The Story of Lee Rolf #2 Injured

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

This is the second of three extracts 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.

Injured

As my interview with Lee progresses he starts to speak about the bizarre behaviour he’d exhibited soon after the December 1968 explosion; ‘I wouldn’t wash, except for my hands.  They were covered in eczema and sometimes purple, cracking and bleeding from excessive hand washing.  I’d sit on the floor and rock from side to side.  I’d stand in a corner with my back to the room, I’d hold my hands over my ears and hum to drown out the family talking. The talking was disturbing, it was all noise to me.’  It’s unclear to me how much of this was a result of the explosion, how much was the consequence of a mother’s abject neglect and how much the continued cruelty of his father.  The context of endless, grinding poverty (which seems, if anything, to increase into the 70s) surely plays its part too.  All Lee’s siblings suffer. [Note: it was only days before completion of this account – in May 2020 – that I meet Chris and we talk – he is in touch with Sherree too.  You can read what Chris had to say later in this story].  Based on my extensive interviews with Lee, one thing is crystal clear, Lee was a disturbed and traumatised child and the imprint is evident today.  How could he be any other way?

As time flowed and the 1970s loomed, it appears Lee wasn’t dwelling much on the explosion at all but, looking back, he feels he internalised the experience.  ‘No-one asked me about it. It’s as though it didn’t happen’, says Lee.  Social worker reports seldom speculate over the root causes of Lee’s ‘bizarre’ behaviour but seem happy to elevate any speculation (including Lee’s own occasional utterances) that it was motivated by a brooding contempt for his father.    

‘It’s true’, says Lee, ‘I resented him bitterly. I’d never enter the house through the front door because he’d come in that way on visits.  I’d never sit in his chair – I’d never look at him or the places he’d be’. 

From the vantage point of the present, looking back fifty years, you wouldn’t expect the social services assessments of the time (least of all social worker notes jotted down during the course of a visit) to theorise over which of Lee’s experiences – the explosion or the parents actions – manifested in which behaviour.  Today, however, pondering Lee’s case, we are more likely to question whether behaviour giving the appearance of being rooted in contempt for the father was in fact rooted, at least in-part, in the trauma of the explosion.    When listening to Lee, although the explosion sometimes sounds like the source of all his trauma, at other times his emphasis shifts to his mother’s denial of affection.  Both he and Chris testify to intolerable levels of material discomfort. ‘I wore the same clothes, they were never washed.  My feet were often wet and sore, holes in my shoes, I’d put cardboard inside’ says Lee.

Despite the interconnectedness of the Sheepcote Valley experience with material and emotional deprivation Lee feels certain that social services records deliberately ignore or underplay the explosion in favour of an exaggerated emphasis on his extreme resentment toward his father.  He feels that the whole system reacted to deflect attention away from the explosion and that it’s been this way ever since.   

For my part I’m left reeling from everything Lee has disclosed, how is a kid meant to cope when parents so comprehensively fail to protect him?  It must feel annihilating.  Neglect is one thing but the fact that Lee’s early life would inflict such harm upon him is hard for most of us to get our head around.  The explosion and his experience of having it ignored inflicts another layer of damage.  Moreover, the fact that his brother Chris, with whom Lee had a close bond, then drifts away from him is surely a factor all by itself? 

Given that Chris recalls the explosion in no uncertain terms, insinuations that Lee’s account is ‘all in the mind’ are extremely weak.  Speculation over what caused it are another matter – perhaps a flash of igniting methane or other chemicals interacting and turning volatile.  In 2008 the location of the tip-turned-nature reserve was cordoned off on advice from the Environment Agency (EA).  In an Argus news report Cityclean’s explanation of the EA decision includes the quote ‘The agency has suggested as a precautionary measure that we should temporarily close the site due to the potentially toxic and explosive nature of some of the gases’.  Three years later a contamination survey ordered by the council concluded that, for benzo(a)pyrene alone, parts of the ground were “60 times the permitted level” but also concludes such contamination to be low risk because nobody lives there. I believe Lee describes what he recalls of the explosion with vivid accuracy. On top of everything else, the explosion was another wrong served on an innocent child.  Yet, at an official level, it appears to have been brushed aside or completely ignored.  Lee would say that it has been concealed.  In the years since and right up to the present day, the hospital records are apparently nowhere to be found.  And so adding to Lee’s anguish and the inevitable suspicions over how he might have exaggerated the whole thing is the fact that he and Chris are unable to authenticate any of what they say happened that day in 1968.

Only twice do the official records of the time mention the explosion. In one report, social worker x visits the family home and notes ‘the children say he was unhinged ever since a petrol can blew up in his face on a tip…’  Escaping the censors black marker pen was another comment: ‘Lee has scarring to the left side of his face, a piece of metal in his lower lip, and his clothes set on fire at a local dump, following an explosion at a local dump about four years ago…’           

After the explosion Lee’s time living at home with his mother and siblings would last another five years before he’d enter local authority care. Arguably, the bizarre behaviour – standing in the corner, wetting himself, the hours spent alone in his room – were all features of complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  Lee feels this may be why Chris detached from him, ‘my behaviour, the smell of me…and Chris was going through trauma too’.  Years later Chris told him that he would avoid contact not just out of embarrassment at the bizarre behaviour but also because Lee’s room was infested with fleas. Unable to trust his surroundings, Lee entered the second decade of his life constantly on the alert for danger.  This would later be diagnosed as Hyperacusis, a condition whereby the sounds of everyday life are experienced as intrusively loud, uncomfortable and sometimes painful.  Many who suffer the condition become instinctively withdrawn. 

