Nobody's Child

by Father Michael Seed

  I cried then, deep sobs that seemed to come from the bottom of my soul. All I had ever craved, as long as I could remember, was to be loved. Nothing more.

  It may have been all she could give – but it was everything I had ever wanted, and I cried for us both, for all the love the two of us had lost. As I clung to Sister Philomena, with tears pouring down my face, I mourned for those might-have-been years, when there could have been so many beautiful dreams, instead of all the frightful nightmares.

  Sister Philomena said that my mother had stayed in touch with her until the month after I was adopted, to make sure I was in safe hands; and after that she never heard from Marie again.

  I later discovered that Joe and Lillian Seed had adopted another baby boy at the same time as me but within a few weeks had sent him back to the Catholic Children’s Society.

  In those days, before the age of computers, all the records were written or typed and those at the Society had been destroyed by fire. There was no record of why the other baby had been returned. Nanny either genuinely didn’t know or remember, or she may have professed ignorance to protect her daughter, and I never saw the Wicked Witch of the West again to ask her.

  Whatever the reason, it might have lost me a childhood companion, but almost certainly saved that child from the most awful pain and some very unpleasant moments. I hope that child was adopted by a couple who loved and cared for their baby in the way that every child should be loved and cared for.

  How different my life might have been if I had been the one to have been rejected.

  Chapter Thirty

  I left school in May 1974, the year of my 17th birthday, with one O Level in art, a wide knowledge of politics, economics, philosophy and the theatre, and a total ignorance of technology, mechanics, electricity and simple arithmetic.

  Britain was still recovering from the disastrous three-day working week brought in by Ted Heath, which had cost him the next general election, and jobs were hard to come by.

  But I was lucky. A job was advertised in the Bolton Evening News for a helper in Knutsford motorway cafe, and after being interviewed on the telephone I was offered a try-out on a day-to-day basis.

  The job mainly involved collecting plates, cutlery and trays from the restaurant and taking them to the kitchen to be washed up. I was also detailed to help with certain chores in the kitchen itself.

  On my first day, I managed to drop a tray holding more than 60 eggs on the kitchen floor and smash the lot. Reluctantly, the management agreed to have me back the following day, but it proved to be a big mistake on their part. This time I slipped on the kitchen floor, knocked over a trolley and smashed nearly a hundred plates, cups and saucers that were stored on it.

  I was fired on the spot, given two pound notes and a handful of silver coins for the total of ten hours I had worked there and told never to come back.

  But luck was still with me. Walking along the High Street, I spotted a handwritten sign in the window of a menswear shop which said, ‘Help needed inside.’ They wanted an assistant salesman, and after a five-minute interview I was given the job.

  For a time all went well, and except for my boss not approving of my telling customers that they could buy similar clothing more cheaply at other shops in town, I seemed to be getting on quite well.

  Until the day they asked me to make the tea.

  Call it bizarre if you like, but there was one problem with this. I had never made a cup of tea or paid attention to one being made in my life. Nanny put her lovely complexion down to drinking only orange juice or milk, and I drank only orange juice or water. At school, I was never shown, or asked, to put the kettle on, and at home my grandmother did all that.

  I managed to fill the kettle all right, and spotted that it had a wire coming out of it with a plug on the end. So I plugged it in. And to be on the safe side, because I vaguely remembered my grandmother doing it, I lit the gas on top of the stove and put the kettle on top of that.

  After a few minutes, I noticed that the plastic part of the kettle was on fire, but, before I could rescue it, the whole thing blew up with an almighty bang and sent bits of plastic flying everywhere.

  All the lights went out in the kitchen and in the shop, and as I had no idea of the existence of such things as fuses and fuse boxes, I didn’t know what to do.

  They had heard the bang in the shop downstairs and then been plunged into darkness. Now one of the men came running upstairs to see what had happened.

  I was so scared I hid behind the door, but my fellow assistant found me and hauled me downstairs, where the boss, shouting at the top of his voice, demanded to know what the hell was going on.

  When I explained, he could scarcely believe me.

  ‘I didn’t know anybody could be that bloody thick,’ he stormed. ‘This definitely isn’t going to work out. You’re fired.’

  I had been there exactly two weeks.

  My next job was as a care worker for the mentally ill in a centre run by Bolton Social Services – whose care I was still in myself.

  To qualify for care, the patients had to be ambulatory and not physically impaired, just mentally ill. There were about 30 male residents in the nursing home. Some were middle-aged but most of them were elderly.

  The people looking after them were a married couple, John and Irene Osborne, who were really nice. They had a daughter, Karen, and a son, Paul, who were both still at school. They were amazingly funny and quite outrageous and, with the exception of Mr Thomas, very different from most of the people I knew. We were surrounded by dysfunctional, pretty crazy residents, but that didn’t stop us having the most enormous fun, and soon I learned to accept the madness around us as quite normal.

  One old man used to throw handfuls of his own faeces at people in the street from an upstairs window, and the majority of them were unpredictable, but we coped. There were just the Osbornes, two ladies and me. We did everything.

