Nobody Came (13 page)

O
ver the next three years nothing very much changed in my life, either at Sacre Coeur or at school. Every day was fraught with the underlying threat of violence, both verbal and physical. I went to school and was bullied. I did my chores in the mornings and evenings plus all day at weekends and during the school holidays, all under the gaze of the nuns. Sometimes it was the hot, steamy laundry room, other times the chilly gardens where we had the back-breaking job of breaking up the clumps of water-sodden soil in preparation for the sowing of seeds. Six of us had to pull a huge sheet of metal with sharp barbs on the underside to rake the earth and create narrow funnels. I’d seen carthorses do this before, but never human beings. It seemed to us that the nuns took a perverse delight in making us work in the laundry on hot days and the gardens on the cold ones.

Three years of being the butt of jokes, three years of being caned and mocked by Mr Douglas, three years of long hours of back-breaking chores and three years of crying into my pillow. Three years before a series of events made me change forever.

The first significant event was when it was recognised that I needed glasses. Seeing me peering at my exercise book, a relief teacher took it upon himself to take me for an eye test. The disadvantage of being called ‘four eyes’ was by far outweighed by my sudden ability to see the blackboard and everything around me with clarity for the first time.

Mine was now the first hand that shot up in class. ‘Oh, not you again, Garner,’ Mr Douglas would complain. He still thought of new ways to torment me, but getting the answers right at least gave me a degree of protection from his sarcastic tongue.

The second event was when I was chosen to be part of the new gymnastics team. For the first time the orphanage had an organiser, a man named Dennis. Just under six foot tall, he had thick, dark, wavy hair, swept straight back from a low forehead. His bright blue eyes under heavy black brows twinkled when he caught us looking at him and an ever-ready smile made him a person we felt we could talk to. Apart from the priests and our schoolteachers, we had few adult male role models. Dennis was just the sort of man that young boys felt they could look up to. Thick cords of muscle ran up his arms, his shoulders were broad, his legs were thick and his long strides jaunty. He was the sort of man we aspired to grow up to be.

Dennis told us that he was a plumber in the daytime but that he was free in the evenings and at weekends. Sport was his passion, he told us repeatedly, and it was sport that turned boys into men. He would train us to put on a gymnastics show for the next summer fête.

He said he needed twenty boys in all. The team would consist of six of the older ones, eight aged between eight and ten, and six of the youngest boys.

‘All for the glory of God,’ the nuns said. They felt they were lucky having someone like Dennis who had volunteered his services. ‘He has been sent to us by the blessed Mary,’ they told us knowingly.

I saw him talking to them, looking earnestly down at their upturned faces as they gazed back at him. On those occasions even Sister Freda’s face broke out into a big smile and I saw Sister Claire’s hand cover her mouth as she tried to stop a girlish giggle escaping. Dennis, it seemed, had every nun under his spell.

Apart from Jimmy and Davie there was not a boy in the orphanage who didn’t want to be in the gymnastics team. We were tired of doing what we thought of as girls’ things in preparation for the fête – all the knitting and crafts and helping the nuns to prepare mountains of food to be sold and consumed on the day.

Also, however busy we were with whichever task we had been allocated, we were always aware of the nuns’ sharp eyes watching us. They always found time to inspect our work, looking for any fault they could find. Should they find anything that they felt was not up to their exacting standards then a cuff around the head or stinging flick of the strap would come our way.

But if we were chosen for the team, not only would we be excused many of the weekend and evening chores as the fête drew close, but in the new colourful sports outfit we would be given, we felt we would be ‘someone’. That someone would be part of a show, that someone would receive applause, that someone would be noticed and admired.

Dennis stopped me in the corridor. ‘Robbie,’ he said, ‘hello there!’ While I had noticed him, I was surprised he had noticed me and actually knew my name.

‘I’ve watched you,’ he said, ‘with your digging and working in the gardens. You move well, boy. How would you like to be in the gymnastics team?’

Would I! ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I would. But,’ and my hand nervously indicated my glasses.

‘This here’s not football, boy,’ was his response. ‘Come, let me show you something.’

He took my arm, held it in a strong grip and led me down a corridor to a room I had never seen before. He opened the door and, with his hand on my shoulder, guided me in.

‘Here it is!’ he said, his voice almost vibrating with pride, and something else that made me flinch slightly. His hand moved up to my neck, gripped it lightly and his fingers stroked the soft down at the back of my neck. I tried to shrug them away and suddenly I wanted to leave, but didn’t know how to without seeming rude.

