One day, Liam said, ‘Come on, Paul. Let’s go in. Let’s see what they are doing in there.’
‘Do you think they’ll have a pop at us?’ I asked. I liked his idea, but I was also a little intimidated at the thought of just going into the club.
‘Dunno. They might, I s’pose.’
‘I suppose we can always leg it if they do.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come on, then.’
We went in nervously and poked our heads around the door. There were some men inside. They were clad in sportswear, and chatting to each other amiably as they worked out. We were sure they were going to shout at us and tell us to fuck off because we were just kids from St Leonard’s and everybody hated us. Instead, two friendly men looked at us with smiles.
‘Come on in, lads,’ they said. ‘We won’t bite your heads off.’
Liam and I looked at each other. Did they really mean it? We shrugged. There was nothing to lose.
We went in gingerly, but they really were friendly; they were not just pretending. Even when they saw our cheap uniforms and bad haircuts, they were not put off. This was the first time that anything of the sort had ever happened. Even when we told them where we were from, they did not recoil from us. What was going on?
‘Do you want to put some gloves on, lads?’ they asked. ‘Do you want to have a little move around?’
I looked at Liam. Liam looked at me.
‘All right, then.’
It was just a rundown gym in the local boxing club, but venturing into the Dagenham Boxing Club was absolutely the best thing that had ever happened to me. Liam and I were boxers after that, two wiry little runts together, beating out our aggression with our small, bony fists. Because Liam and I were both so small and underweight for our ages, people assumed that we were much younger than we actually were. They could not believe it when we told them our real ages.
Although the facilities were very basic, and I was just put in front of a bag with gloves on and told to hit it, getting involved in boxing was a revelation to me, and a real milestone in my young life. For a start, I had my first experience of being with adult men who were not only not violent and dangerous, but also were actually friendly and kind. And they were not just pretending to be kind; they really meant it. The boxing coaches were good with children, and they gave Liam and me the closest thing to proper childcare that we had ever received. The teachers at school caned us and battered us. The care workers in the home beat us up. So far as the social workers were concerned, we were just a series of boxes to be ticked. Our parents had been missing in action for as long as we could remember. These guys actually taught us useful stuff, gave us sandwiches and even listened to us with every appearance of interest. It was amazing. It was wonderful.
For a long time, I didn’t go to the boxing club to learn about boxing, but just to have the experience of someone being nice to me. I am sure that to them it was no big deal, but for me it was huge.
Uncle Bill and Auntie Coral and Liam’s house parents were not impressed with our new involvement with boxing, and they tried to stop us from going to the club. But Liam and I were not stupid. Now that we had adults on the outside who actually cared about us, even just a little bit, the abuse we were getting at home receded somewhat. Any child who had an adult in his life who might conceivably ask, ‘Why is he getting bruised and hurt all the time?’ was less likely to be badly damaged. I suspect that the families involved with the boxing club had an idea that things were bad in St Leonard’s, because they would come to the home and collect us when we had to attend boxing events. They would have asked questions if we hadn’t turned up when we should. This was the first time anyone but Mary had shown any interest in me at all and it was fantastic. While I can hardly say that my self-esteem flourished, some delicate green shoots did begin to appear.
Liam was quite good at boxing, but I was better. I started to realise that I had potential when I did my first gym show, which is a very carefully controlled fight and is all that young kids are allowed to do. The boys fight, but the whole thing is stopped the minute someone gets hurt. I won my first gym show when I was ten years old. After that, I could not be stopped. I won one thing after another until winning became the norm for me. It no longer mattered whether or not I could read and write and do sums, because now I had a plan; I was going to be a professional boxer. This also meant that I had to spend a huge amount of time at the gym, which was fine for me. The less time I spent at St Leonard’s, the better.
I remember the trainers well: Lenny Wilson, Alan Mayhew and Tommy Butler. They and their wives would have Liam and me round to their homes and feed us what seemed to us to be glorious meals, although no doubt it was the sort of ordinary fare that they had every day. Some of the other kids’ mothers would bring food to the club – just ordinary ham sandwiches and things like that, but it was so delicious compared to what we got in St Leonard’s, it was wonderful.
Between the boxing and the improvements to my diet, I started to get healthier and stronger, although I would never be very big. Starling continued to try to discourage my boxing, but, now that I had friends, he could not stop me from going. He and Auntie Coral increasingly left me to my own devices, which suited me very well. I felt better able to control my sphere, and the less I had to do with them, the better. Even when Uncle Bill put me through a glass window once for reasons that I no longer remember, cutting my head badly, I was just sent to hospital on the bus with a towel wrapped around my head and blood trickling down the back of my neck, with no adult to make sure I got there and back in one piece. At the time, this did not seem even remotely odd. The social worker was told that I had slipped in the bath and fallen through the window. I didn’t challenge the lie. What was the point?
