The Devil Rides Out (17 page)
Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
Before I caught the train back to Liverpool and Tony to Southend on the Sunday evening we went for a drink. I can’t remember which pub it was but I do remember a guy at the
bar telling me that he was an ‘out’ gay football referee and also a lord. It seemed that London’s streets were not paved with gold but with peers of the bloody realm. He asked me for my phone number so I gave him Diane’s address and told him to drop me a line there, not wanting my mother to come across any fruity correspondence as she was ‘tidying up’. Hopefully Diane wouldn’t mind me using her address as a PO box providing I read her the contents of the letter. Either way I’d had my bellyful of lords, even fairly handsome ones like this specimen. The ball’s in his court, I thought, and if he wants to get in touch then fine and dandy. If not, well, I really couldn’t care less.
N
ORMAN DID WRITE, AND I WROTE BACK, WHICH
eventually led to regular conversations on the phone. On my twenty-first birthday he sent me a hundred pounds and a promise of a trip on the Orient Express. He also asked me to go and live with him, in Littlehampton. I hardly knew the man but the head was well and truly turned. The movie
Murder on the Orient Express
, featuring Albert Finney and a galaxy of stars, had recently been released. I must have seen it at least three times and would’ve done just about anything to ride on that beautiful train from Istanbul to Paris. I loved trains, still do, although it would be years before I fulfilled my ambition to travel on the Orient Express.
My twenty-first birthday party took place in Sadie’s. Back then, after a few drinks I became, to put it mildly, boisterous and mischievous, although in retrospect I think yobbish would describe my drunken behaviour more accurately. Once I pushed Vera down a six-foot hole in the road on our way up Church Street from the Bear’s Paw to Sadie’s. His cries brought the workmen out of their hut, exclaiming, ‘Don’t worry, lad, we’ll get your girlfriend out,’ as they mistook the tears of
laughter running down my face for those of grief and concern.
At my twenty-first I really excelled myself, flinging my birthday cake across the club and scoring a direct hit on Vera’s face, and dragging Diane around the floor by her ankle until she had carpet burns on her back and one of her contact lenses fell out. Not surprisingly, come closing time no one was speaking to me. This darker side of me, the unsuspecting Norman knew nothing about. When I was ‘lively with drink’ I made mild-mannered Clark Kent look like Attila the Hun.
I’d been at the Conny Home three years now and typically I was bored. In my last year the nursing sisters gave us a few tutorials to prepare us for a written exam. If you passed you got a certificate that meant absolutely nothing as it was not a recognized qualification. I did very well, thanks to the
Reader’s Digest Medical Dictionary
, and can still remember today how to do an Acetest for ketones in a diabetic’s urine and how to change a colostomy bag.
The winds of change blew through the Conny Home. A new childcare superintendent had been appointed and he was supposed to be a bit of a mover and shaker, a wonder boy with innovative methods who was going to transform the place. Let’s call him Greg Tate. He wore a cravat and had a goatee and I hated him from the minute he first swanned into the building with a lion cub in tow, encouraging the children to stroke it while reassuring a surprisingly captivated Mrs Dickie that the animal was perfectly safe around children. The cub seemed to grow into a hefty beast literally overnight. I remember sitting in the staff room trying to pretend I was invisible as it prowled menacingly around the tables, looking for something or someone to eat. Greg Tate liked to drive around West Kirby with this cub on the back seat of his car, hanging out of
the window like a dog, until one day the sensible creature leaped on him from behind and badly mauled his face. He ended up in hospital and the cub went to Chester Zoo.
In my three years at the home I’d never once hit any of the children, wouldn’t dream of it as belting kids just wasn’t and isn’t in my nature. No matter how near to the brink of insanity I was driven, I’m proud to say I never resorted to violence. Hitting a child was quite rightly a sackable offence and so I was more than a little bemused to find myself on two occasions in Greg Tate’s office, wrongly accused of hitting two of the boys. Curiously he refused to name the boys I’d supposedly given a good hiding to, claiming he’d witnessed me in action and that was all the evidence he needed. He was a liar and he knew it, but it was his word against mine and Mrs Dickie took Greg Tate’s side. ‘One more warning,’ she said angrily, ‘and you will be instantly dismissed. Now get on with your work.’ Oh for a union for underpaid, overworked houseparents, I moaned for the umpteenth time, for if there were such an organization the staff at the Conny Home certainly didn’t know about it.
Tate definitely had it in for me and wanted me out, and since it was impossible to keep secrets in the home all the staff and most of the children knew of my alleged crimes. Tate’s pet houseparents had been told to keep a close eye on me and what authority I had with some of the boys went out the window. Tell them to clean their teeth and they’d threaten to go downstairs to Tate and whine that I’d hit them. One night as I was reading the boys a story, Tate marched through the unit. I used to act out the tale I was reading and the lads loved it. Tate caught the tail end of the evil fairy’s speech to the prince she had chained up in her dungeon: ‘You’ll never escape from here,’ I cackled over one of the boys, who was
squealing with mock terror in his bed. ‘You’re trapped in here for ever!’ Ten minutes later Tate’s main henchwoman, a surly cow who had more or less ignored me for the last three years, took great delight in telling me that she’d take over my unit for now as I was wanted in the office.
