Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read

by Paul Connolly

  Before deciding to go into the care industry, Bill Starling had been a lorry driver. In those days, astonishing as it seems, there was no vetting system for house parents, and he had no particular experience in caring for children. For Uncle Bill, the job at St Leonard’s was a way to skim the system, pocket the proceeds and brutalise the kids in the process. Most of us were very small and thin for our age, and the reason why was simple – we were fed on bread and margarine and not much else, while Starling used the housekeeping budget for himself.

  On my very first night – remember that I was just eight years old and that I had just left the only home that I had never known – I wet the bed. Of course, I was desperately embarrassed. But, as if that was not bad enough, Auntie Coral made me strip off my sheets and then threw me and the sheets together into a bath of freezing cold water heavily laced with bleach where she scrubbed me until I was almost bleeding. This was the standard approach at St Leonard’s to children with bedwetting problems. Unsurprisingly, Auntie Coral’s attempts to cure us of bedwetting were less than effective. Most of the little ones wet their beds frequently, and the same treatment was always doled out.

  I soon learned what happened when we children misbehaved in any way. Several times a week, we would be rooted out of our dorms and told to strip off all of our identical white-and-grey striped pyjamas – which resembled nothing more than the prison garb of caricature prisoners in old comic books – and line up in the hallway, while Starling, sometimes with some of his friends, walked up and down shouting, kicking our legs out from under us and stubbing out their cigarettes on our pigeon-chested bodies. They found this funny. They found it hilarious. Uncle Bill always had a cigarette in his hand. He was a chain smoker who lit up and puffed away in front of the children, regardless of what was going on. This also meant that he always had a handy tool at the ready to inflict pain on our tender skin.

  When the adults had tired of the entertainment, we would be allowed to put on our nightclothes and leave. I do remember that this sort of thing would happen more often in the summertime. We would all be sent to bed at the usual early time but, because it was summer, it was still light, and none of us could sleep, so we would start messing about, tossing pillows and generally acting up. Then Bill Starling would come roaring up to the dormitory and root us out, yelling, ‘Get out into the hall, you little bastards! Get the fuck out of bed, you little shits,’ and the entertainment would begin, especially on those evenings when he had friends over and they had all been drinking. While Uncle Bill was not a particularly heavy drinker, a beer or two seemed to help him to shed whatever few inhibitions he still had. Uncle Bill liked to show his friends that the kids he was in charge of knew who the boss was, and he was single-minded in pursuit of this goal.

  Apart from Uncle Bill’s incursions into the dormitory, there was little at St Leonard’s to break the monotony of everyday life. In the morning, we got up at around seven, got our breakfast and went to school. In the evening, we came home, ate, watched TV for a while and went to bed. We were periodically instructed to wash, and generally made to take care of ourselves in terms of personal hygiene. Nothing ever really changed, and every day was pretty much the same as the one that went before it in one long, depressing litany. Birthdays were not celebrated – which was at least honest, because we all knew that nobody was very happy about the fact that we unwanted rascals had been born. In fact, mine was usually marked in the form of birthday greetings on the second of August – when I had actually been born on the twenty-second. In a good year, a local factory would donate toys at Christmas, which we would all share, because there was little question of any child having personal possessions, which would have led inevitably to jealousy and squabbling. Christmas dinner stands out, as Christmas Day was the only day in the year when we would eat well. Some of the children would have gone home to see relatives for the holidays, so there would be less of us about, and we would have a proper roast turkey and other good things and stuff ourselves until we felt sick, and then watch the better-than-usual fare on television.

