The Story of Lee Rolf #1 ……. The Black House years and the explosion on Sheepcote Valley.

Lee’s life reads like a chronicle of wrongs done to him.  For 60 years council and health services appear tangled up in the story like unwitting accomplices. For Lee it’s an urgent story weighing heavily on an already troubled mind. As a consequence his compulsion to seek redress is relentless.  He and I both agree it’s long overdue to write this story down and send it into the world. We take a risk, but placing hope in the old adage “a problem shared…” this is Lee’s story as he told it to me.   – Adrian Hart, Spring 2020

What follows is an extract from Made in Brighton, The Story of Lee Rolf  a short book that I will publish in-full shortly. In a departure from my usual posts this writing represents an attempt to advocate for my friend and neighbour Lee Rolf.                                                           

The black house years                                                                           

I invite Lee over to my house – I’m going to record an interview with him.  Hearing Lee describe his experiences is like turning on a tap.  More accurately it’s like a water pipe bursting.  ‘Lee! Stop a moment – let me switch the video camera on!’ I say.  Swerving up and down the decades, I fall headlong into his story.  Born in November 1958, Lee Rolf likes to describe himself as an ‘ancestral Brightonian’.  I’d noticed that his emails to the council invariably place these words after his name, as if to remind Brighton itself ‘you raised me’.

Lee tells me his earliest memories are from around the age of 3 or 4. He can remember his whole family living with his paternal grandparents on Upper Lewes Road.  His parents, his elder brother Chris, sister Sherree, baby sister Kim and his fathers adopted sister (aged 9 when Lee was born) – had all somehow squeezed into this small terraced house.   

The memory is of a ‘black house’, not black in colour but rather a description rooted in the time Lee spent placed inside a locked coal cellar and of the black mood that seemed always to swirl about the house.  ‘If I was naughty they’d lock me in that cellar.  This happened to Chris too. It was pitch black except for the blade of light that came under the door.  I’d sit on the top step of the coal cellar close to the light.  It felt like I spent an eternity on that step’.  As I listen to Lee, I’m leaning forwards wanting him to register my sympathy.  I’m about to say that sounds awful Lee, it must have been so hard.  But he senses this. ‘It was horrible but, in a way, there was some comfort sitting behind that cellar door.  It was calm.  I was away from the angry people on the other side. My grandmother would always be shouting and stomping around. My father would often be yelling and rowing with my mother, baby Kim would be crying’.

Lee tells me how his dad would hit him.  The father preferred Chris and the two of them could talk about football and boxing (a cold comfort for Chris who also suffered a shocking degree of parental neglect).  The father viewed Lee as effeminate.  From one of the 1960s social worker reports Lee has obtained it’s clear that the council had at least some knowledge of Lee’s circumstances.  It notes the relationship between Lee’s parents as “shaky” and comments on how the grandmother disliked her son’s new wife and constantly criticised her. 

Lee’s early ‘problem’ status is later noted in a referral for Lee going into care (‘Mrs Rolf felt that child guidance is needed as Lee screamed and shouted in his sleep’).  In February 1963 reference to two trips made by Lee and his mother to their doctor appear in social worker notes.  A referral for child guidance was apparently discussed but felt to be less helpful than a prescription for sedatives.  Lee’s night time screaming was deemed likely to settle down once the family were allocated their own council house.  In May 1963 the family moved from the black house to a house in Whitehawk although Lee’s father seems to move out almost immediately despite continuing to visit regularly.  In May 1964 another child is born.

At the Black House Lee had felt trapped inside – he can’t recall ever seeing the back garden let alone playing in it.  By comparison the house at Whitehawk saw Lee and Chris released onto the wide open spaces of the neighbouring South Downs and, long before the Marina was built, southward to the shoreline and rock pools of the undercliff. From aged five, Lee, invariably accompanied by Chris, played outside at every opportunity. 

‘We could escape’ says Lee ‘it was often said on my records ‘Lee is a loner’ but it’s because I had to escape, I was always out in these open spaces.’

Roaming around the valley was a godsend for Lee, out there he was free. But his troubles were far from over.  He recalls being hungry pretty much all the time.  His father was mostly absent and constantly failed to provide maintenance money leaving the family, as Lee puts it, ‘dirt poor’. ‘My dad was the flash-git type – fancy car, expensive clothes, spent a lot of time at Sergeant Yorke Casino or the race track.  We hardly ever saw him.  Just the occasional visit’. Lee describes how one day his father turned up in a Mercedes, got out and threw money on the pavement for the children to pick up, ‘I took the money, spat on it and threw it at his feet. So he punched me to the ground. The family watched on but I’d never cry or let them see tears.  Somehow I still wasn’t manly enough for him.’ 

