And he hadn’t just lost his past, he’d lost his future with it. None of his hopes and ambitions had come along with him, if he only knew it. His dreams weren’t going to come true now. There had been talk of university, but the school Nick was to attend the following morning did not produce anyone fit for that. When the light died in Muriel’s eyes just a couple of days ago, the light that shone on Nick died, too. He had been propelled into a world of poverty and fear he had no conception of.
His new life began in earnest the following morning.
6
Mr Toms
In the morning, Nick was jerked awake by an ear-splitting whistle that made him leap up and look around in alarm. Mr Toms was standing in the doorway in a tracksuit with a sports whistle round his neck.
‘Up you get, you little toads,’ he shouted. ‘Up, up, up!’ He left and went to the next dorm, to repeat the good news there.
All around, the other lads were rolling around and groaning, before crawling out of bed and stumbling rapidly off. Nick sat up in bed. It was freezing. He pulled a blanket around him and watched in a daze as the other boys rushed around him. Already they were coming back and without any delay started getting into their school clothes and folding up their pyjamas neatly. After that, they stripped down their beds, and began making them again from scratch.
It was too early. What about his zeds? The previous night, Toms had told Andrews to show Nick the ropes. But Andrews had only just crawled out of bed. He was leaning on the windowsill looking out at the day and scratching his arse while another boy made his bed for him, and Nick was scared to disturb him.
Nick needed the loo - that was where everyone had gone running off to - but everything was happening so quickly. They were all back already and busy making their beds. Nick tried to copy them but it was coming out all wrong, so he plucked up courage and went to ask Andrews if he’d got it right.
Andrews looked at the bed in horror.
‘Didn’t anyone bloody think to help him? You twats ...’
He rushed over to get it sorted. The bed had to be made with hospital corners - grubby sheets folded over like paper, neat as an envelope. Andrews fell on the bed and ordered one of the other lads to get on with Nick’s pyjamas, while Nick was sent off to get himself ready, feeling like a fool and wondering what was so urgent.
He’d left it too late, that was the problem. A moment after he got back in the dorm, Toms reappeared in the door and blew his ear-splitting whistle again. The boys dropped what they were doing and made a dash for the snooker table. They arranged themselves around it in two rows, three on each side, backs to the table, with their neatly folded pyjamas balanced on their outstretched hands. Andrews hustled Nick into place and helped him get his clothes in a pile. Nick twitched; the pyjamas tumbled. He caught them and hurriedly re-folded them as best he could. He caught a brief glimpse of Andrews’ agonised face staring helplessly at the tangle of his clothes before Toms blew the whistle again and everyone froze.
Nick was anxious, but more bemused than anything. He had no idea just how wrong his pile of clothes was, or how bad his bed looked, or what that would mean.
Toms walked up to the snooker table and removed one of the cues from its rest before going over to inspect the beds. He paused by Nick’s, then came to walk down the line of boys, like a general inspecting his troops.
He hated this part of the morning. Whether it was all neat and present and correct affected his mood for the whole day. He was already in a bad mood, having had to look at a bed made by a moron. When he got to the culprit, the new boy, he could hardly believe it. The boy half smiled at him - as if he had anything to smile about. His clothes looked as if they’d been folded up by a monkey.
Andrews opened his mouth to speak.
‘Shut up,’ barked Toms. He lifted his hand and stirred the air, with a circular motion of his finger. Obediently, Andrews took a step forward, holding his arms out straight ahead of him. Toms lined himself up to one side, held the snooker cue down with its tip on the floor under Andrews’ hands, paused a moment to get his aim just right, and then swung it up in a vicious arc through the air. There was a hard crack as the wood hit Andrews’ wrists, the clothes were flung all over the room and the prefect collapsed to the ground, with a high scream, tucking his hands under his armpits.
No one moved a muscle.
‘I didn’t mean... ’ began Nick.
‘Shut up, new boy,’ said Toms.
On the floor, Andrews was gathering together his clothes. As he got back to his place in the line, he gave Nick a truly poisonous look.
