One

Author in Search of a Character

The Story of Des Hurrion

On the silver snake to meet Des, I thought about how children in care rarely talked to each other about their fractured past, their torn up history.

Certainly that was the case at Burbank.

I knew Des Hurrion closely for five years and I never knew why I shared a home with him. He never told me his circumstances. I never told him mine.

Perhaps, we were not emotionally mature enough to do so. Or – and this I think is closer to the mark – we just accepted that life had badly twisted our fortunes, and that words were not necessary. We were in Burbank, we were in care, we had been floored.

What else could we do but try to get up?

Now, thirty years later, I was about to find out why Des lived with me at Burbank.

Des met me off the train. He wore a black coat, black trousers and shoes. His colours in no way mitigated the excitement that was palpable between us.

We now knew that come what may, we would be in each other’s lives until forever.

It was a good feeling.

Still, I was slightly uneasy. I wanted to ask Des a question, a question I could not ask him when we had first met in Hammersmith. That night, it would not have been appropriate, it would have been out of context.

Now, I wanted to see if Des could deliver the answer I sought.

I needed to ask Des about his affair with Julie, the married woman who ran our Home. Julie had taken Des away from me. He had been mine and then he became hers. I needed to know why and how that had happened.

Des and I walked to the nearby Chinese restaurant. When we entered, it was a quarter full, perfect for my needs.

Not too far away from where we sat was Des’s rented house where he spent his time writing sitcom scripts.

This had been his work for years but soon it would stop. His production company had just dropped him. None of his projects had got off the ground and the money he had been using to fund his writing was now dwindling.

‘I’ll finish the script I am working on at the moment,’ he said nonchalantly, ‘and then I will find another job. Probably get a quiet office job and do writing in my spare time.’

Des betrayed no bitterness at having to give up this work. Since leaving Burbank, he had lived in many places, worked at many jobs. These included barman, postman and IT manager.

In that sense, he had been much braver than me.

I’ve always been filled with an ambition directed towards a writing life. To be employed as anything else would, in my eyes, mark me as a burning failure.

Des was different. He marched to his own drum beat, cared not for the gossip of others. He would work as anything – and he did.

I told him that script-writing was the job I thought him perfect for.

He smiled, a little embarrassed. But it was true.

Des was not only the funniest boy at Burbank during my time there but he was easily the brightest, the most imaginative.

If you would have put money on anyone from the Burbank class of 1970 succeeding in life, Des Hurrion was the one you would have bet on.

He had an enviable intelligence. He once told me that at the age of ten he decided to teach himself French and Latin, which he duly did.

I wasn’t surprised at this achievement. Nothing seemed beyond his ken.

During the first three years of his stay at Burbank, Des attended a private school in Nottingham.

I have met and worked with many privately educated men but Des was not like any of them; he never used his intelligence as a sword, to wound or cut down others. He was not vindictive.

His was a graceful, generous intelligence, shot through with a warm wit that appealed to everyone in the Home, and I mean everyone.

From staff member to the youngest child, no one was exempted from Des Hurrion’s many charms.

Des contained a self-assurance that for a shy fearful boy like me was thoroughly addictive. It still is. I have always envied people who appeared self-possessed, confident, looked like they knew exactly what they were doing in life, their faces seemingly untroubled by the world.

I keenly noted them on London tubes and buses, on the street, in work places, in shops, in clubs, in cafés and restaurants, and I yearned for just a smidgen of their self-possession. I thought, if I could just have a little of their magic and then my world will be a beautiful place to live in. And on such notions do fools build their castles.

At Burbank, Des made me feel that anything was possible, that despite living in care, the future was mine to mould into whatever shape I so desired. He shrugged off limitations. He did not even acknowledge them.

How I loved him for that. How I envied him for that.

Then Julie seduced him and he was no longer mine. Once I had a hundred per cent of Des. Now, I only had fifty.

I have handled many difficult things in life but rejection burns me like nothing else.

Yet, I couldn’t blame Des.

That song Bobby Goldsborough used to sing on the radio to Des and me about loving an older woman in summer, said it all. He was seventeen and she was thirty-five. Who could resist? I would have done exactly the same.

The affair lasted months and only I knew about it.

Certainly, Barry, Julie’s husband didn’t, or he would have torn the Home down, brick by brick.

Des even shacked up with Julie for a while. This was after she and Barry had split up for good and he had moved far away. But it didn’t last. How could it? The thrill had gone.

Suddenly, they no longer worried about being caught in compromising positions. Now they worried about mortgages and jobs, the nine to five life.

Des was never cut out for that existence. He still isn’t.

Thinking about this now, perhaps there was another reason for hunting Des down, a selfish reason. Perhaps by simply being with him I thought I would once again feel my future turning gold, see the world opening up in front of my eyes, just as it did back in my youth when Des and I sat together in the sitting room and played records, or talked in the garden, sitting there with a ball at our feet, the sun placed high above us in a careless blue sky.

‘I’m still not sure,’ he said carefully, ‘if I should tell you everything about my life and what happened, but because it is you,’ he ruefully smiled, ‘I probably will.’

