by Paul O'Grady
‘That’s showbiz, kid,’ Ron said philosophically in his best Liza Minnelli manner as we retired to Sadie’s for a cider and the after-show post-mortem.
CHAPTER 6
The Conny Home
‘THERE’S A JOB IN THE BIRKENHEAD NEWS I WOULDN’T MIND applying for,’ I said to my mother as she sat on the sofa knitting away like a dervish.
‘What’s that for then, village idiot?’ she replied without missing a beat. She was what you’d call ‘on one’ that day. Best not to rile her.
‘Actually it’s for a housefather in a kids’ home in West Kirby.’
‘If you want to look after kids then you’ve got one of your own over in Bootle,’ she sniffed, looking up briefly from her knitting to give me the evil eye before setting off on a bout of head-shaking and tut-tutting, ‘or have you conveniently forgotten about that?’
I hadn’t forgotten, far from it. I thought about Sharon every day. I was going over to visit regularly but still couldn’t raise any of the paternal instincts I’d hoped might have been lying dormant inside me. No such luck. To be honest, the baby still scared me. No, she terrified the life out of me and I looked upon my daughter, sweet little thing though she undoubtedly was, as if she were somebody else’s child, nearly always coming away from a visit hating myself for harbouring what I considered unnatural emotions. After all, didn’t I come from a warm, loving family? So why then couldn’t I express the same love and affection for this child? Jesus, for an eighteen-year-old I was carrying a lot of guilt around.
Diane and I would get on fine for a while, spend a lot of time together, go for nights out, usually to Sadie’s or the Bear’s Paw, but it would inevitably end in bitter recriminations and ultimately tears. In retrospect I can now see that ours had turned into a destructive relationship, riddled with mistrust, jealousy and failed responsibility, but for some reason we always went back for more. I liked Diane very much when she wasn’t playing what I saw as the martyr, a role for which she could have won an Academy Award, but try as I might I just couldn’t live up to the expectations, real or imaginary, that I felt she had of me. Quite simply I was still too immature, an airhead and a flibbertigibbet unable to come to terms with the cold hard truth that I was a father. Consequently I felt trapped, compromised and as if I was being forced into a corner that said ‘Daddy and Partner’. I buried my head in the sand, hoping that somehow the problems would resolve themselves and go away.
Despite my ma’s misgivings, I applied for the job of housefather. A few days later I received a reply inviting me to attend an interview the following week with someone called M. Dickie, Ass Mat.
The Children’s Convalescent Home and School was a large, unremarkable Victorian red-brick building, nothing at all like the grim, imposing orphanages of Dickensian lore that I’d expected. Situated on Meols Drive, West Kirby, a pretty town that we considered posh with its elegant mansions, smart apartment blocks along the promenade, yachting marina and beach with its spectacular views across the River Dee to North Wales. Neither did Mrs Dickie, the remarkable woman cursed with being in charge of the childcare staff, resemble the archetypal orphanage keeper. She was small and tidy, brisk and efficient, somebody I was prepared to like immediately as physically she reminded me of my aunty Annie. Little did I realize that underneath the soft grey perm, fly-away spectacles and neat little twinset lay a strict disciplinarian with a fixed set of values who ruled her staff with a rod of iron. The home was run by a mainly matriarchal hierarchy starting with Matron Evans at the top, followed by Mrs Dickie, an assortment of nursing sisters then chief childcare officers and, at the bottom of the barrel, the housemothers and fathers. I was shown into a sitting room and told to wait. The room had a beautiful set of Royal Doulton tiles around the fireplace depicting highly romanticized scenes of pastoral life and featuring children and animals. After a while a small child with a forehead the size of a cliff face stuck his head around the door. He stared at me for a while before enquiring, ‘Are you in trouble?’
For once I wasn’t and I answered him in the negative.
‘Then why are you sitting in ’ere?’
I told him that I was waiting to see Mrs Dickie.
He stared at me for a while without making any comment before announcing proudly, ‘I’ve got hydrocephalus.’
‘Have you now?’ I smiled cheerfully, not having a clue what hydrocephalus was. A Greek island perhaps? ‘I’m sure it’ll get better very soon,’ I added patronizingly.
