6

BARROWS GREEN: JOY AND CONFUSION

Thin boy of rather pert and impish appearance, not robust. Ephedrine for enuresis.

Another Dr Barnardo’s Home: it is summertime. I am in the countryside, under a large oak tree, in a wide and sloping field; the orphanage, Barrows Green, in Westmorland. Looking up I see a thin silken thread, taut and hanging down. At the end of it is a twirling, skinny caterpillar. I am transfixed by this new experience: a creature, moving as I would do at play, swinging down on a rope; and above is the thick-leafed oak tree – and the warmth of the sunny day surrounds me. Only this moment is my entire world.

There the new Home sat, on a rise of its own land; many-roofed, with a lawn at the back, running to a ha-ha, its lead-lined windows glinted in the sunshine. Along its holly-shadowed drive, its surround of dense woods, and its solitary position on the hill, the house presented itself as a haunted place.

Inside, the candle holders on the corridor walls had just been replaced by electricity bulbs. Or was this picturing to my child’s mind just the appearance of things? Or the conjured-up imagery through the dim corridors; the accompanying echo of the grandfather clock chimes; or the beckoning silence of the huge stairway, its balustrade in dark wood?

All the children, like campers at a newly discovered site, scrabbled about, and we began to make our mark: this deserted territory was ours. We did settle for a while on the lawn at the field side of the house. There we gathered the daisies. ‘Let’s make a daisy chain?’ a boy suggested. ‘Yes! Yes!’ our voices agreed. We concentrated on picking the daisies, pinching a small gap in the stalk and threading the next daisy stalk and flower through. So we continued till a necklace of white daisies with their yellow centre decorated each of our necks. We giggled and admired them, sitting still for a time; least, till our attention moved off to other things, like a butterfly, on which we would jump up: ‘Catch it! Catch it! Bet you can’t!’ And we could not, as it bounced on the air and away.

The setting around the Home was of fields, dotted with grey hen sheds. I saw a horse pulling a plough over the land rise. There was a farm nearby, and a lot of emptiness all about. This place, Mr Clarke told us, was Westmorland.

Mr Clarke was to become my visiting devil, my presented horror. It was his mad-man wide grin which towered above me, and his dark eyes staring into mine; he was the Master of the Barrows Green Home. His report notes on me stated that I was “a highly strung, nervous type of boy; thin of rather pert and impish appearance, not robust.” Of my behaviour, he described me as being:

Very irresponsible and mischievous, tends to be disobedient and destructive when opportunity occurs. No very outstanding improvement can be claimed as yet.

Later on, he described me as, “Utterly undependable and restless and highly strung”. At school, I was “behind and not a trier”; I was “still on Ephedrine for enuresis”. By 1949 I had “Generally improved… occasional enuresis”.

‘Come now, boys,’ (this Home, like all the Dr Barnardo’s Homes I occupied, had male-only children) Mr Clarke instructed and, as usual, approaching us menacingly, his brown rotten teeth in a grimace of some imagined pleasure, his thin moustache, two dark lines above his quivering lips, ‘get your tea from Matron’. I did not like the grey spit often appearing at the corners of his mouth.

He would pass by us with a flap of his beige corduroy trousers and beige safari shirt, rubbing his hands together; his expressed pleasure, no doubt a plan being hatched, or re-lived, in his mind. His quick short-step walk then, thankfully, would take his hunched presence away from our fearing eyes, and into the dim distance that led to his office lair, far along at the end of the ground floor corridor.

One Saturday afternoon, I was told to hurry up the wide stone steps, leading from the house-side path to the back cellar entrance. I was slow and sulky at being shouted at, and so displayed my resistance to instruction.

‘Change your face. Get up here quickly!’ The Master faced down upon me.

I started up the bottom step. Next moment I was lying on the pathway; I had flown through the air – been thrown. I got up and silently began up the steps again. The Master turned away his angry face and walked off, not bothering with me. I did not feel hurt anywhere – I was thin and light, and anyway, only a child. I soon forgot about it.

