Dispatches From a Dilettante

by Paul Rowson

  Driving into town a couple of years later I was aware of a car coming up close and at speed alongside me. It was the same Dolomite Sprint with Smally gesticulating frantically for me to pull over. He insisted on taking me there and then for a drink at the Hayfield which was a notorious Chapeltown pub frequented by, shall we say ‘characters’. The fact that he was known by everyone there suggested that he too might be living the life of a ‘character’ but I had a great afternoon as we told anyone and everyone the story of the greatest race ever run.

  In terms of the comedy preferences I have always been a ‘new man’ even before the term was invented. There was no excuse for some for the racist and homophobic bile that so called ‘comedians’ passed off as humour in the seventies and beyond. My rule of thumb then was to ask myself if the comedian would feel comfortable telling his joke at say the West Indian Centre or the Irish Centre. I mention this because what I am about to relate, happened exactly as I am about to relate it, and I think they would have laughed even at the Irish Centre.

  Liam O’Kane was a likeable, but painfully shy fourteen year old who appeared mid-term when his family relocated from a hamlet in rural Ireland to Leeds. He arrived the week before the annual sponsored walk, which raised much needed funds for the school and showed staff and pupils off in a very good light. Everyone had a job and preparations had spilled over into lesson time.

  In an attempt to involve Liam, make him feel welcome and with the added intention of helping overcome his shyness, I asked him to come with me to the local hardware shop. Incidentally the reason the shop owner came up with the finishing tape for the sprint so readily was the amount of business he got around sponsored walk time. I had given Liam a list and as he edged towards the counter the friendly guy behind it sized up the situation immediately.

  “Good morning son, can I help you?”

  (Hesitantly from Liam) “er yes I want to buy some nails”

  “Fine ….how long do you want them?”

  (Liam growing in confidence) “I want to keep them”

  Liam’s dad, who I later got to know, had obtained employment as the janitor/handyman at a residential special needs school near Wetherby and he tipped me off about a job coming up that would offer considerably more in the way of salary than I was currently earning. The phrase ‘Special Needs’ had not been invented then and the official school name was ‘Ingmanthorpe Hall – A Residential School for culturally deprived and socially maladjusted boys’. Talk about labelling! This crumbling Victorian pile was to be my place of work for the next eighteen months, but within weeks I was looking at the ‘Jobs Vacant’ columns with a growing sense of desperation.

  7.

  A LOT TO ANSWER FOR 1978-1980

  For the owners this was a money making operation from the start. Damaged young boys from dysfunctional families were the cash cow. A local authority would spend, at that time, around a hundred and twenty pounds a week per child who, for the sake of dignity I will refer to as having ‘special needs’, rather than the label used at the time. Ingmanthorpe Hall (‘for socially maladjusted and culturally deprived boys’) could do it for a hundred and ten and also take the hassle of dealing with the ensuing trauma that arrived with each new resident.

  The co- owners were not evil, and in their own way cared to some extent about their charges, but the whole point of the enterprise was to make money. In due course I was to visit similar local authority run places that were many times worse and some of the boys did leave Ingmanthorpe Hall in better shape than when they arrived. Given what they had to endure when they were at home any improvement should not, in theory, have been hard to achieve.

  As a child I often spent the few minutes in the dentist’s waiting room reading the old copies of the Reader’s Digest left there. It used to have a regular feature which went out under the heading ‘Laughter – the best medicine’, and even though there were sad stories and bleak times at Ingmanthorpe Hall, the resilience of the human spirit and the knowing humour required for survival was never absent for long.

  Brian Watson was a troubled fifteen year old with all sorts of nervous ticks and bizarre speech patterns and so even in the most dire situations came out with sentences and word formations that were guaranteed to diffuse incipient tensions. After hearing about another win by Liverpool, who he supported fanatically from a distance, Brian would say “That EMILY Hughes had a great game”. In fact to give us the benefit of his post match analysis Brian had come over to a member of staff and I who were chatting and butted in with “Apologies for interdupting the condensation Mr Rawlstron”. He would happily walk around singing Mull of Kintyre, a Paul McCartney’s hit of the time, loudly and without embarrassment “Oh Mill of Kentucky, I miss strolling down by the sea”. When I pushed him a little on his work in class he blew a fuse and ran out screaming at no one in particular, “there’s nothing wrong with my bastard brasswork”.

  On my second day Brian had come up to me in the playground with a serious look on his face.

  “You work here don’t you,” which he delivered somehow as both a question and a statement. I replied that I did and having had his suspicions confirmed Brian went on to ask

  “You know our head teacher don’t you?”

  I confirmed that indeed I did.

  “Would you give him a message please?”

  I said that I’d be delighted to at which juncture Brian already laughing manically had started to run away.

  “Tell him to fuck off”.

  Brian was one of the few who gradually settled and stabilised but more than once, when it all got too much for him, he would run away. When that happened he was easily found at the nearby slip road for the A1 completely oblivious to the fact that, although he was attempting to get to this home in Halifax, he was on the northern slip road potentially heading in the opposite direction for Newcastle.

