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"When I got my first copy of the book, I hugged it and cried and cried. I slept with it,” said Shirley Maxwell of High Point.

The joy of hugging her first baby doll as a child didn’t compare with the thrill of holding “Scattered Pieces,” a 280-page, hardback book, tightly to her bosom. The book, less than an inch thick, provides a look at Maxwell’s happy times and her haunts.

“I thought about writing the story of my life for 10 years, but I didn’t think I could do it,” she said. A little more than two years ago, she finally resolved to write.

“Once I got started, I just wrote and wrote,” she said. “I had a lot more to say than I thought I would.

“When I held the first copy (of the book), I said, 'Did I really do this?’ I’ve had an interesting life.”

Maxwell raised three children, helped run a family business, became a world traveler and now manages a thrift store for Seven Homes, a nonprofit ministry founded by her son, Kenneth Maxwell. The ministry was begun in 1995 to help boys in crisis.

This is a story about growing up in an orphanage with misgivings about why she was there and entering adulthood with a storybook romance that brought much happiness and disappointments, too.

Maxwell, who went to Mills Home in Thomasville at age 8 along with her brother, Danny, then 6, said that her life has been one of survival.

“My grandmother taught me to be a survivor,” she said.

Little Shirley Topping lived part of her preorphanage life with her maternal grandmother, Minnie Liles, on a farm in eastern North Carolina. That was after her “mother went away and my father wasn’t able to take care of us,” she said.

“He never told us where mother went,” she said. She would find out many years later that her mother had been in a mental hospital.

Maxwell said it turned out that her mother had a brain tumor and wasn’t mentally ill. An operation removed the tumor but her mother never regained her full physical health, she said.

Her father was a policeman in Littleton, who depended on his children’s grandparents to care for them. Then, on a snowy day, Dec. 23, 1943, he took his children to Mills Home to live.

Maxwell’s first encounter with authority at Mills Home — the keeper of the cottage where she was to live — provided an unforgettable experience: “The first thing she did was go through my bag. She started throwing away most of the things I had brought with me. I did manage to keep my hairbrush Grandma had given me and the red beads from Sadie Rose (her first friend). She pulled out the dress my grandma had made for me out of a flour sack and tossed it into a pile on the floor where she had thrown the other things. When I saw her do this, I became very upset and started crying.

“I screamed at her with tears running down my cheeks, 'No, no, you can’t throw that dress away. My grandmother made me that dress, and I love it.’ ”

There were good experiences at Mills Home, too. By the time Shirley graduated from Thomasville High School in 1953, she and a couple of friends were ready to share a place in High Point and begin new lives. She was on her own. Her father had died three years earlier and her brother, Daniel, had fled the orphanage, never to return.
Shirley Topping had a boring job in a hosiery mill and wondered what her next big step in life would be now that high school was behind her.

Romance was not far away. Her special encounter occurred outside of a High Point grocery store.

“Just as I got outside the grocery store, I tripped, and all three bags landed at my feet, breaking the eggs, catsup and mustard jars.
 

Everything else that could and did break was scattered all around, and there I stood, straddling the whole mess and feeling like a fool.”

As she stood staring at two eggs that survived, she heard a voice, “I wouldn’t worry about it, lady. It wouldn’t have lived anyway. Its eyes were too far apart.”

“He was making fun of me and laughing,” she wrote. “He said, 'I’m Cpl. (Robert) Maxwell, ma’am, at your beck and call, and it sure looks like you need help.’ ”

A conversation with the 6-foot Marine from High Point led to a short courtship and a marriage proposal at the Jamestown Fair in October. They were off on their honeymoon on Oct. 18, 1953.

They had three children and ran a business together before divorcing in 1970. He later remarried, and his second wife, Sally Maxwell, became one of Shirley Maxwell’s best friends. Sally Maxwell is administrative director for Seven Homes. Robert Maxwell died a few years ago.

In January 1987, Shirley Maxwell met a suave German gentleman whom she calls Wolfgang while in Jamaica, and they agreed to meet in Paris.

Sure enough, just like a movie script, she met him in Paris and another romance was born. That relationship ended in divorce after 17 years but not before they had seen many of the world’s most exotic countries together.

“He was handsome and smart,” she said. “I didn’t know he was an atheist. I thought I could cope with that, but I couldn’t.”
Sharing her life story has re-energized Maxwell, now 74.

“I’m happy with my life now. I’m contented; I’ve never been so happy,” she said. “I don’t want to call this closure, but …”

Contact Bob Burchette at bburchette@triad.rr.com