Nobody Came Robbie Garner with Toni Maguire The appalling true story of brothers cruelly abused in a jersey care home Robbie Garner Contents Title Page Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Epilogue Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher Prologue I’m an ordinary man; maybe some people would call me an insignificant one. I don’t mind if they do. I know who I am. I like order in my life; routine is important to me. It’s that everyday sameness that has at last given me peace. Each morning before I leave my house I make my bed the way I was made to do as a boy: sheets pulled up tightly and the corners tucked in neatly. I wash my mug and plate and place them in the cupboard over the sink. And when I return home from work it’s my practice to take a shower, pull on jeans and a T-shirt, put away my work clothes and make a mug of tea just in time to watch the evening news. But it was that very routine that destroyed the calmness in my life. The calmness that had taken me so many years to achieve disappeared on a February night when I turned on my television and heard the words ‘abuse, rape and cover-up’. It was the newsreader informing viewers that the dark side of Jersey had been exposed. Suddenly the screen was filled with the blown-up photograph of a large granite building; a building that I, with a rising feeling of nausea, immediately recognised – Haut de la Garenne. Then the picture changed to show dogs on leashes held by white-coated handlers. The police had brought in sniffer dogs. The remains of a child had been found, they said. ‘Only one?’ I thought to myself. The camera moved on to a young reporter standing in the grounds who, with a sympathetic expression on his face and a microphone in his hand, was addressing his unseen audience of millions. ‘The secrets and lies of Jersey have finally come to light,’ he told us. ‘What has been revealed has shocked the residents of an island known not just for its beauty, but also for its tranquillity and lack of crime.’ ‘Behind me,’ the reporter’s voice continued, ‘is the children’s home where, over a period of nearly ten decades, more than a thousand youngsters have been fed, clothed and housed by the charity of Jersey’s government. ‘Some were orphans, some were abandoned, others had been taken into care, but whatever the reason they had been placed in this grey Victorian building they all had one thing in common – vulnerability. They, more than any others, were in need of love, understanding and protection. However, here that was denied them; for it was in this institution that their childhood lost its final struggle to exist.’ The picture changed again and we were back with the newsreader, who informed us that the complaints, the allegations and the whispered stories that had rebounded over Jersey for nearly half a century had finally come to be investigated. Those rumours of rape, torture and even worse had now become shocking accusations. He said the police feared there might be more human remains buried in six other suspect sites the dogs had found. In the cellars underneath the main building a room showed signs that it had been used as a torture chamber. Over a hundred adults, who had once been the children of Haut de la Garenne, had made accusation after accusation to Jersey’s police of the abuse that allegedly had taken place there. In fact, one of those people was in the studio. The camera swung round to focus on an elderly couple that the newsreader was about to interview. The husband, a decade or more older than me, was in a wheelchair. His wife sat next to him, her hand resting lightly on his arm. I could clearly see the tremor in his age-spotted hands as he prepared himself for the questions he knew were going to be put to him. His first answer was bleak and simple. ‘Yes, I was there,’ he said. ‘I was at that place.’ As the words left his mouth, his chin trembled and tears leaked from his eyes. And putting my hand to my face I found corresponding tears had dampened my cheeks; the tears of the smooth-skinned boy I had once been. And the only thought filling my head then was: and so was I. Chapter One Once the initial shock of hearing the words ‘Haut de la Garenne’ had faded I tried to make my mind travel back in time and revisit the past. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to leave my childhood memories buried any longer. The relentless surge of interest in Jersey’s secrets would make sure of that. But I’d kept my thoughts so carefully concealed for so long that they refused to obey me. I couldn’t think about either the granite building that dominated the news or the orphanage, run by the nuns, which I had been sent to first. ‘Not yet,’ they said to me, ‘not yet.’ Instead they bypassed that time and went straight back to that last summer I spent with my family. The summer before they took us away. Six of us – my mother, Stanley (her current man), my two brothers, me, and the latest addition to our family, a baby sister – lived in Devonshire Place in St Helier, the capital of Jersey. It was an unremarkable area made up of terraced houses, a couple of pubs and a few corner shops. A place where families lived, children played and women stood on their doorsteps, cigarette smoke swirling around their heads, swapping gossip with the neighbours. A street like many others; certainly there was nothing unusual about it, but in summer, when the sun shone on the pastel-painted houses, I thought it was pretty. And it was my home. We all lived in three rooms on the top floor of one of those houses. Directly beneath the uninsulated roof, they were cold and draughty in winter but stuffy and airless in summer. I was the middle boy. My elder brother John, with his spiky blond hair that refused to obey his brush however much he dampened it, his wide impish grin and his infectious laugh, was eight, three years older than me. Davie, the youngest, with his round little stomach and chubby legs and indentations on either side of his mouth, was all curves and dimples. He had just learnt to talk in partial sentences and with a wide grin on his pink-cheeked face claimed our attention by chattering to us as fast as he could. He followed John and me around our rooms, stumbling in his haste, his legs slightly bowed, for at three he was still in bulky towelling nappies; not so much because he couldn’t tell one of us when he wanted a wee but because our mother didn’t want to climb down three flights of stairs to the outside lavatory with him. Even sitting him on a potty regularly appeared to take too much effort. Davie often remained all day in his damp nappy until his eight-year-old brother came home from school and changed it. I looked like neither of them. I had a slight frame, fine dark hair and grey eyes that peered myopically at the world. John told me that he knew Stanley wasn’t his father because he dimly remembered the time when he first came to live with Gloria. We always called her Gloria – never mum. ‘You arrived soon after,’ he told me. ‘So I guess Stanley’s your dad but he’s not Davie’s.