Lee recalls other complex PTSD symptoms.  Later diagnosed as ‘Hyper arousal’ (a constant feeling of being on edge triggered by recollections of traumatic events), it seems that few adults, if any, ever thought these symptoms might point to something other than an errant, maladjusted child who hates his father. From Lee’s recollections and the scattering of social worker reports a picture emerges of a kid enduring an appalling home life.  If that weren’t tragic enough, he then suffers more trauma at Sheepcote Valley, the very place he’d escaped to for some semblance of safety and freedom. 

With Lee’s behaviour sinking to new depths, it’s clear that his mother increasingly fails to cope with her own mental health let alone Lee’s.  Lee recalls her outbursts if the children were under her feet. ‘She’d say things like ‘I’ll stick my head in the oven if you keep on like this’.  The house is filthy and Lee confines himself in his box bedroom.  In winter he’s bitterly cold and recalls the ice forming on both sides of his rattling crittall windows. ‘I was crying with cold – it was that bad’, says Lee.  Reports note that he refuses to communicate with family members apart from ‘demanding’ money to buy food.   In contrast, Moulsecoomb School, where he attended aged 11 from September 1969, is remembered by Lee with some affection.  

But if I thought Lee’s story was about to end with the relative safety delivered by school (overlapping with being taken into the protection of Brighton’s care system) another troubling chapter was just around the corner.

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Chris comes back into Lee’s life. Some weeks into the Covid lockdown Lee, who hadn’t seen his brother Chris for years, runs in to him by chance.  Struggling with shopping, barely able to walk towards his flat (even with one of those walking frames with wheels and brakes) Chris appeared almost unrecognisable to Lee, haggard and far more disabled than when Lee had last seen him.  Chris’s speech is garbled and difficult to understand.  From that moment Lee set about helping Chris access food deliveries.  In the past Chris had been reluctant to discuss Lee’s focus on the explosion, seemingly because such conversations would meander into memories of childhood Chris felt were best to let go.

Soon after this encounter Lee and I met Chris up on the Sheepcote Valley ridge close to the golf club.  It was clear that Chris was in poor bad shape although Lee thought he looked a little better.  Chris suffers Asthma and a heart condition but his main health issue is Cerebellar ataxia, a condition originating in the part of the brain that controls muscle coordination.  It has progressively affected Chris’s walking and balance and ability to speak clearly. Lee is convinced that the many hundreds of hours spent playing (and scavenging for food) on the contaminated rubbish tip is at the root of Chris’s Cerebellar ataxia.

I film the brothers as they reminisce. They talk about the golf balls they’d find and swap at the shop for mars bars.  Chris confirms the extraordinary amount of time he and Lee would spend on the tip. Weekends, after school, holidays – ‘we’d spend all day there whenever we could’, says Chris. ‘We used to find things to eat. There’d be sandwiches strewn around with things from the chemist – the lot’.  He alludes to his cerebella ataxia, ‘its why I’m like it’.  ‘You know, we saw it, there was dead animals, petrol, asbestos… everything was over there’. As with Lee’s descriptions, listening to memories of a childhood spent playing at the tip, Chris swings back and forth from recalling the sheer fun of it all – finding old motor bikes, climbing inside wrecked cards – to moments when even these memories are shot through with the horror that kids were ever allowed to play at this place. ‘There were no warning signs, no-one shewed us away – its not right’ he says.  

Lee prompts Chris to talk about life at home.  Chris turns and looks at me, ‘I used to close up, I thought I couldn’t go through all this again.  But recently I’ve opened up – its like a release valve’.  He looks down, ‘we had a poxy time I’ll tell you that now – a poxy time’.  Looking over at his brother but still talking to me Chris says ‘what Lee went through was terrible but inside I was suffering.  I had to live with it inside, I couldn’t let it out if that makes sense’.  At this, Lee chips in ‘Kim always said, “Chris never sleeps, he’s troubled”.  She said that with sadness’.

‘Mum goaded us’, says Chris, ‘she’d hit us with pokers and broom handles’.  ‘What was that noise she always made Chris?’ says Lee.  Instantly Chris makes a hissing sound through his nose, fast intakes of air then snorting like a bull about to charge. ‘That was it’, says Lee.  At times the brothers sound like they are describing a nightmare.  A question from me – would you ever think of seeing your mum now? –  is met with grimaces and shaking heads.  The proposition is unthinkable.  The impression I get is of children trapped inside their mother’s hellish mental state.  ‘There was no good stuff’ says Chris, ‘if my dad was taking us out on a Sunday – sometimes he’d turn up, sometimes he wouldn’t.  We never had a phone’. 