  I had to help in the kitchen and with the cleaning, and one of my regular tasks was to make sure that everyone got out of bed in the morning. Some of them never wanted to get up, and it often took a lot of tugging, pushing and persuasion to get them on the move. At 17, I had to take the initiative and provide a lead. I’m not so sure one could get away with using a 17-year-old to do the job today. But I was in my element.

  One resident, an old rag-and-bone man, who parked his cart at the back of the home, refused to ever wash his hands, so by the front door we kept a pair of white opera gloves and he was made to put these on when he came home from work.

  When one evening I was slightly delayed serving his dinner, he took a pair of goldfish out of the tank in the living room, placed them between two slices of bread and ate them alive.

  None of the other residents found this the slightest bit unusual. It was that kind of place.

  Some of them didn’t really know how to look after themselves, and I found that in assisting them I was satisfying a need in myself to help others. At this point, I began to think seriously about a career in the social services.

  I stayed with the Osbornes for a year and a half, living with my grandmother and walking to and from work every day. Nearly every day, I would be accosted by three teenage girls, some of my worst persecutors, screaming abuse and obscenities. I began to believe that there would never be an end to this kind of thing. It was so depressing. I desperately needed an enormous uplift, both humanly and spiritually.

  By now, I had moved on from the Baptists, much to Nanny’s disgust, and for a brief time attended an Anglican church. But eventually, and I suppose inevitably, because of my background, I returned to the Catholic Church.

  I was aware too that, of the thousands of religious orders that exist, most of them are Catholic, and though other religions treat most of these orders as oddities, the Catholic religion considers them quite normal. That also appealed to me. I approved of a religion that found these supposed oddities normal, just as I found normal the odd characters in the nursing home where I work
ed.

  I had read GK Chesterton’s St Francis of Assisi and gradually my desire to help other people began to merge with the idea of becoming a friar.

  I could have gone on working for the Osbornes for another five years and gained the work experience to help run a similar home myself, but by then the call of Catholicism was already too strong to ignore. And, on a tragic note, John Osborne died at that time, shortly followed by his wife.

  In September 1975, I left the home for crazy people and started work at a Catholic hostel for the homeless in the centre of Manchester. To my surprise and relief, they had accepted me without credentials. They regarded my work there as a test for me before entering a seminary.

  As the result of this successful tryout, in January the following year, as human and sinful as I am, I committed myself irrevocably to a life of service under God and took the first step which would eventually lead to my becoming a friar in the Franciscan Order.

  Postscript

  The Reverend Stanley Thomas remained a close friend of Father Michael Seed until his death on 7 March this year. After leaving Knowl View School in 1979, where he had become Deputy Headmaster, he became vicar of a small parish church in Wales before retiring. He was 75.

  Nanny Mary ‘Polly’ Ramsden moved to a controlled bungalow for the elderly in the centre of Bolton when Michael left home in 1975, and lived there until 1986, when she entered The Little Sisters of the Poor nursing home in Leeds. After a lifetime committed to the Salvation Army and the Baptists she died there, two years later, aged 94, as a Roman Catholic.

  Florence Seed, the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’, died in December 1977, aged 85. She is buried, with her husband, two sons and daughter, Sheila, who died in 2003 aged 79, in a shared grave in Allerton Cemetery, near Halewood.

  The ashes of Lillian Seed, Father Michael’s mother, rest in Bolton, 25 miles from the Seed family plot in Halewood: as separated in death from her husband Joe as she was during their marriage.

  In September 2002, David Higgins, 62, was jailed for 12 months in Manchester after admitting he had preyed on children while working and living at Knowl View School in Rochdale, where, the court was told, he was regarded as a father figure to the boys, who came from troubled backgrounds. He pleaded guilty to 11 counts of indecent assault and gross indecency with a child. The pupils who gave evidence had been at the school in the early 1970s and came forward after the launch of Operation Cleopatra, Greater Manchester Police’s biggest-ever investigation into child abuse in residential homes, which began in 1997. He was banned from working with children for life and ordered to sign the Sex Offenders’ Register.

  Higgins had two other convictions for indecently assaulting children. In 1976, in Leeds he had been given a 12-month conditional discharge, and in Skipton in 1983 he was placed under two years’ probation. Both courts had been unaware of his activities at Knowl View.

  Knowl View Special School for Emotionally and Behaviourally Disturbed Children remained operational for 21 years after Michael Seed left. It was partially burned down by its then pupils and was shut down by Rochdale Council in 1995 amid allegations of sexual abuse and mismanagement.

  Epilogue

  Though the story of my childhood ended when I was 17, the story of my road to manhood and my chosen vocation within the Catholic Church had only just begun.

  It was not a simple route I took. In fact, my journey towards God was rather like navigating a three-dimensional maze of mirrors with a constantly moving centre.

  It was a fascinating journey, full of wonderful characters, often funny, sometimes difficult and occasionally quite terrifying. As in any great maze, there were dead ends and false trails and tempting openings to lure me in the wrong direction.

  But I never lost my belief that it was God who was guiding my footsteps and that, if I listened to Him, I must ultimately arrive at the right destination.