He raised his eyes skywards and exhaled loudly. ‘You’re fucking stupid, you are’ was his parting shot as he slammed the door behind him. Charming.
I sat staring at the Doulton tiles, wondering how much they were worth and thinking what a waste they were hidden away in a room that looked like it was hardly used, when Mrs Dickie appeared. She led me into her office and on the way I attempted to make medical small talk with the information I’d just gleaned from my encounter with the brat.
‘I’ve just been talking to a child with hydrosyphilis,’ I said casually, hoping to impress her.
If she found my faux pas amusing she certainly didn’t show it.
‘The correct term is hydrocephalus, Mr O’Grady,’ she said briskly, directing me to a chair that stood before an ornate and colossal desk. ‘Water on the brain in layman’s terms. Now kindly take a seat and you can tell me what experience you’ve had with children.’
After half an hour’s grilling and much to my surprise, she offered me the job. ‘The hours are seven thirty in the morning till nine thirty in the evening, five days a week. You will be given an hour off in the afternoon and fifteen minutes in the morning and evening for coffee break and evening meal. You will be expected to sleep in once or twice a month. The salary is £1,410.00 per annum, live in or out optional. We would like you to start when term begins on 6 January and I will be writing to you presently with your Contract of Employment. Good day.’ And so for a seventy hour week I would earn £27.11p before tax. I considered myself in the money.
‘They’re letting you loose with a gang of handicapped kids?’ My mother’s tone was sceptical but she also sounded more than a little impressed. ‘Well I never, it might be the making of you.’ My poor ma, always hoping that each new employment venture would be the ‘making of me’.
‘Wait though before you start handing in your notice, don’t go leaving that abattoir before Christmas,’ she warned, hand on hip. ‘You don’t want to lose out on the free turkey and a nice piece of beef, do you, it’d be a crying shame.’
It was customary for FMC Meats to give their employees a turkey and a joint of meat at Christmas. My mother had been looking forward to it since I started working there.
‘Have you seen what they want for a turkey these days?’ she said, her voice rising in sheer disbelief. ‘And as for the price of meat, well, don’t talk to me about that. I bought a piece of liver last week from that robbing sod on Church Road, this big it was.’ She demonstrated the size of the offending offal using her thumb and forefinger. ‘The price of it! I told him, I only want it for a casserole, not a bloody transplant. Now what d’ya want for your tea? There’s a nice bit of yellow fish in the fridge I can throw in the pan.’
My ma never did get the turkey or the beef. The afternoon that I left the abattoir I met some friends at the Woodside Hotel for a leaving drink and ended up getting so plastered that I left both turkey and beef on the number 60 bus. They’re probably still there, going round and round on the top deck.
At first I opted to ‘live in’ rather than get up at some ungodly hour to make the journey to West Kirby in time for work at half seven, even though it meant paying a sizeable chunk out of my weekly wage for the pleasure. Mrs Dickie was a stickler for punctuality and had been known to lock the door a minute after half-past seven so that any latecomers would have to ring the bell to get in and face one of her eloquent retributions. I was frequently on the mat in Dickie’s office over the years for bad timekeeping as well as other misdemeanours. T
he living-in quarters were like monks’ cells, tiny grey cubicles containing a bed and a sink. There was a communal sitting room, equally grim, with a television that had the worst reception on the Wirral. I hated it and lasted a month, running home to Mamma with a bag full of dirty washing to be greeted with ‘Not again! Will I ever bloody well get rid of you?’
My memory of the first day at the Convalescent Home (or Conny Home as we all called it) is a frenzied blur of wheelchairs, suitcases and children arriving back after their Christmas holidays. The children never called us by our Christian names, I was always Mr O’Grady, which I thought an unnecessary formality and one I never really got used to. The noise was incessant as they chattered away excitedly about the time they’d had at home and the presents, both real and fictional, that they’d received for Christmas. Suitcases had to be unpacked, clothes sent down to the laundry to be washed and then put away, heads deloused, school uniforms sorted, beds allocated, medication given – it was chaos.
Apart from a few odd lectures from the nursing sisters after I’d been there three years, I received no formal training at all. I was simply thrown in at the deep end and left to get on with it, gleaning information about the children and their disabilities as I went along. It was undoubtedly a baptism of fire, but I left the home with a valuable education in caring for children with disabilities that would stand me in good stead in the years to come.
