We were lined up along the corridor, waiting to go into the dining room, when he walked past us. It was the first time I’d seen him up close and he looked scary, hobbling along the corridor and paying us no heed, as if we weren’t even there. Ahead of us, my brother, standing out of line, was talking with a couple of boys when, for no reason at all, this evil old bastard suddenly belted him with his walking stick from behind, catching Martin across the side of his face. All this because my brother happened to be in his way. I remember seeing the red mist as my anger surged. I’m not sure what came over me, but I could not stop myself from rushing the few yards up to the old cripple and giving him a solid shove in the back. I watched in horror as the bag of bones keeled over and hit the floor, face down.
“He’s murdered him,” said Goofy.
“One word an’ I’ll murder yea,” warned Martin.
“I’m saying nowt,” grinned Goofy, before suddenly taking a swift kick at the old man, catching him right up the backside as he’d started to get up on his hands and knees, causing him to fall back down again. Another lad, Richard Golab, picked up the walking stick and whacked it down on the headmaster’s head, before throwing the stick up along the corridor. This seemed to have been the signal for others to mock the headmaster, as he struggled to pick himself up off the floor, with none of us willing to lend him a hand.
“Mr Samson’s coming!” We heard the warning and quickly got back in line, leaving the dead-looking headmaster struggling to get to his feet, as we stood silently watching.
“Mr Parker! Are you alright, sir? What’s happened?’ Mr Samson glared up and down the line as he raced to the headmaster’s aid.
“He slipped, sir.”
“He fell over his stick, sir.”
“His stick fell out of his hand and he tripped.”
“He tried to do a jig, sir.”
“I’ll deal with you later, Murphy.”
We were informed by Mr Samson later that day that Mr Parker had said he’d had a dizzy spell. Obviously, he’d been too embarrassed to admit he’d been attacked by a group of young children. And who knows what might have happened if he’d been left on his own with us for any length of time. Yes, when all was said and done, the cripple was an easy target. But then, so were we children…
During the early summer we played cricket, which I loved. I couldn’t bowl, but I could bat and would hit the ball all over the show. Mr Johnstone said he could see I had a keen eye for the ball and that one day I’d make a good cricketer – even though I couldn’t bowl in a straight line and hated fielding.
Martin, on the other hand, was a great all-rounder. He had a competitive streak about him and was able to find that extra push in himself, always on target when bowling or throwing the ball from the outfield to the wicket keeper. It was a talent I’d spotted in our many ducker-throwing gang battles on the crofts of Hulme and Moss Side.
Unusually, Martin held the cricket bat high above his shoulder, like an American baseball player. He’d swing blindly at every ball coming down at him, scoring some spectacular runs, but he never stayed in for long.
Once, when he had bowled a ball that was hit high into the air, he screamed “My ball!” and then stood underneath it, as it dropped back to earth, missing his hands, hitting him straight on his hooter and breaking it.
As the summer got underway, we would play football against each other on most Saturdays. The teams were always Man United v Man United Reserves, because no one would play under any other name. I did like playing football, especially when it had been raining, or was still raining and the pitch was wet and muddy. It was brilliant to slide on, even when I wasn’t making a save.
I was always picked as the goalkeeper, even though I wasn’t that good – but as I was even worse in any of the other positions, I couldn’t really complain. For me, it was great fun just to be out in the open air, slipping and sliding in the mud. That said, I hated playing in the winter, having to stand for an hour or so shivering to death, with my cold hands down my shorts and wrapped around my goolies to keep them warm, plus kicking the toes of my boots against the goalpost to stop frostbite setting in. My teammates always moaned at me for the number of penalties I’d give away. And I must admit I’d be frightened to death when a potential goal scorer was heading towards me. I’d just close my eyes, ready for the impact and kick out wherever I’d last seen the ball, only to hear a cry of pain, having usually kicked the player instead and given away another penalty. But I was still proud of the fact that I held the record at Rose Hill for being the first goalkeeper to let in 20 penalties – all in the same game!
