Nobody Came (22 page)

Authors: Robbie Garner

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Nobody Came

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‘There was a room in the basement where they locked boys away for days sometimes. And at night they raped them till they bled, or forced penises into mouths that were almost too small to take them. They had flabby, hairy stomachs and they smelled of sweat and cum.’

Tears were on my brother’s face. Angry, hurt tears. I still remained silent.

‘When those filthy old men came in their mouths, the boys would try hard not to swallow. But the men would see and they’d hold their noses, pinching so it hurt, until they just had to swallow because they had to breathe.’

‘That’s what happened to some of the boys there,’ he said and I heard those words echo between us, words he found impossible to utter. ‘But it didn’t happen to me.’

He drew once more on his cigarette, then threw it on the ground. Slowly he squashed it flat with the sole of his shoe and stood up. We avoided each other’s eyes. There were no more words that needed to be spoken between us for without them we had told each other everything.

We turned then. Our hands slid into our pockets, we stuck out our elbows, bent our heads and walked back to the hostel with big boys’ bravado, whistling as we went.

Epilogue

T
here were questions about our past that both John and I wanted answered. First, I went to visit Stanley. I knew where he was – he’d never left the mental hospital. I pushed aside my childhood fear of the place and went to see him.

He had turned into an old man, one who seemed happy enough. We smoked a cigarette together and chatted about my work and what John and Davie were doing.

I didn’t ask him why he had tried to hang himself or why he had left us. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Nor did he tell me.

Soon after this John told me he wanted to go to England. He had traced Gloria and wanted to confront her to get some answers. I said I would go with him; I wanted to put my past behind me and start a new life.

Before we left, we reminded the people who mattered at Haut de la Garenne that our friends would be keeping an eye on Davie. We warned them that England was only a short boat journey away.

As the ferry pulled out of St Helier, I felt I was leaving a chunk of my past behind me.

We’d heard that Gloria was staying in a small town in Suffolk. We got a train there and walked from the station to the address we’d been given – a nice semi-detached house on a quiet street.

Of course there was a man in her life, a small man of indeterminate age who provided her with gin and cigarettes.

‘We’re looking for our mother,’ we said when he opened the door.

With a shell-shocked expression, he pushed the door till it was only open a crack and called out to Gloria.

‘My sons!’ she exclaimed, throwing the door wide with no sign of remorse or regret.

It was very strange seeing our mother again – not that we had ever called her that. No longer was she the voluptuous, red-haired Gloria of our memories but a middle-aged woman who had run to fat, with the soft stomach and wrinkled eyelids of the hardened drinker.

I can’t remember the excuses she gave for leaving us, maybe because I didn’t listen to them. I was only there for John’s sake; as a little boy John had loved her, whereas I had loved him.

She enquired about our health and the size of our pay packets.

We told her about Davie’s accident and the brain damage he had suffered but she showed no interest.

We asked what had happened to our sister.

‘I came and took her,’ she said.

She had gone to Sacre Coeur for Denise. It was just us she had left.

John went white. Shock robbed him of speech. I felt nothing. She showed no shame. As far as she was concerned, she’d done nothing wrong.

‘Where is Denise?’ John asked at last.

‘She’s staying at a friend’s.’

I saw John clenching his fists but he didn’t say anything. We caught eyes and it was me who spoke. ‘We’d better be going now,’ I said.

John had the answer he’d been looking for. It was lack of love that had made her leave us; that and the desire to be free.

He and I stayed in England and found work. I carried on training as an electrician; he went into sales.

We wrote brightly coloured postcards to Davie.

When he was ready to leave Haut de la Garenne, he was sent to work on a farm on Jersey. He needed an adult to care for him, they said.

When John was twenty-one he became Davie’s legal guardian. We brought him to England and found him a job in a hotel as a kitchen porter. Finally he was given his own room.

I went to find my sister Denise. She looked like Gloria had once looked, but with a beehive hairstyle. We had nothing in common. The paths our lives had taken were too different. I didn’t see her again.

Over the years, I found out what had happened to some of the other people I had known at Sacre Coeur and Haut de la Garenne.

When he was discharged from hospital, Pete disappeared into the flotsam of drifters who, having no roots or family, made alcohol their friend. He created a social circle by drinking with strangers in back-street bars, sometimes for an hour and sometimes for a whole day, until his anger came back and made him fight them.

