The image of a seemingly unending, tree-lined road that leads from a cemetery to a large stately home repeated itself for many years in my dreams.
When I was nine my brothers and I were driven up that long straight lane to the country mansion that was to be our new home, where the only grownups were social workers. It was a home for children with no parents or parents the state considered unable to cope.
We were sent to Denham Court in the summer of 1970. I returned home in 1972.
At that time the home's regime was in transition. It was moving from a Dickensian-style orphanage, where children were uniformed, regimented and subject to corporal punishment, to a more liberal institution for the children of the poor.
There was lots of normality at Denham Court: we played hide and seek and tag, got into small bruisers and like all children we resisted chores. We just did it without parents, and in large numbers. We traipsed in line to brush teeth and we fell asleep in dorms that slept eight kids, all of us in our large metal-framed beds.
Where my own kids may be given a two-minute time-out on the hallway bench for punishment, in a large children’s home things were notched up a bit. For a nine year-old to walk into a room where a hundred potatoes needed peeling was just a bit overwhelming. I remember my plea of inexperience falling on deaf ears.
We didn’t suffer cruelty or abuse. Or perhaps I’ve buried that. But being removed from your mother at nine was trauma enough for an entire lifetime, a scar that would never fully heal.
Today, I live in a world where so many of us parent so carefully and conscientiously that we can forget the incredible resilience of children. Despite the awful fate of that nine year old, what resonates with me more is that we survived.
At Denham Court, the older kids introduced me to music. From then on, music was never background noise but assumed a bigger dimension in my world. I discovered lyrics there also, which in turn nourished my love of language.
Last night our youngest, Ilyana had her first night without a pull-up. We could tell the issue of transitioning away from pull-ups at night was affecting the mood of our four year old. I was taken back to my first nights at Denham Court where bed-wetting was common. We all slept on thin cotton sheets that sat atop a thick rubber sheet. Getting into that bed in the winter was somewhat akin to getting into an ice-cold bath.
We returned home to my mother in 1972. Now, a parent myself, I feel both the grief felt by my own mom, and a deep sadness for that nine year old boy. And when as an adult I fret about the anxieties my daughters are processing of their own, my own past helps me maintain a sense of proportion.
Ironically Denham Court is now a venue rented for wedding receptions, and so today that long tree-lined road that leads to it resonates differently in other people’s dreams.
