by Lemn Sissay
Norman Mills desperately tried to find a place for me away from all this. He tried to get me out because he could see what was happening. I would call this institutional panic.
OAKLANDS
CHAPTER 27
I work in rain said the storm
Thunder broke his heart
I woke in light said dawn
And spun the sun in the dark
Oaklands in Lowton was a vast Victorian mansion, like Woodfields, on the opposite side of Leigh to Atherton and Gregory Avenue. If Woodfields was bedlam, Oaklands was feral, out of control. John Harding, once the head of Woodfields, was now the head of Oaklands. My anxiety and depression tightened their grip on me.
I sought solitude. And walked and walked alone at night. I couldn’t stop thinking. I found an arch, over an old road, a bridge. No one could see me so I sang. I sang into the reverb of the arch. I sang Marley songs and recited my poems. I saw the houses across the fields, the orange light from the lounges and bedrooms of families and the children’s home far away.
How can you be sitting there
Telling me that you care
That you care?
. . .
We’re the survivors, yes: the black survivors
‘Survival’ – Bob Marley
The cynical attitude of John Harding at Oaklands was countered by a few staff who really did care. But I became more and more insular. More and more broken. Norman Mills warned me that Wood End had been mentioned. So I told him, I had to tell someone: I can’t go outside in daylight. I’m shutting down. I needed him to know. I needed it recorded.
Norman Mills listened to me. The staff around me couldn’t see me. They were concerned with discipline and order. I didn’t want to claim benefits because I was proud of my work ethic. The home insisted I claimed benefits so that I could pay for my keep. But I couldn’t sign on for benefits because I couldn’t get out of the home.
Mr Sumner, the area officer, declared that a condition has ‘only now been recognised by the department and confirmed by Dr Moss’. He transferred the information from Gregory Avenue to Oaklands. The reason I wanted the doctor was so that my condition would be on record. And, at last, I can see that my plan worked. I asked to see a psychiatrist following on from the doctor’s diagnosis. Nothing felt safe around me. I needed help. Most of all I needed witnesses. I knew I was having a breakdown. After sixteen days in Oaklands, Mr Sumner reported:
I’d been in children’s homes for four years. I still had no family. I knew that the staff who were supposed to be looking after me were not looking after me at all. On a midnight walk someone shouted at me, ‘What you think you’re doing round here? Fucking wog. Weirdo.’ A few days passed and I saw their pretty garage door and I kicked it. The police came.
Unconnected to this, I had asked to see a psychiatrist. In her first letter to Norman Mills the psychiatrist calls me ‘Norman Greenwood (also known as Lemn Sissay)’. In this second letter in March she refers to me as ‘Lemn Sissay (known as Norman Greenwood)’.
On 20 March 1984 I stood before Leigh Juvenile Court for kicking the garage door. Norman Mills wrote a three-page testimony to them, outlining my story with my birth mother and the Greenwoods:
This is a spirited defence of a sixteen-year-old boy having a breakdown. I received a one-year conditional discharge. With-in days The Authority arrived and called a ‘staff meeting with appropriate social workers regarding control’. This really was 1984.
I was in a tailspin. On the one hand I had The Authority hounding me with a threat of Wood End; on the other I had the police. May 21 would be my seventeenth birthday, which left me twelve months until the care system was going to throw me out. I hated Oaklands. I hated John Harding.
These notes precede and follow on from my seventeenth birthday. No one made the connection. I returned to the Greenwoods to ask for photographs. My foster mother sat me in the posh room, like a visitor, and opened the photo albums. She shielded the photographs from my sightline as a child shields his food at the school dinner table to protect his chips from being pinched. I felt belittled. I had no proof of my childhood. I needed photographic evidence that I once belonged somewhere. There were no photographs taken in the children’s home either. Catherine carefully extracted four photographs. She closed the album and asked me to leave. But I had more questions about my birth mother. My foster mother flew into a rage and slammed the album on the floor. She phoned my social worker and demanded he take me away. She threw me out of the house and I waited for him on the front step.
I hadn’t ‘acquired a steady (white) girlfriend’. Diane was my first girlfriend. We met in the first year of comprehensive school when I was twelve and lived with my foster parents. She had no idea where I’d disappeared to when they took me away. She called my foster mum but she wouldn’t tell Diane. Diane searched for me for years and found me. We are close friends to this day. In fact, our friendship is the longest close relationship I’ve ever known.
I ran away from Oaklands at night. I walked the East Lancs Road to Moss Side in Manchester – nearly fourteen miles away. I sat inside the doorway of a record shop a little further up from the Reno nightclub. It was 2 a.m. and I watched people talking walking laughing. Beautiful dark faces. The bass was making the world vibrate into the summer air.
But I looked quite threatening, bedraggled, wild-eyed and fearful. There was some suspicion about the guy in the doorway. It was me. A pirate taxi-driver took a long look as he slid along the kerb. Time to go. I arrived back at Oaklands at daybreak to the police.
