Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (2 page)

As a healthy, white male who had been given up as a newborn, I should have been a prime candidate for would-be adoptive parents. In fact, one of the nurses at the home, Mary Littler, was very fond of me and tried to adopt me, even though she was still a very young woman at the time, about twenty years old. My mother put paid to that. Biological parents could veto any adoption of their children by displaying some meagre interest in their welfare, and I believe that my mother came to visit me about once a year, although I don’t remember those visits and don’t know why she was so resistant to having me adopted, as she clearly had no interest in me herself. Mary also told me that my father, who was then working nights, came to visit me every day when I was very small.  

I have often wondered how my life would have turned out if I had become Mary’s adopted son; if someone had loved me as a child, as I love my little boys today.  

I am still in touch with Mary, who lives on the south coast now. She has provided me with some of the sparse information I have about my origins. Mary told me that my father had done his best to keep the family together after my parents separated, and that he had even got back with my mother at one stage so as to get all of us kids out of care, but that once again our mother had ensured that we would stay just where we were. After a while, my father drifted away, too. From that moment, both my parents became strangers to me and they have remained so ever since.  

One of my earliest memories is that of reaching the age of three or four and suddenly realising in a moment of clarity that I was utterly alone in the world. Every child growing up in care has that realisation at an early age. All of a sudden, with awful, shocking clarity of vision, you know that you are all alone and that, ultimately, nobody even cares whether you live or die because the world is indifferent to the children who nobody loves. Nobody wants you. Nobody ever wanted you. It is the loneliest feeling in the world. It is utterly overwhelming. I have been through it myself and I have seen it happen, again and again, to the younger children in the home where I grew up. I think that, when this terrible realisation happened to me, I changed overnight from being quite a friendly, out going child to a difficult, shy child with a tendency to lash out that I have never managed to get completely under control. That dreadful understanding, of being utterly alone and unloved, shatters confidence and hope the way nothing else can.

Just before I turned eight, I was taken from the only home I had ever known and brought by my social worker Mr Gardner, an elegantly dressed black man, to St Leonard’s Home for Children in Essex, on the outskirts of East London. The home was a complex of beautiful Victorian buildings that had been created in what was then the green Essex countryside, to provide London’s unwanted offspring with a healthy country childhood that would give them a great foundation in life. By the time that I was sent to live there, in the late 1960s, London had grown so much that it had engulfed the countryside and the home, which was now run by Tower Hamlets. I had been told that I had a brother there, but we had not had any contact, so I did not know Declan any more than any of the other children I was about to meet. I knew that I had six brothers and one sister and I had met the ones closest to me in age, but I had little understanding of what being related meant. We had all been rejected by our mother, but the older ones had spent a large portion of their childhoods at home.

I am the youngest, after John. Then come Danny, Declan, Peter, Matthew, Michael and Anne. At least our mother had been consistent in not having any interest in any of her children. Several of my siblings had done time in St Vincent’s, and Matty and Michael, who were much older, were in a more secure unit in Bedfordshire. We had nothing to do with each other then; we have almost nothing to do with each other now. I do talk to Matty once in a while on the phone, but we don’t actually meet much. Blood is not really thicker than water; if you don’t grow up with your sisters and brothers, they are not really family.

Back then, as I was brought to St Leonard’s children’s home, I wondered if Declan and I would get to know each other better. I was led by the hand down the long, winding avenue to the cottage I would share with about thirty other children and our house parent, Bill Starling, a man who was then in his mid-forties, having been at the home for about two years. I was told that we children were supposed to refer to him as ‘Uncle Bill’. Some of the other care workers there were also referred to as ‘Aunties’ and there was one in particular who I had the misfortune of having as one of my carers. I can’t tell you her real name for legal reasons but I’ll refer to her simply as ‘Auntie Coral’.