Mr Clarke became the instigator of mental torture to me. I had caused some misdemeanour – I do not remember what. I was sent to him. I stood before him in the polished, main hall corridor – he had met me even before I had reached his sitting room door.

‘Now what have you been doing? Something very naughty, I suppose.’

I stood there, expectant and in fear. ‘Don’t know,’ I whispered.

He grinned, showing his brown gappy teeth. He smelt strongly of tobacco. His dark hair was slick and flattened back over his crown.

‘You know’ – he lifted his arms, and joined his hands, rubbing them together, his hair-covered fingers incessantly intertwining – ‘you will be hung on a cross, if you don’t behave yourself. Your arms will be cut off and your legs cut off.’

I stared, open-face, in shock at the image he was creating in my mind – I knew all about the Cross, Jesus, his suffering and the Crucifixion. The image of hanging there, fixed, began to haunt my brain.

‘Your eyes will be blinded and your tongue cut off.’ He leered at me. I felt trapped as his eyes travelled over my body; they felt to be touching me every place they covered. Froth stuff was appearing at the corners of his mouth. ‘And we’ll cut off that small willie there.’ He sniggered. ‘Yes.’ He thought a moment, still staring at me. ‘Get back to the playroom now.’

He walked off, briskly, in small steps, away into the dim of the corridor. I stood, stunned. He couldn’t have punished me more – now and in the future. I wandered away, more distanced from people and the normality of social intercourse than ever before; my mind barely hung on to the taut guy ropes of my Christian teaching, for my inner world was desolate. And in bed that night, my imagination could find no escape from my fate. I could not even cry – the limits of my mental being were fixed; I slept then, my body stiff with anxiety, my mind pained in fear.

But the morning came and the day took my attention over, and the previous day’s trauma sank into my being. The routine, and its security of expectedness, gave the rhythm of life at Barrows Green. My companionship was the birds and creatures of the woods, fields and grounds, including the lawns and orchard; the small chicken shed with its dry stifling smell inside, and its flapping group of squawking hens fluffing up fallen feathers into my face (for I squeezed my way in one day, out of curiosity) also took my attention.

And the flower beds and gardens: all an expanse of cared-for abundance; though this space was no real comfort for the exchange of society, with the hub and flow of the city I had lost. Even a village would have shown me the weave of daily life: of relationships, of family-meaning, birth, marriages, and family death. I sensed that there was something other, out there – a place, an area, than the place I was now living in. I did not feel that I belonged here. I entrenched myself as an observer of this domain – it did not belong to me.

My Homes report, written by Mr Clarke, stated:

There is appreciable all-round improvement in boy. His enuretic trouble is much diminished and his nervous reactions are much improved.

* * *

This was a time, in my seventh year, that I went home to my mother and granny for Christmas:

22.9.1948	Letter to Mr Lewis (House parent), asking him to call on mother and let us have report on home conditions, as she wishes to have boy home for Xmas.
22.11.1948	Letter to Mr Clarke, Barrows Green House, informing him we are looking in the matter of boy spending Xmas with mother.
22.11.1948	Report from Mr Lewis, Liverpool, mother lives with maternal grandmother and home contains four rooms, two bedrooms. Mother was decorating one bedroom for Eric, she has a single bed for him; she will sleep with grandmother. Grandmother is partially deaf and blind, but house was clean and tidy. Mother is employed as part-time weaver at local mill, wages £3 p.w. (To Mr Clarke, Barrows Green, informed him Xmas leave granted.)

Of this home stay I have little memory, but happy ones. Of moving back and forward in Gran’s black shiny rocking chair; of fascination with the open fire centred in the black cooking range, of the living room; of the cosy warmth of the cottage – and the large form of my mother, for Gran was little. And so quick, my stay was soon over. I left with odd feelings: sorrow at leaving, but happy picturing the Home’s busy life; confused too, why I had to go back to the Barnardo Home, when my mother and Gran were here – and without me.

* * *

Older boys were also at Barrows Green; younger ones were the likes of me, at around seven years of age, going up to boys of sixteen or even seventeen. There was plenty of opportunity for peer group exploration – and abuse from older boys; the wide grounds, fields and woods, all offered privacy and protection from the eyes of authority.

