The Devil Rides Out (13 page)

My favourite boy – not that we were supposed to have any favourites – was Stephen, a lad of twelve who had muscular dystrophy. There is as yet no cure for this terrible muscle-wasting disease and sufferers rarely make it into their middle teens. Stephen was dependent on his carer for everything, paralysed from the neck down apart from a slight movement in his right arm and hand which enabled him to operate the ‘joy-stick’ on his electric wheelchair. His neck muscles were beginning to atrophy and his head shook like a bobble toy as he slowly steered his massive girth in his electric chariot down the corridor, barking instructions to any children in his path to ‘Move your arse, spaz.’

The kids could be terribly cruel to each other and highly inventive with their abusive insults. Stephen’s arch enemy was Andy, another wheelchair-bound boy with spina bifida, and together they would enjoy long sessions of verbal spats.

‘Crab’s legs,’ Stephen would retort, referring to Andy’s withered limbs. ‘You should be in a bucket on the beach.’

‘Fat bastard!’

‘Hunchback!’

‘Mong!’

‘Sir?’ (This coming from little Alan, who could sniff out a good row at ten miles and enjoyed nothing more than muscling in and adding fuel to the fire.)

‘What is it, Alan?’

‘Can you tell these two spackers to stop calling each other names, please. They’re giving me a fucking headache.’

To spare you endless pages of Life at the Conny Home, why don’t I describe a typical day?

6am
The alarm goes off. I ignore it completely and roll over. Mother’s voice from next door shouts at me to ‘Get up or your head will go flat and why should I be persecuted at my time of life with the thankless task of trying to raise a lazy swine out of his pit?’ Quick swill in the bathroom sink, what my aunty Chris calls a prostitute’s wash – face, neck, hands and armpits. There’s no such thing as a shower in Holly Grove and it would have taken too long to heat the water for a bath and my ma would have ended up in hospital after the murderous expense of using the immersion heater and all the fifty pences that would have been eaten up by the electricity meter. (‘Who do you think I am? One of the Rothschilds?’)

My solitary journey into work was less exotic and I’d usually arrive at the Conny Home in time for a quick cup of scalding milky coffee from the tea urn in the staff room before running upstairs to wake the kids. If the train timings had not gone according to plan or if I’d overslept, a late arrival meant finding the front door locked and the wrath of Mrs Dickie waiting inside.

7.30am
Wake the boys and send them off into the bathroom to get washed. Strip whatever beds have been peed on in the night, and then make and change eleven beds. The able-bodied boys were supposed to do this themselves, but they made such a pig’s ear of it that their attempts would never pass muster with Mrs Dickie so it was easier to do it myself.

8.15am
Check the boys’ uniforms to make sure that they’ll pass Dickie’s eagle-eyed inspection and get them all down for breakfast. Any kid with a button missing or a hole in his sweater is sent back upstairs by this good woman to change. Supervise breakfast, the smell of the hard-boiled eggs overpowering, added to which is the stench of Tommy’s overflowing colostomy bag. This has just fallen off due to its weight and slapped on to the floor, spraying liquid shit all over my jeans and most of the dining-room floor. He’d lied as usual and hadn’t changed his bag at all. ‘Serves you right for not checking,’ Mrs Dickie admonishes me in front of everyone. Take Tommy upstairs, clean us both up and fix a new colostomy bag to him. This was a complicated routine back then, involving rubber flanges, belts and tapes and a foul-smelling solution called Zoff which was intended to keep the bag smelling sweet. Return to breakfast room, collect boys, take them back upstairs to gather their school things, comb their hair, wipe egg off their faces, take them to the toilet and then line them up and traipse back downstairs to deliver them into the hands of their respective teachers.

9am
Return to unit and commence cleaning the bathroom, toilets and sluice. The first time I undertook this task I was hauled back by an outraged Dickie, who demanded to know why I hadn’t polished the taps.