‘Now, boy,’ he said, ‘I want you to take your glasses off.’ I did as he said and put them carefully in my pocket.

‘What can you see?’

I told him the truth: I could see everything but it was all just a bit fuzzy. Letters were the main problem; a moving ball was also very difficult, but something that did not move and was large was easy.

‘You can see the vaulting horse, can’t you? Yes? Well, if you can see it, you can jump over it.’ I had a try and Dennis seemed pleased. ‘You’re light and you’re fast,’ I was told.

It was so important to me to be in that team that I was prepared to overcome my instinctive uneasiness. It was just so flattering for me to be singled out for something and told that I was good at it. Praise wasn’t something I was used to.

When the team had been selected, we met for the first practice session. We were to be trained to do a full gymnastics show. We started with a simple bar display, where we swung and moved in unison. After that it was the vaulting horse. For that, dressed just in shorts and a vest, we were lined up in a neat formation in order of height, took a short run to gain speed, put our hands out and vaulted right over the horse. The finale of the show was a human pyramid. The bigger boys were on the bottom and the youngest and smallest one was at the very top.

We started our training as planned in May. It was only once a week to begin with, but as the summer came we had to practise much more often.

Two older teenage boys, who were long-term inmates of Sacre Coeur, were Dennis’s assistants.

Was it complete naivety on the part of the nuns that they didn’t see the darker side of Dennis? Did the desire to make the fête different and more spectacular blind them to his faults and foibles? I don’t know, but we boys soon found out what they were.

For a treat, some of the boys were allowed to watch television in Dennis room. The nuns trusted him to make the right choice of programme for us. The first time I went there, he gave me sweets. The second time, his trousers came off. He told us to do the same, and there was something so powerful about Dennis that he didn’t have to lift a threatening hand to make us do as he wanted.

His large hand would first pat our knees, stroke a head, and then ask if we wanted more sweets. Yes, we did. Small hands would be grasped and fingers wrapped around a penis that to my child’s eyes looked red and angry. Cigarettes and soft drinks appeared. The first time I lit a cigarette I coughed, but I grew to like the sensation of inhaling smoke. I liked the feeling of being part of a group.

I didn’t like touching Dennis’s penis. ‘It’s nice, Robbie,’ he said, as his fingers touched mine. I sucked my sweet and wanted to leave.

Could I have told the nuns what he was doing? Could any of us? Or would they think we were lying or even beat us for being a ‘Devil’s child’? We thought that if we told, those leather straps would rain down on us, dark cupboard doors would open and the stench of the deep litter barns would fill our nostrils all over again. And we were far too ashamed to discuss it amongst ourselves.

He abused all of us in turn. He made us suck him, fondle and rub; we listened to his groans, watched his face grow red and his eyes shut as he leant back in the chair, revelling in his own pleasure.

Dennis had us in his power, and his two assistants were bullies who stood with splayed legs, hands on hips and a sneer on their lips as we practised our jumps and lifts in the makeshift gymnasium.

‘Jump!’ he would shout at a boy. ‘Jump higher!’

Jimmy was the smallest boy who had been chosen, and for him it was a nightmare. He hadn’t wanted to do gymnastics and didn’t like being part of the group. At the vaulting practice he missed the box, his knees hit the side and he crumpled to the floor.

‘I’m going to show you what happens to little boys who keep missing the horse,’ Dennis told him. His two sidekicks snickered.

Jimmy looked at Dennis blankly. ‘It’s too high for me,’ he said in his high-pitched, childish tones.

Dennis lifted the top part of the box off. He beckoned us forward so that we could see what he was doing. There were three tiers to that wooden vaulting horse and Dennis took the top one off and placed it on the floor.

‘If you can’t go over it you can go inside it for the rest of the training session,’ he said to a cringing Jimmy. He scooped him up and placed him on a small shelf inside. He pushed him forward so that his bottom was high in the air and strapped his wrists to a rung at floor level so he was almost upside down. The top went back on and Dennis picked up a flagpole that was used on the playing field to mark out jumps. He poked it hard through the hand hole in the side of the box, laughing as he did so.

‘That’s the punishment for boys who won’t jump,’ he told all of us, then handed the pole to one of his assistants. ‘You do it; not too hard, though – don’t want to skewer him.’

Jimmy was the first one to receive that punishment, but over the weeks it was to be meted out to most of us. It was painful and humiliating. Each time it happened, however young we were, the last shreds of our self-worth were forcibly removed.

