Chris Mapp: Songs of Expectation

London, 1881. Five children leave behind Britain’s slums and workhouses and board a ship bound for Canada. Each carries different hopes and fears, but none is prepared for the separation, hard work and prejudice waiting for them in a country far from home.

They are among the British Home Children: around 100,000 orphaned and destitute children sent from Britain to Canada over a period of seventy years. Most were not fostered or adopted. Instead, they were placed with families under contracts of employment and put to work as farm labourers and domestic servants.

Songs of Expectation blends fictional characters with real history, including events drawn from the life of Chris’s father, Percy, who was sent to Canada through Barnardo’s at the age of twelve. The novel explores what happened to these children, the people who believed they were helping them and the prejudice they encountered after arriving in Canada.

The title comes from a hymn about travelling through doubt and sorrow towards a promised land — words that take on a different meaning when set against the children’s experiences.

Chris talks about the history behind the novel, his father’s remarkable story and the process of turning research and family memories into fiction. The evening includes questions from the audience, with copies available to buy and have signed.

Chris has wanted to write a novel since his teens, but work and family life left that ambition waiting in the wings. Retirement finally gave him the time to return to it, and Songs of Expectation is his first novel.

The story is deeply personal. As well as discovering more about his father’s life as a British Home Child, Chris drew on his own experience of losing his parents and being uprooted as a child. He now gives talks about the British Home Children, helping to ensure that their experiences are better known and remembered.