John Heagney’s four years of family history research turned up some surprises, particularly for his wife Linda. She came from the Scots-Irish clan that owned Dunluce Castle, the fairytale cliffside ruins on the spectacular Antrim coast in Northern Ireland. She had three ancestors on the Mayflower.
His own ancestors trod a more humble path. “As far back as the 18th century it was Heagney the dirt farmer, Heagney the dirt farmer, Heagney the dirt farmer, Heagney the dirt farmer—six generations. It wasn’t until my father’s generation that Heagneys, save for one uncle, moved away from farming and into other fields of endeavor,” says Heagney, laughing.
A native of the Philadelphia neighborhood known as “Swampoodle”—“I could sit on my stoop and see the lights of Connie Mack Stadium”—Heagney is a former newspaper reporter and public relations executive who now lives in Tarpon Springs, FL.
Despite turning up ordinary roots, Heagney struck gold. He learned a secret that his immigrant father had kept all his life—even from his siblings back in the townland of Kinnegillian near Cookstown in County Tyrone. And it gave him fodder for his first novel, Traveler, a fantasy-laced fictional account of the life of the teenaged Bernard “Neddy” McKenna, an alter ego for Heagney’s father, Bernard “Barney Ned” Heagney, who, as a 16-year-old traveled to Canada in the late 1920s who was part of a little known British program that made indentured servants out of impoverished children.
Like Neddy – the resourceful, likeable protagonist of Traveler – Barney Heagney was urged by his parish priest and parents to sign up for the British Home Children program, which between 1869 and 1932, sent 100,000 children from the UK to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, ostensibly to find them homes with families.
The program was well meaning when it was founded in 1868 by Protestant philanthropists alarmed by the virtual child slavery they were seeing in Britain: children as young as six working 12 hours a day in factories for low wages or none.
Unfortunately, the program itself, which involved many Christian sects including the Roman Catholic Church, wound up becoming exactly what it was designed to cure. Many of the children exported to the far-flung British colonies were treated as unpaid labor. “The truth is, it was more economical for the British government to pay a one-time fee to send them abroad than it was to house them in orphanages,” says Heagney, who did a deep dive into research for the novel.
Not that all the children were orphans. Some, like Heagney’s father, came from poor and destitute rural families drawn in by the promise of a better life for their children. Others were classified as “paupers”—they may have had a living parent who couldn’t care for them so they had been exiled to workhouses.
Some of the children, particularly the younger ones, did find new, loving families in Canada. Many others were treated no better than farm animals. “While researching British Home Children, I read testimonials from people who were Home Children,” says Heagney. “A lot of the references about what happens to Neddy and the other children were taken from actual testimony.”
Two of those children, now minor characters in Traveler, were brothers who traveled from Ireland together and were separated at St. George’s home, a Catholic way station for Home Children run by the Sisters of Charity of St. Paul where Heagney’s father also spent some time. “The one boy couldn’t find his little brother and they wouldn’t tell him where he went. They had parceled him out and it took nearly 40 years for him to track him down,” says Heagney. “His brother had lost a leg to frostbite because he was forced to sleep in a barn during an extremely bitter winter.”
The Catholic Church promised that children would go to good Catholic families but had so few staff on the ground that there “was little to no oversight when the children landed,” says Heagney. “They didn’t have field representatives to go way out in the country to see what was happening. Some of these children were literally forgotten to death.”
In 2010, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized publicly for the government’s role in exporting children as indentured servants. “To all those former child migrants and their families, to those here with us today and those across the world, to each and every one, I say we are truly sorry,” Brown said in an address to Parliament. “We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back. And we’re sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And we’re sorry that it’s taken so long for this important day to come and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved.”
Records show that after arriving in Canada in 1929, Heagney’s father was shuttled back and forth between three separate farms and St. George’s Home before his indenture ended in 1932. Later he would work as a miner in central Ontario and as an unskilled laborer in various locations throughout the province. “Basically, he was an itinerant laborer. He never bonded with any of these people,” he says. The elder Heagney emigrated to Philadelphia in 1946 and was followed by his Canadian wife-to-be, Marjorie King. They were married there and Barney, now called Bernie, worked for the Philadelphia Transit Company. The family later moved to Levittown.
