Our earthly birthday celebrants include my 4-year-old great-nephew, Jacob Price, who is the son of his parents Evie and Gareth. Jacob lives in the Huddersfield area of West Yorkshire with his mother, his brother, and maternal grandmother: Adam Heigold who lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire: Riana Lambert who lives in Bradford, West Yorkshire: Kerrie-Ann Hollister who lives at beautiful Kangaroo Creek, in the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales, Australia. We wish all our birthday celebrants a happy day.
My song today is ‘Love Lifted Me’. This is the first solo studio album by the late Kenny Rogers which was released in 1976. The album was a minor success, reaching Number 28 on the Country charts.
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If ever there was one thing to lift any person to higher plains, it is the love of another human being. Most of my occupational life was spent working as a Probation Officer within the West Yorkshire Probation Service. For the first 18 years of a 27-year career, I worked in the Huddersfield area of West Yorkshire. During my years as a Probation Officer, while I helped many an offender stop their offending behaviour, there were many other offenders which appeared to be beyond help. Such offenders have the title of being called ‘recidivists’ (which essentially means that whatever you try to do to help them they will not change, and they continue reoffending regardless). Many repeated offenders continue to receive custodial sentences upon custodial sentences and eventually become institutionalised (they find it easier to exist inside a prison instead of being a free person on the outside). I have met so many people aged between 40 to 70 who have literally spent more time behind bars than they have in the community since first being sent to Borstal as a teenager.
Occasionally, one of these recidivists suddenly stops offending, and when their conversion occurs, it is rarely down to Probation Officer intervention and is invariably down to ‘finding ‘love’. There are three kinds of love they find which gives them the desire (often for the first time in their life) to go straight and to settle down to a crime-free life. They may have experienced a religious conversion inside prison and have found the love of God, or they have found a partner to love and to be loved by in return. The third reason is that they have extended their family line by becoming a parent and having a child to love. From these three prime reasons to change their established criminal pattern to that of becoming a law-abiding-citizen, by far the most common is the love of a good woman. My own Probation Officer experience over twenty-seven years is that the love of a good woman usually trumps a religious conversion, and when a child is born into the same love equation, it has the effect of reinforcing a positive new identity for the new father.
One such person who will always stay with me was Bernard. Bernard was abandoned at birth and never knew his parents. I first became involved with him while he was serving a borstal sentence. He was aged around 20 years at the time. Bernard had no siblings he knew of and was reared in Local Authority Care Homes and a ‘Doctor Barnardo Home’ until he was 17 years old. Bernard was one of those people whose face perpetually carried a ‘look-at-poor-me’ look. Once an individual learned of his unfortunate start in life, it became so easy to focus upon his unhappy start to life and to ignore his recidivist past. Ever since the age of ten, Bernard had run away from every Children’s Home he had been placed in. He would steal anything from anyone, and he appeared to have no moral compass or sign of the slightest conscience. He was a confirmed thief by the age of ten, and before he had entered his teens, he had started burgling people’s houses in the dead of night when the occupants were fast asleep in their beds.
Bernard was committed to a sentence of Borstal as soon as he was old enough. Borstal sentences were usually completed in less than a year but could extend to an inmate serving a full two years if their behaviour proved unacceptable. Serving longer than fifteen months was so rare an experience that Bernard was the only person I ever knew who served the full Borstal sentence of two years plus extra time for repeat offending behaviour while inside. Whatever anyone tried to do to help him, he essentially flung back their kindness in their face.
I worked with Bernard for around five years in total. I can truthfully say that I went beyond the call of normal duties to assist him to change his life for the better, but the more I did for him, the more he rebelled, and threw my kindness back. Because of Bernard’s past, I even started a ’Foster a Young Offender’ project which turned out to be so successful that even the Social Services adopted it in Kirklees. My foster project was geared to asking church members across the whole of Huddersfield if they would accommodate a young offender upon borstal release and offer them a loving family setting. I believe I was the first worker in West Yorkshire ever to show a photograph of the young offender wanting the experience of a home environment. Bernard was the first person I ever placed with a couple in their 50s from half a dozen placements (all the rest worked out).
