I suggested in my previous smaller, hastier and less grammatical email account that I could send you a longer account of my stay at Dr Barnardo's home at Kingston Upon Thames overlooking Kingston Hill from the back of the very large home, and with main entrance in Gloucester Road. As I am now in my house I can now take my time in composing nicer sentences on my own computer instead of my first email to you, which was rather composed in haste in an internet cafe within a hour. I enclose my own experience if you wish to enter it into your webpage for the interest of any other Dickies boys, including Don who's 2002 email to you, encouraged me to send my account too. Logically it is reasonable after such a long time, not to expect much reply, but who knows, and who knows what destiny is? People do change and may wish to forget those days if they induce sad memories into their mind.

Before I begin my experiences on the Kingston Barnardo's home, I would like to clear any possible grammatical abuse of the word Dickies and its possible misuse, though I must say I am not a grammarian or English teacher. The easiest way to get round it is to think of the words Dicky and fairy. Dicky means Richard and in this case the governor Dicky or Richard Gardener before the governor Vernon Paul while I was at the home. Strictly speaking, I am a Vernon if I was there at his time. Incidently governor Mr Paul never referred to the boys as Dickies, but just boys of the home, and I rarely heard other boys calling themselves Dickies.

As there was only one governor Dicky Gardener and not two or more, I can say that I was a Dicky at the home or one of the Dickies at the home. It is much the same if I was a fairy. I could say I was a fairy amongst the fairies, or I am a fairy amongst of the fairies. I am one of Dicky's boys, or I am one of Dicky's Dickies There were around 150 Dickies and I was a Dicky amongst them. I think these grammar examples clears up any further abuse of the word Dickies as to either singular or plural. It is just that most of us, including me, do not stop to think about English grammar when we are rushing a document because we are too occupied with thought of what to write, but I have in this account of my stay as a Dicky boy at the home, and hope it will of interest to former boys at Kingston.

When I first arrived at the end of October 1959 it had been an unusually extremely hot and humid day in Westminster after getting off the train from Liverpool with my brother at Euston station, which made me wonder if it was so hot because I was further south, and if it was going to be hot all of the time. I had never been to London before that day. We were both escorted by a man, who had taken us from another Barnardo's home in the Wirral area, and after walking down Oxford Street for a short distance, he suddenly decided to get a taxi to the Kingston home instead of a Kingston bus he was searching for. The journey from Liverpool for a 13-year-old seemed a tremendous distance and my first thoughts were on how to get back home to Liverpool for a journey of exactly 208 miles in a direct line.  

I eventually arrived and was escorted into a very large house, from my point of view, via the staff area close to their dining room. A lady took me and my brother to our house and dormitory and from there it all began with my first day feeling rather sickly and upset at such a tremendous distance from Liverpool, the strange environment of the home, the strange odour, unknown boys and wondering how to get back home, and what awaited me from both staff and boys for the next few days. While I waited with my brother near the staff room to be taken to my house, a different house mother came in and suddenly exclaimed that we were beautiful. I was a little worried because this had never be said of me before, and also because I did not feel beautiful or think that I was. The other housemothers told her to be quiet, admonishing her: "We have warned you before not to say that!" I had now become a Dicky's boy or one of the 150 Dickies at the Kingston home at that time. 

Within a few days of arriving at the home I was being measured and fitted with grey flannel trouses and a red blazer for school, and thankfully fitted with long trousers for school instead of the shamefully short-leg trousers, which was another distressing experience of having to go to a school full of London boys with obviously different accents from the Liverpool accent. The school did have a science room, and it was in that room that I had to learn most of my lessons as well as science.

Now a 13-year-old boy with added emotional upsets of not being with his parent/s has disadvantages in keenly learning because at that age they do not even know about learning technique and examination technique, or the syllabus layout of what is to be learned. They are after all never told and simply left to get on with it. Their mind is innocent of the world and lacking experience.

I was prompted to write to you after seeing, with some pleasant surprise, Donald Bylett's name and his comments on your webpage describing in a few sentences his stay at the home, and as the time of his stay there coincided with my time there, I thought I would email you with my accounts of my stay and hoping you may wish to put my account on your webpage for any of Kingston's Dickies who had been at the Kingston home at the period of my stay there.

The Dicky, Donald Bylett was in my dormitory and his bed was by the window overlooking the front of the entrance of the home. If you look at the Kingston home from the front and look at the far left windows on the next floor from the ground. the far left window is where is bed was. I remember him having a crystal radio set with high impedance headphones coupled to a small length of wire dangling out of the window and without an earth or ground to improve the strength of the signal, and listening to what was probably the Home Service and the time chimes of Big Ben. That was all the material good he had in the world, and I had even less until I was given a train by an older boy with a pleasant smile and a nice kind face.

As I am now an experienced radio amateur, I do know now that such a simple setup would only have worked near very strong public broadcasting radio transmitting aerials from the London area. I had the magazine Practical Wireless in those days and was very interested in the new transistor amplifying device and the transistor radio, of which the all-transistor radio was so expensive in those days that almost nobody could afford to buy one, and had to satisfy themselves with a more easily affordable battery-operated portable valve-radio. 

My interest was also in science and I remember making at the home a sulphuric acid battery with a plate of zinc and a plate of copper separated by wood and lighting a torch bulb. The governor Vernon Paul soon find out about it, and one of the staff thought the sulphuric acid was dangerous and decided that as the experiment was complete it would be safer to pour all of the dilute acid into the soil just outside of Mr Paul's own little house within the grounds of the home from the glass-stopper, ribbed, amber bottle we had got from the local Boots chemist shop. The soil fizzed with carbon dioxide due to the chalky nature of the soil and the formation of calcium sulphate on pouring the acid onto the soil of Mr Paul's garden. 

I am not absolutely certain how many boys the home had while I was there, but I remember it had in the past as many as 300 boys according to what the staff told me. I think there was probably around 150 boys or perhaps 200 boys while I was there, but older boys were always leaving when they reached 15 years of age. As Dicky's boy Donald says in his email to you, "It was a boys-only home."  

While I was there in 1960 the number of boys appeared to be slowly decreasing due to boys reaching 15 years of age and not enough young boys coming in to replace them. While I was there I had not not noticed any new boys coming in, but noticed older boys departing, and when I departed for another Barnardo home, I last saw my house companion Donald Bylett on a Saturday morning about 7.30 AM in the dormitory in his bed by the window as I left to go down stair to get washed. I do not know what was in his mind about me on that morning, and how he thought about the dormitory being more empty that night, but boys rarely miss each other for very long.

I helped the cook for the last time to make fried bread with canned tomatoes on top, and then sat with my house companion Peter for the last time. In the car I started vomiting due to the fried bread, but soon got over it after the car floor had been washed. Peter actually went to his school on a Saturday morning with another more older well-built grammar school boy, who tormented him every morning at the breakfast table in the large dining hall before they both journeyed to school. He told me that he has to put up with this every morning. I said goodbye to him for the last time when Mr Paul had called me for the car journey and then sat with a 13-year-old Dicky boy from Oxford, who was being taken there for a short holiday to be with a relative. 

It is sometimes suggested that when boys grow up amongst other boys in such homes or boarding schools, and have no contact with girls, that they may become conditioned to have affections only towards their own gender later on in life. I do not think this is an absolute certainty, because many Barnardo's boys have got married to the opposite gender, but I think it is possible that such environments could cause a dislike for woman, especially amongst the more highly intelligent boys later on in life, who may find no mind affinity with the mind of a women because they are so used to male minds in early life and find womens minds different. It is a fact though that highly intelligent men have no affinity with women and remain single all of their lives. Women are also not attracted to them. 

Love after all is based upon a similarity of mind and not on the body, unless you are a four-legged animal. I was not aware of any close affections between boys of Kingston home with us 13-year-olds. If they had it, then they did not express it for shame-sake. I had affections for an older boy who gave me a train and I felt something magically close in mind between him and me. I think his high intelligence appealed to me as well as his pleasing face, which had a large smile when he saw me, but sometimes he would say that I had better go now in case somebody sees us. It is a psychic fact that if you strongly like somebody, they usually end up strongly liking you too. I do not know what affections existed between the older boys because I left while I was a 13-year-old.  

When a boy is parted from his parent or has no parent, he can sometimes form bonds of affection with another older boy because he has lost his centre for a while, and is heart-broken, and looks to the older boy for protection and love. 

I remember seeing some babies there on the first day of my arrival at the back of the building in a nursery, which attracted the boys to go and look at the babies in fascination of them. There was also boys of about 15 or 16 years-old, who were not there during school hours, and who had their own leisure room at the front of the building, which had an old valve radio of which they often had on and probably tuned to Radio Luxemburg for the latest pop songs of the period.  