Toms left the room. He didn’t need to punish Nick, he knew that would be done for him. The boys scattered and Nick backed off to his bed - he knew what was coming. If the staff behaved like that, what could you expect of the boys?
Andrews came straight at him and swung a punch. And Nick being Nick, even though he was almost a foot shorter, swung one back. That was Nick - never say no to a fight. He had a secret weapon, too. He was fearless. Go for the biggest bugger first, take no prisoners. It meant he got his face punched in from time to time, but no one ever picked a fight with him lightly.
Andrews wasn’t expecting it. Nick caught him right on the side of the face and stepped back. Nine times out of ten, a bully stops when they know you’ll fight back, but Andrews wasn’t a bully - he was a thug. He grabbed Nick by the front of his shirt, slapped him hard round the side of the head and shoved him to the floor. He swung a kick, but Nick was like rubber - he literally bounced back on his feet.
The red mist came down. Nick lost it like this sometimes. He let out a yell and went for Andrews like a madman. Andrews was so surprised by his fury that he fell backwards before him.
Nick was on him at once. He grabbed Andrews’ hair in both hands and started banging his head on the floor. When Andrews knocked his hands away, he started slapping and punching his face. Andrews had actually begun to cry for help, when suddenly an irresistible force lifted Nick right up by the back of his trousers and flung him through the air. He landed in a heap against the wall, but was back up in a second and ran in for more, like a fool - straight into the furious figure of Mr Toms.
Nick was like a madman, he even prepared to go for Toms. Toms simply reached out his hand, seized hold of the hair on top of his head, held him still for a moment while he stopped struggling, before lifting his head up so that he was standing up straight. Then he punched Nick in the stomach as hard as he could.
It was like a kick from a horse. Nick was fourteen, tough and wiry; but Toms was a grown man, and a strong one. As the wind rushed out of him, Nick could hear Oliver’s words in his ears the day before: ‘They beat you up like a man.’ He’d thought it was the usual exaggeration, but here it was, just as he’d said. Not detention or even the cane. A violent blow to the stomach. Beaten up like a man.
Nick doubled over like a reed. The punch had been right in the stomach when he wasn’t expecting it. His whole body went into a seizure, his lungs stopped working and he started writhing and thrashing on the ground, desperately trying to snatch some air. The pain was incredible, but far worse was the terrible panic that overwhelmed him, because he was so completely unable to breathe. Toms came to stand over him shouting something, but Nick couldn’t make it out. His ears were roaring.
Toms stooped down and hauled him to his feet by his shirt. ‘Breathe, you silly twat, breathe!’ he yelled, and let him go. Nick fell straight back to the floor, thrashing and banging like a fish out of water, still unable to get so much as a sip of air.
Toms began to look worried. The last thing he wanted was a hospital job. But although Nick was badly bruised, he hadn’t ruptured anything, and gradually he managed to get his breath back in little sips. Within a minute or two he was crouched on the floor, on his knees, almost in the same posture his mother had died in, clutching his stomach and rocking to and fro.
Toms was furious - as much at the shock he’d given himself as with the breach of discip
line. The new boys did sometimes require a knock or two to get them into shape, but he rarely found little scraps like this punching the lights out of one of his prefects.
He shoved Nick onto his side with his foot. ‘I’ve got my eye on you, and that’s something you aren’t going to like, you ugly little piece of shit,’ he bellowed. He looked at Andrews. ‘Fucking pathetic,’ he sneered. ‘Beaten up by a kid. Wanker!!’
Toms left the room, and as soon as the door closed, Andrews went straight over to Nick and carried on where Toms had left off. He stood over him and kicked him several times in the head and kidneys for good measure.
‘You get me hit again, I’ll kill you,’ he hissed. ‘You fight back to me again, I’ll get him to do it.’ He jerked his head in Toms’ direction. He put his foot in Nick’s face and ground it in. Then he bent over him. ‘Get cleaned up. Breakfast is in fifteen minutes. If you’re not ready, you’ll get more of the same again and so will I. And if I get more, you’re dead. Understand?’
