Nobody's Child (12 page)

C
hildren contemplating suicide don’t think about it one day and not the next. It is a continual death wish, and not necessarily curable. It is always there, matched and intensified by the absolute misery that is one’s prime motivation for destroying oneself.

I know, because the foremost thought in my mind for most of my childhood years was to kill myself, and I tried to do it on many occasions.

Always my favourite scenario was to copy my mother’s suicide. I spent countless hours standing on the Long Lane railway bridge or down by the track itself, waiting for a train to come so that I could throw myself into its path. Each time I was determined to carry it through, but each time, as the train rushed
towards me, promising blessed oblivion, I drew back at the last moment.

It wasn’t because I was a coward, because I had faced and conquered pain, and the threat of terrible violence, on countless occasions in the past, and still faced almost daily beatings from the gangs of school bullies. And it wasn’t because I thought that it was wrong to use this way of putting myself out of my misery. It was just something inside, more powerful than my determination to die, that held me back at the last moment.

On two occasions I lay on the track with my neck on the rail, waiting for the train which would mercifully end everything. Both times I lay facing the direction from which the train would come and it was only when it was almost on top of me, and the rail under my neck vibrating madly, that I leaped to my feet and out of harm’s way.

I still vividly recall how close the trains passed and how the blast of them tugged at my clothes and my body, trying to drag me under their wheels.

In the end, I think it was the thought of the effect my death would have on Nanny that prevented me killing myself. But I shall never be certain. I just know that in that final moment I was unable to take the step which would have meant terminating my life completely. Not that I had anything particularly attractive, apart from Nanny, to hold me in this world.

The only time that I was not at risk from attack was at
home, for even in the classroom I was never completely safe from the nips and punches and foul whispers. My cuts and bruises seemed never-ending and sometimes it was difficult to hide them from Nanny, perhaps after a bad beating or being struck by a large stone.

I tried to pass off my wounds as the results of a boy’s normal, everyday rough and tumble, because I didn’t want her to constantly worry about me. She was 73 and I was 10, but I already felt a responsibility for her and didn’t want to see her hurt.

Sometimes, though, if the bruises were bigger or angrier than usual, she would insist on my seeing the family doctor. Poor Nanny never discovered that Dr John Monks was a far greater danger to his child patients than any ailment for which they might have been seeking treatment.

The doctor was very grand and extremely posh. He looked like Mr Pickwick and sounded like the great actor Donald Sinden, and he lived in a grand old house in the most exclusive suburb of Bolton. His surgery was inside this house, and sometimes his children, who were about my age, would open the front door to patients. They must have been educated privately because I had never heard children speak with such a grand accent.

Dr Monks was a Conservative alderman who became mayor of Bolton in 1970. We were extremely poor but always voted Conservative, because Dr Monks would pick up Nanny in his limousine on election days and
drive her to the polling station to vote. During his year as mayor, he had her collected in his chauffer-driven mayoral car.

Everyone acknowledged that Dr Monks’s older partner was a far better doctor, but he was a difficult man and had an appalling bedside manner. If he came to visit Nanny, even though he examined her thoroughly and dealt efficiently with her problem, she would be depressed afterwards.

But, when Dr Monks came, he would sit on the end of her bed, chat with her for a while and give her a handful of pills, and his visit was as good as a tonic.

Everybody liked jovial, laughing Dr Monks, though I suspect only a tiny percentage of his adult patients knew of his secret proclivities.

All the boys in the neighbourhood knew about him, and it was a big joke among us. No matter what was wrong with you, even if you had a sore throat or a headache, you had to drop your trousers and have him feel and squeeze your genitals, sometimes for several minutes at a time. On other occasions, he would sit you on his knee and slide his hand up or down your trousers and fondle you.

The slightly older boys found it a bit embarrassing – I did after I turned 14 – but nobody ever reported him. He was such a friendly jovial character that nobody really minded his persistent groping.

None of the other boys saw Dr Monks as a real threat and even though I know now that what he was doing was
wrong, and that he was using his position to prey on boys, when compared with other chapters in my life, I find it difficult to think of his actions as being anything other than comedy rather than abuse.

Other ‘victims’ must have felt the same, because, to my knowledge, the doctor was never questioned.

In that year of 1968, I had more serious things to think about. In January, my father died. I hadn’t seen him for 13 months because he had been in hospital for all that time with a brain tumour, and, like my Grandma Seed, Nanny had decided that I shouldn’t visit him because his head and face had become so terribly disfigured.

She was driven to see him every fortnight by one of her neighbours, and told me that towards the end he had asked for me. But even then she had still believed that it would be too upsetting for me to see him. Perhaps he wanted to make amends, or to ask for my forgiveness. I will never know.