We younger boys were not allowed in the older Dicky's boys' room, but instead played in a larger hall towards the back of the building where all the Dickies of any age played, and near where we polished our black school shoes. This larger hall had a projector television that projected a dim image onto a white screen of either the VHF ITV Thames or BBC 1, while all sat in the dark on saturday evenings because it was not possible to see the picture in the daylight. 

My own estimation of Dicky Don as time went on was that he had high intelligence and an investigative mind, and well understood his plight at the home, well enough beyond the limitations of a 13-year-old's mind. I remember once that we were all on one Saturday being shown some military recruiting films by the Army in the large TV hall, when Don asked us all to leave because he said these films were only been shown to encourage us to join the Army, which of course he was correct in that analysis of the situation. We all left, but a few days later we were all forced to watch it again by an angry governor Vernon Paul, who invited the Army film team back again and told us all not to leave the hall this time. 

Don could be pleasant and sometimes unpleasant towards me when he was moody, which made me decide he was not suitable as a close friend to confide in or get too close to. My other house mate Peter was more to my liking because of his non-aggressive nature, but he was still childish to me. In my house there was also two brothers from Sunderland as well as an 8-year-old boy or perhaps a little older, and who frequently wet his bed resulting in a rubber sheet being between him and the mattress. Another boy of my house, who was always addressed as Dicky, tended to be more closer in friendship with Donald.

I think there was a David also in my house and several older boys who had their own smaller dormitory near ours. I do not know what Don thought about me, but I expect he thought that I was proud and distant and loved myself, and only wanted to know my own type of similar mind and interest. I did not bother too much with Don, unless I had no choice, because I was far too serious to play childish games in the grounds or house with him. He could be very pleasant and full of smiling when he wanted to towards me. I am sure though, that he must have got very bored in the house sometimes. Some of the boys in other houses were nice persons, while one or two were not, but I would be very surprised if any boy could honestly tell me that he was not more happy being home or with his parents if he had them.

Kingston town was only a walk down the hill from the home, and I remember a bridge that I went under just before I entered the town. The town did have a government surplus shop, which I found interesting and exciting, that sold valve-based electronic equipment and Morse code keys and headphones, and a shop opposite sold lead pellets, air rifles and air guns. The rest of the "shopping centre" was boring to the extremes, and that is probably why the Dickies or any Dicky of the home hardly journeyed there. In those days I could only look at the mysterious Ministry of Defence electronics with great excitement, but unable to purchase any item in the shop, which was partly because it was too expensive and partly because I needed every penny to save for my eventual train fare to Liverpool. 

Our Mother of the house appeared to become sick later on and we hardly ever saw her. Her bedroom was just next to our dormitory and facing the house toilet. An older and tall well-built boy suddenly appeared in our house for several weeks and must have been about 18 years of age or certainly looked it. Once Peter came into our house room after bathing, and only had a white towel around him, which was suddenly pulled off him by this older boy and causing a great laughter amongst all of the 13-year-old boys over his nakedness except me, which I thought was a cruel sport of shaming him in front of everybody. I was very glad when he left for elsewhere. He was far too strong and rough. I expect the headquarters had him there until they placed him in a job, though I never asked him why he was with us.

On a Saturday we were all given pocket money after dinner, and I can not remember exactly how much it was, but it was not much more than one shilling and sixpence for us 13-year-olds. I would go out and explore Kingston town by myself but was nearly always bored, but I did notice that many of the boys hardly went out to gain travel experience and appeared to be afraid to wonder off too far alone, or perhaps they were bored too like me.

Once Mr Paul instructed me to escort a 13-year-old Peter, a boy in my house and dormitory who slept opposite me, to a building in Kingston on some message with a letter on a Saturday. After we had accomplished the job I suggested that we both walk around Kingston shopping area to look around and waste time, but he reacted in fear thinking that somebody might attack us, and insisting we get back to the home right away. He often brought his school homework back with him and studied it in bed before he slept. While we were on the bus returning back home we passed one of those privately-paid very posh schools, where the boys wore very expensive-looking school uniforms having coloured stripes on their blazer. I asked Peter if he would rather go to that school instead of his grammar school in London, but he reacted in horror, "Oh no! I'd be ashamed going there!" At the time I would have expected him to be very proud of going to such a top school.

Peter was also a highly intelligent youngster, though childish from my 13-year-old point of view, with good academic abilities for learning, which is obviously why he attended a grammar school somewhere in London. He thought it was silly of me wanting to run away to my home in Liverpool, but the wisdom was on my side in this case because my single-parent mother eventually brought me home with so many run-away protest. While I was there, Peter wore long-leg brown Corduroy trousers, while I wore long-leg grey flannel trousers in the home, while most other 13-year-olds wore short-leg trousers. I think we wore a striped tie and shirt and a pull-hover, but I forget the details of the colours as I took no pride in wearing them.

I do not know how Peter finally left the home and what his fate was, or how he thinks today in his sensitive mind about his long stay at Dicky's. Peter, who's sir name I forget, appeared to be a very-thinking, sensitive, non-aggressive and delicate boy, and felt very ashamed in his grammar school for being a Barnardo's boy, and was insulted in a degrading way as such in his school by the teachers, as he sometimes told me in the dormitory and house. He had a very vivid imagination and would come home from school telling me about his history lessons. In spite of this he still had a child's mind and sometimes played cowboys with the other boys. There was some affection between me and 13-year-old Peter, and I probably liked him because he was more intelligent than me, and I desired to be as intelligent as him, and to fathom out why he was so intelligent. His mother appeared to be very intelligent. I knew his sir name, but have now forgotten it after so many years. He sat in his bed doing his school homework, while I read a book in my bed facing him and would ask me if I knew the answer to some of his homework tests. A weekly TV western series called Rawhide was often watched by the boys including me in the TV hall in 1960.

The first thing we had to do on returning home from school was to change our school uniforms into casual clothing, though we all wore the same casual clothing, and also polish our black leather shoes until they were shining with first a polish brush and then a shining brush, while sometimes a male housemaster watched on to make sure we did it.  

I think we had about three male housemaster at one time, and one was called Peter Write and he had actually come from Liverpool. Sometimes he would lecture to us on the cruelty of life or injustice of life to be expected after we leave Dicky's in the large TV hall, and one or two older Dickies would say in a quiet voice: "Here he goes again with his lectures on life!" Mr Write was a deep thinker and very philosophical and I remember him telling me that his birth sign was Scorpio. He had sometimes very mind-rapturous moments when he felt like writing a book, as he sometimes told us how he felt in those states of bliss. 

When school had finished we had to return from school right away and could not go anywhere else, but if we had of gone off elsewhere, we would have been late for tea and this would have been known if Vernon Paul had noticed us missing in the dining room. In any case the housemaster ticked us coming in when we had to polish our shoes. All of the boys in the home sat in a large dining room at tea-time along with the staff, while Vernon Paul had his own smaller table and sat there reading a newspaper or some other document before I delivered him his food. He was given by me his food first before the other staff were from the trolley I wheeled into the dining room.

Each table had about six boys sitting around it and my first job was to go to the staff dining room area and collect the staff's tea and food on a trolley, and wheel it into the large dining room and personally give each member of staff their plate of food and tea, after which I would then sit down and have my own food amongst the other boys. The boys did not congregate together as house members but sat with any boy from any house, but most sat in the same place out of habit. The staff food trolley was a job I had to do because I volunteered for it, and I was paid one shilling and sixpence per-week to do it, or was it one shilling and nine pence? It's such a long time ago! 

I also had to collect rubbish from all of the houses and take it to the boiler house, where it was burned by the caretaker, who incidently lived in a small house near the Gloucester Road entrance to the home. In the boiler house a fifteen-year-old Dicky's boy was sometimes there helping the caretaker with his thick gloves on, and he once gave an electric train to me. I took a delight in him right away and liked him a lot, and he certainly liked me. Again in this case was another boy of high intelligence, and I would say very advanced and compassionate, and self-less kindness for giving me the train.

He was rather worried about the older boys seeing him being friendly with me, and at that time I did not know why, but I supposed he did not want to look silly having a younger friend in front of the older boys. The boys of his own age would have laughed at him. I remember his face vividly, which was Germanic with Germanic eyes of a clear blue colour, and dusty white skin, but not Teutonic long head, and he had a sandy-blond, course thick hair. I felt close to him and safe somehow and happy when I was him. He suddenly left the home unexpectedly, as older boys often did, into work or training for a job, or in my opinion, worse still if it had been for Australia to work hard on  farms, or whatever else they had to do in that country. In contrast My house companion Donald was more of racial origins from the Danube area such as Vienna probably thousands of years ago, though no such affectionate closeness existed between him and me, and often very much the reverse. At the time of course I did not think about racial origins, or of Germanic tribes from the Danube area entering Britain thousands of years ago to live here, and who the English really are. 

