The bestselling author who helped so many deeply disturbed children talks to Geraldine Brennan
Torey Hayden has a busy morning: one of her 34 sheep has been bitten by an adder in the middle of lambing, and she is trying to coax her out of a field. The author has often described the work with children with special needs that inspired her bestselling book as “more process-oriented than goal-oriented”, and you don’t get much more process-oriented than a flock of sheep.
Her first ambition, having grown up near Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, America, was to work with bears. To fund her degree in biology, she found a part-time job as a teacher’s aide (teaching assistant) for children with special needs and “fell in love with it immediately”. The first decade of her career in the US Midwest was split between teaching (in special education classes and supporting children with special needs in mainstream classes) and consultancy as a specialist in selective mutism. She videotaped her pupils “because I missed so much when I was working closely with them”, and watched the tapes every afternoon as she wrote up notes. “It gave me an objectivity I didn’t have in class.”
Her first and most famous book, One Child, was published in 1979. It was set in a small class of children with special needs, including Sheila, a deeply disturbed six-year-old who had abducted and brutally attacked a three-year-old boy; she poked out the eyes of the class goldfish during her first lunchbreak. It took Torey just eight days to write the story of her year with Sheila, with its frequent crises and horrific revelations about the early abuse the girl had suffered, and another six weeks to find a publisher.
At first she had no thought of publication: “I had to write it for myself because I can’t think without writing and I wanted to capture my thoughts while they were still fresh, to help me order it all in my head. When I had finished, I thought the public needed to know about this child, about the wonderful person inside and what she could achieve.”
Torey went on to write another seven non-fiction books, including The Tiger’s Child, in which she encounters Sheila, aged 13. Most were published in the UK in the early 1980s and some have been selling for more than 25 years. More than half are rooted in the highs and lows of classroom life (One Child, The Tiger’s Child, Beautiful Child, Somebody Else’s Kids, Just Another Kid, Ghost Girl) and are used in an American university’s teacher training programme.
Other books have been generated by her one-to-one clinical work. She encountered Kevin, the teenager at the centre of Silent Boy (just republished in paperback by HarperElement), in a child psychiatric unit where his mother had left him. He had not spoken for some years. Hospital staff called him “Zoo Boy” because he spent most of his days in a cage-like structure he had built under a table.
Torey worked with Kevin for more than two years, with some long breaks – such as when he tried to sexually assault her in a store cupboard. Despite this and other crises, including making a dagger to kill his abusive stepfather, she rehabilitated him to the point where he could live in sheltered housing and attend high school. Kevin now has a happy family and a job as a hospital orderly. “Of everyone I have worked with,” she says, “he is the closest to being an unqualified success.”
Read more in this week's TES Magazine, out Friday May 09
The TES Magazine has teamed up with HarperCollins to bring you a special deal on Silent Boy, the inspirational tale of one child’s journey towards normality. The book, published two decades ago, tells the story of Kevin, a boy so disturbed that he used to barricade himself beneath a table, who now has a job and a family.
Ten readers will each win a copy of the book, worth £6.99. The competition is open to all TES Magazine readers. To stand a chance of winning, fill in the coupon in this weeks' TES Magazine.
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