Nobody's Child (13 page)

K
nowl View School, I rapidly discovered, was for neither the timid nor the innocent.

We may have been called pupils, but in reality we were more like prison inmates. Officially, we were not allowed to leave the premises without an escort, when we would go out in convoys, like rows of ducks, led by a teacher. This rule was relaxed when we were older.

Set in lush green acres of playing fields and parkland in a genteel suburb some two miles north-west of Rochdale, the school should have been a paradise, but instead proved to be home to a hard core of young career criminals. A later generation of residents would burn down the place, and it never recovered.

We were a nightmare mix of different cultures, colours and religions.

The thugs, mainly skinheads, several of whom had tattoos that were as intimidating as they were explicit, would sneak out of the dormitories at night and head for the town’s red-light district. Some were dealing drugs, others made their ‘pocket money’ thieving and there was a well-organised contingent of rent boys, selling their bodies to kerb-crawling paedophile homosexuals. Some of them were working the streets during the day, as well as at night, and often barely made it back for the evening check by house staff.

Several of them tried to recruit me into their trade, boasting of the rich pickings to be had from what they called the ‘old faggots’ who bought their services. They talked in terms of hand jobs and blow jobs and
bend-overs
, which initially sounded like a foreign language to me, and told me it was money for old rope. Five pounds a time was the going rate for a rent boy in Rochdale in 1970.

For a reclusive boy of 12, whose chief companion for years had been a 73-year-old grandmother, it was frightening and confusing to be plunged into this alien world of casual criminals and sex-for-sale teenagers.

I thought these boys were clearly not short of cash, for several of them wore Ben Sherman shirts, which were all the rage among trendy teenagers at that time.

I was twelve and for once was desperate to conform. I was prepared to do almost anything to possess one of the coveted shirts.

But I also knew that my chance of ever being able to
buy one was absolute zero. We were incredibly poor and nanny had only her pension to live on. There was never anything left over for luxuries. She couldn’t even afford to add anything to the few shillings a week pocket money I was given at school.

But that didn’t stop the longing to have my own trendy shirt. I was so envious, in fact, that I admitted my secret yearning to one of the other boys.

‘I wish I had the money to buy a shirt like yours,’ I told him.

He thought it a huge joke and laughed out loud.

‘None of us bought these shirts,’ he told me. ‘We nicked them. It’s dead easy. No-one ever gets caught. Just make sure there’s nobody watching and stuff it under your jacket. It’s a piece of cake.’

I could scarcely sit still, waiting for my next weekend at home so I could go on my first shoplifting expedition.

But, even after reassurances from several of my
light-fingered
school mates, I was still feeling very nervous as I threaded my way through the various clothes racks and counters in the new C&A shop in Bolton’s first shopping mall, the Arndale Centre. Finally, I was standing before a rail filled with the beautiful Ben Sherman shirts.

There were several people in the shop, but I looked around carefully and couldn’t see anyone watching. I could feel my courage draining away and knew it was now or never, so I snatched a shirt from its hanger and bundled it up and stuffed it into the inside of my jacket.
It was all over in a few seconds, and had been just as easy as my fellow thieves in school had told me.

I was still congratulating myself as I left the shop, and then a young woman grabbed my arm and spun me round.

‘Aren’t you going to pay for that shirt?’ she asked me.

‘What shirt?’ I stammered, and could feel my face starting to burn through the combined impact of fear and shame.

‘The one under your jacket’, she told me. ‘You’d better come to the office.’

I started sobbing, but her heart was too tough to be melted by a few tears and half an hour later a uniformed police constable arrived and marched me down to a panda car.

‘Am I going to jail?’ I asked.

He laughed.

‘No son, but you’ll probably wish you were when your father finds out.’

In the end a thrashing from my father would have been far more preferable than seeing nanny’s reaction.

She was so ashamed at having a policeman come to the house. Angry too, and she slapped me hard. But watching her cry with shame was the hardest thing for me to take.

The incident wasn’t mentioned again for another twenty years until I confessed my ‘criminal past’ to a wonderful lady who had become a dear friend, the late Ingrid Brenninkmeyer.

I had been introduced to her by another good friend,
her neighbour Sir Sigmund Sternberg, a world mover in promoting friendship and co-operation between Muslims, Jews and Christians.

Mrs Brenninkmeyer was a member of the extremely generous, but publicity shy, Dutch philanthropic family, who owned C&A until its closure in Britain in 2000.

She was a saintly lady with an impish sense of humour. When I explained my disastrous sortie into shop-lifting, in one of her family’s stores, she laughed and said: ‘I didn’t realise your connection with my family went back quite so far, Michael. What a naughty boy.’

My ‘criminal past’ remained a standing joke between us until her death a few years ago.

Being caught red-handed earned me a lot of teasing from the boys at school but was soon forgotten as other, more interesting, gossip emerged.

There were fights and beatings and feuds, just like in prison, and I was occasionally a victim of their violence, but I could only be thankful that even the most aggressive among them were usually too busy with their own bizarre affairs to bother with me. The news that Edward Heath had become Prime Minister never made it past the gates of Knowl View, but the current rates for sex and drugs on the local high street were hot topics for discussion.