I asked the caretaker where he was, but he casually said that he was not with us anymore, which caused me to feel very empty and sickly inside my stomach, and I felt very much alone at that moment once again as a great sadness came over me, but soon got over it without anybody knowing about it. I sensed something very different in him than the other boys of the home, as if he had a very advanced mind, and was not from this world, in the thoughts of my boyish mind, which may have been correct or incorrect. He always had a smile for me and I for him, which did not exist between me and any other boy of the home. 

The caretaker was also a nice fellow that I liked too, because he was very free and easy and down-to-earth and not strict, and had no authority over the boys, and also sometimes smelled of fire or smoke like a steam train. He was once carrying a portable radio into his little house, and I asked him if it was a transistor radio. He said no, but that he was surprised on how I knew about transistors and then praised me for knowing. He said they were very expensive and that he couldn't afford one on his wages he was paid at the home. 

Once I was looking after the furnace because the caretaker had gone off somewhere for a moment when Mr Paul came out of his little house opposite the boiler room shouting, "What are you doing there!?" I told him I was throwing cardboard into the furnace. He shouted, "No you can't do that! You're too young! It's only for older boys! Get away from there!" I had to quickly move away without question so as not to annoy him any further. He could get angry and red-faced if he wanted to or if provoked. 

On Saturday mornings the boys played football while the housemothers watched them and cheered them on, but this was of no interest to me and far from stimulating to the intellect. I would much more preferred to have played cricket, which is also boring. Sundays were very boring and sometimes the staff took us out for walks into Richmond Park, which in those days had deer roaming about, and on the ground in wet seasons, a red toadstool with white rough spots on its cap surface grew on the ground near trees. The housemaster Peter Write would sometimes take us out for walks on Sundays, which was mostly towards Kingston town and back to the home. As we walked with him he would talk about life in general, as well as the latest film, and once was romantically interested in some red-haired woman, and if we thought she was his type. Most of the boys said no, she was not. I had not seen her and so said nothing. 

Some of the food in the home was donated by outside businesses and I remember Vernon Paul taking me and another boy of my own age from a different house to a wholesaler in fruit to collect some bananas, which turned out to be absolutely rotten. He was very angry and suggested to the trader that it was an insult to the boys, while he indignantly left without the "bananas" in an angry mood, and then we rode in the car without the rotten bananas heading back to Dicky's home. He told us never to go there, of which we both told him that we never do or would. To which he replied, "I know you don't go there, but just don't go there anymore if you did."

Incidently two or three non-dickies schoolboys at school used to jokingly ask if I was a banana boy, but only a a few times. I should point out though that the word Dickies was not much used while I was there in 1959/1960 at the home amongst the boys to other boys, or by me to other boys when calling them. We called each other by our first names all of the time. Outsiders may have called us Dicky's boys or Dickies and certainly banana boys, but not very frequent. At school one blond-haired boy wanted to fight me. It turned out to be more of a wrestle and I got him down on the floor and sat on him, while he spat in my face and I spat back at him in his face. I let him go when he gave in his wish to fight me just as the school bell went. 

An older and taller boy in school used to infuriate me because just after dinner time he would grab me and sit on top of me, and would not let me go as I lied with my back on the floor full of temper and struggling to free myself from him. After winning the blond-haired boy, this older boy never bothered to torment me anymore, thankfully. He was only having fun and not actually aggressive towards me. There was a small park next to the school containing swings and I remember an iron grid with the words, "Made in Liverpool." This cheered me up a little that some part of Liverpool was actually in Kingston.

I had to work in the main kitchen at supper time for my one shilling and sixpence weekly to help the cook to prepare supper for the boys, which was all-too-frequent nothing more than dried dates between sliced white bread, and I think a chocolate drink, and then I would rush up to my dormitory. Some of the boys resented me because I was hardly ever with them, but busy helping staff instead, and so out of protest would not eat the bread and dried dates, which meant more for me to eat and one or two other boys in our house who were not so protesting. 

I liked the Dicky boy Peter the grammar schoolboy, who was in my house, because I could talk to him about things of interest, though he was a rather delicate person and afraid of the world, and I sometimes wonder what happened to him when he would have left the home on reaching fifteen. I remember he had a mother who once visited him for a day. The other boys in my house though, I could hardly relate to them because I had nothing in common with them and did no know what to say to them any more than one could relate or say much to any person having no common interest except superficial talk on the weather.

Donald Bylett, who recently sent you his comments on your website suggesting you: "Keep up the good work!" at the end of his email message, was a boy that I liked too, but I did not get on too well with him because he was rather bossy in front of the other boys, and so that possible friendship was lost very soon. I got on much better with the older boys and the staff. If Donald had shown interest in science and knowledge and was not so bossy, I would have got on with him very well and guided him home if he ever wanted to run off to his parent/s in protest. I do not know if he had parents to run to, but I suspect he didn't. I have no idea what Donald looks like today and what happened to him in his life after leaving Kingston Barnardo's home. Dicky Don often spent his time in the house and dormitory with other boys and played also within the grounds.

He has had plenty of time to think about life in general since those days and I am certain he is a much nicer person now, and has better social skills towards other people and probably has learnt a lot of knowledge like myself. He is obviously presently surfing the internet, and so is using his intelligence for searching. Like many other Dicky's boys it is difficult to know what has happened to them in their lives, and if they have become good or bad people. In 1960 computers were mainly in universities and worked off reels of iron oxide tape and were totally different than today in being analogue or depending on voltage differences, while the computers of today are digital and depend on on square-waves and no square-waves for their operation or 1's and 0's if you prefer. The operating systems were also different, and so Donald had not grown up in the mass-market computer age. It shows an intelligent and up-to-date mind with Don.

Around Christmas time we were usually invited to a Christmas party or several, and on this particular time our house went to a scouts hall somewhere in Middlesex. We had a party and played games and just before the boys were to leave, the scouts played a dirty trick on all of the boys except me. Each boy was led into a dark hall, where there was a white screen, in which a boy scout moved a torch around the back of the screen and asked the boy to follow its light while his head was close to the screen. Just as his head reached the top of the screen, the scout hit the boy with a balloon filled with water and then gave him a towel. I was kept to the last and then allowed to see the final boy being drenched and surprised.

The boy scouts liked me and told me that they would not do it me because I was a nice person. I had been very friendly with the scouts and got on well with them during the party and games, and I suppose that they had decided I was a good person. The boys in my house soon began suspecting that I knew the scouts and were wondering why I was not hit on my head with a water-filled balloon. Of course they failed to understand that I got on well with the scouts because they had Christian ideals, goodness and codes of conduct, of which Barnardo boys did not have, and were not trained in such ideals as well as the scouts were. It would have been a great idea if the home had scouts while I was there. Incidently Donald was also soaked with water and he must remember that night in the scout hall if he thinks back hard enough.

Of course Barnardo's was a private home for orphans of many family varieties from broken family homes to parentless children. Under Vernon Paul no boy was ever struck by him within my knowledge, and if any housemaster struck boys with a slipper or a hit on the head with the hand, they would soon be out of that job and gone. This does not mean that all governors were the same, because I knew of two Barnardo homes in the north-west of England, where I had stayed as a boy, and who did slap boys on the head with their right hand. This was especially so with parentless boys. It made me feel very angry with such governors for such cruel actions and I felt like reporting them to the headquarters.

Some of the staff did not have a very good impression of the boys because a housemaster once wanted to photograph me and my brother in the grounds, of which he did. I asked him if he was going to photograph the other boys in the home, but he said, "I wouldn't want to photograph that lot, they are not worth photographing." Perhaps some of the boys were not ideal characters or were from broken or violent families, and that such types did not appeal to him.

I remember one winter night in which I witnessed a fight between the caretaker and an older boy of perhaps 15 years of age, with both fighting on the floor, which rather shocked me. The staff told me not to say anything about it. Some of the boys may have been brought up in violent families and were used to seeing violent encounters. There was no multicultural in Dicky's home to the extent that is excessively today in Britain, and so all of the boys during my stay there were white with Danish/Saxony/Norwegian/Danube/Celtic origins.

Kingston Barnardo's did have a typical southern black cockroach specie living especially near the main kitchen, and they were able to run so fast that one could hardly see them. All that I saw was an instant movement from one shadow to another shadow. Sometimes in the morning I would see one or two dead on the floor. Sometimes they got into our shoes and on the wax-polished wooden floor boards but mostly on the ground floors. The building was warm and I suppose they could flourish under such warm conditions. If cockroaches got into cloth chairs they gave off a very offensive varnish-like odour. No such chairs existed in the Kingston home, but were in other homes. 

