Читать книгу Someone to Love Us: The shocking true story of two brothers fostered into brutality and neglect - Terence O’Neill - Страница 9

It’s fair to say I was no angel as a young lad. I think I had a natural curiosity about the world that got me into trouble. I also had sticky fingers when it came to things I was interested in, and that’s another quality that tended to get me into scrapes.

There was a music room in a Portakabin behind the school where they kept lots of instruments for the school band: drums, cymbals, triangles and so forth. Although I wasn’t particularly musical, I took a fancy to these instruments and started taking them home with me, one by one. A drum was first. Once I’d successfully sneaked it out of the school, I was quite brazen about it, banging it loudly all the way back to the Connops’.

‘The nuns said I could have it,’ I lied to Mrs Connop, and she took my word for it and didn’t question me any further.

Next I took the triangle, and again said that the nuns had given me permission. It wasn’t until I had virtually the whole instrument collection in my bedroom that Mrs Connop thought to contact the school, who told her that I hadn’t been given permission to take them at all and that, in fact, they’d been on the point of calling in the police to investigate their disappearance. I had to return them and I got a double punishment because the nuns gave me a rap on the knuckles with a ruler for being a thief, and Mrs Connop gave me a whacking with a stick broken from an apple tree for lying to her.

It wasn’t the only time I was caught pilfering at school. The teachers used to keep a supply of sweets in a cupboard to reward children who had been especially good during the day. I would sneak in at dinnertime and help myself to them, and I got away with it for quite some time before I was caught. It seemed to me that crime paid because all those sweets I’d had were well worth the single rap on the knuckles I received.

Mrs Connop’s punishments were a bit more uncomfortable. I had to bend over and take six of the best on my backside, briskly delivered with a bendy stick, and I wasn’t keen on that at all. I’d try to run away but she’d always catch up with me in the end. You couldn’t win. Once, she bent me over one of the sacks of flour in the scullery where her bread ovens were kept and started whacking me. I saw a mouse inside the sack and reached in to grab it, thinking I’d use it to scare her. All women were scared of mice, weren’t they? I got my comeuppance, though, because the mouse bit me on the finger and I still got the whacking as well.

I don’t think I ever got away with anything at the house. When Mrs Connop found that someone had been up to mischief, she’d call us into the room and demand to know who it was. Although all three of us would protest our innocence, I had an annoying habit of blushing so she would assume it was me, whether it was or not. Either that or Dennis would tell tales on me. I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he thought she would like him better if he kept in her good books by sucking up to her.

Every morning, Mr Connop would knock to waken us for school and we were supposed to get up and wash then dress ourselves before going down for breakfast. One morning it was bitterly cold and I decided to get dressed sitting in bed, with my feet still under the covers to keep them warm. To me it was a clever plan and I couldn’t see any harm in it. However, when we got downstairs, Dennis decided to tell Mrs Connop – ‘Terry got dressed in his bed, under the covers’ – and she went berserk. She grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and started dragging me into the scullery, where she kept a stick ready for beating me.

‘You little so-and-so,’ she yelled. ‘Why is it always you who has to break the rules? Why can’t you be a good boy like your brothers?’

At that point I struggled and managed to break free. I ran out the back door and down the path, with Mrs Connop in hot pursuit.

‘Come back right now!’ she yelled.

‘No, I won’t, ’cos you’re going to hit me,’ I shouted back.

‘I promise I won’t hit you,’ she said, so I stopped and walked back towards her, but as soon as I was within reach she grabbed me by the collar and frogmarched me up to the house, giving me an earbashing about how there was a right way to do things and a wrong way. I still couldn’t understand why it was such a huge crime to get dressed in bed on a cold morning, but she was a very strict, formal type of a person who liked everything done properly.

Sometimes I knew I was definitely in the wrong and on those occasions I’d take my punishment without complaint. Once I found a shotgun out in the barn, and for a laugh I picked it up and pointed it at Dennis and Freddie, threatening to shoot them. Just at that moment, a big black crow flew past and I turned to aim at it instead, which was just as well because the shotgun suddenly went off with a huge explosion that knocked me backwards onto the ground. People came running from all directions and I got royally whacked for that stunt. I hardly felt my punishment, though. I was still in too much shock about the fact that I could have killed one of my brothers if it had gone off a few seconds earlier. My ears were ringing from the blast for the rest of the day.

