‘Denny, what if I’m in the lav when the siren goes off and I don’t hear it?’ I asked.
‘I’d come and get you, stupid,’ he said, cuffing the back of my head.
One of the boys in the home had an uncanny knack of imitating the sound of the air-raid siren. It was so realistic that it was practically impossible to tell the difference from the real thing. One night when everyone was asleep and all was quiet, he decided to have a bit of fun and let rip with his air-raid sound. Seconds later the supervisors were racing around herding us all down the stairs and through the trap door to the shelter. They must have wondered why we were all sniggering to ourselves as word got around about who had sounded the alarm, but I don’t think they ever found out they’d been tricked.
Stow Hill wasn’t a huge children’s home; it was more of a reception centre where they put children while they decided what to do with them. There were probably only five or six boys staying there apart from us. The house had three or four big bedrooms, and Dennis and I were in adjoining beds; when Freddie arrived from hospital he came in beside us. One of the bedrooms was occupied by two old ladies, who were always roasting chestnuts in front of the fire. I remember the sweet, nutty smell which pervaded the house, but they never offered us boys any of them. I don’t think I ever talked to them. They kept themselves to themselves.
Rationing was brought in the month we arrived at Stow Hill, and meat was one of the first things to be restricted, but I don’t remember us going short. We had bread (but no jam), porridge (but no sugar to put on it), potatoes, fish, vegetables (but little fresh fruit). My sisters Rose and Betty turned up at the home one day bringing us some apples and oranges, and I found out later that Betty had nicked them from a greengrocer’s. After that, Dennis and I always referred to it as ‘the forbidden fruit’. It wasn’t an official visit. They sneaked in through a back door to the home that opened onto an alley and crept around until they found us playing in the yard.
‘Where are you staying now?’ I asked Rose as I took a big bite of my apple, juice trickling down my chin.
‘At Grandmother’s,’ she said.
My mam’s mam lived in another part of Newport. I wondered why Rose got to stay with her but we didn’t.
‘She’s only got room for me,’ Rose explained.
Betty told us that she was staying at home with Mam but she was joining the Women’s Land Army and working on a farm. I thought that sounded like fun.
‘You’re lucky because you don’t have to go to school,’ Rose said.
It was true. Our days in Stow Hill were spent playing in the yard out the back, but there was a limit to the number of games we could get up to without any toys. I missed the freedom of the days when I went wandering down to the docks or crossed the river on the Transporter Bridge, but we had been told firmly that we weren’t allowed out of the home and I for one obeyed the rules, because I had discovered to my horror what would happen if I didn’t.
One night, a couple of weeks after we arrived, I was in the bath when the young woman who was supervising my bath-time suddenly picked up a big wooden bath brush and hit me across the back with it.
I screamed in shock and tried to jump out of the bath and run away but she gripped my arm so tightly I couldn’t escape.
‘Don’t you go cheeking me, young Terence,’ she said, and brought the bath brush down again on my skinny frame.
I burst into hysterical crying, struggling to release my arm. I had no idea what I had said to upset her – I hadn’t thought I was being cheeky. No one had ever hit me in my life before. Mam and Dad might have neglected us but at least they didn’t beat us. I’m still not exactly sure what she was cross about.
‘Stop your whining,’ she snapped and hit me for a third time, across the shoulders, and I howled in pain.
When she let go of me, I curled up in a ball at the end of the bath, crying so hard I had a coughing fit and nearly choked.
‘For goodness sake, be a big boy!’ she snapped. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’
But to me it was. The shock of a painful blow coming out of the blue like that was horrible. When I told Dennis later, he said that he had been hit as well and that we would just have to try to stay out of trouble. But how could I when I didn’t know what I had done wrong in the first place?
After that, I was hit several more times at Stow Hill and I usually didn’t have a clue what I’d done to deserve it. Punishments were dished out for the slightest reason and you never knew when the next one was coming your way. I tried to be good and follow the rules, but still I got hit. The injustice of it bothered me a lot but there was no one I could complain to except Dennis, and there was nothing he could do about it.
One day a boy in our room had an ingenious idea. He attached a small plastic bucket to the end of a broom handle using a length of string, then he lowered the bucket over the high wall at the back of the house, so it was dangling above the pavement below. As people walked past on the street, they dropped pennies into his bucket until it was heavy with coins. Unfortunately, just as he pulled it back over into the yard, one of the officials in the home saw him and, because Dennis and I had been standing watching, we got punished as well – which seemed most unfair to me.
‘But we weren’t doing anything,’ I cried, unable to contain my rage. If I had done something naughty, fair enough, but I hadn’t.
‘Be quiet! Don’t talk back!’ the supervisor snapped and hit me again.
A hard little core of defiance formed inside me. I hated unfairness. I thought these people were nasty and tried to stay out of their way, keeping my head down so I didn’t draw attention to myself. How dare they hit Dennis and me! How dare they!
The months went by, and in May 1940 an official told us that there had been a court case to talk about our future, and that they had decided we would be best looked after by the local authority rather than going back home to Mam again. She and Betty were on their own at the time because Dad was over fighting in France against the Nazis. During that May, Dennis told me that Dad had been one of the thousands of soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk as the German army approached. Seemingly he had to spend a long time up to his neck in oily waters off the French coast and he claimed his health never recovered after that.
I didn’t care about the fact that we weren’t going home. I’d never had any feelings for my mam. I didn’t even call her ‘mam’ – I never talked to her – so I certainly didn’t miss her. I was happy enough at Stow Hill, apart from when someone hit me. However, our time there wasn’t going to last forever. We were told by one of the staff in the home that the welfare officers had put an advert in the paper seeking foster parents for ‘three Catholic boys’, and they had received eleven replies. They spent some time interviewing all the prospective candidates, then in October 1940 it was decided that we would be sent to stay with a couple called Mr and Mrs Sorrel, who lived a few miles outside Hereford, which I found out was over the border in England.
Dennis, Freddie and I were looking forward to going to our new home. We reckoned that they must be kind people to take us on and that they’d probably give us lots of presents and lovely meals. We fantasized about how nice their house would be, and how it would be like having a real mam and dad to look after us, instead of the useless ones we had had before.
However, when the day came to travel to the Sorrels, I had a high temperature and wasn’t allowed to go. Dennis and Freddie set off without me, and I was most upset and indignant about it. I had to spend a week at Stow Hill all on my own, lying in bed and swallowing horrible medicines. The following Saturday they came back to collect me along with Mrs Sorrel, an old lady with grey hair and a friendly face.
We