Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (3 page)

Another housemaster keeping an eye on things would be Graeme Stewart — lordly of baritone and gloomy of countenance, with a liability to press the fingers of both his hands together while holding forth like some grand old duke — who, like most of the highly strung employees at this institution with such a notably high staff turnover, is a recent hire. Like most of the others, too, Stewart looks to be in good physical trim. As well he needs to be. A number of the younger housemasters have in the not-
too-distant
past been hospitalised by their wards, with one of them still bearing the imprint of a towel railing that a freaked-out teenage gang member tore from the wall one morning just this past May and used to nearly throttle him.

Alas, the same can’t be said for the chief nightwatchman, a hulking Dutchman who calls himself Mr Tjeerd but whose actual name might be Mr DeJhers, the matter being the subject of some confused speculation. To the watchman’s barn-like physique is added the appearance of tobacco-stained fingers and a thick European accent that few here can successfully interpret as he mutters through a large mouth stopped frequently with hand-rolled cigarettes, salaaming and gesticulating as he goes, like some angry mute. Tjeerd oversees the employees who start work around 10 each evening and stay on until the first of the day’s housemasters show up the following morning, and whose role it is to provide a supervisory presence during the night.

Sometimes they are also required to wake kids to administer medication or escort them to the toilets to provide urine samples for a mandatory medical analysis. This last duty Tjeerd usually effects by entering the chosen room at around midnight, flashing a big torch into the occupant’s eyes and enjoining him to ‘Piss in da jar, half full!’ Still, it’s not as if the incumbent watchman’s lack of English skills is an entirely bad thing. One of Tjeerd’s predecessors used to routinely enter the bedrooms after dark and rummage through the dresser drawers in search of comic books, especially war comics. These he would read in his office (recliner chair, feet on table, cup of instant coffee to the side, spare hand drumming the desktop without rhythm) while passing the hours. So accustomed were some of the boys to his regular nocturnal rummaging that they took to leaving their comic books on their dresser tables before going to bed at night — the comics were duly taken, but always returned before sunrise.

Rounding out the staffing complement are various operational staff, including a gardener and general maintenance guy and a couple of women with the décolletage of middle-aged barmaids — the last of the red-hot mamas if you’re a hormonally charged
13-year-old and care deeply about such mysterious things — who are, you correctly assume, the matron and cook. The much younger woman standing next to them, the one with the beehive hairdo and the frankly inappropriate short skirt? That must be the psych student who recently completed a survey on the boys’ mental states. Joining the others, as well, would be those who work at the on-site school on the watch of the physically imposing chief educator, Dave Kelsey, one of three teachers employed at the little schoolhouse adjoining the main building.

Finally there comes the man who brings this disparate group of individuals together. Maurie Howe is not only the institution’s principal, or chief executive, but also one of the pioneers of residential children’s care as it has come to be practised in New Zealand. Mr Howe is a YMCA man through and through — not, one hastens to add, in the louche sense of the song of the same title popularised a few years later by the Village People, but in the strictly New Zealand sense of the era. An impressively fit, undemonstrative man, quick of movement and speech, he is never emotional or anxious — or poorly dressed. This morning he emerges from his office (that’s the one located on the right-hand side of the main corridor near the front entrance) bedecked in a hat and tweed jacket and coordinated tie, in the fashion of John Steed from the adventure series
The Avengers
. For good measure, too, he is clutching an umbrella as Steed might a walking cane.

A man in control. A sphinx without any secrets. The style never varies. He’s the rock that doesn’t move, isn’t moved, won’t be moved, can’t be moved: Maurie Howe casts his professional shadow throughout the buildings here as powerfully as the tune now being pumped out of the radio system, ‘If I Only Had Time’, the high and lonesome French standard that will eventually be covered by scores of Anglo-American acts. As sung today, in a smouldering voice, by a 21-year-old Kawerau kid, John Rowles,
whose uncle is a Black Power member, but who has somehow made the song his own, taking it to the upper reaches of the UK hit parade seven years ago before rocketing to the summit of the pop charts on both sides of the Tasman Sea, and now casting its charms over this group of boys. The tempo is slow and quivery, the melody very lush, and the singer’s vocal delivery as straight as a bowling ball rumbling down the polished floors of any of the institution’s endlessly scrubbed wooden passageways.

