Nobody's Child (14 page)

T
he arrival of Stanley Thomas was, for me, like the arrival of the Robin Williams character in
Dead Poets’ Society
. It was a revelation and an awakening.

He had long blond hair and a moustache, wore ‘flower-power’ shirts in purple, yellow and pink, ties with vivid psychedelic colours, and his jackets were velvet or corduroy. His appearance and demeanour, like his sharp sense of humour and his crackling intelligence, were light years away from those of our dreary warder-like teachers. He even spoke differently from the others, with an extremely grand accent rather like Laurence Olivier’s.

I took to him immediately – and he to me. I suppose I was as unique among the pupils as he was among the 
staff, and I think he recognised in me someone on whom he could work, a blank canvas.

The other kids, at least those who could communicate, seemed content with the idea of working in a factory all their lives. I was not. I was open to everything and anything and eager to question it all, and I think Mr Thomas found this both challenging and stimulating.

It was quite a shock for me to discover that this flamboyant character, then 41, was a Church of Wales Anglican priest, ordained in 1968, who was doing a master’s degree in education. This was not information he revealed to other boys at the school, and I later learned that I was the only pupil who knew his real vocation.

He played classical music for us in the classroom and talked about Dickens and Shakespeare. None of us had ever encountered anybody quite like him before. Some of the skinheads believed he was gay, which he wasn’t, and tried to wind him up. But he handled their crude bullying tactics with rich good humour and devastating repartee and they soon learned to leave him alone rather than be so effortlessly exposed to public ridicule.

Mr Thomas had his own little flat in the school, where he would smoke Gitanes and drink dry white wine, both pure evil according to my Baptist pastors. I can still remember the distinctive smell of tobacco and wine in his flat whenever I think back to those days; they were comforting smells and never seemed stale. He also burned long tapers of incense in little china holders.

There was a big couch in his living room, covered in a very elegant woven tapestry, and two small armchairs. There were two small coffee tables and two full bookshelves with other books piled on the floor alongside them. He had an amazing collection of classical records and a modern record player. The fitted carpet was beige with polka dots and on the walls, which were all white, hung large framed copies of modern art, including works by Picasso and Dali.

I would go to Mr Thomas’s flat twice a week and sometimes more often. He loved to provoke me, smoking and drinking in front of me, even though he knew I ardently disapproved. What he was doing, of course, was challenging my intellect.

I would say, ‘How can you be a Christian and drink?’ and he would reply, ‘Would you like one?’

When I scolded him and told him that he was a heretic and that Anglican priests were devils, he would laugh.

During one of our early discussions, he introduced the subject of Darwin and suggested I should read
The Origin of Species
. I told him that as a strict Baptist I adhered to the belief in Adam and Eve and that it would be considered a sin by my church just to read that book. Indeed, some members of that strange sect still believe that to this day.

‘But how can you criticise without having read the argument?’ he replied.

It sounds crazy, going from not wanting to read to reading Darwin, but that is exactly what happened.

I had learned to read with Mr Bleasdale and still had the capacity to read. I had simply chosen not to do so. I did have a fantastic memory, however, which I still have, and I had retained the ability to read. So, armed with a dictionary, I embarked on Darwin’s masterpiece.

I loved the book. It opened my view of universality. I could see that everything was linked and that human life was evolving.

When Mr Thomas said, ‘I think you need a drink,’ I would reply, ‘It’s a sin to drink.’

‘What about Jesus turning water into wine?’

‘That was Ribena.’

‘Try living.’

I was a strange oddball little character, mentally bound in a weird puritan world, and in his way he was as eccentric as me. That was why we became friends.

He talked to me about the poet William Blake and told me I could read him if I wished. The choice was mine. I loved Blake’s poems and am still a committed fan to this day.

Then came Shakespeare, followed by Oscar Wilde and Dickens, and I found myself in a printed paradise. Reading all these strange things and trying to make sense of them, with Mr Thomas’s help, was expanding my boundaries in giant leaps.

Over some 18 months, my political sympathies
seesawed
from left to right, probably influenced by the books I was reading. At 15, I was slightly rebellious and had become an admirer of Harold Wilson, who, I was
actually aware, was the current Labour opposition leader. But within months I had embraced communist ideology, and a few months later I had become a fascist.

Mr Thomas insisted I read Karl Marx and then introduced me to Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. I had no knowledge at all of the Second World War except from the RAF stories told me by my father, though he had not mentioned the Nazi leader’s name. I told Mr Thomas that the world Hitler described sounded like a real Utopia, and now I was able to compare Hitler and Marx, and concluded they were rather alike in their methods of controlling people. I had read
Mein Kampf
with no agenda, so now Mr Thomas gave me
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
and biographies of Mussolini and Franco, which broadened my perspective on the fascist phenomenon in Europe.

Next I devoured Nietzsche, on whose thought Hitler had in part based his philosophy, and Wagner, whose monumental music had drawn inspiration from the same writings, and then started on thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw.

