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From the Cambridge News, July, 2014
Cambridge writer Anthony Robinson on his new book, Real Stories from Street Children Across the World
Written by LYDIA FALLON
When Anthony Robinson talks, you can’t help but listen.
It’s my job to ask the questions but I’m left temporarily speechless as I sit enthralled and inspired listening to the writer talk about his life travelling the globe, and the people and places he’s seen and met along the way.
From Sydney to Cambridge, via stints in South-East Asia, Siberia and Japan (to name just a few), he’s a man who has been there, done that and, in this case, written the books. “Most Australians travel because we are so bloody far away and we want to know what is going on,” the straight-talking Aussie chuckles. “I think everyone needs to run away to sea once in their lives.”
Passionate, eloquent and refreshingly frank, it’s also clear Anthony is a man who, when he puts his mind to something, will do his upmost to make it happen, regardless of the challenges he may face along the way.
Case in point: the journey it took to research and write his latest book – Real Stories from Street Children Across the World – was a profound one. Nights sleeping rough on the world’s meanest streets, death threats and an alcoholic 13-year-old with one working limb, tells only half the story. It was a journey of huge emotional and physical strain, but one he knew he had to make.
“I think for all of us there are certain things that are just not right, and seeing children on the streets is one of them, for me at least,” Anthony, 64, says when we meet at his Cambridge home. “So like many things that sit in awareness and will not go away, street children kept resurfacing and that ‘not-rightness’ kept nagging until I had to do something about it.”
So he did. The book tells the real-life stories of six courageous children and their families who live and work on the streets in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Guatemala. These resourceful, resilient and optimistic kids talk about their pasts, their present lives and their hopes for the future in their own heartbreaking words; words that will stay with you.
“It was important for me to give the children a voice. It’s usually through the agency of adults they tell their stories – ‘The children think this’ – and I think that’s awful for anybody not to have a voice,” Anthony says. “Kids tend to be patronised or bullied and I don’t think they are listened to honestly and with respect; you don’t have to give in to them all the time but give them a voice at least.”
Beautifully illustrated by artist June Allan, every child will leap off the page and into your heart. They’ll make you weep, laugh and long for change. From 9-year-old Chippo, an orphan who was forced to work as a slave before running away to live on the streets of Zimbabwe, to Santos, a 12-year-old boy from Mozambique who left home aged 11 after suffering years of beatings at the hands of his father; they may live in a brutal, harsh world, but their hopes and dreams, Anthony says, are just the same. “They just want to talk to someone and have someone listen to them,” he says. “Most of these kids have no one to love, no one to listen to them or make a fuss of them. They are mostly just bouncy, optimistic, resourceful little kids who have short and brutal lives.”
Growing up in Sydney, Anthony started his travels in 1973 after graduating from university. He headed to South-East Asia first (“because it was nearest”) before spending a year in Japan where he tried his hand at everything from teaching to modelling. Writing was always the big passion though. “I wrote since university and was always encouraged to do it; the problem is every time I’m encouraged to do something I seem to do the opposite, so I stopped,” Anthony laughs. “But I did take it up again a few years later.”
He met his wife and fellow writer Annemarie Young while working for the adult migrant education service, and she was the one who encouraged him to start writing for children. “I wrote commercially for years, but then my wife said ‘You would write well for children.’ I told her ‘Don’t be silly, how could I write for children?’ But she can be hard to beat off and she persisted, so I started writing a novel for children set in Cambridge and really enjoyed it.”
Anthony’s current book has been years in the making. He first came across street children on a trip to Portuguese Timor in the early 1970s. From that moment they were forever on his conscience. “They were in the market, as they usually are,” he recalls. “They work in markets, sleep in markets and earn a bit of food for a bit of work, and they were in my peripheral vision all my life from then.
“They are in every country. Half in the shadows and half out. They are watchful little children and very fast on their feet if anybody were to intimidate them or scare them off.”
He pauses: “We all have things which are on our peripheral vision and as they come further and further into your main vision there comes a point where you have to do something about it or not – and I just decided to do something about it.”
