Читать книгу Someone to Love Us: The shocking true story of two brothers fostered into brutality and neglect - Terence O’Neill - Страница 8

A man from Newport Council came to pick us up and take us to our next home, in the village of Yarpole near Leominster. After we got off the bus, we had to follow him on foot along some very narrow lanes, where frost sparkled on the tarmac and our breath misted the air. The last part of the walk was uphill and Freddie, who was still only three, kept falling behind so we had to shout at him to hurry up.

At last we reached a big black and white house surrounded by railings and set back in huge gardens. The council man opened a tall metal gate and led us up a long crazy-paving path to a huge wooden front door. He lifted the door knocker and knocked with a loud clattering sound and shortly afterwards a maid in a black dress with a white apron opened the door.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell the lady of the house that you’ve arrived.’

Dennis and I stared at each other, mouths wide open. The hall was oak-panelled with paintings hung on the walls and the highest ceilings I’d ever seen. An oak staircase lined with more pictures curled up to the next floor.

The maid reappeared and ushered us through a door into a living room that was bigger than our entire flat in Bolt Street. A posh lady with lots of wavy silver hair and smart clothes was standing by the fireplace looking at us.

‘This is Mrs Connop,’ the council man told us; then he introduced us to her one by one. We didn’t say anything, still too much in awe of the grand surroundings. To us, it was like somewhere a king and queen might live. All it lacked was a throne.

‘Go and wait outside in the hall, boys, while Mrs Connop and I have a talk,’ he told us.

We turned and trouped back out to the hall obediently.

‘Are we really going to stay here?’ I whispered to Dennis. ‘It’s like a castle or something.’

‘Looks that way,’ he replied.

‘This is far better than the Sorrels. We’ve landed on our feet this time,’ I said, gazing round.

Dennis shrugged. ‘If things don’t change, they’ll stay as they are,’ he said mysteriously, and I thought it sounded like an impossibly clever thing to say.

We could hear voices inside the sitting room but couldn’t make out what they were saying. I wasn’t tempted to put my ear against the door though. I’d already got used to the fact that grown-ups we barely knew made all the decisions about where we stayed and who looked after us. It wasn’t up to us. We just had to go with the flow and do what they told us to.

After a while, the council man popped his head out. ‘Come on in, boys,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m delighted to say that Mrs Connop has agreed that you can come and live here. This is your new home. Say thank you to her.’

‘Thank you,’ we all mumbled.

‘Now you have to promise that you will behave yourselves, and look out for each other,’ he said. ‘Do you promise?’

We said that we did, and shortly afterwards he hurried off to catch the bus back all the way to Newport, his job done.

Mrs Connop told us to sit down, so we huddled together on her big comfortable sofa, three sets of skinny thighs poking out of grey shorts all lined up on her lovely soft cushions. She told us that her husband, Mr Connop, and her youngest son James were outside working on the farm that adjoined the house and that they’d be back for dinner later. She explained that her two eldest sons, Michael and John, were in the Air Force, and that her daughter, Olga, was in the Forces as well. We were to address her and her husband as ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir’, and the boys as ‘Master’, but I can’t remember what we were supposed to call Olga. Maybe she didn’t mention that.

She said there was a lodger, a distant relative of hers, who lived in a room off the main hall, and she told us that the maid who’d ushered us in earlier would be the person who looked after us.

Then there was a list of rules we had to remember: we were only to use the back stairs, not the grand ones we’d seen outside in the hall; we would eat our meals in the kitchen, not the main dining room, which was just for family members; and she said that Dennis and I would be starting school just as soon as she could get us enrolled. That all sounded fair enough. She said it in a kind way, smiling at us, and when she’d finished she picked up a little bell on the table beside her and rang it to summon the maid to come and show us to our rooms.

The maid was a girl in her early twenties with a mass of bright red hair, so it wasn’t long before Dennis and I started calling her Ginger, which she didn’t seem to mind. She was a laughing, friendly type who was always generous to us, making sure we had plenty to eat and telling us gossip about the local area. She was more like a friend than someone in charge of us, and we all adored her from the word go.

We ate our meals with Ginger, sitting at the big kitchen table, and when she heard the bell ring she would dash through to the dining room to collect the dishes that the family had been eating from. That first evening there was rice pudding, one of my favourite foods of all time. When Ginger brought through the family’s empty pudding dishes, I noticed that they had left the skin on the sides of their plates, which to me was crazy because I thought that was the best bit.