In December 1967 Lee and the family moved house again – this time to Moulsecoomb.  Although Sheepcote Valley was now further away, Lee and Chris still spent every bit of free time on ‘the back’ where they’d play.  This was the area in the basin of the valley then used, somewhat chaotically, as a rubbish tip.  At the tip the brothers would scavenge for food.  Both brothers still vividly recall the hunger they invariably felt and how they’d eat discarded sandwiches, biscuits and fruit much of which had come from hospital waste and had been picked over by seagulls.  The boys would discover dead dogs floating in puddles of petrol.

The explosion on Sheepcote Valley

If Lee’s story was a movie or some other piece of fiction the explosion would be the first plot point – the shock event that triggers everything that follows.  Today you can’t see any evidence of the old tip on Sheepcote Valley although the current recycling centre run by Veolia UK occupies part of it.  Back when Lee and his brother played on the tip it hadn’t much changed since its origins around 1916.  In the 1970s it was still a largely unmanaged local authority tip – you took rubbish there and you tipped it.  A few council employees watched over the place. Anything from old cars, fridges, washing machines to excess hospital, abattoir and domestic waste (including foodstuffs) would lie strewn around the site.  In its early days the site was the dumping ground for military junk left over from the First World War.  As it filled up, earth cut from under the chalk embankment would get bulldozered and gradually the tip would edge toward the boundary of the campsite to the south.  In 1981, when it got too close, the tip closed.

For Lee and Chris, just like many kids from nearby Whitehawk estate, the tip provided endless activities.  Numerous accounts exist where former residents now 60 or older recall childhoods where playing on the tip was a highlight. Lee recalls the ‘totters’, men who’d earn meagre sums of money scavenging for copper and brass.  They’d light fires to burn off the plastic from electrical cables.  Scrap metal would then be taken to Richardson’s scrap yard and sold for cash.  When cars were broken up the totters would let kids use an upturned roof to float around in the large deep puddles which formed on the lower part of the tip.  With so much oil, petrol and benzo(a)pyrene present in the ground these puddles would sometimes catch alight.

It was at this exact location on a winter’s day in December 1968 that the ground exploded.  Lee, then aged 10, and elder brother Chris were playing.  ‘There was a flash – I was blown back and set on fire’, says Lee, ‘Chris ran off screaming’.  ‘That’s all I can remember until waking up in the passenger seat of a lorry with coats wrapped round me.’  Lee assumes it was one of council vehicles based at the tip.   Instead of taking him to hospital the lorry took him home.  ‘I remember my mum was at work.  The next door neighbour took me in.  They wrapped me in a blanket and gave me sweet tea. I remember being taken outside to an ambulance. Apparently I was passing in and out of consciousness.  The police told us later they’d found Chris miles away, dazed and wandering the streets’.  As Lee recalls the outline of the ambulance, the telling of this part of his story is causing raw emotion to rise – he stops and clears his throat before continuing.  The time at the hospital is a blur and it seems that records of it have been removed (perhaps there never were any – certainly none that can be requested).  Had he suffered actual burns? How long did he stay in hospital?

Lee was sent home.  In describing the aftermath of the explosion Lee talks almost exclusively about his mother’s lack of emotional warmth.  Despite the explosion and the trauma of it nothing much had changed.  “I was barely 10.  I don’t remember any cuddles or affection – never a squeeze or being picked up and asked ‘what have you been up to today’, it was just cold.  Clearly Lee needed something from his mum. Perhaps she tried, perhaps it wasn’t enough. But all Lee recalls is the fact she never gave it.  The rare moments of concern his mother ever showed were always couched in terms her anger at the trouble he caused her.  He remembers that, for a while after the explosion, his mother would loudly complain to all who’d listen that ‘Lee has started to wet the bed.’   You don’t have to be an expert in these things to listen to Lee’s account and know that all these decades later he remains deeply traumatised by the early part of his life.  But the explosion seems to have compounded the trauma.  After that extraordinary event he was left to cope with the trauma all by himself.  Chris left to cope alone with his too.  In other ways life continued as before, always hungry and in winter always cold.  Lee recalls how physical and emotional warmth were only ever to be found at Moulsecoomb School – free school meals, heated classrooms and a few good friends.  ‘I had one good friend – I still know him.  He remembers how I changed after the explosion.’  It would be 40 years before Lee returned to Sheepcote valley.

Copyright c 2020 Adrian Hart