While boxing certainly did not make me any less violent, it enabled me to focus and channel my anger and to control my aggression and temper so that I could use them for my own purposes, rather than just lashing out indiscriminately. Because I had always been undersized and underweight, from a very early age I wanted to be able to take care of myself. Boxing was the ideal way and fortunately I was very good at it. It showed me how important it was for things to be organised and orderly and disciplined, which was a lesson that I absorbed very well – and perhaps even a little too well. Although it might sound strange, it was also through boxing that I learned about love and respect and how family members can care for each other. As well as the coaches, some of the families of the other boys in the club took pity on me and had me round for meals, to feed me up. Of course, I always ate ravenously. I also seized the chance to look at ordinary family homes and all the usual accoutrements: family photos, fridges full of food, mums and dads who smiled and said encouraging things and didn’t just curse and swear and swat their kids around the head. Knowing that there was another world out there stood me in good stead later in life, when I was in a position to make choices that would impact seriously on my future.
Most of the children at St Leonard’s were much less fortunate.
Because I had been abandoned as a newborn, I had never known my mother, who was now living in Clapton in East London, but some of my older siblings had a degree of contact with her and, when I was about twelve, Danny and John suggested that I should go and visit. The older ones used to go up every few months and get a bit of guilt money from Mum and they recommended this as a thing that I would like to do, as all the kids appreciated having a little money to spend on sweets, especially because we were all on slim pickings at the home and were constantly hungry. All I had to do was show up and listen to her standard rant about how nothing that had happened was her fault in any way. It was a short ride on the train to Bethnal Green and on the bus through Hackney to Clapton, and I went on my own.
That was how I saw my mother for the last time in my life, and the first time that I can remember. She was living on her own at that time, and the idea was that I would spend the whole day there so as to get to know her a little. She told me to g
o to the shop across the road to get her something. On my way, I turned and shouted, ‘Mum, what was it you wanted?’
She came out and went crazy, hissing, ‘Don’t you call me Mum around here!’ She did not want anyone to know that she had children. Why, I do not know. Perhaps she didn’t want her neighbours to know that she had abandoned all eight of her kids. I felt as though I had been slapped in the face.
Among the men whom my mother was seeing was an Irish builder, a big beefy man with huge arms, who was there when I called around. When they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about, they spoke to each other in Irish.
Feeling ignored, I decided that I did not have a mother. After all, I had my boxing.
I think that I saw my father once or twice during my childhood; although I don’t remember him very well. Seeing him was like visiting someone I didn’t know. By this time, he was living in Hackney with a woman called Betty, and to me he just looked like any older man I might have passed in the street without giving him a second glance. I felt quite indifferent towards him. I don’t know how he felt about me, but I do know that I was never visited by either of my parents during my time at St Leonard’s.
Many children who grow up in care have daydreams about how, one day, they will return home, and life will be lovely and Mum and Dad will explain how it was all one big, horrid mistake that should never have happened. As for me, I never really entertained any dreams of getting back with my parents, and visiting them didn’t make any difference. At least I had my boxing. At least I could take care of myself. Or so I thought.
But all my bravado did not stop me from getting hurt by my caregivers or out in the world. When I was thirteen, I got knocked over by a bus on a zebra crossing in East London, breaking my arm.
‘You stupid little fuck,’ was Auntie Coral’s comment. ‘You had it coming.’
But remarks like that didn’t seem to matter as much as they used to.
I was beginning to understand that life at St Leonard’s was even worse for many of the other kids.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
I think, looking back, that the saddest thing about the abuse – sexual and otherwise – at St Leonard’s was that most of the kids in the home didn’t even realise that it was strange or unusual for our carers to find sexual pleasure in the children’s prepubescent bodies, or for teenage boys and girls to have to sleep with male and female house parents whenever they clicked their fingers in exchange for what should have been basic rights, such as decent food to eat and reasonably good quality clothes to wear. Although it may seem strange to anyone who grew up in a normal family environment, so far as we were concerned, this was just the way adults behaved because, quite simply, this was the way that the majority of the adults in our lives did behave. It was all most of us knew and we didn’t even question it. We honestly believed that this was just the way the world worked. For many of us, the first inkling that our childhoods had not been normal didn’t come until we left the home and moved away.
Looking back, I have realised that the situation at St Leonard’s with respect to the sexual abuse must have been far more organised than it seemed to me at the time, and I wonder how extensive the organisation was, although I suppose that I will never know the whole story.
Just as girlie girls are attracted to hairdressing and tough guys to door work, paedophiles are attracted to working with children. Well, obviously. One of the questions potential care workers are asked at interviews is: ‘Do you like children?’ Then, once there are enough of them in the system, I guess it is easy for the whole thing to be perpetuated. Perhaps there is a secret handshake of some kind. I do know that institutionalised sexual abuse was far more common than anyone would like to think. I hope that this is still not the case, and the social workers I have met in recent years have assured me that the situation for children’s care today is very much better than it was for my generation. But it is hard to be overly optimistic.