At 15, in this crazy environment, surrounded by rent boys, drug dealers and the mentally subnormal, I had become something of a philosophic eccentric.

Under Mr Thomas’s guidance, I also started to paint, and was allowed to join the sixth-form art class at a local secondary school. It taught me that there were normal people in the world who did not beat you up. They may
have been older than me but I found that I could fit in, just as I had earlier on my school trip to Europe.

My painting also had a secondary benefit. It excused my participating in sport, which I loathed.

With a first name like mine, I fancied myself as something of a Michelangelo and over the next three years I painted a huge mural on a wall of the school dining hall, depicting Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. It was some 12 feet long by 6 feet high.

Amazingly, I became the only child in the history of that school to gain an O Level in any subject. It was in art.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but what I was receiving from Mr Thomas was, to all intents and purposes, a private education, albeit one based on classical values. I’ve never understood ‘modern’ because I have had no training at all in anything technical, and I’m still frightened by technology.

But, for literature, theatre, music and art, Mr Thomas was my personal Professor Higgins; an immense genius. He took me to the theatre and concerts and art galleries – while my contemporaries were listening to the Beatles – and opened up worlds that I would otherwise never have known existed.

It was almost certainly because of all my new knowledge, and the enormous boost to my confidence it provided, that I was singled out by our new resident trainee social worker, Mary, who was only 19 and very pretty. She had a gorgeous figure and wore tight jeans and tops. I was not yet 16 and not much to look at, but
that didn’t matter. I was experiencing my very first crush, and went to sleep every night with thoughts of Mary wrapped in my arms.

The reality was far more mundane. We had regular discussion sessions, just the two of us, for she, like all her colleagues, had been told about my mother’s suicide and my reluctance to take part in normal life, and I was, I suppose, an interesting subject for study. But I was no longer, I think she soon realised, the boy described in my thick bundle of case notes. Over the past two years, I had become a different person, and possibly her equal intellectually. I could discuss philosophy, theology, sociology, art and the theatre intelligently, knowledgeably and in great detail, which made me quite an oddity, considering my age and situation.

Perhaps she was just being kind, or more likely she simply wanted to show me off to her friends, but Mary invited me to spend the weekend with herself and her parents in Bristol, to meet some of her former school chums. Already secretly besotted with her, I jumped at the opportunity to spend a whole weekend in her company, hardly daring to think what it might lead to.

The headmaster and Nanny had to give their permission, and I think Nanny was quite nervous about me going off with a young woman for the weekend, but in the end they both agreed.

My first adult trip away from home provided some of the most fascinating days of my life up until that time, though sadly not in the way I had anticipated. Mary and
her friends treated me as though I were their age – four or five years my senior – and I found I could talk with them as equals. We spent hours in coffee bars and restaurants discussing everything from the most unimportant trivia to deeply intellectual subjects and I revelled in being a part of it. They took me to the Bristol Old Vic and introduced me to my first-ever pizza.

Sadly, though, I gradually understood that Mary’s interest in me was a mixture of professional and purely platonic. She may have found me an intellectual equal and a fascinating case study, but I was a non-starter as a potential boyfriend.

I thought, no doubt like millions of lovesick boys before me, that my heart would break, and I followed Mary around like an orphaned puppy for several weeks, but, in the end, time, as ever, proved a masterly healer and I was able to get over my unrequited love.

I may have conquered my infatuation for Mary but I still couldn’t cope with salvation. I spent many nights praying for it, because the Baptist pastors kept telling me that if I wasn’t saved I would surely go to hell. But what they called ‘my conversion experience’ never came. I knew I was supposed to allow Jesus to save me, but he obviously didn’t feel so inclined. I felt absolutely excluded, and in the end I decided to pretend to be saved.

Still only 15, I asked to be baptised as, in the words of the faith, an ‘exclusive, strict and particular’ Baptist. As I stood before the congregation in Moses Gate
Baptist church in the Bolton suburb of Farnworth, I swore that I accepted and understood Jesus Christ as saviour and ruler of my life.

Mr Thomas came to witness the event and probably thought I was mad. I thought so too, and hoped that if Jesus did exist he would forgive me for lying about my beliefs. But at least I felt safe, and that I wouldn’t go to hell any more. So it was definitely worth the deception.

This was also the time I rethought my plans for suicide.

Nanny would often say, ‘I don’t want to live any more. I wish the Lord would take me.’ But then she would say that she had one good reason to go on living, and that was me. During my weekends at home with her, I would mow the lawn and do the other chores, but I was gradually becoming aware that I also had a deeper responsibility for my grandmother.

In addition, Mr Thomas’s teaching had radically altered my perception of just about everything and I concluded, one evening as I lay on my bed, that I no longer wanted to kill myself. The world had become an infinitely more interesting place to be in. I wanted to stay.

A
t the age of 16, after more than a decade of terror and turmoil, I finally entered a more tranquil period. At Knowl View, I had graduated from the shared dormitory to a room of my own and, though I was still in a state of considerable isolation, I had developed a satisfying and at times pleasing way of life.