When I arrived Tate flew at me like a maniac, his face purple with rage.
‘What right have you to tell a boy that he will remain in here for the rest of his life? How dare you bully these boys like that.’
I tried to explain but he refused to listen, instead ranting some textbook shit at me about building a child’s confidence. I told him in no uncertain terms where he could get off and after giving the matter some thought handed in my notice to Mrs Dickie a few days later.
She busied herself at her desk with a bunch of papers, muttering angrily as she shuffled them around.
‘This really is most inconvenient, Mr O’Grady,’ she snapped. ‘Won’t you please reconsider? Apologize to Mr Tate for swearing at him and we’ll try and forget about it.’
I was flattered but above all surprised that she wanted me to stay and for a brief moment considered changing my mind. However, wild horses couldn’t have got me to apologize to the loathsome Tate and besides, Littlehampton beckoned.
‘What will you do?’ she asked.
I thought for a moment before confidently announcing, ‘I’m going on the stage.’
She couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d hit her in the face with a large, fresh trout.
‘Well really!’ was all she could say, as if I’d said a dirty word.
The staff had a whip-round and bought me a silver nugget on a chain and we had a leaving do that ended in the usual
drunken carnage. Some of my boys cried when I left, waving at me forlornly from the window with red eyes and wobbling lower lips as I walked away up Meols Drive, holding back the tears myself. I started to panic, indecisive as always, wondering if I’d made the right decision. What the hell was I going to do in Littlehampton with someone I wasn’t even sure I liked? It had been hard work at the Conny Home but I was fond of the kids and there was great camaraderie among the staff. I was going to miss those Saturday nights when, rather than go home and then have to come in again at the crack of dawn the next morning, I’d stay with Eileen and Janet or Jane and Ged in their rented flats nearby and spend the night talking. We did a lot of talking through the night and when it was our turn to sleep in at the home we’d sit up most of the night in the staff room, smoking like chimneys and drinking endless cups of tea, chewing the cud until the night sister came along and asked us if we knew what beds were for.
Just before I left the home, a summer fête was held in the gardens at the back of the building. There was the usual tat – hoop-la, guess how many sweets in a jar, a lucky dip – and when asked by Mrs Dickie if I would like to do something theatrical to help raise funds I volunteered my services as a fortuneteller and offered to read the tarot cards. I could no more read the tarot than I could hieroglyphics but it beat making a fool of myself singing ‘What Are We Going To Do With Uncle Arthur?’ Besides, I’d have to be pissed before I’d do that in public.
‘We’ll erect a tent,’ Mrs Dickie said, ‘and charge fifty pence a reading, or is that too excessive? I wonder if you need a licence to tell fortunes? I don’t suppose anyone will mind providing you don’t predict anything too alarming. You won’t, will you?’
I had quite a queue and surprisingly my readings seemed to make sense to a lot of my gullible customers. Perhaps I have the gift, I seriously wondered, seeing a career as a fortuneteller in Blackpool beckoning until Angela brought me down to earth by telling me that desperate people will believe anything. My bubble burst, I took her for a tour around the home and she was shocked and saddened by what she saw, finding it impersonal and sterile.
It was interesting to see the home through an outsider’s eyes. In my three years there I had become as institutionalized as the children and had learned to accept the rigid routine and stark surroundings without questioning. It’s a different story these days. I believe the children now have their own rooms and live in an informal and happy environment. Some of the old staff are still working there. Give those girls a medal!
One of the customers in my fortunetelling tent was Tate. He had contempt stamped all over the face that probably he told himself was devilishly handsome every day in the mirror.
‘Have you seen what you look like?’ he scoffed. ‘Go on then, Gypsy Rose, seeing as it’s for a good cause. I don’t approve of fortunetellers, particularly blatantly fraudulent ones like you, but I’ll show willing and go along with it.’
‘Fifty pence please.’ I held my hand out.
‘Well, what do you see in the cards then?’
Oh, I wanted to take the cards and shove them up his arse,
but I resisted the temptation. Instead I studied the spread I’d laid out in front of me intently, with what I hoped was a professional air.
‘Well, come on then, tell me what they say,’ he mocked.
‘You have no future left. It’s all used up,’ I said solemnly, handing him back his fifty pence and quoting a line from Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil:
‘Now please leave.’ I had the satisfaction of seeing him slightly unnerved by this and, as time would tell, my prediction proved to be more than accurate.
In 1997/98 a number of people alleged that they had been sexually abused while living at the home as children. Four male members of staff were put on trial and given lengthy prison sentences: an 81-year-old man, two members of the Christian group the Crusaders, and Greg Tate. Jane, one of the housemothers I was friendly with during my time at the home, rang to tell me.
My initial reaction was sheer disbelief followed by guilt. How could I not have known that the sexual molestation of children was taking place on a daily basis under my very nose? Why didn’t the children tell me? I felt that I’d let them all down.
Jane felt very much the same but offered an explanation. ‘Did you know anything about paedophiles?’
‘No.’ I’d never heard the word in the seventies. I knew about dirty old men, I’d had dealings with one when I was a paper boy flogging the
Liverpool Echo
around St Catherine’s Hospital. A male nurse had attempted a feeble grope, for which he received a kick in the balls.
‘Did any of the senior staff ever tell you to keep your eyes out for sexual abuse?’