We went to work at Harmeny House in the fall of 1959. We had been married in June, after Stephen had done his exams. Then we found out that he was not going to be able to graduate as his supervisor had decided that he needed a further period of supervision. While she continued to see Stephen weekly she recommended that we apply for a job at this newly established school.
.. I don’t think we realised that the school had only been up and running for a little over a year at that juncture. Sidney Hill, the headmaster was actively looking for staff and, as we were both unemployed and had little idea of our future, we had few options but to agree to go out to Balerno, a small village outside Edinburgh, for an interview. I am sure with the recommendations from the Department. of Social Studies behind us we were duly hired.
Harmeny House had been the home of the beer baron, Sir William Mc Ewan Younger. It is a large three storey building with many additional wings added over the years. The setting is a mature estate with lovely trees, a kitchen garden and a small stream running through one end of the garden. It was a very familiar kind of space for me. I had gone to school in a similarly Scottish pared down version of an English baronial estate,
Sir William had given his house to the Save the Children Fund to found a school for (what were then called) Maladjusted Children.
Today, we would probably describe the children as Emotionally Disturbed, which rather changes the emphasis from adjusting the children to society, to first dealing with their emotional needs.
In reality, Sidney’s view of their needs was advanced for the times. He looked at the whole child with emphasis on providing a stimulating and caring environment through the process of re-learning the tasks of maturation.
Harmeny only took primary age children from approximately five to 13 years old. The most capacity was 25 children but when we went there to work there were about 12 children.. More were to be introduced as time went by. The Local Education Authority made the referrals and a small committee of the Board made the final selection. They made the final decision which child would benefit most from a residential school setting . As we were getting settled into our new employment, I made a somewhat disturbing discovery. I had suspected for a while that I was pregnant as I was sick in the morning and had had no period for two months. I will never forget standing in a telephone booth in the village when the person on the end of the phone said’, Congratulations you are three months pregnant! . ’ It did not feel very congratulatory to me!! Of course I wanted children but…… not quite so soon! My biggest concern was how to tell my employer this news. I asked to see Sidney and confessed to my state; with many apologies for what he may have felt was taking a job under false pretenses. I need not have worried! His mild response was that these things seemed to happen when people got married!
My other preoccupation was my unfinished thesis. Like Stephen, I was unable to graduate as I was in the middle of writing up a research paper on the housing of the elderly in some of the local villages. I had already collected all the required data and submitted my project to my thesis advisor. Later on in our employment, this paper was rejected as not up to standard. Looking back now, I realise this was inevitable as I had neglected to go and see my advisor on regular appointments. When I did go, he made me feel like a ditsy female who had no hope of ever making it in academia. He also made it clear that he did not approve of students who got pregnant while still ostensibly in the process of getting a degree. The letter of rejection was one of the most tactless I have ever received and as a result I abandoned the whole project. The net result of all this was that I did not go back to university until I was fifty and completed a Masters in Social Work in 1990!
Our jobs at the school were to be house parents. There was no specific training for this role in those days, although there is now a full curriculum.
We were required to do two shifts a day out of three, and we had two days off per week. Ours were Monday and Tuesday and we often went into Edinburgh for this period and visited friends.
Our duties were to get the children up in the morning and supervise breakfast. While the children were in school my job, another girl and I did the washing. This was quite a big job as many of the children wet the bed. We had a minimal washing machine and no drier! We would hang out the sheets on an outside washing line. If it rained we had to take the damn things down again and make a further effort to hang them out again later in the day! At one point, Stephen rigged up a makeshift dryer with an electric heater and a fan in one of the basement rooms. A veritable fire hazard. We dared not leave it alone, so the saving in time was minimal.
Then, with a lady volunteer from the village, we did the mending and ironing. At this point the children wore their own clothes. These did not stand up very well to the rough outdoor play we encouraged so there was often a lot of mend
We supervised lunch and when the children returned to school we had a bit of a break. School only lasted until about 2:30 and if the weather was good we took some for a walk or Stephen played a rough game of soccer with the boys. Later on in our time at Harmeny, one of the community building consequences for bad behaviour was to mend the potholes in the driveway. The boys turned out to really enjoy this activity, although I suspect that Stephen did a great deal of the shovelling.