They talk about the explosion. Not surprisingly Chris remembers it all too well but he’s foggy about aspects of it.  He thinks the police were quickly on the scene but Lee insists that’s wrong. He does remember the flash, imagining this to be a tank of diesel set alight.  Lee corrects him ‘it was some kind of gas Chris.’  And he remembers running away. For Chris the enduring memory was how much this incident affected Lee.

We have to go – the sun is too hot and Chris has been leaning against a gate for an hour now.  He’s keen to raise another subject.  Chris has a daughter and grandchildren in Peacehaven.  For years he’s been trying to get the council to re-house him so he can be closer to his family. Despite having a two bed flat his efforts to be allocated a one bed flat seem permanently stuck in cycles of administrative incompetence.  The latest chapter is that a GP’s medical notes confirming his poor health need requesting all over again. As he relates the saga to me Chris looks truly desolate.  The process has to re-start.  ‘Why another GP letter? I’m not going to get any better from this Adrian, I can’t go on the phone all the time because I get wound up’.  Listening to this Lee is shaking his head, his brother’s dilemma sounds all too familiar.  Lee looks into the camera, ‘it grinds you down and maybe that’s the purpose of it – there comes a day when you can’t be bothered‘.    

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Note: In January 2021 Chris’s sister Sherree helped write-up his story. I’ve added it at the very end of this extract.

1975 and 1976  – Lee’s 2 years in Brighton’s youth residential care system.

Lee is pulling another photocopy from his folder.  Another heavily redacted page from incomplete social services reports begin with an entry dated January 1975:  ‘Lee received into care – Brentwood Assessment Centre due to being “beyond parental control”’.  Lee recalls happily cooperating with the move to residential care although younger sister Sherree, aged 13 at the time, was distraught at Lee’s departure.

Paradoxically it’s around this time that an improvement is noted in Lee’s school behaviour. Although social work reports from 1975 recall some extremely bad behaviour in 1973 – notably the smashing of windows in the school canteen – it seems that a transformation took place in the run up to exams. The report revisits the official view that Lee’s dislike of his father (and dislike of his father’s visiting the family home) were the root cause of errant behaviour but also notes how Lee’s behaviour in class had become “exemplary”. His last year at Moulsecoomb School overlaps with the move into the care system.  A January 1975 social worker report states: ‘He relates extremely well to teachers and they have shown considerable concern over his reception into care.  He has been able to tell them of his problems recently whereas before he had never talked to them’.

The support and concern the teachers showed is likely to be of the sort any of us would extend to a teenager who’s just gone into care.  It seems Lee – now 16 – had begun to talk openly and trustingly to adults for the first time in his life.  In the process two young art teachers appear to have befriended him.  One – a teacher aged 23 – ended up inviting Lee to her home where he became a regular visitor.  She even gave him jobs babysitting her children from time to time.  The other teacher friend would take Lee out to the pub (of course, today, eyebrows raise at the possible ‘inappropriateness’ of these friendships). 

In our interview I pause to tell Lee how, coincidentally, my art teachers were also the first adults I could relate to but Lee frowns, his memory troubles him: ‘in my case I’m not sure how appropriate it was’, he says.  For Lee it wasn’t that his teachers were at fault.  And certainly their concern for him was genuine.  He explains: ‘Thing is, they all knew each other’.  As I listen the penny gradually drops – teachers, social workers, care home managers, Brighton in 1975… the world 16 year olds like Lee entered was permissive.  Social life with teachers and care workers bolstered these boys and offered a ray of sunshine in the grey – but there were very specific dangers for them. 

When Lee says they all knew each other he means the teachers, the social workers (the younger ones at least) tended to inhabit a social scene frequented by a scattering of adults with far less noble intentions.  Lee describes how he and other working class boys found themselves in pubs and clubs which, although shocking at first, projected a sexualised sub-culture which they soon took for granted.  Taking in the gay-scene this was simply, more broadly, hedonistic nightlife Brighton-style. Far more underground than it is today this was a social milieu fizzing away like a non-stop firework party lit back in the 60s.  In amongst the many adults that frequented this scene a few were there to target the likes of Lee.    

He soon spells out ‘they all knew each other’ in starker terms, ‘I used to tell social workers about a particular teacher. He offered me after-school help with literacy at his home, when I went round, you know, he tried it on’. Lee mentions other examples (a care manager who wanted to help bathe him), ‘they saw me as part of their social life.  By then I was 17, only a few years younger than they were, but at least it meant I could stand up for myself’. 

Despite being tough in all sorts of ways, Lee always adds the caveat that his life up to this point made him vulnerable.  ‘I was a lot younger than my years. My social workers knew that.  But when I told them about the sexualised stuff they took no notice, I think they saw it as me making trouble – and anyway they were all friends’.  Lee pulls yet another social worker report from his file and, as he reads it, the 1970s Brighton scene he’d had to navigate instantly pendulums to something extraordinary and infinitely more troubling.  As the council’s child protection ‘standby officer’ Gordon Rowe was part of the team organising Lee’s care.  Lee’s 2 years in care took him up to his 18^th birthday late in November 1976 at which point the council’s ‘duty of care’ terminated.  This period had seen Lee moving from Brentwood Assessment Centre (where he’d stayed for 4 months) then to a foster family, then to Brighton’s YMCA.  Lee’s unruly behaviour at the YMCA led to Gordon Rowe being tasked to place Lee in emergency accommodation – the Emerys Hotel.  Already mistrustful of Rowe (who’d been keen for Lee to visit his flat too), Lee refuses to go to this hotel and instead stayed for a week or so at the home of his art teacher friend before being placed with yet another foster family.  Twenty years later, having progressed to running Buckinghamshire private care homes for young adults, Rowe would commit suicide rather than face trial on rape charges and the serious sexual assault, brutal ill-treatment and neglect of severely learning disabled young men and women under his care.

