HERNE BAY
The Little Restaurant on the Prom
A childhood memoir of life before polio, and immediately after, and my magical childhood adventures in and out of a wheelchair
Chailey Heritage
The bullying went on ceaselessly. I was spat on, full in the face. I was held down with metal chairs whilst my legs were stung with stinging nettles. Sadists and bullies hounded me day and night. A pile of fresh shit was found in the snooker room. The prefects rounded up the usual suspects and their bare bums were exposed to be inspected for traces of excrement. I was not a usual suspect but I was subjected, none-the-less, to this barbarity and humiliation. I, thank God, was pronounced innocent. But I had had enough. A boy named George threatened to smash my balsa wood plane that I was building. "Go an' see whether Mr Giles is about or I'll smash yer plane!" I limped off along the corridor as fast as my legs would allow. Mr Giles was nowhere to be seen. I came back into the empty dormitory where George was sitting holding my plane. As I got to the dorm door I said: "I can't find him, George I…." And there was this CRACK. I knew that George had smashed my plane. A rage welled up in me that I had never known before. As I entered the dorm I hurled the ball I was carrying at George. He had never seen me angry before. It bounced off his head whilst I went for him screaming like a demon. He was a bully and allbullies are cowards. I've never seen him move so fast! He must have told the other bullies because I was never troubled again.
Chailey was a hell-hole. But the food was good. Never have I tasted cheese rissoles like the ones at Chailey Heritage. Brown bread and butter were the order of the day. When visitors came it turned to white...
I remember a huge kid with callipers on each leg. He was so huge that he couldn't sit down. Instead he used to stand at the end of our communal, wooden table and eat boiled eggs. He was on a diet.
A kid with a finger sticking out where his arm should have been the other arm hanging uselessly at his side. No-one could play Ping-Pong like he could, nor write as elegantly with his one solitary finger, his shoulder to the paper, his extra large digit coiled around a fountain pen. He was born that way. He didn't know any different. And it didn't matter! It didn't matter to him at any rate.
It was instilled in me not to 'sneak', not to tell of what I saw and experienced. Not even to my parents. "One more day of pain, one more day of sorrow, one more day in this ol' dump, we're goin' home tomorrow," we sang. We sang the song of freedom but not of choice. Maybe I could burst the bonds of sneaking. Maybe I could, and I did.
In those days parents had not the choice, choice as to where to send their disabled children. The bonds of legality bit hard. But the authorities hadn't bargained for the Buras. The Buras dug their heels in right up to the ankles. Gundolf House, the school that I had been attending before polio struck, were willing to take me back. This gentle school with gentle teachers: Miss Golding and Miss Daisy who took me to their gentle hearts. I could no longer March to that wind-up gramophone that always seemed to play March of the Tin Soldier. But I could hear it and watch the others without envy. I had, after all, other fish to fry that tasted just as good.
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