Cliff Greaney didn’t exactly have a blueprint for a conventional family unit.
He was just shy of his sixth birthday when he was dropped at the Whakarewa Children’s Home, along with his four older brothers. Their sister, a toddler, was adopted into a hellhole of a dysfunctional family.
The children’s father was a West Coast miner and in many ways that Cliff can still list, a clever but aggressive man. He was also an alcoholic, who at some point “decided to get rid of one family and start another”, as Cliff wryly puts it.
Robbed of her six children, their mother had a breakdown and ended up in Sunnyside Hospital, the Christchurch mental asylum. Although the children remained in contact with her, she became institutionalised and stayed in the facility for the rest of her life.
Cliff doesn’t particularly remember life before they entered the home, aside from a few scattered recollections. His childhood memories belong to Whakarewa.
The Greaney children’s arrival in late 1953 coincided with the annual Rotary Christmas party, which has been spoken of very fondly by each of the residents that The Guardian has contacted.
“Rotary Day” included games, a huge spread of food, and gifts for all of the children. One of the Rotarian’s jobs that day was to head downtown to find five more presents for the sudden arrivals.
Whakarewa was home to Cliff for 10 years, and that stability was a valuable thing. By his estimation, close to 200 children would have passed through the doors in his time there. He felt for the ones who came and went and came back again, “because they literally had to fight their way back into the peck order”.
Life was easier with siblings, but each resident still had to establish themselves in the home’s hierarchy.
The children rose early and did chores before school. One of the worst jobs was peeling potatoes, Cliff remembers, laughing at how his left-handed technique inevitably resulted in the removal of the skin of his fingertips.
The spuds got smaller and smaller as winter progressed, making the job even less enviable.
They did, however, fit nicely into the exhaust pipe of the home’s old red bus, which was the portal for adventures around the district almost every weekend.
The home worked, Cliff says with certainty, and he believes that this is because, aside from the structure of chores and school, the children were given plenty of free time to wander the hills and play by the river. In this, they were left to learn from each other.
The older kids taught skills to the younger ones, and they also helped to keep each other safe. After all, one irresponsible act or incident of bad behaviour could result in the curtailing of freedoms for all the residents.
Cliff says that the children had, almost as a rule, come from backgrounds where they had learned not to trust the adults in their lives.
“Most of the kids that came there had a chip on their shoulders a mile wide,” he says. “Kids like that – they don’t want to learn from grown-ups. They’ve had enough.”
He has huge respect for the house parents who looked after them, but he says that the staff would come and go without warning, and so the other children were a more reliable network.
“The herd protects its own.”
Cliff left the home in 1964, aged 16, and did an apprenticeship as a painter/ decorator. He met his wife Charlaine during a stint working in the North Island, and the couple settled back in Motueka.
One of the things that drew the pair to each other was the fact that neither “had parents to speak of” and had both spent a large part of their childhoods in care.
Cliff says that children didn’t come easy to them, so they decided to foster. Although neither had had a conventional childhood, Cliff says that their time in care gave them a solid understanding of children.
“I think, having grown up in there, I knew how kids thought.”
The couple fostered six children over the years, who ranged from just a few months to 16 years old. The couple eventually had three children themselves – a biological son and daughter, and an adopted son in-between.