The couple concerned had been married thirty years and had only parented one son who had sadly been killed in a traffic accident (I believe) some years earlier. Their son was young when he died and would have been around Bernard’s age had he lived. The age similarity was an obvious attraction, leading them to believe that Bernard would be ideally suitable. For the first few weeks of Bernard living with the couple, all seemed to go okay. Then one night before the month was out, while the couple slept, Bernard robbed them of whatever valuable belongings he could find in the house before making off to fence his stolen goods the following day. He even stole a silver-framed photograph, and later he discarded the photo inside the frame before selling his stolen property.
Of all the things he stole, the photograph inside the silver frame was the most precious as it was the only photograph they had of their deceased son around the time he was tragically killed. Bernard was rightly sent to a Young Offender’s Prison as a sentence for his despicable theft from the kindly couple who had offered to share their home with him. For over one year, I continued to visit Bernard monthly in the prison for Young Offenders at Thorpe Arch, Weatherby. The visits would take place in his prison cell and a prison guard would remain outside, within sight and hearing distance. During each visit, I would spend one hour, and every visit during that first year, Bernard remained totally silent whenever I attempted to engage him in any conversation. Observing that he never once spoke to me, the Prison Officer nearby would often remark after the visit had ended, “I don’t know why you bother with the little ….?” I was slowly arriving at a similar conclusion.
One visit to see Bernard in his prison cell occurred during a day when I could have done with taking the day off work. I cannot recall whether I was under the weather, or one of my children was not well, or some other domestic issue was concerning me, but after an hour of having received the usual silent treatment from Bernard, my patience snapped, and I lost my temper with him. I told Bernard that I considered him to be one of the most ungrateful and inconsiderate clients who I had ever worked with. I cannot recall if I pinned him up against the wall of his prison cell while I was railing him but whatever I did, and however understandable, it was most unprofessional. I believe it was the first and last occasion I ever ‘lost it’ during a 27-year-long career. Meanwhile, the Prison Officer nearby heard and saw my actions, and said to me, “Go on! Give the little toe rag what for. I won’t see you!” It was probably the Prison Officer’s invitation to thump Bernard while he turned a blind eye that returned me sharply to my senses.
Just as I was leaving the prison cell in a state of total exasperation, for the first time in one full year and a dozen hourly visits from me, Bernard broke his silence. He said in a polite voice, “Thank you for visiting me, Mr. Forde.”
I continued to visit Bernard a few more times before his release, and he completed his Young Prisoner Licence in another area outside Huddersfield. With Bernard moving to another area upon his prison release, our statutory contact as Probation Officer and Client came to an end.
About four years passed by and nothing else was heard of Bernard during the intervening period. I kept my eye open on all the court cases in the whole of Kirklees, as I half expected to see Bernard’s name appear on the list of court defendants. There would rarely be an evening when I failed to scour the daily court appearances and convictions in the regional newspapers.
One morning while walking through Huddersfield, a voice called my name from behind, “Hi, Mr. Forde. Nice to see you. How are you doing?” Looking back, I saw it was Bernard and a young woman in her twenties who he introduced to me as his partner. He had a young child in the pram he was pushing who he proudly told me was his child, and I believe he had another toddler holding his hand (although my memory fails me about that).
Bernard was smiling like a Cheshire cat. That was the first happy look on his face I had ever seen, and it filled me with joy. He was obviously proud of his partner and their family and he told me with pride that he had not reoffended since he had last seen me. He also told me that like himself, his partner had been raised in Care all her life also. He told me that together they had found love and that for the very first time in his life, he was happy. I made a point of telling the couple who had been so kind to Bernard, and from whom he stole. They were pleased that he had become law-abiding and had settled down since he stole some of their property. I told them he had always been ashamed by that offence of his, which was his last known offence. Bernard told me when asked, that he had never been back to see the couple. I suspect the shame of what he had done was too great for him to cope with.
God bless you, Bernard, wherever you are. I wonder if Bernard’s grown-up son today works as either a policeman, prison officer, or even a probation officer, or…….. could he be a prisoner somewhere? I would hate to believe so! ‘Love’ certainly lifted Bernard to new heights.
Love and peace
Bill XXX