  Jimmy Sturrock was a pathological liar whose untruths were of such epic scale that even the youngest of boys in the school could see through his porkers. When stable and on his medication he was friendly and desperate to please, but even then could not stop the invention of fabulous tales, such was his insecurity and need for status. A fairly typical example occurred during a lesson about ‘Flight’ which happened after the boys had just come back into residence from their half term break. They were often even more hyperactive at this time, having been back in the environment that caused many of their personality disorders in the first place.

  Jimmy, who hailed from a tough housing estate in Manchester, announced, with real concern in his voice, that two days previously a 747 in difficulties approaching the airport had been forced to divert and make an emergency landing in his road. This provoked ‘hoots’ of derision from the rest of the class and I had to remind myself not to join in. Jimmy, sensing that this wasn’t going down well, attempted a recovery of sorts by then adding words to the effect that his road was very wide and so there were no injuries and obviously, because there was a safe landing, the papers hadn’t reported it. Despite the hole that he was digging for himself the only concession Jimmy made was that it might not have been a 747.

  I once went to Jimmy’s home and was never remotely tempted to laugh at him again. Part of the staff teaching contract involved driving the mini bus to get the kids home at the end of each term. Often I was allocated the South Yorkshire /Lincolnshire coast run which meant dropping them off at a grim rural council house or bleak and bare flat in some run down coastal town. Although they lived in different areas, in different streets, in different buildings with different numbers, all of them were going home to no hope city.

  Arriving at Jimmy’s and parking behind a burned out car he asked me to come in. As I still had three others in the van I said that I would stick my head round the door to say hello. Having worked in ‘deprived areas’ for much of my life I was still shocked at the interior of Jimmy’s home. No matter that no greeting was extended to him and certainly none to me by the pallid teenager sprawled on a bare mattress.
There was no furniture to speak of, a filthy cooker and stained bare boards. A fresh pile of dog shit in the corner emitted an odour that made me want to gag and the filth on the window made the light coming from the bare bulb a necessity. Our eyes met and I knew that he knew what was going through my head. So Jimmy Sturrock, if you are alive today, I hope you have had some fun in your life and maybe even a flight on a 747 – you deserve it.

  Not all the houses were like Jimmy’s. John May’s mother was a single parent who kept a small tidy flat behind a bingo hall in Cleethorpes. As this was on my regular drop off route I had struck up a few conversations with her on past ‘deliveries’. John was always the last to be dropped off and at this point after driving for over three hours an offer of a cup of tea was welcome. John was one of the least troubled kids and the propensity to go into wild tantrums for trivial reasons was his only big challenge. The first thing any visitor could hardly fail to notice was that, although immaculate, the entire surface of every wall was covered in pictures of minor pop stars with many having scrawled handwritten notes on them to John’s mother Annie. It was clear she was a groupie and if I hadn’t guessed Annie confirmed my suspicion before the tea was poured. She cheerily gave me a quick summation of recent conquests complaining that as the town was experiencing hard times, the best venues had closed and gigs were few and far between. I didn’t like to say that I couldn’t recall Cleethorpes ever having been regarded as an essential stop off on rock tours.

  Annie was brutally honest and her rationale was unimpeachable. John’s dad had disappeared years ago, local single men were dull and unreliable and she didn’t want to move away from her mother who lived nearby. There was an authenticity to her frankness that had an endearing quality to it. Unfortunately on the last occasion that I dropped John off there was a new poster on the wall. It was of the fifties band pop combo Lord Rockingham’s Eleven. They had one big hit with ‘Hoots Mon’ which can still be heard via YouTube. They must have reformed for a final tour and last payday. What disturbed me was the fact that all of them had individually thanked Annie for her ‘hospitality’.

  One of the worst cars I ever owned was a clapped out Alfa Romeo and this coincided with the period I worked at Ingmanthorpe Hall. It was jinxed in every respect and constantly breaking down. The latest failure to deliver me to my destination had necessitated another visit to the garage where a careless mechanic had turned his blow torch onto the rear wing and burnt the paint off. As they had no match for the specialist Alfa Romeo yellow, they re-sprayed the area with the closest approximate hue that they had in stock. When I collected the car it looked as though someone had vomited on the rear wing and I decided there and then to sell it. All I needed was to identify a buyer as shallow and impressionable as I had been at the time of purchase and that person turned out to be a social worker visiting Ingmanthorpe Hall for a case conference.

  These monthly conferences were to assess progress of individual boys after their arrival and were taken very seriously, mainly because it gave the professional attendees (teachers, psychologists, social workers) a chance to practice professional jargon. At any given conference at least one professional contributor was more disturbed that the boy whose progress we were supposedly scrutinising. They seemed to go on forever and always over ran. This I soon realised was because the attendees, during the course of the conference and cocooned in a stress free environment discussing the theoretical progressive development of damaged young boys, were relieved of the more challenging task of actually interacting with them to effect that development.