When Jimmy was let out he didn’t cry or say anything. I remembered him the first time I’d seen him, that first night in the chapel when a nun pushed him off the bench. He was such a sad, lonely little boy who wanted his mother not to be dead, and his father to come back to Jersey for him.

His silence seemed to outrage Dennis and, just as Mr Douglas had picked me out to bully at school, so Dennis now picked on Jimmy. He told the nuns that he refused to jump. ‘But,’ he said, ‘every boy in this group must do something.’ The nuns nodded their heads in agreement.

‘You are going to learn a song, Jimmy,’ he told him. ‘One that suits you. “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley” seems the right one, and you are going to sing it for the visitors at the fête. You, my boy, are going to do the solo.’

I wonder how Dennis knew that he had chosen the worst possible punishment for the quiet, timid and insular Jimmy.

Jimmy was no match for Dennis physically, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. As the fête approached, he left his bed in the middle of the night and dragged his sheet along the corridor to the gym. In the dark he climbed the bars, tied the sheet round his neck and secured the other end around the top bar. Unlike Stanley, he managed to tie the knot correctly.

He was found early the next morning, his small face suffused with blood, his tongue protruding from a mouth that had seldom smiled and faeces and urine streaking his legs.

I don’t know where he was buried.

Davie never asked where his friend was. I think somehow he must have known.

T
here is, I found, a limit to the amount of humiliation you are prepared to take. There is an end to fear. There is the start of anger.

My anger began as a tiny spark but it took three years before it turned into a flame. And when it did, I found that I was no longer afraid. What was the final straw that ignited it? I don’t know, but Jimmy’s death certainly changed something in me.

Dennis left after Jimmy died. He was seen coming out of Sister Bernadette’s office, his face bright red with anger. His teenage cronies helped him pack up his car and he drove off without a word to anybody else. I wonder what organisation that worked with young children he wormed his way into next?

His bullying assistants started a rumble of excuses that they spewed out loudly for all to hear, trying to absolve themselves from any blame.

Nobody talked about the compartment in the vaulting horse. Nobody mentioned Jimmy’s fear: the fear that had crept under the little boy’s skin, bleaching it a ghostly white; the fear that had made his muscles twitch and quiver and his heart beat faster and faster; the fear that curled round his throat, restricting his breathing until he gasped for breath; the fear that he had ended with a rope. No, nobody talked about that.

‘He missed his dead mother,’ the bullies said. ‘It’s his father’s fault for leaving him here.’ And the final words of self-justification: ‘He wasn’t quite right in the head. Couldn’t have been, could he?’ Each time they repeated their remarks, their own belief in them grew and, once believed completely, they turned their attention to the next potential victim of their cruelty.

I watched them, those boys, as they swaggered along corridors; bullies, I noticed, always went about in groups. They picked on the insular boys, the ones with few friends to protect them. They craved the admiration of their peers and the palpable fear of the weak. Then another realisation came to me: bullies were also cowards.

‘Four eyes,’ a boy at school called me. ‘You think you’re a smarty-pants, first hand up with the answer every time,’ said another. ‘Bastard!’ was the next insult that assaulted my ears. My shoulders hunched up in the familiar victim’s cringe. I wanted to get past them before a foot came out to trip me, a finger poked me painfully in the ribs, or I was pinched spitefully on a soft spot of my body. I started to put my head down, started to scurry past – and then I stopped.

For the first time I turned and drew myself up to my full height.

‘Sod that,’ I said to myself and took my glasses off.

I looked at my main tormentor. Without my glasses, the boy was blurred but I could see enough to shoot my fist out. I suddenly remembered John protecting me once. ‘Hit hard on the shoulder first,’ he’d told me, and that was what I did. With a look of stunned incredulity, my tormentor stumbled back.

‘What did you just call me?’ I asked and the bully paused for a second, sensing something had changed in me.

‘Bastard, a sorry little bastard,’ he repeated and squared up to me.

I pulled my fist back twice more and slammed it into the bully’s stomach, winding him. I heard his breath leave his body in an astonished whoosh, and then my fist connected with his chin. He went down. It all happened so fast that by the time a teacher realised something was happening, it was over. His companions had already slunk quietly away down the corridor.

‘I slipped, sir,’ the boy said and Mr Douglas chose to believe that story.

That was the start of my fighting back.

I went to the school gym and had a word with the sports master. ‘I want to train for sports day,’ I told him. ‘I want to be part of it.’

He remembered me trying out for the football team and missing even the easiest of kicks, so he gave me a dubious look.

