The Tablet Lecture 2008 - Part 1

Our Lost Children: the Challenges of Raising Young People Today

Michael Holman SJ

There are some events in life, some happenings or encounters, which change us, we all know that. We also know that some of those events, usually the ones that come upon us unawares, have the capacity to shake us to our very foundations, to challenge radically our perceptions: what we had taken to be the case no longer seems that way. It is perhaps characteristic of such moments that later on, in the cool light of day, we see them as lighting a path we have been travelling for some time. It just takes extraordinary events to make us aware of it.

The events of May 2004 were like that for me. Within two months, I was due to come to the end of nine years as head of a boys’ comprehensive school in the trusteeship of the Jesuits, Wimbledon College. True, there had been some heart-stopping moments, such as when a boy on a managed move from another school set off the fire alarm exactly half way through an OFSTED inspection. But overall I used to tell myself, and still do, that I could not imagine a better place or more appropriate context in which to exercise my priesthood for so many years.

Thanks to a good deal of team work, the school seemed to have done quite well. It had hit most of its targets. Its numbers had increased to around 1450, examination results had improved, one stage of a building plan was complete and a second was about to begin. There was a thriving sixth form consortium with our sister school; we had won a school improvement award and even the schools’ minister had come to visit us. The College was oversubscribed with a catchment area covering most of South West London which provided us with a student body that was mixed in almost every way except in terms of gender: socially, ethnically and educationally it was comprehensive.

What mattered to me, very much, was that this school was a place of ministry. For most of the boys and their families it represented the Christian community with which they were most in contact. Chaplaincy services developed, increasingly under lay leadership, though almost always with the support of one or two Jesuit students or “scholastics” undergoing pastoral training before embarking on the study of theology, the last stage of our lengthy formation. Just before I left, one such scholastic had initiated a partnership with a Jesuit mission in Karnataka, southern India. Each summer a party of 20 or so sixth form students would go out to help build a school for dalit or “untouchable” children: an adventure that has since proven life-changing to many.  Impact experiences like that are often needed to break through the thick crust which our culture imposes on many of our young people.

What, then, of my own foundation-shaking experience? It was a Saturday lunchtime in early May when I came back to our community house to find a note, a telephone message. It was marked “urgent”: could I please phone the parish priest in Worcester Park? I did, as I recall, there and then. “Do you remember Michael?” “Yes, of course”. “His parents want you to come round”. “Sure, but why?” “He was stabbed to death last night”.

At times like that you don’t hang around. I got into the car and drove over to Worcester Park. Then began six weeks I’ll never forget. Nor do I ever want to forget them because (I suppose) of what they taught me.

The family was distraught: a mixture of anger and guilt combined with shock all mixed with rage. Michael had come to our school at the age of 11. His schooling had been disrupted. His family had moved to New Zealand for a while but didn’t settle. In his own way he was a troubled but good young man. How often would I see him standing outside the deputy head’s office about to answer for some misdemeanour! A broad smile from ear to ear would greet me as his face blushed bright red with embarrassment. Two days later on the Monday morning there he was, surrounded by his wailing family, lying in the mortuary chapel of St Helier Hospital in Sutton.

It was six weeks before we could hold the funeral. There was an autopsy and then an inquest was opened before finally the body was released. Stories circulated of Michael’s last moments. They said he had got off a bus in Cheam village in the early hours of that Saturday morning. Young people would congregate there as there were no CCTV cameras. Apparently, he had recognised one young man in a crowd. It was said there was no altercation. He had gone over to the boy and was greeted with two thrusts of a knife into his stomach. The story went that he was spat upon as he lay dying. The story also had it that the assailant’s father turned him in to the police the very next day.

His funeral was and remains the most challenging experience of my life as a priest. St Matthias’ Church was full, mostly with Michael’s friends. Like most of them, he had of late led an almost feral existence, staying out all night in the parks in the warmer weather, every so often going home to be fed, and meanwhile doing some graffiti up and down the railway lines. If you have travelled in that part of the world, you might have seen his tag, “PLEAZA”.

The funeral mass over, his body was taken by horse-drawn hearse the two miles or so to the crematorium. The family and a long line of his friends walked behind. In the crematorium chapel, they crowded round his coffin: some still stunned in disbelief, others quite overcome with grief.

I did much questioning, much soul-searching during and long after that spring of 2004. Events such as that which claimed the life of Michael have now tragically become more commonplace. So far this year 28 teenagers have been killed on the streets of London, 22 as a result of knife attacks. Each of those deaths brings back to my mind those events of May 2004, and it is good they should.

Michael’s death put me in touch with some of those who work with young people at risk of involvement in gangs and extreme street violence. His death made me ask many wider questions about the lives of the children in our schools, about their happiness or the absence of it, about their present and future states of well-being.

It’s my view that these deaths on the streets should not be seen as exceptional events, isolated happenings. They are rather symptomatic of a malaise afflicting our society. I began to wonder whether the policies I had pursued in my years in school had at least in part contributed to this malaise; I began also to wonder whether our contemporary culture, while claiming to promote the sum of human happiness, in fact does much to undermine it, especially for the most vulnerable, amongst whom we must count many of our young people.

Next