Nostalgia: The light they couldn't take

Part One: Number 23

People often ask me what it was like—those years behind the gates on Berry Head Road. They imagine the Home as a place of refuge, a good Christian institution with discipline and learning. And in some ways, it was. But those who’ve never lived inside its stone walls can’t understand what it meant to walk the line between silence and survival.

You see, when I stepped through that gate in November 1904, I was nine years old and scared out of my skin. My name was William. I’d just said goodbye to my mother—her shawl wrapped tight against the wind, her eyes red-rimmed, her back straight but shaking. She walked away without turning, and I knew even then it was because if she did, she wouldn’t be able to keep going.

The man who greeted me was tall, stiff in posture, draped in black. “You’ll call me Chaplain—or Sir. Do you understand?” he said without looking me in the eye.

I nodded.

And that was that.

They gave me a number—23. They stitched it into my collar, wrote it in ink on a wooden peg where I hung my cap. I wasn’t William anymore. I was Number 23.

That first night, I cried into a pillow that smelled of soap and silence.

Part Two: A Life of Stone and Routine

The Home was a world of routines. Bells ruled our lives. Wake at six. Scrub the chamber pot yard. Cold water in the bowl, chalk on the toothbrush, boots lined straight. No one spoke. Talking was forbidden. Even breakfast—bread, margarine, weak tea—was taken in silence. If you whispered, you were caned.

I remember the cane across a lad’s hands—he flinched but didn’t cry. We learned quickly. Crying was private, saved for the night under thin blankets and thicker darkness.

They shaved our heads. Said it was for lice. I watched my hair fall to the floor like leaves, and with it went the last of my childhood.

My boots were too big. Stuffed with paper. They clacked on the flagstones like hammers. We scrubbed those same stones on our knees—whitewash, carbolic, and cold water that burned our fingers raw. We weren’t just boys. We were workers. Cleaners. Orderlies. Invisible unless we did something wrong.

There was no warmth—except from one man.

Part Three: Jabez

Jabez Lake.

Short, steady, with eyes that watched and listened. He arrived the same year I did—1904—appointed Drill Instructor. A fisherman before he stepped through those gates, and you could tell. His hands were thick, his boots worn soft, his voice like saltwater: honest and calm.

He didn’t raise the cane. Didn’t shout. Didn’t shame. He taught by doing. Showed us how to march, how to breathe through pain. He had children of his own. You could feel it in the way he looked at us. Not with pity, but with recognition.

Once, I slipped carrying coal and cut my hand. He helped me up. Just placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Back straight. You’re stronger than you know.”

That was the closest thing to love I received in that place.

He started the Sea Scouts in Brixham. Believed boys should know the sea, not fear it. He taught us knots, stars, the way the tide moved. He gave us back a piece of the world we’d been taken from.

He was the first man who ever made me feel seen.

Part Four: The Boys and the Sea

The sea was never far. You could smell it in your sleep. We heard its voice in the gulls and the bell buoys. It gave, and it took.

One night, we heard stories of the Susan Patey—a fishing smack that sank after colliding with another trawler, the Dazzler. Five dead. Two of them brothers. One of them sixteen.

But the part that stayed with me was what John Mugford did—gave up his life buoy for his skipper. “I’ve no one depending on me,” he said. That boy chose to save another when he thought he was going to die.

I never forgot that.

There weren’t many stories of heroism in the Home. But that one lived in our whispers, in the way we folded shirts for each other, or passed crusts of bread under the table. Quiet bravery. That was our gospel.

Part Five: Leaving

I left the Home in May 1909, aged fourteen.

I was sent to Greenwich Hospital School for naval training. A new agreement, they said. I packed my uniform, said nothing, and walked to the gate.

Mr. Lake stood there. He didn’t speak. Just shook my hand.

That one handshake meant more than every sermon I’d ever heard.

I didn’t cry when I left. But I didn’t smile either. I just walked, one foot in front of the other, carrying five years of silence in my chest.

Part Six: The Long View

I never went back.

But I heard things. That Chaplain Brown stayed until 1925. That the food was still thin and the walls still colder than the sea wind. That a Navy doctor came in 1911 and finally said out loud what we all knew—too much bread, not enough care.

Eventually, the Chaplains left. The accountants took over. George Janes ran it like a business. Had his own gardener, his own house, while the boys shared broken furniture and went without meat.

Some boys ran away.

Some disappeared.

Some, like me, just endured.

Part Seven: The End

By the 1950s, the Home was failing.

Captain Pockett-Pugh arrived and changed things. Gave us toilet rolls. Pocket money. Let boys attend his daughter’s wedding. Little dignities that felt like gold after decades of scarcity.

They dropped the word “Orphanage” in 1957. Too late for us.

By 1980, there were just a handful of boys left. No heating. No new furniture. The place crumbled while the past whispered in its cracks.

It finally closed in 1988.

Part Eight: The Light That Stayed

I stood outside the gate one last time that autumn.

Didn’t go in. Just stood, cap in hand, as the wind pressed against my coat and the gulls screamed overhead.

I thought of Mother. Of Sam. Of those long, barefoot marches to church. I thought of Jabez Lake, standing in the yard with his whistle, eyes on us like a father. And I realised—I had survived.

Not just the beatings and the silence. But the forgetting. I had held on to something they couldn’t take. My name. My memory. My light.

Because even in a place built on rules and rations, even among all the cold, there had been warmth.

In a shared crust.

In a lifebuoy passed to another.

In a firm handshake from a good man.

So no, I didn’t go back in.

But I left something behind in that stone place.

And it left something in me.