Patchwork Man (5 page)

‘Because you have to convince me first, and if I’m convinced, I’ll defend you – and you’ll get off.’ It was rash – but not as rash as the confession I’d been about to tumble headlong into.

I
t was called a children’s home, but anything less like a home I can’t imagine. I wasn’t the only one sent there. George and Win got sent there with me too. We were classed as ’older boys’. For some reason the original division of older and younger kids was revised for me and I ended up being re-classified ‘older’ even though I was under ten. Maybe it was another ‘administrative mistake’, or age was as irrelevant as caring in the end.

It was in Eastbourne, so it wasn’t completely in the country, nor completely out of it. It was on the coast – and freezing most of the year, but surrounded by rural countryside too. In fact it wasn’t just on the coast, it was almost in the sea, on a grassy strip to one end of the conurbation, wind-battered and isolated – far enough out of town so we didn’t interfere with ‘decent folks’. It felt like winter there all year round, even when the sun shone, because the breeze, no matter how balmy elsewhere, still had that biting cold to it that defines the coastal airstream. The salt-scorched paintwork was testimony to its interminable beating, and as the elements beat the building, so the staff applied their diligent ministrations to us, the residents.

Barely a day passed without a small act of cruelty. It became the norm to expect rapped fingers, a twisted ear lobe or pinched skin on the inner arm. None of it showed. If the home was inspected all the kids in it were apparently robust and unharmed – and we would never dare complain about the treatment for fear of more. Despite being innocently restrained there, we gradually came to see ourselves as the lowest of the low – the abandoned, the ‘not wanted’. ‘Shoved out’ as Danny put it so eloquently to me later. We knew whatever we claimed would not be believed and then we would suffer ten-fold when the official visit had ended, leaving us to the tender mercies of our Houseparent.

The first week there passed innocuously enough. There were six kids to a dorm, each with a bed, plastic under-sheet in case of bed-wetting, two rough blankets and a checked brown counterpane. I found out later all the dorms were the same – even though there was a different Houseparent responsible for each. If you went into another dorm where you’d made a friend, you’d find it almost exactly identical to your own, apart from perhaps a minor variation in the wall displays, although even then they were simply variations on the same theme. If at any time we’d changed dorms, I think we could have expected our lives to have remained almost identical to before. They all had the sense of being somewhere you were forced to be, not where you’d choose to live.

We kids were responsible for the daily ritual of stripping back our bedclothes and then reversing the process to remake the bed, ensuring as we did that each layer was so neat and tight you could have bounced a pin on it. A sloppily made bed got you a spot on the chart on the wall and a punishment. A black spot was a misdemeanour, a red one a bed-wet and a yellow one signified approval. Needless to say our chart had mainly black and red spots and very few yellows. I always thought of yellow as sunshine, and there was little of it there, without the accompanying cold shiver of imminent threat – whether from the icy wind or the equally cold treatment of our Houseparent or co-residents.

Our dorm was made up of me, Georgie, Win, Fat Sam, Jonesy and Lennox. Lennox was black and at first I was afraid of him because despite having lived in the suburbs on the outskirts of London – the Smoke – there were still not that many blacks even in Croydon, the slum hole of the locality. My only direct experience of coloured people was when Pop had a fight with one over a betting slip at the bookies one Saturday when he’d taken Win and I with him because Ma was struggling around full-bellied just before Jill and Emm were born. He was bigger, harder and meaner than Pop, and Pop’s belt had stayed firmly buckled even after he’d blacked one of Pop’s eyes and kept the ticket. He’d grinned cheerfully as he pocketed it and strolled back inside the bookies, giving Pop a mock salute by way of thank you as he went. His teeth had gleamed unnaturally like stars in the night sky and whenever Lennox grinned, my five-year-old’s brain kicked in and instinctively remembered the mocking black face and the sparkling teeth, with Pop crumpled and defeated. I learnt after a while that Lennox was actually a gentle giant without the will to hurt a fly and then my riotous imagination turned him instead into a Tom Robinson – but that came much later.