  The kids of St Leonard’s were a motley crew of mostly Irish and black boys and girls. They were the offspring of already dysfunctional families, like the Connollys, who had come to London with the idea that they would get ahead and prosper, only to find that the streets were not paved with gold after all. Their old problems were still with them and now there was no support system to hold everything together as there might have been at home. In those days, the perception was that the most dysfunctional people in Britain were usually either Irish or black, which is why, if you look at old news reels, you’ll see the signs landlords used to post in their windows: ‘No blacks, Irish or dogs’. Irish and black petty criminals flooded borstals and prisons, and most of the drunks cooling off in the police cells were from the same demographic. Even at the young age of the children in the home, we were seen as the lowest form of life there was, and treated accordingly.

  It was not fair, but people who come from the toughest, hardest, most poverty-stricken backgrounds are often going to be the most difficult to deal with and the most likely to become dangerous, truculent people, and the most likely to get drunk and make a nuisance of themselves. I saw this for myself, growing up, and later when I visited a relative in borstal where he was serving time for mugging old ladies. In his lock-up, as elsewhere, the prisoners were mostly Irish or black – there were no white, English grammar-school boys there!

  At the home, we children often got into fights, but we were also like sisters and brothers and, perhaps surprisingly, we were colour-blind. Nobody cared who was Irish and who was black because we had so much in common; we were all abandoned runts who had been thrown on the tender – or not so tender – mercy of the state. We would fight over the last scrap of bread on the table or what we watched on television, but we didn’t care what colour anyone was or where their parents had come from.

  My best friend at St Leonard’s was a little boy called Liam Carroll – another Irish child – who was in much the same boat as me. Liam lived in the cottage directly opposite mine, Myrtle Cottage. The windows of our cottages faced each other and, when we had to return to our respective buildings, Liam and I would part reluctantly. We would go to our dormitories and wave at each other through the windows, a strangely comforting ritual. I can still remember seeing his pale face through the slightly warped old glass, as though I was looking at him underwater. I didn’t know how Liam had ended up in the home. He had a bigger brother but I never learned how they had been abandoned and this was not something we ever discussed. I imagine that it was another sad little tale of dysfunction and lack of love.

  Liam and I were inseparable for years. To this day, I have to say that he was one of the strongest people I have ever known. It seemed to me then that, no matter what life threw at him, Liam would be OK. Even as a child, Liam appeared to be a pillar of strength. The only really happy memories I have from my childhood involve Liam. We bunked off school together whenever possible, and made our way to a nearby field where horses bound for the abattoir were kept. We enlivened the final days of those unhappy horses by jumping on them and riding bareback until we fell off. When we did go to school, we would walk the five miles there so as to save our bus fare to spend on sweets and other cheap carbohydrates that made us feel briefly full.

  On one occasion, all the kids from the home had been taken over to Holland to do a hundred-mile march from Nijmegen to Arnhem, together with a bunch of boy scouts in uniform. Finding ourselves in the local red-light district, Liam and I spent so long eyeballing the girls that we missed our lift back to the youth hostel in the depths of the forest, and had to make our own way back in the dark, getting there just before the search parties were sent out.

  These might not sound like typically happy boyhood memories, but they are what I have and they make me smile. For me, Liam was a real big brother, and I think he loved me, too.

  SCHOOL DAYS

  I STARTED GOING to St Mary’s Cath
olic School in Hornchurch when I was eight. Ostensibly, having been born to Catholic parents and baptised into the Church, I was being raised as a Catholic, and we all went through the motions of First Holy Confession, Holy Communion and Confirmation without understanding what it was all supposed to mean. The Church never intervened in any matters concerning our material welfare, and seemed to see us as nothing more than souls to claim for the Catholic God by dispensing the basic sacraments without explanation. The hypocrisy of the whole thing still makes me very angry. Presumably, my mother had eight children she clearly did not want because she was a Catholic and good Catholics do not use birth control. Heaven forbid! Having thus ensured our arrival into an unfriendly world, the Church did not seem to feel any further responsibility for us.

  There was one positive figure in my life during this period, a fact for which I am hugely grateful. Mary, who had wanted to adopt me as a baby, had kept in touch with me, and was something of an aunt figure. By this stage, she had moved away from London and down to the New Forest on the south coast. Mary had married a kind man called Adrian and had a son of her own, Spencer, who was six years younger than me.

