Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  It was four years ago, aged nineteen, when Gavvy was still alive, that Karen first revealed what he had done to her. Standing in a club one night she’d seen the babysitter (a grown man now) go up to one of her friends and rub against him with his hips.

  ‘Get away from me, you fucking poof!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Karen joined in, ‘you dirty queer!’

  ‘Hmmmm,’ he retorted, ‘I don’t know what you’re smiling at. Your brothers liked it.’

  Karen had run out of the club, and somehow in her burst of tears and seething all her secrets had come out, too. ‘And my boyfriend’s gone absolutely fucking ballistic, dragged me to my mum’s, kicking and fighting I was, and he sat me down and said, “Now tell her what he done to you.” So I did.

  ‘Actually, towards the last three months of his life Gavvy had been begging me to tell somebody. And I said to him, “Do you know what Dad and Stuart will do to you?” He said, “I don’t care.” I said, “Do you know what they do to men like you in prison?” And he said, “I don’t care, it’s what I deserve.” And I told him I’d told Mum. And he said, “She’s got to tell Dad.”

  ‘The hardest thing is not just yourself, because if I’d said something it wouldn’t have happened to the other kids Gavvy did it to. But when I was eight years old I was too frightened to tell anybody, and by the time I’d got to thirteen I didn’t want to tell anybody because I was disgusted. He did it with a friend of mine. She was staying over, and I heard him come in the bedroom. And I heard his whisper, “Janey,” and I heard him get in the bed with her, and then everything else after that I blanked out. I don’t remember, but I remember he got into bed with her, because I heard the squeak as he got in.

  ‘Another night, Gavvy went upstairs to talk to this other girl. She was eight, nine, real fiery, said nasty evil things. She’d hit me, so Gavvy went up to sort her out. And I sat downstairs, but nothing anybody said was going in because I couldn’t stop thinking about what I thought was going on upstairs. Gavvy come down and I went up about ten minutes later, and she had her nightdress on and her knickers were on the floor down the side of her bed. And I knew.’

  One of the ironies of child abusers–or at least it was so with Gavvy–is that they so terrify and oppress their victims that they get a reputation for being especially good with the child: the only person in the house whom the child respects.

  ‘Guilt is a large part of it,’ agrees Karen. ‘Gavvy, if he’d done something to me, he used to give me cigarettes or money. For years I felt like I shouldn’t have taken the fags and money off him. But it was sort of a good thing for a bad thing. I do often feel like I encouraged it, because he knew he could buy me with fags or money.’

  Karen was eighteen (Stuart was twenty-nine) when Gavvy went missing. His wife phoned Karen up.

  ‘He’s been drinking and he’s gone off with some tablets, I don’t know where he’s fucking gone off. I’ve phoned the police and they’re sending a police helicopter out.

  ‘Karen,’ she added, ‘I know what he’s done to you.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  And Gavvy’s wife gave this astonishing reply: ‘Karen, I know what he’s done to you and I don’t care. I don’t hate you, Karen.’

  The damage in Stuart’s family is not just the number of people whose lives have been poisoned by one paedophile brother, but the corruption of their relationships with each other.

  Three days later the police found Gavvy about half a mile from his house, dead, in the woods, ‘and they said he really suffered, because of the tablets he took, and I’m glad he did. He hadn’t had an excess amount of alcohol, but the tablets he took, coproximal, Anadin, they’d eaten his kidneys and his liver away before he died and he’d have been in absolute agony dying, and I’m glad. I’m glad he suffered.’

  Stuart’s character crumbled after the age of twelve.

  He was studied by an expert on truancy, a former Cropwood Fellow of the Department of Criminology at Cambridge University, an easygoing, energetic man, widely considered one of the best practical educationalists in the county: Keith Laverack. Laverack’s Cropwood thesis, ‘Absconding from Kneesworth House’, written while also still teaching at the school, investigated correlations between running away and build, height, weight, number of siblings, illegitimacy, previous taking and driving away offences, previous other offences, IQ, family structure, number of previous court appearances, and reading age.

