Nobody's Child (15 page)

N
anny was to remain a constant in my life until she died 20 years later, at the age of 94. But my feelings towards my parents had been irrevocably altered.

I still grieved for Mammy and loved her just as much as before, but I felt a growing resentment towards her for not having told me the truth about my birth before she killed herself. It would probably not have made the pain any easier to bear, but it just might have stopped me blaming myself for her suicide.

I had instinctively felt my father was a stranger when he forced me to perform those disgusting sexual services, and knowing now that I had been right could never erase the memories. But at least it was some comfort to learn that it had not been my real father making me participate in such unnatural acts.

I never did find out who my real father was, and I had – and still have – no desire to seek him out.

But within a year of discovering my true identity I met Sister Philomena, the nun who had handled my adoption, and she told me the sad story of the young Irish girl, my mother, who came to England to have her baby, and loved him so much she had to give him away.

Marie Godwin was only 16 when she became pregnant, Sister Philomena told me, and had to leave home in Ireland to save herself and her family from the shame of having an illegitimate child. She was a mill worker, but found herself a job in nursing at a hospital in Manchester.

I was born on Sunday, 16 June 1957 in Gore Street and was registered as birth number 396 in the
sub-district
of Manchester Western. My father’s name was left blank on the birth certificate.

Sister Philomena said that Marie, who was very pretty and had dark curly hair and a ready, sunny smile, loved me very much and looked after me herself for more than six months, having me baptised a Catholic in December that year.

But, even though she was working, Marie found she could not provide adequate food, clothing and care for me, and eventually the financial strain proved too much.

‘In January of 1958 she brought you to me, at the Catholic Children’s Society in Salford, and asked if we could find you good parents who could give you a decent start in life,’ the nun told me. ‘Marie kept in
touch with me for a year, until after you were safely adopted, in November 1958, because she wanted to know about the couple who would be raising you. What kind of people they were. She hated giving you away because she loved you so much. But that was all she could offer. Her love. She thought you deserved more.’

I cried then, deep sobs that seemed to come from the bottom of my soul. All I had ever craved, as long as I could remember, was to be loved. Nothing more.

It may have been all she could give – but it was everything I had ever wanted, and I cried for us both, for all the love the two of us had lost. As I clung to Sister Philomena, with tears pouring down my face, I mourned for those might-have-been years, when there could have been so many beautiful dreams, instead of all the frightful nightmares.

Sister Philomena said that my mother had stayed in touch with her until the month after I was adopted, to make sure I was in safe hands; and after that she never heard from Marie again.

I later discovered that Joe and Lillian Seed had adopted another baby boy at the same time as me but within a few weeks had sent him back to the Catholic Children’s Society.

In those days, before the age of computers, all the records were written or typed and those at the Society had been destroyed by fire. There was no record of why the other baby had been returned. Nanny either genuinely didn’t know or remember, or she may have
professed ignorance to protect her daughter, and I never saw the Wicked Witch of the West again to ask her.

Whatever the reason, it might have lost me a childhood companion, but almost certainly saved that child from the most awful pain and some very unpleasant moments. I hope that child was adopted by a couple who loved and cared for their baby in the way that every child should be loved and cared for.

How different my life might have been if I had been the one to have been rejected. 

I
left school in May 1974, the year of my 17th birthday, with one O Level in art, a wide knowledge of politics, economics, philosophy and the theatre, and a total ignorance of technology, mechanics, electricity and simple arithmetic.

Britain was still recovering from the disastrous
three-day
working week brought in by Ted Heath, which had cost him the next general election, and jobs were hard to come by.

But I was lucky. A job was advertised in the
Bolton Evening News
for a helper in Knutsford motorway cafe, and after being interviewed on the telephone I was offered a try-out on a day-to-day basis.

The job mainly involved collecting plates, cutlery and trays from the restaurant and taking them to the kitchen
to be washed up. I was also detailed to help with certain chores in the kitchen itself.

On my first day, I managed to drop a tray holding more than 60 eggs on the kitchen floor and smash the lot. Reluctantly, the management agreed to have me back the following day, but it proved to be a big mistake on their part. This time I slipped on the kitchen floor, knocked over a trolley and smashed nearly a hundred plates, cups and saucers that were stored on it.

I was fired on the spot, given two pound notes and a handful of silver coins for the total of ten hours I had worked there and told never to come back.

But luck was still with me. Walking along the High Street, I spotted a handwritten sign in the window of a menswear shop which said, ‘Help needed inside.’ They wanted an assistant salesman, and after a five-minute interview I was given the job.

For a time all went well, and except for my boss not approving of my telling customers that they could buy similar clothing more cheaply at other shops in town, I seemed to be getting on quite well.

Until the day they asked me to make the tea.

Call it bizarre if you like, but there was one problem with this. I had never made a cup of tea or paid attention to one being made in my life. Nanny put her lovely complexion down to drinking only orange juice or milk, and I drank only orange juice or water. At school, I was never shown, or asked, to put the kettle on, and at home my grandmother did all that.

I managed to fill the kettle all right, and spotted that it had a wire coming out of it with a plug on the end. So I plugged it in. And to be on the safe side, because I vaguely remembered my grandmother doing it, I lit the gas on top of the stove and put the kettle on top of that.

After a few minutes, I noticed that the plastic part of the kettle was on fire, but, before I could rescue it, the whole thing blew up with an almighty bang and sent bits of plastic flying everywhere.

All the lights went out in the kitchen and in the shop, and as I had no idea of the existence of such things as fuses and fuse boxes, I didn’t know what to do.

They had heard the bang in the shop downstairs and then been plunged into darkness. Now one of the men came running upstairs to see what had happened.