We didn’t hear much about the bombing raids that were flattening British cities that year, but we were regularly warned that if we saw something that looked like an abandoned toy lying on the ground we should give it a wide berth and run and tell a grown-up. There was a pris-oner-of-war camp near where we lived, and there was some talk that prisoners might escape and plant boobytrapped toys where unsuspecting children would pick them up. I remember being told about this over and over again, but it went clean out of my head the day I saw a shiny red and silver model aeroplane in a hole in a drystone wall. I was over the moon as I pulled it out and whizzed it up and down through the air making plane engine noises all the way home.

‘Look what I found!’ I beamed at Mrs Connop as I walked in the door, holding out my prize.

‘You stupid boy!’ she yelled, grabbing it from me. ‘Do you never listen to anything you’re told? How many warnings do you need?’

My mouth fell open. Could it have been a trap planted by a prisoner of war? The thought of the danger I could have been in was chilling, but strangely exciting as well.

When my seventh birthday came round in December 1941, I was hoping that maybe Mrs Connop would buy me a nice shiny plane of my own, but she made a curious announcement one evening.

‘Your birthday is too close to Christmas,’ she told me, ‘so we’re going to move it. Your new birthday will be on February the third. Dennis’s is in March and Freddie’s is in April, so it makes sense to have them one after the other like that.’

I protested that I’d rather have my birthday sooner than later, but her mind was made up and that was that. I’d have to wait a couple of months to turn seven.

As Christmas approached, we started to get excited about it. We’d never really had a proper Christmas before, although the one on the ward at St Woolos hospital had been nice enough. Mrs Connop and Ginger put up a big Christmas tree in the hall and decorated it with ornaments brought down from the attic. The ones that I was most interested in were little parcels, neatly wrapped up in shiny paper, which hung all over the branches. Every time I walked past I tapped one of them, trying to work out what might be inside and whether any of them might be for me.

The Connops’ older children, Michael, John and Olga, came home on leave and Dennis and I pestered them to tell us stories of bombing raids over German army bases, and the Battle of Britain, and what it was really like to pilot a Spitfire. They answered our questions patiently for the most part, only occasionally telling us to ‘put a sock in it’.

On Christmas morning we were bursting with excitement when we were invited into the drawing room and handed a parcel each. I could tell straight away that mine wasn’t an aeroplane because it was a big flat box that rattled when I picked it up. I tried to smile and look pleased when I opened it to find a board game called Ludo. Freddie got a painting book and some paints and I think Dennis got some books. We were each given a money box shaped like a post box, with a slot to put the coins in and an opening in the bottom where you could take them out. It wasn’t exactly what we’d have chosen ourselves, but they were the first Christmas presents we’d ever received and that was a great feeling.

Later that day we had our first proper ‘family’ Christmas dinner as well: chicken and ham and dried fruit pudding and so much food that we were stuffed to the gills and couldn’t have eaten another bite.

Before we went to bed that night, I had another look at the Christmas tree and saw that, intriguingly, none of the parcels hanging on it had been opened. I kept my eye on that tree right through the festive period up to 5 January, when Mrs Connop and Ginger carefully took down all the decorations and packed them away in boxes to go back up to the attic. The next time I could sneak off without being spotted, I climbed the ladder up to the attic and found the box with those parcels in it. I had to know what was inside them. I peeled the paper off the first one and was bitterly disappointed to find it was just an empty cardboard box. I tried another and another until I had opened nearly all the parcels and the floor was strewn with wrapping paper, but they were all merely decorative, with nothing at all inside. It was a bitter disappointment to me.

I’d forgotten all about it by the time my crime was discovered. Some weeks later Mrs Connop had climbed up to the attic to look for something and come upon the bits of Christmas paper strewn about, whereupon she gathered the three of us in the drawing room and urged the culprit to confess. My blushing gave me away yet again, and I took my six of the best reluctantly. That time it definitely hadn’t been worth it.