There were three distinct types in the school: the children who were not aware, called mentally subnormal in those days, the thugs who suffered from serious behavioural problems, and me. Most of the
hooligan types had been badly abused mentally, physically or sexually, and many of them had a parent who was either in prison or addicted to drugs or alcohol, or both.

The school gave scarcely any formal lessons apart from metalwork and woodwork. Each boy was more or less allowed to get on with whatever he fancied doing at the time, though there were compulsory monthly visits to the production lines of dozens of factories across the north of England, and it was very clear that the authorities believed this was the only kind of work we could ever aspire to. As a result, they never attempted to academically equip us for anything more challenging. The only important teaching seemed to be to get us to read and write.

With the exception of the headmaster, Mr Turner, who was a dedicated caring man and someone one could always talk to, the teachers seemed to have difficulty in providing intellectual stimulation or inspiration.

One teacher was particularly repulsive. This brutal low-class individual appeared to thrive on being nasty, referring to us all as ‘little shits’ and verbally abusing the most susceptible boys. Once he had selected his victim, he would concentrate for the whole lesson on reducing him to tears. He was bordering on sadistic, and I don’t understand how people of that mentality manage to get into teaching.

Mr Turner and the psychiatrist apart, most of the resident staff acted more like warders than teachers
and seemed not to take much account of our feelings. Some were critical to the point of being cruel. The majority made little or no effort to get to know or understand us, though there were a few teachers who clearly cared about the boys and made a big effort to improve our lives.

One teacher used to complain all the time that we smelled. It was true. We were smelly. Youngsters tend to sweat a lot and we were made to wear our underwear, socks and shirts for three days at a time. Trousers were worn for a couple of weeks between washes. I suppose we were used to the smell, but the teachers must have found a whole class of us pretty overpowering. Sometimes I myself would find the smell in the dormitory unbearable and I tried to leave a window open at night, even in the winter.

The dormitories were open-plan with room for a dozen beds and lockers. We had a wall either side of us for privacy and we each faced another boy’s bed across the central walkway. The brown linoleum floors were immaculately clean and the predominant smell, apart from ourselves, was of Dettol. But we weren’t the ‘pigs in shit’ that one teacher used to sneeringly label us.

Ironically, one of the most popular teachers, David Higgins, later became the subject of a police investigation into paedophilia and was convicted of indecent assault on several of the pupils at Knowl View. Like Dr Monks, he had vocationally situated himself to have maximum access to the boys he preyed on.

Even though we had to wear the same underwear for three days, we were made to shower every day, which I thought was marvellous. At home, we had been lucky enough to have had a bathroom with a bath. In those days, many homes still didn’t. But I had never had a shower before going to Knowl View and I loved it.

If Mr Higgins had had his way, we would have showered twice a day. Other teachers would come to watch us in the open showers and often make very personal remarks about our genitals, but Mr Higgins was the only one who would touch us. His technique was ingenious. He would take us on hikes or potholing, and because we loved these outings he was by far the most popular teacher. Of course, boys of that age adore mud, so Mr Higgins encouraged us to get as dirty as we liked, and when we returned to the school it was only natural that he should suggest we all have a good shower.

And there would be Mr Higgins, then aged about 30, armed with the soap, helping us to reach the parts we couldn’t easily reach. He would give a little rub here and a little rub there. It was the perfect cover for a pervert.

There were five showers in a row and he would have us in five at a time. Sometimes he would wash and play with us and, on occasion, he would get boys to masturbate. At the time, I thought that all this was normal; that it was what they did at boarding school. No one ever seemed to object and the rent boys would joke about giving him ‘one on the house’.

To begin with, I hadn’t understood some of their comments about Mr Higgins, but in this kind of environment few mysteries survived and, courtesy of Mr Higgins’s command performances in the shower, I soon learned about that rite of passage through adolescence, masturbation.

It rapidly opened my eyes to what the rent boys were up to, but it also made me see the utterly selfish reasons behind my father’s nocturnal demands and threats, and confirmed that my childish instincts had been spot on. What he had forced me to do was both wrong and shameful.

But even this realisation wasn’t enough to make me want to discuss my father’s predatory sexual practices with my new psychiatrist. My experiences were far too recent and painful to talk about out loud. They were family secrets that were too raw and horrific to reveal to anyone.

The one thing that all 50 or so boys at Knowl View had in common was a weekly individual meeting with the resident psychiatrist. Like me, at these sessions, none of the boys ever honestly discussed his background or problems. People like the psychiatrist couldn’t understand that kids don’t open up on demand. We made up lies and acted out fantasy family scenarios rather than reveal the truth.

The psychiatrist was a decent well-meaning man and very different from the lady I used to see in Bolton. We did jigsaws and played games instead of messing about
with boxes, but I never found our sessions any help. I knew I wasn’t mad and I’m sure he believed the same, but we still had to spend our half-hour together each week. It was, after all, a school for maladjusted children and he had a job to do. 

