Someone to Love Us: The shocking true story of two brothers fostered into brutality and neglect

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‘Get off me, you! Leave me alone.’

He held me just long enough to get a look at my snotty nose – I always seemed to have a cold in those days – and the itchy scabs all over my legs.

‘I’m going to get a doctor to come and look at these children,’ he said. ‘They need medical treatment.’

He stood up and wrote something on his papers and then made for the door. ‘I’ll return later, Mrs O’Neill,’ he said. ‘Make sure all the children are here when I get back.’

After he left, Mam sat sobbing on the settee. I wanted to run out the door and escape but Dennis talked me out of it.

‘Maybe the doctor will give us something to stop the itching,’ he said. ‘That’d be good, wouldn’t it?’

I wasn’t convinced, but if Dennis was staying, I decided I would as well.

When the doctor came later with his big black medical bag, I noticed he wore gloves to examine us, as if we were too dirty to touch. We lined up in front of him and one by one he listened to our chests and looked at our arms and legs and peered into our ears and eyes. The Inspector stood behind him with his arms folded.

After a while the doctor stood up. ‘The four youngest children need hospital treatment,’ he said. ‘They’ll never get better in these conditions.’ He looked around the room. ‘I’ll arrange for them to be picked up.’

‘Where are you taking them?’ Mam cried. ‘I don’t know what their father will have to say about this.’

‘Just to St Woolos hospital, Mrs O’Neill. We’ll sort them out there and they’ll be home before you know it.’ He glanced at the Inspector. ‘We’ll be in touch to let you know, at any rate.’

I looked at Dennis and he didn’t seem to be bothered by this turn of events. ‘We’ll get lots of grub in hospital,’ he whispered to me. ‘And I won’t have to go to school.’

But the doctor and the Inspector were big scary men and I was worried that they were going to put me in handcuffs and lock me away, as they had done to Tom, so when they came to pick us up I tried to hide and I was screaming my head off as they dragged me out into a van parked in the street outside. Freddie was crying too, but Rose and Dennis were sitting quietly so I soon calmed down, following their lead.

When we got to the hospital, the first thing I saw was a big grand front doorway with wide steps, which to me seemed really posh. We were taken up to the ward in a lift with criss-cross metal gates that clanked shut. I giggled when I first saw the nurses because they looked so funny with big white caps that were like boats perched on top of their heads. They gave us all hot baths, then one of them painted brown liquid all over my skin, from neck to toes, and I wriggled when she got to the ticklish bits. They were nice, those nurses: smiling and gentle and good fun.

The four of us were put in the same ward, each with our own bed, which was a luxury I’d never experienced before. I loved the feel of the crisp white sheets and the clean, starchy smell and the fact that I had my own little bedside cupboard, despite having nothing to put in it. At mealtimes, a trolley came round with fantastic food, the likes of which I’d never tried before. There were chunks of real meat in the stews, and mashed turnips and puddings with creamy yellow custard. One day we had tripe cooked in milk and Rose wouldn’t eat it because she said it was disgusting, that it was made from cows’ stomachs, but I thought it was very tasty.

It was Christmas while we were in hospital and we got a special dinner that day with turkey and stuffing and roast potatoes, which was the best meal I’d ever had in my life. Everyone was in a good mood. The nurses tied lots of balloons round Freddie’s bed and tried to teach him how to sing ‘Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run’. We all laughed till our sides hurt as he tried to copy them because at not-quite-three years old he couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘R’ so it came out as ‘Wun, wabbit’. It was a really happy day.

We stayed in St Woolos hospital for a few weeks, and the rash on my skin cleared up rapidly. It was great not to be scratching my legs till they bled the whole time. The matron also gave me medicines to help clear my chest, and my nose stopped running constantly, which was a welcome relief. Then one day we were told to get dressed in the clothes we’d arrived in, which had been washed and pressed for us. Dennis, Rose and I lined up at the end of our beds, and watched as the Inspector came into the ward and greeted the nurses.

‘Are we all ready?’ he said to us.

We nodded.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Off we go.’

I was sad leaving the ward because I’d really liked the nurses and the lovely food and having my own bed. I assumed we were being taken back home again to sleeping crushed up in a rough old bed and feeling hungry most of the time.

‘What about Freddie?’ Dennis asked, and was told he would be following on later.

