The Children's Home

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In 1936, three years before World War Two near London, England, a four-year-old boy suffered the loss of his father who died of coronary heart disease at the early age of forty-five. His mother, widowed with six children, whose meager income was derived only from dressmaking and alterations, could not afford to keep them all in the rented house. Consequently the four youngest were sent to an orphanage run by Methodist Clergy, over a hundred miles north in the Warwickshire Midlands. Upon arrival they were segregated into separate houses and seldom permitted to see each other except from a distance, for almost a decade. Religious indoctrination was a daily routine with early morning prayers plus mandatory church attendance three times every Sunday. "House Mothers" known as Sisters frequently administered strict punishment, bordering on child abuse, for the slightest disobedience. The "Discipline Master" and Governor of The Children's Home doled out even more severe physical treatment for major infringements. Talking without permission, bed wetting, failure to eat every inedible morsel of food at meal times or the inability to complete a required task satisfactorily were met with beatings, isolation or the denial of meals and playtime. A continuing lack of sympathy or the unfulfilled need to approach someone for understanding caused loneliness, withdrawal, anger and bewilderment. During the Second World War, a further lack of donations meant that children were required to wear handed down, threadbare clothes, regardless of the intended sex of the wearer. Feet were forced into ill-fitting footwear and socks only worn on Sundays or special events, when local patrons, parents or benefactors attended. Boys in itchy, linen nightgowns slept on thin horsehair-stuffed mattresses, a haven for lice, laid on lead-painted iron-framed cots in rows, on cold bare wood dormitory floors. Early in 1940 situations deteriorated even more with the introduction of food rationing, r