Forty-nine years old now, Des retained a face that time had rendered quite keen. His dark hair was pushing back a bit but that just served to emphasise his large brown eyes. The skin around those eyes remained relatively unwrinkled and his constant expression was one of being slightly amazed by what was going on around him. When you discovered what he had been through as child and man, that was no big surprise.

I pushed the tape recorder across towards him.

‘What better time than now to start the talk?’ I said.

‘What better time indeed?’ he replied.

‘And don’t forget to do Julie.’

Des laughed out loud at my unintended double entendre.

‘To do Julie,’ he repeated, mimicking my London accent.

He swigged again at his beer and finished it off.

‘But first,’ he said, as he signalled for more alcohol, ‘a little background material.’

* * *

Des Hurrion was born on 23rd July 1956, in Paddington, London.

His mother, Mary, was a Catholic Irish girl who crossed the Irish Sea in the early fifties and found work in London as a chambermaid.

She met a young engineer who persuaded her to do that which she shouldn’t, and Mary fell pregnant. The father disappeared, last heard of living in Shepherd’s Bush.

The mother was broken by anguish. Her religion was strict and unforgiving on such matters. Having babies out of wedlock was a mortal sin. Now, hell itself beckoned.

‘The plan was to have me adopted the minute I arrived,’ Des said. ‘So she went to a mother and baby home in Highgate and I was born.’

As is always the way in these matters, Highgate is less than a mile away from where I now live.

When Des appeared, the inevitable occurred; the mother’s maternal instincts reared up, completely consumed her. Suddenly, she could not abandon her baby son.

A new plan was required to keep her in Des’s life.

‘She had me fostered to a family in Addlestone, Surrey,’ Des said.

‘Meanwhile, she tried to find a job as a housekeeper – she was a very good cook – and once she had done that she thought she would then take me back and bring me up in the house she was working in. I was taken to this foster family just before my first Christmas.’

He paused, reached for his beer.

‘You know, I have never spent Christmas with my real mum.’

I asked Des if he at least knew the nationality of his father?

‘I first heard about my father when I was fifteen,’ he explained. ‘If you remember I had a talent for playing the piano and my social worker wondered where that talent had come from, so on her own initiative she found out about my father.

‘She visited me at Burbank one day with a document and reading it she said she had found out that my father was an engineer.

‘She said the document had more information about him and some information about my birth mother; I told her I didn’t want to know.

‘Subsequently,’ he continued, ‘I traced my birth mother. During that process I learned four things about my father: he was Irish, he was twenty-eight when I was conceived, he lived in Shepherd’s Bush, his name was Ben Kavanagh and he did a runner as soon as he found out my mother was pregnant.’

I had never met my father either, I told Des, and I believed I never would.

‘How come?’ he asked.

When my mother fell pregnant with me, she was a long-term patient in a Surrey hospital. Naturally, her condition created a huge scandal.

Urgent questions had to be raised. How had this happened? Who was the father? A doctor, heaven forbid? A nurse, heaven forbid? A patient? A groundsman? An outsider?

Whoever it was, a cover up was required, a cover up that existed to this day.

Moreover, my mother never gave up his name, either to the authorities or, later to me.

Two days after my birth I was placed in care and then fostered.

Des too was fostered but his experience had been different to mine. His foster parents adored him. Mine made my childhood a living hell. Des’s people sought to give him a kind of loving. Mine cruelly berated me all day long.

Such is the turning of the cards.

Des’s foster dad was a glazier by trade and the mum stayed at home.

They had two daughters of their own but they were giving, loving people who were moved to foster abandoned children. Des was later to become their fourth adoption.

‘I think my saving grace – my sanity – is that I was really loved in those early years by my adopted parents and by my real mother who came and visited at least once a fortnight,’ Des said.

Ironically, a battle between Des’s two mothers, his real mum and his foster mum, started to take shape. The battle for Des’s heart lasted for two years. Then Mary, Des’s birth mother, found work as a steward on a boat sailing round the world.

It was there that Mary met a young man whose entices she could not resist. She fell pregnant again.

The father now gave Mary a cold choice. Either come to America with me, or raise Des and the new baby on your own.

One or the other.

Mary acquiesced to her lover. She chose him over her son. On a day he would never forget, Mary visited Des and told him that she would not see him anymore.

She was starting up a new life and he would not be in it.

This day, this very day, was the last time they would ever see each other.

Des was just three-and-a-half years old.

‘I remember it so well,’ Des said. ‘She told me she was going to America, which is a very stupid thing to say to a three-and-a-half-year-old because America might as well be Isleworth. And then she just walked.’

As she walked away, Des instinctively turned to his foster parents, his safety net. He believed they would catch him and hug him and tell him everything was going to be alright. That the world still existed and he still had a place in it, an important place. But he was wrong.

They did not reach out to him. They did not cuddle him, or embrace him. They too, like Des, stood frosted in confusion.

The effect of their inaction would haunt Des in the most terrible way.

‘My foster parents were good people,’ Des said, ‘but they had been born in the 1900s and they didn’t know how to show emotion or affection. I wasn’t allowed to show any anger or frustration. What was worse is that when my real mum took me out as a kid, she would say, we’ll be together one day and it will all be wonderful. She built up this fairy story which I subliminally took in.

