Children

How I came to be at the Caldecott Community

November 1942, the stench of battle and death hung over the deserts of North Africa like a cloud, the battle of El Alamein was drawing to a close and the Allies were landing in Tobruk. A few hundred miles north along the coast, away from the noise of war and the smell of death and destruction, there were two people staying in a small village called Ain Zhalta, 1,200 feet up at the foot of one of the largest cedar groves in the Chouf district of Lebanon, and it was paradise. The two had so far survived the four years of the war in Europe. He was an RAF fighter pilot who had been shot down twice, once in the Atlantic and once over Malta, and she a young WRN officer whose ship had been torpedoed and who was able to save herself and one of the drowning sailors. Now the two were on leave. Seven months later the WRN was flown by the RAF to Britain and taken to a London clinic to have her baby.

The WRN was threatened with discharge from the Navy but the Pilot intervened and threatened his resignation if she were discharged. She was not discharged and the two went their separate ways back to war duties, and the baby was sent to a nursery in London.

 At eight months old the baby was evacuated to the country in case of more bombing in the city.

Summer 1945 saw the end of the war in Europe and survivors began to return home and try to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives. The pilot went back to his wife and child, and the WRN had met her future husband and wrestled with the problem of what to do about the child being cared for in the country.

 I was that child and many years later I was told a man dressed in an RAF uniform came to see me one day in the country. I didn’t see him again for thirty years.

 There was a lady who visited and brought me some clothes and we went out somewhere. I remember a room with a type-writer.

In 1947 the Home and all the children moved to a beautiful house in the Kent countryside; this was now my home. There were lots of grown ups who I looked upon as my mothers, a great big house with a big family, and I accepted from an early age, knowing no better, that everyone lived in big houses with lots of mothers.

 The summer holidays were spent with different people and places, but most of those memories are muddled or forgotten but for one: I spent part of a summer holiday with my mother. She had two little boys; one was still a baby who cried a lot, and there was a man who came home in the evening and let me play on the eldest boy’s tricycle in the garden, and we had marmite on fried bread for breakfast; I had never had that before. I never went back.

 One sunny afternoon, I must have been about six years old, I was dressed up in my Sunday best and was told my mother was coming to see me. One of the grown ups (Miss D) put down a rug at the far end of the first lawn near the beech trees and I called my mother to come and watch me hanging upside down from a rope between two trees holding on with my hands and my legs wrapped around it. I remember feeling she wasn’t very interested. Sitting on the rug my mother gave me a book as a birthday present, ‘The Water Babies’. Then the grown up told me my mother had to go as she had a train to catch. As she walked away I watched for minute, and then I remember thinking ‘I want to go back to my family now’ and I didn’t like the look of the book anyway. It would be 30 years before I saw her again.

Fractured memories of early childhood come and go, and the very early happy days remembered always seemed to be sunny days. One particular memory, I can’t remember where I was going or how old I was, I was put on a train in the guard’s van with my name and destination on a label hung around my neck. The guard sat me up on this tall chair and I could see in a mirror all the way along the top of the train to the engine with the smoke pouring out of the chimney and blowing back along the top of the carriages, and the bridges coming before we got to them. It was magical.

 The first few years of my life in the Nursery at Mersham le Hatch were ruled by cocoa with skin on it, and struggling with cold chewy meat mixed with salty tears, and hair washing night, and being scared of being caught talking in the dormitory after lights out and having the mouth washed out with soap if heard being rude; but there were quiet moments before bed-time when we were read aloud to, sitting on the floor in our pyjamas and dressing gowns in front of a crackling fire that was nice.

 At the age of 6 I was moved to the ‘The Big House’, to the Junior Study playroom, a new adult to look after us, a new dormitory and some new children who I didn’t know but we all learned to get on pretty quickly. Life to me seemed to be ruled by bells and school and meals and bad nights of sleep walking and nightmares. In my sleeping walking I was found wandering around the house searching for light and the way out, and not knowing where I was (my sleep walking continued into my early thirties). My nightmares were about monsters and big houses that I didn’t recognise but I was watching them burn down and me ending in tears knowing I now had nowhere to live. I have to say that nobody at Caldecott seemed to ask or question as to why I was having these bad times, and I was just taken back to bed. Of course I didn’t understand why it was happening, and I don’t think that the staff were equipped to understand it either, so I just kept my fears to myself.

 We had a ‘Star Chart’ on the mantle-piece and in the mornings the head of the dormitory, a senior girl, would tell the house mother if we had been good enough to earn a star. At the end of term the person with the most stars got a reward. I don’t remember ever getting to the ‘top of stars’; I found it difficult to be good all night.