Heagney grew up hearing his father talk sporadically about life in Ireland. It inspired his own first visit to the island in 1973 to meet the family his father hadn’t seen for 44 years. But Bernie “never once mentioned that he left to become an indentured servant,” says Heagney. “He never talked about it.”
Then, a few years ago, a chance conversation with an American cousin also delving into the Heagney roots led him to the manifest of a ship called the SS Montroyal where he found his father’s name in a list of other unrelated children traveling without parents or relatives, all headed to St. George’s Home in Ottawa, Ontario. “I found out that St. George’s Receiving Home was the Catholic Church’s largest repository for British Home Children in Canada,” explains Heagney. “And I thought, ‘Wait a second? British Home Children? What is that?”
Another researcher directed him to an organization in Birmingham, England that housed many of the archived materials from the Home Children program.
When the thick envelope of research materials arrived from England, “my jaw hit the floor,” says Heagney. “It had everything. They sent copies of some things and originals of others. I saw the original application to the Catholic Emigration Association filled out by my grandfather and a copy of the actual brochure the British government distributed. When you know what actually happened, it is absolutely horrifying to read. They promised great wages, good homes, free healthcare, and it goes on and on about this wonderful opportunity.”
Like any good reporter—and Heagney was an award-winning one—his first thought was “There’s a good story here.” But it couldn’t be a straightforward biography: His father, who died in 1982, left no history, written or oral, behind. Even his family, who still live in Northern Ireland, knew little of his life after he left for Canada. “None of his siblings, all of whom I met, knew he had been sent away as an indentured servant. Even my Aunt Rose, who I interviewed when she was in her 90s, had no idea what a home child was or that dad was one of them,” says Heagney.
So Heagney took the actual documentation of his father’s experience leading up to his departure from Northern Ireland as a Home Child, combined it with archived interviews of other children in the infamous program and spun a tale of young Irish farm boy named Neddy McKenna who sets off across the ocean to an uncertain future. Then he added a touch of mysticism with an enigmatic stranger calling himself Traveler, who appears in Neddy’s dreams to, as he puts it, “guide, advise and challenge everything the boy knows or thinks he knew.” The result is a life-altering journey.
Heagney says he always enjoyed the 1998 romantic fantasy film Sliding Doors, which explored how small choices can change a life. Missing a train or catching a train. Turning left instead of right. In a series of parallel scenarios, movie goers were shown the results. “I started thinking, what if you had someone who could guide you at pivotal moments of your life?” Heagney mused. “What if Neddy had that?”
The novel opens with one of Traveler’s warnings, “It’s a weapon. The glass is a goddammed weapon. Smash it in his face and run like hell!” that makes sense to the reader and to Neddy only when the boy is face-to-face with a libidinous landlord. Traveler shows up again and again in Neddy’s dreams including once to warn of an impending British raid on his family’s farm to seize IRA guns hidden by his father.
Traveler has a cinematic feel to it: It’s action-packed and full of vividly drawn characters. There’s Neddy’s strong mother, Moira, and rapscallion father, Edward; little Timmy, taken from his widowed father and befriended by Neddy on the ship to Canada; the evil ship’s cook who provides the book’s most shocking turn of events; and the McKeowns, the kind and compassionate farming couple who want to adopt young Timmy and take the teenage Neddy in along with him.
Heagney deftly weaves together a gripping tale full of drama, humor, history, poignancy, and even a little romance. There’s a character named “Mary” whom Neddy meets on the ship taking him to Canada and her to a position as a domestic in the home of a prominent Philadelphia family.
“Mary added a softness to the story because she’s such a sympathetic character,” explains Heagney. “She’d been abandoned by her family, and through her character I was able to tell the story about life in Ireland for girls like her.”
Ironically, Heagney, who had earned a living writing nonfiction, found fiction a more effective vehicle for bringing to light the life and times of his father. “I wanted to write his story but to add much more texture,” he says. “Fiction provides a broader, more forgiving palette for a writer,” particularly one who wanted to honor his father but needed to fill in the gaps of his life.
Fictionalizing his father’s life also allowed him, like Traveler himself, to alter the course of events. Heagney says, “It allowed me to carve a more hopeful path than my father ever got to travel.”
Click here to order Traveler by John Heagney from Amazon.