‘When she walked out on me that day the fairy story was gone and suddenly I was in harsh reality. She created a fantasy world we were going to be in. Then she left me and that world was gone.’

To deal with the loss, the pain, the confusion, Des reached for every child’s first line of defence – fantasy. Every day, he imagined his mum returning to rescue him and taking him off to a lovely house and there he would find laughter and smiles and sunshine days and happy ever afters.

He kept this picture alive his whole childhood.

He had to, otherwise he was dead.

You and I both, I told him.

The years passed. Financially, they were difficult. The sharp edges of poverty started closing in on the family. In all aspects of his life, from food to clothing, there was want.

‘I used to have to wear my sister’s blouse to school,’ he said, ‘and of course they button up the wrong way to the boys. I used to get so paranoid that someone would notice. I had to wear her shoes. My feet are knackered now because the shoes were too tight for me.’

At school, Des did not shine. His grades were continually low. He also failed his eleven plus. Not hard to see why. Motherless children rarely prosper academically. Other things on their mind, you see.

Yet Des was lucky. Unlike me, he had a great aptitude for learning music. At home, he played piano, played it extremely well.

Often, when he practised, though, his dad ordered him to play quieter. A streak of anger would then rise in Des and he found himself silently wishing his father would die.

‘Unfortunately,’ Des said, ‘I got my wish.’

In May 1969, his adoptive father contracted emphysema and took to his bed. Des was scheduled to go on a week’s holiday at a scout camp. The day before Des’s departure, his dad called for him.

‘My dad was a fun loving man,’ Des said, ‘but when he got the illness he became a real curmudgeon. So I walked into the downstairs room and I thought, oh God, here we go again. But when I walked in he was all smiles. He gave me a ten bob note or a pound – I can’t remember – but he did it because I was off to scout camp. I couldn’t believe it. So I went off to scout camp.

‘When I got back my adopted brother ran out of the house and said, “Dad’s dead.” I remember my foster mother hugging me, which was something she never did, and it being really quite uncomfortable. I didn’t like that at all. We were poor then but now we were even poorer.’

His father’s death was merely the prelude to the darkened storm heading his way.

Not long after burying the father, the foster mother’s granddaughter was diagnosed with flu. Doctors heavily counselled the foster mother against any contact due to her anaemic illness.

The foster mother ignored their warnings. Blood will protect me, she reasoned. She reasoned wrong.

In February 1970, the foster mother was rushed into hospital with major flu symptoms, complicated by her weak immune system.

In her absence, Des, not yet fourteen, was now forced to take on responsibility, become the head of the house.

He cooked, he washed, he cleaned. He made sure his siblings got to and from school, made sure they got to bed on time. He also organised weekly hospital visits where the mother would issue instructions.

Two months into this new life, a policeman knocked on their front door.

‘Are you Des Hurrion?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

The policeman shifted his feet, looked awkwardly at Des. Then, he spoke.

‘I am very sorry to tell you this but your mother has died. Can I come in?’

But Des said, ‘No, you can’t come in,’ and then he remembered himself and added, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.’

Des closed the door. The first thought that struck him was about their three dogs: now mother had passed, would they be able to survive? That question really bothered him.

‘My younger brother broke into tears when he was told,’ Des said. ‘But I didn’t feel anything. I was numb. I had just lost four parents in ten years.’

Social workers were called. Whilst they began assessing the situation, Des stayed at the family house, still cooking, still cleaning, still protecting his siblings.

Then, he was asked to attend an appointment at a solicitor’s office. At that meeting, his mum’s will was read out.

In it, a major surprise.

His foster mother had ordered that a part of money from the sale of the house would pay for a private education for Des. He would be schooled in an exclusive boarding school. His adoptive mother had reached out from beyond the grave and set him on a new path.

Des was shown a list of prospective boarding schools. He picked a school in Nottingham. He did so because it was the furthest away from the nightmare he now knew as home. He started in September.

Meanwhile, there was summer to negotiate. At first the authorities tried to place Des with his foster family’s relations. But those relatives cared not for the golden child.

‘I was sent to relatives who didn’t really want me,’ Des said. ‘There was one auntie and uncle in Selsey Bill. The uncle used to smoke all the time, ash falling on his chest. They didn’t want me around so I was put into care where I was specifically told I could at least spend holidays with my foster brothers and sisters.’

* * *

Not for him the stability of living in one Home. Instead, Des was moved from one children’s home to another without rhyme or reason. He was not allowed to settle but made to move round the country seeking shelter.

‘I’d be put in a home and then a bit later I would get a letter from the authorities,’ he said. ‘It would contain a rail ticket and say, be at this station at this time where so and so is going to meet you. Off I’d go. Then once in that home I’d get another letter.

‘Be at this station at this time and so and so will pick you up. I’m thirteen years old with a little blue suitcase going from station to station. I went to Sussex, I went to Norfolk, all over the country. Can you imagine that today?’

Funny word, care, when applied to Des.

The first children’s home Des entered was in Hindhead, Surrey.

He arrived on a Friday, the weather absolutely glorious.

