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His most substantial book to date, this compelling story of a teenager caught in a corrupt 1980s Care Home is a powerful study of a particularly highly-charged and distressing subject. Handled with great sensitivity and engrossing narrative drive, it is an important addition to the understanding of how childcare can go so wrong.
The police came for him at his own home around lunch time the next day. He hid in his room when he heard them banging, but when they started to knock the door down, he went to let them in. They took him straight to Meadow Hill Assessment Centre.
Nick’s first sight of Meadow Hill were the grand steps leading up to a pair of imposing stone pillars framing the door, glimpsed between the rhododendrons and sycamore trees that lined the winding drive. The bushes were all in flower, so they drove up through a forest of purple blossom, dappled in bright May sunshine, into a cracked tarmac car park in front of the house. It looked more like a church than a Home. The front door was big enough to admit giants. The two policemen who had picked Nick up led him up the grand but decaying steps.
‘There, you’re the Lord of the Manor now,’ one of them said.
‘Better than where you came from, eh?’ said the other.
Nick followed them in anxiously. He asked them if Jenny knew what was happening to him but they just shrugged. ‘We’re just taking you where we were told to,’ one of them said.
He was left inside with a fat black woman in a trouser suit, who signed for him, and then sat him down in her office with a biscuit and a glass of Cola, while she rang through to see if the head was ready to see him. Her call made, she sat opposite him and watched him as he ate and drank. He’d eaten nothing since his dinner the night before – just a chunk of cheese he’d found in the fridge at his house that he’d eaten in bed before he went to sleep.
‘How’d you come to end up in a place like this?’ the woman, whose name was Dilys, asked him. ‘Don’t answer, I have your notes here. I know everything about you. Mum died. Things not too good.Well, you’re going to have to make the most of it. Do as you’re told and keep your head down. It’s going to take a little time to find your feet in a place like this. Maybe you’re going to have to take a few knocks. Tell me, Nicholas,’ she said, tipping her head back and looking at him across her plump cheeks. ‘Do you know how to be invisible?’ Nick shrugged. It didn’t sound like the kind of question that required an answer. ‘Because you have to learn to be invisible here,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘And don’t rely on getting rescued either. Who’s going to want to foster a great big brute like you? Your pretty face won’t help you in here. On the contrary. So. You have any family nearby, then, Nicholas?
‘They’re all in Australia,’ said Nick defensively.
‘Well, it’s not like a family here,’ she scolded. ‘I don’t think there’s a soul in Meadow Hill who knows what a family is really like.’
Nick swallowed his Cola and said nothing. Dilys picked up her pen and got back on flicking through the papers on her desk for another few minutes until the phone rang. She answered, and took Nick off to meet the headmaster of Meadow Hill, Mr William James. Bill James was a wide, pale man with soft pink ears that stuck out like mug handles through his thinning, shoulder length hair. He had tired, puffy brown eyes. The skin beneath them was so dark it was almost black. He was sitting well back from his desk, dressed in a scruffy black suit, dandruff on his shoulders, drinking instant coffee and dusting biscuit crumbs off his sleeves when Dilys delivered Nick to him. When he got to his feet and came round the desk to shake hands and introduce himself, he revealed an enormous waist. The headmaster must have weighed nearly twenty stone. Bill James had been the headmaster of Meadow Hill
for over twenty-five years. He was a campaigning man, a reformer. He firmly believed that there was no such thing as an evil child, and that even the worst of them could be turned into useful adults. His motto: ‘Every child deserves a fresh start.’ He settled himself back down behind his desk and looked at the boy sitting on the other side. Nick was pale and dirty and his face was red and slightly swollen on one side. He’d been in a fight recently. The usual sort of thing. Good-looking lad. Light brown hair, blue eyes.
Trouble. He could see it coming. Funny thing, it was the pretty ones who were often the most trouble. He welcomed Nick and began his introductory speech.
'Meadow Hill,’ he told Nick, ‘is the end of the road. We take care of boys that no one else will. They all come here. Juvenile delinquents, runaways, ne’er-do-wells, bullies and orphans. Outside of these walls, a great many bad things happen, as I’m sure you know, and a great many perpetrators of those bad things end up here in my care at Meadow Hill. And every one of them arrives at a level playing field. We’re all equal at Meadow Hill. Every child has the opportunity of a fresh start. I have to say, though, Nicholas, not many of them take up that
chance. Very few. Just the odd one, occasional escapees from a life of crime. Nicholas,’ he said earnestly, peering hopefully at him from over his reading glasses, ‘I want to ask you – do you think you’ll be one of them?’
Nicholas was confused. ‘I haven’t done anything, Sir.’
Mr James smiled grimly. ‘No one has ever done anything in my experience.’ He flicked through the notes on his desk. ‘Mother,’ he observed. ‘Heroin.’ Nick stared sullenly at him. Mr James sighed and waved a hand at the window.
‘Tell me, Nicholas. What do you see out there?’
Nick followed the hand. ‘Nothing, Sir.’
‘Trees,’ prompted Mr James.
‘Trees.’
‘Trees, Sir.’
‘Trees, Sir.’
‘The darling buds of May. It’s a fresh start. Away from the streets and the drugs, away from the inadequate parent . . .’
‘She wasn’t inadequate.’
‘Ah. Perhaps a good parent would have been a little more careful with the carer of their child, don’t you think? But the good news is, Nicholas, that a life on the streets with no solace but cheap drugs is no longer the limit of your horizons.’ Mr James lifted his eyebrows and stared across at Nick, waiting for a useful response. Nick scowled. ‘I haven’t done anything, Sir,’ he said again. The fact was, he liked the streets. He liked the drugs too, when he could get his hands on them, although all he’d ever really tried was a bit of weed.
Mr James shuffled his papers. ‘I don’t think I’m really getting through to you, am I?’
‘Fuck you, Mr James,’ Nick replied. But not out loud.
‘I’ll be honest with you, Nicholas. We can’t offer you a mother’s love here. That has been taken from you. What we can do, however, is offer you an education of sorts, plenty of exercise and a secure home. There’s a lot of boys would give a great deal to have that – although precious few of them seem to end up here,’ he muttered to himself, half under his breath. ‘So, Nicholas! Make the most of us, and we will make the most of you!’
Mr James went back to the file. ‘Good at school. No weaknesses, the report says. Wonderful – a boy with no weaknesses! An all-rounder.
Marvellous. But! – what’s this? Attendance, awful. Ah. No weaknesses – but without the gift of hard work.’ He shook his head. ‘I never met a truant who didn’t regret it in years to come,’ he remarked. ‘But it’s hard enough teaching you boys geography, let alone wisdom. Well,
there’ll be no skiving off here. We have everything here on site – home, school, play, all in one place.’ He smiled across the desk. ‘No escape. Nowhere to run off to! And no stealing, either. There’s nothing here to steal!’
He leaned back and laughed at his own joke – which was, sadly, pretty nearly true. Mr James picked up a telephone and asked for a lad to be sent up. He sat and waited, smiling vaguely and twiddling his thumbs. After a few minutes there was a knock on the door.
‘In,’ hooted Mr James. The door opened and in came a pale, slight boy, a year or so younger than Nick, with a head of wavy blond hair.
‘Oliver, this is Nicholas,’ said Mr James. The two boys looked at each other cautiously. ‘Take him to Mr Toms,
will you? He’s to be settled in. Keep an eye on him. I think he might need a bath.’
‘Will do, Sir,’ piped Oliver. Mr James dismissed them and the blond boy led the way out of the office and back into the grounds.
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