 As a child, when I was sent, as many of us were, to an adult to talk over my problems, even as young as I was, I knew that they wouldn’t understand how I was feeling - “how can they when they are not me” is what I said to myself. I didn’t know myself and therefore didn’t know how to express my feelings in words, so I learnt to tell them what they wanted to hear, saying words that I’d heard adults use like ‘hate, ‘unloved’ ‘angry’ ‘sad‘ ‘nobody cares’ ‘you don’t understand’. Understanding only comes with adulthood as I found out; it’s then that talking things over helped me to resolve some of the problems and understand why I felt the way I did because of the circumstances, and that “none of it was your fault“.

 As an after-thought I wonder if, had I lived in a stable loving family, would I have had the same problems; was I born with an angry and sad personality, whatever the circumstances.

The memories of the next five years were mostly a mixture of nice days and gloomy days. On sunny days we spent our free time climbing beech trees and jumping in and out of the old Ice house that had lost its roof, and running through the remnants of trenches beneath the beech trees, dug by soldiers as an exercise and for a possible front line defence during WW2, now half submerged by 10 years of earth and leaf litter. The house had been taken over by the MOD during the war and if you managed to sneak out of bounds onto the roof from one of the top floor dormitories you could find graffiti and soldiers’ names carved into the parapets.

 I hated school lessons. I could read and write from the age of 5, but I found it hard to understand numbers or to tell the Time (I still do in my 60‘s) so I was pleased when it came to Wednesdays when we went on walks on sunny days down through the Deer Park, then over the Elephant stile and across the fields to the village shop to spend our 9d on a bottle of Tizer or lemon sherbet tubes with liquorice straws; and on the way back played hide and seek in the bracken that grew high above our heads, and chased the vipers out of the long grass, and swung up and down on low hanging branches of the trees in the Park. Some days we went on really long walks accompanied by a pony and Trap and we could take turns riding in the Trap.

 In high summer we had the annual Gymkhana. We all had to learn to ride and look after the ponies that lived at the house during term times. I didn’t really like horse riding but everyone had to participate. I was put on a small pony to enter the potato race in one of the Gymkhanas but the animal didn’t want to walk or run so I had to get off and pull it round the course. I came last!

 On gloomy cold rainy winter days the Wednesday walks were miserable. We kept to the roads and wore very flimsy black rain coats and wellies that slapped and chafed against your legs causing sore red rings on the skin, and your long socks, in spite of garters that were supposed to keep them up, slowly slid down until they bunched up under your feet and made walking painful; and if you didn’t get back to the house within sight of the leader you were given a ‘plain tea’ (no jam on the bread and butter).

 One day the second bell was ringing for lunch and we should have been in the house at the first bell, so we ran like the wind. Skidding round the corner I lost my footing and fell on my knee on the newly tarred and gritted drive. I screamed when I looked down at my knee. It was a dreadful sight. My screams brought one of the carers who picked me up and ran up the fire escape to the sick room. There was no pain that I remember, just panic at the sight of my knee. I was driven to the local doctor in town who patched me up and sent me back, but the knee would not heal and I ended up in the local hospital for an operation, where they gave me gas; and I remember the doctors and nurses began to blow up like balloons and float around me, and when I woke up my leg was in a splint and wrapped in bandages. It hurt I remember, but I was quite proud and made the most of the attention I got and hobbled around all summer. I’m not sure what they did to the knee but I still have a horrible scar and cannot kneel without discomfort. Later at the school I went to, I didn’t have to kneel like the other girls while saying the Rosary in the school hall.

One day when I was nearly nine years old I was taken into town to a small one-story building. I wasn’t sure what it was all about but it turned out to be some sort of Court, and I was allowed to go up the steps to a little dock. I remember being fascinated by the smooth shiny wood rail, and only remember someone saying “...mother” and me saying “yes” and suddenly I had a new mother and a new name, and then it was over. As we were in town we went to buy some new name tabs at the Haberdasher’s for my clothes. At the house we were given numbers and I was number 11 (I liked being number 11) but now I was to be given name tapes with a new name. I was asked if I would like to keep my original name as a middle name and although I was still quite young it was an adamant “yes”. In that one day I had become someone else.

 Now I was a new person and the Deputy Head of the Home was my new mother, but I felt confused and different; I didn’t know why and felt the other children wouldn’t like me anymore and talked to myself a lot about who I was. I cried a lot inside because I didn’t want to show anyone that I was sad as even then I was aware many of the children had more to be sad about than me.