The final place Lee was allocated was care accommodation at Hillside in Moulsecoomb.  Then, as he turned 18, he was given a dingy bedsit on Waterloo Street in Hove.  My impression of Lee’s rocky 2 years moving through Brighton’s care system is that the system was really only there to tick a box; to demonstrate a duty to protect – essentially, in this case, it was to manage a ‘problem’ boy whose mother could no longer cope.  But as with so many children and teenagers received in to care, the system fails to cope too.  Records indicate that a succession of foster homes and hostels found the adolescent and troubled Lee to be unmanageable.  What they don’t indicate is that Lee, the perpetual misfit, was no more protected in the care system than he had been as a child at home.          

Lest we forget it was also a period that saw Lee continue to display all the symptoms of complex PTSD tangled as they were with adolescence and entirely justified resentment toward his parents.  A one-page report by an educational psychologist from February 1975 goes no further than to note Lee as a pleasant boy with a ‘good moral sense’.  Despite quoting Lee’s tacit attempt at excusing his insolence (“my dad who kicked me around when I was a kid”) the report focuses on his problem-child issues by noting how these presented “serious difficulties at home” concluding that his “aggressive and pathological obsessional behaviour” might benefit from a period in care.   Alongside the care accommodation would be psychiatric help with overcoming his “basic distrust of others” and exploring “root causes”. 

A few months later a slightly longer report by a consultant psychiatrist does at least attempt a more thoughtful assessment of Lee.  Quoting Lee the report notes Lee’s suspicion of “all those people, social workers, psychiatrists, doctors and things”.  It notes Lee’s comments on how the only person he can talk to is a young art teacher friend and the fact that Lee came across as truthful.  A viewpoint attributed to Lee is that all his problems revolve around “the intense hatred [Lee] has for his father”.  Lee tells me doesn’t buy that – looking back he sees it as a deflection.  Either way, just like in the earlier report, Lee’s stated resentment of all his family is left unexamined other than to regard it as a “peculiar obsession”.  Once again ‘psychiatric help’ is deemed helpful but ultimately, says this consultant, it’s impossible to make a diagnostic assessment.  He says, “I’m not even sure if seeing [Lee] once or twice more would help [  ] but ‘long term management of some kind or another may be of more benefit.”  All the while one thing is dodged, the explosion on Sheepcote Valley tip.

Over the next few years as the 80s loomed Lee’s life as an independent adult, on the surface at least, went well.  He began work as a hod carrier and was later employed by Jaegers as a trainee cloth cutter.  ‘The past was always in the back of my mind’, says Lee, ‘but it was tolerable.  In the late 70s I remember going to clubs – Sloopy’s, The Sweet.  I had a spring in my step.  You do when you’re younger’.   He met a girl and they were allocated a home at Milner Flats.  In 1980 a son was born. Below the surface Lee tolerated a set of yet to be diagnosed physical and mental health problems.  His girlfriend had her struggles too.  By 1984 the relationship was over.  Lee continued onwards but his resilience was eroding.  He managed to be a decent, attentive father to his son and his relationship with his sister Kim was very good.  The relationship with his mother had fallen by the wayside.  His relationship with his father remained non-existent.

Misdiagnosed, mis-prescribed, records lost.

Right across this period and into the early 1990s Lee was in touch with his surgery and a GP who’d known him since birth.  Lee was awash with obsessive, compulsive behaviours – tapping surfaces with his fingers, hand washing, anxiety over doorways.  ‘Kim and my son would take the mick out of my foibles’ says Lee, ‘but I’d laugh with them about it’. 

From about 1992 Lee, now in his thirties, entered periods of severe depression for the first time.  The social life of bars and clubs that had featured in his twenties ended. ‘I was finding it hard to be in places full of people’, he recalls.  From this point onwards Lee sought escape to the nearby South Downs and coastal paths – once again, always out on his bike.  Impossible to escape, however, were the obvious connections between his health and his past.  Lee’s physical complaints now included interstitial cystitis, stomach ulcers, tinnitus, chronic insomnia and acid reflux on top of the constant experience of hyperacusis.   It was in 1992 that Lee decided he’d try to trace any documentary evidence relating to the circumstances of his childhood.  These records and reports, he hoped, might explain his present and ongoing medical problems.  Requests for social services records relating to his mother were refused because his mother wouldn’t give permission (she stated that she saw no point in digging up an unhappy past) and the records relating to himself, although released to him in 1996, were so heavily redacted that some of the pages Lee has shown me are covered in more black marker pen than readable text.

