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he’d denounced his parents for ‘shoving him out’ had opened the door to the dark place where I’d kept mine all those years. Perhaps curiosity played a part too – why Margaret had raised this particular ghost before becoming one herself. It was a split second decision – and it came from the same place as the unintentional agreement to continue the case had come from. I almost said, ‘we could compare notes,’ but I managed to pull back from the precipice just in time. I made a dangerous promise instead.
    ‘Because you have to convince me first, and if I’m convinced, I’ll defend you – and you’ll get off.’ It was rash – but not as rash as the confession I’d been about to tumble headlong into.

4: The Home
    I t was called a children’s home, but anything less like a home I can’t imagine. I wasn’t the only one sent there. George and Win got sent there with me too. We were classed as ’older boys’. For some reason the original division of older and younger kids was revised for me and I ended up being re-classified ‘older’ even though I was under ten. Maybe it was another ‘administrative mistake’, or age was as irrelevant as caring in the end.
    It was in Eastbourne, so it wasn’t completely in the country, nor completely out of it. It was on the coast – and freezing most of the year, but surrounded by rural countryside too. In fact it wasn’t just on the coast, it was almost in the sea, on a grassy strip to one end of the conurbation, wind-battered and isolated – far enough out of town so we didn’t interfere with ‘decent folks’. It felt like winter there all year round, even when the sun shone, because the breeze, no matter how balmy elsewhere, still had that biting cold to it that defines the coastal airstream. The salt-scorched paintwork was testimony to its interminable beating, and as the elements beat the building, so the staff applied their diligent ministrations to us, the residents.
    Barely a day passed without a small act of cruelty. It became the norm to expect rapped fingers, a twisted ear lobe or pinched skin on the inner arm. None of it showed. If the home was inspected all the kids in it were apparently robust and unharmed – and we would never dare complain about the treatment for fear of more. Despite being innocently restrained there, we gradually came to see ourselves as the lowest of the low – the abandoned, the ‘not wanted’. ‘Shoved out’ as Danny put it so eloquently to me later. We knew whatever we claimed would not be believed and then we would suffer ten-fold when the official visit had ended, leaving us to the tender mercies of our Houseparent.
    The first week there passed innocuously enough. There were six kids to a dorm, each with a bed, plastic under-sheet in case of bed-wetting, two rough blankets and a checked brown counterpane. I found out later all the dorms were the same – even though there was a different Houseparent responsible for each. If you went into another dorm where you’d made a friend, you’d find it almost exactly identical to your own, apart from perhaps a minor variation in the wall displays, although even then they were simply variations on the same theme. If at any time we’d changed dorms, I think we could have expected our lives to have remained almost identical to before. They all had the sense of being somewhere you were forced to be, not where you’d choose to live.
    We kids were responsible for the daily ritual of stripping back our bedclothes and then reversing the process to remake the bed, ensuring as we did that each layer was so neat and tight you could have bounced a pin on it. A sloppily made bed got you a spot on the chart on the wall and a punishment. A black spot was a misdemeanour, a red one a bed-wet and a yellow one signified approval. Needless to say our chart had mainly black and red spots and very few yellows. I always thought of yellow as sunshine, and there was little of it there, without