Nanny broke the news of his death to me as she had done about the death of my grandfather, waiting at the front gate for me to come home from school. It wasn’t a real shock, as I hadn’t seen him for over a year, but I felt sort of numb inside. My thoughts went instantly to the last time he had been with me – and whatever sorrow I might have felt died in that instant. I did not cry.

This man had treated Mammy and me with a mean and pitiless savagery which was almost inhuman. But,
even though a beast, he was still my father, and at the age of ten you don’t dwell on the bad times.

He sought an answer to his problems with violence and, as a result, existed in a loveless hell of his own creation. That, and a slow and agonising death, I believe, were his punishment, and I let it go at that.

Somehow it had come down to Nanny and me against the world. A very eccentric household with each of us clinging on to life for the sake of the other.

The second significant occurrence that year was that Mr Bleasdale, my headmaster, decided to teach me to read, and for a part of each day I sat at his desk with him in his study and belatedly learned my ABC.

By the end of that year, even though I still refused to put my newly acquired skill to work in the classroom, I had, at least, mastered the art of reading.

T
he progress I had made thanks to Mr Bleasdale didn’t stop me, when I came to sit the 11-plus examination, from writing my name at the top of the paper and then sitting there for two hours daydreaming. As usual, I made no attempt to read the questions or to write any of the answers, and left all my papers blank. I couldn’t write or express myself on paper in any way and I certainly couldn’t do arithmetic.

I had refused to conform for so many years that I was beyond change. I didn’t want to be a part of other people’s worlds. I didn’t care about not belonging. Having retreated into my own isolated existence, I found I liked being there. I just couldn’t cope with the ordinary world. I had no desire to study, even though I felt
incapable and a failure. It was just another dimension to my general misery.

Not surprisingly, I failed my 11-plus, recording the lowest-ever mark achieved in that exam – zero. No less surprisingly, as a result I was sent to the most dreadful school in the area, St Anne’s Catholic Secondary Modern.

There was still a great difference in those days between ordinary secondary schools and grammar schools. Peter and my other guardian angels had all passed their exam and gone on to good grammar schools. I was now heading for a new environment, with no protection against the other children and no friends among the teachers.

On my first morning, I set off alone on the walk of a mile and a half to St Anne’s. Nanny was too old to accompany me, though she had made sure I was kitted out properly in my new uniform.

I made a poor start by turning up at the wrong school, having failed to notice that I was in a different uniform from every other child in the playground. Most of the children had been called to their new classes before a teacher spotted that I was the odd boy out and pointed me in the right direction for St Anne’s.

Being late made no difference to which class I was assigned to. News of my unique exam mark must have preceded me, because I was placed in the bottom class and told to sit at the back.

St Anne’s was a horrible school, filled with horrible
children and horrible teachers. It had no redeeming features. Everything was horrible.

Any faint hope I had held on to that I might have gone unrecognised in my new school was crushed within minutes when, installed in my classroom, I found myself facing some of my worst enemies from St Osmund’s.

I don’t know why I was so surprised to see them there, for my young tormentors had been among the most unruly and underachieving pupils in my primary school. Their chances of passing the 11-plus had been only marginally better than mine, and I had stood no chance at all of passing.

Within a morning, all the other kids in my class, and probably most of the school, knew about my mother and my sessions with the psychiatrist. I was still the mad kid with the mad mother, and an irresistibly inviting target for everybody’s spite and cruelty.

My only defence at this stage was to crawl ever deeper into my shell and become even less sociable than before.

But this didn’t save me from regular beatings, for bigger boys would start their bullying the moment they saw me, and, if I wasn’t with someone big enough or willing enough to protect me, which was rare, I would always end up with at least a bloody nose.

My only respite from this constant torment came during a week-long school visit to Belgium and Germany.

Nanny thought that, after everything I had been through, this would be a wonderful treat – and so it was. The children who went on the trip proved to be from
the better-off and better-behaved element in the school and I wasn’t bullied once during the whole week we were away.

The contrast with my normal life in Bolton was incredible. I had never been out of Lancashire and Liverpool in my life, apart from summer trips to Douglas, Isle of Man, with Nanny to stay in a boarding house run by her sister, Ethel Marks. Now I was visiting foreign countries and staying in posh hotels, and had travelled through London and across the sea in a huge boat which had our school bus parked below decks.

Our trip through London was mostly a blur, with distant views of Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral. I had no way of knowing then, or even imagining, that one day I would make this city my home, know the corridors of the Palace of Westminster better than the streets of Bolton, and number prime ministers and royals among my friends.

