Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (5 page)

St Leonard’s was home to quite a number of young lads who had been ‘saved’ by the social workers or police from working as rent boys on the streets. These were kids who came from backgrounds as bad as any you could imagine. Just think of children being so desperate – aged just twelve or so – that they will take to the streets to sell their small bodies to whoever shows interest, risking the sexually transmitted diseases and the beatings that come as part and parcel of that way of life. These boys had been ‘saved’ by the police and social workers only to be sent to St Leonard’s where their bodies were once again fair game for the adults. But now they were not even getting any money in exchange for their favours, and they did not have the option of running away because, if they did, they would just be sent straight back again. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.

There were also teenage boys who were summoned to have sex with some of the female care workers, and who did not even mind, because who doesn’t like sex? It was screwed up, but in a strange way, in the cottage where I grew up, having scored with Auntie Coral was a bit of a rite of passage for a lot of the boys. Despite her mean disposition, Auntie Coral wasn’t bad looking. She was quite attractive and was probably not getting her leg over at home, so she made up for it with the boys she was supposed to be taking care of. My older brother Peter, who had been at St Leonard’s before I appeared on the scene, had had sex with Coral loads of times; he recommended it, just as a bit of light relief. Peter was a good-looking kid, and she liked them handsome. I am very happy to say that Coral never gave me the glad eye. She hated me way too much.

There was another woman who also worked at the cottage, and she liked young boys even more than Auntie Coral did. She was out of control. I remember her coming into the boys’ dorm early in the morning to see for herself, in her own words, ‘who had the biggest willy’.

‘Out of bed, lads,’ this woman would shout. ‘I want to see a bit of skin. Ooh, go on, don’t be shy. Let me see your willies. I won’t hurt you.’

At some point during my ten years at the home, it was rumoured that Coral had a baby, and we all assumed that it had been fathered by one of the boys who she was supposed to be taking care of. Nobody had any proof, but that was what everyone was saying.

It was not until later that we would think about how inappropriate it had been for a woman who was supposed to be in the role of their mother to get her leg over with her male charges. Sex was everywhere at St Leonard’s and at the time we did not discuss it much. We didn’t have to; it was just a normal part of life, like having bread and margarine for lunch and dinner.

One particular boy came to live at St Leonard’s when he was about thirteen. I’ll call him Simon (not his real name). Shortly after his arrival, we all knew that he was one male member of staff’s special friend and that, for some reason, Simon was treated very differently from the rest of us. In fact, Simon slept regularly in this staff member’s flat and, in return for whatever went on there, he ate well and was generally taken care of in every material way. Simon had better meals and nicer clothes than the rest of us, and we all assumed – not unreasonably – that this was because of whatever it was he was asked to do by his older friend, although, of course, I don’t know the specific details of the nature of their relationship. The special attention would continue until Simon died of a heroin overdose, years later.

I have since wondered how so much sexual abuse could go on without anyone finding out about it and shutting the place down. Unfortunately, we now know that St Leonard’s was far from unique, begging the question as to how high the abuse went and to what extent the abuse of England’s rejects wasn’t just accepted but perhaps even expected and seen as appropriate in certain circles. Prescott, the Principal of St Leonard’s, was a magistrate, for crying out loud, and a very senior social worker in the area. He was a very prominent local citizen who was well known and respected everywhere he went. Did everyone know about what was happening at St Leonard’s and choose to turn a blind eye? Did the authorities somehow think that it was all OK or that, as the rejects of society that they were, the foundlings of St Leonard’s somehow deserved all they got?

But, realistically, who was going to care about what was happening to a bunch of black and Irish louts? The teachers in school just saw us as problems to be kept quiet. I don’t know if they were aware of the sexual abuse that was going on in the home. Plenty of people would cross the street to avoid us and, to be fair, we gave them a lot of good reasons to do so.

We each had an assigned social worker who came every six months, and a fat lot of use they were. My social worker would sit down with me in the dining room twice a year, with Starling or Auntie Coral there too, just to make sure that everything was all right.