Nightmare
There came a point when Martin went very quiet on me, which was something I’d never witnessed from him prior to arriving at Rose Hill. The fact that we’d had a different upbringing from many of the kids incarcerated there wasn’t to say that we were ungrateful for our lot. Happiness in its true sense of the word had never been an issue for us. We just got on and made the best of what life had on offer for us, grateful for the nice things that did come our way. And if the height of happiness was measured by, say, picking up a discarded piece of chewing gum, pulling it apart and sharing it with each other, then we were very happy.
Of course, Martin sometimes got frustrated about one thing or another, as I did. But he seemed to have become very sullen and quiet. And where once we had been able to talk to each other about anything, my brother seemed not to want to confide in me about what was troubling him. He even told me to “Feck off!” when I had gone on and on, asking him what was wrong.
This was very upsetting for me and I cried myself to sleep, wondering what it was I could have done, or if I had unwittingly said something to hurt him. But while I didn’t know whether it was something I’d done, I knew for sure that he wasn’t missing his mammy and daddy.
One weekend, Martin and I, along with 14 of the other boys, were chosen to camp in the orchards of Rose Hill. My brother had seemed a little chirpier and when I told him I thought he didn’t love me any more, he threw his arms around me and told me he would love me forever, which made me cry tears of happiness.
It had taken an age to set up the camp, erecting two small toilets and six tents. We were helped by a silver-haired, muscular man wearing a sleeveless psychedelic shirt, short khaki trousers and leather sandals, who introduced himself to us as The Skipper. He seemed very jovial and touchy-feely, tickling the boys as they held up the main tent post, deliberately making it collapse before we were able to hammer in the wooden pegs to hold the guy ropes fast. We had great fun throughout the day, bringing us some small respite from our mundane daily lives.
On the Saturday evening, we sat around the campfire singing songs, accompanied by the Skipper on his banjo. A few of the songs were already known to us and a couple he had taught us for the first time, including “Dublin’s Fair City”, with the Skipper singing the verses and us loudly joining in on the “Alive, Alive Oh” chorus.
Mr Butterworth came into the camp later in the evening and served us up some fairy cakes and diluted orange juice, before sitting down by the fire and telling us a ghost story. It was about a young village boy who, heading home one night, had seen the Devil peer over the church wall, smiling at him. He ran off home, screaming the whole village awake. Then the boy, along with his parents and a large group of villagers, set back off along the dimly lit lane to the church, where a goat had suddenly peered over the wall. Laughing at the little boy’s obvious mistake, the villagers headed back to their homes. As the boy dragged his heels behind them, he took a quick peek over his shoulder, to see the figure of the Devil standing beneath the huge oak tree in the grounds of the church. But his fear of being ridiculed for a second time that night stopped him from calling out. And he ran home as fast as his legs would carry him.
Martin and I shared a tent with two other boys, McCormack and Flynn. We agreed to keep the battery-operated Til
ley lamp switched on, which had given out a very dim orange glow – enough to be able to find our way out of the tent if we needed to go to the toilet. I climbed into my sleeping bag, zipping it right up to the top before pulling the drawstrings tight inside of it. I could only see darkness.
“The Devil won’t come here tonight, will he Martin?”
“If he does, he won’t be botherin’ us for sure.”
His answer wasn’t that much of a help and then some fecker had to start making wooing noises.
“Shallup or I’ll be wooing yah with me fist,” warned Martin.