The tragic death of Kim Rolf                                                                   

In 2008 the tragedy of Kim’s suicide strikes a blow to Lee that’s evident 12 years on – there has been no discussion involving mention of his sister that hasn’t caused Lee’s voice to crackle with emotion in a matter of seconds.  It seems that as the 1990s ended and across the years that followed Kim and Lee became much closer.

Kim’s personality had always been vibrant and full of life.  With obvious pleasure Lee recalls Kim as a tomboy of a child; exuberant and with a mischievous sense of humour.  He recalls her courage facing up to their father. ‘After he’d hit our mum one time she jumped on his back and wrestled him to the ground’, recalls Lee, ‘she was tough’. There’s no space here to do justice to the memory of Kim, a single mum who adored her son and who was well known and extremely well liked in Brighton.  It seems that she struggled with clinical depression too – Lee recalls Kim suffering acute symptoms of menopause and was not at all herself prior to her suicide.  The coroner noted serious response failures in mental health services sought by Kim (it seems she had become lost in the system).  Moreover, Kim had been frantic in her struggle to access mental health support for her 17 year old son.  It is perhaps an example of one the lowest points reached in the journalism of Brighton’s Argus newspaper that its reporter’s response to the coroner’s 2009 inquest (which the reporter had attended) would be a short piece titled ‘Brighton mum jumped from cliffs after son turned to crime’.  The story and its headline bore no resemblance to the coroner’s findings.  Inexplicably (unless it was to justify a headline?) the Argus report inferred that a serious street robbery committed by Kim’s son (for which he served prison time) had occurred before rather than after her suicide.   In just 150 careless words the Argus inflicted a devastating blow on the grieving family prompting dozens of Kim’s friends to write moving tributes to both Kim and her son in the comments section underneath.

All the wrong labels                                                                                                                                    For Lee, the obvious connection between Kim’s suicide and her struggle with haphazard mental health services dealt an additional blow.  The parallels intensified his sense of injustice.  Prior to her death Kim had warned Lee about sharing too much information with GPs.  All Lee recalls is that Kim had remarked ‘be careful what you say’.  It had been a passing comment but it had sounded a note of mistrust in the system – on personal records, on over-medicating and so forth – which chimed with worries building up in Lee’s mind for some time.  The surgery now had an array of new doctors. In 2008 Lee was prescribed the drug Ritalin (for suspected ADHD) just as it had for Kim’s son.  By this time Lee was on a number of medicines and it seemed no bad thing when the GP arranged an appointment for an overview of all these prescriptions.  Lee’s recollection is of double-checking the appointment ahead of attending the review only to discover that it had been changed to autism spectrum testing.  This moment seemed to sediment profound mistrust in Lee’s mind over the decisions and labels applied to him and a determination to demand access to all medical and social services records filed under his name. 

To this day, if Lee were to see a therapist, it’s likely that he would later demand sight of any session notes.  Although he continued to be prescribed Ritalin for some time, Lee has doubts over the ADHD diagnosis and regards the appointment for autism testing (which he refused to attend) as yet another example of over-medicalising him.  In 2016, as a protest for what he saw as the council blocking his access to appropriate services, Lee refused to pay council tax.  Soon after this he became aware that he’d been exempted from paying the tax and then discovered the stated reason was ‘severe mental impairment of intelligence and social functioning’ (SMI).  The SMI exemption is obtained by a person or their professional advocate after submitting a signed application alongside a GP certificate confirming the severe mental impairment “appears to be permanent”.  With absolutely no recollection of having ever submitted or signed such a form Lee’s sense of being misdiagnosed and erroneously labelled behind his back escalated dramatically.  Amongst papers he’s recently found, is a blank SMI form along with the certificate requiring completion by his GP.  At the top of the form, addressed to Lee, it says “your social worker has stated you have a brain injury”. 

When I pointed out to Lee that SMI is not a medical diagnosis and just a procedural, tick-box way to exempt council tax Lee is unimpressed.  ‘It’s still a label. Still a way to pigeon hole me’, he says. I sympathise – in Lee’s case it would have been especially important for any social worker or GP to explain to him that the SMI label was a means to an end rather than a diagnosis.  Lee is adamant that he would, in any case, have declined making such an application.  ‘My whole point was to refuse to pay my council tax as a protest. I told them – take me to court if you want, I’ll tell my story, I’ll contact the press’. He regards a description of SMI as both repellent and a pointless box to tick given most of his council tax is discounted anyway.  ‘I have complex PTSD which is treatable, it’s not “permanent”. Labelling me SMI is grotesque, I’d never consent to it.  It was done behind my back’.  

By labelling him with SMI (albeit for the purposes of exempting council tax), Lee believes the council adds one more layer in the construction of a view of him as psychologically unsound (a person whose claims must be taken with a pinch of salt). He cites a conversation with his original GP who knew him from birth who told him that all talk of ADHD, autism (and certainly SMI) was ‘completely wrong’ given the obvious likelihood of PTSD. However, Lee recalls the same GP speculate that he was brain damaged.  It seems the notion of possible brain injury has muddied the picture of Lee ever since.  As detailed in the final extract, a ‘complex PTSD’ diagnosis does indeed emerge into view initially in the form of a referral for EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) therapy.  EMDR is commonly offered to patients suffering PTSD.