I can’t remember flicking matches or burning any curtains. I’ve never been accused of doing anything like it before or since. There’s no mention of my diagnosis or my attendance to the doctor or psychiatrist. This report is from Oaklands on 17 May, four days before my seventeenth birthday.
WOOD END
CHAPTER 28
Connect cold ice with fire
And the ice melts to find
Broken telephone wires
Tangled in Mangled Minds.
We ran like the water
Cupped in hands
And splashed like the water
That splits lands
The date of the decision by The Authority to imprison me in Wood End was 21 June 1984. There were no charges. No sentence. I was taken immediately. Norman Mills drove me through Lowton, Leigh and Atherton, onto Everest Road and through the gates of Wood End Assessment Centre.
We were both silent. He didn’t want me in there. He knew it was a foregone conclusion even before I went to Oaklands from Gregory Avenue. I had been in ‘care’ of Wigan Social Services for seventeen years. The idea that they wanted to assess me now was a joke. This wasn’t assessment. This was imprisonment.
The staff at Wood End told Norman Mills he couldn’t come in. He wanted to check where I would be sleeping and eating for his report but the rules were different at Wood End. There was a smirk on the officer’s face. ‘Welcome to Wood End, young man. We do things differently here.’
I was marched to a utility room. A seriously overweight man with a thick bunch of keys slapped down some regulation clothes – ‘different clothes for a different place’. A three-button T-shirt, dark blue trousers and pumps, all in the muted colours of rubbish that’s gone through a mangle. He told me to bathe and change. I was marched to the sports hall and sat at a table. The food came in one tray with bowls moulded into it. I ate with a plastic fork and spoon. Wood End was deathly silent. There were no pictures on the walls. After eating they led me through grey fire doors, more security, to the medical room for a health check with Mrs M., under her cloying leer. I was being reprogrammed.
‘You have one hour a day of recreation,’ the man said. He opened the door into a plain room with chairs lined against the walls where boys were sitting. They barely looked up. Unlock. Lock. Unlock. Lock. I was taken deeper inside. A siren went off. A howling raced through the corridors. ‘Testing the alarm,’ said the man.
There wer
e two sorts of child-inmates: young people on remand (awaiting court appearances) and young people in care. It was a technical difference because we were all treated like charged criminals. I was under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. I was marched along the corridors in size order with the others, largest at the front, smallest at the back. In silence. We were to speak when spoken to. The assessment centre’s job was to keep us in order all times – meal times, recreation, gardening and education. Anyone who stepped out of line was beaten. There was no ‘outside’ now. This was a lock-up.
The officers were mainly men. White men. Men who wanted to be somewhere else. Men who didn’t hide their displeasure in us. Men who viewed us as weaklings. Men who got a rush out of fighting. Ex-police officers, ex-probation officers, ex-army officers. Men with moustaches and pot-bellies. Weight-lifting men with chipmunk cheeks and over-stacked chests. White men with white fists. Men who stood like bouncers outside clubs. White men with white smirks and yellow teeth. Men in the middle of divorces, men with drinking problems, men with sexual problems, men trying to forget that they were not who they wanted to be when they were boys like us; men with crotch rot and athlete’s foot. Men with anger issues. Broken men. Hurt men. Dangerous, white men. Men who hated their fathers.
This really was George Orwell’s 1984. I was right. I was right about the entire dysfunctional system, which pretended it could care for me while knowing in its heart that it couldn’t. This horrific place was where the system stopped pretending.
Reprogramming meant I had to have a psychological test to determine whether I would be put into labour or education. It was my human right not to be imprisoned and therefore nothing in the assessment centre had any validity in my eyes, including the staff.
But I had to be careful to avoid a beating. How to comply and yet not comply? The test asked questions such as, Are you a tree in a forest or a tree on a hill? I replied, I am a poet tree. The hierarchy were displeased.
Remember that I knew I should not have been in Wood End. I knew The Authority did not have the intelligence to deal with me. And most of all, I knew that challenging them, in Wood End, on any of these issues would incur their wrath.
Are you a tree in a forest or a tree on a hill? The questions offended me so I answered them my way. Because of this, Wood End brought in a school psychologist to assess me.
The Authority was not happy with the letter from the educational psychologist and a few days later they made their own report. It was most important for them to record that I was nothing special.
‘Sportsmanship totally unrelated to his ability.’ This means that I happily gave the football to a lesser player (sportsmanship) rather than took the opportunity to run with it. I saw how the staff played football with us and how aggressive they were. It seemed to me they were working out their own mental problems and we were just a backdrop. It was belittling to see them joyously slicing the legs of young boys as if they were playing amongst men. It was sick. I trained myself in indifference. Many of the boys felt free in sport but I saw how much the staff enjoyed hurting them. Let them play, I thought. These people may have had us physically locked up. But they couldn’t have my mind.
