A troubled childhood. Part 3

The continuing autobiography of a remarkable man. This episode is one of the darker ones in his story, and contains details of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child

Part 3

My next memories were of moving on from that first home, and being put into another. This disturbed me, as at least I knew the first home, but this other one, this new one, was strange. I was five, maybe five-and-a-half, I don't remember exactly, and I was put into a big redbrick building that seemed huge to me. It was a Victorian building with foreboding rooms and dark cupboards that I got to know very well. It was a sad place, full of orphans and deserted children, but we would play games and fantasise as to what our mothers and fathers would be and look like. The one strength we had was loyalty to each other, for we were treated harshly. I can remember so clearly being hungry, always hungry, even during those early years.

At this particular children's home we were sent to the local school, which was not a good place. At this stage I began to experience the laying down of patterns that would follow me all through my childhood and adolescence. Whenever something was stolen it was always us orphans who were brought to the front of the class. It was always us who had to empty our pockets out and make sure that we didn't have anything that had gone missing, and it was always us from the home who had their desks opened up first. I can remember the outrage and the injustice that sank into my heart from those days and is with me still, for I know now that I will never step down from an injustice.

If I believe and perceive that something is right then death alone is all that will remove me from that position. That may sound dramatic, or melodramatic, but it is my truth and it is a fact, and I have gone to the wall for justice on more than one occasion.

The interesting thing about the behaviour of children is that if one child is different from the rest then that child will become the object of the group's bullying. I suffered bullying from those early times until far, far into my twenties, and I had to fight physically and mentally and emotionally for everything - not that I am complaining, for you have to fight in this life. I could cite any number of occasions when there would be groups of people who would come and pick on me for my hair and the purple patches that I still had and the skin that I had. My disjointed lankiness and the fact that all my clothes came from charity donations and usually had seen far, far better days, were also reasons for being picked on.

So I received beating after beating after beating, but one thing became very clear at that early age to the people who beat me, in particular within the school. They could never walk around with their eyes shut because I might be beaten by three or four boys but I made absolutely certain that I got every single one of those boys on their own at some time and returned, with severe interest, the beatings that they gave out. It doesn't give me any pleasure to expose that shadowy side of me, but I found a great elation in hurting those who hurt me.

I found a power in seeing blood, in particular if it was someone else's. So I soon developed what I felt was quite unwarranted, a reputation for being out of control, a hard nut, incorrigible, irrepressible.

It was at this time, probably when I was six, or maybe six-and-a-half, that I met my first form of sexual abuse. There will be a lot about abuse in this narrative for I have lived a life of abuse, and I claim that experience not from the high point of the victim but from the position of a teacher. You may not understand the meaning of these words at this stage of the book but I do hope that you will understand them when you've reached the last page.

There was a man, a teacher at that school, who was fat, bald, with just a little bit of grey hair and funny bits growing out of his nose. Life was hard for me in that school, constantly being the butt of jokes, the searches, nothing was yours, the fights, and I was always scrapped first because, of course, it must have been me who started the fight because I was from the orphanage. This man, this teacher, befriended me. He had a soft voice and soft hands. One thing I wanted more than anything else was to be accepted as part of the team, to be accepted as an equal, and to this day this need, this desire to be seen as an equal, has quite often coloured my actions.

And all that I wanted from those early days was to be in the football team. This was a bit difficult as I had no football kit and, just as with many times in my life, I had come up against the gatekeepers, the gatekeepers of the rules, the gatekeepers who will not let you into the club. There were rules, even at this early stage, that you couldn't do PE unless you had the khaki shorts or knickers, white top, white plimsolls, and football boots for the boys who were playing football. I desperately wanted to play football. I was fed up with sitting around outside in the cold while everybody else seemed to be having such great fun. So this man, my teacher, he gave me a football top, and he gave me a pair of football boots. They were huge! They were gi-normous! I didn't care, they were mine and I stuffed them full of paper and I found some dubbin and I dubbined those boots like mad and imagined that I would be a great footballer.

This man said that to be a footballer you have to have good muscles, and he said that I had good muscles but that massage was important to these muscles, to make them better and make them strong. Not only that, but while he was massaging me I could have a sweet or something. I never really knew there was anything wrong for I would lie on my back, naked, and he would massage me. He used to pull my percy a lot but I couldn't understand what his interest was in that, because you must remember that I was used to being surrounded by girls and I always used to think that I was different and somehow not right. He had one similar to me except his was bigger, of course, not that I paid much attention to it. And he used to just massage and pull mine until it was sick, or his thing was sick. You must remember that I had no conception at this stage of what this man was doing, except at a later stage when he tried to hurt me. He tried to bugger me on several occasions but I believe that I must have been well looked after and well protected and he never succeeded.

© J K Adler-Collins 2008