It was morning and the Home was deserted. All the kids were on holiday. Des was taken in, sat at a table and given some breakfast. After he finished eating, the woman in charge told him to take a stroll around the grounds so he could become familiar with his new surroundings.

Des walked into the gardens, began exploring. Next thing he knew he had stumbled upon a beauty spot, known locally as the Golden Valley. There he stopped and gazed into its tranquil, breath-taking scenery.

And then it happened, the Orphan’s Epiphany arrived and made itself real to him. He was not alone in experiencing its terrible gifts.

All of us who have been abandoned have experienced the moment when we suddenly realise with a deep horror that we are completely and utterly alone in this world: that there is no one to guide us and protect us or help us. There is no mother, no father, no love. The only people on our side are ourselves and we will never be the same again.

All this revealed to Des on the most glorious of summer days.

‘I stood on this spot looking down the valley on this beautiful day and I am thirteen years old,’ Des said, ‘and I said to myself, You are on your own. There is no one there. You are alone but you know what? Part of me was okay about it. Part of me was absolutely terrified and sad. Yet I also felt kind of a thrill because now I was in charge of my own destiny.’

I told Des that my Orphan’s Epiphany occurred when I was seven years old. My foster mother had just beaten me with a cane and sent me to bed. The rain was heavy that night, the wind so strong it made the tree outside tap irregularly on my window, creating a sound so menacing, as if the Devil himself was trying to get into my room.

That was the moment which told me I had no one to turn to in life, no one at all.

Most people were given this message – all humans are alone – when death approached. We orphans were given it at a very young age.

I don’t know which of us was better off knowing such things. I have always suspected it is us.

Des realised that he had a huge problem. He was a sensitive kid who loved books and played the piano. He suspected that many kids in care did not share such enthusiasms.

In the rough and tumble of a children’s home environment, Des knew he would be swallowed up unless he made drastic changes.

In a flash, the answer appeared. He would kill himself, and then create a new Des, develop a new character who was charming and funny and could talk himself out of any situation.

Charm and humour would be his protection from the fists of the unhappy. To achieve this aim, Des had to rid himself of his melancholia, the sadness which shone unmistakeably from his eyes, the sadness which made him an immediate target.

To do so, he took his deep painful emotions and memories and buried them as deep as he could. If they came to mind, he shushed them away, like you did a troublesome pet. It was hard at first but soon he became competent.

And the effect was astonishing.

Within a month, Des Hurrion had become a bright and breezy boy, forever quick with a joke and a smile. Suddenly, everywhere he went, people marvelled at him, wanted to know him. He was irresistible. He told them jokes and they laughed. He was cheeky, irreverent and they patted him on the back.

‘I had re-invented myself,’ he said. ‘For the first time in my life I felt special. It was great, a really good time. Discovering you have ability when everybody has written you off was great. I kind of felt there wasn’t much I couldn’t do. I had come out of this oppressive environment and suddenly I could express myself, do the things I wanted to do. It was a great time.’

The magic had worked. Beautifully.

People wanted to know Des Hurrion and be with him and I was no exception.

Des arrived at Burbank in the summer of 1970. Another impersonal letter had arrived, containing a rail ticket and orders to be at Woking train station at six in the evening on a certain Sunday.

A Barry Isleworth will pick you up, the letter said.

Des packed his little blue suitcase and trundled off to see where life was now going to take him.

He waited an hour for Barry at Woking train station.

When he finally turned up in his purple Morris Minor, they both realised that they had been waiting for each other at the wrong entrances.

On the way back to Burbank, Des blithely said to Barry, ‘I won’t be here long. I’m back at school in Nottingham soon and then I’ll probably spend the holidays with my little brothers and sisters.’

Barry turned to Des, a little confused.

‘Hasn’t anyone told you?’ he asked.

‘Told me what?’

‘Your family do not want you to spend time with them. They don’t want you. I am sorry. You’ll be here at the Home full time now. This is where you now live.’

Ice snagged his stomach, turned his body numb. Bewilderment suffused him. After all he had done for them, his foster family had turned against him, cruelly rejected him.

He arrived at Burbank in a state of shock but as he got out of the car, he suddenly remembered what to do. He reached for his new character. The new Des cracked a smile, buried the hurt and walked into Burbank.

At this point, I had been at Burbank for two years. Even so, I can’t recall how Des and I met, what was said, how we bonded; all I know is that very soon after his arrival, Des and I were firm buddies.

Like everyone else, I was mesmerised by him. I wanted his magic. I wanted to be as confident as him, that self-assured. I wanted to play guitar beautifully, write lengthy interesting essays, crack witty remarks, time and time again. Just like Des did.

The only problem I had with Des was that he went away to his boarding school and there was no one else at the Home to fill his shoes. Actually, there was Colin Nollie who I bonded with over music, but his dad took him away after a few months and I never saw him again.

The other kids at the Home I got on with fine. But none were as magical as my Boy Wonder.

During his holidays we hung together as one. He played me Steely Dan records; I played him Bowie and The Faces. We read similar books, swapped authors, gave each other knowledge. We played football in the garden for hours and hours, and then smoked ciggies and tried to kiss the girls. We laughed at staff members, broke rules, and took as much advantage as we could. We grew up together.

