Courtesty Shirley Kilgour
Beverly, second from front, and other girls at Florence Booth's Children's Home saying their prayers before bed.
A horrific tale of abuse of children in care half a century ago emerges in a new book, In the Hands of Strangers. Author Beverly Wardle- Jackson talks to Diana Dekker.
Beverly Wardle-Jackson tells the distressing story of living in the Wellington Salvation Army's Florence Booth Children's Home at the age of eight and being regularly thrashed for chewing her fingernails. She was on the way to becoming a state ward. The inspections happened after bath time and on one particularly terrible day she was so worried about the upcoming inspection that she peed in the bath.
Wardle-Jackson, 62, writes in her book, In the Hands of Strangers: "All day at school it had been on my mind, and I cried the whole way home, because I knew that within an hour's time I would be in deep trouble. Bath time came and I lined up with the other girls to wait my turn. I hadn't felt the need to pee before I got in the bath, but the fear of what was to follow proved too much for me, and I just couldn't hold on.
Richard Cosgrove/Fairfax NZ
Chrsitchurch woman Beverly Wardle-Jackson's life started off badly and went that way for years. She reveals all in a new book.
"Lieutenant [the Salvation Army officer] saw what I was doing and grabbed me by the arm, hauling me from the bath. I was naked, wet and crying with fear as [she] thrashed me all over my back, bottom, arms and legs. Bright red welts appeared on my upper legs and thighs, and white hand marks tinged in red covered the rest of my body. It hurt so much I couldn't help screaming.
Although she had thrashed me before, this was the worst and most prolonged incident. After she had thrashed me, I cried and cried, seeking comfort from someone, anyone . . . but there was no-one."
"I was beaten a lot there, " Wardle- Jackson says, "for things I didn't really understand. You had to learn Bible texts and on a Sunday you had to sit there and if you hadn't learned the texts you were taken out of the room and thrashed. Simple things at the time, when I look back.
Courtesy of Shirley Kilgour
Girls at the Florence Booth Children's Home practising songs to sing at the Salvation Army Annual Congress. Beverly is the blonde girl in the centre.
"People say the baby boomers had the best lives ever. Some of us certainly didn't."
Wardle-Jackson has been long and happily married and lives in Christchurch, but her life started badly and went on that way for years. She was born in a Waipawa caravan park, the fourth of 10 children of an unreliable mother who moonlighted as a prostitute and sometimes left the children to their own devices at night. Their father went in and out of the family picture. "He tried his best, " she says.
Soon her mother had moved in with Wardle-Jackson's maternal grandmother, in Johnsonville.
Courtesy of Shirley Kilgour.
Beverly (far right) with some of her sisters and cousins on a rare visit to an uncle's house in Upper Hutt.
"I don't know why but I have a memory I don't think people believe. I can remember back when I was 3 years old and put in a cot and not being able to play with my brother and sisters. I found out later we were living with my grandmother in a state house, a one- bedroom house. She was not supposed to have people living there. My mother turned up with four children, me the youngest. I have horrible memories of being in a cot and not being allowed to make a noise, day after day after day. My mother and grandmother would be listening to the radio and if I made a noise my grandmother would hold a shoe up."
She doesn't know if social welfare authorities demanded the children go into care, first in the Salvation Army home, or if her mother gave up on them and dumped them on whoever would have them, charity or state.
"I don't know if she called social welfare. She quite possibly did. We were never told things. I never knew a lot of the reasons for why things would happen."
She doesn't think the size of the family was to blame. People had large families in those days, she says, and they coped. She thinks her father tried his best when he was there "but at that stage there was this thing about fathers and custody of daughters. We weren't allowed to live with him and we were not encouraged to see him". And no matter how dysfunctional her family was, "they were my family and I wanted to be with them, not with strange staff".
Wardle-Jackson's parade through institutions took her and her sisters to the Miramar Girls Home, where she was separated from them. She was 12 and now a state ward. She began to bunk school. Running away became her only control over her situation.
