One Law For the Rest of Us

by Peter Murphy

  I hope that, at some point during the very public discussion of my recovered memory that is about to take place, someone will acknowledge that, if I’d had the remotest recollection at that time of what had happened to me while I was a pupil there, I would never have let Emily come within a hundred miles of Lancelot Andrewes school, much less let her board there. I really do hope that someone will allow me that much.

  She’d been at the school for a little over a year when we first noticed some signs of disturbance. We’d got into the habit of taking her home for a day on some weekends, school activities permitting, and sometimes for an evening here and there. The school didn’t like the idea particularly, because they didn’t want to be seen to be giving some girls extra privileges just because their parents happened to live within easy reach. I understood that. But we couldn’t ignore her and pretend she wasn’t there when it was so easy to see her. Besides, with my history I understood very well the feelings of any girl whose parents were far away, or worse; and we encouraged Emily to befriend girls in that kind of situation, so that we could invite them to come home with her. At first, she was very excited to be at school, proud to wear the same uniform I’d worn all those years ago, enthusiastic about the games she could play, the friends she was making, full of talk of everything she was learning. And then she suddenly went quiet.

  I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. As I said before, she’s always been the kind of girl who retreats into her own head from time to time, and it’s something we’d got used to. It would pass, and she would return to her usual self. But now it didn’t pass. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to worry unduly at first. But it didn’t pass for three weekends, and on the third Sunday evening Ken and I decided that I would ask her, while I was putting her to bed, whether anything was wrong: which was when she told me, in much the same injured tone she might have used to complain that another girl had hit her with a hockey stick during a games period, that men came to the school in the evenings to touch her, and she didn’t like it.

  I didn’t recover any memory immediately. I recall feeling, as any mother would in the circumstances, horrified and shocked and angry and sick to my stomach, and at first disbelieving. As I questioned her as gently as I could, all those feelings, with the exception of disbelief, grew stronger. The disbelief melted away. I told her that she didn’t have to go back to school; she was safe at home now; and she should go to sleep while her father and I discussed what to do. She nodded, and climbed into bed without protest, asking me to leave her night-light on. I really don’t know how I made it downstairs in one piece, physically or emotionally.

  We decided within the first five minutes that we would withdraw Emily from the school immediately. We didn’t make much progress in deciding what else we should do. We knew we should go to the police. That sounds obvious enough, I know. But in a small community like Ely, nothing is as straightforward as it seems in a big city like Edinburgh or London. In places like Ely, it’s easy for men like Father Desmond Gerrard and John Singer to acquire power out of all proportion to their true importance in life, and to have the ear of the police and the authorities. I worked for the diocese, and I’d caught glimpses of what happened when we had the odd priest who didn’t quite live up to his vows. Things had a way of getting covered up or vanishing into the fenland mists. We couldn’t take it for granted that Emily would be believed outside our home: and once we breathed a word of what she had said, my employer, the diocese, became my enemy – not only Desmond Gerrard, but my friend Bill Hollis, and, by inevitable extension, our community, and the Church itself. Those were not good enemies for someone in our position to make.

  Then there was the question of other girls to whom this might have happened, and their parents. It seemed unlikely that only one girl would have suffered abuse: based on what Emily told us, it all seemed too well organised, too persistent and systematic for that. But we had no way of knowing the scale of the abuse. We hadn’t asked Emily about other girls: she had enough on her plate with what had happened to her. Later, it turned out that she didn’t know everything, any more than I’d known everything in my day: Father Gerrard was too cunning for that. But she’d talked to some other girls, and once word of Emily’s complaint got out, whether to the police or to other parents, it wasn’t hard to imagine the storm that would descend on us.

  I woke up screaming at three o’clock that morning. We hadn’t been in bed very long. We were exhausted, having spent hours in increasingly inconsequential exchanges about the situation, which had not even begun to point us in the right direction. When I awoke, it took Ken almost an hour to calm me down to the point where I could speak coherently enough to tell him what I’d remembered – in between bouts of further screaming, and bouts of not being able to breathe, and bouts of vomiting, and bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, with him running from bedroom to bedroom periodically to check on Emily, who, bless her, was gallantly pretending to be asleep throughout. I think the process of confiding my memories in him took about two hours, after which he called our friend and GP Linda Gallagher, who with great kindness came straight round to the house, and shot me up with something that made me go numb at first and then made me relax a little and breathe more easily; and left me boxes of tablets that she assured me would have the same effect; and promised to come back to check on me twice every day; and told Ken that if he didn’t take Emily out of ‘that’ school immediately, he would have her to answer to.

  We’d already decided that: we knew we had no choice. But in addition, Ken made an inspired decision. He saw, long before I did, that we were hopelessly out of our depth, and needed guidance about where to go and what to do next before we jumped into the terrifying unknown. He remembered having worked on a case with a high-powered London solicitor called Julia Cathermole, who had close connections to people in high places, and was used to dealing with them. She sounded like just what we needed, and he contacted her that same morning.