In the New Year of 1942 I began to get friendly with the Connops’ lodger, a happy, friendly man whose name I can’t remember any more. He walked about the village in all weathers, summer and winter, wearing just an open-necked shirt, short trousers and heavy boots. He always stopped for a chat with any villagers he passed and had a big smile for everyone. At the age of seven, I thought he was an old man but looking back he was probably only in his forties or fifties. One day I admired a pencil that he was using, which was painted gold, and he said I could have it. A real gold pencil! I was over the moon about it and took it to school the next day to show off to all the other kids. It became one of my most prized possessions for a time.

After that, I started hanging around with the lodger when he was working on the farm, asking if I could help out. I liked being with him. He chatted to me as if I were an equal, explaining things about farming and animal behaviour and why you planted certain crops in a field at particular times, and I found it all fascinating.

One day the lodger wanted to saw some small tree trunks that were piled up by the saw bench at the back of the farmhouse, and he asked me if I would give him a hand. The saw bench was a criss-cross wooden contraption. You put a log into the cross-section and then two people were needed to operate the long saw with handles at either end. Although I was only seven, I’d done it before and I knew that I had to push while the lodger was pulling and vice versa.

We’d only just started cutting when all of a sudden the saw blade jumped out of the groove and the lodger yelled in pain and jumped backwards. Blood was gushing from his finger and he sat down hard on a log. I ran inside to get Ginger and I think the district nurse was called out later that evening to have a look at his wound. I felt terrible. It wasn’t my fault, but I knew that the cut had been a very bad one.

I don’t know if his injury had anything to do with it, but soon afterwards the lodger became very ill. Mrs Connop looked after him herself, bustling in and out of his room with clean bedding and bowls of soapy water and trays with soup and cups of tea. Whenever I peeked in the door he was lying back on his pillows looking gaunt and exhausted and completely different from the cheerful, chatty man he’d been before. He tried to say hello to me but it seemed like a huge effort and after a while I stopped talking to him when I passed and just glanced in timidly at his unmoving shape under the bedcovers.

And then one day Mrs Connop told us that he had passed away. She kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and I could tell that she had really cared about him. People in the village seemed very upset as well and lots of them stopped me to pass on their condolences. ‘He was a good man,’ they all said.

I felt very sad myself. It was the first time anyone I knew had actually died and while the nuns explained to me that he had gone to Heaven, which was a ‘much better place’, I found the whole idea that I would never see him again very hard to take on board. ‘Never’ was such a big word. For ages, I kept glancing into the barn, half-expecting to hear him whistling away in there, or I’d look into his room when I passed and get a shock to see the neatly made bed with no person inside.

And then a few months later, his room was dismantled and a wall removed so that the hallway became much larger than it had been before. No trace of the lodger remained, except for the gold-painted pencil he had given me. That was my first experience of death and for me it was very unsettling and strange.

The year continued, and mostly we were happy-go-lucky kids having an idyllic time. Freddie had joined Dennis and me at school and he was old enough to take part in more of our after-school games. We built a den together in the corner of the chicken shed, where we could hide our birds’ egg collection and any other valuables we didn’t want grown-ups to find, and where we could stay hidden from Mrs Connop when she was on the warpath. Once we took a baby owl from its nest and carried it to our den, but unfortunately it died as we didn’t know how to feed it. Ginger knew about our hiding place but she would never give the game away. She protected us when we got into scrapes, so long as she could do so without getting into trouble herself.

I continued to have a bit of trouble with bullying from some of the village boys. There was one in particular, called Dick, who was the ringleader. He lived in a pink house up at the top of the village along with his nan, to whom he wasn’t very nice. I heard him talking to her one day, using all sorts of bad language and berating her: ‘I told you to do so-and-so’ and then ‘Don’t argue with me.’ He obviously wasn’t a decent person. I don’t think I was the only person he bullied but I probably used to wind him up a bit. I stood up for myself and didn’t take things lying down if someone was mouthing off at me, so I was often in trouble for scrapping. Mrs Connop used to get very cross with me when she found out, but what could I do? I had to defend myself or I would have got hurt.