The governor's office was just near the front door entrance on the left as you walked in. He had a map of Britain on his wall just over the safe, where money was kept in it. On happily getting back to Liverpool, I was unhappily, and still in my Kingston schoolboy uniform, sent back to Kingston on the third day, and while on the train with the housemaster Peter Write and heading towards London, a kind lady gave me five shillings after talking to us in  food area on the train. On reaching the home, Mr Paul requested me to give the money to him, but I simply said nothing and looked towards the floor, and did not hand the money over to him. He asked me again. He then suddenly said, as if deciding it was the right choice, "You keep the money then." and then I walked out of his office and the next day bought a boy's coping saw from a local tool shop just down the hill.  

He somehow knew about my purchase of the coping saw, and I can only think that the shopkeeper knew I was a Dicky's boy by the typical striped tie and clothing we wore, and had worriedly phoned up the home to let the governer know of my unusual purchase of a coping saw. Perhaps he thought the home had iron bars on the windows. Actually I think he did, because Paul Vernon coming out of his little house with his friend saw me, and jokingly said that I don't need it as there were no bars on the windows of this home. I answered him by saying, "It's not for that.", but then he jokingly replied: "It's all right, I know what it's for." 

Once Mr Paul allowed into the home and elderly lady who lived neaby, who was allowed in to instruct us in the playing of the violin, and I was put into her class and tried the violin out, but were not actually instructed but just tinkered only. Eventually Mr Paul dismissed her on the grounds that she had taught the boys nothing. Sometimes I past her large house on the way home from school with some other boys, who decided to knock on her door to say hello. She came out very upset and said that she was not allowed into the home, and that the fault was with the boys for not being able to learn and not her. That very afternoon I saw Mr Paul and decided to tell him that the violin lady was upset. He became very annoyed, announcing, "You mustn't go near that women, she's a fraud! None of the boys learnt how to play the violin, and she is not allowed in here!"  

I have to admit though, that he was probably right, because I asked her about the notes, but she said, just keep drawing the bow over the strings for the time-being. 

While I was nervously in his office after being brought back from Liverpool, he pointed out to me in 1960 that in the history of this home that no boy had ever got so far in running away as me. He seem rather astonished and told me that it was 208 miles distance on the map, which he asked me to look at and point to where Liverpool was, while I stood near his desk. This slightly pleased me, but I thought it no big event after doing it, and would have no problem from now on if I ever chose to run off again when in a sad distressing mood.  

I had been called into his office and he wanted to know where I got the money from to buy the train ticket to Liverpool. I told him that I saved my pocket money, which prompted him to asked how many weeks it took. I gave him the number of weeks and he agreed that would be about right. He then asked me to point to Liverpool and Kingston on the map. I did so instantly, and he seemed satisfied that I had done the jouney without help. He had his safe opened to see if I looked at it. He then said that no money had been taken from the safe. I perfectly understood as a 13-year-old boy that he was trying me out and looking for clues. It was obvious that if I had failed to give the exact number of weeks, he would have suspected me a thief. It was also obvious that if I had not known the location of Kingston and Liverpool on the map instantly, then he would have concluded that some adult had helped me to get home successfully. 

My journey to Liverpool must have impressed all of the boys because as I was led into the dining hall by Mr Write after being brought back, there was a loud uproar of cheering by the Dickies on seeing me, which slightly embarrassed me as I went over to my table to sit down for my tea and feeling rather sad at being brought back. Of course nobody knew that I had originally bought a map of Britain from a shop in Kingston town for sixpence, and had kept this map secretly until I needed it. I studied it well and became familiar with the towns from Kingston to Liverpool. Any sensible boy could have done it with sufficient planning, determination and will to go back to his parents.

I would be interested to know if any other boy at Kingston home had ever beat my record of 208 miles after I had left, and would like to hear from them. I expect not, but who knows? My record before 208 miles had been as far as Birmingham, where I was caught by the police after asking strangers too many directions. This journey had been accomplished with bus rides to Windsor and Oxford, and then a lorry lift to Birmingham from Oxford. I tried at 12 midnight to sleep in a front garden with my raincoat over my head, but woke up freezing in the frost, and so jumped over the wall to get a lift from a passing lorry. The lorry man took me into a cafe and bought me some food, which was chips and egg and took me to his home, but the next morning I ran off heading into Birmingham City and was caught asking directions. My housemother journeyed to the Birmingham police station to collect me, and being nearly late for the train, a black police car ringing its bell got us to the railway station on time, and a few hours later I was back in Kingston home having failed half-way in my Liverpool objective.

I had slept on the floor of the lorry driver's house in total darkness and woke up thinking that an armed knight in shining armour of ancient times was watching over me. It may have been my boyish imagination. The next morning the lorry driver and his wife gave me something to eat and went to work leaving his boy to look after me, but I escaped with him running after me with his big dog, and got on a bus going somewhere. He jumped on the bus but had no fare, and so the conductor told him to get off.

A few years ago in a town called St Helens, which is in Merseyside and not far from where I presently live, I noticed a Barnardo's charity shop, which prompted me to go in and asked if they still have such boys orphanages. The lady told me, not anymore because it effected or harmed the mind of the child, and that now children are fostered out into families. I am not sure if that is the reason why the homes closed down, and I suspect it was due to lack of money and that it had become too expensive to look after the boys, though I recently was told that it was because councils took over the job of looking after children.

Did such homes, you might ask, effect the mind of the boys? I think possibly so in some cases of sensitive boys, but not in all cases of more rougher boys, but who can be sure what is in a person's mind and how it will effect them later on in life?

I remember Peter, a boy in my house, once crying in the dark of a winter night in the main bathroom, while I had a reason to enter the bathroom with bath soap supply on some staff-job purpose and was surprised to see him there all alone in the dark and emotionally upset in tears. I asked what was wrong and if he was alright, and he cryingly told me he wanted to be alone and that he would be alright if left alone. I left him, but wanted to stay with him, but returned several minutes later in case he needed help and comforting from me, but he had gone.  

I also remember Donald sometimes looking sad and gloomy as if in reflection of something troubling his mind, but never saw him crying. Don never revealed his feelings to me, but I am certain he had his sad moments like any other boy. I always thought he was a little spoilt, but I think he thought it was me that was spoilt by the lady who looked after the staff. It is true that I was often with her in helping-capacity, but because she liked me obviously as a substitute son, because she had no children of her own, she tended to want to see me a lot, and had not much interest in any other boys in the home. She probably did not know Don, and boys were not allowed near the staff area except me, because that was my job to be there on washing-up time after the staff. 

These of course are negative or positive emotional experiences and such stay in the mind for life, and often flash back into the mind in adult life as we are getting older and less occupied with the world, and do sometimes cause dreams of living back in the home in childhood. I have often myself had dreams of being a boy back in the Dicky's home but amongst unknown boys in the dream and even seeing Mr. Paul, and recently my house companion Peter still as a boy but perhaps a little older in the dream. 

I am not a psychologist and would not know if a person's mind was disturbed after being in Dalziel of Wooler House all those years ago, or any other Barnardo home. I suppose the longer the stay at the home the more likely it would be so, and a boy without any parents to run back to when in distress, might even be much more disturbed with flashbacks of sad memories of being all alone in the world and never having had parents to run back to in times of emotional stress. At such a young age the mind is also more impressionable by sad emotional experiences and will later on in life have flash back as they are going to sleep. 

Perhaps my worse experiences was at bath time once a week, when we all were naked in the bathroom, but happily had a white towel to cover us. I did my best to make sure I was not seen by the other boys looking naked as I stepped into the warm bath water, which had sometimes just previously been used by another boy. Most of them were not bothered about being naked, but I was rather shy of being naked. It was a large bathroom off a long corridor that must have had about ten baths, while a housemaster watched over us to make sure we bathed ourselves and finally ticked against our names on his sheet of paper that we had been bathed correctly. The housemaster Mr Write mostly did the checking that we were bathed properly. 

When the boys got up in the morning we washed ourselves in a large stony-floored room having sinks and toilets on the right, and was accessed through the side yard at the back of the main house, and was also at ground level. Just before school we all stood in the TV hall in our school groups, while a housemaster would call our group to leave for school. I was not too impressed with the Anglican school I had to go to, but dinner hour was a time worth waiting for, as we sometimes had fish and chips and other nice foods, which I do also remember getting at the Barnardo's home. My own teacher instructed us in science and I remember once all in one breath explaining to him how a Daniel cell battery was constructed. 

The headmaster of my school sat at our dinner table in the large wooden hut opposite the school, and had chosen his own favourite boys for that table, and I was one of them. Once a boy wrongly sat for his dinner at our table and the headmaster rudely said: "What are you doing here? Go and find another table! I only have the best boys here!" Not a very nice thing to say, but that is what happens in the life of some schoolboys. 

At Christmas time, coloured paper decorations were put up by the two housemasters in the large TV hall by mainly Mr Write, which was also used for religious services on Sunday and also for playing in during the week after school. We each received a Christmas present of only one toy, which was not very large and not expensive. I remember swapping my toy with another boy of my house for his wallet. I was known in the home as Danny or Dan, though my name was actually Daniel on my birth certificate. 

