Beck - Mal Peet (with Meg Rosoff)

 Peet's last book - unfinished before his death and tidied up and finished  by his friend, author Meg Rossoff.  Well I liked it - a lot.  But be warned, it is a rather dark story.  Some of the low score reviews on Amazon seemed to miss the point.  Or rather, they seem to have been written by persons who don't keep up with late 20th and early 21 century news.  For hundreds of orphans were sent from the UK to both Canada and Australia - to help ease the burden on state coffers one supposes.  And some of those children were abused by the very people that were supposed to help them.  The trick was that they were told they would be sent to new homes, where they would work, but be loved and fed.  And some  were.  A lot were not.....

Beck is one of those orphans, his father gone, his conception the result of a quick coupling for money following the loss of a job by his mother who desperately tries to look after two parents addicted to "patent" medicine of some kind and her own brother, mentally handicapped and locked away.  When they all die in the Spanish flu epidemic, Beck finds himself in an orphanage.  Being of mixed race parentage, no-one wants to adopt him, and so here he is, on a ship out of Liverpool bound for Canada, where he will find himself in the care of the Christian Brothers.  If you do not know who you are, or what is expected of you, you will lead a life of confusion, and that is  exactly what Beck finds in the "care" of the Brothers.  Beaten and raped for a misdemeanor not of his making, he is passed on from the Brothers to a farm to help out.  Watching the family eating good healthy food whist he is just offered bread and the gravy from the stew he is lost.  What to do, how to do it, where to go?  And so, just a year after leaving Liverpool, he finds himself running with nowhere to go.  But go he must, and he will have many other adventures.

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