Liz Berry’s first poetry collection, 2014’s Black Country, fused the personal and political with disarming tenderness, its soaring imagery and soft dialect words from the West Midlands making beautiful whorls in the grain and flow of its music. The same was true of her poetry pamphlet, The Republic of Motherhood, in 2018. Now comes The Home Child, a novel in poetry: not continuous narrative, but a sequence of lyrical snapshots illuminating a story that is not only heartbreaking but also, essentially, true.
The Home Child is the story of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell. When her mother died in 1908, Eliza was packed off at the age of 12 from a children’s emigration home in Birmingham to rural Nova Scotia, and put to work as an indentured domestic servant. She never returned, never raised a family, never saw her brothers again, and died in a care home. Between 1860 and 1960, Britain sent more than 100,000 “home children” to Canada. They were orphans, or had families too poor to care for them. In 2010, Canada’s Year of the British Home Child, Berry discovered Eliza’s small gravestone, paid for by her employers, in Cape Breton. After losing her mother and her childhood home, Eliza was pursued by the irony of that word “home” right to the grave.