‘Indeed we do polish taps, Mr O’Grady.’ She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips tightly to indicate that such wanton slovenliness was inexcusable. ‘We also scour and clean every inch of this bathroom, not forgetting the sluice and the toilet area, thoroughly. The spina bifida children are prone to urinary infections and we can’t risk any of the children catching anything from unhygienic surroundings, can we? Now have I made myself clear, Mr O’Grady?’

‘Crystal, Mrs Dickie.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Yes, Mrs Dickie.’

I am dragged back on to the unit from scouring urinals and made to pull a bed away from the wall. Mrs Dickie proceeds to run her finger along the waterpipes and bed rails then holds it under my nose for inspection.

‘And what is this, Mr O’Grady?’

‘It looks like dust, Mrs Dickie.’

‘Correct. And you have children in your care who suffer from severe asthma. Dust such as this could bring on an attack. Get it cleaned if you will, please.’

‘But isn’t it the cleaner’s fault there are dusty pipes?’

‘No. The children are in your care, not hers.’

‘Yes, Mrs Dickie.’

I hated myself for rolling over and being so subservient but it was easier than confrontation as Mrs Dickie was never wrong.

Clean unit and finally go down for coffee and fag break with fellow workers, bemoaning our lot in life, until Dickie puts her little grey head around the door and asks us if we’ve any intention of returning to work.

11.00am
Return kids to school. Check the boys’ lockers. Tommy’s has two used and very full colostomy bags hidden at the back. Check and sort the linen cupboard, repair holes and replace buttons on any clothes that need it, which seems to be most of them. Up till then I’d never so much as threaded a needle, now here I am stitching away like the brave little tailor.

12 noon
Collect boys and take them into the dining hall for dinner. We sit and eat with the children and it is my least favourite part of the day. I try and teach them some table manners, to no avail, so I slope off and have a sly fag with Janet, one of the housemothers. Get caught having sly fag by ‘she who must be obeyed’ and verbally cleaned to within an inch of our lives. Return to dining room, supervise playtime, making sure that any of the kids who need changing or medication are sorted out. Take Stephen to the loo. Return kids to school.

2pm
One hour’s break so sit in the staff room drinking tea and smoking as leaving the building is not encouraged.

4pm
Kids arrive back from school and line up hungrily in what was probably once a gym for a piece of cake and a glass of milk off a tea trolley.

5–7pm
A period known as Activities. This involves traipsing round West Kirby pushing a wheelchair with a gang of kids hanging off it or sitting in a ridiculously small room known as the telly room trying to keep them entertained for two hours. The telly is a tiny black and white portable of dubious age that sits on a high shelf in the corner and has the same lousy reception as the antique in the live-in staff’s sitting room upstairs. The more able-bodied boys go off to play sports or do something with a Christian group called the Crusaders.

7pm
Supper. Those of us who have been on the dreaded Activities are given fifteen minutes to go and have something to eat ourselves, usually rubbery luncheon meat and cold mashed potatoes or my bête noire, cheese pie.

Most of the regular children went home at the end of each term. Only a handful of kids remained behind, including Stephen and Andy and some of the more severely disabled children who had nowhere else to go. To make sure that the staff didn’t idle the time away we were ordered to clean the place from top to bottom, scrubbing floors, washing walls down, scraping off the wax that had steadily accumulated on the wheelchairs’ wheels and perform endless other tasks. Add to this a number of disabled children who came to stay for a month as convalescents and you’re talking hard graft.

One of the nursing sisters, a grisly little Irish woman, said to me one day in the dispensary, ‘They’re not human, you know, Down’s children.’

‘How d’ya mean, Sister?’ That statement sounded a little too Third Reich for my liking.

‘I don’t mean this in any nasty way, I just mean that they are so very special, untainted by worldly worries, that I really do believe they are related to the faery folk.’

I knew exactly what she meant. Down’s children are indeed very special and we can learn a lot from them. Unsullied, they see the world and those who inhabit it with a different eye and are a joy to be with.