In the final extract we return to Sheepcote Valley and ponder the vexed issue of the contaminated ground. Lee’s certainly that it remains dangerously contaminated to this day and that he alone has a duty to bring this to light adds to yet another layer of complexity to this final chapter in his story.

Copyright c 2020 Adrian Hart

Memories of a childhood by Chris Rolf (and Sherree Rolf)                                                          

­57 Wiston Road, Whitehawk

Our young lives were blighted before they had even started.  The birth of a child shrouded in secrecy and placed for adoption just a few years before I was born.  An absent father who would occasionally make an appearance and drop by to slip off a few quid and check in on us.  A mother left penniless and alone caring for her five children that were plagued with ill health.  Welfare records reveal that at one stage all three boys had contracted mumps, one of us had bronchitis, I was suffering from chronic asthma and our sister had colic.  We seemed to be constantly poorly with runny noses and a host of other ailments. Then there was the involvement of the Child Welfare team who were assigned to assess and monitor the family but were consistently denied entry when they visited the home.  It is at this time I often wonder if we had somehow managed to slip beneath the radar of the Welfare Service after we had moved because things just seemed to have got harder from thereon.

Life as a child brings back dismal memories.  Our family seemed different from all the others; resilience and hardship is all we knew and we basically just got on with it.  It all began at Wiston Road where days were spent walking home from Whitehawk Juniors with my siblings and loitering outside an empty home waiting for Mum to come home.  We had two sets of neighbours we would hang out with.  One family lived on the corner just down the road in a comfortable semi surrounded by a large garden.  They were your average typical working-class family full of fun, kindness and compassion. They had four sons and the youngest two being a similar age to us meant we would sometimes get invited over to play.  Their Dad seemed a real hands-on family man who came across as a good role model for his boys. The antithesis of our family life.  He worked on the buses and their Mum was a housewife who was always at home looking after the kids.  She would bake the best coconut cake and sometimes would offer us some with tea when we went over there to play.   She was a warm and caring lady who used to save her boys comics so we could read them too. The other family who lived further up the road on the other hand were dirt poor and lived in equally deprived conditions.  They were a big family with little income.  Dad was a grave-digger and Mum was a large woman who would sit in her chair dressed in oversized baggy clothes sipping tea.  The kids would sometimes come down to the local tip with us to salvage whatever they could find.  Their house was quite shabby and drab but the family were friendly . When the old man died, they could not afford to hire a suitable venue, so they held his wake in a local café instead.  We used to go round there to play and get offered a cuppa even if it meant drinking it out of a jam jar.                

I would often play truant with other kids and one day got caught and reprimanded for stealing some pies from Kemp Town railway station.  I would have been about 9 years old at the time, but wherever I went hunger soon followed. The Police were called and dropped me home with a ticking off.      

We didn’t have bikes or scooters to play with so one day I found a heavy 6 foot iron pole down the side of an old spring bed that had been dumped in our back garden.  I wanted to use it to build a wigwam with my brother, only the pole collapsed and struck me on my face.  I was taken to hospital and had five stiches.  Luckily Mum was home then and got a neighbour to rush me to hospital. The scars on my left ear are a reminder of what happened that day.

Coming home from school and playing at the tip every other weekend with my brother became a regular thing.  We would go there to search for anything we could find whether it was for food, broken bikes or something we could salvage and sell for a few shillings.  With no one at home it just seemed something to do rather than hanging around on the doorstep in the cold.

32 The Avenue, Moulsecoombe

At about aged 11, we moved to 32 The Avenue to a bigger house with lots of outdoor space and a large green to play on.

I attended Bevendean Juniors before moving up to Moulsecoombe Seniors.  I made some lifelong friends with the kids on the Avenue.  Our situation hadn’t changed much in that we still had the occasional visit from Dad when he wasn’t working and would drop by to take us out for a spin in his car.   My middle sister would have to wake up and get our youngest sister ready for school and we would still come home to an empty house and hang around outside in all weathers until dusk or when a kindly neighbour would take us in. 

Even after we moved to a different area, we had somehow managed to find our way back to Whitehawk tip in Sheepcote Valley.  In 1969, the year Apollo II made history by landing on the moon, I meanwhile witnessed a different kind of blast.  It started off as a normal winter’s day when my brother Lee and I was scouring Whitehawk tip collecting as many bits of lead, copper and metal as we could find so that we could sell for a few bob at the local scrape yard.  We were used to handling lead as we had done this many times after school.  Lee had been sitting around a small fire burning off the plastic from copper wire when all of a sudden there was an almighty bang.  A spark had ignited from the methane gas and the place exploded into a huge cloud of orange smoke. The force of the explosion catapulted Lee into the air.  I was standing about three metres away and fear and panic instantly swept over me.  In a state of shock I ran away from the scene as fast as I could.  Nearby our neighbours from Wiston Road heard the explosion and saw the cloud of smoke billowing in the air.  They recalled that incident as if it were yesterday and knew immediately that it was Lee who had been injured. The site workers rushed to his aid and found him unconscious and burnt.  They bundled him into their van, covered him with coats and rushed him home.  He didn’t come too until the van hit a bump half-way up The Avenue.  On realising there was no one at home they took him to the nearest hospital.  I ran home in a daze until a police car found me and took me home. On his release from hospital and during the aftermath of the accident, Lee’s behaviour had changed and what we now know was post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), was misdiagnosed as having a possible brain injury.  He was exhibiting the classic signs of a child who was deeply distressed and had started withdrawing from the outside world.  Without psychotherapy or counselling to help him overcome this, he got labelled ‘disobedient and difficult’.  He became withdrawn and at times would refuse to wash and became paranoid of touching things, especially metal objects like doorhandles or taps. Other times he would refuse to use the indoor toilet and would defecate in the garden instead.  He became hyper-sensitive to noise and would stand alone in a corner covering his ears.  This were all behaviours brought on after his accident.  Mum of course was totally ill-equipped to deal with these challenges and her only way of handling the situation was to remove him from the family home into care.  The flashbacks of these events are still vivid in my mind and has had a knock-on effect on both our health and physical well-being.

