!
I learned children's linen numbers long before I learned their names! The linen mistress would ask “What happened to 38’s jeans?!” It wasn't, of course, a straight information-seeking question. It really asked “What in God's name do you allow to happen down there if a pair of jeans can end up in my linen room in this condition? ... and I want to know about number 38’s jeans specifically!” Number 15’s socks (or, rather, sock, for one had been lost) or number 29’s underwear were also high on her agenda, and one prevaricated with the linen mistress to one’s cost.
As I say, these were the early days. It was sobering to begin work in an agency for troubled children, believing that one had brought one’s own learning and skills to bear, and to find oneself right in the middle of a savage hierarchy which threw one back on one’s defenses. I answered these linen room questions as if I were one of the delinquent children myself, and invented all sorts of bizarre and improbable explanations – parallel process working its way back up the food chain!
It was number 38, as it happened, who was to give me, unwittingly, my first lesson in Child and Youth Care work.
* * *
I have to confess that in those days when few staff had to work with large numbers of children, one formed opinions about them entirely on the basis of how much trouble they caused. And it wasn’t just the actual trouble, for we quickly picked up the cues in their non-verbal behaviour. A shady look was quite enough to alert staff to potential trouble, and whispered communications behind hands earned labels like “underhand” or “subversive”. I was new, remember, and I do not hide the fact that all of us on the staff were self-protective and defensive as hell. Number 38, by all appearances, was trouble. Eyes cast down, quick with an inaudible retort to anything which was said, a supercilious smile ... when he was around (all thirteen years old of him) I watched my back.
In my second week on the job I was doing my rounds of the dormitories before turning in. It had been “one of those days” and I was wondering why on earth I had agreed to be someone (as the Director had prophetically put it in his invitation) “to add new blood” to the program! Anyway, I was doing the last rounds and on walking into dormitory #4, I noticed that #38 was missing from his bed. I asked a couple of the others in the dorm but received in reply only fake-sounding snores or non-committal sighs. A conspiracy, to be sure. The boy had clearly absconded. I must sharpen my sensitivity to the signs on offer, for I hadn’t quite seen this coming. I also panicked, for in those days we didn’t have seniors or supervisors. The assumption was that each staff member was responsible for his group, no matter how large or complex. Anyway, it was 9 o'clock at night, and I didn’t feel familiar enough with anyone on the staff to disturb them so late – or, for that, to admit that I had lost one of my flock!
Also, I didn’t want to appear at the breakfast check short of one inmate. (The whole institution ate in one huge cafeteria-style dining room, and the meal started with a military-style check: each dormitory group reporting “All present, sir!”) It was unthinkable that one of my four groups would report “Number 38 missing, sir!” I had to do something.
I did. I knew that in the small office in my building there was a locked filing box. (I had never had the time to open it, let alone look through it, so I didn’t know what help it would be). I unlocked it. Inside I found a card for each boy in my unit: date of birth, school standard, linen number (!) and parents' addresses and phone numbers. That’s it. I scrabbled through to number 38 and withdrew the card. Just like all the others. But under parents' address there were three entries and no telephone numbers. In those days telephones were not as common as they are today, and poorer people were less like to have telephones. Just my luck.
Father. Address unknown. Last reputed address 19 First Road, East Colliery. Mother’s address (crossed out three or four times and new addresses added; most recent one seemed to be “with brother’s family, 172 Central Avenue, Primrose Township.” Then there was a further entry: Sister, try the Cabaret Club on 16th ... crossed out; try Caesar’s Bar & Grill in the Savoy District (I had only heard of the Savoy District) ... also crossed out. And so it went.
I climbed into my third-hand car, very much a student’s car (made in 1951) and headed for the District, thinking that the sister would be the first port of call in an AWOL case. Caesar’s remembered her from some months back and suggested another address to try. After only two “leads” I actually found her. Had she seen her younger brother? Thank God, no, she replied. And he would know better than coming near her. He was nothing but trouble. I thought I saw her point. She wanted nothing to do with the boy. Was that all, she asked? Thank you.
No love lost there.
I thought that a “brother’s address” was the least hopeful place to track the boy’s mother, but on reflection it was possibly the most reliable. For someone who moved about a bit, finding an actual current domicile could be time-consuming, but a relation might actually be keeping more in touch. And so it proved. The brother knew exactly where she was and sent me straight there. She was sub-letting an already sub-let room in a boarding house, and not even the proprietor knew as much about the lady as her brother.
Mother spoke to me through her door opened a crack of one inch. She listened to my problem, heard that I was concerned as to where her son might be, listened to the saga of my cross-town pursuit, my contact with the sister ... and said “So?”
"I thought he might have come to you,” I suggested.
"You’re the people meant to be looking after him,” she said shortly.
“We are,” I agreed, “but tonight he went missing. I’ve been trying to track him down in case he gets into some difficulty.” Mischief and trouble-making, I nearly said, but I kept it all sounding positive.
“Well I don’t care s---,” she assured me. “I don’t care where he is. you're supposed to know where he is, so it’s your problem.”
I didn’t quite know how to respond to this. I had never imagined a mother talking like this about her son, so I was taking on some whole new experiences.
“Well, I'll let you know what I find out,” I said, hoping that this sounded reassuring.
“Whatever,” she muttered, and slammed the door.
* * *
As undergraduates we had done an inner-city research project, knocking on doors and asking whether residents in the area would benefit from a food delivery program. It had aroused a sympathetic response from nearly every door we knocked on, so I had assumed that I was quite good at this door-to-door interview process. Tonight I was to learn that I knew nothing, and felt that I should rather have taken up an actuarial career, or librarianship!
When I found (admittedly, it was now quite late at night) where #38’s father lived, I again put on my polite Sociology class expression and introduced myself. Father had likewise given me a full one-inch door crack, which rather cramped the text-book style! I explained the problem, and although he looked at me throughout my exposition, he made no reply. I wondered whether his boy had perhaps come around here tonight? Silence. As I tried to accentuate my eye-contact and restate the details of the AWOL case, I realised that the man was attempting to focus on a point in space a few inches above my head and some three feet behind me. His eyelids were also drooping, and he was swaying slightly. To all purposes, he was, in fact, unconscious.
I thanked him and walked back along the dingy passageway from his apartment, and suddenly realised that my awareness had shifted away from my own ineptitude and embarrassment to a sense of deep sadness. It was not a sentimental or melodramatic sadness; rather a technical sadness. It was the realisation that I could no longer see #38 as a surly, crass, pain-in-the-ass trouble-maker, but that he clearly had nothing going for him in his young life and he was probably doing the best he could with a situation I could not begin to understand. It was, in spite of four undergraduate years, the first relevant learning I had achieved in my life. The size of the task waiting back at the program smacked me between the eyes. It was not just the #38s of this world; it was (at this stage, anyway) the whole cast of characters in my 48-bed dormitory unit. Where to begin?
As I drove back to the program I thought also of the linen mistress. Perhaps her regime was, after all, a response to similar insights: at least she was making sure that the kids had decent clothes on their backs which were clean and ordered, and hers was one task which could be done properly and reliably.
* * *
The joke, as it turned out, was on me. On my return I went straight to dormitory #4. The boy was in his bed and fast asleep. During my earlier rounds he had simply gone to the toilet. In my own insecurity and paranoia I had assumed the worst. And, I reflected grimly as I looked at the sleeping kid, my “worst” was child's play compared to the “worst” that he faced in his young life.
