Liz Berry’s first poetry collection, 2014’s Black Country, fused the personal and political with disarming tenderness, its soaring imagery and soft dialect words from the West Midlands making beautiful whorls in the grain and flow of its music. The same was true of her poetry pamphlet, The Republic of Motherhood, in 2018. Now comes The Home Child, a novel in poetry: not continuous narrative, but a sequence of lyrical snapshots illuminating a story that is not only heartbreaking but also, essentially, true.
The Home Child is the story of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell. When her mother died in 1908, Eliza was packed off at the age of 12 from a children’s emigration home in Birmingham to rural Nova Scotia, and put to work as an indentured domestic servant. She never returned, never raised a family, never saw her brothers again, and died in a care home. Between 1860 and 1960, Britain sent more than 100,000 “home children” to Canada. They were orphans, or had families too poor to care for them. In 2010, Canada’s Year of the British Home Child, Berry discovered Eliza’s small gravestone, paid for by her employers, in Cape Breton. After losing her mother and her childhood home, Eliza was pursued by the irony of that word “home” right to the grave.
Philanthropists thought emigration would give the children a better life, but it was a callous, ill-supervised scheme, with a whiff of the blindly philanthropic Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House. Many children were appallingly treated, and worked all their lives for only their board. When Gordon Brown was prime minister, he apologised to the children and their families on behalf of the British government. “We are sorry,” he said, “that their voices were not heard.”
Berry has redressed this, and given Eliza a voice. She possesses one photo of Eliza, standing alone in a field in a black coat. Drawing on interviews with other home children, she has invented for Eliza a poignant story and lyrical interior life. Some of the poems are Eliza’s excruciatingly censored early letters to her brothers. “My people am farmers / and decent enough but work me so hard/ my bones crack at night /… I am to go to school. / Will you send for me? / me news from home / for I am – quite well / and happy and ever so / lonely grateful, yes ever so.”
The cruelty is intensified, but also redeemed, by Eliza’s aborted love story. “And slowly we’m sweethearts / atween the wet grass all river-licked, / lime dust in our hair/ and both of us so frightened, / blind as moles. But wanting / something. Wanting. / We’m side-by-side on the grass, / my barefeet in the water / bowing our heads, gentle / as osses at the water-trough.”
“Home” proves to be other people, the feelings you have for them, and when you lose them, the memory of those feelings. The Black Country word for “home” is wum. When Eliza thinks that she has lived her whole life without a home, “I send myself back to that hour in the woods / when he first took my fingers / and touched them to a leaf. / Feel it, he said, They call it a lamb’s ear. / He was my wum then.” The whole book is a profound act of witness to a long injustice, and a beautifully crafted conjuring of a life lived as truly as possible.
• Home Child by Liz Berry is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