  Mr Laverack made the first clever suggestion about Stuart’s schooling in a decade: ‘Listen to the boy.’ Stuart is not spastic. He is not going to die before he’s twenty and therefore does not need to be made ready for teenage years in a wheelchair. The boy says he wants to go to a normal school. Let him go.

  Stuart went. He left the Roger Ascham and for six months joined a nearby comprehensive.

  He got worse.

  Laverack’s inspired instruction had come too late. Stuart now used his great discovery, violence, in every new environment, as prisoners do in jail, to ward off all threats, real or fanciful. He and another thug in the making beat four boys to pulp behind the maths class, an incident that Stuart remembers with fondness. ‘That worked in my favour a lot. People never called me spaggy legs again after that. The same people who used to be cruel were now cautious.’

  ‘He seemed keen to establish himself as an aggressive and worldly person since he had experiences of dealing with the police,’ ventured the head teacher in his annual report, writing for a second wishfully in the past tense. ‘He is quite proud of the fact that his natural father is “inside” and idolises the criminal experiences his father has had.’ He boasted that his dad would ‘sort out’ everyone Stuart disliked. ‘Many stories Stuart has written and scenes he has acted out have involved crime and prison.’ After six months he was expelled.

  Stuart was assigned a social worker–a careful, attentive woman who would drive out, attempt soothing conversations and then drive away again, having made not a jot of difference.

  He was sent to an assessment centre. ‘An immature lad, with slurred speech and an ungainly stance, 160 cm tall and weighing 45 kg, Stuart has a very poor relationship with his peers, being disliked by most…Bedtime has proved to be particularly traumatic for him.’

  The climax came in December 1981, Stuart aged thirteen. Stuart’s mother was in the village, attending a parent-teacher meeting for her well-behaved son, Gavvy: a lively boy, very popular at school. No, not brilliant at maths. English? Well, no, but a thoughtful child, a good lad, a kind boy, even if he did seem recently to have found the Lord and say ‘Hallelujah’ a lot.

  In the middle of this evening, Gavvy came running in, sweating, crying: ‘Mum, quick, come home,’ he shouted. ‘Mum, Stuart’s going mad.’

  Judith coursed back. Already, in the hallway, neighbours at the house were trying to sort out the mayhem. Glasses shattered, plates splintered, table overthrown. Raging and stamping upstairs. Judith bound up. In Stuart’s bedroom she found him. He stood weeping, beating his bloodied fist into the wardrobe. In his other hand, a knife. He went for her.

  ‘I want to go into fucking care! I’ve asked enough, haven’t I? If you don’t put me in care I’ll do those fucking babies! [Karen and Marcus] Put me into fucking care!’

  ‘Why, Stuart, why?’

  ‘Just fucking do it!’

  So Judith agreed. An hour later the police arrived and took Stuart away.

  It would be ten years before Stuart revealed why he’d been so desperate to leave that night. Just before Gavvy had rushed off to get Judith, he and the babysitter had sodomised him with a milk bottle.

  In my first version of this book (the one Stuart derided as ‘bollocks boring’) Stuart made almost no changes to his copy of the manuscript. The few written corrections he did suggest concerned this time, in care homes, after the age of twelve. They read as if he is highlighting spelling mistakes in library books.

  Stuart complains that he has been driven half to sleep by my awf
ul sentences and lack of dramatic structure, but he hasn’t put anything on the manuscript to help with that. It is as though only the labels of his past, not the evocations, can be fixed by writing anything down.

  ‘His table manners,’ noted the headmaster at Elmfield, ‘are poor; throwing food and cutlery around and sometimes spoiling other people’s dinner with salt or pepper…He dresses with reasonable care although he will often wear dirty underwear. This also reflects his personal hygiene, outwardly appearing clean but in reality, dirty.’ When teachers questioned his disruptiveness, ‘he would show no response and on most occasions would continue with his threatening behaviour. Then if staff felt it necessary to physically restrain him, Stuart would lose his self-control completely and lash out at any person or object near him. It has been noticed on a couple of occasions that Stuart’s eyes were actually “rolling” and whenever questioned later his memory of the previous events has been very poor.’