Life after the Sheepcote incident changed the close friendship we once shared as brothers. Lee would fight with such tenacity that Mum would tear us away apart by our hair.  Like a dog with a bone, he wouldn’t let go.  My asthma rendered me shortness of breath and I struggled to keep up with a fight; exhausted and gasping for air until I surrendered.  It became clear he was suffering from PTSD and this part of releasing his frustrations.

My school report at Bevendean Juniors referred to me as being ‘retarded’ because tests showed I was below my average reading age.  Reading this for the first time was upsetting and I felt wronged that I was labelled this way.  Considering we had to fend for ourselves most of the time and were never encouraged to learn at home or given any extra help with our schoolwork, it is was hardly surprising that none of us were able pass the 11 Plus exam.  In fact Lee wasn’t even given the opportunity to sit the 11 Plus exam because of his condition.  Our siblings went to separate schools and we were put into what was termed in those days as ‘backward’ classes.  Nevertheless, what I didn’t achieve academically I made it up through sport.  I excelled at most sports and enjoyed sparring at boxing lessons, playing snooker, football, rounders and cricket and to this day enjoy most sports. 

Being raised in a one-parent low-income family, we were entitled to vouchers for a free uniform. This would have been the only time I remember wearing a new set of clothes and it felt good to wear something crisp and brand new, even if it was just the school uniform.

Sometimes we would go scrumping in the allotments and once got caught taking potatoes from the field.  If I did manage to find a way to get into the house, I would make sugar or ketchup sandwiches to fill our bellies.  The black and white TV never seemed to work and we would have to bash or jog it to get rid of the fuzzy picture.  The house always seemed cold and damp I think there was only one coal fire to heat the entire house.  Coats were put on our bed to keep us warm at night.  If there was a knock at the door, we would be told to hide and keep away from the window.  I don’t know who or why nobody wasn’t allowed to in, we just knew we had to duck beneath the window when we heard a knock and dare we make a noise.

Our Auntie would sometimes come over during the week and between them they would circle the advert in the Argus which jumble sales were going on that weekend.  Our Saturdays would therefore be spent trawling around the jumble sales bringing home second-hand clothes and homemade cakes for tea.  The clothes would then be stockpiled on a chair under some sheets in the lounge.  Later when Mum started work at the Open Market we would catch a bus into town to St Peters Church to stay with our Nanny Giles at her small place in the residential care home and we would spend endless hours playing at The Level or making up games outside the care home.  Nanny Giles would give us loose change from doing her shopping which we spend on comics and collecting football tokens.  Mum would pick us up in the evening with her shopping bags laden with sweets and more cakes and we would rummage through the bags to see what she had brought, except she would quickly hide them away and shout at us to keep away from the bags.

In the heat of the summer and without a fridge/freezer, food would be left to fester and sticky fly paper would be dangling in the kitchen with dead flies, like raisins on glue, amongst the piled-up plates and saucepans that were left on the side.  But unlike the fleas that used to bite us at night time, the dead flies didn’t bother us.  Mum would squeeze the fleas between her fingers and tell us to shake the sheets before getting into bed.

Like any mischievous boy growing up on a council estate in the 60’s, I played up and sometimes got into trouble.  One day whilst balancing on the back on my friend’s chopper bike, I managed to grab hold of a couple of bottles of fizz from the corona lorry that passed by up The Avenue and on another occasion I helped myself to the mini bottles of milk outside the canteen and gulped them down on my way home from school.

The winters were harsh back then and our clothes would be hung out in icy weather.  We would bring them in off the line frozen stiff and the smell of the cold outside air would waft around the room.  We would have to wait for the school jumpers to thaw out before placing them in front of the fire.  When our shoes got wet Mum would stuff them with scrunched-up newspaper to dry them out for the morning. But of course they were still damp the next day. I don’t remember being sent off to school wearing gloves, a scarf or even a woolly hat. 

The mornings were chilly and before going to school our job was to clean out the fire grate of soot and coke and light a fire using rolled up newspapers, tinder and charcoal.  To get the fire started we would roll up an old newspaper and puff and blow through the it till there was a spark.

