I would go to Mr Thomas’s flat twice a week and sometimes more often. He loved to provoke me, smoking and drinking in front of me, even though he knew I ardently disapproved. What he was doing, of course, was challenging my intellect.
I would say, ‘How can you be a Christian and drink?’ and he would reply, ‘Would you like one?’
When I scolded him and told him that he was a heretic and that Anglican priests were devils, he would laugh.
During one of our early discussions, he introduced the subject of Darwin and suggested I should read The Origin of Species. I told him that as a strict Baptist I adhered to the belief in Adam and Eve and that it would be considered a sin by my church just to read that book. Indeed, some members of that strange sect still believe that to this day.
‘But how can you criticise without having read the argument?’ he replied.
It sounds crazy, going from not wanting to read to reading Darwin, but that is exactly what happened.
I had learned to read with Mr Bleasdale and still had the capacity to read. I had simply chosen not to do so. I did have a fantastic memory, however, which I still have, and I had retained the ability to read. So, armed with a dictionary, I embarked on Darwin’s masterpiece.
I loved the book. It opened my view of universality. I could see that everything was linked and that human life was evolving.
When Mr Thomas said, ‘I think you need a drink,’ I would reply, ‘It’s a sin to drink.’
‘What about Jesus turning water into wine?’
‘That was Ribena.’
‘Try living.’
I was a strange oddball little character, mentally bound in a weird puritan world, and in his way he was as eccentric as me. That was why we became friends.
He talked to me about the poet William Blake and told me I could read him if I wished. The choice was mine. I loved Blake’s poems and am still a committed fan to this day.
Then came Shakespeare, followed by Oscar Wilde and Dickens, and I found myself in a printed paradise. Reading all these strange things and trying to make sense of them, with Mr Thomas’s help, was expanding my boundaries in giant leaps.
Over some 18 months, my political sympathies seesawed from left to right, probably influenced by the books I was reading. At 15, I was slightly rebellious and had become an admirer of Harold Wilson, who, I was actually aware, was the current Labour opposition leader. But within months I had embraced communist ideology, and a few months later I had become a fascist.
Mr Thomas insisted I read Karl Marx and then introduced me to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I had no knowledge at all of the Second World War except from the RAF stories told me by my father, though he had not mentioned the Nazi leader’s name. I told Mr Thomas that the world Hitler described sounded like a real Utopia, and now I was able to compare Hitler and Marx, and concluded they were rather alike in their methods of controlling people. I had read Mein Kampf with no agenda, so now Mr Thomas gave me The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and biographies of Mussolini and Franco, which broadened my perspective on the fascist phenomenon in Europe.
Next I devoured Nietzsche, on whose thought Hitler had in part based his philosophy, and Wagner, whose monumental music had drawn inspiration from the same writings, and then started on thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw.
At 15, in this crazy environment, surrounded by rent boys, drug dealers and the mentally subnormal, I had become something of a philosophic eccentric.
Under Mr Thomas’s guidance, I also started to paint, and was allowed to join the sixth-form art class at a local secondary school. It taught me that there were normal people in the world who did not beat you up. They may have been older than me but I found that I could fit in, just as I had earlier on my school trip to Europe.
My painting also had a secondary benefit. It excused my participating in sport, which I loathed.
With a first name like mine, I fancied myself as something of a Michelangelo and over the next three years I painted a huge mural on a wall of the school dining hall, depicting Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. It was some 12 feet long by 6 feet high.
Amazingly, I became the only child in the history of that school to gain an O Level in any subject. It was in art.
I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but what I was receiving from Mr Thomas was, to all intents and purposes, a private education, albeit one based on classical values. I’ve never understood ‘modern’ because I have had no training at all in anything technical, and I’m still frightened by technology.
But, for literature, theatre, music and art, Mr Thomas was my personal Professor Higgins; an immense genius. He took me to the theatre and concerts and art galleries – while my contemporaries were listening to the Beatles – and opened up worlds that I would otherwise never have known existed.
It was almost certainly because of all my new knowledge, and the enormous boost to my confidence it provided, that I was singled out by our new resident trainee social worker, Mary, who was only 19 and very pretty. She had a gorgeous figure and wore tight jeans and tops. I was not yet 16 and not much to look at, but that didn’t matter. I was experiencing my very first crush, and went to sleep every night with thoughts of Mary wrapped in my arms.