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked in a puzzled voice, but John didn’t answer me then. Years later he told me that he’d overheard Stanley shouting at Gloria, asking her who the baby’s father was, when he found out that she was pregnant with Davie. Certainly with his light brown hair and round face, he bore no resemblance to the dark-haired, olive-skinned Stanley, but Gloria insisted he could only be his. Denise was dark like Stanley but it was hard to tell what her baby features would be like when she grew up. Another reason I always believed that Stanley was my father was that although he was mild-mannered and never said an unpleasant word to my brothers, it was me he seemed to single out for attention. Sometimes it was just a warm smile and a hand brushed lightly across my head. Occasionally, when Gloria was out of hearing range, he would fumble in his pocket, draw out a few coins and place them quickly in my hand. ‘Buy yourself some sweets, lad,’ he would whisper to me and I knew to hide the money away from Gloria’s sharp gaze. He even on rare occasions took me down to the pier on the small wooden cart attached to his bicycle and treated me to an ice-cream. But apart from those few encounters he was rarely seen, nor did he involve himself with any of us. Stanley was a landscape gardener who left for work early each morning, seven days a week, dressed smartly in caramel corduroy trousers and a brown tweed jacket, and returned late at night after we were in bed. The early start was no doubt because of the wish to get to work but the lateness of his return was, I would now guess, due to his reluctance to be in my mother’s company. On the other hand, Gloria left the rooms infrequently, apart from her visits to the hairdressers to have a perm or get her colour touched up. Her days were spent sipping gin mixed with lemonade, which she poured into a glass almost the moment she woke, while flicking through magazines like Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Realm, painting her nails, plucking her eyebrows and winding her hair onto large pink plastic curlers. She was someone who preferred to entertain her friends at home – mainly men, all of whom we were told to call uncle. They only came when Stanley was out at work. I always knew by her languid preparations when these visitors were expected. Her long red hair was brushed into smooth waves, powder fluffed over her face, a small brush spat on then dipped in some sort of black goo before being applied to her eyelashes, and lastly red lipstick was smeared on a mouth she turned in then pushed out into a pout. Checking her teeth in the mirror for lipstick marks she would smile at herself knowingly. She was ready. Watching these preparations, my little brother and I waited for what always came next. She turned to look at us as if she was seeing us for the first time, or as though she had forgotten our existence. When she noticed Davie and me gazing at her, the smile faded from her lips to be replaced by a look of irritation at our presence. ‘Robbie,’ she said to me each time, ‘when my visitor arrives, say hello then take Davie into your room and keep him quiet. When John comes back from school I’ll send him out for our supper. Trotters and chips, all right?’ Pigs’ trotters, fried in bubbling fat until the skin was so crisp it looked like batter, was our favourite supper. Content with my bribe, I smiled, nodded and accepted the terms. Often when the uncles arrived they would bring Davie and me a paper bag containing sticky toffees and sometimes even old copies of Beano or Dandy comics, clearly already read by other children. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I would say, for my mother had instilled in all of us the need for good manners towards the uncles, and clutching the booty I would push my baby brother into our room. We greedily stuffed the sweets into our mouths the moment the bedroom door was shut and then with bulging cheeks settled down to play. I couldn’t read the comics so I put them on one side for John. He would either read them or invent stories to make the illustrations come alive later when we had finished our supper. Making the appropriate ‘woom, woom’ sounds, we ran battered Dinky cars across the thin carpet, piled up painted wooden bricks, which Davie knocked down, then played with our wax crayons. I’d draw him pictures and he would chortle with laughter at my attempts. Matchstick figures of people appeared on paper, then I dressed and coloured them in, gave them a square house and finally drew in flowers and a tree. But however much I concentrated on the games and my drawings, the walls were so thin that I could hear every sound coming from the sitting room. The gurgle of beer being poured, lemonade splashing into gin, the small screech of the gramophone needle when it was placed carelessly, with a drunk’s lack of precision, onto the record on the turntable and the scrape of furniture being moved. Johnnie Ray’s melodious voice would be singing a love song, laughter, my mother’s voice, giggles, a man’s groans, voices, and finally the door closing; the uncle’s visit had ended. The one thing those visits taught me were the words to the latest songs. Before I started school I didn’t know who ‘Jack and Jill’ were and I hadn’t felt fingers climbing my arm to the words of ‘Itsy bitsy spider’; in fact, I didn’t know one line from a nursery rhyme, but I could sing every verse of Johnnie Ray’s ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’. When I finally left our room I entered one that reeked of cigarettes, cigars, beer and another fishy type of smell, which always lingered in the air after an uncle’s visit. I didn’t know what it was, just that my nose wrinkled with distaste as soon as I smelled it. I have one vivid memory of my mother. It is of the last afternoon that I was home when an uncle visited and, after hearing the door shut, I had ventured into the sitting room. Gloria was lying on the settee showing a large expanse of white dimpled thigh above laddered stockings. Her eyes were shut and puffs of breath pushed themselves out of her lipstick-smeared mouth, along with a trickle of spit that was clinging to the corner of her lips. Her face, which had looked so pretty earlier with its powder-pale skin and red lips, now appeared flushed and flaccid as though the gin had soaked into her skin, loosening it from the framework of her bones. In the ashtray was something that looked like a balloon that had lost its air. A pair of black lacy panties lay tossed on the floor. Her bottle of gin was almost empty so I knew two things: left alone she would sleep for some time, but if forced awake her temper would explode. Looking at her, I hoped my baby sister Denise wouldn’t waken, for if her wails and cries penetrated Gloria’s slumbers then our bedroom would become my only retreat. I had learnt that Gloria’s hand would lash out when she was annoyed, and I got the brunt of it when John was at school. But my sister never seemed to wake on the days the uncles called. John told