And then suddenly I was fifteen, he was seventeen and life was about to change.

* * *

Julie, the head of the house, became a hippie. It seemed the right thing to do. Although a child of the sixties, she had missed out on that decade’s massive cultural changes. I did not know why. I suspected she had been too busy obeying everyone – parents, husband, her career – to take part.

Now it was time to time to change all that.

The catalyst for this dramatic change was Julie’s husband, Barry Isleworth. Together, they were charged with the running of the Home. I suppose you could say they were the closest any of us would get to a proper mother and a father figure.

At first, their work reflected their marriage: Julie was in charge of staff rotas, the washing of clothes, the feeding of the children. Barry was the boss. He chaired meetings, roared off into town when he felt like it, drank a lot, maintained his own little office, acted the boisterous father figure.

Man first, woman last. It was the early seventies and feminism was a new concept, ripe for mocking. You want to burn your bra, darling? You can guess the rest of the ‘joke.’

Whilst she loved him, Julie ignored the unfair balance of their relationship. Love will do that to humans. But when the cracks appeared in the marriage, exacerbated by Barry’s drinking and his roving eye, Julie determined to take action.

As her home was bound up in her job, she had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. She would have to stay, see out the marriage.

That’s when she decided to become a hippie. What a great act of revenge, to turn yourself into something your boozy, narrow minded husband would never understand in a million years.

Obviously, Julie would need a crash course in her new chosen subject.

She needed to know her Dylans from her Lightfoots, her Woodstocks from her Isle of Wights, her Hesse from her Kerouac, her kaftans from her afghans.

There was only one man suitable for the job – my fellow orphan and very best friend, Des Hurrion.

Des’s obsession with music was as fierce as mine. It began the day a social worker gave him the album, Fire and Water by the band Free, and it never abated.

All it took was two plays of that album and down came the posters of his favourite footballers, Manchester City’s Franny Lee and Colin Bell, and up went posters of the two main Free men, Paul Rodgers and Paul Kossoff, to take their place.

Des now dressed accordingly. I see him now, sitting in the Home’s front room, wearing his blue cheese-cloth shirt, his dark luxurious hair dropping onto his shoulders, playing Free songs on his acoustic guitar, a rock star in aspic.

Julie started gravitating towards Des, started spending a lot of time in his company. I would often find her with Des in the sitting room, her sitting in a chair, sewing, Des playing his guitar or playing records.

Sometimes, he would point out a particular part in a record or tell some story about the band they were listening to, and Julie would instantly stop what she was doing, and lean forward and listen so attentively.

Or maybe he would drop a joke and she would laugh and shake her head in quiet amusement. Oh Desmond.

At first I found this scenario kind of funny. It amused me to hear this woman I thought of as so square, suddenly start talking about Alan Hull’s new solo album, Pipedream, or what she thought of Hendrix at Woodstock.

Des saw her differently, though.

Julie was not a mother figure to him. She was a bright, attractive woman who paid him loads of attention. He liked that. He liked the new Julie, the one who was opening up day by day, turning into something totally unexpected.

‘I remember coming home from working in a part-time job I had,’ Des said, ‘and everybody had already eaten and Julie saying to me, what would you like to eat? I said, I really fancy fish chips and beans and she went out and cooked it for me. She presented it to me in the dining room and then sat and asked me all about my day. It was kind of weird.’

One night, the inevitable happened in the small corridor that leads from the hall to the kitchen. I can see it now, Des coming one way, Julie towards him.

‘She was smiling benignly all over her face,’ Des recalled, ‘and as we squeezed past she kissed me on the lips. It wasn’t a passionate kiss but it was a kiss and it totally freaked me out. I had no idea what was going on. I really don’t know what happened but soon she was coming to see me and we were being really naughty. It really is as simple as that.

‘There were no women around who fancied me and I was flattered. I was seventeen years old, and wanted a woman to find me attractive. The fact that she was twice my age didn’t seem to matter, she was a woman who found me attractive.

‘Any woman who made an advance at me at this time was in. I just went with the flow, as I have done all my life. I just did it. I didn’t know what was going on, I just knew I enjoyed the attention of this woman and I knew that I liked this woman.

‘I always know quickly the people I am going to like and when she changed and became a bit more open, I realised I liked her.’

The affair lasted seven months and was conducted in complete secrecy. That meant deceiving me, four live-in staff, six ancillary workers, twenty children and a husband of seven years standing. A salut, you two.

That was some going.

At first, I suspected nothing. In fact, the idea never crossed my mind and if it had done I would have dismissed it as absolutely preposterous. A member of staff did not sleep with a child. That thought had not even been formed in our collective consciousness. At Burbank, the unacknowledged demarcations were clear. It was kids here, staff over there and never the two shall be at one.

Moreover, Barry, Julie’s husband, was not a man you would want to mess around with. This was a beefy man, a capricious man, capable of great and deep anger at the most unpredictable of times.

Then I started growing suspicious.

Des would make the odd remark or disappear and then not be able to satisfactorily tell me where he had been. I noticed that we rarely spent time alone; Julie always seemed to be around.