The reality was far more mundane. We had regular discussion sessions, just the two of us, for she, like all her colleagues, had been told about my mother’s suicide and my reluctance to take part in normal life, and I was, I suppose, an interesting subject for study. But I was no longer, I think she soon realised, the boy described in my thick bundle of case notes. Over the past two years, I had become a different person, and possibly her equal intellectually. I could discuss philosophy, theology, sociology, art and the theatre intelligently, knowledgeably and in great detail, which made me quite an oddity, considering my age and situation.
Perhaps she was just being kind, or more likely she simply wanted to show me off to her friends, but Mary invited me to spend the weekend with herself and her parents in Bristol, to meet some of her former school chums. Already secretly besotted with her, I jumped at the opportunity to spend a whole weekend in her company, hardly daring to think what it might lead to.
The headmaster and Nanny had to give their permission, and I think Nanny was quite nervous about me going off with a young woman for the weekend, but in the end they both agreed.
My first adult trip away from home provided some of the most fascinating days of my life up until that time, though sadly not in the way I had anticipated. Mary and her friends treated me as though I were their age – four or five years my senior – and I found I could talk with them as equals. We spent hours in coffee bars and restaurants discussing everything from the most unimportant trivia to deeply intellectual subjects and I revelled in being a part of it. They took me to the Bristol Old Vic and introduced me to my first-ever pizza.
Sadly, though, I gradually understood that Mary’s interest in me was a mixture of professional and purely platonic. She may have found me an intellectual equal and a fascinating case study, but I was a non-starter as a potential boyfriend.
I thought, no doubt like millions of lovesick boys before me, that my heart would break, and I followed Mary around like an orphaned puppy for several weeks, but, in the end, time, as ever, proved a masterly healer and I was able to get over my unrequited love.
I may have conquered my infatuation for Mary but I still couldn’t cope with salvation. I spent many nights praying for it, because the Baptist pastors kept telling me that if I wasn’t saved I would surely go to hell. But what they called ‘my conversion experience’ never came. I knew I was supposed to allow Jesus to save me, but he obviously didn’t feel so inclined. I felt absolutely excluded, and in the end I decided to pretend to be saved.
Still only 15, I asked to be baptised as, in the words of the faith, an ‘exclusive, strict and particular’ Baptist. As I stood before the congregation in Moses Gate Baptist church in the Bolton suburb of Farnworth, I swore th
at I accepted and understood Jesus Christ as saviour and ruler of my life.
Mr Thomas came to witness the event and probably thought I was mad. I thought so too, and hoped that if Jesus did exist he would forgive me for lying about my beliefs. But at least I felt safe, and that I wouldn’t go to hell any more. So it was definitely worth the deception.
This was also the time I rethought my plans for suicide.
Nanny would often say, ‘I don’t want to live any more. I wish the Lord would take me.’ But then she would say that she had one good reason to go on living, and that was me. During my weekends at home with her, I would mow the lawn and do the other chores, but I was gradually becoming aware that I also had a deeper responsibility for my grandmother.
In addition, Mr Thomas’s teaching had radically altered my perception of just about everything and I concluded, one evening as I lay on my bed, that I no longer wanted to kill myself. The world had become an infinitely more interesting place to be in. I wanted to stay.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
At the age of 16, after more than a decade of terror and turmoil, I finally entered a more tranquil period. At Knowl View, I had graduated from the shared dormitory to a room of my own and, though I was still in a state of considerable isolation, I had developed a satisfying and at times pleasing way of life.
Shortly before leaving Rochdale, I was told by one of the social workers there that some of the younger children, newly arrived at the school, modelled themselves on me because I followed a very diplomatic path, avoiding or deflecting potentially injurious encounters with fellow pupils.
I was very aware, intuitive and immensely sensitive, and was able to pick up others’ vibes. But no warning antenna in the world could have prepared me for the traumatic revelation awaiting me in the headmaster’s study when I was called there in the spring of 1974.
It was the month before my 17th birthday, and I was about to leave Knowl View to try to make my own way in the world – though not, I had promised myself, the way they had planned for me to go, in a factory.
Having assumed I was about to be given the standard school-leaver’s pep talk, I was surprised to be told to sit down in the chair facing Mr Turner across his desk. We were normally made to stand, to receive our plaudits or punishments, after being summoned individually to the headmaster’s study.
Mr Turner was a huge but very gentle man, and extremely kind, but on this occasion he looked uncharacteristically grim and seemed to be having difficulty knowing where to start. In the end, he must have decided to get it over with quickly, because he told me, in a sort of rush, that my grandmother had asked him to reveal to me some important details from my past. To tell me the truth – namely, that Joe and Lillian Seed had not been my real parents. They had adopted me from the Catholic Children’s Society when I was about a year and a half old.
I’m rather glad I was sitting down when he dropped that bombshell. It actually took my breath away. I felt quite light-headed.
My real name, it appeared, was Steven Wayne Godwin and my mother had been a young mill worker called Marie. My father was unknown. I had only become Michael Joseph Steven Wayne Seed, by adoption, on 11 November 1958, when I was 17 months old, having been baptised a Catholic in my real name by the Jesuits a year earlier, at the Holy Name Church in Oxford Road, Manchester.
I sat there speechless, barely able to think. All that cruelty and pain and heartbreak, and all of it had been based on a lie.
Mr Turner asked me if I understood and if I was all right.
I nodded. That was all I could manage.
‘Your grandmother feels that you had a right to know this, but also feels that you may not want to go on seeing her. She’s frightened that you may want to sever all ties with her as she is not your natural grandmother.’
I found this news even more distressing than the revelation that I was adopted. Nanny was the only person, to my knowledge, who had ever shown any affection towards me or claimed to have loved me. The thought of a future in which she did not play a part was very bleak indeed.
Mr Turner was looking at me expectantly.
I found I had to clear my voice a couple of times to speak. I told him, ‘My parents are dead as far as I am concerned. They were my parents. I’m not interested in looking for any others. I had quite enough trouble with the last ones.’
I felt like the character in The Importance of Being Earnest.
‘This is your certificate of adoption, and these are the details of your birth mother,’ the headmaster told me.
Bits of paper that made a mockery of my life up until now.
Just like Nanny, I thought. An absolute realist. She understood that, leaving school to make my own way in the world, I might need proper identification. To know who I really was. She was still thinking of me and I loved her more than ever because of it.
And it was a real pleasure indeed to know that I was not related in any way to the Wicked Witch of the West.
‘You’ve got a lot to think about, Michael,’ said Mr Turner. ‘And, if I might offer you some advice, I would say that it would be wise for you to think very carefully before embarking on any attempts to uncover your real family. All this must have come as quite a shock. Let this information I’ve given you today sink in properly before you do anything.’
I walked back to my room in a daze. Mr Turner’s disclosures had been cataclysmic in their effect. They offered possible explanations of events that had seemed so senseless before.
My father’s anger for one.
He had obviously blamed my mother for not being able to have babies, and not having a son to carry on his line must have festered in him. I realised then that many of his remarks had their origins in this. She was clearly not the wife he wanted.
After his marriage, he had been away, or abroad, until the end of the war, then did a series of jobs he didn’t really like. I thought now that he must have seen himself as a failure, with no point to his life. His own depression, coupled with the alcohol, did the rest.
I could never excuse what he had done to me and I know that he drove my mother to suicide. It was as though he had murdered her. But I was as certain now as I could ever be that all their problems, and my mother’s awful depression, probably had their roots in the 16 years they had tried, and failed, to have children of their own.
Then they had adopted me. But I wasn’t his child. I was just nobody’s child. A constant daily reminder of his inability to father a child of his own. I understood then the hatred and the anger and why I must eventually forgive him. But the memories were still too fresh to attempt that step then.
I explained this to Nanny when I went home that weekend. She was in tears when she opened the front door and pulled me into her arms. She had spent the whole week knowing Mr Turner was going to break the news and fearing that she would never see me again.
I kissed her on both soft cheeks, which were wet with her tears, and hugged her again and told her she was the loveliest nanny any boy could ever wish for, and that I would always love her and need her. And she told me I was the best grandson in the world and she was so proud of me.
It didn’t matter to either of us who my real parents were. Our bond was still there, and that was all that counted.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nanny 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 partici
pate 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.’
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