ABSTRACT

Social work was not my first choice of career. I grew up in Kent, the ‘Garden of England’, and worked on a farm every Saturday for a friend’s father. It was not surprising that when I left school at 16, I enrolled at an agricultural college, determined to become a farmer myself. It was not to be. I soon learned that because I didn’t come from a farming family, the best I could hope to achieve would be to be a farm manager of a large commercial farm – the very last thing I wanted. My dream in tatters, I got a job as a stockbroker’s clerk in London, commuting each day and hating every second of every day. Life at home was difficult too. I was an only child and my father was bipolar. He had spent periods of my childhood in and out of psychiatric hospitals while my mother struggled to keep the family together, working in commercial banking and looking after my father. During one particularly unhappy episode my mother became ill herself, and I was cared for by the parents of schoolfriends and my mother’s relatives. By the time I left school, I lived for my free time, which was spent completing the community element of a Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award.1 Looking back, I see this and my father’s illness as the triggers that led me into a career in social work. I began an introductory course in social care at a local college, and on completion of my studies, applied for jobs all over the UK. My first job was in a

residential childcare unit for emotionally disturbed 10-to 16-year-olds in Aberdeen in the North East of Scotland at the age of 19, not understanding a word anyone said to me!2