If we were on evening shift, we supervised a short period of study, then supper then bedtime .By 8:30 the children were meant to be settled; often this was difficult to achieve. After that we all met in the kitchen for a delicious supper and some good talk. I can’t remember who supervised overnight. As we had inherited the beer baron’s cook we were often fed quite exotic fare.
The cook was an older lady, or so she seemed to me then, and she was always complaining about the bad behaviour of the children. I did notice that she often slipped some of them a little extra treat now and then. We all knew that her bark was worse than her bite!
The two people who influenced us most in this setting were the senior housemother Miriam, and the headmaster Sidney Hill. Even although both Stephen and I had done courses in the Social work school, not much we had learned was useful in our new role. Psychological theory in those days was heavily influenced by Freud. His theories did seem a bit farfetched in this milieu. Behaviour Therapy did not seem adequate either. So we learned by doing, which is probably the best way to learn. One of the main themes running through all our instructions was that under no circumstance should we hit, belittle, or otherwise threaten the children .Given that both Miriam and Sidney were both Quakers, it is not surprising that this was the theme underpinning their whole approach to dealing with the children.
It is salutary to remember that back then there had been no exploration of child abuse as a phenomenan. No one seemed to have an inkling about sexual abuse either, at least in any of the literature . Parents disciplined their children in Scotland by a good hiding, often with a hair brush of other weapon. Most firmly believed that,” To spare the rod spoiled the child’. This attitude was prevalent in schools too, where the taws was used frequently. It was often used on the ’bad’ unruly boys in my school. I can still remember once being included with everyone else who forgot their lunch money. I was terrified!
Due to their background as Quakers, both Miriam and Sidney had a very strong belief in a non-violent approach to bringing up children. Sidney had been a conscientious objector during the war. He told us with glee that when he had to register to get married he had described himself as a’ swineherd’! It must have taken quite a lot of determination and courage to maintain this belief for the period of the war; also to re-establish himself in his profession when the war ended .Our farm had employed a number of ‘conshies’ in the war years. One I remember well, had been a concert pianist and had come to us as a cowman. I don’t think he knew one end of a cow from another, but he became quite the expert over time. He played our beautiful Ayrshire cows classical music in the firm belief that they let down their milk more willingly to Bach or Beethoven!
Miriam had worked in many of the devastated areas of Europe. She was part of a Quaker group who tried to save many of the abandoned babies that arrived from all corners. She described how, as these children were being prepared for transportation to safety, she and her co-workers would pin a little note on their blankets This would contain the only information known about them: where they were found, when, and any further insight into who their parents might be.
She was a very small person. Her eyesight was poor as she was an albino, but she never let any of these handicaps interfere with her compassionate caring for our children.
The children were very young, and by the time they came to us, they had been studied and assessed many times over. It is rather sad to realise that they had scarcely been in the school system for more than a year or so before their behaviour was deemed impossible.
They were both angry and despondent. Their acting out behaviour seemed to them useless against the powerful forces ranged against them. Their parents, society, the school system, even the few other children they would attempt to befriend were against them. This feeling of helplessness made them frustrated and the whole cycle would begin again.
Our task was to be sensitive and understanding about the roots of the anger and frustration while holding them to the consequences of their actions .Easier said than done!
One little girl I remember particularly because she was so small;, but made up for her small stature, by a belligerent stance against the world. Woe to anyone who told her what to do!
Getting her up in the morning was often a challenge . She would refuse to put on any of the clothes you laid out for her. Sometimes she would choose herself, albeit slowly and we were launched. Sometimes she sat hunched over on the bed without moving. Left alone when you had to attend to another child, she might manage to wreck the complete room. Our response was to stay with her to prevent any further acting out behaviour. Also to keep her company so that she did not feel rejected or punished. When she showed signs of movement our task was to help her put the room back together and proceed with the day. The message was, I understand your anger , but that was not a way to express it. In spite of our understanding, reparations are still your responsibility. Very seldom were we able to talk about what happened. Being able to name ones feelings came a lot later in the process of rehabilitation for most of our children.
