Integrity on the Edge

The construction of this site offers many opportunities to look at writings of the past. I've shared a few below from the actual book itself. Not that it will ever be finished. New adventures keep adding to it. I'll keep it to bite-sized bits.

7. Holyhead & Escape

Ryan’s mother Judy often visited him in Worthington House detention centre. Norman never visited. Judy sent him new shoes for his release day. He wore them with pride as he strode down Bangor’s high street. Apparently, Bangor has the longest high street in the UK. Ryan walked up and down it repeatedly on the day he got his freedom back. Everyone wanted to hear about “jail time ”. He embellished tales of snooker balls in socks, shower rapes, savage beatings. In truth, there’d been one kicking from a screw and a lot of boredom.

Back in Holyhead in 1983 after detention, Ryan found himself in a two-bedroom flat where James had a room and Ryan had a sofa bed. Norman’s resentment simmered. Ryan saw the writing on the wall.

The town itself was dying. Shops with closing down signs, a cold wind whipping through empty streets. In The Queens, Ryan — moustache darkened with mascara, passing for eighteen — drank cider and black on his dole money, which never lasted.

Heroin was creeping in. Ryan watched lads his age rattle with withdrawal.

“Time to get out of this shit hole,” he said, lining up a pool shot.

“Yeah, yeah, everyone says it,” John Tuck coughed.

“I’m not everyone, am I John?” Ryan replied.

The next weekend Ryan stood at the edge of town on the A5 trunk road with his thumb out.

“Where you off to, mate?” shouted a driver.

“Anywhere, mate, anywhere but this shit hole,” Ryan replied.

“Jump in.”

That was the last day Ryan Tanner was a resident of Holyhead, gateway to Ireland.

8. Drugs, Mushrooms & Means of Escape

Ryan’s biological father was of Irish descent, thick accent. Ryan wore that as a charm in summers, faking the accent to flirt with female holidaymakers. Anglesey in the sun felt like it could have saved him. It didn’t.

At thirteen he drank half a pint of magic mushroom juice. Fear, then colours and laughter. He wanted more. Three nights running, he and a gang tripped on the school playing field. To passers-by, just kids in the dark. To them, a trillion billion stars, spaceships, wizards, dragons. When the mushrooms ran out, the slump hit hard.

He’d heard of LSD as the adult, a more dangerous version. Stories of jumpers thinking they could fly. It scared him. For now.

Judy was addicted to prescription drugs as far back as he could remember. Valium, anti-depressants. Ryan ran next door to Vera’s to “borrow” tablets, then watched Judy repay her after chemist day. Judy also drank. Thursdays were benefit day: women queuing for child allowance and tokens, men cashed their giros, debts settled and pints poured. Ryan wove through legs hunting cigarette butts; sometimes he scored whole fags. Heaven.

Norman, unlike most men around, always worked. Deep sea diving. Guns, dogs, home-brew sessions with his mate Seamus; bare-chested posturing in the sun while Judy and Seamus’s wife Hilda drank on the bench. Ryan watched from the window, changing records, dodging Judy’s suspicion. Norman talked big, earned well.

Ryan’s petty crimes — meter break-ins, theft — he rationalised as taking from faceless companies. The law called it burglary. Thatcher’s Britain was in no mood to be lenient with kids like him.

The state’s answer was care homes.

9. Detention Centre

Ryan’s first youth detention centre (DC) sentence came off the back of drunken stupidity: criminal damage to a service station toilet and theft of a bag of oranges. Homeless, drunk, slow-footed, he and his mate Steve were easy arrests.

Worthington House DC ran on routine and intimidation: icy tiles, Belfast sinks, strip-washes, bed packs, inspections, boots. Same thing every morning. Ryan loathed the governor and any uniform that thought it owned him.

He eventually got a farm job in his last three weeks — hard graft, better grub, a brief taste of less confinement.

Ryan’s mother Judy visited; Norman never did. When he left, in his new shoes, he strutted that Bangor high street like he owned it. The legend of his time inside grew with every retelling. The truth mattered less than the armour.