  10

  This is what I remembered.

  Not long after my arrival at Lancelot Andrewes, I had noticed that Father Gerrard would come into our classroom from time to time, while class was in progress, for no apparent reason. He would stand just inside the door and watch. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Our teacher would carry on with the lesson without interruption, so I concluded that it was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to be concerned about. After watching quietly for some time he would leave.

  I’m vague, to say the least, on dates and times. Apparently, the preferred age range for Father Gerrard’s guests was seven to twelve. I was never called on after my twelfth birthday, and I don’t remember any of my friends telling me about being touched after that age. But on what days it happened, and how often it happened, I couldn’t say. It wasn’t every week; often, I was left alone and another girl was taken. I remember that it wasn’t unusual for him to come for someone. But I couldn’t begin to say how often, or when, it happened. It just became a part of our life.

  Father Gerrard would come into our dormitory at about eight thirty at night, by which time the only other member of staff left in our side of the building would be the night duty teacher, who wouldn’t stir from the staff common room unless summoned in case of illness. He would pause at the door and then select a girl – only one – to come with him. We went with him as we were, wearing our regulation nightdresses and nothing else, and in bare feet, regardless of the time of year and the temperature. We walked down familiar staircases, and I remember thinking, the first time it happened to me, that Father Gerrard must be taking me to his study, and assuming I was going to be punished for some transgression or other, and being unable, for the life of me, to think what it could have been. Father Gerrard was known for sometimes beating girls who had transgressed in a serious way with a cane in his study. It had happened to Joan; she had told me about it; but I’d always understood that the beatings were administered during the day, with Matron pres
ent.

  When we walked past his study into a room I didn’t even remember being aware of, and had certainly never been in, I was taken aback, and somewhat relieved that, apparently, I was to be spared punishment. The relief didn’t last long. There were three men in the room, smartly dressed in dark suits and ties, as if they’d just come from the city. They were standing around the long table in the middle of the room, talking and laughing, and drinking what from my memory, from its colour and the size of the glasses, I think must have been whisky – I couldn’t have known that at the time. One – the man I’m told I have to call the Right Reverend EF, to protect his reputation – was smoking a cigar. When Father Gerrard brought me into the room, they turned towards me, and I heard mutterings, something like, ‘Yes, very good.’ Sir CD walked over to me, took my hand, and led me to where they were standing at the table. ‘What’s your name, my dear?’ he asked. I told him. ‘Audrey,’ Lord AB repeated. ‘What a nice name. I had an aunt called Audrey.’ I remember pulling my nightdress tightly around me.

  The Right Reverend EF was the first to touch me. Father Gerrard never joined in the touching, never once, but he also never left the room. He stood quietly in the far corner of the library, watching. The Right Reverend EF gently prised my fingers away from my nightdress, which he then lifted up to expose my body. The other two men gathered round to watch. I see what happened next in my memory through the eyes of a grown woman. I can’t imagine what thoughts I had of it as a child, or even how, as a child of seven or eight, I tried to describe or explain it to myself. I don’t know how a seven-year-old child could make sense of having a grown man kneel in front of her, put two fingers inside her cunt, and fondle her, destroying what was left of her hymen, if there was anything left of it after so much hockey and gymnastics; while two other men stood on watching, rubbing their cocks through their trousers, or sometimes out of their trousers. I don’t know whether I even tried to make sense of it then. My memory is that I detached from what was going on, looking around me, doing my best to read the titles of the rows of books on the shelves that covered the walls, trying to count how many books there were in the nearest section of bookcase; anything to take my mind away from what was happening to my body. When the Right Reverend EF had satisfied himself, Lord AB and Sir CD took their turns with me. I’m describing, as a grown woman, my memory of what was done to me as a child. As a woman I understand what was going on. It doesn’t make it any easier.

  As far as I remember, those were the only three men who ever touched me, and they weren’t always all there together. I was never raped; and I was never asked to touch any of their cocks. I don’t remember any of my friends saying they’d been raped, though one or two told me that they’d had their hands placed on a cock and been told to rub it; whether by these same men or others, I have no way of knowing. I remember, to my horror, that after I’d been taken to the men a number of times, there came to be a routine, a regularity, almost a monotony, about it. There was a numbness in me, too. They would ask me questions about how school was going, how many goals I’d scored at hockey, and sometimes they brought me chocolate, for which I thanked them politely and mechanically, before turning my attention to the books on the shelves.

  And at three o’clock on that morning, it all came flooding back. Reflecting on it later, I asked myself how I could have suppressed the memory for so long. I come back to the conclusion that my mind had taken pity on me, and had wiped the slate clean so that I didn’t have to torture myself with those images. There was a culture of silence at school, too. I don’t think I ever spoke to a friend, or she to me, about it more than once. But because my memory banks had been wiped clean, I’d allowed Emily, my daughter, to follow in my cold bare footsteps down those chill staircases to that clubby private library. It was a thought that broke my heart. I thought it had been broken completely. But later, another thought came to me, which found another piece of my heart to destroy, a piece that must still have been intact until then.

