Synopsis
This week Sheron Houston and Michelle Scott star in a story about life in an Assessment Centre for young girls.
The White Bird Passes | Part 2
In the second part Jessie Kesson, as she is today, relates her unusual upbringing to her distinctive work as a writer and her task as a social worker in London.
The White Bird Passes
'I don't want to dust and polish. And I don't want to work on a farm. I want to write poetry, great poetry, as great as Shakespeare''. Those are the words of 16-year-old Janie as she comes to the end of a seven-year stay at an Aberdeenshire orphanage. The story of Janie is the story of the writer Jessie Kesson and her remarkable autobiographical novel The White Bird Passes. The first part of the programme is a dramatisation of her childhood as described in the novel; a childhood of poverty, street games, vice, gossip, the squalor of the slum tenement and the rigours of an orphanage, all of which she survived with extraordinary resilience.