 I vowed then never to let anyone see me outwardly cry, only cry inside, but that can be a real physical pain in the pit of the stomach; so instead of crying I would just let it out by being angry. It didn’t help by Miss D calling me in now and then, showing me letters from my birth mother to her, saying that she had had another baby, and giving me a gift that my mother sent for my birthday, as she often did. I remember thinking “so what, I don’t care”. Nobody, that I can remember, ever asked me how I felt, or was I troubled or unhappy about it; and were my frightening episodes of sleepwalking, bad nightmares and bouts of uncontrollable anger, that trouble me even now when I’m sad, related. So I just learned to live with them.

 At the end of each term all the children would get excited as they packed their cases and I would watch with a deep sense of loneliness as they all boarded coaches at the back of the house, smiling, shouting and waving as the coaches drove away leaving me standing there on my own wondering where they were all going and longing to be part of it; it looked exciting. I have since learned that many of those children on the coaches were going back to troubled homes for their holidays.

 I didn’t always stay with my adopted mother during the holidays as they went away on holiday, so I was often sent elsewhere.

 Suddenly at the age of 11 I was wrenched away from the only home and family I had ever known. I was to be sent to what I can only describe now as my own personal purgatory, a convent school as a boarder. When my birth mother agreed to my adoption, she had asked that I should be brought up as a Catholic. Her wishes were granted, and I think they prepared me for it, but I don’t remember; so it was only when I was taken to London to buy my expensive uniform for my new school that I knew that I was going away somewhere. The day arrived and I was prepared to do anything to stay where I was. I didn’t want to go and tried to hide in a holly tree so that they couldn’t take me to the train, to no avail.

 My new school term always finished before the Caldecott’s so I was returned to the Community before their holidays began, usually for about two weeks; but never again felt welcome or able to fit in anymore. I was no longer one of them and the anger deepened.

PURGATORY

From the very first day to my new school, when all the girls met in London to board the train to School, I refused to cry; I just became bitter and angry and lost, thinking only that I was being sent away as a punishment because I was a bad child or there was something wrong with me.

 The Convent turned out to be a prison for me and I had to make the immediate decision on the first night that I would just have to stick it out; hang on to my sanity; don’t count the days or the years, and don’t think too much; just do the minimum that was asked of me just to survive until I was let out.

 Before the very first morning classes of the Term began, I decided it was important that my new classmates needed to know that I was really somebody else, not who they thought I was. I stood up at the front of the class, got their attention, and wrote my real name on the blackboard, and underneath my new name. I don’t think the class took any notice but it made me feel better. I had to rub it out quickly before the teacher came in and it was never mentioned again.

 I was not a model prisoner and spent many hours in trouble, sitting out in the corridors with my desk during lessons, missing out of watching films in the school Hall at weekends; spending many Friday evenings going to confession and making up all sorts of sins to the priest that I hadn’t committed; not being chosen to join the Hockey or Tennis teams on away games. I was a good athlete, a good Tennis and Hockey player, and it really hurt, but I continued to cause trouble. It seemed to me that it was the only way to get attention from the staff. It didn’t work, and I was the only one who suffered. The teaching was second to none and lessons that I did attend amazingly taught me a lot and stayed with me, and without realising it has served me all my adult life.

 I spent a lot of time on my own in the School’s wonderful old library (once used by Darwin). It was meant to be a punishment, but I had a thirst for knowledge, but couldn’t cope with the structured classroom teaching; and used the time to educate myself by reading books by the dozen, and by the age of 13 I had read authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Hardy. I read books I didn’t understand, I studied a world Atlas and read the Oxford Dictionary but one thing I was told I had to do, was to learn the Catechism from cover to cover, with the exception of the articles of the 4th Commandment ‘Honour your Father and your Mother’, for which I was very grateful - one less to learn!

 I would occasionally receive a letter from my mother which made me feel angry and determined to cause trouble for the adults, although I didn’t really know why. Nobody ever came to visit me and sometimes I would stand on the edge of the school grounds and plan my escape, but realised I had nowhere to run to. I may have been wrong, but I felt there was no place anymore at the Caldecott Community for me.

 I tried for those three and half years not to allow myself to self destruct. It was hard. I would often get out of bed in the night when the rest of the dormitory were sound asleep and stand at the open window for ages trying to comprehend the vastness of the sky and stars; the tears would trickle down my cheeks. I wanted to be up there and out there but I didn’t know how or why. I imagined that this is what being in prison must feel like. I found it such a profound feeling it made me very sad. I was only 13.

 The beds in the dormitories were set out like hospital cubicles with curtains all round. They were known as ‘cells’, with a footlocker for your dressing gown, pyjamas and slippers, a chair and a bowl and jug. To wash you joined a queue at a communal sink up stairs on the top landing to fill your jug to put in the bowl in your cell. If you were too far down the queue the water was cold by the time you got to the sink.