‘How are things going then, Paul?’ she would ask. ‘Everything OK with you?’ She would sit there with her pen poised to take a note and usually she would not even bother looking me in the face. I always suspected that she hated me, or was scared of me. Why else did she not want to look at me?

I would look at Auntie Coral. She would look back at me. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

‘Yeah, OK,’ I would say. ‘Things are OK.’

Then the social worker would look at the file about me, where Starling had written down all the latest complaints about my behaviour and the many problems that they had keeping me in line. Perhaps understandably, she was taken in by what had been written in my file. I was invariably described as a very violent child – which I was – but how would this woman know the underlying reasons for my rage when it was presented by Starling as me who was the problem? And thank God I was violent, because that is one of the reasons, if not the reason, why I escaped from the horrendous sexual abuse that was the fate of so many of the other children. I had just one very narrow escape. Alan Prescott, the Principal, came in to my cottage one day when I was about thirteen and just beginning to go through the changes of puberty. I was ironing some clothes in the day room, and he staggered over to me drunkenly and leaned against me.

‘Hello, Paul, lad,’ he said. ‘How are you today?’ He tried to give me a winning smile. I could feel his stubby erection, hard against my leg, and see the burst veins and the enlarged pores on his face. There was a pimple on his upper lip. His large paunch pushed against my skinny ribcage. I could smell the booze on his breath and the rank stench from his armpits. I was suspicious of him and I wasn’t going to take any chances. He was lucky he didn’t get an iron in the face. Instead, I drew out my knife – I always carried a knife down the back of my trousers – and went ballistic.

‘Don’t fucking touch me, you fat cunt!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll cut your fucking balls off. Get the fuck off me, you fat cunt!’

Prescott started drunkenly backing away towards the neighbouring television room, gathering speed as he went. His belly wobbled with the effort.

‘Don’t mess with me, Connolly,’ he said rather weakly. ‘Or I’ll make you regret it.’

But I could see the fear in his eyes and it gave me courage.

Prescott slammed the day-room door behind him and held it closed with all his strength as I pressed against it, trying to get at him with the knife. I slammed my knife into the wooden door, over and over again.

Prescott continued to lean all of his considerable weight against the door. ‘Come and help me, you little idiots!’ he shouted.

The children who had been watching television ran over to help him hold the door closed. They were terrified. Nobody wanted me to get into the room with my knife. I stabbed the door over and over again until I was exhausted and it was full of holes. Finally, after what seemed like hours, I stopped. My breath was ragged. A tense silence was perceptible as, slowly, Prescott and the children on the other side of the door began to walk away.

I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I just left and went outside to the gardens to be on my own.

That was the first time that any of the staff had ever tried it on with me and I intended for it to be the last. Fortunately, after that, they all seemed to decide that I was just more trouble than I was worth. They tended to go for the softer touch; for gentler children who didn’t have the means or ability to stand up for themselves.

Because I was never abused myself, I can’t tell you about the details of what went on. Those stories can only be told by the victims, or by those of them who have survived. There was just one case that I was a direct witness to, when Bill Starling tried to rape a young girl who was about thirteen at the time. She was a gorgeous girl with blonde hair and a developing body that had caught the eye of the boys of around her own age – and of Bill Starling, although she was quite a bit older than the girls who usually interested him. I suppose that she was just so pretty that Uncle Bill decided to make an exception. I was walking past the girls’ dorm one night when I heard a lot of noise – thumps and screams. I stuck my head around the door.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

Uncle Bill, who was then in his fifties, was on top of this girl, trying to rape her. I could see her wide, terrified eyes and Uncle Bill’s fat, hairy hand across her mouth.

‘Fuck off, you,’ he said, looking at me over his shoulder. ‘Get out of here. This is none of your business. This is between her and me.’

‘I ain’t going nowhere,’ I told him. ‘I’m staying right here until you leave her alone.’ I stayed.

