Coram Boy. Jamila Gavin

      

      Have you ever wondered why Jamila Gavin

       wrote Coram Boy? Or where you can go to find out more about the Coram Foundation?

      This Egmont Extras edition includes an exclusive,

       never seen before interview with Jamila answering

       these questions and more

       – and you can also hear Jamila reading

       an extract from the book.

      FEATURES

       Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin

       An Interview with Jamila Gavin

       A Reading from Coram Boy

       Contents

Foreword

Prologue

Part One – 1741

1. The Coram man

2. The Black Dog

3. Meshak’s angel

4. Thomas and Alexander

5. Dawdley Dan

       6. The orphanage

       7. The cottage in the woods

       8. Sir William returns

       9. The ball

       10. Jealousies

       11. The Coram Hospital

       12. When the voice breaks

       13. A quickening

       14. Autumn apples

       Part Two

       15. Mother Catbrain

       16. Meeting in the chapel

       17. Old friends

       18. Partings

       19. Mementoes

       20. Apprenticed Out

       21. A face from the past

       22. Discovery

       23. Child Slaves

       24. Messiah

       25. There came six boys

       26. The Coram boy

       27. Recognition

       28. On the run

       29. Everything is time

       30. ‘Save him, sir!’

       31. The river flows to the sea

       32. The crying wood

       33. Epilogue

       An Interview with Jamila Gavin

       A Reading from Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin

       Foreword

      It was a passing remark which triggered the story – as is so often the way with writers. A friend murmured something about ‘the Coram man’ in the eighteenth century: someone who collected abandoned children, ostensibly to deliver them to the newly founded Coram Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Children. But the Hospital had never employed such a man, and any so-called Coram man was acting on his own, and most likely in his own interests without any regard for either the abandoned children or the miserable women who had entrusted their pathetic offspring into his safe-keeping. Indeed, the highways and by-ways of England were littered with the bones of little children. Children in the eighteenth century were routinely brutalised, whether it was at home or at Eton College, whether it was in the parish orphanages, which were no more than dying houses, or in the cathedral choir schools. It was often entirely a matter of luck if a child was kindly and lovingly reared, and it was to redress