  Bless her heart; Mary would invite me down every summer until I was about thirteen for a little holiday with her family at their home in Bournemouth. It was a different world. They had horses and stables and we would go to the beach every day in her little red Mini. Knowing that there was a real world in which people could be kind to each other was a lifeline to me; much more than I realised at the time. Mary was a kind, generous spirit who showed me how an adult woman could be nurturing and generous. As Adrian was usually working, I saw little of him, but he was a benign figure in the background. Their child, Spencer, was born when I was about six, and because of the age difference we didn’t have that much to do with each other, although I remember him running about after me when he got a little older.

  My short holidays with Mary and her family were extremely precious to me but, kind as she was, Mary’s influence on me could not repair the damage that was being done in St Leonard’s and at school. I was still illiterate at eleven when we took the 11-plus, which of course I failed. Attempting it had been bordering on the ridiculous and I don’t know why the teachers even bothered to put my name down for it. From there, I went to the all-boys Bishop Ward Catholic School in Dagenham.

  After the fiasco of the 11-plus, I largely gave up on school, skiving off whenever I got a chance. When I did turn up, I either got into a fight or got the cane. I was a poor kid from the children’s home with a free dinner ticket, cheap clothes and a lot to prove. As I fell farther and farther behind the basic minimum standards I should have reached, my behaviour deteriorated until I posed a significant discipline problem in the classroom and was probably a danger to myself and others. School continued to be a complete nightmare as I grew older. The lessons were awful and we were locked in the rooms in an attempt to wield some control over us.

  Because I had failed the 11-plus, I was put in the lowest class along with all the other dim kids. We were now the ones who had been labelled as failures. We accepted the general designation of ourselves as dunces, but even then I think that I knew on some level that I was brighter than most of the kids in the dunces’ class. I was briefly put into a higher class, despite not being able to read and write, but I got upset because I wanted to be with my friends. All the Catholic kids from St Leonard’s went to school together, and I didn’t want to be away from my pals: my best friend Liam Carroll and two others. I felt that I needed to be with my friends because there was strength in numbers and I was glad when I was returned to the dunces’ corner.

  Skinny and undersized, ignorant and completely unaware of my potential, I was belligerent, bitter and angry way beyond my limited ability to verbalise those difficult feelings. Like the rest of the children in St Leonard’s, I had very good reason to be angry. The cottage that I was supposed to call home was far from being a refuge, offering violence and beatings instead of home comforts.

  On one occasion, my house father, Bill Starling, caught me bunking off school. Uncle Bill had been waiting behind the cottage door for me, and when I came back he grabbed me by the hair, punched and kicked me up two flights of stairs, saying, ‘Get up there, you little bastard. Go on, you little fuck. I’ll teach you to bunk off, I’ll show you who the boss is around here…’ Then Uncle Bill threw me off the balcony at the top. I landed heavily, breaking several ribs. I ended up in sick bay for a few weeks with my ribs bandaged tightly so that they could heal. I was philosophical about my stay in the sick bay; at least I didn’t have to go to school.

  So far as I know, there was no onus on Starling to explain or justify the injuries in any way. Certainly, it did not occur to me to make any sort of official complaint, because what had happened was not exactly an anomalous event in a home where violence was a daily occurrence. I don’t even know if it would have been possible for me to complain, or to whom I could have gone. Perhaps files and reports were made about my unfortunate stint in sick bay, but as these would have been given to Principal Prescott, who was almost as dangerous as Starling, who was going to care?