  My first steps towards God were faltering and uncertain. I did not know even if I was heading in the right direction. I was still only 17 and working in the nursing home in Bolton when I made my first moves towards breaking with the strict and particular Baptists. I had experienced the heavy influences of liberalism and universality and no longer wanted to belong to a tiny and exclusive sect.

  Mr Thomas, my teacher at Knowl View School, had broadened my concepts and I had begun to develop a stronger faith as a Christian. But I needed to find some expression and wasn’t sure where to direct it, and in my search I turned first to the Anglican Church.

  The obvious choice was Bolton Parish Church, which was close to where we lived, but when I walked in I was completely overwhelmed. It is an enormous church, about the size of Canterbury Cathedral, and I found it almost frightening.

  Much better, I thought, to ease my way in with something more manageable and I plumped for St Paul’s, a smaller church conveniently sited by the main bus stop in Bolton market. St Paul’s was deeply evangelical, which was extremely Low Church, and fitted well with the traditions I had already adopted from the Salvation Army and the Baptists.

  Canon Colin Craston was a committed Low Church man and one of the leaders of the evangelical tradition in Britain. A tough, uncompromising man. At least, sadly, that’s the way he came across to me.

  After my first visit to St Paul’s I asked if we could talk and he sat me down there and then in a pew and told me to say my piece. My account of my somewhat complex religious background, which ended with my baptism, by full immersion, into the Baptist Church, took me almost an hour, and he listened patiently, in silence, until I had finished.

  His first comment took me completely by surprise. ‘You, Michael, are a Catholic.’

  I said, ‘I’m certainly not. Catholics aren’t Christians.’

  I noticed he didn’t bother to disagree with this statement, but he repeated, ‘You are a Catholic. Were you baptised?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I now understand that I was baptised a Catholic as a baby.’

  ‘Well, you’re a Catholic then.’

  I reminded him I had been baptised a Baptist when I was 15. Didn’t that cancel out what had happened to me as a baby?

  ‘No,’ he told me. ‘You’re definitely still a Catholic.’

  ‘I know what I am and it’s not that,’ I insisted. ‘I really don’t care what you think I am, but what I want to be is a member of the Church of England.’

  Strangely, had it not been for that mad conversation with Canon Craston, I would not have actually considered universality in the sense that the word ‘Catholic’ means universal. One evening that week, and in the week that followed, he insisted on my spending time at his residence, listening to him expound on the differences between Catholics and Anglicans. It made not a scrap of difference to him how much I protested that this wasn’t necessary. That I had been considering becoming a Baptist pastor and had attended Bible College at Birkenhead on several weekends with that aim in mind.

  ‘I am an evangelical,’ I kept telling him. ‘I am not a Catholic, so why are you wasting our time giving me all the differences?’

  The result of these lectures was really hilarious. He hammered home the differences between the two churches so convincingly that I ended up thinking to myself, My God, the Catholic Church actually appears more attractive.

  But by this time the good canon had determined that I should be formally received into his church in the middle of Evensong, to publicly recant my belief in the Catholic Church.

  ‘You will have to denounce the heresies of the Church of Rome in front of the whole congregation,’ he said.

  I was as nervous as any other 17-year-old and I certainly didn’t want to let him down, but I had to protest. ‘I’ve already told you that I’m not a Catholic and I don’t really want to renounce being what I’m not, either privately or publicly.’

  ‘You were baptised as a baby and you have to do it,’ he said.

  I suddenly realised that, to him, my conversion had become a political as well as a personal issue. I cou
ldn’t conceive that any Roman Catholic in Bolton had ever renounced his faith publicly and become an Anglican. This wasn’t a normal happening. It was more like something out of Oliver Cromwell’s times.

  At this point, I had decided that I didn’t want to go through with the ceremony. But I did it anyway – out of fear. I also had a horror of letting people down.

  Nor were my fears eased by the reaction of my local Baptist pastor when I told him I was about to join the Church of England.

  ‘You will be leading souls to hell if you become an Anglican,’ he warned me.

  The thought flashed into my mind: perhaps I had better go for gold and become a Catholic, then I can really lead them to hell.

  On that dreadful Sunday when Canon Craston called me forward to the altar, I felt that I was walking towards a gallows. He had a whole list of things I had to denounce, half of which I didn’t totally understand the meaning of.

  ‘Do you denounce the teachings of Rome, which are contrary to Scripture?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Do you abhor belief in Mary?’

  ‘I do.’

  On and on it went, until finally he welcomed me into the Church of England.

  When it was all over, I was doubly certain that I did not want to remain an Anglican. If this was the Church of England, I wanted none of it.

  Ironically, though, it was his trying to make me an Anglican which brought me back to the Catholic Church.

  In the midst of all this nonsense, I felt I had to talk to someone else about what was happening. I continued attending St Paul’s for two more Sundays.

  Instead, I plucked up my courage and went to a service at St Peter’s, the vast and intimidating parish church, and there I met the lovely, almost saintly Reverend Sydney Clayton, who turned out to be Stanley Thomas’s intellectual double. He was a progressive Anglican and really rather grand, and was the number two at St Peter’s.