Nick nodded and sobbed. He had never felt so humiliated in his life. He could hardly walk, his stomach was a ball of pain, his face was swollen where Andrews had kicked him. He hauled himself to his feet and staggered to the toilets to splash water on his face. Somehow, he managed to be ready with the others, waiting on the landing for the whistle, so they could file down in a crocodile to the hall below for breakfast.
The year was 1984. No one who had thought about it for long believed that beating kids was going to do anyone any good, but inside Meadow Hill the violence went unchecked. In some of the Homes it worked well enough. There were plenty of people willing to work long hours for low pay to help the kids. But when it went wrong, as it had in Meadow Hill, there was no inspection and no accountability. The staff could do as they liked.
The only training Mr Toms ever had was in the army. He had fought very bravely years ago in Korea, but the only technique he had ever been given to sort out human problems was discipline. It was a simple fact that if you hit a difficult kid often enough and hard enough, the problems disappeared. Of course they didn’t really go away - they just went underground and a few years later the brutalised victims would start making their presence known elsewhere in the country, re-emerging and filling up the prisons in the form of addicts, thieves, bullies, murderers and rapists.
Outside, Nick’s mates were hanging around in their new wave hairdos, smoking weed, cheeking the teachers, watching their parents clean up after them, punking it up on a Saturday night and listening to Adam Ant, Depeche Mode or The Clash. Inside, you could be hospitalised for folding your clothes badly. Toms thought of it as ‘teaching the new boy the ropes’, which basically meant picking him up for every little infringement of the rules he might make. The rules were countless at Meadow Hill, but if there wasn’t one handy, Mr Toms just made it up. Of course the new boy was messing up all the time.
The other boys were used to new lads getting this treatment. For some of them it meant it wasn’t their turn anymore, and they were more than happy to see Toms’ attention turn to Nick. Others liked to join in. There’s always someone who wants to please the biggest, toughest kid by following their example, and Toms was the biggest kid by far. To this, Nick responded as he always did - by fighting back. As a result, he upset the pecking order. In Meadow Hill, the pecking order wasn’t about clothes or good looks or wit and how cool you were or how good at sports - it was plainly and simply about how tough you were. Nick had showed himself a fighter by having a go not only at Andrews, but even at Toms. As a result, every kid in the Home who fancied himself with his fists lined up for a go.
The first fight came at the first chance - during break. A lean, tough-looking boy pushed over to him and started shoving him backwards.
‘Who are you looking at? What do you want?’
‘I wasn’t... ’ began Nick, but the boy wasn’t there to listen. He shoved Nick in the shoulder so he staggered backwards.
‘You’re a little twat, aren’t you? Staring at me. Eh?’ Another shove. It didn’t take much. It never did with Nick; he had a temper about two microns long. With a cry of rage, he hurled himself at the boy.
Next thing he knew he was on the floor with a foot going into his ribs. He tried to get up, but was kicked back down - bang bang bang. In the end, all he could do was curl up into a ball and wait for it to finish.
There were two more at lunch time. He won one of those, lost the other. If he managed to get going, he stood a good chance because he just went completely ape, but if they were quick, like that first lad, he was lost.
There was more trouble after school on the sports field. By then, it had become a game. Nick had raised his head too high, too fast. He had become a target.
By the end of his first day he’d had four fights. Toms was completely vindicated in his assumption that Nick Dane was trouble. Four fights! What more proof do you need?
That evening, before dinner, Nick got his punishment. Toms took him out of the main hall with the two other lads he’d been caught fighting with - the others had got away with it - and Andrews. He did them first. It was the cane, six strokes each. They were tough lads who could take a punch without a whimper, but Toms had all of them, even Andrews, screaming in pain. He made them wear their gym shorts while he did it and Nick was terrified to see the blood show through by the end of it. Blood? He was a kid being smacked for being bad. How did blood come into it?
Toms sent the other boys out before he had a go at Nick. From the hall there were cheers as the boys entered. Toms looked down at him and nodded his head.
