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I spent all of my childhood and teenage years in the Falls Road area of Belfast. I was there in 1969 when the simmering civil rights struggle erupted into full-scale insurgency war.
Some twenty-five years later, when my wife and children and I were safely ensconced in the leafy suburbs of middle-class York, and the conflict back home showed no signs of abating, I picked up a Sunday Telegraph magazine and saw my mother on the front cover, so close up that every wrinkle in her seventy year old face was clearly seen. She was in deeply serious conversation with a neighbour, and she was standing outside our former home, against the backdrop of the Republican graffiti-laden gable wall. Underneath was the caption: LIVING WITH A REPUTATION: THE TOUGHEST STREETS IN BRITAIN.
Wow! Isn't that amazing, living there all those years and not realising it was one of the toughest streets in Britain? How do they measure these things? (It's one of the best examples I can recall of a sensationalist press headline having no bearing at all to the character [nor to the characters] of the area it wishes to portray. I've still got the magazine with the cover).
I left school at fifteen and drifted for a few years. I got married and we had a family. Then I wrote a ghastly novel, which nevertheless, got me a place in the University of Ulster, doing English. I was a contemporary of another drifter at the same university, also doing English, Brian Keenan.
Then my wife and I and our three children left for York where we lived for over twenty years. York was bliss. The kids enjoyed it too, but they gradually perceived it as too boring and middle-class. All three of them soon left.
I got an M.Phil in Social Work at York, under the tutelage of the brilliant Professor Dorothy Whitaker. She taught me all I know about groups, and, how we function, or, how we should and should not function in groups. She is one of the three great social work educators in my life, along with Charlotte Lodge and Morwenna Toleman. I dedicated my second book Working With Child Sexual Abuse to these three women.
After qualifying, I worked in North Yorkshire Social Services for thirteen years. You don’t stay around thirteen years unless you have to, or, there’s something special about the place; which there certainly was in Selby where I was based: colleagues, work, learning, and increasingly, the novelty of getting a lot of material published. I was a regular contributor to Community Care and Social Work Today. I won the Community Care Travel Scholarship in two consecutive years, and spent two periods working in Calcutta and Los Angeles.
In 1987, I left Yorkshire and worked in Beeston, Leeds, for four years. This was the time when social services, the press, public and government were all concentrating on child sexual abuse. It was one of those periods of lunacy when untrained, unqualified and inexperienced leaders in social services unwittingly perpetrated terrible damage on innocent families and on the children they were supposed to be rescuing. My book Working With Child Sexual Abuse was to some extent a reaction against all that. It angered a good many people. A prominent Leeds paediatrician threatened to sue me because of some of its content. Everyone recognises now the damage that was done!
During those years at Leeds, I took time out and embarked on a lecture tour of the State of Victoria, Australia. I thought I was going to the farthest corners of the earth, but it felt as though I hadn't gone any further than round the corner, such was the distinctly British-like environment, in Melbourne in particular, and because of the number of Brits who were running child protection services at all levels.
In 1991, I returned to Belfast and joined Queen’s University. This was surely the opportunity to write and research as much as I wanted, but the reality was very different. Teachers and trainers at all levels were being increasingly subjected to a bureaucratic nightmare of daily assessment, evaluation and self-evaluation that literally drove some staff to the edge. But I enjoyed the teaching, and joining to the Conference circuit. I travelled quite a bit, speaking, debating, networking etc., and I did write a substantial amount.
I took early retirement in 2000. I said I would never write anything again, especially about childcare. But retirement coincided with the arrival of our grandchildren. They were literally presenting me with a fully equipped laboratory in which I could observe and film them in the most natural environment. All my knowledge and experience of childcare had to be revisited, critically analysed, and rewritten.
Between 2001 and 2009 I wrote another three textbooks, and of course the novel, which has taken some five years. I also got involved in the campaign in support of Sally Clark, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice this country has ever seen. The circumstances of her death remain a shocking testimony to the dishonesty and arrogance of so-called childcare experts, and the slavish, ingratiating following they somehow still manage to generate amongst gullible professionals.
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