Finally, on holiday in the Isle of Wight, the truth was revealed. I was on the beach and went to get an ice cream from the kiosk. Next to it was a postcard stand. I wandered over to look at them.

The next thing I knew, I heard Des and Julie talking on the other side of the stand. They thought they were alone.

She was telling him they had to be careful, she thought Barry was getting dangerously suspicious, Des was telling her not to worry. Then they moved off. I gazed at a postcard for two minutes.

Later that day, in a quiet place and moment, I told Des I knew.

‘Really,’ he said.

‘Really,’ I replied.

‘Ah,’ he said.

And then he brought me into his confidence. He told me how he had been seeing Julie for a few months now, how she was desperately unhappy, how her marriage was dead and that they both brought each other happiness.

What I didn’t know was that the fires were already cooling. About a month after my discovery, Des and Julie finished.

Why, I asked him thirty-four years after the event?

‘Because I had just enrolled at Guildford Technical College and had begun hanging out with girls and boys of my own age. I found it embarrassing to be the lover of a thirty-five-year-old woman,’ he coolly said. ‘So I ended it.’

In the Home, of course, the relationship was wonderful. It was illicit, exciting. Sneaking down midnight corridors, opening doors slowly, hoping they wouldn’t creak, entering a bed for sex with a woman so much older than yourself.

Fantastic. What could be better for a rampant seventeen-year-old?

But at college, amongst his own age, his own kind, the attraction waned.

There was another reason for Des breaking away from Julie.

Rock ’n’ roll. May sound silly but you have to understand that for Des music was the most important thing in the world to him. Why? Because music was the creator of his dreams, the father of his visions. Music shaped a world inside his mind’s eye and Des went to live there.

‘One of things that my 1970s rock and roll did was to romanticise the itinerant,’ Des said.

‘Listen to the song, I’m A Mover by Free. There is a line about being born by a river and like that river, the guy has been moving since. Can I associate myself with that? Damn right, I can. You’re talking about someone who had been shunted around for five years. And check out the lyrics to a John Miles song called Remember Yesterday.

‘There is a line that says something about how he has been everywhere but still has no place to go. What better way to deal with a peripatetic life than to realise it was actually quite cool? Rock ’n’ roll music really did change my life. Suddenly there is this wonderful world you can go into with these sounds and lyrics.’

I knew this escape route well. In fact, I knew it back to front. Music gave me hours of welcome escape, took me off to faraway worlds, fantastic places. Yet Des took things much further than me.

Some months into his course, he quit further education for good. He hopped on a boat to France where he busked and made his living.

Des and his guitar, and the open road. Told you he was braver than me. I’d never have made such a move. Fear would have stopped me. The world still scared me at this point.

‘I left college because I wanted to be free of institutions,’ he said. ‘The boarding school, the Home, college… Also my work was suffering because of this liberated rock ’n’ roll lifestyle I was living and there were no adults to tell me what a stupid decision I was making, although my course tutor tried.’

Des returned to Britain, got a job, got a flat.

‘I did what most people do at that age,’ he said, ‘which is listen to rock ’n’ roll music, drink too much and just have the time of my life.’

In 1977, he went with friends to the Guildford Civic Hall to see a band called Thin Lizzy. Who should be standing in the bar when he arrived? Julie. They got talking.

Telephone numbers were swapped.

Julie had now left Barry, had her own place where she lived with her daughter, Susan.

Soon, the inevitable. The pair were re-united. Des went to live with Julie. But it would never work. Des had left college to pursue the magic that can free your soul. Instead, he found himself with a job, a wife, a child.

‘It wasn’t where I wanted to be,’ Des stated. ‘I wanted to live in London and I didn’t care where it was.’

I too needed London to save me but Des took a different route to Our Blessed City of Salvation, the city that allows you to re-invent yourself, re-make yourself, to do as Des had done, and forget all. London breathes its past on all its citizens but its future is what excites, what allows us to hide our pasts.

One morning, Des opened up a map of London, shut his eyes and placed his finger on the page.

He opened his eyes. His finger was placed in the middle of the Thames River. No good. He repeated the action. His finger hit Watford. Elton John territory. Not good.

‘The third place I hit was a place called Gunnersbury which is West London, Chiswick,’ he said.

‘I took the day off sick and I went to Gunnersbury to have a look around. There is nothing at Gunnersbury. There is the Brentford flyover and a roller disco which tells you how long ago it was. I went back and looked at the map and saw that Ealing was near Gunnersbury and Ealing resonated. I suppose because I had heard of Ealing Broadway, Ealing Common, Ealing Studios. I thought okay, I’ll live in Ealing.’

One day, the inevitable happened. Des and Julie got into a massive row. Shortly afterwards, he packed his bags.

He travelled to Ealing Broadway station, and then asked a cab driver to take him to the cheapest hotel. Two weeks later he applied for a job as a barman at a local pub.

‘I had to start all over again. No friends, didn’t know anybody. Got a job in a local pub after two weeks. Went into the pub on Thursday and the landlord told me you are working tomorrow night with a guy called Chris.

