Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (14 page)

Unbeknown to the men, however, the boys they were expecting to nab easily were armed and rather more alert than might have been supposed, something they only discovered after bursting through the door of a cubicle where a few moments earlier the pair had been attempting to wake up a fellow inmate. The men found themselves staring down the barrels of a couple of rifles.
Freeze
. The boys backed out of the building, slowly, their
weapons still trained on their would-be captors.

But now it was time for the night's third surprise: the screech of tyres announcing the cavalry's arrival, a Kingswood car at one side of the institution, a Comer van on the other. Time to go. And if anybody got in the way, well, as far as Charlie was concerned, that was just going to be too fucking bad.

The boys sprinted through the grounds, making for the alleyway on the outskirts of the main field, the artery that connected the institution to the street leading off to the railway station, only to find their exit blocked by the first cop, who by this point had been alerted to the fact that the boys were packing heat. He fired a warning shot into the air. His quarry spun around and began sprinting in the opposite direction, back towards their parked vehicle on Riverside Drive. Alas, fate seemed to be against them in that direction, too, because another officer, Murray Cameron, was bearing down in the same direction along with his dog, Nick.

Cameron had heard the shot fired into the sky by his colleague, and for a moment he was nonplussed. Cameron knew all about weapons. The guys at the station called him Gunner, a nod to his shooting skills, but this would be the first time, he realised, that he might be called on to parlay those skills against a couple of
hot-blooded
gun-toting children, now heading in his direction at a fast clip. Just kids. Then again, did it make any difference what age they were? The dog-handler decided to give chase.

Within moments, or so it seemed, he had almost caught up with them outside their parked van. As Charlie attempted to clamber inside, the cop ordered the dog to go for the younger boy. Somehow the kid managed to wrench the door open and nearly get out of harm's way. His rifle was stuck in the door. Sensing triumph, Cameron bounded over to the vehicle, yanked open the door and made to pull the boy out. The kid darted to one side. It was only then that the young officer remembered Charlie, who
now had
his
loaded weapon cocked and pointing straight at the cop's chest. Only a foot separated them. He saw the boy's body tighten, his finger on the trigger, now applying pressure to the firing mechanism. Then, as if from a vast distance, the final click.

EVERY AFTERNOON AT THREE A FULL-FIGURED
, slightly stooped old woman named Colleen would emerge from the solitary lift inside the Department of Social Welfare's district office on Lower Hutt's High Street pushing a metal trolley clustered with cups and containers of hot water. Bill FitzGerald's office was the first on the right after the lifts, and custom dictated that the former child welfare chief, who had taken over as director that past July, was among the first to receive a visit from the office tea lady.

On the afternoon of September 15, 1972, Colleen had particular reason to be punctual: the events of the previous evening over at Epuni had left the normally mild-tempered director in a state of considerable agitation. Not only had head office bawled him out about it that morning, details of the whole sorry episode were now splashed across the front page of the
Evening Post
, with tomorrow's edition of
The Dominion
almost certain to follow suit.

Not that FitzGerald could blame the newspapers. It
had
been a close call. If the older boy's rifle hadn't jammed at the last moment, the department would almost certainly have had one death on its hands, maybe more. True, the immediate problem had been sorted out for the moment; the boys, handcuffed to each other, appeared in court that morning, with a lengthy sentence awaiting both of them. But that didn't address the long-term question of what was happening over at Riverside Drive. Even the mayor of Lower Hutt, John Kennedy-Good, along with local Labour MP Trevor Young, were said, accurately as it transpired, to be planning to lead an angry delegation over to Epuni demanding its immediate closure.

Wearily, one assumes, the director picked up the receiver
and dialled head office to discuss how they might best go about restoring sanity. The mild-mannered officer might even have silently offered the kind of oath he was seldom heard to say:
damn
. Who could blame him? The situation must have seemed like the latest in a growing pile of last straws.

The general staffing situation was plainly chaotic, as indeed it had been for some time, with just one experienced housemaster among the entire staff complement and 17 new appointments rushed through in the first quarter of the year alone. ‘It has been like trying to run the new
Rangatira
with a crew of barge-hands,' FitzGerald later wrote. Sooner or later, he added despairingly, the public's concern ‘is bound to become all too evident'.

His overriding impression, however, even ‘after making allowances for all the difficulties involved, including the increasing sophistication and defiance of the boys and efforts made from all quarters to try and improve the situation', was that the management of the home had all but collapsed on account of what he said were the ‘inadequacies affecting its operation and purpose'. Howe simply ‘does not delegate or communicate sufficiently for senior or junior staff to feel they belong … senior staff cannot make decisions in his absence. He is not receptive to ideas from staff members'.

And on it went. Probably the only positive thing that might have been said at this point was that Epuni's problems weren't as noteworthy as those seen at Fareham House in Featherston, an all Maori girls' institution, where staff became so exasperated with the behaviour of the inmates that they had simply walked out en masse. Later, the Fareham principal was even run over by a car while attempting to prevent a bunch of wards absconding, leading to an ensuing scene like something out of a nightmarish English school story: kids armed with knives swooping from the trees to conduct sorties in the main building, where a terrified matron and her seamstresses hid in cupboards listening to the
children chanting ‘We hate the Child Welfare!'