Dennis and I were ushered into a van outside, but Rose went off separately. No one told us where she was going. No one told us where we were going either, but instead of taking us back towards Pillgwenlly, I realized we were being driven into the centre of Newport and soon we pulled up outside a great big house on the top of Stow Hill.

‘What are we doing here?’ Dennis asked.

‘This is your new home,’ the Inspector told us. ‘For a while at any rate. It’s a children’s home. You’ll be looked after here until we decide what we’re going to do with you next. Be good boys, mind, and I’m sure you’ll like it.’

I looked up at the big, smart-looking building set in nice gardens and I decided that if it was anything like the hospital, that would be OK with me. I didn’t mind if we weren’t going home. I didn’t miss Mam or my older brothers or sister. The only person I cared about – Dennis – was there with me and with him around, everything was sure to be fine.

Chapter Two (#ulink_9be728d8-d2ad-5b71-866c-87891c595ee0)

I didn’t realize there was a war on until I got to Stow Hill Children’s Home in January 1940, despite the fact that my dad had signed up to fight. Somehow it hadn’t got through to me that Hitler had invaded Poland and we had declared war on Germany as a result. I was only five years old, so that’s my excuse. But one of the first things we learned at Stow Hill was that when the air-raid warning sounded it meant there were German planes in the sky and we had to run to the shelter in case they dropped a bomb on us.

If the sirens sounded during the day, we ran to the shelter entrance which was in the big yard surrounded by a high wall where we played at the back of the building. If they went off at night, we had to leave our bedroom and file down the stairs to the front room where there was a trap door in the floor, just in front of the fireplace. When you opened the trap door, stairs led down to the cellar below. There were bunk beds down there where we waited until the all-clear sounded. I never minded being in there because it was cosy and warm and we were all perfectly comfortable. It was scary to think that enemy aeroplanes could be dropping bombs up above and I shivered at the thought of being caught upstairs when it happened.

‘Denny, what if I’m in the lav when the siren goes off and I don’t hear it?’ I asked.

‘I’d come and get you, stupid,’ he said, cuffing the back of my head.

One of the boys in the home had an uncanny knack of imitating the sound of the air-raid siren. It was so realistic that it was practically impossible to tell the difference from the real thing. One night when everyone was asleep and all was quiet, he decided to have a bit of fun and let rip with his air-raid sound. Seconds later the supervisors were racing around herding us all down the stairs and through the trap door to the shelter. They must have wondered why we were all sniggering to ourselves as word got around about who had sounded the alarm, but I don’t think they ever found out they’d been tricked.

Stow Hill wasn’t a huge children’s home; it was more of a reception centre where they put children while they decided what to do with them. There were probably only five or six boys staying there apart from us. The house had three or four big bedrooms, and Dennis and I were in adjoining beds; when Freddie arrived from hospital he came in beside us. One of the bedrooms was occupied by two old ladies, who were always roasting chestnuts in front of the fire. I remember the sweet, nutty smell which pervaded the house, but they never offered us boys any of them. I don’t think I ever talked to them. They kept themselves to themselves.

Rationing was brought in the month we arrived at Stow Hill, and meat was one of the first things to be restricted, but I don’t remember us going short. We had bread (but no jam), porridge (but no sugar to put on it), potatoes, fish, vegetables (but little fresh fruit). My sisters Rose and Betty turned up at the home one day bringing us some apples and oranges, and I found out later that Betty had nicked them from a greengrocer’s. After that, Dennis and I always referred to it as ‘the forbidden fruit’. It wasn’t an official visit. They sneaked in through a back door to the home that opened onto an alley and crept around until they found us playing in the yard.

‘Where are you staying now?’ I asked Rose as I took a big bite of my apple, juice trickling down my chin.

‘At Grandmother’s,’ she said.

My mam’s mam lived in another part of Newport. I wondered why Rose got to stay with her but we didn’t.

‘She’s only got room for me,’ Rose explained.

Betty told us that she was staying at home with Mam but she was joining the Women’s Land Army and working on a farm. I thought that sounded like fun.

‘You’re lucky because you don’t have to go to school,’ Rose said.

It was true. Our days in Stow Hill were spent playing in the yard out the back, but there was a limit to the number of games we could get up to without any toys. I missed the freedom of the days when I went wandering down to the docks or crossed the river on the Transporter Bridge, but we had been told firmly that we weren’t allowed out of the home and I for one obeyed the rules, because I had discovered to my horror what would happen if I didn’t.

