Far From Home

Far From Home: The Sisters of Street Child is set in Victorian England, at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Jim Jarvis is taken to the workhouse, but Emily and Lizzie face a very different future. They enjoy working with Rosie, their mother’s friend, in the Big House, but this can’t last forever. Desperate to find a safe home for them, Rosie hands them over to Mrs Cleggins, who promises them work as apprentices in a northern cotton mill. A new, dangerous and difficult life begins for them. They long for home. 

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Published HarperCollins, January 2015. ISBN 978 000757 8825.

Far From Home is also published by HarperCollins as an unabridged audio book, read by Karina Fernandez. Click here to hear an audio sample and to order.

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‘Take us with you, Ma! Don’t leave us here!’ Lizzie begged.

‘I can’t,’ her mother said. She didn’t turn round. ‘Bless you, I can’t. This is best for you. God bless you, both of you.’

Extract from ‘Far From Home’, read by the author

‘Street Child’ – continuing the tale – ‘Far From Home’

My inspiration for Far From Home was definitely Street Child. Since Street Child was published in 2009 it has sold thousands of copies in its two HarperCollins editions. I have received thousands of letters from children – mostly in class bundles from schools, who, by lucky chance, are studying the Victorians. By far the most commonly asked question has been: Will you write a sequel? For years my answer has always been the same, you write the sequel. It’s in your head! The next most frequently asked question is: what happened to Emily and Lizzie?

My response to that has always been that although Jim Jarvis was based on a real child, I’ve no idea whether he had sisters or not. They’re completely made up, as are most of the other characters. And I turn the question round – what do you think happened to them? Children send me their ideas, and they are so imaginative and so varied that I then say, well, you see, I would never be able to get a sequel right for everybody!

But then came a suggestion from HarperCollins that I might consider writing a companion book to Street Child. To my surprise, I responded immediately that I would love to do that, and that most of all I would like to write about Emily and Lizzie. After all this time!

I start Far From Home at the point where Emily and Lizzie are left behind by their dying mother, but I wanted their story to be different from Jim Jarvis’. I needed to get the girls away from London and put them into a new environment, and so as soon as possible I packed them into a waggon and sent them up north, to a valley very like the one where I live now. I called it Bleakdale. I found them work in a cotton mill, and waited to see what might happen to them.

What were Victorian cotton mills like?

Horrible. They worked very long hours in really dangerous jobs. Lizzie was a scavenger, and she had to crawl under heavy moving machinery called mules to gather up any bits of fluff or cotton that were lying below it. She had to do it again and again, till she was so weary that she could hardly move at all. If she dawdled or stopped, she was hit by her overlooker. Emily was too big to be a scavenger, and so she was put to work as a piecer, mending any broken threads that were tangling round the spindles of the machine called a billy. The mill was hot and noisy, and cotton fell like snow around them, making it difficult to breathe.

Read more about pauper apprentices in northern English cotton mills in a Guardian article from May 2023.

Didn’t anybody care about these child labourers in Victorian England?

A man called Lord Shaftesbury took a great interest in the plight of poor children. He was President of the Ragged School Foundation (see Street Child and Dr Barnardo) and he was the politician who drove the law called the Factories Act, limiting the hours that children worked in factories. By the time Emily and Lizzie were in the mill, they should only have worked up to 10 hours a day, and they had to be over 10. They were lucky! But many factory owners ignored the law. Workers were treated like slaves, and there was no way out for them.

What happens in ‘Far From Home’? Who are the characters in ‘Far From Home’?

Rather than tell you what happens, which might spoil the adventure story, I’ll break the synopsis of Far From Home up into a series of scenes:

‘Far From Home’ synopsis

Preface

Emily and Lizzie have found peace and happiness in a seaside village on the Wirral coast. So now you know it has a happy ending.

Chapters 1–8

Life in the Big House. The girls try to help Rosie with her work as a cook, but while Emily is good at it, poor Rosie keeps making mistakes and getting herself into trouble. You’ll meet the downstairs people – Rosie, Judd the housekeeper, the Lazy Cat, her niece. Upstairs, the two Dearies who never leave their beds, and The Crabapple, one of his ‘lordship’s’ daughters. Outside, you’ll meet Lame Betsy again – do you remember her from Street Child? And, briefly, you’ll meet Tip again.

Chapters 9–27

Outside the workhouse, Emily and Lizzie meet Mrs Cleggins, who puts them in a waggon for a few days with workhouse children to travel up north. They all think they’re going to a mansion, they’ll have horses, and they’ll eat roast beef. You’ll meet Robin Small, Smiley Sam, Bess, Miriam and other children.

They arrive at the apprentice house, where they’re going to live. You’ll meet Skivvy and Master Crispin.

In the Mill you’ll meet other workers and child apprentices, and Crick, the bully. 

In the Mill House are the members of the Blackthorn Family, who own the mill. The children all love Miss Gillian.

In their longed-for day out, everybody goes to Buxford Fair!

Then exciting, dramatic, frightening things start to happen, and Robin Small is at the centre of it. Emily and Lizzie are separated.

Chapters 28–34 

The Wirral. You meet Aunt Gillian, Hetty and Eglantine. You see the sea! And you have news from Dr Barnardo.

Imagine you are Emily and Lizzie

So, imagine. You’re ten years old. You’re working all the hours of daylight in horrible conditions. You’ve lost your home, your mother and your brother. But at least, like Emily and Lizzie, you have your sister. At night you sleep in a dormitory in the Apprentice House. You have nothing of your own, except the clothes you wore when you arrived. What’s it like? And that’s what I’ve tried to imagine for you in Far From Home.

Researching ‘Far From Home’

I live in a seven mile valley, and half way down it is a now-converted cotton mill. When I first came here local people would tell me their memories of workers coming over the hill from the neighbouring village of Castleton, running down the steep tracks with their lanterns held high. Most valleys in this area and throughout Yorkshire and Lancashire had a mill, and many of them still remain and have been converted to residences.

Some, however, are still working. I took my references from several of these, and learnt about the different kinds of machinery by visiting working and educational mills such as the one at Cromford in Derbyshire. I based the apprentice house in Bleakdale on the one at Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, Cheshire.

Next, I did my reading research:

A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, written in 1832. It’s an account of a man who had worked in mills since childhood. His story was written up for him by John Brown and there is no knowing whether the accounts of Blincoe or the retelling were strictly accurate, but it gave me many clues about the harshness of the living and working conditions of children during the Industrial Revolution, and of the cruelty of many mill-owners and overseers. If Blincoe’s accounts are true, and there’s no reason to believe that they aren’t, then many workers, particularly women and children, were treated as slaves, fettered to the mill-owner for years and with no hope of release or betterment.

Although Far From Home is set some years later, and many reforms had been created by then, it is likely that they were only gradually and perhaps rarely fully implemented, especially in rural areas.

You may also enjoy my blog post on Victorian childhood.

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