‘My eyesight might not be good enough for football,’ I said, looking unflinchingly up into his face. ‘But,’ I repeated Dennis’s words, ‘I’m fast and I’m light. Without my glasses I can’t see the numbers on a blackboard or a moving ball, but I can run. I can run fast!’

He smiled. ‘Can you, lad? All right, Garner, I’m going to give you a chance. You can start training with the relay team.’

A smile stretched my face from ear to ear.

‘Oh, and Garner – no more fights; not if you want to stay in the team.’

‘No, sir.’

It was just after I started training for the relay team that something amazing happened. I was out working in the gardens, and during our mid-morning break one of the boys had pulled me to one side.

‘Robbie, make some excuse, say you’ve got an upset stomach, have to go to the lav, got the runs, anything. Your brother’s just on the other side of the wall, behind the outhouses.’

‘What? He can’t be!’ I was sure he must be mistaken. Davie would be inside dusting the hall at that time.

‘Your big brother. What’s his name? John,’ the boy said.

My heart jumped. I felt a tingly sensation all over my body. Could it be? Could it really be?

I hurriedly did what had been suggested; I doubled over groaning loudly, clasping my stomach. I said I had the runs, and when the nun on duty grudgingly gave me permission to leave, I staggered to the lavatory door as convincingly as I could. Luckily the section of the wall behind the lavatories was lower than the rest and didn’t have spikes embedded in it.

As soon as I knew I was out of sight of the main building, I ran as fast as my feet would carry me. When I rounded a corner I saw him sitting on top of the wall.

It was not the John I remembered, not the boy of eight whose picture I had so often reached for in my mind, but the John he had grown into, who was now thirteen; with his broad shoulders, muscular arms, and a face that had lost all trace of childish innocence, he already looked like a young man.

A huge smile spread across his tanned face and his pale grey eyes sparkled as he looked down at me.

‘Robbie,’ he said softly.

On seeing that smile that made his eyes crinkle up at the corners, that smile that had always said ‘It’s just you and me, brother,’ I felt the prickle of tears and swallowed hard. Now was not the time to cry. I wanted him to jump down, to hug me – but big boys don’t do that, I told myself sternly. I dashed the back of my hand across my face, flicked aside a tear and whooped in glee.

‘Hello, John,’ I said and swung myself up next to him.

‘You’ve grown tall,’ he remarked. ‘You jumped up here without any help.’ He looked me up and down admiringly.

He told me he had borrowed a bicycle from one of the wardens at Haut de la Garenne. I found out later that he might have borrowed it, but it certainly wasn’t with permission.

It was the first time he had been able to get to the orphanage, he told me. He had wanted to all right, he had missed us terribly, but it had been difficult to get out of the home.

‘It’s not so bad now,’ he said, ‘now I’m a bit older. But they kept an eye on us when we were younger.’

He asked about Denise and Davie. I told him I’d never found out where Denise was but said that Davie was fine. I couldn’t tell him about the accident; not yet anyway.

He told me his plans then. ‘I’ve only got just over a year left in that place, then I can get a job and live in a hostel. There’s a man there, he’s not too bad, he’s the one fixes everything up. Once I’m out of there they won’t be able to stop me visiting you here. Then it won’t be much longer till you get out and we can get a place together. I’ll be old enough to get Davie out too, you see if I don’t.’

His words swept over me like warm rays of sunshine. I imagined all three of us in a small sunny flat, with money coming in to put food on the table, nice clothes, and trips to the beach together again. The pictures he drew filled my head with wonderful images that day.

He told me he would try to come again. Nothing was easy, though. I had to keep my chin up and I had to send his love to Davie. All of a sudden he was gone, pedalling back to the home.

I went to bed that night with my secret curled up warmly inside of me. I knew it couldn’t be shared. I knew I couldn’t tell Davie even though I wanted to so badly because he wouldn’t understand that it had to be kept secret. The day that only that morning had seemed so grey and drab, a day like any other, had just for a short while been changed immeasurably.

As I lay in bed I could still hear his voice, see the picture of the person he was now, and hear him promising me the one thing I wanted more than anything else – a future and a family. I had no doubt he could make this happen because he seemed so grown-up now. His voice had already broken and the tones were deep and resonant in comparison to my squeaky childlike voice. A soft down already topped his upper lip and he had thick blond hair on his arms and legs as well. I was so proud because he looked more like a man than a boy, and took great delight in telling the other boys that he was my brother.

I saw John twice more. He came to the wall and together we made our plans. Then he stopped coming and it was a whole year before I found out why, and it would be almost four years before I saw him again.