Years later, when this victim gave her testimony to the police, she told them that she would have been raped for sure, if I had not stayed. I was just in the right place at the right time – for her that is. Frustrated by being thwarted, Uncle Bill laid into me instead. He beat me up, and then he pushed one of the small wardrobes in the girls’ dorm on top of me. Considering the way we lived in St Leonard’s, this was water off a duck’s back so far as I was concerned. I was happy that I had got one over on Uncle Bill and that I had been able to stop the girl from being raped.

Another of the care workers spent a great deal of time with one of his young charges throughout her time at the home. When she was between sixteen and eighteen, just out of the home, and he must have been in his fifties, they got married and he moved her into his house. You would think that such an unlikely and inappropriate marriage would have caused alarm bells to ring with the social workers – surely that isn’t right? This girl went straight from a children’s home into married life with one of her former caregivers, while she was still an adolescent. Even if, as may have been the case, there had been no sexual activity between them when she was still a minor, she might as well have been marrying her own father. Who was watching these people? How can this marriage have been allowed to take place, apparently unquestioned?

I already told you how boxing saved me from myself. It turns out it probably saved me from the sexual abuse, too. There was a huge difference between the treatment received by the kids who had people who cared about them on the outside and the ones who did not. There were some kids who even had parents whom they visited occasionally and others who had aunties and uncles or grandparents who took an interest. Some would go home for the weekend and get taken out once in a while to do things. These children were not abused, or at least were not abused as badly, because Starling and his friends knew that there was someone who cared about them in the outside world. They were even fed better, because the house parents knew that, if they were really badly treated, someone would notice and there might be some payback. I remember a couple of Jewish kids who had parents living locally who retained contact with them and possibly saw them at the weekends. Because there was some one looking out for them, they were given proper meals and spared the beatings that were daily fare for the rest of us. We would all sit down for meals, and they would have a different meal set in front of them to the rest of us.

I didn’t have parents who cared about me, or aunties and uncles to visit on the outside, but, thanks to my involvement at Dagenham Boxing Club, I did have boxing coaches who took a paternal interest in me, and their wives, who did more for me than anyone in my own family ever had.

When we kids started getting into our teens, fumbling around with the opposite sex was on the cards and most of us did not hold back whenever the opportunity for some sexual activity presented itself, as it did pretty often. For one thing, when you get a mixed bunch of teenagers together – any teenagers, even the well-brought-up ones from good families – the hormones are going to fly, bras are going to be opened and a lot of teenage sperm is going to be spilled. For another, many of the inmates of St Leonard’s were already very sexually experienced by the time they hit puberty, and they were more than ready to start initiating sexual experiences themselves, if only so that they could feel in control of a situation in which they had always been victims before. All children learn by imitating the behaviour of the adults in their lives, and the children at St Leonard’s were no different.

There were more boys than girls at the home, so sexually available girls were very much in demand. After bedtime, us boys would get up and sneak over to the girls’ rooms to see if we could get a little action. I remember some of the girls very well. There was a beautiful girl of about fifteen who I’ll call Angela (not her real name) who was very popular because she was so damn good-looking and sweet along with it. The same lad who was rumoured among the kids to have supposedly got Auntie Coral knocked up was also doing her. As a result of her interest in this lad, Auntie Coral hated Angela, whom she saw as a rival, and had it in for her, especially when he and Angela became a serious item. Auntie Coral did her best to make poor Angela’s life an absolute misery and it says a lot for how Angela felt about this boy that their teenage relationship lasted as long as it did.

One of the first girls I ever really fancied, when I was about thirteen, was a gorgeous mixed-race girl with long, loose curls that tumbled down her back. Again, to protect her identity, I can’t tell you her real name but I’ll call her Maria. She was a real stunner with beautiful copper-coloured skin and eyes you could have drowned in. Maria even showed a little interest in me. Well, I was hooked and fancied myself in love.