‘That night, this bloke walked in at eight o’clock and said, “Hi, I’m Chris.” We worked the shift and had a good laugh, and at the end I said, “Do you fancy a pint one night?” He said, “Yeah all right,” and like all the key relationships in my life I knew straight away that I was going to know him forever.’

The very next night he met a woman called Margie and a man called Wig. To this day, all three have been his closest friends. Like me, like so many other orphans I suspect, his friends became his family.

Soon after, Des left the pub, moved on. He took on casual jobs, worked as a postman, a fork-lift driver before deciding to get serious and take a computer course.

Naturally, he passed. He began working in IT, working his way up to manager status. But something was not quite right.

* * *

Every now and then, especially after a weekend of heavy drinking, he would suffer panic attacks.

He put these attacks down to his large alcohol intake. But one day at work, a Monday, he went to the pub at lunchtime for the boss’s birthday drink.

At one point, feeling a little giddy, he went to the toilet.

And it was there that Des Hurrion fell to pieces.

He recalled, to me, strange, frightening sensations that rushed through his body. He remembered how fear filled up his stomach quicker than booze ever did. He recalled how he rushed out of that toilet shaking, and afraid to his very soul, as if death had just brushed by his shouder.

‘I walked over Putney Bridge. I thought I was having a heart attack,’ Des said. ‘It was a nightmare. The next day this depression moved in, this dreadful depression. It was like carrying a cow on my shoulders. I remember walking round the park and I could feel this thing on me, on my shoulders, on my head.

‘I really needed a break but I had to work, I had to pay the rent so every day I dragged myself into work. A lot of people at that time described me as looking shell shocked. And they were right, I was finally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I must have looked awful every morning coming into work. I stuck it out for a couple of years and then I went into counselling.’

Luckily, Des happened upon a sympathetic psychiatrist. As their sessions lengthened, enlightenment slowly dawned. Answers appeared.

He was shown that the character he had created to protect himself with had fallen apart. All the hurt that he had pushed downwards had now surfaced. That was why the pain was so unrelenting. That was why the black despair gripped so tightly.

They went back further and further and further until they came upon that dreadful day, the day when Des’s mother walked away from him, and so, in their unwitting way, did his foster parents.

‘I had locked it away but it wouldn’t stay locked,’ Des quietly said.

‘The simple fact is that at the age of three-and-a-half I had my heart broken and wasn’t allowed to express the pain and the anger and the fear that I felt.

‘My social worker once brought up the subject of my mother and I remember very clearly being very practical and saying, “Oh it’s fine, she’s got her thing to do.” But I couldn’t deal with it and my brain imploded. So I had a dreadful time for a very long time. From my late twenties to my early forties, in fact.’

As children, we had no understanding of adults. If they hit us, we became convinced it was our fault. We knew not their motives. How could we? We could hardly stand on our own two feet.

When I discovered in later life that my foster mother had experienced a bad childhood, a heavy load was instantly lifted off me. I now knew I was not bad or stupid, or any of those other terrible names she had spat out at me. The pain she was in had caused her to lash out. I just happened to be in the way. Unfortunate. Unlucky. Terrible. But you know what?

Knowing that I was not to blame gave me a tremendous kick-start.

At thirty-nine years of age, Des decided to track down his real mother. He needed to confront her. He needed understanding. He needed her to heal him.

At first, he thought she was in America but he was wrong. After a year of hunting he was astonished to find that one of her recent addresses was just two miles away from where he lived. They had probably passed each other by in the street and never realised it.

He discovered that she had married the father of her second child and had had two more children with him. The man had then run (as they do) and she had raised the family on her own. Then she went back to Ireland. Des found her address and sent her a letter.

‘I said in the letter that I didn’t want to upset her life but just wondered how she was and who she was,’ Des said, his voice now slowing. This is such hard territory for him to enter.

‘She phoned me. She is thirty years older than me and she sounded like an old woman. It was such a shock because I remember when she was young. We had a brief talk and at the end of it she said, “I love you Desmond,” and I said, “I love you very much, Mum.”’

This was the first time mother and son had told each other that. Des was in his late thirties at the time.

The phone calls continued but when Des suggested a meeting, she shocked Des. She said no.

The stigma of illegitimacy still frightened her. ‘She thought, if someone found out that she had a son, she would lose her friends, lose her kids, and that she would be vilified all these years later for having a child out of wedlock,’ Des explained.

‘She couldn’t cope with it at all. So we had a phone call relationship. We did plan to meet but she let me down a couple of times. It was a very painful eight or nine months. She sent me a jumper for my fortieth birthday and a card with a car on the front like a kid’s card, which was weird. She also sent me a couple of photographs of her. I had never seen anyone who looked like me before. We were two peas in a pod. I could have been her brother.’

Des Hurrion retained just one happy instant from this time. Speaking to her on Hallowe’en, his mum said, ‘You know I don’t believe in witches.’

To which her son replied, ‘You haven’t seen some of the women I’ve been out with.’

Both mother and son laughed out loud together. They had never done that before. It felt good.

‘But it wasn’t going anywhere,’ Des continued. ‘I phoned her in February of 1996 and she was in a foul mood on the phone. She accused me of having people spy on her in Ireland. She was really paranoid.