10. First Homes: Eryl House & Ty Gwyn (I)

Eryl House, in Llandudno, was one of the few places Ryan remembered without immediate hate. A family-orientated home. Local school. Local kids. Some normality. Which meant, of course, it didn’t last. He was sent home too soon. Predictably, he reoffended and went back into care.

Ty Gwyn on Anglesey was a small, modern unit in a village, ten bedrooms, meant to be homely. Under different leadership it might have been. But it fell into Neville Snot’s empire. At first, while Snot kept his distance, Ryan thrived: local football, discos, girls, friends.

Then Snot tightened the net.

11. Yellow House Project (YHP)

The Yellow House Project hit Ryan in the face with the stench of detergent and bleach. Eight weeks of assessment under Neville and Jane Snot. Silence in school hours. Cleaners as informants. Staff as terrified extensions of Snot’s will.

Basic “education” in a single classroom with Jack Roberts, an unqualified bully and Snot’s yes-man. Ryan was caned, slapped, dragged; Roberts would later be publicly named for using “excessive force”. Ryan eventually won £8,500 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board for Roberts’ assaults — money he was advised to spend on law books.

Jane Snot stalked corridors, policing biscuit crumbs and portion sizes, growling, forcing the Lord’s Prayer before meals, clipping Ryan around the head. Their daughter Connie hovered, drawn to Ryan, stirring trouble.

The threat was constant: “You’ll end up in Byrne House.”

Snot meant it.

12. Transfer to Byrne House

As the summer of 1981 faded, Byrne House hardened from threat into destination. “The Big House.” “The Colditz of Care.” tbc.......

12. Transfer to Byrne House

As the summer of 1981 faded, Byrne House hardened from threat into destination. “The Big House.” “The Colditz of Care.” Snot got his way. At the end of September, Ryan was sent there.

The lane to Byrne House was half a mile of tunnelled hedgerows. The Big House stayed hidden until the very end. Dead end. Castle doors. Staff houses are scattered through the grounds. Greenhouses smashed into dens. A secure unit. A myth. Ryan arrived cocky. He’d learn fast.

13. Byrne House: The Regime

Byrne House by day was busy: seventy staff, endless activity. By night, it shifted shape. Boys summoned to staff flats. The infamous “flat list” read out before supper, same names again and again: Packette, Tipper and others. Ryan never once made the list. At the time, he felt cheated. Later, he thanked his Higher Power.

Night staff worked at the far end of the corridors. Anyone leaving Hogget’s flat had to pass them. They saw everything and said nothing. Ryan became familiar with Stan Wolli, an ex-cop with a pot belly, who traded tea and late-night phone calls for gossip. Stan wanted names, incidents, the flavour of each day. Ryan obliged when it suited him.

The gardens and sheds provided cover for solvent sniffing, alcohol, sex with local girls, and scraps with local lads from the huge estate beyond. Violence, boredom, bravado, secrets. Always secrets.

14. Violence as Currency.

Violence was a daily routine. Punishments were sport.

The “corridor run” initiation: two lines of boys down a long corridor armed with forty-year-old leather boxing gloves, bamboo canes ripped from gardens, Doc Martens, table tennis bats, pillowcases full of shoes. New lads sprinted through and got battered. Some, like Ryan, were chased all the way, black and blue for days.

There was the “double Chester”: two staff wrenching your arms behind your back, bending you forward while another booted you in the chest. Winter fun: being chucked into the frozen swimming pool, smashing the ice.

Dirty snowballs forced into mouths. Ice-cold showers. Toothpaste rubbed in eyes. Chairs kicked from under you. Fingers bent back, wet towels whipped, heads down toilets and flushed. Psychological punishments: no home leave, no visits, no youth club, no rides out, no contact, total isolation from anything that resembled normal life.

Staff encouraged fights between boys. Murder Ball in the gym with a medicine ball, no rules, injuries ignored. A Bruce Lee film night could end with an all-out brawl on the stairs. Staff laughed or lost control, but the atmosphere of sanctioned violence remained. Shower time brought too many male staff watching. Paul Wilson — Shaggy hair, wellies-- dead legs, nipple pinches, squirting water up boys’ backsides — was later convicted of sexual offences. Others followed similar routes.