"The only way to get out of the system to me, at my age, was to run away. I thought I could round up my family and we'd all live together. I see it now as childish dreams, but at the time it was something I so much wanted."
Running away was to eventually incur extreme punishment. She was sent around state homes, Miramar to Christchurch to Fareham House in the Wairarapa, where she recalls sexual abuse by the local vicar charged with preparing her and others at the institution for confirmation. She told no- one.
"We didn't know where to turn to. There was no-one to support, no-one to tell."
From there, a sad teenager who punched someone who tripped her up, she graduated into the mental health arena.
She writes of her thoughts as, frightened and furious, she was carted off from Fareham House in an ambulance: "Porirua hospital? Wasn't that the place they sent mad people to? They think I am mad and they want to lock me up in the madhouse. What have I done? Why are they doing this to me? I'm only 14! I suddenly thought about my mother and father. What would they say if they could see what was happening to me! Would they even care? The tears flowed again. Nobody cared about me or wanted to help me. These strangers could do whatever they wanted to me and there was nothing I could do to stop them."
A mental institution was one way of keeping control of a damaged teenager. True to form, she escaped, with another teenage girl, and they were both subjected to a dose of shock treatment following their capture.
"The electric shock treatment was for punishment more than anything else. They gave it to me and Wendy on the same day after we absconded."
Another escape later and she was locked for a time in the forensic ward, with the criminally insane, where she was soon attacked by one of the patients. On and off, she was in Porirua hospital, where she began cutting herself, for about three years.
"Porirua hospital was a dreadful, horrible place, certainly no place for children."
One break from the hospital was spent with her mother and her boyfriend. She says he raped her, though no-one believed her.
Not all the young people she knew from institutions had the happy ending, marriage and stability, that Wardle-Jackson did. Her friend, Evelyn, a state ward also incarcerated in Porirua hospital from Fareham House, "never made it out of the system".
"They locked her in a cell naked and straightjacketed. She was only 12 or 13 years old. I used to sneak in and look through the little peep-hole when she was tied up in a straitjacket for a month and had to stay in the room. I think it sent her mad. She's never come right. She was a relatively normal kid taken off her mother when her father died. Her mother had a drink problem. She's still in psychiatric care.
"A huge percentage of kids' lives were damaged and they didn't come right and were in mental health care or prison the rest of their lives. They never had a chance.
"I know these things happened. I lived with them all my life. It's a part of social history that should never be repeated. And this story should be out there on behalf of all state wards.
"You hear snippets of what happened to kids. I wanted to put the whole story together. I felt it was a story never told, a continuous story of someone's life and a very hard book to write."
Before the book she "hadn't written anything at all". She hadn't even talked about her experiences to her husband.
"I was so ashamed of how my life had been I kept it inside for years and years and years. I told him one day, told him the whole story."
With his support, she did a Canterbury University extension study class, Gifting Your Stories, and the tutor "taught me a voice to write".
Wardle-Jackson was shrugged off from institutional life when, at 17, she became pregnant with the first of her four children to her first, off-again on- again, partner. She met her husband two decades ago and and they married soon after. They have seven children and 10 grandchildren between them.
"The last 20 years have been the happiest years of my life.
"I tried not to make it too sad, " she says of the book. "I put some of the good times into it. I made friends among the girls and we're still friends today. I don't see so much of them now. Most of them never got out of the system."
Her mother died last year, aged 86. "I never went to the funeral. I had no relationship with her. All my life I never forgave her for what she did to our family."
Does she lay blame?
"I think both the state and my parents. I can't really blame one or the other for what happened to me. When the state was holding us I would rather have lived at home in poverty than what I had to endure.
"I do blame the state for what I had to suffer, but not any more. I don't feel bitter. I feel at peace now. For many years I felt tormented. I used to re-live being locked up. Some of the punishments haunted me for years. I had no-one to talk to so bottled them up."
- Your Weekend
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