‘Your turn, son,’ he said. Oddly, he was at his kindest at these moments. Nick bent over with his hands on his knees as the other lads had and stuck his behind out. ‘It’s always worse to start with, but once you get to know the ropes you'll find it easier,’ Toms told him. ‘And I’ll tell you what. If I see you trying, I’ll go easy on you, OK?’
Nick could only nod.
‘But today you haven’t tried. You got caught fighting twice, Dane. Not good enough. Those boys got six for having one fight. How many do you think you should get?’
Nick couldn’t even answer. It was all he could do to keep his legs from trembling.
‘What’s two sixes, boy?’ yelled Toms suddenly.
‘Twelve, Sir,’ he croaked.
Toms didn’t reply. He swished the cane to and fro a bit, then landed the first one.
Nick had promised himself not to make any noise, but he couldn’t help himself from yelping. It was agony. Toms waited in between each blow for him to compose himself. The first three he spread out, but the fourth he deliberately aimed where the first had landed. Nick screamed with pain and on the fifth, involuntarily put his hands back and caught the cane on his wrists; so Toms delivered that blow again. After six, there was a longer pause before it started again. He stopped at nine.
‘Now get out of my sight,’ said Toms. He stood leaning against a table with his arms folded while Nick got himself together, wiped his nose and made for the door.
‘They’re all the same, the tough ones,’ remarked Toms behind him. ‘They all come in here smirking and they go out crying like girls.’
Nick went through the door, swallowing his sobs. He was expecting jeers on the other side, but they never came. He got a bigger cheer than any of them, even from the lads who’d been fighting him a few hours before.
‘Let’s see if he’s a sergeant or a corporal,’ someone shouted. Nick was rushed and overwhelmed. He began to flail about to fight them off, but there were too many of them. They meant no harm, though. They grabbed his arms and legs and pulled down his shorts. Everyone bent to have a look at his backside.
‘He’s a bloody general!’ someone shouted. Another cheer went up. They let him go. Nick pulled up his shorts and staggered off to a corner to collapse. His shoulder and back were slapped as he went past.
‘Well,done, mate!’
‘Nine stripes on your first day - it’s a record!’
‘G
eneral Dane, eh?’
Nick nodded and tried to grin, but he could hardly speak. Then the whistle went, and he joined the rest of them in a crocodile onto the football field.
The attack from Toms gave him a break from the boys - he was left alone for the rest of the day. But it wasn’t over by a long way. Andrews still had a lesson to teach him. He was twice the size of Nick, but perhaps he was wary now, because he got some friends to help him. They crept out of bed and came on him in his sleep. One of them pinned his hands above his head, another put his hand over his mouth, another held his legs while Andrews punched him in the stomach, just where Toms had got him that morning, five or six times.
‘That’ll learn you not to mess with me again,’ hissed Andrews in his ear. They held him down for a while longer, clamping his mouth shut while he heaved and struggled silently, before they let him go. Nick doubled up in bed, rolled over and vomited onto the sheets.
And next day, the fights started again.
For the next few days, Nick wandered around in a daze. Why was this happening to him? Because his mother had died. Each night, he wept. Each morning, Toms found an excuse to bring the snooker cue down on his head, or across the back of his knees, or jabbed it in his stomach. All he wanted to do was get through the next hour without another fist, another kicking, another caning. The only break he got was during lessons at school or after a caning, when all enemies briefly banded together in a celebration of their stripes.
School itself was a joke. One of the teachers’ idea of a lesson was to sit them down, put a tape recorder on playing hideous country and western songs, put his legs up on a desk, take out a book and leave them to it. The only time he got up was when someone made too much noise, in which case he took them into the corridor and beat them. Not everyone was so bad, admittedly. In some of the classes there was even the chance to learn something, but it was pretty basic. Nick was well into his studies for his O-levels when Muriel died. Here, no one did any exams at all. It was taken for granted that even if they were on offer, no one was going to pass. The only lessons that did any real good were woodwork and metalwork. In the expectation that the best the boys could hope for was trade, the workshops were actually rather good.