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Summary
Summary
'By the time I was seven years old, I understood that we were neglected by my mother who was absent from the house most days and most nights. We rarely received a bath or a wash and I presumed that the fact that my skin was several shades darker than the other kids' in my street was all down to accumulated grime rather than because of my different ethnic origin.' Rosie Childs was the talk of her Liverpool council estate when she was born, because she was black. Her mother and her mother's husband were both white and from birth she was stigmatised for this proof of her mother's infidelity. Suffering neglect from her mother, a prostitute and alcoholic, Rosie was left in a bare, filthy council house to fend for herself and her siblings until, aged nine, she was placed in the care of an order of upright and often cruel nuns. She finally embarked on a settled life as a nanny and pre-school teacher, but she couldn't escape from herself and the black cloud of her childhood. psychiatric hospitals for years, until she was helped to remember the horrifying secret of the childhood she thought she had buried forever. Now, with support as Rosie Childs, she has moved on, and is truly happy at last.
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Born Clare Malone into a family in which alcohol and neglect flowed in abundance, the author found that her dark skin set her apart from her five blond siblings. Not until the children were permanently removed from their working-class Liverpool home to the scarcely improved conditions of a church-operated orphanage did the nine-year-old child learn that her appearance was inherited from her mother's momentary affair with a Chilean sailor. Clare briefly lived as a foster child with a disturbed but middle-class couple and then found independence as a nanny for several years. In her late 20s, she attended a nursing program but suffered a breakdown that led to years of medication, hospitalizations, occasional homelessness, and, only in middle age, to a therapist who helped her unlock the secret demons of her childhood. Having changed her name with each new chapter in her life, Childs now sees herself as successful and, while emotionally frail, is beyond the period during which cutting and bulimia were her only reliable outlets. She writes with simple eloquence and neither sentimentality nor self-pity. Readers who flocked to Dave Pelzer's memoirs of growing up abused will appreciate this story with its added complexities of gender and race issues.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Childs, born Clare Malone, was dropped into the world on the couch of her mother's dirty house in Liverpool in 1954. In this heart-wrenching read, Childs tells of growing up as a lone mixed-race child in an all-white area, where she is the shamefully visible product of her dissolute mother's extramarital trysts. Filthy and neglected, she and her siblings scrape by with stolen bread and lice-filled heads until Childs is nine and they are removed from her mother's custody into an orphanage, run by punishing nuns. Childs rebelliously adapts to their vigilantly tough custody until she is discharged at the age of 15, unadopted and afraid. She is subsequently placed with foster parents found by her mother, with whom she has sporadic contact, and makes the first of her many lifetime name changes. After a period of success as a nanny and preschool teacher, she enters college at 30 and has a breakdown that sends her on an ugly carousel of self-mutilation and eating disorders. Somehow this horrible existence remains hopeful: her indomitable spirit is heartening, and the book is hard to put down. Vulnerable but without self-pity, Childs tells a story of survival that's a shot across the bow from the many unwanted children. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A debut memoir traces the long-lasting consequences of childhood trauma. Childs's startling and evocative autobiography begins thus: "I am fifty-two years old and have changed my name seven times so far." What follows is the story of those name changes, and of the life changes that prompted them. Childs was born in Liverpool, the mixed-race result of her white mother's extramarital affair. Her mother kept a slovenly house and neglected her children. Occasionally, Childs was placed in temporary foster care, but she was always returned to her mother's squalid surroundings until social services finally moved her to the Park Hall Children's Home, which was run by Irish nuns. Though the nuns were emotionally distant, and Childs found their Catholic morality foreign and arbitrary, she settled into a routine, and began, if not to flourish, at least to function. Just as she had found her niche, she was shuttled into a horrific situation with a manipulative foster mother. All in all, her childhood was "a series of starvations." Eventually, Childs enrolled in a two-year college nursing course. On the surface, things were looking up: No one knew her background, and her classmates were friendly and nice. But Childs's life caught up with her. She began cutting herself (treating her razor blade with sacred reverence, wrapping it "in white tissue paper like a delicate, fragile piece of china") and binging and purging. A breakdown, a suicide attempt and a stay in a psychiatric hospital followed. By the end of this searing account, Childs's recovery seems simultaneously remarkable and unfinished. Her blunt, straightforward prose is eerily effective, and there are moments of real literary sophistication; her recollection of a childhood attempt to steal apples from a tree reads like a subtle commentary on the famous scene in which Augustine steals from a pear tree. Grueling, but riveting. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