 Having washed, you then emptied your dirty water into a bucket that stood in the empty fireplace at the end of the dormitory, being careful someone else’s scummy water didn’t splash onto your slippers. There was a gap between you and the next bed where you had to hang a ‘foot curtain’. This was hooked up once you were in bed so that the nun on duty doing her rounds before lights-out could see you in bed. With permission you could request one day a week for a ‘lie in’ and you would hang a dressing gown cord on the foot-curtain and were left to sleep when the bell went for Mass at 6.30 in the morning. If there was no cord hanging up a nun would tap you on the foot and say “Dominus Vobiscum” you had to answer “et cum spirit a tuo” then get up and put all the bed clothes onto the chair by your bed and join the jug queue. I discovered I could hide by curling up on the chair and putting the bed clothes over the top of me, and when everyone had gone, get back into bed, it worked for a while until the Prefect discovered that the number of people in the pews in chapel did not tie up with the list they had of those having a lie in. I ended up having to sit in the back pew every morning next to the Head Mistress!

 At breakfast if you had been reported by the head of the dormitory for talking (no talking between 8pm and 8am) or causing a disturbance, you joined the ‘penance queue’ and confessed your sin. Depending on the severity of the crime you could be put on the ‘penance table’ on your own in the middle of the refectory. I got used to it; it didn’t bother me. Rescue came when after a couple of times of being sent back to the Caldecott by the despairing Head, and unfortunately returned again with a promise to be good, it was at last suggested I should leave. I was 15.

 Did the Caldecott Community in its early years, help myself and others to come to terms with our fractured lives?

In one way we were shown there was more to life than just surviving and how it was possible to break away from the turmoil of the environment that brought us to the Community in the first place. I know that many children that I met many years later, as adults, were able to take advantage of this and change their lives for the good, but some never found their way out.

 Was the Community at fault? Were there too many children with too many different needs, all trying to live together? Maybe the Caldecott was not flexible enough in its thinking about these different needs. Could more contact and involvement in working with a child’s home-life as a family unit have benefited some children? Perhaps some children were in the wrong place to help with their individual needs, but I believe Caldecott really wanted and thought they could help every child that came to the Community.

 Miss Leila always said how sad she was that some children hadn’t stayed with the Community long enough for them to feel settled and ready to face the world outside with confidence and a belief in themselves.

 The Caldecott was a unique experiment for its time, but was it the right approach? Now it seems that ideas are changing, as each decade passes and society wants to learn more about what children (and families) in a crisis need or don’t need. Have those that matter learned anything useful from the Caldecott Community experience?

 A list of activities and experiences available for both boys and girls at the Community was a revolutionary idea and the thinking behind it was that every child would benefit in some way and would hopefully find their niche in life. All activities were for both girls and boys.

Horse riding

Husbandry

Gardening

Wood work (boys only)

Music

Sewing

Weaving

Youth Hostelling

Swimming

Camping

Walking

Cricket

Dancing

Singing

Acting

Cooking

Helping in the nursery with the little ones.

Housework

How did we benefit from all the opportunities open to us?

 For many of us we learnt that the animals living at the Community were completely dependent on us for their survival, a big lesson for some children, including me.

 There were the occasional unkind things done to small animals in a fit of anger but the peers of a perpetrator were quick to come down on them.

 The Caldecott had pigs, chickens, geese, horses, a donkey, silk worms, guinea pigs, rabbits, mice, dogs, tadpoles collected by the children and outdoor cats that lived in the barn but all needed to be fed and looked after.

 Patience was another thing to learn for many children. Helping to plant something in the Kitchen Garden for eating and then wait for it to grow so that you could pick it, take to the kitchen and see it end up on everybody’s plate at meal times.

 The Garden had every kind of fruit, vegetable and flowers you could think of and every child had an opportunity to work in the garden if they wished to.

 We also learned things that we never knew we were capable of doing and also things that we never wanted to do ever again.

For those children, myself included, who were at the Community for more than a few years, knew each other so well that we remain friends for life and have sometimes called upon each other for support in times of crisis in later life.

NOTES

See "Audrey Coningham Roche, Anne Coningham Naylor's Mother"

In an oral history interview held at the Planned Environment Therapy Archive, we learn that Anne was evacuated to Hyde House in Dorset at the age of 9 months, and that Caldecott was her home until she was 15, when she was sent to Switzerland by Leila Rendel to help her learn French. She worked in the Caldecott Nursery for a time, and (perhaps an inheritance for her mother) was a very good athlete - fastest in the county and a junior Wimbledon tennis.

The Catholic convent girls' boarding and day school she describes in her memories was Combe Bank (now a co-educational independent school, Radnor House Sevenoaks).