Fiction featuring Care Experience The Memoirs of a Survivor Doris Lessing 1974 The Memoirs of a Survivor is a dystopian novel. A future modern city is falling apart and there are gangs of people trying to survive in the face of food shortages and swarms of rats. An unnamed narrator—middle-aged, well-educated—is watching this from inside her flat. One day a 12 year old girl, Emily Cartright, is left with her. Where the narrator is considering migrating too, now she feels compelled to stay. As she takes the task of caring for Emily seriously, Emily also provides the opportunity for the narrator to reflect on her own childhood and adolescence. In effect, the narrator comes to mother herself. Aside from Emily, there’s a home for other children in the story, a home where Emily spends considerable time caring for children whose parents have died or abandoned them. Gerald—likely modelled on Roger Diski, Jenny’s one time husband—a young man in his early 20s, has set this up External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Who Cares?: Memories of a Childhood in Barnardo's Fred Fever 1994 Following a suicide attempt, the author began to re-examine his childhood, spent in Dr Barnardo's children's homes, foster homes and hostels. He gained access to his files and found them to be incomplete and misleading. This book describes the misery of his childhood and his life since then. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Prince Philip: A turbulent childhood stalked by exile, mental illness and death Prince Philip 2021 Prince Philip was only eight when he was suddenly separated from his parents and his four elders sisters. He never lived with his immediate family again. The youngest child of Prince andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Philip was left in the care of Alice's family in England after his mother suffered a breakdown and was hospitalised. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Bee Sting Paul Murray 2023 The Bee Sting (2023) by Irish writer Paul Murray was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023. The novel tells the story of the Barnes family which is crumbling because of financial problems and a number of personal crises. Each of the 4 members of the family talk about what is happening from their perspective. Teenage daughter Cass who is in the final stages of high schools & goes on an alcohol drinking binge. 12 PJ who spends an inordinate amount of time on the internet. Mum, Imelda, who is struggling with selling stuff instead of buying it. And Dad, Dickie, whose car business is failing & who is being blackmailed. During the sections on Imelda we find out that her father was violent and Imelda’s aunt Rose took the child in for her safety. “It wasn’t always easy Rose was strict Although she never locked her in her room she always made her go to school do her homework go to bed at half past ten…” (p.201). After her mother’s death, Imelda stayed on with Rose even though her father was insisting she return home. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Matthew Henson Matthew Henson 2001 This is the story of African American explorer Matthew Henson (1866-1955), who was orphaned as a young boy, then in kinship care for a while, and working as a cabin boy by the time he was 12. For more than 20 years, Henson accompanied Commander Robert Peary on expeditions to the Arctic. External Website

Television Shows Eden's Lost (TV show) 1989 Based on Sumner Locke Elliott's book of the same name, Eden's Lost is the story of 16 year old Angus Weekes who goes to live with family friends when his guardian dies. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience In The Clearing J.P. Pomare 2020 The story of Freya who was in foster care from the age of 15 after she was removed from a charistmatic and fantatical woman, Andriene, who is determined to collect together 12 children as her disciples. External Website

Academic Articles Christian Science Versus the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden Anne Stiles 2015 In The Secret Garden (1911), Frances Hodgson Burnett presented Christian Science as an alternative to the popular rest cure invented by Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell. Burnett, who underwent several unsuccessful rest cures for her depression, eventually turned to Christian Science, aspects of which surface in The Secret Garden. The novel's child protagonist, Mary Lennox, stands in for charismatic leader Mary Baker Eddy. Mary rehabilitates her reclusive uncle and her cousin Colin, a bedridden hysteric. By showing a young female healer curing hysterical males, Burnett inverted the gender politics of the rest cure and contradicted its key principles. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Shaped by Silence: Stories from Inmates of the Good Shepherd Laundries and Reformatories Rie Croll 2019 Shaped by Silence brings together the powerful stories of five women from Ireland, Canada, and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and other institutions operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Their narratives include one teenager’s experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Canada; another story of a child who was born in a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls held in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia. In these institutions, women and girls became a coerced workforce. Hard, unpaid and relentless physical toil, isolation, enforced silence, and prayer constituted the nuns’ strategy for converting their “fallen” charges into the Christian image of pure womanhood. Within this regime, girls and women suffered physical, psychological, and emotional abuse. While intimately capturing the dark and enduring after-effects of ill-treatment, the stories recounted in Shaped by Silencealso describe survivors’ efforts to heal and rebuild their lives. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles The Queen's Gambit is a striking study of female genius, and the drama of the year Sarah Hughes 2020 The Queen’s Gambit is the story of a troubled chess prodigy who after her mother was killed, grew up in an orphanage where the children were sedated with drugs. Sarah Hughes explores how it became a word-of-mouth hit External Website