One night, a couple of weeks after we arrived, I was in the bath when the young woman who was supervising my bath-time suddenly picked up a big wooden bath brush and hit me across the back with it.

I screamed in shock and tried to jump out of the bath and run away but she gripped my arm so tightly I couldn’t escape.

‘Don’t you go cheeking me, young Terence,’ she said, and brought the bath brush down again on my skinny frame.

I burst into hysterical crying, struggling to release my arm. I had no idea what I had said to upset her – I hadn’t thought I was being cheeky. No one had ever hit me in my life before. Mam and Dad might have neglected us but at least they didn’t beat us. I’m still not exactly sure what she was cross about.

‘Stop your whining,’ she snapped and hit me for a third time, across the shoulders, and I howled in pain.

When she let go of me, I curled up in a ball at the end of the bath, crying so hard I had a coughing fit and nearly choked.

‘For goodness sake, be a big boy!’ she snapped. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

But to me it was. The shock of a painful blow coming out of the blue like that was horrible. When I told Dennis later, he said that he had been hit as well and that we would just have to try to stay out of trouble. But how could I when I didn’t know what I had done wrong in the first place?

After that, I was hit several more times at Stow Hill and I usually didn’t have a clue what I’d done to deserve it. Punishments were dished out for the slightest reason and you never knew when the next one was coming your way. I tried to be good and follow the rules, but still I got hit. The injustice of it bothered me a lot but there was no one I could complain to except Dennis, and there was nothing he could do about it.

One day a boy in our room had an ingenious idea. He attached a small plastic bucket to the end of a broom handle using a length of string, then he lowered the bucket over the high wall at the back of the house, so it was dangling above the pavement below. As people walked past on the street, they dropped pennies into his bucket until it was heavy with coins. Unfortunately, just as he pulled it back over into the yard, one of the officials in the home saw him and, because Dennis and I had been standing watching, we got punished as well – which seemed most unfair to me.

‘But we weren’t doing anything,’ I cried, unable to contain my rage. If I had done something naughty, fair enough, but I hadn’t.

‘Be quiet! Don’t talk back!’ the supervisor snapped and hit me again.

A hard little core of defiance formed inside me. I hated unfairness. I thought these people were nasty and tried to stay out of their way, keeping my head down so I didn’t draw attention to myself. How dare they hit Dennis and me! How dare they!

The months went by, and in May 1940 an official told us that there had been a court case to talk about our future, and that they had decided we would be best looked after by the local authority rather than going back home to Mam again. She and Betty were on their own at the time because Dad was over fighting in France against the Nazis. During that May, Dennis told me that Dad had been one of the thousands of soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk as the German army approached. Seemingly he had to spend a long time up to his neck in oily waters off the French coast and he claimed his health never recovered after that.

I didn’t care about the fact that we weren’t going home. I’d never had any feelings for my mam. I didn’t even call her ‘mam’ – I never talked to her – so I certainly didn’t miss her. I was happy enough at Stow Hill, apart from when someone hit me. However, our time there wasn’t going to last forever. We were told by one of the staff in the home that the welfare officers had put an advert in the paper seeking foster parents for ‘three Catholic boys’, and they had received eleven replies. They spent some time interviewing all the prospective candidates, then in October 1940 it was decided that we would be sent to stay with a couple called Mr and Mrs Sorrel, who lived a few miles outside Hereford, which I found out was over the border in England.

Dennis, Freddie and I were looking forward to going to our new home. We reckoned that they must be kind people to take us on and that they’d probably give us lots of presents and lovely meals. We fantasized about how nice their house would be, and how it would be like having a real mam and dad to look after us, instead of the useless ones we had had before.

However, when the day came to travel to the Sorrels, I had a high temperature and wasn’t allowed to go. Dennis and Freddie set off without me, and I was most upset and indignant about it. I had to spend a week at Stow Hill all on my own, lying in bed and swallowing horrible medicines. The following Saturday they came back to collect me along with Mrs Sorrel, an old lady with grey hair and a friendly face.