As Don says, at the back of the home there was indeed a Coombe golf course, and the boys would bring back golf balls from there. Eventually the people running the golf course did not want any of  Dicky's boys on the golf course and so the governor Vernon Paul told us all, with some annoyance in his face, not to enter it anymore, as we were not welcome there. Just near Kingston Hill and in our grounds we had a pear tree or two growing near the fence. Going up Kingston Hill was the way to London City, and two buses could get you into Westminster in a short while, which I once did after running away. 

Sometimes the governor would use an old car for encouraging us to learn to drive and I had to get into it and worriedly drive fearing I would crash into a wall as a 13-year-old boy. We were of course in the grounds of the home and the governor always had his foot near the foot brake. 

Anyway, it was pleasantly nice to see Dicky Don Bylett's account on your webpage after all this time since 1960, and I hope perhaps he can send you his own experiences at the home in greater detail and give his email address, as he was there longer than me and will have more experiences to tell of.  

I hope you can fit in my own account into your webpage for other ex-boys of the home to view along with my own email address. Donald may have enjoyed his stay at the home and had little regrets, but I personally was not very happy and I am certain that I was not alone in this sadness. If my parent's home had been in Kingston or nearby and not so far away as Liverpool, then perhaps I would have felt more happy enjoying myself and not bothering to run off, which incidently was only three times while I was there. Of course I would not need to run when I could easily visit my parent in Kingston on Saturday afternoons.  

All boys must have felt insecure because they did not know what was to happen next in their life, and a mere three years or even one year is a long time in the mind of a child or teenager. The 15-year-old orphans must have felt great insecurity not knowing their fate after their departure from the home, and eventually being sorted out for work. At fifteen a boy has no rights to rent a house and even if he could, his wages would be too low. So it must have been a very insecure moment in their life.  

I remember once seeing two red-haired brothers on Kingston railway station on a Saturday afternoon, who were very emotionally upset and waiting to journey towards Southampton, and then a continent at the other side of the world, with little notion or understanding of their fate and what was to happen to them. I felt like going over to them and telling them to change their mind and go back to the home. The younger brother was most upset in tears and I would have gone over to them to ask if a change could be made for them to stay in England, but on that Saturday afternoon I was on a secret mission to find out what the single fare was to Liverpool from Euston station for a boy and so did not want to excite suspicion. We were only actually allowed out on Saturday afternoons by ourselves, and would need a good reason to go out by ourselves any other day. Of course we went out by ourselves or with other boys for school, but for no other reason. 

The lady accompanying the two boys came over to me and asked if I was going to Australia because one boy had not turned up and she was still waiting for him, and if I was that boy. I said no, and she replied by saying that I dressed like a Barnardo boy and that the other two boys knew me. She then alternatively asked me if I had come to say goodbye to the boys going to Australia, to which I gladly replied that I had. I then worriedly quickly got away after she went back to the two boys, and returned later on when they had all gone to enquire of the fare, which turned out to be eighteen shillings and sixpence to Lime Street Liverpool, but was a little dearer when I finally got to Euston station months later after happily saving up the fare. 

One of my many jobs was to strike a loud-enough tune on device a few steps up the front entrance main stairs that had several brass tubes of different lengths for calling the boys and staff to come to dinner ot tea. I think the tune was just forward and back. 

It was unfortunate that the home did not for us 13-year-olds, have a well-stocked book library or any library for checking up on school lessons and learning about modern knowledge in general. It would have helped the boys to develop their minds and helped them to feel more confident like as in the exclusive Eaton public school for the rich or Rugby school, but I suppose it needs a great mind to think all these things out. It was after all an orphanage, and which caused some shame with the boys and including me sometimes, but generally I was not ashamed or bothered over such things. 

If you wondering if my experiences effected my mind, it is difficult for me to say. I developed a passionate interest in science and electronics at that time, and refused to eat meat because I did not believe in killing animals for food and still do, though the home did not have scientific equipment such as heavy microscopes and other scientific instruments as an aid to learning and developing a boy's mind into confidence and great learning abilities. I suppose the excuse was lack of money or lack of donated equipment, and after all who cared about poor boys from poor and often broken families, who in times past would have been in the gutter like Oliver Twist and classed as low-life by the wealthy Victorians.  

I had been as a boy in a total of four different Barnardo homes, but I can definitely say that Kingston home was the best and had more variety for any boy in those days, even if it did not have scientific equipment, or even a typewriter for boys to practice on and learn. Vernon Paul could have got scientific equipment, typewriters, sword fencing equipment and archery equipment if he had put his mind to it, but he probably did not want to do it. At least the orphan boys would have had a similar background to the best of schools. It is just that persons trained in such arts would have do be volunteers without pay to train the boys in the home, and so boost their confidence in life and at school. 

Vernon Paul was certainly concerned about the activities of the boys, but was limited no doubt by lack of money and lack of ideas. In regards to sword fencing and fighting arts, he probably would not have allowed it. In any case Dr Barnardo could not have done a greater thing than to have started homes for orphaned boys. 

I have noticed that in our so-called modern times, that there is a taboo against training boys to fight. I am not in favour of mass-killing or warefare, but training young people in sword fencing and other fighting arts gives them a spirit to fight life's battles and not end up like so many young people on the streets, and without a fighting spirit and eventually dying from drug abuse. Training them in fighting arts would give them confidence in other aspects of life, so that they had a secure life and plenty of money from lucrative trades. A shy unconfident boy with an inferiority complex is not going to get very far in life. 

If I won say £20 million on the national lottery, which ias highly, highly, highly unlikely, my first incentive would be to try to initiate a new private home for orphans based upon my own ideals of brotherhood amongst the boys. Any boy who had been a member of the home would be a life-long member that nothing could change this membership or cancel it whatever he did in life, and he would be expected to try to help any other member if that member fell by the wayside of life and to get them back on their feet and happy again in their life as best he could. I would probably call the home, "Brotherhood of Boys Home". If a boy wanted to run home to his single parent, then we would get him back with the more older experienced boys escorting him on the journey, but ofcourse he would have to return back in a few days if he was under our care and his parent did not want him. We would give him the confidence that he can get home easily, and after that he would probably settle in amongst his other brothers and become one of them in unity, knowing that he can get home any time.  

All the boys would be expected to be great friends for life, and that no boy should attack any other boy of the brotherhood. They would be expected to participate in fighting arts to give them confidence in life and relating with other people, as well as developing their minds to a very highly intelligence when relating to life as adults. All boys would be trained to run any home if the governor died, which in itself would give them confidence in life. All staff meetings would be done in the presence of the boys, and boys would be classed as junior staff.  

The main aim of the home would be to increase the intelligence of the boys to an extremely high degree, and after that, the rest would be easy because they would understand how not to fail in life. Some boys would be trained as intelligence officers to benefit the brotherhood by given them intelligence tasks in order to research on what is going on around them and how to become rich and so benefit the brotherhood of orphaned children from some donations to the cause. A simple intelligence training task for a young boy could be to ask him to find out who owns the land in the area and the names of the local council members, or who owns the local shops or how to become a member of Parliament. There would be every sort of equipment for boys to use and so develop themselves to excelling at school and university and whatever else. 

Younger boys would be expected to have several older experienced boys as close friends in order to develop faster intellectually by seeing how older boys achieve things. The boys would be trained to look after the health of the body and the mind, as well as the soul. I could go on and on, but I think I have expressed my ideals if I won £20 millions on the lottery to start off the first home. Perhaps I should do the lottery, and if its is destiny for such a thing to happen, then I shall win and accomplish the ideal. Any way, that is my dream. The above are all very nice ideas, but in real life there may be practical problems preventing it, and perhaps it is too idealistic and expecting too much. 

The usual signs of a highly intelligent boy or man, is that he composes his sentences very long, making it difficult for less intelligent people to grasp all of the ideas within the long sentence, while the highly intelligent boy or man grasps very easily what he is writing in his very long sentences, as well as what is in other highly intelligent writers long sentences. Holding the breath while studying or doing a task is believed to increase the intelligence. Probably the majority of people can become highly intelligent, but you will need other highly intelligent people to relate with if you are not to become lonely because less intelligent people will be boring and this could cause depression. You will probably then start wondering if there are intelligent aliens in the universe to get in contact with. 

On Sunday mornings we were taken to the local church, which for us Anglican boys was further down Kingston hill towards the town centre, and there we heard the vicar's sermons. After that we returned back to the home and had our dinner. There was not a lot of Anglican boys attending the church, and I think Donald Bylett must have been a Catholic, as well as most of the other boys in the home. Don went to a different school than me and I attended an all-boys school about a mile away. 