Some children’s expression of anger was somewhat more dangerous. One little boy expressed himself by setting fire to railway embankments. When he ran away, which he did frequently, we would wait to hear reports on the news about where the fire was .We watched continually to see if he had matches. He was very good at sneaking them. As Stephen smoked in those days he had to keep his well hidden. In spite of our vigilance, he did once manage to set fire to a chest of drawers. Luckily Sidney intervened and threw the drawers out of the window and averted a fire.
Most of the children ran away. We were far out in the country adjacent to the Pentland Hills, a wide open space of moors and heather .Unable to navigate in this unfamiliar territory, they usually found their way back to Harmeny by nightfall.
I do remember, in the early days, taking a small group for a walk. I was full of enthusiasm for the health benefits of outdoor air and healthy exercise! By the time I struggled back to Harmeny every one of the children had disappeared. I tearfully reported to Sidney that all the pupils had melted into the hills! His response was a laconic,” They’ll come back when they are hungry,” and they did.
Sometimes the children retreated into a fantasy life. One young fellow was a dog and insisted on being treated as one. .Unfortunately he had a very long tail which really hindered his mobility and our capacity to move around him. To an outsider it would have looked somewhat strange to see a staff member solemnly stepping over an imaginary tail, or apologising for having accidently stepped on it.
My task, at one point, was to try to improve his table manners. As his usual method of eating was to lower his head to his plate and shovel the food in with his front, ‘paws”, I had a difficult challenge.
First, I tried to suggest that he be a very clever dog and do a very clever, ‘trick’ and eat like a human. That went over like a lead balloon. Then I tried an appropriate, ’dog treat’ . That did not work either. In the end, we resorted to the bottom line. in this community, dogs do not eat at the table, so you will have to go and eat elsewhere. He did get bored with only me as a companion. I don’t remember how it ended but luckily for me he got interested in a new ‘wheelie’. Stephen had devised this very intriguing machine for the boys out of old bicycle wheels. He then lost interest in being a dog.
I was an absolute failure with another boy. He was encropetic ( he soiled himself).This was quite a common difficulty in Scotland in those days,( possibly due to the usually pervading method of harsh discipline). Our instructions were to avoid all expressions of displeasure at this behaviour and merely to help him change and carry on with the day. He was very good at provoking anger and frustration. It was a goading behaviour which I now recognise as analogous to an abused woman provoking her abuser in order to get the expected beating. I got really annoyed with him one day and told him off. He gave me a sly sideways and satisfied look and promptly filled his pants. Needless to say, I had to be assigned elsewhere as I had succumbed to his method of paying back my aggression in a very satisfying way.
My husband Stephen really connected with the little boys.He had been a pretty disturbed boy himself. Like many children during the war he was evacuated at six years old to stay with a person he had never even met before. He figured that if he were very bad this lady, whom he came to love very much, would send him home! So he looked around to see what she seemed fond of, her precious display of ornaments, and broke them all into many pieces! Give this person her due, she did not get upset and in due time he settled down with her.
Stephen spent many days off at the municipal dump collecting useful cast offs. First, he brought bits of broken bicycles, especially wheels. Out of these the children and he devised a one wheel kind of Hoop with handles. These were simple enough that they could be imagined as all sorts of vehicles. Some were horses and some were tanks and some were hot rods. They were the great rage for a couple of months.
Then he used old iron bed rails to make a primitive rail road down a small hill towards the stream. After much work they also had a small trolley to go on the rails and whizzed down the hill at a very satisfactory speed. How no one was hurt I will never know.
Near the end of our stay I helped Stephen drive out two or three derelict cars which we put under the trees thinking they would make good play places. In about a month the children had reduced them to complete wrecks. In the end, Sidney had to hire men with a demolishing truck and metal cutting equipment to cut them up and cart them away.
All this time, I became more and more pregnant. The girls were very jealous. One said to me in no uncertain terms,’ ”I’ll kill that baby when it comes out”! This meant we had to find another place to live as I would not have felt safe living under the same roof as such vehement children, even if they were really quite small.
So we had to make plans!! But that is another part of the on-going story!
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