‘Can I scrape the plates?’ I begged Ginger.

‘No, can I?’ pleaded Dennis, his eyes spotting what mine had already noticed.

When she realized what we wanted, Ginger solved the dispute by scraping the plates herself and dividing the delicious baked skin between the three of us.

After dinner, we were taken in to the sitting room to meet Mr Connop. We stood in a row with our heads bowed, hands behind our backs, not sure what to expect.

‘Come over here, Freddie,’ he said. ‘Do you want a sweet?’ He held out his two closed fists. ‘Which hand do you think the sweet is in?’

Freddie pointed to one of his hands and he opened it to show a boiled sweet in its cellophane wrapper. Freddie swiftly unwrapped the sweet and popped it in his mouth, so his little cheek bulged out to the side.

‘You next! Terence, is it?’

I picked one of his fists and took the sweet inside it, then Dennis did the same. But what a shock I got when I opened the cellophane wrapper and popped the sweet in my mouth!

‘Pah!’ I spat it out into my hand. ‘Yuck!’ Instead of the sugary taste I’d been waiting for, my mouth was filled with the taste of soap.

Mr Connop roared with laughter. ‘You got the trick one, Terence. Weren’t expecting that, were you?’

I stood, crestfallen, until he pulled another sweet, a real one, out of his pocket and handed it to me.

‘Be on your guard in future,’ he said. ‘You never know when someone might be having a joke with you.’ He winked, knowingly.

The next day Mr Connop played another joke on us. He led us into the dining room, where his radio set was playing some music, and told us to sit down and not move a muscle. We all sat as we’d been instructed and he left the room, closing the door behind him. We waited and waited and then there was a loud knock on the door. The three of us looked at each other.

‘Should we answer it?’ I asked.

Dennis shrugged and we waited, but then the knocking came again. I decided it might be someone needing a hand with something, so I got up and opened the door to find Mr Connop standing outside.

‘Hah!’ he pointed. ‘You’d never make it in the army if you can’t obey a simple order! I said to sit still and not move a muscle.’ Then he burst out laughing at his own trick.

He was always the joker in the house. In the morning we’d quite often hear him walking along the corridor outside our room, letting out what we thought were loud farts with every step. How could anyone fart that much? I was amazed that such a posh person could be so rude. It was only when I peeked out the door one day I realized he wasn’t breaking wind at all. They were armpit farts, which are caused by placing the palm of your hand over your armpit and moving it up and down to create suction. He giggled like a schoolboy when I caught him out. I thought it was such a good trick that I practised and practised myself until I had mastered the art of armpit farts.

Mrs Connop was much stricter, telling us off for making too much noise as we ran down the hall, or tramping mud into the house, or splashing water in the bathroom, but she was always fair. When she told me off I always knew she had good reason to, and that was far better than the system at Stow Hill where punishments had been arbitrary and unexpected.

About a week after we arrived at the Connops, it was time for Dennis and me to start school, and because Newport Education Authority had said that we were to be brought up as Roman Catholics, we were enrolled at the Sisters of Charity School at nearby Croft Castle. Well, I say ‘nearby’ but in fact it was about four miles away from the Connops’ house. Every morning we had to set out through the village to the lodge gates and then up a long school driveway lined with huge beech trees that creaked and swayed in the wind. I didn’t mind the morning walk so much, although it meant getting up at the crack of dawn so we’d be there on time. What I hated was the walk home after dark in those winter days, listening to the wind whistling through the branches. The moon shining through the bare trees cast strange shadows on the ground and we could hear the sounds of dogs howling and owls hooting, which made our imaginations work overtime.

‘There’s a bogeyman lives in these woods,’ Dennis told me. ‘He eats young boys for breakfast and spits out their bones.’

I was quite a cocky six-year-old and didn’t scare easily, but these walks would frighten the life out of me. I’d run as fast as I could to get past the eery stretch of trees, through the lodge gates and out into the open, and Dennis would come running after me laughing but, if truth be told, more than a little scared himself. The following year, after Freddie started school, I’d do the same thing to him, telling him stories about the bloodthirsty bogeyman until he was almost hysterical with fear.

In spring and summer it was a different matter and we really enjoyed our walks to school. It was beautiful countryside, carpeted with bluebells in spring, and we passed by a small lake where watercress grew round the edges in summer. Dennis and I often picked bunches of watercress and took them home, where Ginger would make us delicious watercress sandwiches for tea. It tasted lovely in white crusty bread fresh from the oven. Mrs Connop made her own bread every week, using a long pole with a flat bit on the end to push the tins of dough into fiery bread ovens, then pulling them out again when the bread was baked. We loved watching her doing it, partly because the smell was so fantastic.

