two four-cornered bell towers at each side of the central elevation. Except that there were no bells in them. Just stone urns. There was a portico at the main entrance, with a triangular roof above it supported on four giant columns. Above that, an enormous clock. A clock whose golden hands seemed to tick away our time there as if they were going backwards. Or maybe it was just our age. When you are young a year is a big part of your life and seems to last for ever. When you are old, there have been too many of them gone before and they pass all too fast. We move so slowly away from birth, and rush so quickly to death.
We arrived in a big black car that day. I’ve no idea whose it was. It was cold and the sky was spitting sleet. Looking back, from the top of the steps, I could see the millworkers’ tenements in the valley below, cold grey slate roofs and cobbled streets. And beyond that, the city skyline. We were surrounded by green here, trees, a huge kitchen garden, an orchard, and yet we were just a gob away from the centre of the city. In time I would learn that on a still night you could hear the traffic, and sometimes see red tail-lights distantly in the dark.
It was our last view of what I came to think of as the free world, because when we crossed that threshold we left all comfort and humanity behind, and entered a dismal place where the darkest side of human nature cast its shadow on us.
That dark side was made flesh by the governor. Mr Anderson he was called, and a more brutal and cruel man you would be hard pushed to find. I have often asked myself what kind of man is it that would find fulfilment in abusing helpless children. Punishment, as he saw it. I often wished I could have met that man on equal terms, then we’d have seen how brave he was.
He kept a leather tawse in a drawer in his room. It measured about eighteen inches in length, had two tails, and was a good half-inch thick. And when he belted you with it, he would march you along the bottom corridor to the foot of the stairs leading to the boys’ dorm and make you bend over. Your feet were on the first step, to elevate you a little, your hands supporting you on the third. And he would leather your arse till your legs buckled beneath you.
He was not a big man. Although he was to us. In fact, a giant in my memory. But actually he wasn’t much taller than Matron. His hair was thin, the colour of ash, and oiled back across his narrow skull for all the world as if it had been painted on. A close-cropped black and silver moustache prickled his upper lip. He wore dark-grey suits that concertinaed around thick black shoes which squeaked on the tiles so that you always knew when he was coming, like the tick-tock of the crocodile in
He never referred to any of us by name. You were ‘boy’, or ‘you, girl’, and he was always using words we didn’t understand. Like ‘comestibles’ when he meant ‘sweeties’.
I met him for the first time that day when the people who had brought us there took us into his office. He was all sweetness and light and full of assurances about how well we would be looked after here. Well, these people were barely out the door when we discovered what being well looked after actually meant. But first he delivered a short lecture.
We stood trembling on the linoleum in front of his big, polished desk, and he positioned himself, arms folded, on the other side of it, tall square windows rising to the ceiling behind him.
‘First things first. You will refer to me at all times as sir. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, and when Peter said nothing I dunted him with my elbow.
He glared at me. ‘What?’
I nodded towards Mr Anderson. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
It took him a moment or two to understand. Then he smiled. ‘Yes, sir.’
Mr Anderson gave him a long, cold look. ‘We have no time for Catholics here. The Church of Rome is not welcome. You will not be invited to join us in hymn singing or bible reading, and will stay in the dorm until morning prayers are over. Don’t bother settling yourselves in, because with luck you won’t be staying.’ He leaned forward, then, knuckles on the desk in front of him, glowing white in the gloom. ‘But for as long as you are here, be aware that there is only one rule.’ He paused for emphasis and enunciated each word. ‘Do. What. You. Are. Told.’ He stood up again. ‘If you break that rule you will suffer the consequences. Do you understand?’
Peter glanced at me for confirmation, and I gave him an almost imperceptible nod. ‘Yes, sir,’ we said in unison. We were nearly telepathic sometimes, Peter and me. As long as I did the thinking for both of us.
We were marched, then, along to Matron’s room. She was an unmarried woman I think, in her middle years. I always remember her downturned mouth, and those shadowed eyes that seemed opaque somehow. You never knew what she was thinking, and her mood was always characterized by that sullen mouth. Even when she smiled, which was hardly ever.
We had to stand for ages in front of her desk while she opened a file on each of us and then told us to undress. It didn’t seem to bother Peter. But I was embarrassed, and afraid I would get a hard-on. Not that there was anything remotely sexual about Matron. But you never knew when that damn thing would pop up on you.
She examined us both, I suppose for identifying marks, then went carefully through our hair searching for nits. Apparently she didn’t find any, but told us that our hair was too long and that it would have to be shorn.
And then it was our teeth. Jaws prised apart, and stubby fingers that tasted bitter, like antiseptic, thrust in our mouths to poke around. As if we were animals being sized up for market.
I remember clearly the walk along to the bathroom. Stark naked, holding our folded clothes in front of us, prodded from the rear to hurry us along. I don’t know where the other children were that day. At school probably. But I am glad there was no one there to see us. It was humiliating.
About six inches of lukewarm water were poured into a large zinc tub, and we sat in it together to work up a lather with rough lumps of carbolic soap and wash ourselves thoroughly under Matron’s watchful eye. It was the last time at The Dean that I shared a bath with just one other person. Weekly bath night, it turned out, consisted of four to a bath, always in the same six inches of scummy water. So this was luxury.
The boys’ dormitory occupied the first floor of the east wing. Rows of beds along facing walls of a long room. Tall arched windows stood at each end, and shorter rectangular windows lined the outside wall. In later days it was filled with spring sunshine, warm and bright, but today it breathed gloom and depression. Peter and I were given beds side by side at the far end of the dorm. I had noticed, as we passed among them, that all the neatly made-up beds had small canvas sacks placed at the end of them, and when we reached ours I saw two empty sacks draped over our solitary case. There were no bedside cabinets, drawers or cupboards. We were, I soon found out, discouraged from accumulating personal belongings. And connections to the past were frowned upon.
Mr Anderson came in behind us. ‘You can empty your case and place your belongings in the sacks provided,’ he said. ‘They will remain at all times at the foot of your beds. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Everything in the case had been systematically folded by somebody. I carefully separated my clothes from Peter’s, and filled both our sacks. He sat for a while on the edge of his bed flicking through the only thing that remained of our father. A collection he had begun before the war of cigarette packets. Like a stamp album. Except that in place of the stamps, he had cut out the fronts of dozens of different cigarette packets and pasted them into the pages. Some of them had exotic names like
Peter never tired of looking at them. I suppose the album was mine, really. But I was happy to let him have it. I never asked him, but it was as if those cigarette packets gave him a direct connection in some way to our father.
I felt a much stronger connection with our mother. And the ring she had given me was the symbolic memento of her that I guarded with my life. Not even Peter knew I had it. He couldn’t be trusted with a secret. He was just as likely to open his mouth and blab to anyone. So I kept it hidden in a rolled-up pair of socks. It was just the sort of thing, I suspected, that would be confiscated or stolen.
The dining hall was on the ground floor, and that’s when we met most of the other kids for the first time, after they got back from school. There were probably fifty or more of us at that time. Boys in the east wing, girls in the west. Of course we were a curiosity. Naive newcomers. The others were blase, experienced Dean kids. We were wet behind the ears, and worst of all, Catholics. I don’t know how, but they all seemed to know that, and it separated us from the crowd. Nobody wanted to talk to us. Except for Catherine.