Incidently, I still do science and electronics as a hobby of mine and my house is full of scientific equipment to train up my brain and intellect, as well as for my experiments. I also find that joking and seeing an alternative aspect to everything keeps the mind young and healthy and gives it an excellent memory. After all, would any boy have been more happier in the gutter begging for food and shelter in the cold and wet, as when Dr Barnardo first took in boys from the street? I think not, but then what boy can think in that rational state of mind when he only seeks freedom of spirit and body like a wild bird to his original home of birth? Children don't have rational minds and are unable to fully understand what is best for them and their future. 

I still get bored and depressed though even today if I have no experiments to do, which tend to be electronics these days and the EEG brainwaves and muscle signals. I did have a theory that if brain signal sine-wave voltages could be amplified to a much higher voltage, then it might be possible to move objects with the will of the mind. No such thing happened sadly, but it was worth the try, and I learnt a lot of how to amplify brain signals,  build active filters and build differential amplifier and operational amplifier circuits for such amplification of the EEG. I used one of  my analogue oscilloscopes with a long glow persistence to view the EEG and EMG waveforms. I built the amplifying circuit around the excellent AD627AN chip at 1000 times voltage gain and 10 million ohm input, and the amplifying filter around the NE5534AP operational amplifier at 10 times voltage gain. This of course is only one channel. Ready-made multi-channel equipment is extremely expensive in the region of thousands of pounds. However my method gave me an excellent understanding of what it's all about, and strictly-speaking the brain is not actually thinking thoughts any more than passing electricity through a lot of organic chemicals would cause thoughts. The mind has to be in the soul, but it uses the brain while it is joined to the body. I still do not what thought is and what form of energy it is. 

Another related subject to brainwaves is the effects of mobile phone masts on the health of the body and the brain's EEG for those living close to them. It is rather a secretive subject because of its possible use in mind-warfare and harming peoples health of body and mind. The internet has many American websites dedicated to the subject of mind control, though some of its victims have allowed their imagination to run wild with symptoms that could not possibly be achieved with just pulsed radio waves, and probably all of them have no technical knowledge or experience in the real subject.  

Generally-speaking, living near pulsed radio waves from mobile phone mast or other types of pulsed signals, or pulsed radio signals on telephone lines, or cable TV or pulsed microwave beaming is likely to agitate the brain, causing high beta waves and so causing headaches, poor sleep, depression, general weakness, confusion in the elderly, fuzzy thinking, less rational thinking, suppressed religious beliefs, water retention or swollen feet and legs, overweight problems, some paranoia, some memory loss and poor immune system. In the 1960's there was no such transmitters near people, and people tended to think more sharply and children done better at school and were more thinner. People were less overweight as a result of being free of such pulsed signals. It is a fascinating subject to research into and very technical on the electronic side of it, but as I say somewhat secretive in the New World Order, and so be wary. 

As I have mentioned depression, it is worth pointing out that there are far more depressed people in Britain today than there ever was in 1960, as well as many people living alone contributing to towards such negatives states of the mind. Depression is a state of mind that can have many causes such as overweight, loneliness, not enough mental activities and outdoor activities, not enough contacts with other people and of course the cruel world. Alternating between sadness and happiness is natural for all of us, but to be constantly happy or constantly sad is not natural. Children tend to be more happier than sad, and so I suppose we should try to do the same in having more happiness than sadness. Plenty of outdoor activates is probably the best medicine to prevent sadness. Highly intelligent people tend to feel alone and sad if they do not have another highly intelligent person to relate with in ideas. 

Of course I am unable to remember every single day at the home and it is only the emotional moments that are in my mind, in much the same that I can not remember every day at school. When I left the home, I was driven by Vernon Paul in his car to another Barnardo's home about 60 miles from Liverpool in Shropshire. As Don left in 1961 and would have been a 15-year-old, I do not know where he went. Perhaps he went home or to another Barnardo's home for older boys ready to work at 15-years of age. It would be interesting to know what happened to Don after he finished with the home, and what he thinks about his experiences at Dicky's home after all those years and if the memories ever flash back into his mind. How he feels and thinks about his life today would be of interest too. It would also be interesting to know of new boys there, and what happened in the Kingston home after I had left in Don's own life there. 

The front entrance door to the home was forbidden for us boys to enter, and was only for visitors, and so we had to walk around to the right side of the building in order to access the home through a door close to the boiler house. We were also not allowed up the front stairs to our houses, but had to go through the dining hall and up other stairs and down a long corridor to access our houses. I could go up the front stairs when on duties. Vernon Paul had a secretary who looked out of the front window of the office as we boys left for school and returned home, and she would have saw us leaving by way of the front door or coming back home through the front door. If we spoke to any stranger she would want to know what it was about. I was once coming home from school when a man in a car asked me at our home's main entrance if he was at the entrance of Kingston Hospital. I directed him further up Gloucester Road and to turn right. She questioned me about who I was talking to and told me not to talk to any more strangers, and that anybody could tell that this home was not a hospital. 

While I was at Kingston home I had never saw any ill-treatment from the staff or from Vernon Paul, but only on one occasion did I witness some ill-treatment from a new housemaster, who had his bedroom in our house, and who thought he could use a slipper on the boys. He was not long there after that, thankfully. He may have hit Don, or was it another boy named Dicky of our house? I am not certain after such a long time. One housemaster was an electrician and eventually left for a good high-paid job in that trade after not being very happy in the home and its low pay. I do not know why he was unhappy and why he took the job of being a housemaster, but the one that replaced him did not last long either after hitting some boys with a slipper. 

The housemothers tended to stay a bit longer. We never actually regarded them as our mothers, because we knew that they could come and go anytime. They never hit boys, and were mostly present while we had our supper in the room next to our dormitory, while one or two housemothers prayed during that moment. Not all were religious and one was very nasty. This housemother once took a lot of boys for a long walk on a Sunday, and I for some reason kept looking at her without much thought about her, when she suddenly exclaimed: "What are you looking at!" I replied by simply saying, "Nothing.", and then she grew very angry running towards me, which prompted me to get out of her way. I told one of the staff who I worked for, and she told her later on that I had not meant that she was "nothing", but I merely meant I was not looking at her or looking at nothing in particular. 

Our other housemaster was Peter Write and would never believe in hitting any boy. He was far too spiritual in his mind for such indulgent sadism against a child. I am not saying that no boy was ever ill-treated in 1959/1960 by a housemaster. It could be that some were, but unknown to me. It was more likely that another boy would start fighting another boy. My mother once came to visit me and asked Mr Paul if the boys were ever hit. He replied that some of the boys here have no parents and some only one, which in itself is a heart-break for them, and to hit them would only upset them worse. In my own boyhood experiences you had more chance of being caned at the outside school than suffering ill-treatment in Kingston's home from any of the staff. 

Mr Write had journeyed to Lime Street station to collect me when I was being sent back to Kingston after my three-day freedom. He said that he would have took me to his relations in Liverpool but that there was not enough time. When my mother appeared to say goodbye to me, he kissed her on the face and said that she was a wonderful person. I was bought the magazine Practical Wireless, and then after developed a keen interest in electronics. Mr Write was certainly an emotional person, because it was not long before he began talking to a woman on the train in the food refreshment area, and started telling her about me, and that he was now taking me back to Kingston's Barnardo's home. She must have felt sorry for me because she gave me two half-crowns of which I smilingly and happily thanked her for. 

Another point of interest is that one of the lady staff I helped in my work duties, once told me that the governor Vernon Paul had also been a Barnardo's home boy, and had never been married, though that is all I know of him. Perhaps others know much more. His car shed was at the back of the home near the golf course, and I often saw him doing work on his car with his close friend, who would come to the home to visit him and sometimes talk to the boys. Sometimes he watched us playing in the grassy grounds of the back of the home to check on how we were doing or settling in to our new environment. 

This account of my stay at Dicky's would be incomplete if Idid not give my thoughts on the governor Vernon Paul. He was certainly strict and could easily become annoyed with Dickies and staff if they caused him annoyance, but for the boys, he did have concern for them and would sometimes study them playing on the field from his garage through the windows while the doors were closed in summer months. He was always busy and tended to be mainly in his office near the front door of the main building. I can not remember him ever going upstairs to any of the houses. As he was not busy on Saturday afternoons at official duties of the home, he would be busy working on his car in his garage with his friend, who frequently visited him on Saturdays, but sometimes we saw him near the area where we polished our shoes after coming in from school, and he often talked to us, but I forget what he talked about. One of the electrician housemasters was often there too, and he once had a valve output audio transformer with the primary connected to a torch battery and jokingly shocked us as he transiently connected the battery to the primary via insulated wires. I think he was soon stopped having such fun with us by the housemothers. 