Anthony sowed the first seeds back in 2010, but the journey to get the book published wasn’t an easy one. “You can’t just turn up in countries as a 60-year-old man and say ‘Take me to your children’, which is a very good thing,” Anthony explains. “So we had to get the charities on board and you’re a stone in their shoe half the time. Then the countries don’t want you there because they say ‘We don’t have street children’, but of course they do.
“Eventually we managed to set it all up, and it was hard – physically and emotionally – but it was wonderful too.”
With the help of charities Street Child Africa, Meniños de Mozambique, Streets Ahead and Camino Seguro, Anthony travelled to some of the most dangerous cities in the world, (“Guatemala City shocked me the most, it’s just all the clichés you hear about the third world and banana republics”), meeting and interviewing children from all walks of life.
Keen to experience exactly what it’s like for these kids, Anthony would often sleep on the streets too; it was, he concedes, a terrifying experience. “I wanted to see what it was like at night because they all agreed that was the scariest time and it really was. You don’t sleep because you’re scared and it was interesting to know that and feel that.”
What was the hardest moment? “I’d been interviewing all morning in Maputo, had a quick lunch and then interviewed all afternoon. I came out into the light like a blind mole and tripped over this one kid called Manuel, a 13-year-old alcoholic with only one working limb left. He was sat on the pavement having a rest. I turned around and there was this little fellow called Jamie who was a dwarf with no legs who got around on a modified skateboard.
“I just burst into tears,” Anthony remembers. “I still do, it’s all too much.”
Having made that inevitable connection, it must have been heart wrenching to leave? “It’s all in the eyes,” he muses. “When your eyes meet in that metaphoric sense, it changes you profoundly.
“It’s hard to go back to normal life when you have been to all these places; I have to give myself a week now. It’s just difficult to get on with things when you have all these kids’ faces in front of you.”
Dealing with issues like slavery, domestic violence and homelessness, a dark undertone thrums through the book, and it’s far removed from your usual frothy kids’ affair. Writing with such honesty about life on the streets – with no punches pulled – was, Anthony says, hugely important to him.
“We have to get at children before the media do,” he explains. “It’s important to give children an informed choice so if someone says to them ‘street children’, they will have a notion of what is going on.
“If you don’t give them something else to eat, they’ll just have what is in front of them.”
Real Stories from Street Children Across the World is part of a series of books called A Voice for the Voiceless, which Anthony and his wife Annemarie Young have been researching and writing for the past few years. They previously published a ground-breaking four-book series called The Refugee Diaries, to much critical acclaim, and are currently working on a book about Palestinian children, another cause close to Anthony’s heart.
“It’s about the kids caught in the middle of the conflict. Both these sides are awful, they are just men with guns and men playing politics, and it’s the kids who are powerless in the middle. The book will look at how it affects their lives,” he says.
At 64, you might get the impression Anthony would want to slow down. Not a chance. There are more books (and adventures) in the pipeline, and he says he will keep going, as long as he has his health and is making a difference. “It’s most rewarding to see how the books affect children,” he says. “We do these workshops on the back of the books, and you see them react with interest, curiosity and compassion. That’s the deal. That’s why we do it.
“All writers have egos; anyone who writes things down and thinks people should read it has got a bloody ego. But it’s not about me and that’s really liberating.”
An extract from Real Stories from Street Children Across the World
Santos’s story
I was born here in Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique. I am 12 or 13, I’m not sure. I used to live with my mum, dad, big sister and brothers. But my mum didn’t like me, so she left.
Then my big sister got married and left. I was at school in those days. And one day when I got home, I found out my older brother had had a fight with my dad and left home.
I was 10. Then my dad got another wife and stopped working. I don’t know why. My little brother and me started going onto the streets and begging. We needed to eat. My gran found out and came and took my little brother to live with her. Dad was angry all the time and would beat me a lot, even if I did everything he asked me to do.
One day I fought back. That was it, really. So I left. I was 11. Now I come to the Meniños Day Centre every day to meet my friends. We leave in the afternoon and beg at the robots (traffic lights) for money or food. We play in the park if we have made money for dinner, and then sleep downtown in the parks.
When I grow up I want to be an engineer or a government minister.
Real Stories from Street Children Across the World by Anthony Robinson is published by Frances Lincoln
Cambridge writer Anthony Robinson on his new book, Real Stories from Street Children Across the World