Terence O’Neill - Someone to Love Us - The shocking true story of two brothers fostered into brutality and neglect

We got on a bus to take us the fifty-mile journey from Newport to Hereford and, as we boarded, I did something very naughty. Maybe I was bored after my week’s confinement to bed. Maybe I was jealous that Dennis and Freddie had gone ahead of me. Or maybe I just fancied the piles of bus tickets sitting under a clipboard, all of them in different colours to denote their different values. While the conductor wasn’t looking, I lifted the spring, slipped one of the piles out of its place and shoved it into my coat pocket.

It wasn’t long before the conductor noticed one of his piles of tickets was missing and there was a great hullabaloo. He made the driver stop the bus and everyone was asked to look on the floor at their feet to see if they could find the lost tickets. I pretended to look along with everyone else, chuckling to myself about the loot in my pocket. Of course, the tickets weren’t found and the bus continued on its way.

When we got to the Sorrels’ house, a pretty old cottage in its own grounds on the edge of a small village, I took off my coat and threw it on a chair. The movement must have jiggled the pack of bus tickets because Dennis suddenly spotted them poking out.

‘Here, Terry! What’s this all about then?’ he asked, pulling them out.

I thought he would think it was a good laugh and would share in the joke with me, but instead, to my horror, he shouted for Mrs Sorrel.

‘Look at this! Our Terry’s been thieving,’ he shouted. ‘He’s got the bus tickets.’

She came out of the kitchen and looked at me sadly. ‘Oh, Terence, how could you? We’ll have to take these back to the bus station tomorrow and apologize. What were you thinking?’

I braced myself for a punishment of some kind but it didn’t happen. She just seemed really disappointed in me and that made me ashamed. I hadn’t thought I was doing any harm, but Mrs Sorrel said that stealing is stealing no matter whether it’s a gold sovereign or a halfpenny piece. I was upset that she had a bad opinion of me from the very first day I arrived there. It wasn’t a good start.

I was furious with Dennis for ratting on me as well, and later on we had a scrap in the garden when I called him a dirty rat and a bloody tell-tale and a traitor. We quite often scrapped, in the way that brothers do, wrestling each other to the ground and giving dead arms and legs, but we never really hurt each other. Dennis was much stronger than me and he’d pin me down on the ground so I couldn’t fight any more and that’s usually how it ended.

The Sorrels had a great garden for kids to play in. An overgrown path led down to an old brick toilet and then there was a brass bedstead sticking out of the boundary hedge, which Mr Sorrel said helped to keep the foxes out. And best of all, just across a field there was an old aerodrome and we could watch the planes taking off and landing, which was very exciting for three young boys. One of the pilots from the base sometimes came over to the Sorrels’ for his tea and Dennis and I used to ply him with questions about how many bombs he had dropped and what it was like being chased through the skies by enemy planes.

Dennis and I slept in an attic room in the cottage, and we had to climb a ladder to go to bed at night, which was an adventure for lads our age. On bath nights, Mrs Sorrel put an old tin bath in front of the open fire and then heated a big cauldron over the flames to get hot water. Freddie would have his bath first, then me, and then Dennis, but between each of us she topped up the bath with hot water from the cauldron. No one had ever been so kind to me in my life up to that date. I’d lie back in the steaming water thinking ‘This is the life!’

During the week, Dennis went to a village school that was just across the road from the cottage but I didn’t start there, despite the fact I was almost six. I don’t know why. During the day, I just played out in the garden with Freddie and sometimes we helped Mr Sorrel to tend his vegetables. There was a lake nearby with swans on it so we might go to look at them. On Sundays we all attended the local church, which was the first time I’d been to church in my life. I found it a bit boring and was always being reprimanded for fidgeting during the sermon. The priest used big words and I could never understand what he was talking about so it was hard to sit still.

I was pretty happy there with the Sorrels. They were nice people, salt of the earth you might say, but I think they found three energetic boys a bit of a handful. I was already getting a reputation for being the naughty one of the three, although I don’t think I was naughty so much as restless when I got bored. I do remember that I was always being told off for using colourful language, which I had picked up from my dad and my older brothers back at home. Everyone swore in Bolt Street; that’s just the way they talked.

Anyway, come the New Year of 1941, a welfare officer arrived and told us we were moving on again and that we would be picked up on the 6th to go to our next home. It seemed we had only just arrived and started to get settled, and that was my main objection to the move. Although the Sorrels had been nice, I hadn’t had time in the three months to become attached to either of them. I just thought it would have been better if we could have put down roots somewhere instead of being always in temporary places. But it wasn’t up to me. That much was clear already. I just had to do as I was told and go wherever the council took me.

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