When I met up with Declan, he gave me some inside information. Until recently, the housemother who had been taking care of him had been a kind, older woman called Peggy, whom the children referred to affectionately as ‘wooden tit’ because of the prosthetic breast she wore following an operation for breast cancer. I do not know how Peggy felt about her nickname, but it did seem to be meant well. The children had all liked Peggy and she seemed to have provided them with a degree of security and some sense of being cared for. Unfortunately for me, Peggy had by now retired.

Starling was still quite new, and apparently Declan had not quite got the measure of him yet, or else did not want to talk about it for some reason. The Principal of the home was a man called Alan Prescott, and I was strongly advised by Declan and all the other kids I met to keep out of his way, for reasons that would soon become very clear.

At St Leonard’s, there were fourteen ‘cottages’, each of which housed up to thirty kids. At the home, we had our own orchards, playground, sick bay, swimming pool and gardens. It all looked beautiful and someone had clearly put a lot of thought into building a wonderful environment for London’s unwanted kids. We were there for all sorts of reasons, although I was in a minority, having been unceremoniously dumped by my mother as a babe-in-arms. We had rent boys who had been ‘saved’ from the streets as teenagers, riddled with sexually transmitted diseases and serious behaviour problems; children whose parents had voluntarily given them up for one reason or another; and children who had been taken from their parents by the social workers for the usual reasons of neglect, indifference and abuse. Occasionally, a child would come and stay at St Leonard’s for a short period while his or her case was being decided, but the vast majority of us were there for the duration of our childhood and teenage years and, for us, St Leonard’s was the only home that we knew.

We were all different, but we had one thing in common: we were all miserably, desperately unhappy. Not a lot of thought had gone into selecting the house parents who served at St Leonard’s – or perhaps it had, albeit not in the way one would expect, and we certainly were not receiving anything even vaguely resembling proper childcare.

Before deciding to go into the care industry, Bill Starling had been a lorry driver. In those days, astonishing as it seems, there was no vetting system for house parents, and he had no particular experience in caring for children. For Uncle Bill, the job at St Leonard’s was a way to skim the system, pocket the proceeds and brutalise the kids in the process. Most of us were very small and thin for our age, and the reason why was simple – we were fed on bread and margarine and not much else, while Starling used the housekeeping budget for himself.

On my very first night – remember that I was just eight years old and that I had just left the only home that I had never known – I wet the bed. Of course, I was desperately embarrassed. But, as if that was not bad enough, Auntie Coral made me strip off my sheets and then threw me and the sheets together into a bath of freezing cold water heavily laced with bleach where she scrubbed me until I was almost bleeding. This was the standard approach at St Leonard’s to children with bedwetting problems. Unsurprisingly, Auntie Coral’s attempts to cure us of bedwetting were less than effective. Most of the little ones wet their beds frequently, and the same treatment was always doled out.

I soon learned what happened when we children misbehaved in any way. Several times a week, we would be rooted out of our dorms and told to strip off all of our identical white-and-grey striped pyjamas – which resembled nothing more than the prison garb of caricature prisoners in old comic books – and line up in the hallway, while Starling, sometimes with some of his friends, walked up and down shouting, kicking our legs out from under us and stubbing out their cigarettes on our pigeon-chested  bodies. They found this funny. They found it hilarious. Uncle Bill always had a cigarette in his hand. He was a chain smoker who lit up and puffed away in front of the children, regardless of what was going on. This also meant that he always had a handy tool at the ready to inflict pain on our tender skin.

When the adults had tired of the entertainment, we would be allowed to put on our nightclothes and leave. I do remember that this sort of thing would happen more often in the summertime. We would all be sent to bed at the usual early time but, because it was summer, it was still light, and none of us could sleep, so we would start messing about, tossing pillows and generally acting up. Then Bill Starling would come roaring up to the dormitory and root us out, yelling, ‘Get out into the hall, you little bastards! Get the fuck out of bed, you little shits,’ and the entertainment would begin, especially on those evenings when he had friends over and they had all been drinking. While Uncle Bill was not a particularly heavy drinker, a beer or two seemed to help him to shed whatever few inhibitions he still had. Uncle Bill liked to show his friends that the kids he was in charge of knew who the boss was, and he was single-minded in pursuit of this goal.