D
uring my first year at Knowl View I underwent two fundamental changes. I became a Strict Baptist, and Mr Stanley Thomas stepped into my life. In truth, it was Nanny who changed faiths after being a lifelong Salvationist, and I just followed suit.

The one weekend a month when I was allowed home became the highlight of my existence. I found I missed Nanny far more than I ever dreamed I would, and I concentrated hard on enjoying every moment we had together.

For these weekend visits, the boys – those who had homes to go to, or were wanted there – had to be driven by a uniformed chauffeur and accompanied by a social worker. I suppose they wanted to make sure we ended 
up in the right place and were not getting up to mischief. The return journey was different. We were left to make our own way back to school, by bus, train or any other available means.

It was during one of my weekends at home that Nanny announced that she was no longer a Salvationist but had become a Strict Baptist. She was converted by a former fellow Salvationist, Pastor Harold Watson, who had become a travelling evangelist, almost as well known in his day as Billy Graham. When he came to preach in Bolton, Harold contacted my grandmother and that was enough to convince her that we too should become Baptists.

I wasn’t afraid of Harold, because he was a family friend, but I found the preachers in the local Baptist church really frightening. They were extreme, even by normal Baptist standards. Sermons lasted at least an hour and were full of fire and brimstone and dire warnings that if one wasn’t saved one would spend eternity in the fiery pit of hell. Everyone in that church that day had to be saved.

The problem for me was that not only was I not saved, but I didn’t even know what ‘saved’ meant. I convinced myself that I was going to hell and, as I was still determined to kill myself at some stage, I accepted that would be when I would make the leap into the fiery pit.

I’d already given up on the concept of God. If they had been through the kind of disasters I had encountered in my life, it was quite normal, I thought, for someone to
give up on God. But that didn’t mean giving up on religion. Not with a Nanny like mine. We would go to Baptist evangelical rallies on Saturdays and church and protests on Sundays. To say she was fervent would be a drastic understatement.

Nanny had a wonderful neighbour, Dorothy Kay, who would drive us to the rallies. She would pray while she was at the wheel, which involved closing her eyes. We were both terrified of her driving and Nanny would frequently remind her, ‘It is better to live a little longer in this world than to be too soon in the next.’

Strict Baptists were not what I would call charismatic. The preachers were very emotional, but not the congregation. Our clergy were called pastors and didn’t wear clerical dress, just ordinary shirts and suits. There were no crosses in the church. No altar. No idolatry. No stained-glass windows. All these were sacrilege.

There was no set order of service and no ritual. The focal point was the pulpit and the sermon.

Catholics and Anglicans were considered evil. The Methodists were damned, and ordinary Baptists were heretical. We were exclusive, strict and particular and accepted everything by rote. We hated all forms of modernism. Even Billy Graham was considered too liberal for our taste. For that matter, so too was Ian Paisley!

We certainly didn’t approve of football on Sundays and on that day our entertainment was protesting outside football grounds.

I found myself caught up in a kind of schizophrenic situation, being, on the one hand, a biblical fundamentalist and a critic of all other Christian groups and, on the other, not believing in anything. I wanted to believe but I couldn’t. I just went along with the strict Baptist creed. I suppose I was indoctrinated, and the fact that I had been baptised and confirmed into the Catholic faith had become irrelevant. Unlike the local parish priest in Bolton: a chubby, twinkly-eyed and dedicated young enthusiast in a black suit, who would often call at Nanny’s house in search of me, a missing member of his flock. Nanny, who had not approved of Catholics as a Salvationist, now saw them as outright devil-worshippers and would make me hide with her when the priest knocked on our front door. She would pull me down to the floor and we would squat or sit there, below the level of the window, until he gave up and went away.

But Nanny’s religion never interfered with her television viewing. Her favourite programme was Peyton Place, and, though I doubt the pastor would have approved, she was an avid viewer of this and many other scandalous soaps. She adored Liberace on a Saturday evening.

It was at this rather confused stage in my early teens – I was now 13 – that a minor miracle occurred, one that was destined to change my whole life.

A new teacher was appointed at Knowl View, and put in charge of my class. The system, a misnomer if ever
there was one, which operated there was that each class, of about 15 boys, had the same teacher for a full year. Theoretically, they would teach all subjects, but in practice they often taught none. There were no formal lessons, no tests, no assessments and no exams at Knowl View. The opinion of the authorities seemed to be that we were not worth educating. We were merely being kept off the streets – at least that was the intention – and put on hold until we were old enough to become assembly-line fodder.

Apart from weekly woodwork and metalwork classes, we were allowed to get on with exactly what we wanted, which included putting our feet up and sleeping if we so chose. The last thing that appeared to be expected of our teachers was that they should actually teach.

Then Stanley Thomas arrived, and for me everything changed. This was the man who would rouse my curiosity, stimulate in me an unstoppable quest for knowledge and teach me how to think. He was to be my reverse nemesis, the one who would erase the effect of all the bad things in my life and steer me towards eventual happiness and fulfilment.