We got on a bus to take us the fifty-mile journey from Newport to Hereford and, as we boarded, I did something very naughty. Maybe I was bored after my week’s confinement to bed. Maybe I was jealous that Dennis and Freddie had gone ahead of me. Or maybe I just fancied the piles of bus tickets sitting under a clipboard, all of them in different colours to denote their different values. While the conductor wasn’t looking, I lifted the spring, slipped one of the piles out of its place and shoved it into my coat pocket.

It wasn’t long before the conductor noticed one of his piles of tickets was missing and there was a great hullabaloo. He made the driver stop the bus and everyone was asked to look on the floor at their feet to see if they could find the lost tickets. I pretended to look along with everyone else, chuckling to myself about the loot in my pocket. Of course, the tickets weren’t found and the bus continued on its way.

When we got to the Sorrels’ house, a pretty old cottage in its own grounds on the edge of a small village, I took off my coat and threw it on a chair. The movement must have jiggled the pack of bus tickets because Dennis suddenly spotted them poking out.

‘Here, Terry! What’s this all about then?’ he asked, pulling them out.

I thought he would think it was a good laugh and would share in the joke with me, but instead, to my horror, he shouted for Mrs Sorrel.

‘Look at this! Our Terry’s been thieving,’ he shouted. ‘He’s got the bus tickets.’

She came out of the kitchen and looked at me sadly. ‘Oh, Terence, how could you? We’ll have to take these back to the bus station tomorrow and apologize. What were you thinking?’

I braced myself for a punishment of some kind but it didn’t happen. She just seemed really disappointed in me and that made me ashamed. I hadn’t thought I was doing any harm, but Mrs Sorrel said that stealing is stealing no matter whether it’s a gold sovereign or a halfpenny piece. I was upset that she had a bad opinion of me from the very first day I arrived there. It wasn’t a good start.

I was furious with Dennis for ratting on me as well, and later on we had a scrap in the garden when I called him a dirty rat and a bloody tell-tale and a traitor. We quite often scrapped, in the way that brothers do, wrestling each other to the ground and giving dead arms and legs, but we never really hurt each other. Dennis was much stronger than me and he’d pin me down on the ground so I couldn’t fight any more and that’s usually how it ended.

The Sorrels had a great garden for kids to play in. An overgrown path led down to an old brick toilet and then there was a brass bedstead sticking out of the boundary hedge, which Mr Sorrel said helped to keep the foxes out. And best of all, just across a field there was an old aerodrome and we could watch the planes taking off and landing, which was very exciting for three young boys. One of the pilots from the base sometimes came over to the Sorrels’ for his tea and Dennis and I used to ply him with questions about how many bombs he had dropped and what it was like being chased through the skies by enemy planes.

Dennis and I slept in an attic room in the cottage, and we had to climb a ladder to go to bed at night, which was an adventure for lads our age. On bath nights, Mrs Sorrel put an old tin bath in front of the open fire and then heated a big cauldron over the flames to get hot water. Freddie would have his bath first, then me, and then Dennis, but between each of us she topped up the bath with hot water from the cauldron. No one had ever been so kind to me in my life up to that date. I’d lie back in the steaming water thinking ‘This is the life!’

During the week, Dennis went to a village school that was just across the road from the cottage but I didn’t start there, despite the fact I was almost six. I don’t know why. During the day, I just played out in the garden with Freddie and sometimes we helped Mr Sorrel to tend his vegetables. There was a lake nearby with swans on it so we might go to look at them. On Sundays we all attended the local church, which was the first time I’d been to church in my life. I found it a bit boring and was always being reprimanded for fidgeting during the sermon. The priest used big words and I could never understand what he was talking about so it was hard to sit still.

I was pretty happy there with the Sorrels. They were nice people, salt of the earth you might say, but I think they found three energetic boys a bit of a handful. I was already getting a reputation for being the naughty one of the three, although I don’t think I was naughty so much as restless when I got bored. I do remember that I was always being told off for using colourful language, which I had picked up from my dad and my older brothers back at home. Everyone swore in Bolt Street; that’s just the way they talked.

Anyway, come the New Year of 1941, a welfare officer arrived and told us we were moving on again and that we would be picked up on the 6th to go to our next home. It seemed we had only just arrived and started to get settled, and that was my main objection to the move. Although the Sorrels had been nice, I hadn’t had time in the three months to become attached to either of them. I just thought it would have been better if we could have put down roots somewhere instead of being always in temporary places. But it wasn’t up to me. That much was clear already. I just had to do as I was told and go wherever the council took me.