Treetops Children’s Home

Treetops Children’s Home is a refuge for foundlings and other children unable to live with their families, established at Treetops Manor by Sunday Small and Tom Branning with the support of Lady Lavinia Huntley. Its defining purpose is not simply to house children but to ensure that none feels unwanted: the home turns Sunday’s experience of abandonment and institutional neglect into a practical commitment to belonging. The story first presents that commitment as a future undertaking, then returns years later to show it in operation when another infant is left at the door.

Origins and purpose

At the end of the Mothering Sunday service, Sunday accepts Lady Lavinia Huntley’s offer to use Treetops Manor for a home for foundling children. She and Tom intend to take responsibility for it when they marry, but Sunday asks that Lady Lavinia live there too and advise them. Their youth and inexperience are part of the proposal, not a reason to abandon it: Tom can manage practical work around the house, while Sunday will do what she can and looks to her mother for guidance. The plan thus joins the couple’s labour to the support of an older woman who has both the means to offer the house and a personal bond with Sunday.

The home’s founding idea is expressed through a contrast with the Nuneaton workhouse. There, residents are divided by sex, assigned hard labour, and rarely brought together except for Sunday church; Sunday has seen how separation can devastate families. Her own memories include poor meals and a punishment cell in which she was kept for three days without food or drink. Later, after leaving the workhouse, she describes those conditions to Lady Lavinia Huntley in the hope that speaking plainly may improve life for those still there. Against that system of separation and deprivation, Treetops is imagined as a place where children can be cared for as individuals and know that they belong.

Household and care

The home’s operation is presented through its domestic setting rather than a formal administrative structure. Treetops Manor becomes a home for children, and Sunday and Tom share responsibility for running it with Lady Lavinia Huntley’s help. Tom is expected to take on practical jobs; Sunday undertakes the work of caring for the children. Lady Lavinia’s continuing presence provides the advice Sunday specifically requested, while Zillah and Cissie Burns also help with the children’s daily care. The account shows a working household in which responsibility is shared among people bound by family ties, friendship, and service.

That care is significant in light of the neglect Sunday witnessed in the workhouse nursery. There, an attendant uses sloe gin to quiet babies and leaves them hungry and in soiled binders; Sunday changes the infants, warms their milk, and feeds them. The novel does not present that episode as a detailed description of Treetops’ routine, but it establishes the experience behind Sunday’s concern for vulnerable children. At the home, the practical work of settling the babies into their cots is shared by Zillah and Cissie, and Sunday hurries upstairs to check on the newest arrival. Care is conveyed through attention to particular children, not through an abstract promise of benevolence.

Growth and residents

The home develops over more than six years. Its first three arrivals are Benjamin, a cheerful, strong-willed boy who wins Sunday’s affection at once; Edwina, who arrives two months later; and Marianne, affectionately known as Annie, who joins them a month after that. Five more babies find a home over the following six years. By the time Kitty arrives, the whole second storey has been given over to the children: there are eight foundlings already in residence and nine with the new baby included. The growing number of children makes the original offer of a refuge a sustained undertaking rather than a single act of rescue.

The children’s development also marks a contrast with the insecurity of their beginnings. The first three, once infants, are now cheerful and robust. Sunday has become attached to Benjamin and to the others, while the home’s shared life gives the children a place within an ongoing household. The evidence does not describe a fixed intake procedure; instead, the home’s purpose is made concrete by the repeated arrival of babies who need a safe place and by the care given to those already there.

Kitty and the home’s continuing role

Kitty’s arrival demonstrates that Treetops remains open to children in need after the home has been established. Tom and Sunday find the bundled newborn on the doorstep. A letter explains that the baby was born the previous day, gives her name as Katherine, asks the household to take her in, and encloses money for her immediate needs, with further contributions promised at regular intervals. The request recognizes Treetops as a refuge for babies and children unable to live with their own families. It also gives the household financial help for Kitty without changing the fact that the responsibility for receiving her rests with the people who run the home.

By this point Tom and Sunday have been married for almost seven years. They have no child of their own, a circumstance Sunday regrets, but caring for the foundlings means she is rarely without the company of babies and children. The arrival of Kitty draws her immediately upstairs, where Zillah and Cissie are settling the children for the night. Sunday has a feeling that this particular baby will be important to her, though the account does not yet explain why. The moment keeps the home’s purpose open-ended: each new child becomes part of its life, rather than merely the conclusion of a completed rescue.

Narrative significance

Treetops Children’s Home gives institutional criticism a constructive answer. The workhouse’s divisions, labour assignments, poor food, and punishments shape Sunday’s understanding of what children should not have to endure; the home represents the alternative she and Tom choose to build. Its success is measured in particular circumstances—the children who grow up there, the adults who share their care, and the willingness to receive a baby left without a secure family home—not in a claim that every difficulty has been solved.

The final image of the home’s future is connected to the candle lit at the Mothering Sunday service in honour of mothers. The light becomes an image of the path Sunday and Tom intend to follow as two people who grew up in the workhouse and now plan a home for lost and lonely children. Years later, Kitty at the door makes that intention newly present. Treetops is therefore both a household and a continuing promise: that an abandoned child can be welcomed into a place where care is shared and belonging is made real.