If they only had time. In fact, both the staff and the inmates of Epuni Boys’ Home have all the time in the world. Epuni is among the oldest of the country’s 16 processing centres for delinquents, an institution of short-term correctional training, the term used to refer to the Ministry of Works-designed structure spread out across 1.5 hectares of grounds. The residence is charged with assessing and classifying the estimated 350 children aged between seven and 16 who at this historical point are pushed through its doors each year before passing out again, usually to some other form of
state-sponsored
residence or foster situation.

About half of the boys are state wards — which is to say, children who have been committed to the care of the Department of Social Welfare by a magistrate in the Children’s Court — while some of the others are among the 354 kids around New Zealand whose guardians have signed a voluntary agreement under which the department has custody of the children for a while. Most of the kids have been sent here by the courts from a wide area of the North Island and the upper South Island, a catchment area basically falling just short of the similar institutions in Hamilton and Christchurch, but often taking in kids from other areas that lack the facilities to provide residential care.

Practically speaking, Epuni is as much a holding pen for an overloaded youth justice system as any lofty setting for
therapeutically
based observation of the wards who live here for
anything up to eight months at a time. Of the 38 inmates held here just a half-dozen years ago, for example, 23 were state wards, eight were on adjournment in child welfare cases and just seven were on remand; now eight out of every 10 boys are remand cases from the children’s courts. A majority of these inmates will remain in an officially supervised environment for the remainder of their early years, with a significant number going on to lengthier stretches of long-term training, borstal and jail — the institutional pathway for which, since the 1950s, a stint in ‘short-term correctional training’ is typically the curtain-raiser in respect of kids aged between eight and 17 whom the government has placed in care. In the department’s view, according to its official literature, it can be taken as read that these children are ‘disturbed, retarded or delinquent youngsters’.

The institution, as you’ve already seen, has three residential wings, known as Rata, Totara and Kauri (respectively, the senior, intermediate and junior wings), a small school, a large courtyard, a gymnasium, and a recreation and television area. Each inmate has his own small room. Typically there are about 35 youngsters in this ‘open’ part of the institution, although the numbers fluctuate between 20 and 40; their median age is 13. Detailed inspections of the operation are relatively rare. Supposedly, the institution is meant to produce an annual report, written to a common format, which allows the principal to unburden himself over what happens to be concerning him in any particular year — but these, too, are largely pro forma exercises only ever really changing in the aftermath of some scandal attaching itself to the residence.

The institution is also required to keep a set of diaries to record daily comings and goings, the names of the individual kids who receive corporal punishment, and other facets of day-to-day life. Here again few of the injunctions are ever followed to the letter. Crises of one sort or another often seem to be crowding in. Some
days it’s as if it’s all Howe and his hard-working colleagues can do to keep the place from resembling one big happy Manson family.

Making their jobs all the harder are the questions that are starting to be raised in the wider culture about the use of facilities such as these, the usual criticism being that an institution such as Epuni is no place for children, the most recent complaint being that kids like these should be kept in their own communities.

But such reservations are out of step with the prevailing wisdom of the time and the assumptions of the department. As two of the era’s best-known researchers, Rosemary Dinnage and M.L. Kellmer Pringle, recently argued — and Howe likes quoting their words — there is ‘little basis for such sweeping rejections of residential homes. On the contrary, there is some evidence that certain children may find it easier to accept, or cope with, a larger, less intimate environment since it makes less intensive emotional demands.’