I have no memories of my parents going to any nativity plays, or parents evening but unbeknown to me, Mum did find the time to go to the school to complain about my behaviour at home and to enquire about putting me into a childrens home.  The incident after the explosion at the tip had unsettled me and she was finding it difficult to cope, at times calling me a ‘heathen’.  According to reports, I was apparently settling in well as school. The crux of the issue was more to do with our dysfunctional family life, rather than my behaviour, that was the main concern of the authorities.  Our situation at home did not make things any easier and eventually it was at this point that it was decided to send Lee away and placed into care at Brentwood Childrens Home, aged 15.  On reviewing past records, it seems clear that if it were not for the observant male teacher at Bevendean Juniors who recommended that it was not in my best interests to send me away, then I too would have faced the same fate as my younger brother.

There were no bedtime stories, set routine for mealtimes, friends round for tea or sleepovers, no birthday cakes or birthday songs or family holidays, except for one trip to Lingfield when we lived in Whitehawk that the Children Services had organised for me and my brother whilst Mum was at the Convalescent home.  Records show that we had an enjoyable time and that the lady who looked after us said we could go again during half term. For some unknown reason, we never did.  I don’t remember having my own toothbrush, yet alone brushing my teeth at night; there we no warm pyjamas to snuggle into bed.  The fleas, overcoats, a hot water bottle and being shouted at to get into bed, were the only things I remember at night.

One Easter, our Auntie on my Dad’s side of the family turned up at the house with a bag full of easter eggs for the kids, only Mum wouldn’t answer the door.  She left the eggs on the doorstep and walked away. This was just another side of her erratic behaviour that was upsetting for the kids. 

Sometimes the ice-cream van would chime away up The Avenue and kids would go rushing up for a cornet or a lolly, only we would stand away as we had no money.  This treat only seemed to be for the families who had both parents at home and not for kids like us.  It was the same story at our local chippy in The Avenue too.  We couldn’t afford a bag of chips so would go later in the evening at clearing up time and ask for a bag of scraps, which were the greasy and crispy leftover bits from the batter.

Christmas was not always a happy time and would often end up with blazing rows and on occasions Mum would just walk out.  Money was tight and presents were normally second-hand but she would try her best to give us something each like colouring books, pens and a second-hand toy. Food vouchers from the WVS (Womens Voluntary Service) meant we could have lots of fizz, dates, fruit, selections boxes and other festive goodies. Some of the stuff came from the cake and sweet stall at the Market which had gone by its sell-by date; the chocolate liquors would turn into lumps of sugary syrup caked in at the bottom of her shopping bag with other gooey stuff and a bit of loose foundation too!

December would not have been a particularly happy time as we later learnt that this was the month when her first child was born and subsequently adopted.  Whether that had played a part in her mood-swings and mental health, we will never know.  At her worst, she would threaten to put her head in the gas oven or swear on one of the children’s lives. 

By now Dad had remarried and his visits became less frequent as he settled down with his new wife.

20 The Crescent, Moulesecoombe

We had approached adolescence when we moved into this house.  We had lovely neighbours called Sandy and Mick on one side.  They had three children whom we would play with and Mum and Sandy became good friends.  On the other side were an elderly couple who preferred a quieter life and once made a complaint about me starting a fire in their back garden.

This was the house that Lee last lived in before being taken into care and for my middle sister who moved away after falling pregnant at the age of 16.  We didn’t get taught about the ‘birds and the bees’, and Mum’s own response to this was that she could give the child up for adoption or have an abortion and that she wasn’t to worry about it as ‘most of the girls around here fall pregnant young anyway’.

Hygiene standards at home were pretty basic.  Setting lotion which consisted of a bowl of sugar and water, a comb full of dead hair and crumbled compressed powder with loose make-up in a small container, would be lying left on the side. Cucumbers left in a vase would turn mouldy and food would be left to go off was normal.

When I was a turned 19 for a bit of fun, I dressed up as a woman with full make-up, high-heels, a dress and a wig.  When she saw me standing on the doorstep she told everyone to keep away from the window and not to open the door.  After her initial shock, she later saw the funny side of it.  But with his odd sense of humour Dad bet me a fiver to turn up at the hospital to cheer up his wife, who was recovering from a miscarriage.  The joke misfired and she was horrified to see me thinking I was his first wife!

14 Hillside, Moulsecoombe

This would have been the last house I lived in.  My brother was living at the childrens home and my middle sister had left.  Mum’s mood swings and devisiveness was still as noticeable as ever.  She seemed incapable of treating us equally and instead would take sides depending on which mood she was in. Bringing a girlfriend home was an ordeal as she would hover outside my bedroom door listening in to our private conversations.  It didn’t feel a homely or comfortable place to bring friends back and with the constant rows I felt it was time to move on.  When I eventually got engaged, I dropped by to introduce my new fiancée, only once again she wouldn’t answer the door and could clearly be seen twitching behind the net curtains.  Nothing had changed, and while this pattern of behaviour might have seemed normal to her, was completely abnormal for my fiancée who came from a conventional family background and couldn’t understand why she didn’t invite us in. Announcing an engagement and pregnancy should have been a happy occasion only she had managed to dampen it yet again with her erratic behaviour.