Films/Videos Thirteen 2016 Thirteen (2016) is a British drama series centred on Ivy Moxam (Jodie Comer), a 26-year-old woman who has escaped from the cellar where she has been imprisoned for 13 years. The series explores the profound difficulties Ivy has in returning to live with her family who – 13 years on - have different lives: her boyfriend has married, her sister is engaged, her father is with another woman. Soon after Ivy returns home, another girl is abducted. Ivy is enlisted by the police to help them find Phoebe. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Alma's Not Normal review – this bleak, brilliant comedy is far from ordinary Lucy Mangan 2020 The comedian Sophie Willan has turned her award-winning stage hit into a new TV show, via childhood trauma, sex work and ornamental pixies External Website

Academic Articles Oliver Twisted: the origins of Lord Voldemort in the Dickensian orphan. James Washick 2009 Given the theatrical extremities of Harry Potter's birth, early childhood and treatment, we could expect some similarities between Charles Dickens' Victorian waif, Oliver Twist, and the boy wizard, to the point that we might reasonably trace Harry’s origins to his literary predecessor. However, while such an attempt might uncover places where Rowling’s creation in some ways faces similar circumstances as Dickens’, for the most part, Rowling gives a backstory and characterization to Harry which diverge so greatly from Oliver and his workhouse experiences that other similarities seem largely superficial. Instead, if we seek to find the influence of Oliver Twist, we find the most convincing comparison not with the protagonist of Rowling’s series but with the villain, for in Tom Riddle, the boy who will become Lord Voldemort, we find the true inheritor of the Dickensian model. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Ronnie Archer-Morgan shares his fostering story Ronnie Archer-Morgan 2023 Antiques Roadshow Expert Ronnie Archer-Morgan has appeared on the One Show and talked about how important his foster family were and how they saved his life. He said: “I discovered what it was like to become part of a loving family.” External Website

Films/Videos Alex Cross (film series) 1997 3 of James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels have been adapted for the screen. Kiss the Girls (1997) stars Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross and is based on Patterson’s 1995 novel of the same name. Along Came a Spider (2001) also has Morgan Freeman starring as Alex Cross in an adaptation of the 1993 eponymous novel. Alex Cross (2012) is based on the 2006 novel Cross and stars Tyler Perry as Alex Cross. External Website

Films/Videos Paper Lives 2021 Paper Lives (2021) is a Turkish drama film starring Çağatay Ulusoy Mehmet (Çağatay Ulusoy) is a garbage collector who runs a recycling centre in an impoverished area of Istanbul. He is unwell with a kidney condition. Mehmet is a friendly character, keeping an eye out for the many homeless children in the area, having once been homeless himself. When Mehmet discovers an 8-year-old boy hiding a garbage bin, he takes the child in. Mehmet adores Ali and cares for him while also trying to reconnect him to his family. External Website

Television Shows Water Under the Bridge (tv show) 1980 A miniseries based on Sumner Locke Elliott's book of the same name. The story revolves around a young man who was in foster care as a boy and his journey from Sydney to London. External Website

Actors Cassidy Mack Spending her early years in the Foster Care system, Cassidy was adopted at the age of six. At the age of fourteen, Cassidy found her own foundation to encourage young people in the foster care system to reach their potential. After a meeting with actor Ryan Goslind, Cassidy to become an actor. Some of her favourite roles are playing Zoey in Zoey to the Max and Jen in The Storyteller. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Out of Darkness. Growing up with the Christian Brothers Ivor A Knight 1998 Ivor Knight, born in 1934 in Perth, was declared a ‘neglected child’ in 1938 and placed in the custody of the Christian Brothers. He survived the Castledare, Clontarf and Tardun orphanages after which he worked on sheep and cattle stations. In 1968, he joined the Western Australian Prison Service and rose through the ranks to Superintendent. He took early retirement in 1991 External Website

Writers Martin Buber 1878-1965 Martin Buber (1878-1965) was born in Vienna. His parents separated when Martin was 4 years of age. After the separation of his parents, the young Martin lived with his paternal grandparents in Lember, now Lviv in Ukraine. Martin Buber’s paternal grandparents were wealthy and part of the Jewish “aristocracy”. The boy was homeschooled by his grandmother and he learned to speak a variety of languages including Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Ger, Italian & English. At University, Martin Buber studied philosophy and art and he completed a PhD at the University of Vienna in 1904. Martin Buber was 60 when he migrated to Palestine – after the Nazis stopped his teaching and public lectures – and became involved in the Palestinian Jewish community. He was appointed as a professor in social philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a position he held until 1951. Buber’s major philosophic works (in English) are I and Though (1923), and 2 collections of essays, Between Man & Man (1944) and The Knowledge of Man (1965). External Website