There was one downside of summer on that farm, though, which I discovered to my horror at tea one night. Up above the kitchen table, haunches of pig were covered in salt and suspended on wooden racks to cure and become bacon. I was sitting right beneath one with a bowl of vegetable soup that Ginger had just handed me. Suddenly there was a plopping sound as something fell into my soup. At first I thought Dennis had thrown something at me and I looked up suspiciously but he was busy with his own soup. What could it be? There was another ‘plop’ and when I looked into my bowl I could see a little white worm-like thing wriggling away.

‘Agh!’ I shrieked. ‘Ginger, what’s that?’

She peered over. ‘That’s a maggot,’ she told me, matter-of-factly. ‘Flies lay their eggs up there in the bacon on any bits that aren’t covered by salt, and maggots are the result. Good source of protein if you fancy eating them!’ She laughed at the horror on my face. ‘Either that or just keep your bowl covered up next time.’

All three of us quickly put our arms round our soup bowls and leaned over to protect them, and for the rest of the summer we would always check our food carefully before taking a bite.

At weekends and during school holidays we went out to help Mr Connop and James on the farm, although I’m not sure how much help we were at our age. There weren’t any tractors in those days so horses had to pull the ploughs and it was one of our jobs to take the horses to the drinking troughs for water and help to feed them. One Saturday I worked in a field with Mr Connop for the whole day, hoeing the crops row by row, and at teatime he slapped me on the back and told me I was a really good worker. I liked his praise and decided I was going to try and earn it whenever I could. I looked up to him and wished he could be my real dad and not just my foster dad because I wanted to be like him when I grew up.

The next day, he asked the three of us to collect the thistles that had been cut in one of the orchards. I decided to try and build a ‘thistle-rick’, copying the way I’d seen the grown-ups building hayricks. I filled a wheelbarrow full of thistles and started pushing it along the rutted ground, but it was way too big and heavy for me.

Mrs Connop saw what I was trying to do and, trying to spare me, she called out that I should put the wheelbarrow away and come indoors to get ready for school the next morning.

I hated to fail at anything I set out to do, and I was yearning for Mr Connop to praise me again, so I was feeling a bit upset and frustrated as I turned to take the wheelbarrow back to the shed. The wheel hit a stone and got stuck and, instead of trying to move round it, in a fit of temper I shoved the wheelbarrow up against the stone trying to force it over. At that moment, my foot slipped and I lost my balance and fell, hitting my face hard on the edge of the metal wheelbarrow.

Mrs Connop came flying across the field to pick me up. My mouth was full of hot, salty liquid and when I spat it out, I was alarmed to see bright red blood all over the ground and down the front of my shirt.

‘Your teeth!’ Mrs Connop wailed. I looked down and, sure enough, there were my two front teeth on the ground. I felt with my tongue and there was just a big ragged gap where they used to be. Thankfully it was only my baby teeth I lost, but I had a year or so of being teased by all and sundry about the gap. I became so self-conscious about it that I used to cover my mouth with my hand when I smiled or laughed. ‘The toothless wonder,’ Dennis used to call me. Needless to say, I wasn’t allowed to use that wheelbarrow again.

The Sisters of Charity School was a boarding school as well as a day school and, as the name suggests, it was extremely religious. It had been a girls’-only school but by the time we got there, there were quite a few boys as well. I had to go to mass every morning, taking the communion wafer. We were taught by nuns, who used their best endeavours to turn us into holy creatures of the Lord and sometimes this involved rapping us on the knuckles with a ruler if we committed a sin such as using bad language or taking His name in vain. I was still a frequent, though inadvertent offender. Swear words just slipped out my mouth without me consciously putting them there.

Although Dad’s family were Catholic, we’d never been to church back in Newport. My only religious experience was of the boring sermons at the Sorrels’ church, but I was impressed by the elaborate ceremony of the Catholic church in Yarpole and thought there must be something in it all. I learned my lessons faithfully and after a few months I was dressed up in a white suit and had my confirmation by the priest, about which I was very proud.

On the way to and from school I had a bit of bother with some of the village kids bullying me. I don’t know if it was my gappy teeth, or the fact that I was a welfare boy, or maybe just because I could be a bit mouthy, but I’d often find a group of them surrounding me and calling me names or chasing me down the road, throwing stones.