At St Leonard’s, all the house parents and other care workers socialised with each other and seemed to have few friends on the outside, and I assume that everyone who lived and worked in the home knew what was going on with respect to sexual contact between the caregivers and the children, even if not everyone was actively involved with it to the same extent. I suppose that, just as the situation seemed ‘normal’ to us kids, so it must have to those caregivers who had lost all touch with reality and the way the outside world functioned. They all collaborated at work, and then after work they would pop over to each other’s cottages for a drink and a few cigarettes. They lived on site with apartments in the same buildings as the children’s rooms and they had absolute control over their small kingdoms and all their small subjects.
The Principal, Alan Prescott, was not just a notorious pederast whom all the children feared with very good reason, but also a local magistrate and a prominent local character, so the caregivers didn’t have to worry about any repercussions from him; he was in it up to his neck. There was literally nobody to whom the care workers had to answer. The Tower Hamlets authorities were about fifteen miles away. I don’t know how closely they supervised St Leonard’s but there certainly was no sign of any interference from them. There were domestic staff who would come in to clean and I don’t know if they were involved in the rampant abuse of the kids, but I think not. For one thing, they had much less contact with the children and, for another, I noticed that in the cottage in which I lived our ‘carers’ tended to lay off their most unwelcome attention when they were around, and to greet the cleaners with cheery smiles and hellos as if they were the most normal people in the world.
‘How are you?’ Uncle Bill would enquire cheerfully, as if he had not been meddling with a pair of under-sixes just half an hour earlier. ‘Back to clean up after the wretches!’
I am not sure exactly when I realised what was going on, but it must have been when I was about nine or ten. As I had been eight when I was sent to St Leonard’s, I was already too old to attract the interest of Bill Starling, who had taken a dislike to me from early on, in any case. Some of the children had been with Starling from a very early age – as young as four or five – and had been groomed by him to take part in sexual activities with Uncle Bill from when they were little more than preschoolers.
I think that the saddest aspect of this was that these kids had no idea that their lives were anything other than ordinary. Five was a good age to start sexual contact with Uncle Bill, so far as he was concerned. Children who caught his attention were selected by him for special treats, and brought into his private living room. They would emerge later, having been fed biscuits and sweets and given toys. They paid dearly for those presents, but at the time the rest of us just envied them, because we thought that that meant that somebody loved them, at least a little bit.
I particularly remember a couple of the girls. They were pretty little things, Irish like me. In our cottage, we all resented them bitterly because they seemed to be Starling’s little pets. The rest of us kids were very jealous when they got taken away and given treats and no doubt there was a certain amount of bullying of the children who seemed to be the house parents’ favourites. They were about five and six at the time, and both Starling and Auntie Coral were very affectionate towards them indeed. Now, I can only shudder at the thought of what those little girls probably had to do to earn those treats.
It is very difficult to explain to anyone who has not been there how strangely normal it can feel to know that the adults in your life are interested in your body in a way they shouldn’t be. That was the culture in St Leonard’s, and we were all utterly accustomed to it to the extent that it modified our behaviour on a daily basis.
Standards of personal hygiene were quite high at St Leonard’s and we were all exhorted to bathe regularly. Even the children who had not been singled out for direct sexual abuse knew that bath time was a difficult time, when Uncle Bill and sometimes Auntie Coral would find a reason – any reason, no matter how spurious – to
come in to the bathroom to see you in the nip and make a ribald comment or two. We learned that the best time to bathe was when the domestic staff were there at work, because then Starling was much less likely to find a reason to barge in on a bathing child. Bathing in the evening or at night was commonly known to be a risky activity, and most of us avoided it at all costs.
Many of the staff at St Leonard’s were also having sexual relationships with the older kids, and here the dynamic could be different and much more ambiguous than the straightforward abuse of the little ones. While these relationships were clearly hugely inappropriate, not just because of the great difference in age but because of the power dynamic at play – we are talking about young people having sexual relations with the adults who were supposed to be providing them with mother and father figures – they were not simply examples of rape and abuse. Many of the teenagers were willingly engaging in sexual encounters because, for them, this behaviour had become a normal way of earning brownie points from the adults in their lives. In many cases, they had been accustomed to having to have sex with adults since before they had even come to the home.
St Leonard’s was home to quite a number of young lads who had been ‘saved’ by the social workers or police from working as rent boys on the streets. These were kids who came from backgrounds as bad as any you could imagine. Just think of children being so desperate – aged just twelve or so – that they will take to the streets to sell their small bodies to whoever shows interest, risking the sexually transmitted diseases and the beatings that come as part and parcel of that way of life. These boys had been ‘saved’ by the police and social workers only to be sent to St Leonard’s where their bodies were once again fair game for the adults. But now they were not even getting any money in exchange for their favours, and they did not have the option of running away because, if they did, they would just be sent straight back again. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read Page 3