Lying in the tent and tucked right down inside the warm sleeping bag, I felt relaxed and safe. Even so, I lay as close as I could be to my brother, listening out for the slightest sound. I could feel a strange sensation inside my head, similar to sitting on a swing with my eyes closed as it gently rocked back and forth, before my heavy eyelids closed. I’d often wondered afterwards, had something been slipped into our orange juice? This would certainly have explained my intense drowsiness and the dream-like quality of what happened next…
I remember waking suddenly and hearing a strange, low sound close by. Inside my head, I could see fleeting, ghostly images, which at the time, I’d been unable to make any sense of. I was awake and yet I felt the images I was seeing were unreal. There were people in our tent. They were speaking in low tones. Mr Butterworth led me by the hand, out of the tent and through the orchard, to the wooden huts used whenever the remand centre had an overspill of kids. I remember laying on one of the beds. I was naked and he was asking me to do something. But I couldn’t understand what he was asking me to do, and then I began to panic. I could hardly breathe because he had put something in my mouth and he was pressing himself into me.
Another man was kneeling in front of me. I was only able to see the top half of him, which was bare. He suddenly lifted my legs and put one either side of him before pulling me forwards towards him. Mr Butterworth was now standing behind him and telling me it was fine, as I felt the man pushing himself inside me. Pushing and pushing. And then I suddenly woke up inside my sleeping bag, from where I could see someone kneeling behind Martin and holding him still.
In the dim light of the tent, squinting through half-open eyelids, I made out the grey form of Skipper. He was naked from the waist up and kneeling just a foot away from me. He had my brother in front of him and I could see Martin was up on his knees, with the bottom half of his pyjamas down around them. I froze as I saw Skipper holding onto my brother’s hips and pulling him backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, repeatedly, before suddenly stopping. Moments later, he released his grip, letting my brother drop onto his sleeping bag. And in the blink of an eye, the image was gone.
The following morning, Flynn and McCormack were at each other’s throats, arguing over whose undies were whose. I noticed the zip of my sleeping bag was completely undone to the bottom, though I knew for sure I had zipped it right up to the top the previous evening.
“Are yah okay Tommy?” Martin was awake and out of his own sleeping bag.
“I had a bad nightmare is all,” I told him, unable to make sense of the images flickering through my brain. “Der’s some blood on the back of yer pyjama bottoms,” I said, noticing the red smudges as my brother stood up.
“Piles,” he said. “I’d been squeezing me head on the bog all the morning. Look at them two eejits!”
“I don’t crap me undies like you, Flynn, these are mine!” McCormack had managed to pull the cleaner pair of undies from Flynn’s grip, before kicking the skid-marked pair across the ground to land at Flynn’s feet.
“I’m not wearing them shitty things,” said Flynn, taking a kick at the dirty undies and stubbing his big toe on the ground in the process. He hopped around, howling in pain, causing the three of us to howl with laughter.
Skipper cheerfully bade us a good morning and dished out a breakfast of sausages, beans and toast, which we ate around the campfire. By the late afternoon my head had cleared and I thought no more about the nightmare I’d had during the night. Later that day, those of us who had been camping were taken to the pictures in the two Bedford vans to see “The Sound of Music”. I loved the film, especially near the end when each member of the Von Trapp family, having planned their escape from Nazi-controlled Austria, sang “So long, Farewell”.
I still remember the tension I felt as, one by one, each family member left the stage, leaving the little girl on her own to sing the last chorus. How my heart had drummed, as I screamed inwardly for her to hurry up and go to her family before the Nazis realised what was going on.
My favourite song from the film was “Climb Every Mountain”. The lyrics were so powerful in the sense that they gave me hope and a reminder that there were better things beyond Rose Hill. And in some small way, it became my burning ambition to search out the rainbow that could lead me and Martin to our dream, which was to be free.
That little rat, Paul Seager, got to sit on Mr Butterworth’s knee again. The crawling little fecker. It seemed to us he could get away with almost anything and not get told off. The squeaky-voiced, giggly blond git! Too afraid to sleep on his own in the dark, he’d often let one of the older boys in the bed with him. On many occasions, he and his little circle of secretive friends would be chosen to visit places outside the home, staying tight-lipped and refusing to mention in conversation where they’d gone, even when Martin and I had grabbed Seager in the bogs and had threatened him with the dire consequences of not giving up his secret to us. But he wouldn’t say a word, so we were none the wiser as to why he and his friends always got first dibs at everything.