‘Get off him,’ Dennis would shout, charging towards us and hitting out at my attackers. ‘Leave him alone, you little bastards.’ Given that he was a good six inches taller than them, they’d usually melt away at that point. ‘You OK?’ he’d ask me gruffly, and I’d grin: ‘Course I am!’

Dennis never hesitated to step in and protect me, despite the fact that he was the quieter, shyer one of the two of us. I was the tough one, ready to take on any challengers – and I frequently did.

I was glad when school broke up for the summer. The farm was a paradise for young boys and we spent hours on end out in the fields playing. We’d lie down in great mounds of freshly cut grass to make an imprint of our bodies, or we’d climb trees and collect eggs from birds’ nests (although we knew never to take more than one egg from each nest so the mother didn’t abandon it altogether). We’d make a hole at each end of an egg using a thorn from a thorn bush and blow out the white and the yolk to stop it going bad, then take it back to our bedroom. We didn’t have many eggs but we were very proud of our little collection.

Perhaps our favourite game was aeroplanes and gliders. Dennis would tie one end of a long piece of string round his waist then attach the other round mine with a slip knot. He was the plane and I was the glider being towed around by him. We spent many happy hours running around the fields with our arms outstretched, Dennis going one way and me gliding the other, until we fell over exhausted on a grassy bank to lie and watch planes going overhead. Every young boy in those days knew the different markings you got on aeroplanes, and we were always on the lookout for ones with the tell-tale black-edged cross symbol that would indicate a stray German bomber. We never saw one, though, out there in the heart of Herefordshire. The war hardly impinged on our lives at all, since we didn’t suffer any food shortages, being lucky enough to live on a farm. The most dangerous thing that happened to us that summer of 1941 was the day when Freddie nearly drowned.

It was a scorching hot day and the three of us had gone to play near the pond in one of the bottom fields, next to the orchard. There were tadpoles and frog-spawn in the water and we liked to collect it in glass jam jars. At the edge of the pond there was a big log, and Freddie decided to clamber out on it so he could get closer to the tadpoles, but just as he reached the furthest point, the log rolled over and tipped him into the deep water.

Immediately Dennis and I scrambled onto the log and lay full length along it, trying to catch his hand to pull him up again but it was difficult because he was struggling so much. He kept disappearing under the glassy green surface and we’d haul him back up coughing and spluttering. Neither of us could go in the water to help him because we couldn’t swim. No one had ever taught us. We clutched at Freddie’s hand, his clothes, panicking like mad as his fingers slithered yet again out of our grasp. ‘Hold him!’ I yelled at Dennis. ‘I’m trying!’ he yelled back. Finally we managed to get a firm grip and drag him back to shore, pulling him up through the weeds and mud.

There was a terrifying moment when he lay on the bank with his eyes closed, not moving. I shook him frantically, yelling ‘Freddie! Wake up!’ Dennis pushed down on his chest and pumped his hands up and down. And then Freddie coughed, and gasped for air, and when he started sobbing I knew he would be all right and I was flooded with relief.

‘Thank God! Thank God!’ I cried, shivering despite the heat. But then there was another worry. ‘Mrs Connop will kill us when she finds out.’

‘We can dry out his clothes before we go back,’ Dennis decided. ‘She doesn’t need to know.’

We persuaded Freddie to take all his clothes off and laid them out on the banks to dry. He stopped crying and started chortling with glee at being able to run around the field stark naked.

We stayed out at the pond all day so that by the time we went back to the house, Freddie’s clothes were dry, albeit caked in mud. We’d agreed we wouldn’t tell Mrs Connop what had happened but Dennis was a bit of a tell-tale and couldn’t seem to help himself. As soon as we saw her he blurted out ‘Freddie fell in the pond.’ She didn’t get cross, though, because it was obvious that no harm had been done. I don’t think she ever realized how close that four-year-old boy in her care had come to drowning.

It gave me a horrible fright, though. When I lay in bed later that night, I had visions of his little face disappearing under the murky water, only his hands still waving in the air. At breakfast the next morning, I looked at his blond hair and baby features and shuddered to think that he could have been dead. Freddie seemed to have forgotten all about it but those moments when he lay unconscious on the bank were lodged in my memory forever. They introduced a touch of something dark and menacing into the otherwise perfect boys’-own summer on the farm.