  ‘I used to go in such a state, just so I didn’t feel nothing. Get yourself so fucking psyched out, so you couldn’t feel it when they were jumping on you, pinning you down. You just keep struggling, whatever pain or position you’re in, you still try and wiggle and get out. I’ve been tied up in blankets like as a straitjacket, just so they don’t have to have so many staff holding me down. The police have come and handcuffed me in Kneesworth House and handcuffed me ankles, hands behind my back, then they used something like bootlace to get the two together, and then they tied a blanket up round me, on me chest, so I couldn’t do nothing, then one just sat there and held me head. They always had to hold me head.’ His head, he boasts with a toothy smile, ‘is me strongest muscle’.

  Stuart’s old supporter Keith Laverack was now the principal at the next school, Midfield Assessment Centre. With Laverack came hope. Laverack had the intelligence to treat his pupils and their needs individually. He was the social services’ ‘Golden Boy’. Because of his height, the children affectionately nicknamed him the ‘Giraffe’.

  ‘But not you, eh, Stuart?’ I remark, becoming, as I periodically do, rather sated with his misfortunes. ‘You didn’t like him any more than any other teacher who had tried to help you, did you?’

  Stuart shrugs and remains silent.

  ‘You know what makes it difficult for me? You don’t like spaggy school: understandable. So you get out of it. Your brother was horrendous, so you then demand to be put in a children’s home: understandable. What I don’t get is that at the same time as wanting these things, you also turned against them and against your mother and your supporters, your parents, the teachers who were good to you. Then, to cap it all, when you are in care you repeatedly run away, back home, to where your brother was. Explain that if you can.’

  Stuart has no explanation. ‘Running away from institutions may represent a compensation for dependency cravings,’ noted Keith Laverack in his thesis, ‘obliquely revealed by the compulsive way absconders seek out further “trouble” and bring about inevitable re-commitment to institutional care.’

  Stuart nods. Might be that, he thinks. Sounds a bit glib to Stuart. ‘When you’ve been brought up in the System it’s a very common thing that you’re suspicious of everyone and their motives. When people get close, if you’ve been abused, you often set out just deliberately to wreck that relationship.’

  ‘Oh, this bloody conspiratorial “System”,’ I say, frustrated. ‘Linda, your Outreach Worker, she was part of The System, wasn’t she? And you like her, don’t you? Denis, he’s part of The System, you told me these two people got you off the streets, saved your life. Wynn, your drugs counsellor–another System person.’

  ‘That’s not me point, Alexander.’

  ‘Me, when I work at the Day Centre or Willow Walk Hostel, I’m part of The System, aren’t I?’ I pound on. ‘Laverack, he got you out of the school you hated, didn’t he? Another System man. Other teachers, I’ve seen it in the reports, they tried to make life better for you. System men and women, every one. Couldn’t you see that? Couldn’t you see any of the good? Distrust, yes, I understand, but why all this loathing before you’d even given the people a chance? In fact–no, wait, let me finish–your brother, your abuser, is just about the only character in this whole story who wasn’t part of The System, isn’t that the case? See, you ought to be thankful to The System, don’t you think? The System’s been the safest place for you. Why not try and be nice about it once in a while?’

  A decade and a half after Stuart left Laverack’s paternal care, the nationals broke the story:

  Kids home sex sicko jailed for 18 years

  Keith Laverack was convicted of eleven specimen counts of buggery and four of indecent assault against girls and boys.

  Terrible crimes ‘tip of iceberg’

  His actual offences probably numbered thousands.

  The ‘Giraffe’ lost interest when they had turned 14

  The prosecutor compared him to Captain Hook, in Peter Pan: ‘He is never more sinister than when he is at his most polite…The courtliness impresses even his victims, even his victims on the high seas, who note that he always says sorry when prodding them along the plank.’