Mr Paul sometimes had his food over at his house, which had a very small kitchen and the lady looking after the staff would have cooked his breakfast and dinner, but at tea-time he had his tea with us boys in the large dining hall and sometimes made important announcements to us from there, which were often about complaints of the boys. He would get annoyed if we continued to chatter when he stood up to gain our attention, and if any bananas or oranges were due to be given out at tea-time, he would order them to be collected. We would all get them back the next day. In spite of all this he was obviously dedicated and understanding, but tried not to show it in front of any boy. I am almost sure, but not absolutely sure, that we boys had to stand up as Mr Paul entered the dining hall at tea-time, and sit down when he sat down. 

Whenever he was on a message to collect anything anywhere in Kingston, he would frequently take a few boys with him to help him, but did not favour any particular Dicky's boy and so different boys were taken out by him each time. If you complained about another Dicky punching you, he would exclaim, "I don't want to hear tales!" and then walk off. We always addressed him as yes sir and no sir. He was especially with his friend on Saturdays, who also had a car. His friend liked the Dickies and he seemed unmarried and free, and I suspect he had been a Barnardo's boy in the past. I sometimes wonder how Vernon Paul got on after he retired when the home closed down, and if he became bored and nostalgic of the past. 

An Australian staff lady, I had to help as part of my work duties, took great interest in me and must have liked me because she bought me a book on electricity and another on algebra, and once took me to the Royal Festival Hall. This caused resentment amongst the boys of my house who thought that she should have took all of the house to the Royal Festival Hall for the night out. I told her and she said she would not have the money to do that. 

She warned me never to go to Australia and that Barnardo's was wrong to send boys out there where people had no luck or happiness and that is why she had come to England. After I left the home she departed several weeks later for Spain with some Spanish friends to work there. She was in tears on the morning that I departed for another Barnardo's home near Shrewsbury. This home was the most boring home I had ever been in and the governor, who had a stomach ulcer, hit children on the head if he got annoyed with them. It is a home that I would take no delight in writing about, and my emotional experiences there are almost nil. At least I was near Liverpool and ran off getting home every time to show my mother I wanted to be home. This was my last Barnardo's home and I was still a 13-year-old. The boys had almost nothing to do in such a small home and the village of Much Wenlock was so tiny and boring, and surrounded by hilly grassy meadows. As was to be expected, the boys there was not as bright as the boys of Kingston's home because of less variety of activities. Getting home to Liverpool was as easy as getting a bus to town for me and I never failed. 

The school there in Much Wenlock was next to a quarry in which strong explosive bangs went on in the day during lessons. It was exceptionately easy to get home, as it was a mere 60 miles distance, and a bus from Shrewsbury to witchchurch, then Chester and then Birkenhead got me to our famous River Mersey and Liverpool by crossing the Mersey River in the ferry boat. I had to ask people if they could lend me the fare in each town and, that is how I paid for the bus fares. I did make a friend with a non-Barnardo's boy at school, who told me that where he lives is so lonely, and that there are no houses for miles around except his parents house. I nearly always wore my school uniform rather than Barnardo's clothing, because then I just looked like any ordinary schoolboy going about his business from school to home and so it would be difficult to easily find me. Most boys did not know of such methods and were soon found wondering about aimlessly in typical Dicky's clothing. 

There was also a large wooden shed at the back of the Dicky's home in which a model electric railway system was set up on a large table complete with trains, bridges and stations. I played in there with delight many times on operating the trains after 7 PM along with other Dickies. The man who was in charge was not part of the home's staff, and would arrive at 7 PM to open the door. There was also another large wooden shed in which pantomimes were played around Christmas, with some of the boys and housemasters acting together in the play. 

Sometimes we were taken to the cinema in Kingston town, of which there were two cinemas, and I remember on another occasion being taken to Brighton town with other boys of my house, and all of us being bought chips on our way home in the cars. Dicky's boy Don will probably remember that event at Brighton. 

Nobody cut our hair at the home and so we could only go to a home-selected barber, who to get to we had to walk up Gloucester Road and turn right and walk down the main road for a few hundred yards to a barber's shop. I forget now if I had been given money to pay the barber, but I must have been.  

Sometimes we were given oranges at tea-time. Perhaps they had been donated because it was not a regular happening, and I often wonder now how we got our natural vitamins in the cooked food. Once I was getting out a long heavy can of milk from the cold storage in the main kitchen, when on taking the lid off, there was a dead black cockroach floating on the milk. I told the cook and she reported it to the governor Vernon Paul instantly, who annoyingly instructed it to be poured down the drains and not to be used. These large cans were delivered on a truck to the home. I have not seen such milk cans anymore. How the large ancient beetle specie got into a can of milk in cool storage having its lid on is a mystery. 

I hope my own account of my sad and sometimes happy and often full of adventure, but often dull experiences at the home too when I had nothing to do, will be of some use on your webpage, and as Donald, a past house and dormitory companion of mine, says too, I also wish you to keep up the good work, as well as good luck in your efforts at this past-memory adventure. It is logical to assume because of your internet websites of Barnardo homes that you were also in a Barnardo's home too. It is almost certain you were.  

As an adult with deeper thoughts, but still boyish thoughts, I now know that my experiences as a Dicky's boy was part of my pre-ordained desitiny, just as the time my future death and everybody else in this world is also pre-destined to the exact time and date. Even this email is part of my destiny. Perhaps some will say that we control our own destiny by an effort of will and action and that destiny does not exist. I am inclined to believe that pre-destiny is real enough in the life of everybody and that there is probably nothing that we do that has not been pre-ordered before our very birth, and that we are not able to escape it no matter how clever or cunning we are. We are just lucky that that most people do not know what is going to happen to them in their earthly life. The priest of ancient Egypt said that the soul is joined to the body as a punishment, but I think is is more exact to say that the soul is joined to the body for a number of causes, and learning new knowledge is one of them for me.

It would also be very interesting to know if any other Dickies were very happy at the home and if their emotional experiences at Dicky's home have made them more deeper in thinking. As a sharp contrast, I once spoke to a young Austrian man about his stay at the Vienna Boys' Choir (Die Wiener Sangerknaben) when he was a boy in Vienna Austria at the singing school, and he told me it was the happiest days of his life and that they travelled the world to sing, and were all great friends at the boarding school. 

It is a very different situation where boys have happiness, certainty, confidence and ability, but an interesting contrast all the same to Dicky's boys, who's happiness was so uncertain, and they knew this very much when they wondered of what the future held for them in the Dickies home and after it, and no doubt some cried alone in the dark of the boys bathroom or somewhere else in the winter nights at Dicky's.  

They might make a close friend only to sadly discover that their friend had left the home for good, and was never to be in contact after that. I think it was the element of uncertainty of their stay at the home that could effect a Barnardo boy's mind later on in life, when the mind's storage of memory starts to surface to trouble the awakened-conscience, and the mind's wound-sensitive nature hurts in waking or in dreams. Incidently we did not have any poetry books in Dicky's amongst us 13-year-olds, and I was very lucky in that the lady who cared only for the staff liked me and even wanted to adopt me and did also buy me some books. My job duty with her was to wash the staff's dishes and dry them and that is how she got to know me and like me. This caused resentment amongst the other boys of my house and one or two unexpected punches out of jealousy, and for not being with them in the house or to play games and keep them company. 

It might be expected that youngsters living in Kingston home would have got bored. I certainly got bored when I was not doing duties, though most of the boys occupied their mind with playing games with each other in the large TV hall during the dark winter months, or if the TV was on then watched that instead. One my house mate Peter did a very unusual thing in that he hid in a large tall wooden cabinet having two pull-out doors, that was just by the staff washing up area where I washed the staffs dishes. I was helping the lady who looked after the staff and talking to her, when she went to the cabinet to look for a new dish cloth, and was shocked to see Peter standing in there all alone. She told him to get out and asked him what he was doing in there. He simply declared that he was hiding. I told her a little about Peter and how intelligent he was, and that he went to a London grammar school. She exclaimed that she was not surprised and that there was something about him that she did not like, and that there was something very strange about him. I think she was under the impression that my housemother had sent him down to spy on her while I was helping her. This though is unlikely as he would not have heard much inside a closed cabinet, but on thinking back it was not fully closed, but who knows?  He probably was just hiding as children do, but whatever the reason, I liked him and was not against him.  

I have to admit though, that I could not understand Peter's mind and why he was so intelligent, and even then, as a 13-year-old, I was wondering how I could become as intelligent as him. I wondered if he had been born like that, or had influence from his mother's activities early on in life. Of course his intelligence was only academic or school-type, and it did not express itself in practical intelligent activities. For example I made a copper-zinc battery that lit a torch bulb, while Peter had not shown interest in such practical things, but would rather play. Peter had also shown no interest to run away and get back to his single-parent mother while I was there. His mother resembled Peter in features and smiled a lot when she visited him and he smiled back at her. She did not stay very long with him, which might suggest that she lived somewhere in London. 