‘I phoned her back and said, look this is not healthy; don’t call me back and I won’t call you. Then I put the phone down.’

Yet she still haunted him, still exerted a massive pull on his soul. How could she not? She was his mother.

A year later, Des wrote again to her. In the letter, he told her not to respond, that there was no point staying in touch, but he wanted to tell her one thing, and that was this – I will always love you, O mother of mine.

As he told me this, tears started up in his eyes. Such tragedy. Mother and son, torn apart by religion, by circumstance, unable to help each other, to grow, to live as intended, in happiness, in love. I felt helpless.

Des wiped his eyes, moved his head left and right, attempted to shake himself clear of the sadness gripping him.

Another swig of beer, then he started up again, his tone more measured, more matter of fact.

‘I was very pissed off over Easter and I couldn’t understand why,’ he said.

‘Then I realised it was the ninth anniversary of me getting in touch with her. I wrote myself a note which said, I am free. That was three months ago and that’s when it ended.

‘I do understand and I forgive. Because when she left me she had my sister Alex inside her and she made the right decision. She had an unborn baby and she was with a guy that she thought would be okay. I don’t have a problem with that, I just have a problem with all the pain it has caused me.’

He paused. ‘I always feel that all my life I have been tidying up someone else’s mess. But the thing is I have come to terms with it all. I understand about my mother, I have recovered from the breakdown and to be honest, I like my life now.’

The clock struck ten.

I looked down and saw that the ashes of the words we had spoken were piled up around our feet. Empty beer bottles stood close to white plates which were smeared with dark sauce and coloured foods.

For a brief second or so, the walls of the Chinese restaurant faded in and out, in and out, out and in. Alcohol was once more threatening to take me on a long holiday from myself.

The bill arrived, money was exchanged.

Des walked me to the station in the black cold country night and we hugged goodbye.

On the train home, I thought of Des living alone at forty-nine years of age, not married, childless. For most people this would be the tragedy. Life is about children, about togetherness.

Yet there are other routes to take in life and just as meaningful. Who is to argue differently?

As Bill S. once wrote, to thine ownself be true.

All in all, I thought Des happy. After all, he had his freedom, the precious freedom that music showed him as a kid and still means so much to him today.

Music made him unfettered, unafraid. God bless music. Today, Des Hurrion has the ability to go with the flow of his life, to go wherever his soul dictates, see where it takes him, whether that be as an IT manager in charge of an office, in charge of people, or as a barman in an Ealing pub full of drama.

It is the same freedom he exuded at the Home. My man still believed in the magic that can change your soul. It made me so happy.

A week later, I wrote an e-mail to Des.

From: paolo@gmail.com

To: desh@hotmail.com

Subject: The New Book

Des – Hope all well, amico. Finished writing your chapter last night and have attached it above. I was hoping you could take a look at it, correct any mistakes, dates, etc. The first thing that struck me was how similar our starts in life had been. Both our mothers were Catholic immigrants who escaped to England from highly religious and restrictive societies. Both of them carried such high hopes for their future and both tragically floundered.

Unintentionally, they brought two boys into this world whose lives would be heavily touched by pain, misery, extreme difficulty.

The only difference was this: The bulk of my pain occurred in childhood.

Yours, unfortunately, would not let go and savage you again in later life.

I have to say I was really moved by a lot of what you had to say. That image of you as a small child with your little blue suitcase being shunted from home to home is one that will stay with me a very long time. I really think it a damning indictment of how badly valued children (especially motherless ones) were in this country. I use the past tense. I can only write what I see but I think there has been a positive sea shift in child rearing. I just look at my friends who are fathers and they are fantastically involved with their children, probably in ways that their fathers had not been.

They really have placed themselves at the centre of their kid’s lives, have fully accepted commitment and responsibility. I really do admire them for those qualities. And in the world of care I see positive changes. Since The Looked After Kid was published I have been invited to many care functions and conferences to give readings. I normally do a reading of ten mins, take questions and then afterwards speak to social workers, foster parents, etc.

Everyone I meet seems genuinely anxious to do their very best for kids in care.

I did a reading at a home in Birmingham once. Never forget it. I read the opening chapter where I talk about the bedroom that the eight of us shared, the crappy clothes we had to wear, the lack of money, the lack of everything really. When I finished there was a silence and then this girl exclaims, ‘Man, you’re old school!’

Turns out they all had their own rooms, forty pounds a week pocket money, and could basically come and go as they pleased.

I used to think I was like the great Spurs footballer Jimmy Greaves and could perfectly time my runs into the penalty area of life and score with ease. Going by what those kids told me, I am wrong. I think we both landed in care about twenty years too early. Being facetious. Of course, all those kids, forty quid a week or not, will suffer the same problems and experiences we did. Money and riches won’t change that. You have to go inwards, stage a revolution of your mind and heart, to beat that which would bring you to your knees.

Better go. The Sopranos are on TV in a minute. You should watch it. Best show ever. Get in touch after you have read the chapter. Also am going to see Norman Bass next week. He lives down near Brighton. Best ones, Paolo