MID-MORNING. A KINGSWOOD POLICE VAN SWINGS
through the main gates to deposit the latest addition to the institution’s ‘closed’ quarters, the relevant housemaster having already been alerted to the drop-off. The moment the van grumbles to a halt he is striding towards it, clipboard and pen in hand, to exchange a few words with the driver about the new boy. Is he a nail-biter? A bed-wetter? Will he be disruptive? The boy, hands shoved deeply in his jacket pockets, gets led off to the institution’s welcoming ‘secure’ block.

Once past the 42 beds in the main part of the institution, one cannot help but be taken a little aback at this readymade prison, which we saw a bit earlier, with its four cells, a shower and a day room. It’s among the institution’s busiest wings. Virtually all newcomers undergo what administrators describe as a three-day ‘induction programme’ in this hated part of the residence, designed,
it is said, to thwart the chronic problem of absconding and provide an ‘individual oriented’ environment for newcomers, as well as a dedicated area for health checks. Because Epuni is almost perpetually strapped for cash and short of qualified staff, however, these programmes are infrequent at best, and the cellblock appears to serve little practical function beyond what its name suggests.

But that gluey tinge to the smell that hovers in the air, like the whiff of gunpowder after a fireworks display, owes something to the cellblock administrators’ commitment to their health-related duties. During Epuni’s first decade, head lice had never been considered a serious problem. But the number of cases of human louse infestations, or pediculosis, has apparently been on a roll since the construction of the cellblock, leading some of the institution’s growing legion of critics to wonder whether the supposed epidemic might simply be an excuse for what by any other reckoning appears simply to be a humiliating initiation ritual. Cases of head lice among kids of Polynesian descent, after all, are considered rare on account of the particular hair consistency of the ethnic group that accounts for the lion’s share of the Epuni cohort.

Nevertheless, the condition is considered sufficiently prevalent that every last resident in Epuni quickly becomes familiar with the Maori-language appellation — kuta — for the microscopic brown creatures that cause itching, sores and skin breaks. Accordingly, every newcomer is coated with a thick lotion, smothered across his entire body, almost as soon as the police deposit him on the doorstep and a staff member has managed to bundle him into the first available shower. The lotion needs to be applied only after the boy is dry, however, so first he is required to stand naked until the water has evaporated from his head; only then may the supervising housemaster dip a paint-brush into a pail of cream and use it to coat the boy’s entire head and body.

Because there is no product or method which actually
guarantees the destruction of these eggs or hatched lice after a single treatment, the youngster will go without a shower for the next seven days while the lotion supposedly does its work. So while the ubiquity of the treatment may or may not arrest the spread of the kuta, the presence of the paste on so many unwashed bodies lends the institution its notably pungent air.

Like everything else at Epuni, the kuta ritual is performed strictly according to the book — or more precisely, the manual — with something approaching the same degree of attention a medieval schoolman might have given the works of Aquinas. Over the decades, first on the administrative watch of the Child Welfare Branch of the Department of Education and more recently the Department of Social Welfare, these weighty black- and
green-bound
tomes have been promulgated for the guidance of staff.

These manuals enjoy a certain pride of place inside the main administrative office, a room of neatly typed instructions, official papers and 121 separate key sites, which otherwise resembles nothing so much as the cell of a slovenly monk. The
Field Workers’ Manual
, dating back to the late 1950s, is one; another is the venerable
Social Workers’ Manual
, which was first produced around 1970. Together they sit among other duty books and daily logs of activity recording significant events relating to a child (health checks, corporal punishment, time spent in solitary confinement) that staff working on one shift might need to communicate to others.

Workers are expected to know, as well, the content of the new Children and Young Persons Act 1974, passed with some political fanfare last November and effective from the previous April, in the interests of revising and consolidating the earlier Child Welfare Act of 1925. Finally, for good measure, this past year has seen a new
Residential Workers’ Manual
and a
Principal’s Handbook
, which like all the others are already evolving and growing over time with
various insertions and modifications as the official mood dictates.