Sean Arthur Joyce
—for the boys and girls who passed through the Hazelbrae*
distributing home in Peterborough, Ontario and similar institutions

A boatload of Barnardo girls arriving in St. John’s awaiting transport to distributing home. Library and Archives Canada PA-041785
Your footsteps are not in the leaves
skidding across a sidewalk,
your voice not in the sigh
lifted from the canal,
and your body certainly
not in this granite cut,
stamped and buffed
by remote hands.
You giggled at steam huffing
from a locomotive squeal,
eyed the long walk up Conger’s Hill
with something like dread,
something unknown
about to be born. You wiped,
scrubbed and polished
daredevil curves of banister;
fed two hundred pigs at dawn,
pumped water, made tea,
stoked the fires that broke
the morning darkness.
You hid beneath the soft fortress
of an iron cot, screening out
the furnace of a stare
burning away sleep.
Some, it’s true, were kind.
Men and women both, who wept
when made to choose you—
cattle from a stockyard—
your good breeding showing through
faces stoic, eggshell clean.
Some measured your biceps
and calculated foot-power.
Others would have taken you all—
breeches and Oxfords,
pinafores and aprons—
happily emptied gleaming oaken halls,
leaving only silverware
and the half-gone spirits of matrons.
But here in this corner—lamplit
wonderland—a boy curled catlike
in a lap, absorbing stories.
By this hearth, a girl shook out
her curls as she would a towel,
trying to recall the magic stitch
that made her fingers tingle
with the faint ghosts of home.
©2012 Sean Arthur Joyce
* Hazelbrae was opened by Barnardo’s Homes in June 1884; the first group of children arrived July 22, 1884 and included some boys. After 1888 it became exclusively a girls’ distributing home for Barnardo’s, bringing some 8,000 of them into the Ottawa Valley to work by the time the Home closed in 1923.
According to Trent Valley historian Elwood Jones: “Their train stopped as it crossed the laneway from George Street to the front of Hazelbrae on the hill overlooking the Midland railway line that is now part of the Rotary trail. The children (some boys among them) had only a short walk to their new Canadian home.”
—with thanks to Ivy Sucee & Peterborough Museum & Archives for research assistance
What a beautiful poem….so moving. My grandmother was a BHC who came to Hazelbrae in 1913 at the age of 13. I’ve enjoyed reading your other posts about your visit to Peterborough. I’ve learnt a few new details. Thanks for such wonderful writing!
Thanks for your compliment Beverley. I am the grandson of a BHC who came to Canada in 1926 with the Church of England. Thankfully at last their stories are getting out there after long years of suppression.