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Home Child

by Barbara Haworth-Attard

Promise Song

by Linda Holeman

For more than 50 years, from 1868 to 1925, various schemes emptied the orphanages of Britain to provide the farms of Canada with cheap hired help. Many of these schemes, most notably those of Dr. Barnardo, were an attempt to improve the lot of abandoned or orphaned children. Unfortunately, with little in the way of legislation or inspection to ensure that the children were educated, paid wages, and treated humanely, many were shamefully abused. Some recorded their lives as Home children in letters and memoirs. These documents have been used as source material for several non-fiction books. Now they have inspired two novels aimed at young readers.

In Home Child, Barbara Haworth-Attard relates the story of a character called Arthur Fellowes. A sickly undersized 13-year-old orphaned by the death of his schoolteacher mother, Arthur has been sent to Canada to become a farm labourer. The reader experiences Arthur’s first six months on the Wilson farm near London, Ontario through the eyes of 12-year-old Sadie Wilson. Sadie feels sorry for Arthur, is mystified by her mother’s hostility to the boy, and struggles to combat the community prejudice that all Home children are thieves and liars.

The story moves swiftly, and the characters are brought alive through apt dialogue and lively action. Readers will be caught up in several threads: the fate of Arthur as well as Sadie’s own growing pains. Sadie’s sympathy for Arthur gives her new insights into her cousin’s vanity and the reasons behind her older sister’s tart tongue. Young readers should be encouraged to ignore the uninspiring front cover and take a chance on the story. They will be well repaid.

Promise Song approaches the same material from the point of view of 14-year-old Home child Rosetta Westley. After the long sea voyage and train trip to the Belleville, Ontario orphanage, Rosetta is devastated to discover that she and her beloved baby sister will be separated. Adoptive parents are waiting for six-year-old Flora but Rosetta is considered too old for adoption. Instead, she has been hired out as a servant on the Thomas farm, where she finds an unhappy situation. Mean-spirited Albert is impatient with his young wife Gudrun’s sadness at the loss of two babies, and he thinks Rosetta’s desire to finish school and become a teacher is “uppity.” At first, Rosetta is determined to leave, but she finds herself unable to abandon the timid Gudrun, pregnant again and terrified she will lose another baby. Rosetta is a feisty heroine who manages to complete the Grade 9 exams that qualify her to teach and infuses some spirit into Gudrun before she sets out to find her sister, Flora. The reader is left with the sense that Rosetta will rise above the stigma of being a Home child.

These are fictional characters and situations, but the backgrounds ring true. The reader experiences the sheer slogging drudgery and grind of rural life in the early years of this century and the often disastrous effects of community attitudes kept narrow by limited experience. In both stories, the host families follow the letter of their agreement with the orphanage: the Home child is grudgingly allowed to attend school and fed whatever the family eats. Although worked hard, these children were not worked any harder than the family members themselves.

But various characters demonstrate attitudes that surviving letters show were all too prevalent in Canada at the time: Strangers with different accents were looked at askance and poor strangers were treated with disdain and hostility, blamed for their own unfortunate position or taken advantage of because they had no family to protect them. In Promise Song, the hired man attempts to rape Rosetta, a fate all too common for female orphans, and other children bully Arthur in the schoolyard while the schoolmaster looks on. Although these stories are about the particular plight of Home children, both authors have also shown the general struggle of all immigrants to gain acceptance, to prosper, and eventually to come to love their new land.

 

Reviewer: Barbara Greenwood

Publisher: Roussan Publishers

DETAILS

Price: $8.95

Page Count: 128 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-896184-18-9

Released: Dec.

Issue Date: 1997-2

Categories:

Reviewer: Barbara Greenwood

Publisher: Tundra Books

DETAILS

Price: $8.99

Page Count: 276 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-88776-387-1

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: February 1, 1997

Categories:

Age Range: ages 11-14