  Even though the potential buyer of my car was a social worker and, unusually for his profession an aggressive type, I got over my personal dislike to start the selling operation. I waxed lyrical about the history of the marque, the aero dynamics of the Italian design and the high performance. In reality I had only been able to drive to school for the last five days because we lived on a hill and I could bump start it. He announced that he would come round to our house at the weekend with his wife to fully inspect the car and make a decision.

  Within seconds of seeing the vehicle his wife accurately observed that it would be an impractical purchase that would cost them a fortune to run. Despite the offer of fresh coffee and a newspaper in order to let her husband look at the engine (deeply and embarrassingly patronising and a pathetic example of gender stereotyping but I was desperate to sell), she insisted on staying with him and trying to dissuade him from completing the transaction. Nevertheless I could sense the ‘Alfa Romeo’ name was something that he clearly thought had kudos and when he made me a low cash offer I grabbed the money and waived them goodbye as they bump started their own personal drive towards unhappiness.

  As a firm believer in Karma I should have expected the retribution that was shortly to come my way. The great lawned area in front of Ingmanthorpe Hall had once been a cricket pitch and still served as one once every year, when the school staff took on a team of social workers. It was quite a formal and competitive game mainly because the setting demanded it. The original scoreboard was still in existence as were the rollers and even the wooden pavilion. Add to this the fact that there was no shortage of labour to keep score, prepare sandwiches and roll the wicket between innings, and to the casual observer it would appear that a proper cricket match was in progress. Sadly the standard of the players on both sides was erratic at best, and personal frustrations often led to tensions in a game that was always taken a little too seriously. There is something vaguely disturbing about middle aged men in denial about the loss of sporting abilities they probably never possessed in the first place, when in their so called ‘prime’.

  The social workers batted first and were mightily annoyed at three contentious LBW decisions had gone against them together with a highly dubious catch by our wicket keeper which dismissed their final batsman. They had some justification as I was the wicketkeeper who had failed to alert the umpire that the wonderful diving catch, taken by me to dismiss their familiar looking last man in, had in fact bounced just before I scooped it up. I was opening the batting after the tea break and strode out to the crease with a little muted encouragement from watching boys and a couple of sniggers.

  Their opening fast bowler seemed to be pacing out a very long run up and duly delivered a bouncer of venom and pace which nearly decapitated me. There was no let up, despite protestations from out captain that this was a ‘friendly’. It was only after the third consecutive bouncer that I realised the bowler was the recent purchaser of my ailing Alfa Romeo. He had been in possession of it for a week which seemed, from his nakedly aggressive demeanour, to have given him enough time to realise its numerous faults. Amazingly I had a recurrence of an old leg injury, was recorded as ‘retired injured’ in the scorebook and, to avoid scepticism from colleagues, I had to limp around for the next two days.

  The requirement to work every third weekend was not optional and it was hard to work out whether the boys, or the staff on duty, were most depressed. The gloom was lifted occasionally by trips out. Driving back from one such visit to York where the boys had, after strict admonition, been given the last half hour to themselves, I was overtaken by an agitated driver who swerved in front of me just before a set of traffic lights which were on red. This gave him the chance to get out of his car, rush up to my window and accuse the boys of stealing stock from his Arts and Crafts shop. We agreed to drive to a visible parking spot ahead to sort it out. In the thirty seconds it took to do that the boys howled their innocence in such an authentic manner that I too was convinced that a mistake had occurred. The shop owner was not to be placated until the boys and the vehicle were searched which in order to get back in time for tea, I agreed to.

  To mine, and the boys’ relief, nothing was found despite a painstakingly thorough search. This allowed me to curry favour with them by making the man apologise. He grudgingly did so and I further berated him for further lowering the self esteem of vulnerable boys. We arrived back for tea and I mentioned to the col
league who was using the bus that evening that I thought there may be a slow puncture in the rear offside tyre. Rather than risk it he decided to change the tyre there and then. I was half way through what passed for dessert when he motioned me to come outside. Ingeniously crammed in the spare tyre bay slung beneath the bus was a tray of expensive looking ethnic jewellery.

  We both understood the implications of having made this discovery. Many of the boys were used to police interrogation of a much more vigorous nature than any we might attempt and the time for that had passed. I had failed to note the address of the shop owned by the accuser or take his details and, shamefully as it was by now eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, I wanted to get home. However redress was made three weeks later. I had kept the jewellery with a plan in mind. After a little bit of research I was pretty sure that the contraband must have come from one of three shops and some further casual conversations over the next few days in school meant I had narrowed down the potential culprits to three boys. Ensuring that the three suspects were on board for my next trip to York, I stopped the van outside an Arts and Crafts Shop. I could tell by the surreptitious glances they gave to each other that I had lucked out straight away. Producing the jewellery from the glove compartment I instructed them to go in and give it back to the owner who I was confident would be pleasantly stunned and let the matter drop.

  What I had failed to factor in my planning was the fact that the shop had changed hands in this period and woman behind the counter thought that she was being offered stolen goods by scruffy looking young thugs. She was correct in her assumption that the jewellery was stolen but would not buy into the truthful rationale for its attempted return. They eventually found a home in an Oxfam shop and several life lessons had been learned but not by the people who should have been learning them.