Nicolas went to England and trained as a baker. He married and had a son. I know he gave him a puppy for his fifth birthday because we got a Christmas card that year with a photo of them all.

Christopher became a teenage prostitute who dressed in shiny girl’s clothes. I heard he died of AIDS.

The pretty boys left the island. We never heard what happened to them.

We lost touch with Martin but I heard from someone that he got married three times.

Stanley died at the age of eighty.

Gloria died in her sixties. I didn’t go to the funeral.

John didn’t go to her funeral either because he died before her, of motor neurone disease. That terrible wasting illness put my brother in a wheelchair and eventually in a nursing home.

That was all a long time ago.

I have no photographs of us when we were young. There are no family snapshots of our growing years. But inside my head I keep an album and when I close my eyes I can open it and look at the pictures inside at my leisure and remember how we were.

John as he was at eight, a golden boy, running on the beach with a wide grin on his face and a stolen apple in his hand.

Davie at three, all curves and dimples, his arms waving in time to his ceaseless chatter.

John sitting on that wall at Sacre Coeur nearly seven years later, already looking like a man, his eyes sparkling as he said my name.

Davie at five, pale-skinned and thin, his mouth rarely smiling.

Him at ten and again at thirteen, his solemn face turned to me, his gaze holding mine as he asked that question: ‘It won’t be for ever, will it, Robbie?’

John at seventeen, so handsome, so confident that his past was left behind and his future stretched in front of him.

John in a wheelchair, his body drooping and his face lined.

John smiling up at me when I tucked his blanket round his knees, that smile that said, ‘It’s just you and me, brother, just you and me against the world.’

After I had buried my beautiful brother I did something I had wanted to do since I was a child and used to look out to sea.

I bought an air ticket.

‘Do you want to come?’ I asked Davie. ‘Come with me to faraway places where the sun is hot and the sky is blue.’

‘You go,’ he said. ‘I like my job. I like my room. It won’t be for ever, will it, Robbie?’

‘No, Davie. It won’t be for long,’ I promised him for the third time.

When my grief over John’s death had lessened, I returned to England. Davie was still working in the hotel where he had the room of his own.

I got a room just near him and took a job as an engineer. I live on my own but I see Davie two or three times a week. We have dinner or go to the pub. He seems content with his life.

I thought my past was behind me – and then I turned on the television. ‘Human remains have been found in the cellars underneath a children’s home in Jersey,’ the newscaster said.

For the rest of the week I tried to avoid the news. I stayed in, switched the television off, even refused to listen to the radio. But I found it impossible. Newspapers seemed to be everywhere: at the garage, the grocery store, even in the hands of my fellow workers, and their headlines screamed out at me. In my work’s canteen, radios blasted out even more details and people speculated about what else might be revealed.

Gradually the numbness that stifled my feelings lifted. Without its protective barrier, memories of beatings, canings, rapes, humiliation and acts of inexplicable cruelty filled my head. Those memories I had managed to suppress for so many years now demanded my thoughts.

Often, after I left that place, I asked myself why we had not gone for help – but where could we have gone? We didn’t see the police or the welfare officials as our friends. Rather we saw them as being in cahoots with the authorities running the homes. So we kept quiet, not even talking to each other about what went on in those cellars. We kept it all locked deep within ourselves.

Now it seems that some brave souls did go to the police, and as the sheer number of their stories mounted up, some action had to be taken. I have mixed feelings about it. The wardens who abused me would be old now if they’re still alive. I don’t know what good the investigation will serve, apart from bringing up memories I’d rather have kept suppressed.

I can see him so clearly now – the other part of me, my younger self who was denied a childhood. For he still lives alongside the person I have grown to be.

He is a lanky, gangly boy, all knobbly knees and bony elbows; a boy who tried to be tough, a boy who wanted a home, who yearned for a place that was his; somewhere adults would look after him, care for him, love him; but of course that was never going to be his fate. His safety would only ever come from his adult self: the man who needs routine, who in the morning tucks his bedclothes tightly in and always washes up before he goes to bed.

Acknowledgements

S
pecial thanks to Barbara Levy, and her assistant Vicki Salter; to Gill Paul; and to Carole Tonkinson and all the team at HarperCollins.

Copyright

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First published by HarperElement 2008
06 07 08 09 10

Robbie Garner asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library

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This book is based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, some names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed. Not all of the staff in the institutions described were cruel or abusive, and the staff mentioned in this book are composite characters, drawn from experiences of those whom the author remembers.

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