Shortly before leaving Rochdale, I was told by one of the social workers there that some of the younger children, newly arrived at the school, modelled themselves on me because I followed a very diplomatic path, avoiding or deflecting potentially injurious encounters with fellow pupils.

I was very aware, intuitive and immensely sensitive, and was able to pick up others’ vibes. But no warning
antenna in the world could have prepared me for the traumatic revelation awaiting me in the headmaster’s study when I was called there in the spring of 1974.

It was the month before my 17th birthday, and I was about to leave Knowl View to try to make my own way in the world – though not, I had promised myself, the way they had planned for me to go, in a factory.

Having assumed I was about to be given the standard school-leaver’s pep talk, I was surprised to be told to sit down in the chair facing Mr Turner across his desk. We were normally made to stand, to receive our plaudits or punishments, after being summoned individually to the headmaster’s study.

Mr Turner was a huge but very gentle man, and extremely kind, but on this occasion he looked uncharacteristically grim and seemed to be having difficulty knowing where to start. In the end, he must have decided to get it over with quickly, because he told me, in a sort of rush, that my grandmother had asked him to reveal to me some important details from my past. To tell me the truth – namely, that Joe and Lillian Seed had not been my real parents. They had adopted me from the Catholic Children’s Society when I was about a year and a half old.

I’m rather glad I was sitting down when he dropped that bombshell. It actually took my breath away. I felt quite light-headed.

My real name, it appeared, was Steven Wayne Godwin and my mother had been a young mill worker called
Marie. My father was unknown. I had only become Michael Joseph Steven Wayne Seed, by adoption, on 11 November 1958, when I was 17 months old, having been baptised a Catholic in my real name by the Jesuits a year earlier, at the Holy Name Church in Oxford Road, Manchester.

I sat there speechless, barely able to think. All that cruelty and pain and heartbreak, and all of it had been based on a lie.

Mr Turner asked me if I understood and if I was all right.

I nodded. That was all I could manage.

‘Your grandmother feels that you had a right to know this, but also feels that you may not want to go on seeing her. She’s frightened that you may want to sever all ties with her as she is not your natural grandmother.’

I found this news even more distressing than the revelation that I was adopted. Nanny was the only person, to my knowledge, who had ever shown any affection towards me or claimed to have loved me. The thought of a future in which she did not play a part was very bleak indeed.

Mr Turner was looking at me expectantly.

I found I had to clear my voice a couple of times to speak. I told him, ‘My parents are dead as far as I am concerned. They were my parents. I’m not interested in looking for any others. I had quite enough trouble with the last ones.’

I felt like the character in
The Importance of Being Earnest
.

‘This is your certificate of adoption, and these are the details of your birth mother,’ the headmaster told me.

Bits of paper that made a mockery of my life up until now.

Just like Nanny, I thought. An absolute realist. She understood that, leaving school to make my own way in the world, I might need proper identification. To know who I really was. She was still thinking of me and I loved her more than ever because of it.

And it was a real pleasure indeed to know that I was not related in any way to the Wicked Witch of the West.

‘You’ve got a lot to think about, Michael,’ said Mr Turner. ‘And, if I might offer you some advice, I would say that it would be wise for you to think very carefully before embarking on any attempts to uncover your real family. All this must have come as quite a shock. Let this information I’ve given you today sink in properly before you do anything.’

I walked back to my room in a daze. Mr Turner’s disclosures had been cataclysmic in their effect. They offered possible explanations of events that had seemed so senseless before.

My father’s anger for one.

He had obviously blamed my mother for not being able to have babies, and not having a son to carry on his line must have festered in him. I realised then that many of his remarks had their origins in this. She was clearly not the wife he wanted.

After his marriage, he had been away, or abroad, until the end of the war, then did a series of jobs he didn’t really like. I thought now that he must have seen himself as a failure, with no point to his life. His own depression, coupled with the alcohol, did the rest.

I could never excuse what he had done to me and I know that he drove my mother to suicide. It was as though he had murdered her. But I was as certain now as I could ever be that all their problems, and my mother’s awful depression, probably had their roots in the 16 years they had tried, and failed, to have children of their own.

Then they had adopted me. But I wasn’t his child. I was just nobody’s child. A constant daily reminder of his inability to father a child of his own. I understood then the hatred and the anger and why I must eventually forgive him. But the memories were still too fresh to attempt that step then.

I explained this to Nanny when I went home that weekend. She was in tears when she opened the front door and pulled me into her arms. She had spent the whole week knowing Mr Turner was going to break the news and fearing that she would never see me again.

I kissed her on both soft cheeks, which were wet with her tears, and hugged her again and told her she was the loveliest nanny any boy could ever wish for, and that I would always love her and need her. And she told me I was the best grandson in the world and she was so proud of me.

It didn’t matter to either of us who my real parents were. Our bond was still there, and that was all that counted.