I was bolstered initially by the daily expectation that we would be returned home shortly. The board outside the home stating ‘Children’s Home and Orphanage’ remained merely a label in those first weeks. It was a home for us children so I accepted it without question. It took some months to find out the precise meaning of ‘orphanage’, by which time it was a self-evident truth that we were stuck there, and not about to be collected by Ma or Pop any time soon – if ever. I ate the tasteless lumpy porridge for breakfast, did what I was told to by frosty-faced Miss Liddell and trudged obediently between school, ‘chores’, and keeping a low profile.

Chores were specifically allocated and regularly rotated week on week. Mine varied between polishing and dusting the dorm, corridor, communal room and meal area, and mopping the floors on a Saturday morning. Miss Liddell’s motto was ‘the devil finds work for idle hands’ so every bit of spare time not otherwise accounted for would be filled with a chore if she caught you hanging around. I idly wondered once what work the devil was finding for her hands whilst we did all the work and she did none, but that was soon answered by a slap or a pinch when I slackened off. The irony was that a punishment for ‘laziness’ was often more chores so I also learnt how to make myself scarce, thereby avoiding not only the allocation of more chores, but also more trouble. The first few weeks, however, were spent tediously learning that particular lesson. The older the boy, the heavier the duty. At nine, I was deemed old enough to mop the floors and help turn the younger ones’ mattresses once a month, so gradually my stick legs and scrawny arms developed their own rangy strength. Mopping the floors involved not only a damp sweep but also the accompanying dry mop, followed by the polish applied with the heavy bumper mop. By the time I was finished, I’d be sweating, arm muscles burning and weak from over-exertion. I became used to the smell of water and disinfectant so strong my eyes smarted. If I ever now encounter it in the corridor leading to the cells where I’m interviewing one of my clients or after Mrs Mop has done her piece in Chambers, I’m still unwillingly transported back to a Saturday morning in the home, and my arms and back aching.

The only ones who regularly got out of chores on a Saturday in our dorm were Win and Lennox. Win because he cannily got himself a paper round at the shop on the corner of the only block of houses near us. Lennox because our Houseparent displayed her latent racism and proclaimed him unable to be fastidious enough to clean the floor properly when he came from a land where they still went around half-naked and lived in grass huts. Lennox told me his family had lived in Brixton for over fifty years, but that wouldn’t have cut any ice with Miss Liddell. It would have just got him a black spot on the chart for impertinence. He was sent over to the carpenter’s shack to help chop wood instead. However Lennox wasn’t stupid or dumb. He gave me the most useful piece of advice I learnt in those early weeks and months: what went on in the home should stay there, and what went on in school should equally never be mentioned in the home. Have two separate lives – that way you didn’t let the trouble from one spill over into the other; and it allowed choices, something we had very little of otherwise.

Our surroundings were as barren and bleak as the sparse turf on the green leading down to the rye grass hillocks and the wind-tossed beach. Our soap was carbolic, and as coarse as a pumice stone. Our toilet paper the type you’d find in public conveniences at the time – not much better than the newspaper squares Ma told me they’d had to use during the war, and certainly not reaching the dizzying heights of Izal. If you were last through the bathroom any scum mark round the basin or bath was attributed to you, whether you’d made it or not, and you’d have to spend any playtime you’d hitherto been allowed scrubbing it away until it shone, or risk another black spot on the chart.

There wasn’t much of playtime of course – it often went on extra chores, even if you hadn’t misbehaved, and we had little by way of toys or possessions to enjoy during it. We were allowed to kick a ball around on the grassy patch, or swap whatever toys or comics we might have somehow garnered. Win always came out top on this score. His paper round gave him unequalled access to comics and sweets in the corner shop. I do believe this is where his life of crime first started – nicking the occasional comic, fistful of humbugs or a sherbet dip. Later it progressed to fags, tobacco and if he was very sly, bottles of booze, but that was rare and only straight after a stock take. With such meagre resources we had to develop other ways of tracking down treasures to ensure our black market in leisure could continue. The bins were the best option.