There were over a hundred and forty boys and girls of all ages and disabilities in the Conny Home, separated into units with names like Truth, Courage and Prudence. I was put in charge of Courage and by God I needed it. Courage housed fifteen boys ranging from eleven to thirteen. They totally ignored me at first, sensing and then taking advantage of my total ineptitude and lack of experience. These kids had been at the home for a few years and by now were old lags, so they weren’t about to let a gormless novice rule the roost. After a fourteen-hour shift I’d stagger upstairs to my cell of a room, completely exhausted and feeling totally inadequate, wondering if childcare had been the right choice of profession.
After a term on Courage and just when I’d begun to get to know this surly bunch, and more importantly had become fairly adept at keeping them in some semblance of order, I was moved to another unit, Truth 2. These boys were a lot younger, their ages ranging from seven to nine, and surprisingly I found caring for them a lot easier even though they required far more attention. Out of the eleven in my care, there was an older boy with muscular dystrophy, three asthmatics, two boys with colostomy bags, a diabetic, assorted skin diseases including a lad covered from head to toe in psoriasis, a spina bifida, and a couple with what was then known as ‘social debility’, a euphemism for neglected, unloved and abused. The kid with hydrocephalus who I’d met the day of my interview was also on my unit. His name was Alan and he was a troublesome but hilarious little monster, an arrogant, precocious peacock of a child who barely reached my kneecaps and who I swear was the inspiration for the devil baby Stevie in the animated sitcom Family Guy. From the minute he opened his sly little eyes in the morning he chattered away incessantly until by teatime every member of the staff could be found hiding in the sluice, driven there by this child’s unabating confabulation. Undaunted, Alan would then shift his attention to his imaginary friend (who no doubt had a pig’s head, fiery red eyes and was known in his locality as Beelzebub) and proceed to turn his ear into a piece of well-chewed liver.
To the uninitiated Alan looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, yet he possessed a vicious temper and was prone to violent outbursts if provoked. For an eight-year-old he had a remarkably extensive vocabulary of profanities, cursing like a docker who’d just lost his pay packet and lashing out with his tiny fists and feet at his unfortunate antagonist. Even his imaginary friend kept a low profile on days like this. The other boys loathed him and tended to keep him at arm’s length, wary of his unpredictable temper and over-fondness for snitching on them. As it happened, snitching was Alan’s favourite pastime. Forever trying to curry favour with Mrs Dickie, if at any time he couldn’t be found he was more than likely to be in her office, spinning a yarn about either a member of staff or one of the boys. He was an inveterate tale-teller and a shocking liar who told outrageous stories about his wonderful home life to compensate for the sad lack of one and, despite all his shortcomings, I was very fond of the little horror.
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.
‘Blob, you can’t even wipe your own bum,’ Andy would shout at Stephen, which was a bit rich since Andy couldn’t either.
‘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?’)
Quick cup of tea and a fag (‘They’ll kill you, those bloody things, stinking the house out’) and then leg it down the hill to Green Lane Station to catch the train to Hamilton Square and change for the West Kirby line. Nina la Roche enjoyed taking the train to West Kirby with me, on the odd occasion I had to pay a trip to my bank on my day off, transforming the half-hour journey into a trip on the Orient Express. Manor Road was revamped into Rue du Manoir while Hoylake became Hoylaken, an exclusive spa town somewhere in the Dolomites.
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.
Tell the boys to get dressed while I get Stephen out of bed and into his wheelchair
(not an easy task with a twelve-stone boy). Take Stephen into the bathroom and get him on to the toilet. Run back on to the unit to separate Alan and Colin, who are tearing each other’s hair out. Get Stephen off the loo, give him a good all-over wash applying cream and powder to his pressure points, get him into his tracksuit. Have a look at the eczema and psoriasis boys to make sure their condition hasn’t worsened in the night and then ask if Tommy has changed his colostomy bag. He assures me as always that he has.
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.
‘Polished the taps, Mrs Dickie?’ I laughed, thinking she was joking. Surely nobody polished taps? Boy, did I have it wrong.
‘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?’