I was so scared I hid behind the door, but my fellow assistant found me and hauled me downstairs, where the boss, shouting at the top of his voice, demanded to know what the hell was going on.

When I explained, he could scarcely believe me.

‘I didn’t know anybody could be that bloody thick,’ he stormed. ‘This definitely isn’t going to work out. You’re fired.’

I had been there exactly two weeks.

My next job was as a care worker for the mentally ill in a centre run by Bolton Social Services – whose care I was still in myself.

To qualify for care, the patients had to be
ambulatory and not physically impaired, just mentally ill. There were about 30 male residents in the nursing home. Some were middle-aged but most of them were elderly.

The people looking after them were a married couple, John and Irene Osborne, who were really nice. They had a daughter, Karen, and a son, Paul, who were both still at school. They were amazingly funny and quite outrageous and, with the exception of Mr Thomas, very different from most of the people I knew. We were surrounded by dysfunctional, pretty crazy residents, but that didn’t stop us having the most enormous fun, and soon I learned to accept the madness around us as quite normal.

One old man used to throw handfuls of his own faeces at people in the street from an upstairs window, and the majority of them were unpredictable, but we coped. There were just the Osbornes, two ladies and me. We did everything.

I had to help in the kitchen and with the cleaning, and one of my regular tasks was to make sure that everyone got out of bed in the morning. Some of them never wanted to get up, and it often took a lot of tugging, pushing and persuasion to get them on the move. At 17, I had to take the initiative and provide a lead. I’m not so sure one could get away with using a 17-year-old to do the job today. But I was in my element.

One resident, an old rag-and-bone man, who parked his cart at the back of the home, refused to ever wash his hands, so by the front door we kept a pair of white opera
gloves and he was made to put these on when he came home from work.

When one evening I was slightly delayed serving his dinner, he took a pair of goldfish out of the tank in the living room, placed them between two slices of bread and ate them alive.

None of the other residents found this the slightest bit unusual. It was that kind of place.

Some of them didn’t really know how to look after themselves, and I found that in assisting them I was satisfying a need in myself to help others. At this point, I began to think seriously about a career in the social services.

I stayed with the Osbornes for a year and a half, living with my grandmother and walking to and from work every day. Nearly every day, I would be accosted by three teenage girls, some of my worst persecutors, screaming abuse and obscenities. I began to believe that there would never be an end to this kind of thing. It was so depressing. I desperately needed an enormous uplift, both humanly and spiritually.

By now, I had moved on from the Baptists, much to Nanny’s disgust, and for a brief time attended an Anglican church. But eventually, and I suppose inevitably, because of my background, I returned to the Catholic Church.

I was aware too that, of the thousands of religious orders that exist, most of them are Catholic, and though other religions treat most of these orders as oddities, the
Catholic religion considers them quite normal. That also appealed to me. I approved of a religion that found these supposed oddities normal, just as I found normal the odd characters in the nursing home where I worked.

I had read GK Chesterton’s
St Francis of Assisi
and gradually my desire to help other people began to merge with the idea of becoming a friar.

I could have gone on working for the Osbornes for another five years and gained the work experience to help run a similar home myself, but by then the call of Catholicism was already too strong to ignore. And, on a tragic note, John Osborne died at that time, shortly followed by his wife.

In September 1975, I left the home for crazy people and started work at a Catholic hostel for the homeless in the centre of Manchester. To my surprise and relief, they had accepted me without credentials. They regarded my work there as a test for me before entering a seminary.

As the result of this successful tryout, in January the following year, as human and sinful as I am, I committed myself irrevocably to a life of service under God and took the first step which would eventually lead to my becoming a friar in the Franciscan Order. 

T
he Reverend Stanley Thomas remained a close friend of Father Michael Seed until his death on 7 March this year. After leaving Knowl View School in 1979, where he had become Deputy Headmaster, he became vicar of a small parish church in Wales before retiring. He was 75.

Nanny Mary ‘Polly’ Ramsden moved to a controlled bungalow for the elderly in the centre of Bolton when Michael left home in 1975, and lived there until 1986, when she entered The Little Sisters of the Poor nursing home in Leeds. After a lifetime committed to the Salvation Army and the Baptists she died there, two years later, aged 94, as a Roman Catholic.

Florence Seed, the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’, died in December 1977, aged 85. She is buried, with her husband, two sons and daughter, Sheila, who died in 2003 aged 79, in a shared grave in Allerton Cemetery, near Halewood.

The ashes of Lillian Seed, Father Michael’s mother, rest in Bolton, 25 miles from the Seed family plot in Halewood: as separated in death from her husband Joe as she was during their marriage.

In September 2002, David Higgins, 62, was jailed for 12 months in Manchester after admitting he had preyed on children while working and living at Knowl View School in Rochdale, where, the court was told, he was regarded as a father figure to the boys, who came from troubled backgrounds. He pleaded guilty to 11 counts of indecent assault and gross indecency with a child. The pupils who gave evidence had been at the school in the early 1970s and came forward after the launch of Operation Cleopatra, Greater Manchester Police’s biggest-ever investigation into child abuse in residential homes, which began in 1997. He was banned from working with children for life and ordered to sign the Sex Offenders’ Register.

Higgins had two other convictions for indecently assaulting children. In 1976, in Leeds he had been given a 12-month conditional discharge, and in Skipton in 1983 he was placed under two years’ probation. Both courts had been unaware of his activities at Knowl View.

Knowl View Special School for Emotionally and Behaviourally Disturbed Children remained operational for 21 years after Michael Seed left. It was partially burned down by its then pupils and was shut down by Rochdale Council in 1995 amid allegations of sexual abuse and mismanagement.