Still, things were bad enough at Epuni. A blistering four-page memo dispatched by the department's national director-general, Ian Mackay, concluded that it was high time for the Epuni chief to take stock of his career and decide ‘whether change is personally palatable or not. We clearly cannot continue to experience the succession of emergency situations which, among other things, have embarrassed the Department and the Minister, if there is a chance that changes could bring about any improvement.' Lest the point of the message be lost on Howe, the director-general added, ‘He should be shown this memorandum.'

That was a bit difficult to do, however, for by this point Howe was on sick leave. Mackay's next move was to summon a posse of experienced operators — including Hokio Beach's assistant principal, Mike Doolan, and Howe's old offsider from the 1960s, Gary Hermansson, who had since moved on to become a senior counsellor at Kohitere — to ride in and sort out the mess, with strict instructions not to leave until normality had been restored.

With a grimace, Doolan recalled the scene that greeted them on their arrival. ‘People were leaving that institution more quickly than they were coming in. It was an absolute hellhole of a place. And because the staff were under pressure to deal with it, they were doing some ludicrous things.' One night Doolan was awoken by the nightwatchman banging around in one of the corridors. Intrigued, he slipped on a dressing gown and padded off to see what was happening. It turned out that the watchman had waited until all the inmates were asleep before going around their rooms and removing everyone's shoes. ‘What he didn't realise, of course, was that he woke everyone up.' Doolan laughed sardonically at the memory. ‘This was the kind of stupid, stupid stuff that was going on.' Not that there was that much he could do: ‘Every day I prayed that this cup would pass me by.'

Added Hermansson: ‘I think by that stage things were fairly chaotic. I'm not sure exactly where Maurie was at this stage but there'd been quite a staff turnover and the kids were much more … well, the fine line between being in control and being out of control was fading. It was almost like the inmates had taken over the asylum.' Rather than dutifully going off to their rooms or whatever else was required of the wards on a particular day, ‘they all just ran off twt anywhere. So we had to call the police while the kids were all out in the community or wherever.'

Hermansson pursed his lips at the recollection. ‘I remember standing there and thinking, you know, there's just nothing you can do about this. We had once had this kind of agreement between the kids and ourselves that we were in charge and they were able to follow what we did and we could negotiate.' The social contract had been broken? ‘Exactly, yeah, it was kind of like suddenly everything had turned on its head.' The institution had become a place of ‘tension, conflict and negativity'.

As far as Hermansson and the others were concerned, the problems seemed almost entirely to be a factor of management and staffing problems brought about by the institution's inability to face up to, as their report put it, ‘the changing attitudes of youth'. There was, they wrote, an unattended need to meet their desire for ‘self-expression and independence within the limits of what is reasonable in an institutional setting. The frustration at the lack of [this] is expressed in their rebellious and sometimes violent behaviour.'

There followed a salty assessment, signed in the name of Denis Reilly, the acting assistant-director of residential services at the time, which began its managerial critique thus:

As for the boys themselves:

There followed a number of recommendations and yet another blunt assessment of the chief executive's future prospects: ‘If he is unable to respond to the help that is given, I see no alternative to
his transfer.' Neither circumstance was to eventuate.

A few months later, on April 2, 1973, yet another report was filed by the department's assistant director, concluding in much the same vein and recommending the chief executive's transfer out of what was becoming one of the department's most problematic works in progress. ‘I reluctantly join the long list of those whose unanimous opinion it is that Mr Howe is not adequate as a Controlling Officer,' Bernard Baker wrote of the principal's ability to cope with such ‘extraordinarily demanding' times.

Maurie was devastated. He asked for another chance to sort out the problem. Baker was impressed, and not unsympathetic. He agreed to give him another shot. Partly this was because of Howe's ‘great strengths in the verbal expression of his ideas', as he later put it, but also, one suspects, because to have dumped him at this point would almost certainly have meant closing the institution altogether, something the mayor and the police may well have been agitating for, but which the department could not countenance. But it had been a close call.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 23, 1973, SOCIAL WELFARE
inspector Elsie Feist turned up at the door unannounced to see how things were progressing since the events of the previous winter. What followed made for interesting reading in the report she subsequently filed.

The young man who greeted her at the front door may have been an attendant or he may have been a ward — it was a bit hard for her to tell. Little matter. Feist was duly escorted along the main passageway, whereupon she espied another woman of a similar age to her own, shoulders hunched and hands jammed in pockets, shuffling along in the opposite direction, who turned around and frowned at the newcomer.

‘Who are you?' the woman demanded of the inspector.

‘I was just going to ask you the same question,' Feist parried.

She was, it transpired, the resident matron, Edith Sweatman, and by Feist's account what followed was not much of an improvement on their introduction. A somewhat stilted conversation ensued. Sweatman seemed in an oddly lethargic mood, but also angry, in a subdued kind of way, as if she secretly wished her unexpected guest might do everybody a favour by smuggling herself out of the premises in a laundry truck. During their desultory exchange, the inspector made mention of a planned staff meeting; might she attend?