I would never give up hope or lose my determination to ultimately triumph in this world, but back then I was simply the most insignificant person who happened to be passing through a great city. It was a foreign wonderland to me, and I really was in a state of wonder.

Staying in a hotel was also a new experience for me. For the first time in my life, I was actually being waited on. Never before had I experienced such a magical time.

That week showed me that other people lived lives that were totally different from anything I had ever experienced. I saw how normal people communicated
and impressed one another with hardly any effort. For the very first time in my life, I fitted in and was part of a crowd, and yet the feeling was so overwhelming that it made me feel more depressed than ever before.

But I still felt the warmth of the other boarders, the camaraderie of my companions, including my teachers, and it was marvellous. For the first time, I felt I truly belonged, however long that might last.

There were some little pedal cars at the place we stayed at near Knokke in Belgium, and one morning I decided to pedal off alone. I went for what seemed like miles and it was a very comforting feeling, knowing that nobody knew me and that I could carry on pedalling for ever – never going back.

I could drive until I reached the sea and that would be the end of it all. I would go on until the water covered my head. Then I would join Mammy. I felt at peace with the world. Perhaps this would be the time I could go through with it.

But I was never to know what might have been.

One of my teachers missed me and came looking for me. He found me pedalling furiously away from town.

The teachers were able to laugh about it afterwards, but I still wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t been found that day.

A
fter the heavenly luxury of an unmolested week abroad, it was dreadful having to return to the everlasting hell of daily strife in Bolton.

The level of bullying was at an all-time high and for the first time in my life I began to seriously doubt that I could go on taking it. My battered spirit, which had sustained me through the worst that my father and grandfather and Grandma Seed had dished out, couldn’t take much more of this kind of battering. The beatings alone I might have coped with, but it was a different thing to have to withstand the sheer magnitude of their combined loathing and contempt.

On top of all that, educationally things were hopeless. I still couldn’t study and, though I detested my total
academic incompetence, I could do nothing to change it. I was sinking and didn’t know how to bail out. More than ever, I wanted to die.

Even my relationship with Nanny had reached an
all-time
low. Most of the time now, I was depressed and frustrated, upset and angry. She was the only one I felt I could let off steam to and, even though I knew I was taking it out on her because she was available, it didn’t stop me throwing terrible tantrums. I was horrible and very aggressive towards her and, though I knew it frightened her and made her depressed, I couldn’t stop.

As well as finding me a struggle to cope with, Nanny could no longer look after me properly, and this made her even more upset. She thought she was holding me back.

At the same time, my social worker also thought that my having to care for Nanny was inhibiting my normal development. Mr Ffelan said it was unhealthy for me to be with someone who was getting so old. I was almost totally isolated from everyone else and had very few friends.

I didn’t even want to go out any more. I just wanted to stay in my room and hide away. I’d had enough.

After almost a year at St Anne’s, I had achieved nothing except to make myself the most unpopular and targeted boy in school.

Somehow, said Mr Ffelan, I had to adjust to living with other people. It was impossible for me to carry on in normal education. I needed to be among other boys
like myself. A new school, he explained, had been opened in Rochdale called Knowl View, which was a special school for emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children. This experimental school was destined to remain open for under 20 years and, though it was a disastrous fire that brought about its end, it was ultimately considered to have failed.

In the beginning, however, Knowl View seemed the perfect answer for local authorities trying to rid themselves of their worst problem youngsters – of whom I was one – and we were passed on to the school and scratched from the social workers’ register.

Unfortunately for me, most of the boys were sent there for being extremely aggressive and out of parental control. In truth, most of them belonged in a detention centre, and I imagine that many of them ended up behind bars. Others had serious mental problems or were retarded and were incapable of fitting into an ordinary school. Nanny and I knew nothing of all this when Mr Ffelan drove us there to view the school and meet the headmaster.

But, for me, there was not really any other option. The physical and verbal abuse I was suffering at St Anne’s had long since reached an intolerable level and I believed that, if things went on unchanged, the other children would kill me.

Nanny didn’t want me to go but we both recognised that to carry on as we were was no longer either feasible or desirable.

Neither would Knowl View School turn out to be, despite its sparklingly clean and modern facade. No one told me that it was a school for maladjusted children. But, even if they had, I wouldn’t have known what it meant.

My departure brought floods of tears from Nanny and stirred up my terror at leaving an environment I was used to. Despite my fears, I was optimistic because I figured that, as I didn’t know anyone in Rochdale, I could completely reinvent myself there, and perhaps even make friends.

Which all proves that at 12 I still had a lot to learn about the vagaries of fate.