I also used to get into trouble for being late for school. If I was dawdling around, the others would set off without me and I’d have to make my own way there. One morning in the autumn of 1942, I was ambling along the lane on the outskirts of the village, hitting the heads of dandelions with a stick. I knew I had to get to school but I was in no particular hurry. Just then a local farmer drove by on his tractor, which was pulling a trailer. I knew he’d be driving up to Croft Castle so I decided to hitch a lift and I jumped onto the back of the trailer.

The farmer turned round and he was not best pleased. ‘Oy! You! Get off there!’

I was standing in the middle of the trailer, which was still moving, arms outstretched to keep my balance on the slippery surface.

‘Get off before I come back there and drag you off!’ he shouted.

I stepped carefully towards the front of the trailer, thinking I could jump off at the towbar, but suddenly my foot slipped. I fell as if in slow motion and hit the ground hard, and the wheels of the trailer trundled over me. The farmer braked abruptly and came running round.

‘You stupid idiot! What have you done?’

I lay there, winded, unable to move because I was trapped by the trailer wheels. Fortunately it was empty or it would have been much heavier, but still the farmer had to use all his strength to lift up one side of it so I could roll out, dazed and bleeding.

‘Blimey, your knee’s in a bad way,’ he said, looking down at me.

White bone was visible through a huge L-shaped gash covering my entire kneecap.

‘I reckon I’d better give you a lift back home. Connops’ place, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ I protested faintly. ‘I have to get to school.’ All I could think of was that I’d get into trouble with Mrs Connop if she realized I hadn’t been in school at that time of the morning.

The farmer lifted me up onto the back of the trailer and drove me slowly through the lodge gates and up the long driveway to the school building. The trailer bumped around causing me a lot of pain, and the journey seemed never-ending. When we got to the school, the farmer explained to one of the nuns what had happened, then carried me inside and sat me down on a chair.

Mrs Connop was phoned to come and get me and, meanwhile, one of the nuns began cleaning and dressing the wound.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I told her as soon as the farmer had gone. ‘It was his fault for shouting at me to get off the trailer without even stopping it. He was trying to make me hurt myself.’

She ignored me and carried on dabbing at my knee. I couldn’t look down at the wound without feeling sick at the sight of all the ripped-open flesh and the blood still oozing out.

Mrs Connop drove me home in her pony and trap, and then called out the district nurse, who took one look and said the wound had to be closed up with metal clips. I don’t remember how many she put in because I was almost faint with the pain, but she used a machine like a stapler to insert them right round the wound and then placed a big dressing on top. After she left, I tried to get up and put my weight on the leg but it was agony. All I could do was hop to the kitchen, where Ginger gave me a piece of bread and jam to help me forget about my injury.

I was off school for a couple of weeks and every day that sadistic nurse came round to change my dressing. She was no Florence Nightingale, that one. She’d sit me down on a chair in the hall and rip the bandage off, saying ‘This will hurt me more than it will hurt you.’ Of course, it was a black lie. Every tug caused stabbing pains that made me cry out loud. She didn’t soak the lint with water to loosen it up so the area of bandage that was stuck to the wound pulled off a layer of flesh with it every time.

‘Stop with your crying,’ she’d say. ‘A good tug and the pain will be over quicker.’

Underneath the wound was still jagged and messy and it made me nauseous every time I caught sight of it.

One day the pain was so bad as the nurse tugged at my dressing that I jumped to my feet, slapped her on the face, and hopped down the hall into the kitchen. I was trying to escape but she caught me before I reached the back door.

‘What a big baby you are!’ she exclaimed, but after that incident she agreed to soak the lint before trying to pull the dressing off, which made things slightly more bearable.

I was a healthy, growing boy, so the wound healed and before long I could run about again, but there was a jagged crimson scar running the length and breadth of my kneecap, which duly impressed the boys at school when I finally got back to show it to them.

‘Good one,’ said Dennis, running his finger along it almost as if he was jealous he didn’t have one as well. ‘It’s like a war wound.’

The new skin that grew in the area was pink and shiny and over the next few months the scar turned from crimson to purple. It was ugly to look at but I saw it as a sort of badge of courage. Nothing could defeat me now. I was a survivor.