Over the week the rubbish contents of our collective dorms, the Governor’s offices and the kitchens were all accumulated in a disused greenhouse at the back of the main building before incineration. There was nothing left of the greenhouse by then but the smoke blackened low brick walls. The glass had long since shattered and lay in increasingly diminishing shards around the area. The place itself was banned to us but if we planned a careful enough look-out and distract system, we could raid the rubbish before its ceremonial burning. The rubbish was piled in sacks or cardboard boxes so we would organise ourselves into three groups – the lookout men, the rubbish sifters and the stash men. The stash men took away the treasures the sifters found and hid the spoils somewhere safe for later divvying. It was an honour to be designated a stash man. It meant your peers trusted you to be fair with them, and you only really stood a chance of being a stash man after ‘initiation’. At the time I arrived, there weren’t so much gangs in the home, as selective groups. All that was to change not long afterwards, but even then, ‘initiation’ was still very much part of the process of acceptance.

My prized possessions were an odd lot – books, puzzles, paper and pens. I suppose they already reflected my more cerebral leanings. Generally the boys fought over Beano and Dandy back issues, sweets and assorted weaponry like catapults and knuckledusters. Once the haul contained a complete set of blunted kitchen knives, swooped on gleefully and sharpened painstakingly over the next two weeks, before being allocated in order of merit to the members of the most select of the select. Occasionally the whole contents of a kid’s locker would find its way into the incineration pile and we would be jubilant at the rich pickings our foraging produced. It was only later when we identified Tony’s things that we found out that if a child died and there were no relatives to claim their personal effects, or the family didn’t want them, everything was thrown away – both life and possessions equally disposable. Things such as knives, cigarettes, matches and alcohol were confiscated on sight and the miscreant sent to the Governor for punishment – which invariably meant the cane, or worse, so we became adept at being not only creative in finding our treasure, but equally so in hiding it. Pride of place in my treasures was the multi-coloured ink pen I’d found and had returned to me during the divvying as no-one had the slightest interest in it. For me, it was like a rainbow in a world of grey, and I delighted in writing some of my private musings – also carefully hidden – in its many colours, reflecting my mood as I did so; red for anger, blue for thought, yellow for hope. Again there wasn’t much yellow.

My immediate impression of those first weeks in the home were ones of uneasy waiting. Miss Liddell was the very first amongst them. She greeted us disapprovingly at the door when we arrived.

‘Ah, the Juss boys,’ and led us frostily to our dorm. ‘Unpack,’ she directed, and waited whilst we did. I didn’t know what to do with the book and two toy cars I’d brought from home. The toy cars had been intended for Pip and Jim but of course we’d been separated. I dithered, and she snatched them from me and threw them in the top drawer of the small locker next to my bed. I knew then, as I felt the pinch of her bony fingers and the scratch of her long pointed nails that she was never going to be a House
parent,
whatever her title
.
True to my assessment she proved herself clearly before we even went to bed that first night. She could lash out so suddenly and unexpectedly you weren’t sure where the blow had come from when she was displeased. Sometimes it was the back of her hand – a quick flick of the wrist and it was like being lashed by a whip. At other times it was the slipper, vinyl soled and making a crack that stung like blazes on tender skin. She was short and stocky despite the skeletal fingers so a blow from her catching you unawares would send a puny child, like me, reeling. Even as I grew bigger and brawnier over the years I was there, I never lost my fear of her and her sudden violence.

My first involuntary mental arithmetic was to calculate how old the baby must be by now according to the number of days spent there, and whether Ma would be recovered enough for us to go home. By the time I got to fifty-five, and still there seemed to be no visit, I rationalised how old that was in months and realised it was nearly two. Ma had been up and scrubbing floors within two days of Jill and Emm being born. For the first time the thought crossed my mind that maybe things weren’t so all right as I’d assumed. Or maybe Ma wasn’t all right. I asked Win what he thought when we were allowed our fifteen minutes outside to kick a ball around the yard. He was dismissive. I may have tried to appear hard, but Win – older than me by nearly four years – already was. It wouldn’t have been long before he would have made a serious challenge on Jonno’s supremacy if we’d stayed at home. Whereas life in the children’s home might have felt cold and hard to me, for Win it had opened up endless opportunities for control and mastery. He’d joined a ‘select group’ within a day or two of arriving and was already working his way up to second in command. His position gave Georgie and I some protection – Georgie was always the dreamer of us – but only whilst Win could be bothered. The day seemed to be fast coming when he couldn’t.