The Homecoming

The Channel 4 documentary 'The Homecoming' that was on last night was excellent but still rather hard to watch.

Journalist Rachel Roberts had decided to track down some of the other children from her children's home in Doncaster, and ended up going on a very personal journey of self-discovery. 

The findings were often sad and grim - the parents who couldn't cope, the families left abandoned, a terrible sense of children's lives being desolated by their parents' actions. Often, this tiny children's home was the only stable environment they had ever known before being fostered off or sent to larger homes, or split up from their siblings. Roberts herself was fostered out with her sister, but her brother was sent somewhere else, and at 38 she still lives alone and admits to having difficulties with relationships.

She wasn't the only one. The scars of the past had clearly haunted the others. She found two brothers living together in a caravan, another three siblings in a council house, an ex-con, wrecked marriages, a suicide, and - most startling of all - her own half brother, landlord of the Becher's Brook pub, right opposite the children's home: a half brother of whose existence she had been totally unaware until the previous day.

It turned out that her father had abandoned his first family for her mother, raised another family and then, when she left him, couldn't cope and placed all of the children in a care home. In one instance the two families had even overlapped. It struck me as deeply Freudian that her half-brother, clearly a deeply damaged man, every day stands and looks out at the care home in which he lived (the Bechers has no fond memories for me, incidentally, as I was beaten up behind it when I was 11).

One reason that I was in two minds whether to see the documentary was because I lived near that home. The producer emailed me some months ago to ask if I remembered any of the children and I said I didn't, although it was only a few streets away, but I gave her some other names I thought might be helpful. 

But I was wrong. As it turned out, I did know two of them and it was an enormous shock to see them on television, as it was to see their photos in my old school uniform, and the headstone in the graveyard I played in as a child (our house backed onto it). I didn't recognise them as adults, but I certainly did as children, especially Florence - for starters, she was the first black person that I ever knew. We were at the same school but I didn't know she was at the home - I just thought she'd disappeared one day. 

I'd told the producer that I was glad Roberts' recollections of the home were happy ones (the people who ran it turned out to be the salt of the earth), but that what I remembered was discrimination. At school the children were treated as if they were guilty of some sin, back in the days when divorce or 'broken home' was a dirty word. These kids that came and went often had to sit at the back of the class, with the gypsy children - another set of kids nobody wanted. 

Thanks heavens, the documentary wasn't all bad news. There was the odd happy marriage among the interviewees, some determinedly caring parents and a couple of successful careers. But the overwhelming sense was of adults struggling forever against the damage done to them as children.  "I've not got many memories," said one, "because I choose not to have them." Can't say I blame him.