Apart from Uncle Bill’s incursions into the dormitory, there was little at St Leonard’s to break the monotony of everyday life. In the morning, we got up at around seven, got our breakfast and went to school. In the evening, we came home, ate, watched TV for a while and went to bed. We were periodically instructed to wash, and generally made to take care of ourselves in terms of personal hygiene. Nothing ever really changed, and every day was pretty much the same as the one that went before it in one long, depressing litany. Birthdays were not celebrated – which was at least honest, because we all knew that nobody was very happy about the fact that we unwanted rascals had been born. In fact, mine was usually marked in the form of birthday greetings on the second of August – when I had actually been born on the twenty-second. In a good year, a local factory would donate toys at Christmas, which we would all share, because there was little question of any child having personal possessions, which would have led inevitably to jealousy and squabbling. Christmas dinner stands out, as Christmas Day was the only day in the year when we would eat well. Some of the children would have gone home to see relatives for the holidays, so there would be less of us about, and we would have a proper roast turkey and other good things and stuff ourselves until we felt sick, and then watch the better-than-usual fare on television.

The kids of St Leonard’s were a motley crew of mostly Irish and black boys and girls. They were the offspring of already dysfunctional families, like the Connollys, who had come to London with the idea that they would get ahead and prosper, only to find that the streets were not paved with gold after all. Their old problems were still with them and now there was no support system to hold everything together as there might have been at home. In those days, the perception was that the most dysfunctional people in Britain were usually either Irish or black, which is why, if you look at old news reels, you’ll see the signs landlords used to post in their windows: ‘No blacks, Irish or dogs’. Irish and black petty criminals flooded borstals and prisons, and most of the drunks cooling off in the police cells were from the same demographic. Even at the young age of the children in the home, we were seen as the lowest form of life there was, and treated accordingly.

It was not fair, but people who come from the toughest, hardest, most poverty-stricken backgrounds are often going to be the most difficult to deal with and the most likely to become dangerous, truculent people, and the most likely to get drunk and make a nuisance of themselves. I saw this for myself, growing up, and later when I visited a relative in borstal where he was serving time for mugging old ladies. In his lock-up, as elsewhere, the prisoners were mostly Irish or black – there were no white, English grammar-school boys there!

At the home, we children often got into fights, but we were also like sisters and brothers and, perhaps surprisingly, we were colour-blind. Nobody cared who was Irish and who was black because we had so much in common; we were all abandoned runts who had been thrown on the tender – or not so tender – mercy of the state. We would fight over the last scrap of bread on the table or what we watched on television, but we didn’t care what colour anyone was or where their parents had come from.

My best friend at St Leonard’s was a little boy called Liam Carroll – another Irish child – who was in much the same boat as me. Liam lived in the cottage directly opposite mine, Myrtle Cottage. The windows of our cottages faced each other and, when we had to return to our respective buildings, Liam and I would part reluctantly. We would go to our dormitories and wave at each other through the windows, a strangely comforting ritual. I can still remember seeing his pale face through the slightly warped old glass, as though I was looking at him underwater. I didn’t know how Liam had ended up in the home. He had a bigger brother but I never learned how they had been abandoned and this was not something we ever discussed. I imagine that it was another sad little tale of dysfunction and lack of love.

Liam and I were inseparable for years. To this day, I have to say that he was one of the strongest people I have ever known. It seemed to me then that, no matter what life threw at him, Liam would be OK. Even as a child, Liam appeared to be a pillar of strength. The only really happy memories I have from my childhood involve Liam. We bunked off school together whenever possible, and made our way to a nearby field where horses bound for the abattoir were kept. We enlivened the final days of those unhappy horses by jumping on them and riding bareback until we fell off. When we did go to school, we would walk the five miles there so as to save our bus fare to spend on sweets and other cheap carbohydrates that made us feel briefly full.