Our Little Secret
Mr Samson picked a group of us to join his Christmas Eve choir to sing carols at the local community centre for the elderly. Martin wasn’t chosen because he sounded like a foghorn. When Mr Samson had asked him to sing solo, Martin told me he had deliberately sung out of tune, just so as he didn’t have to sing to “smelly auld fogies”.
Anyway, it made a change to have learned all the words to a carol, instead of making them up as we went along, as we used to do when we were out carol singing in Hulme.
A few weeks before Christmas, Mr Butterworth informed us of the upcoming nativity play, saying those who were interested in taking part should give their names to him. I don’t know why I put my name down to be the Virgin Mary, I just did. The following day when the four of us – me, Williams, McGuinness and Seager – had gone to the gatehouse lodge to audition, I was confident of having a good chance, considering the opposition I was up against.
“It’s the Virgin Mary we’re looking for, not a gollywog,” explained Mr Butterworth to the weeping black boy, Williams. “Sorry lad, you can play one of the Kings, they can be any colour. As for you McGuinness,” he said to the plump Irish lad, “you haven’t a hope in hell’s chance of getting any talking part with that accent of yours. Let alone fitting into any of the costumes. Look at you lad!”
“Sure, wouldn’t Mary have been fat after havin’ a baby?” argued McGuiness. “Me mammy was blown up like a big balloon for ages, so she was. An’ I’ll be sittin’ down so no one will notice me much?”
“Well, for one, the Virgin Mary came from Nazareth, not a potato field somewhere in Ireland. Secondly, I would have thought the size of your head would be a giveaway. You can be the donkey, along with Miller. Sort it out between yourselves, who’s the back and who’s the front end.”
With those two eejits out of the way, there was only me and Seager in contention for the part. We only had the one line to say and he couldn’t even get that right. When the angel came down from Heaven to tell him the surprise news, “You’re going to have a baby”, all he had to say was, “How can this possibly be?” but he couldn’t remember all the words. And even when he did eventually get the line right, he just wasn’t convincing enough. He was no better at holding the baby Jesus, perching the plasti
c doll with the cracked face on his knee like a ventriloquist holding his dummy. And he paid no heed to it at all. Whereas I’d been an attentive mother and had held the baby Jesus close to my bosom, shushing it now and then to make it more convincing. I even put on my best girlie voice and added a few extra words to my line, having known (though not understanding) that a woman must be shagged before she can find a baby under a bush. So I said, “But how can this possibly be? I’ve never been shagged before.”
A belt around the ear was surely all the punishment I deserved, but my effort to impress Mr Butterworth had all been in vain and that maggot, Seager, ended up getting the part. I couldn’t understand why I always missed out. I knew life wasn’t fair but just for once it would have been nice for something to have gone my way.
But then, for the first time in my life, my prayers were answered. Seager went off to face the magistrates and never came back to Rose Hill. Mr Butterworth took me down to the Gate Lodge, telling me on the way that he had a nice surprise waiting there for me. When we walked into the music room, my eyes lit up at the sight of the pale-blue Virgin Mary costume, consisting of a baggy white flannel dress and a blue head shawl like the nuns wore, only this was a much lighter blue.
“Do you still want to play the part of Mary?”
“I do that sir. Please, sir.”
“Quieten down lad. We don’t want the world to know what we’re up to.”
“I’m just excited, sir.”
“There are other lads who want to play the part as well.”
“Oh.” My face dropped.
“Do you remember the little secret we had between us? When I cuddled you? In my office? I gave you the little bag of sweets afterwards?”
“I didn’t tell a soul sir, honest,” I lied. Though I’d forgotten all about it by this time.
Boy Number 26 Page 5