I have given mostly good accounts and some sad accounts of my stay at Kingston. Some of the 150

boys could well be gone to another world and hopefully heaven, or suffered bad lives due to lack of wisdom and foolish mistakes and wrong choices in their lives, or just a plain inevitable punishing destiny, and the older staff almost certainly no longer in this world, but for me the Dicky's home was not my proper Liverpool home, though if I had been a street orphan with nobody in the world to love me as a child, then I would have regarded it as my proper home, especially under the highly understanding governor Vernon Paul and his staff of 1959 to 1960. 

I can only guess the fate or destiny of some of the boys. Some may have done well in the the rat race of life, while others may have failed in the rat race of life, depending on the definition of success, but both poor and rich end up the same as dust in this world. At their age now, some may well be feeling that they are getting old, while others may still feel young and active and forever learning new knowledge like me. Some may not have looked after the health of their body and the health of their mind, or may have married nagging wives causing them to have a tormented face and a weakened depressed mind, or been single and young-thinking like me, and still with boyish wanting-to-learn minds like me. Some may have become corrupted by life and lost all sense of purity and scout-like ideals of the original Robert Baden Powell type of scout 

With best wishes for all Dicky's boys or Vernon's boys of Kingston Surrey if they should ever view this website, and and of course especially Donald, who's email dated 2002 to you encouraged me to email my experiences as soon as I saw his short account. Something in me induced me to surf for the Dickies of Kingston home in Google.com. Perhaps destiny? Regarding Don, I only remember his fresh boyish face, and as a blue-eyed, light-brown-haired boy, and if he passed me on the road today I would probably not recognise him, or he me for that matter. 

I hope my own account may be of some interest to researchers into Kingston's Dickies and their activities at Dicky's, but most of all I trust it reflects some of what went on in the home from my narrow perspective that may be a little different than other Dicky's boys, who probably had less work activities to do than me at the home, and spent much of their free time playing in the grounds or in the TV hall or whatever else they did.  

As in the first Harry Potter film, when Harry looks into the mirror that reflects his inner-most desires to behold his dead parents smiling at him, and while indulging in his delight, he is disturbed by the wizard governor who enters the room and sternly warns Harry of the error of his past memory indulgences by saying, "It does not do to live in the past, and forget to live in the present."  

Of course all of our life is founded upon our past experiences, but if we try to hold onto something of the past to the extreme of not letting go of it, then we are not experiencing the present and making full use of it and will sooner or later become sick and morbid. 

There is an ancient verse in the Indian Upanishads, a book that I remember reading a while back out of curiosity and excited delighted astonishment, in which one remarkable verse says:  

"Those who embrace perishable things, perish with those things: but those who embrace the Imperishable become imperishable."  

This implies to having one's heart set on things that perish and are soon gone, such as friends, lovers, love affairs, wives, children, sons, daughters, family, wealth and so on. We become emotionally and lovingly attached to them, and when those things die or leaves us, then our own soul could die too if we brood too much on the sudden loss, and break our heart causing us to pine away.

But the Imperishable of course means God or the Supreme Being, who is without beginning, unborn, uncreated, unchanging and undying. When we set our heart or soul on this Imperishable God, then like him, we become imperishable or immortal and filled with his bliss and happiness, and are then able to see through the Great Dream or foggy field of our uncertain existence, often only foolishly seeing a few metres in front of us, and hardly seeing what lies ahead in the march of time, until we are surprised and shocked by it, and sometimes destroyed by it.

Embracing the Imperishable also means having our Centre of Being in God from which we plan our life. If we have our centre of being in transient and short-lived things, then we are like a leaf blown aimlessly about by the wind. Or we are like a homeless person without a stable home as their centre from which they conduct themselves in the world. Having a centre is the most important thing in the universe for a human to have. The bird has its centre in its nest, some boys in a gang, some men in a club, and some men foolishly have their centre in a loved one, but all these centres are unstable and short-lived. It is only the Imperisable that is unchanging and the most secure centre of all in the whole universe from which to conduct our lives and activities. Barnardo's boys had little centre, and those who had no parents had probably no centre at all. Barnardo's no longer exist, and if that was a centre of some sort to some boys, it is no more a centre, but only a past memory of what once existed. All those other short-lived centres do not strengthen our soul, or give our soul everlasting existence, security and happiness. Sometimes these short-lived centres can almost destroy us, as in the loss of a loved-one.

Today, Barnardo home have been replaced by council homes and it is not unusual to see teenagers and young men from previous council homes, homeless and begging for money on the streets of London and other large cities. Some are slaves to drugs and some are slaves to prostitution and have lost all sense of purity and do not even have a short-lived centre. Their souls are gradually been destroyed in this world, even before they have gone to the proper place of hell, which is designed to destroy the souls of the wicked by torments, or purify them for a heavenly world. 

All that we do instantly becomes the past in microseconds and less, and there is actually nothing that we can hold on to without it becoming a past memory or past event. Dicky's boys can not return back to those days at Kingston in their original boyish innocence and walk amongst the boys and staff of those days, unless they invent a time machine that can bypass time and space, but otherwise their days there remain only dreams. 

I have now completed my narrative of the days when I was at Kingston's Barnardo's home for other Vernon's and Richard's boys to read. Other boys had been there since they were 8 years of age and will have longer accounts than me to tell if they so wish to tell Frank, the webmaster of this internet page. Writing is an art and a skill, and many will feel they are not up to it, and therefore do not wish to make fools of themselves to English grammarians with pages full of grammar mistakes. I feel much like a fool myself for writing this narrative, which is probably corrupted by some grammatical abuses and deviations of the English language. I have been honest in my report and added nothing sensational or fabricated in my narration of the events for my stay there, and hope it will interest some past boys of Kingston.

Spelling can be a problem in the English language as in, "narration" and "narrative", which you might expect in both cases for them to only have one "r". I have had to send two reports to replace my original first composition to Frank because I understood later to have hurriedly made some grammatical mistakes in my narrative. 

In writing my narrative I have had to meditate on those days in 1960 and become a boy again in mind, and remember how I felt that long ago in Kingston, but perhaps this mind-reversion to a 13-year-old boy's mind was never needed, because I have never been married or lived an equivalent married life, and so no such male/female experiences have aged me by nagging and worries in my mind, or robbed of me of intelligence or the desire to learn new things. I have never really grown up, whatever that means. I still think I am young inside, and even loll about the floor when I am reading books as if I was thirteen years of age, and still like to joke with others like a boy does. What is more, I still do not feel as if I am yet home, but still waiting to return to the heavenly world far out in space amongst the stars where I originally came from before I was born. 

But then even as Jesus says: "That unless you become as child, you can in no way enter heaven."  

To me, being a pure boy is heaven, and being a man is hell. 

It is only when we are boys that we experience the greatest delight, but as we become older, life's cruel experiences can rob us of that delight if we allow it to, resulting in us becoming sad and lacking interest as we get older in body. 

Well, I have completed the details of my stay, but those days are all over now, and no such equivalent exists anymore in Britain, and now council departments run children homes with probably a different government ideology than Barnardo homes. The world is rather different today with closer surveillance on people and their activities. All shopping centres have cameras watching everybody shopping. No such surveillance concepts existed in 1960 and boys felt more free and less paranoiac. Mobile phone towers are everywhere today, and those unlucky enough to live within a few hundred metres of them may well be suffering adverse symptoms from pulsed radio waves. Drug addiction and alcohol addiction amongst the young was virtually unknown in 1960 but is now very prevalent and destroys many young people. 

In these times I no longer try making batteries, but my interests have been in bacteriology and microscopes, radioactivity and uranium ore and a host of other sciences as a hobby. Having read about Marie Curry and her discovery of radium as a boy it was inevitable that I would buy Geiger counters and prepare uranium compounds such as the yellow-fluorescent crystals of uranium nitrate, orange-coloured uranium trioxide, black or green uranium oxide and so on in my teens. Boys no longer have such happy scientific freedoms, as governments have made laws preventing access to such substances for scientific education. Also schools can no longer afford the expensive scientific equipment needed to teach the youngsters. One school nearby had only one oscilloscope and not even a function generator, and the teacher was given a ludicrous amount of money of £30 to buy equipment for his class. 

Everything is now based upon paranoia and fears. I never actually got a gram of radium, but I understand that its gamma rays of 1 gram can be detected about 100 metres away with a Geiger counter. It is unhealthy for their mind because it deprives them of good quality education when they are denied scientific freedoms. Science is on a serious decline in Britain and universities are having to close down science courses. At the moment I am wondering what to do in science to prevent myself becoming bored. 

From a Vernon's boy who does live in the present, and sometimes in the future, but sometimes thinks of his past days with some delight of his adventures and sometimes of sadness as a one of Dicky's boys or Paul Vernon's boys if you prefer.  

From Danny Dunlop. Dated 6/7/2006.

My email address for any Kingston Dickies or Dicky's boys or Vernon's boys or Vernons wanting to  email me is:    wolfgang12345@swissinfo.org