  I’d confided in Joan, I realised, more than in my friends. Joan was never taken; she was already past the preferred age when we first arrived at school. But Joan had been beaten in Father Gerrard’s study. At the time, I never understood why, and she never told me. It hadn’t made sense at the time. Joan wasn’t the kind to misbehave; she was an obedient, responsible girl. But I’d told her what happened to me. And suddenly, in the early hours of that day, it all made horrific sense. ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t.’ She’d known what was happening to me at school, and later she’d seen the scars I still carried when I grew up: when we lived together in Edinburgh, I’d confided in her about the intimate problem I was having with my boyfriends. She’d tried to stop it. It could only mean one thing. She’d confronted Father Gerrard, told him to leave her sister alone, perhaps even threatened to expose him. She was a determined girl. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she had threatened him. She hadn’t misbehaved. She was trying to save me. We had no parents to protect us. As my older sister, it had been up to her. I never knew what a toll it had taken on her. But now I saw it all too clearly. When she thought she’d failed, she couldn’t live with it. She couldn’t even talk to me about it.

  And that’s when I swore, by all I held sacred, that I would make them pay for what they had done, all of them: Father Gerrard, and all those high-profile bastards to whom he loaned the bodies and souls of his pupils for their entertainment, while he stood in the corner and watched; all those high-profile bastards who were now hiding behind the initials of their names to protect their reputations. I would make them pay, if it took me the rest of my life and cost me everything I had.

  11

  Tuesday 12 February 1974

  ‘Today is the twelfth of February 1974, and it’s now eleven fifteen in the morning. We are in an interview room at Parkside police station in Cambridge. Present are: myself, DI Phillips, of the Cambridge police; DI Walsh of the London Metropolitan police, who is making a note of the interview; Father Desmond Gerrard, headmaster of Lancelot Andrewes school; and Mr John Singer, the solicitor for Lancelot Andrewes School. Mr Singer, I understand that you are also representing Father Gerrard for the purposes of this interview, is that correct?’

  ‘It is. In the unlikely event that this matter is taken further, I will ensure that Father Gerrard is represented by a solicitor with more experience of criminal matters, but, confident as I am that it will go no further, I shall represent his interests today.’

  ‘I assume, Mr Singer,’ Steffie Walsh intervened, ‘that you have explained to Father Gerrard that you have a possible conflict of interest, given that you represent the school?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Steffie and Ted exchanged a smile. Before they left the Old Bailey conference room, Ben Schroeder had taken them aside and quietly suggested dropping this spanner into the works – and to judge from John Singer’s reaction, it was having the desired effect. Steffie noted that Father Gerrard had also reacted, with a quick glance in Singer’s direction. Gerrard was an imposing man, dressed in a long black cassock, a large silver crucifix hanging down from his neck over his chest, his black hair interrupted only intermittently by grey flecks, making him look younger than his seventy years of age. There was also a quiet, a reserve, about him. It was the first time he had raised his head to look at anyone since they had seated him in the interview room.

  ‘I understand from our counsel,’ Steffie continued unhurriedly, ‘that the school and its trustees may be legally liable to victims of the assaults and their parents. So, in the highly likely event of parents taking legal action against Father Gerrard and the school, Father Gerrard’s interests and those of the school would not be the same. Counsel suggested that Father Gerrard might prefer to have independent advice.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s up to you.’

  As if irritated by the interruption, Singer pulled his chair alongside Father Gerrard’s and whispered frantically in h
is ear for some seconds, after which he turned back and shot Steffie a look of defiance.

  ‘I am a churchman, Inspector,’ Father Gerrard said, ‘and as such I look to the Church to safeguard my interests. I am perfectly content to be advised by Mr Singer.’

  Steffie nodded and resumed her note-taking position.

  ‘Father Gerrard, you are here today voluntarily, at our request, so that we can put questions to you about alleged events at Lancelot Andrewes School,’ Ted said. ‘You are not under arrest, and you are free to leave at any time. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. And I’m sure that Mr Singer has explained this to you, but I must begin by cautioning you. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but what you say may be put into writing and given in evidence. Do you understand the caution?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Ted rummaged through a small pile of documents he had in front of him on the table and selected one. ‘If I may, Father Gerrard, I’d like to begin by making sure I understand the layout of the school. Can you confirm that what I am showing you is a plan of the school, floor by floor?’

  Father Gerrard glanced at the document briefly. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Six floors in all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we understand that, as we look at it from the main road, the girls’ school is on the left, and the boys’ school on the right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What separations are there between the two?’

  ‘Separations? I’m not sure I understand.’