Attention on me started before I can really remember: it was the next Home Superintendent, Mr Savidge, commenting that he found me in bed the day he arrived, put there in the mid-afternoon hours. It was reported to him that I was isolated upstairs: ‘“for being rude” – you had your pyjamas turned back to front.’

Thankfully, Mr Clarke was not long in authority at this Home, and had been replaced by Mr Savidge. I could not quite believe that I would not see Mr Clarke again – that the new Master would always be here, in his place. ‘Is Mr Clarke really gone?’ I asked Master one Sunday afternoon, when I saw him standing quietly looking out of the empty dining room windows.

‘Don’t look so troubled.’ Master stared at me a moment. I waited before him, feeling small beneath his much taller height.

‘I assure you Eric; Mr Clarke has left for good. I am in charge of the Home now.’

I beamed a smile at Master; he was in charge of the Home now – Mr Clarke had ‘left for good’. I felt safer now. I ran down the corridor, happy – and there was the freedom of the Sunday afternoon walk to come.

* * *

My earliest memory of sexual attention was when being around a small fire the older boys had made in the middle woods in a clearing, with deep dark spaces behind our backs and surrounding us. A small gang of various ages gathered: ‘Let’s see it, Eric.’ All eyes and leering faces turned to me. I shrank into my sitting position; I knew they wanted something of me – and their attention, for some odd reason (I barely sensed), was on my willie. I resisted, said nothing, and shifted uncomfortably. But I had to show them – and they gazed, till I pulled up my shorts, with a wary eye kept on my fireside companions.

Of course, I had my fancies – if a little boy can have such attraction for older boys. Even as I followed such boys around, I was becoming what I had been shaped to be from my first experience of sudden detachment: an outsider, a loner. I was comfortable and safe in my own company; as I have said, the woods and creatures were my true friends. ‘This is Barrows Green. You will like it here.’

Sometimes the house staff were happy, and the Home’s atmosphere lightened up, as if everyone was glad the children were about. Such times, it seemed, fitted in with a ditty that was in the air, about the Home:

If I knew you were comin’ I’d have baked a cake

baked a cake, baked a cake

If I knew you were comin’ I’d have baked a cake

Howd-ya do? Howd-ya do? How’d-ya do?

This buzzed round in my head at the time, and I liked it: it seemed to match the sunshine and the freedom of the trees I saw as I gazed from my small dormitory window, having wandered upstairs to get some self-presence and stillness, in my own company.

Mockingbird Hill was another song I liked; the light and happy female voice of Patti Page made me happy too:

Tra-la-la, tweedle dee dee it gives me a thrill

To wake up in the morning to the mocking’ bird’s trill.

Miss Naylor, one of the female house parents, noticed me; she gave me attention, and she behaved kindly. I had feelings of friendship toward her because of her quiet nature: not loud-talking or telling children off all the time.

As well as Miss Naylor, there was another houseparent I liked: a bigger female, very chubby and motherly. In spare minutes of the weekend I liked to sit on the bath edge and watch as Miss Talbot rinsed out the bed sheets. I was transfixed by the strength and size of her forearms as she rung the sheet into tight furls letting out the clear water into the bath. She would smile at me watching her. Her nature was soft and this was a puzzle to me: that she appeared big and strong yet was gentle and friendly. And I never heard her shout at us, but she could be serious in instructing us some times. She let me be myself, which I liked – not demanding anything, or any particular behaviour, from me. It was between these two female staff that I wanted to be near, for they had care for me.

It was here at Barrows Green that I became conscious that I “wet the bed”. I did not like the whole procedure of the orange-coloured rubber underlay being changed, and my sheet taken for washing. I had done wrong, I thought, as there was such fuss being made of it. Wetting the bed did not seem a regular occurrence, but I did it intermittently. ‘Eric not yet suitable for adoption’ would be written in my records. I later wondered if my bed-wetting was the reason. It was too late for any adoption a couple of years down the line, as I was “settling in”: it would “be disruptive for Eric, as he gets on very well with the other boys”. So that was that for the last opportunity of a conventional family life.