“Imagine her in the snow globe of the first winter when the snow falls for months, when the wind is a coyote at the barn doors and the Scotch pines are furred like great bears. The water in the trough is ice, the little speckle-bellied fish motionless in the stream and the only sounds in the muffled woods are of snow falling (but that is no sound at all) and Eliza's breath on the wet wool of her collar (and that too is no sound at all). The whiteness changes everything, everything is wiped away: the backroads, the churches, the dead returning to loam in the Malagawatch cemetery, even the lake itself has been drunk by whiteness. Only she has colour - that sorrel hair like a bird from the old country.”
When poet Liz Berry stumbles onto a hidden part of her own family's story, it leads her into an investigation of a lost chapter of British history; a story that takes us from the slums of Edwardian Birmingham to the snowbound hills of Nova Scotia.
In 1907, twelve years old and newly orphaned, Eliza Showell (Liz's great aunt) was placed at the Middlemore Children's Emigration Home in Birmingham. Her brothers - little older than her and unable to provide for her - were forced to sign the papers for her admission. Within months, Eliza was sent via ship to Canada, where she was placed in indentured domestic service in rural Nova Scotia. She would never return to Britain or see her brothers again.
Between 1860 and 1960, over 130,000 of Britain's poorest and most vulnerable children were forcibly emigrated to distant parts of the British colonies to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants. They were known as Home Children. It is estimated that one in ten Canadians is descended from a 'Home Child'.
They were sent by child-care agencies, religious missions and philanthropic organizations. It was believed that they were giving the children the gift of a better life. Yet on arrival, Home Children were separated from any remaining family, worked only for their board and many were poorly treated. Although some managed to build the promised 'better life' for themselves, many carried the effects of their loss and ill-treatment throughout their lives.
In 2010, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official apology on behalf of the UK Government to the child migrants - "We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back, and we are sorry that the voices of those children were not heard."
Liz's new book, The Home Child (Chatto & Windus, 2023), imagines Eliza's journey through an incredible new series of poems that reads like a novel. In this radio feature, we hear poems from the book and accompany Liz as she follows in Eliza's footsteps; visiting the site of the Emigration Homes in Birmingham, speaking to local historians and descendants of other 'Home Children', and making a visit to the Birmingham Archives to view records of Eliza and hundreds of others like her.
With the voices of Lori Oschefski of Home Children Canada and Valerie Hart of the Balsall Heath Local History Society, co-author of The Lost Children.
Poems from The Home Child written and read by Liz Berry, with poems in Eliza's voice read by Keira Langowska-Gadd
Original music composed and performed by John Matthias. Recorded by Dan Smith.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio