by James Rhodes
Parenting tip – if you want a quiet half-hour to have a nap, give your toddler a book of matches. They’ll be captivated.
It’s the best thirty minutes of my short life. And I feel things that all little boys ache to feel – invincible, adult, 6 feet tall. Noticed.
And so it carried on. For weeks. Smiles, winks, encouragement, pen knives, lighters, stickers, chocolate bars, Action Men. A Zippo for my sixth birthday. Secret presents, special gestures, and an invitation to join the after-school boxing club.
Which is where everything went bad.
Now it’s important to acknowledge that I chose to do boxing class. was asked and I said yes. It was very much a conscious choice. It was not something that was foisted upon me. This guy, this movie star who I wanted to get closer to because he liked me and made me feel special, invited me to do something after school with him and I agreed to it.
You might think my five-year-old mind is a little unreliable. Not quite fully formed, not yet capable of accurate recall. So I’m going to let the head of the junior school speak for me. That way you’ll know it’s properly legit. It’s from a police report she filed in 2010 and is unedited.
In September 1980, I was appointed Head Teacher of the Junior School at Arnold House, a Preparatory School for boys in St John’s Wood. It was there that I first met James Rhodes. He was a beautiful little boy, dark haired and lithe, with a winning smile. He was bright, articulate and confident for a 5 year old. From the earliest of ages, it was clear that he had a talent for music. When he was 6, in about 1981–2, he was in my form (I was a teaching Head in those days). His parents were lovely people, themselves high achievers and they lived just down the road from the school. Although they recognised James’ talents for music, I suspect they wanted him to have an all round experience in education and sporting activities were to be included. They signed James up for the extra curricular boxing activity. This was a paid activity and once ‘signed up’; the parents committed to at least a full year of coaching.
Boxing was a popular activity with boys. It had been added to the curriculum by the previous owner of the school, George Smart. Many shiny silver cups were awarded for boxing at the annual Prize Giving. In the absence in those days, of a real Physical Education programme and having no Games field on site, as we were in the middle of St John’s Wood, boxing in the early 80s was the only physical activity on offer and many parents opted for it for their sons.
The Boxing coach was a man named Peter Lee and I believe he worked at school on a part time basis in the late 10’s. He hailed from the Margate area of Kent. He was a powerfully built man, but not very tall and was probably then in his late 40s. He seemed very ‘old’ to me! In 1981, the new Gymnasium was opened and Peter was in his element. He claimed to have been involved all his life with boys clubs and I clearly remember him boasting of his friendship with Jackie Pallo, who I gathered was a famous wrestler.
Quite a few of my boys from my Junior School were sent to Boxing to be taught by Peter Lee. Some appeared to really enjoy the activity and I do remember that in the beginning, James did too. However, fairly soon after he had joined the activity, I noticed a change in James’ demeanour. He became rather withdrawn and appeared to be losing his sparkle. The boys who were down for the Boxing activity would change into the white shorts and coloured house T shirts in their class room and then I would escort them over to the Gym and then collect them 40 minutes later.
It became clear to me that James was becoming reluctant to attend this activity. He would take ages to change and often keep the rest of the group waiting. I remember so clearly the time he asked me to stay with him in the Gym. I didn’t. I thought that he was being a bit of a wimp. However, every Boxing day, usually twice a week, James would play up and I realised that he really didn’t want to be there. On many occasions, I did stay with him. I hated the whole thing. These very small children were positively encouraged to be aggressive. James was a thin little boy and it was clear that he was very uncomfortable. I thought at the time when Mr Lee asked James to stay behind to help him clear up the equipment that he was trying to make the child feel special. When I took the rest of the group back to change, it was always James who had to go with Mr Lee and help him clear up. I allowed this to happen on many occasions. This happened more than 25 years ago, long before Child Protection became an issue, but there seemed to be an element of trust between colleagues, and children being alone with an adult was never really questioned.
One day, James came back to the classroom to change having been with Peter Lee and he had a bloody face. When I asked him what had happened, he burst into tears and I went straight back to the Gym to question Mr Lee. I was told that James had fallen. I didn’t believe him and at that point, I suspected that the man was being violent in some way to James. The next day, I shared my concerns with my colleague, who was the Headmaster looking after the Senior School. I told him about James’ personality changes, that he seemed reluctant to go to the Boxing activity and that I was worried that Mr Lee was in some way frightening the child. He told me that I was over reacting and that little Rhodes needed toughening up.
I can’t remember exactly how long James continued the activity, but I do remember him begging me not to send him to the Gym on more than one occasion. I also remember explaining, that because his parents had opted for this paid activity, I couldn’t take him out of it without their permission. I spoke to James’ Mum about this and she too had noticed that he wasn’t particularly ‘himself’ and that he appeared withdrawn at home. She was a lovely lady who adored her 2 sons but I can’t remember the activity being cancelled for him. I sat in that Gym week after week. I thought I was protecting him. One day he returned to the classroom after having helped Mr Lee tidy up and he had blood on his legs. I questioned him, but he never said a word, just cried quietly. I took him home that day and we played the piano together.
James left my care in the July to enter the Senior department. He no longer had me to protect him. It was frowned upon when the boys became 7+ for teachers to ‘mother’ them. I saw this once happy, confident child become paler and paler as time went on. He was a very unhappy boy and didn’t stay the course until he was 13, but was moved to another school when he was about 9 or 10. My colleagues in the Senior School just said he was very unhappy – that was the reason for leaving.
I next saw James when he was 11 at Harrow School and competing in a Piano competition. My Godson was in the same competition. James struck me as a very troubled young man. I later heard he had had some sort of breakdown. I have recently read an article in the Sunday Times about James who is now an accomplished concert pianist. I was appalled to read that in the interview he referred to being seriously abused by a teacher at his primary school.
I felt sick with the remembrance of it. I am wracked with guilt for not realising the hell that James must have been going through. I tried to protect him from what I thought was physical nastiness. It never occurred to me in my naivety that anything of a sexual nature was occurring. I am in touch with James again. He has confirmed the sexual abuse and asked me to name the teacher who hurt him so badly. I got the name right.
Sadly, now I look back, James might not have been the only victim. There were several children who were fearful of Mr Lee and because of that I banned all children from my Junior School from going to his Boxing activity at the end of that year. I was regarded as an over protective female by my male colleagues. Thank God I was.
I am desperately sorry that James has suffered so deeply and for so long. I am also immensely proud that he has come through this and out the other side. He deserves every success and happiness in life. Scars and deep wounds sometimes make us stronger.
I write all this because I know I have to go to the Police. Mr Lee might still be alive. He might still be involved with children, even his own grandchildren. It is my view that he is a danger to young people. As a Minster in the Church of England and a part time Prison Chaplain, I see the effects
that serious abuse has on the lives of young people. May God be the judge of these people who ruin the lives of others.
Chere Hunter
So there we are. My very own fight club. As Tyler Durden has taught us, the first rule of fight club is we never talk about fight club. And I didn’t. For almost thirty years. And now I am. Because fuck you if you’re one of the people who think I shouldn’t.
There’s quite a lot to unpack in the police statement above. There’s a lot of insinuation but no real facts about the abuse. Abuse. What a word. Rape is better. Abuse is when you tell a traffic warden to fuck off. It isn’t abuse when a forty-year-old man forces his cock inside a six-year-old boy’s ass. That doesn’t even come close to abuse. That is aggressive rape. It leads to multiple surgeries, scars (inside and out), tics, OCD, depression, suicidal ideation, vigorous self-harm, alcoholism, drug addiction, the most fucked-up of sexual hang-ups, gender confusion (‘you look like a girl, are you sure you’re not a little girl?’), sexuality confusion, paranoia, mistrust, compulsive lying, eating disorders, PTSD, DID (the shinier name for multiple personality disorder) and on and on and on.
I went, literally overnight, from a dancing, spinning, gigglingly alive kid who was enjoying the safety and adventure of a new school, to a walled-off, cement-shoed, lights-out automaton. It was immediate and shocking, like happily walking down a sunny path and suddenly having a trapdoor open up and dump you into a freezing cold lake.
You want to know how to rip all the child out of a child? Fuck him.
Fuck him repeatedly. Hit him. Hold him down and shove things inside him. Tell him things about himself that can only be true in the youngest of minds before logic and reason are fully formed and they will take hold of him and become an integral, unquestioned part of his being.
My mum, bless her, didn’t notice or didn’t want to notice anything was wrong. I don’t blame her. She was a young, naive mother, overwhelmed with life and desperately trying to keep her shit together despite being a Valium-resistant insomniac with a family to look after and no rule book. It was all she could do to get up in the mornings, get food on the table and stay upright until 11 p.m. She was and is an incredibly empathic, generous and loving woman, and she was facing a horrific situation in the best and only way she knew how.
I’m not going to write about the sex in detail. For a number of reasons. Some of you might read it and use it to fantasise about. Some of you might read it and judge me for getting a boner at the time (on occasion). Some of you will read it and just feel nauseous and indignant. But most of all I don’t want to go into detail because I don’t think I’ll make it out the other side if I do, especially when you can just buy a copy of the Daily Mail if you’ve the urge to feel titillated, nauseous or judgmental. Cheaper, quicker, less traumatic for me.
The point of sharing those sticky, toxic words is simply this: that first incident in that locked gym closet changed me irreversibly and permanently. From that moment on, the biggest, truest part of me was quantifiably, sickeningly different.
TRACK THREE
Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, Second Movement
Ashkenazy, Zukerman, Harrell Trio
A few months before his death in 1828 at the age of thirty-one, Schubert completed a fifty-minute-long trio for piano, violin and cello. He had led a short, miserable, broken life with music providing the sole counterpoint to his wretchedness. Schubert was constantly broke, relying on friends for food, lodging and cash. He was invariably unhappy in love, not helped by being short, ugly and over-sensitive to slights both real and imagined. And yet, despite being a walking, talking car crash, he was aggressively prolific – he wrote more than twenty thousand bars of music in his eighteenth year alone, composed nine symphonies (Beethoven had only written one by the age of thirty-one), over six hundred songs, twenty-one piano sonatas and endless chamber music.
The vast majority of his output wasn’t performed until after his death, but this trio was. Chamber music was much easier to perform in private homes than orchestral music, and some homes in Vienna would host regular Schubertiades – informal evenings of his music, together with poetry readings and dancing. In 1828 the trio was given a first performance at one of these evenings (put on to celebrate a friend’s engagement). The slow movement encapsulates perfectly a life too short-lived – funereal and dark, tinged with hope and an insight into the infinite potential of genius.
Written by one of the only composers since Mozart who could conceive and compose an entire work in his head before scribbling it down on paper, this is the soundtrack of a man so depressed he started out his student days training to be a lawyer.
It is a devastating reminder of just how much we have missed out on by his dying prematurely at the age of thirty-one.
Stupid syphilis.
WHAT’S MORE INTERESTING (TO ME) than how I learned to swallow and take it in the ass, is the impact that rape has on a person. It is like a stain that is ever present. There are a thousand reminders of it each day. Every time I take a shit. Watch TV. See a child. Cry. Glimpse a newspaper. Hear the news. Watch a movie. Get touched. Have sex. Wank. Drink something unexpectedly hot or take too big a gulp. Cough or choke.
Hypervigilance is one of the weirder symptoms of PTSD. Every time I hear a loud noise, sneeze, bang, shriek, cry, car horn, anything sudden like a touch on the shoulder, a phone notification, I jump out of my skin. It’s involuntary, uncontrollable, unintentionally humorous and dementing at once. And it’s especially shit with classical music where sudden changes in volume occur all the time (if you see a slightly scruffy guy on the Tube with headphones on jumping out of his seat every few minutes, come and say hello).
There are also the tics. The little and not so little twitches that have been with me since the abuse started. Eyes twitch, vocal chords spasm, grunts and squeaks pop out uninvited and must be repeated until they are just right. And, continuing along the OCD/Tourette’s spectrum, things need to be touched a certain way, rhythms tapped out impeccably on tables or walls or legs, light switches flicked the correct number of times, and on and on.
When I’m playing on stage is where it gets dangerous; if a part of my left hand touches the keys of the piano then I have to replicate the exact same touch with my right hand. I have to. And quickly, too. Which is not something I want to be thinking about and orchestrating when trying to remember the 30,000 notes of a Beethoven sonata. I will also need to sniff one of my hands at certain times while playing (a big ask). And I try (and fail) to pass all of it off as ‘being artistic’ so people don’t notice. I will try and wait until I’m playing a loud bit before squeaking so the audience doesn’t hear me. Will try, on the fly, to change the fingering I’ve spent hundreds of hours memorising to allow me to turn my hand inwards and scrape the edge of the keys to satisfy that unique itch. And God forbid I should see a hair on the key. Then I’ll have to find time to brush it off, mid-performance, so everything is clean. It’s a lot to think about, feels totally out of my control, and there is no satisfactory explanation that will cut it with the critics when it impacts on my playing.
The mental tics are much more insidious. Thoughts literally cannot be stopped or truly dreadful things will happen. So when I’m in a state, thinking about something bad, maybe about my girlfriend being all flirty with some other guy, or perhaps what it would feel like to hurt myself (a different variation on the same theme), it must be followed through until I am satisfied. So when well-meaning shrinks tell me to distract and stop the thought, I just laugh and think, ‘Ain’t going to happen, and actually you should thank me for it because if I do that you will end up paying the price and have some terrible accident, you’ll lose your career and husband, end up broke and disabled and need your own shrink who you won’t be able to afford so you’ll die alone and in obscurity, miserable and afraid. You’re welcome.’
Then there are the really shaming things. Like getting an erection every time I cry. Somehow the body remembers everything and links tears
with sexual arousal. I would cry as he blew me. But physiology is physiology and my dick did its job and got hard. And so now when I cry it thinks, ‘Oh I remember this! Up we go.’
Sex is an excellent topic also. The ground-swallowing, monumental shame of the orgasm. The images that fly across closed eyelids as you fuck, that force you to shake your head to try and make them disappear. The constant reminders of being touched there, there and there and what it meant at the time and so what it must mean now. The unremitting awfulness of believing at a core level that your girlfriend, wife, fiancee is somehow stained, broken, disgusting and evil because she had sex as a teenager. Despite knowing how ridiculous, how stupid, how illogical that sounds. I had sex young. It was bad. I am bad. You had sex young so you are bad. And so we cannot be together, I cannot respect you. You are so fucking disgusting. Marry me. I love you. You vile fucking whore. There’s a Hallmark card, right there.
There were childhood sexual fantasies of being the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust and wandering around the streets pulling women out of cars and doing unspeakable things to them, getting aroused at the thought of being held down and having to beg for my own life, and a host of other weird and wonderful kinks involving torture, control, pain and God knows what. All before the age of nine.
And those flashes of anger. Corroding, all-consuming anger at everything in the whole world. Anger at happy fucking families, broken families, families, sex, success, failure, sickness, children, pregnant women, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, schools, hospitals, shrinks, door locks, gym mattresses, authority, drugs, abstinence, friends, enemies, smoking, not smoking, everything and everyone, ever.