Self-harm became common: glass from broken greenhouses used to carve skin, blood as language. Ryan carries scars on eyebrows and forearms as ghost-notes of those days.

15. Education Denied

“Education” at Byrne House was a joke. Matt “Chooch” Matthews, head of education, cared more for trains and war stories than teaching. One art teacher with dark glasses and wandering hands. Rugby-playing staff who could jog but not teach. A “house skills” sewing class Ryan secretly enjoyed, and used later in life.

Most of Ryan’s school hours were spent in gardens or lifting weights in a self-declared gym. Stephen Morris lurked there too often, eyes on boys’ bodies. Later, he’d be convicted for abusing younger boys in Alyn House.

No one left Byrne House with academic qualifications. Not one. Ryan knew this long before the Whitehouse Inquiry that cost thirteen million pounds to say the same thing.

The reports about him from that time painted him as violent, immoral, and beyond help. Page after page of condemnation. Had he died before 1992, that’s all his children would ever have known about him. He would not let that stand.

16. Absconding & Top Dog

In a system where you either bullied or were bullied, Ryan adapted. Fast.

He remembered the boys who chased him after the corridor run and kept receipts. As he grew, he took them on one by one. By the time he was “top dog”, they regretted every extra shot they’d landed.He became the most prolific absconder Byrne House had seen. Slipping out, hitching rides, disappearing. The threats of lost privileges meant nothing.

“Stick your home leave up your arse. Fuck your pocket money and fuck your youth club too.”Staff knew not to rely on being able to beat him into line. Some instead leveraged his status: “We’ll get Tanner on you.” Ryan played along if there were cigarettes or chocolate in it. Give a slap, take a biscuit. He was learning how power actually worked. Skewed lessons, but lessons all the same.

17. Ty Gwyn (II) & Other House.

After Byrne House, Ryan bounced back to Ty Gwyn, now as an older, harder teenager. Ty Gwyn had become, in his words, “a teenager's unit of fun. He treated it as a bedsit: come and go as he pleased, vanish for days, return when broke. He had a brief, fumbled sexual encounter with a student from Manchester. The Inquiry never traced her.

Eryl House, earlier, had been comparatively calm. If he’d been allowed to stay. Instead, aged sixteen, Ryan was effectively evicted into a world he wasn’t prepared for.

18. Andrea Taylor & The First Cameras

Andrea Taylor first appeared in Ryan’s life at the Yellow House Project: tall, heavy smoker, some vague deputy role. Later, she turned up at Byrne House on placement and took a shine to Ryan, offering advice he mostly ignored.

In 1990, out of the blue, she reappeared working with a Yorkshire Television producer. Ryan was in a joinery workshop called Spindles when Geoff Barber — dusty hippy boss with a pointed beard — yelled: “Tanner, there’s a woman on the phone for you, she reckons she works for Yorkshire Television. Don’t forget us when your name is up in lights over Hollywood, will you?”

It was a call that changed Ryan’s life. He never forgot Geoff for passing that handset — or for still owing him three weeks’ wages. Taylor told Ryan his childhood had been ruined by the homes, and there was a possibility of compensation.“You and the others are entitled,” she said. “They failed you badly and ruined any chances you had of a decent education.? Ryan thought of his non-education, gardening and weightlifting instead of school work. The idea of getting something back hooked him.

He met the film crew in a pub (free beer, maybe food). They toured Byrne House, Yellow House, and other units. Ryan took to the camera; the camera took to him. Taylor whispered prompts, fed narratives, all the while nursing her own buried agenda — revenge on the Snots and the managers who’d sidelined her.

The documentary made Ryan a “go-to” contact for hacks. TV, radio, and newspapers started with him or Taylor. He had addresses, phone numbers, stories, and a willingness to help.

The police and politicians noticed. So did certain newspapers. Taylor would later front-page as “Our Andrea Exposes Monsters,” recasting Snot as a sexual abuser rather than the violent bully he was. Ryan didn’t buy it. He knew the difference. Taylor won her war. Ryan was left managing the fallout of being half-truth’s poster boy. cont-