  I have now told Stuart many times that he should see the lawyer who has been fighting Cambridge County Council to get compensation for Laverack’s victims. This lawyer is someone I know. A courageous, tireless man. He has had three group actions already, secured over a million pounds, and will soon be starting on a fourth.

  Stuart shakes his head. He knows one person who gave evidence in a nonce trial to get compensation, and because of the memories he ended up ‘cutting himself to pieces and hanging himself’. Also, Stuart finds it hard to be specific about what happened to him, because most of the time he was high on glue. ‘One particular time, I’d been sniffing in a wood next to the school. Something horrible happened, but I don’t know what. I don’t know if it was with a member of staff or not. Sometimes when I used to glue-sniff, I used to see all the spunk over the bag, and you weren’t sure if you was tripping or if it was real. Used to make me physically sick.’ To some extent he holds himself responsible. ‘When I used to get pinned down and they used to touch us up, well, one of the dirty cunts, he used to sit on me, right on me face with his bollocks on top of me gob. It’s hard to say it, it’s a horrible thing to admit, I made some of the abuse so easy for them because of my behaviour. They could justify bending me up or dragging me off somewhere quiet, to pin me down. Looking back, that’s exactly how it feels, is that I created it to the extent that it happened. You’ve got this young violent little cunt who needs controlling.’

  Stuart has, however, read the sneering remarks in certain papers about ‘compensationitis’ and how, when claimants start making money, it just brings scum out of the woodwork, making up stories, looking for easy cash. ‘That can be so wrong,’ he says quietly. ‘Often, it’s only because the victim’s seen that other people have got through it, not all of them’s hung themselves, that they get the courage to have a go. Them later claimants could be some of the most abused.’

  Most of his life, he says, has been spent ‘trying to block my experiences at these schools out. Every day, every day, it’s like a big war what I’m always losing.’

  The closest I have got to details is this: we were driving around the countryside together one day, and we passed the Midfield School site where Laverack had been his headmaster; Stuart took me down the drive to have a look, and became momentarily confused by the building–a dull, extended, typical piece of nasty council work. It is now used as an old people’s home.

  ‘It’s different–something’s changed. I can’t put my finger on it.’

  Incidentally, I asked, ‘How many times did you run away from here?’

  ‘That’s it, that’s what’s changed, it’s only got one floor now. They must have knocked the old structure down and put this one up. I remember now, because I had to tie the sheets together to climb out of my bedroom, because it was on the next floor up. That day was the onl
y time I ever run off twice in one day.’

  ‘Why twice?’

  ‘Because the police brought me back from Girton the first time. The police always brought you back here. That was one time it happened. That’s why I ran off a second time.’

  ‘Happened?’

  ‘You know, in the office, after the police had gone.’

  ‘What happened?’

  In that chilling way that Stuart often manages to capture the essence of a thing, he says: ‘I don’t remember the face, only the movement.’

  ‘Not Royston, Girton’ he has written on his copy of the first, rejected manuscript of this book, beside the section on Kneesworth School. I had made another mistake in those pages. It was not from Royston but Girton the police brought him back to perform fellatio and be buggered.

  24

  ‘There’s 365 days a year, all the different things what happen. For someone who’s got a pea-brain like me, it’s hard to keep anything.’

  The Forgotten Years: Aged 0–10

  ‘Going to write a book, are you? Thought so. As soon as I heard your voice, I said to myself, “He’s going to write a book about Stuart.” That boy has suffered. He deserves a book. You should write a book about me, too.’

  Grandma Ellen and Little Bert live in Fen Ditton, on the edge of Cambridge, in a tiny prefab cube at the end of a line of paving slabs: a bungalow, an outsized sugar lump. ‘Nan’s small; she’s always been small,’ says Stuart. ‘But she knows about me forgotten years.’

  Grandma Ellen is sunk in an armchair peeping out over the middle rung of a Zimmer frame that she has parked in front of her. Her face is like a polished string purse. She has got so ancient that she’s started to smooth out again.