The dormitories were locked at night. It is the only time we were without constant supervision. Because of the red nightlight in our rooms we couldn’t see out of the meshed glass slit in the dormitory door, but the night watchman could see in.
What must we have looked like to him when we were fast asleep? Young boys from eleven to eighteen, our heads resting on pillows, our hands gripping the sheets to our necks, mouths slightly open with the night-light splashing the shadows from our eyelashes across our faces.
There were women who worked at Wood End under the eyes of the men. But they were syphoned of their instincts. I have had nightmares up until my forties that I was still imprisoned in Wood End. Dickens hinted of the same condition when his father had been placed in debtors’ jail and he found himself in a similar destitute institution – the workhouse. Dickens wrote:
The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day to day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life . . .
Wood End was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions, and it caused nightmares. It is easy to wonder if this happened at all. Years later, in 2013, I wrote a blog about Wood End. I didn’t expect what followed. Other people reached out. This gives you a better picture than I could. Kevin on 15 November 2014 at 3.57 p.m. said:
I was dumped there by the council while my mother was in hospital when I was 12. I had never been in trouble or had any contact with the police, but by the time I left that place I was a broken child. I have never got over it. It has affected everything I have done in my life. Today I am contacting Wigan council and Manchester police to have my say as well. I have managed to raise a family, send my two kids to university, and have had my own business for the last 20 years but I lived with a life of demons, in the past using drugs, I have bouts of depression, an ongoing struggle against alcohol, low self-esteem, self-destructive anger problems. I have been one of the lucky ones. Those people who abused us were the weak and the useless, not us.
Ricky Mayes on 8 February 2015 at 12.49 p.m. said:
My life has never been the same in and out of mental hospitals all my life brain injury due to having my head smashed against the black board in maths class no dr was called I was knocked unconscious for over 24 hours I have got a on going investigation going on with Manchester police I was just a innocent child like your self at the time if you want to contact me please do. wish I knew the name of the maths teacher in 1977 I want him and all the other staff brought to justice for the abuse mental physical and sexual that I and many other boys suffered under Wood Ends sick regime lets stand together and have a voice.
Nick on 10 May 2014 at 12.26 p.m. said:
I was at Wood End between 1979 and 1981. One staff member was a bully. I got my first kicking on my second day there, one of many. I was forced to strip and had my genitals and rectum fondled and examined (that’s what he called it). Once refused to eat my porridge because I didn’t like the pink packets of low calorie sugar they used, I wanted some proper sugar. So once the hall was cleared I was held behind and had my face pushed into the porridge and held there until I agreed to eat it. My face was marked for about 2 weeks.
Got into an almighty row with the member of staff, a few hours after my case conference was heard, as I was told I could speak to my mum before she left, they never let me see her. He pushed me against the corridor wall outside his office and held me there by my testicles squeezing them harder and harder, it seemed to last a life time. It made me vomit all over his jacket, to which I was given a good stomach punch which left me on the floor crying and in agony. The following day he told me I would never see my home again or my parents should I tell anyone what had happened, he said he could keep me in care forever, I believed him, I was 14 and none the wiser. Throughout my stays at Wood End I was made to strip, had my genitals fondled and was punched or beaten at least once a week. I went from Wood End to St Thomas More at Birkale Southport.
Things there were not as regimental as Wood End but the abuse was worse, regular body checks by one member of staff, included having you genitals played with and a finger or two inserted into your rectum.
Colleen Candland on 10 February 2015 at 6.44 a.m. said:
My husband was in care from the age of 10. Wood End was a care home he was placed in on two occasions. He has the physical scars which were the result of the malicious and very vio
lent beatings. He also ran away from Wood End, jumping directly through the glass window of the dorm and leaving a chunk of his skin on the broken window pane. He was caught 9 hours later in an old mill. He was taken by the police to the hospital for stitches to his damaged hand then he was returned to Wood End. Only terror could make a child jump through a glass pane to escape the brutality. He was in care all of his childhood and did become one of the many who did end up in prison. The emotional pain is still buried deep within and will never be erased. He has first-hand experience of the cruelty administered by the staff in the homes and has never forgotten their faces or names. On a positive note he has made a life for himself and has found happiness. He is now works as a falconer and the care and love he bestows on his birds and dogs is beautiful to see and experience, particularly when you know how much pain he carries within his soul. He will not talk to the police or any of the authorities as he does not seek to open his wounds but he does share the horror of his past with me and agreed to me sharing this with you as he has read your blogs, poems and writings and can relate to all of them.
Wood End was a violent and toxic place with a barely hidden general belief that these boys needed to be taught a lesson. The short sharp shock treatment was an alternative term for abuse. In the sports hall they forced us to play ‘murder ball’. It was institutionalised violence for voyeurs. I made myself a witness. When a fight broke out between the boys I watched the men, the staff, ejaculate. The men let the fight continue until they’d done. Then they’d say, ‘Come on, you two, break it up.’ Then they’d watch them in the showers.