  You might be wondering how it was that nobody at school ever noticed that anything was wrong. For a start, most of the teachers either didn’t look at or didn’t care about the little scruffs from St Leonard’s. They didn’t like the blacks or Irish any more than the general population did. In fact, as they had to deal with us and our problems every day, they probably liked us even less. They saw their responsibility towards us as beginning and ending with keeping a certain amount of control in the classroom, and if that meant lashing out, so be it. As there was little expected of us in terms of academic achievement, there did not seem to be any feeling that we needed to be taught even basic literacy or numeracy skills. Sometimes another child’s parent would say something like, ‘Hasn’t that little boy got an awful lot of bruises?’ but an answer would always be supplied, along the lines of: ‘Yes, he’s a violent little boy. A bit of a problem, really. He had another one of his tantrums and he threw himself against the wall again.’

  I did have one teacher who seemed worried about what was going on in St Leonard’s. His name was Mr Molloy, another Irishman.

  ‘What are you doing, Paul?’ he would ask. ‘Jaysus, why are ya always covered in cuts and bruises? You’re a little ruffian. What have you been up to, at all?’

  I would say, ‘Yeah, sir, they beat me up in the home.’

  ‘Would you go on outta that. They never did.’

  In the 1960s and ’70s, watching out for kids’ general welfare was not seen as part of the teachers’ remit.

  To be fair to him, Mr Molloy did go down to St Leonard’s and ask what was going on, only to be met with a blank wall.

  ‘Paul Connolly?’ they said. ‘Let’s have a look at his file.’

  Starling had to write in my file every day – as he did in every child’s – and I gave him plenty to write about so there would have been a weighty pile of papers on me.

  ‘Last Thursday?’ he or Auntie Coral, who he had no doubt instructed, would say. ‘Let’s see. Oh yes, Paul had another one of his violent tantrums. He was throwing himself against the wall again. He has an episode like that every other day. He’s a troubled child. To tell you the truth, we are barely managing to contain him. No surprises where he is heading…’

  Starling didn’t have to answer to anybody; he was something along the lines of a dictator in his own little empire. He wrote the rulebook.

  The year I turned eight, I was run over by a car when I was crossing the road to go to the shops. I know that if someone had explained to me how to cross a road I would not have been run over at all. The children from the home were all very accident-prone, simply because we were never taught simple, basic things such as the rules of the road. The car changed gears and I thought it was stopping to let me go but it ran me over instead. Nobody had ever told me about looking both ways before you cross the road, so I had not even a
cquired this very basic skill. The resulting injuries made me determined to get fit and strong, although I didn’t know how. I just knew that I wanted to be able to stand up for myself because I saw with my own eyes, every day, what happened to the kids who went along with their victim status, and because I was afraid that my injuries would make me more vulnerable to attack from the people who were supposed to be taking care of us.

  By this stage, I slept with a knife that I had stolen from the kitchen under my pillow – a long, sharp kitchen knife that would do some serious damage if called for. I didn’t know how to use it properly – not yet – but knowing that it was there made me feel a little bit safer. When I was about to go to sleep, I would close my hand against the smooth wooden handle of the knife and it would give me more comfort than any teddy bear ever could.

  The first time I met a real family was when a kid from my class in junior school invited me home to play one day after school. I was so overwhelmed by all the food on offer at my friend’s house that I just put my head down and ate like a wild beast. I had never seen steak before. I ate until my stomach hurt, and then I looked around and took in those exotic creatures, mum and dad, and a house where the pictures were not nailed to the walls.

  For the very first time, it began to dawn on me that the way we lived in St Leonard’s might not be the norm; that there might be a different, better way to go about doing things. For the very first time in my short life, my yearning for something better began to take shape. I realised what I had been missing all this time – a family; a home.

  By the time I was eight, I had already been identified in St Leonard’s and at school as an extremely violent, difficult child, so it was not surprising that I was drawn to boxing. The original idea to get into boxing was Liam’s. He was also a very small kid with a need to be able to stand up for himself, and I imagine that his motivations must have been very similar to mine. We used to walk to school together, and the route took us past Dagenham Boxing Club. Liam and I used to wonder what went on in there and we often speculated about it.