The British Journal of Developmental Disabilities

Vol. 48, Part 2, JULY 2002, No. 95, pp. 125-127

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POINTS OF VIEW

Now retired, though still working a few light hours a week, curmudgeonly, with words disappearing for good out of my memory bin, I do what many my age do, look back. Silly perhaps, but there it is. For example, I’ve been looking at the records of the earliest admissions to this hospital, beginning in 1949. When I started work in the early 1960s, people held telephonic conversations, sent telegrams. Most letters were inst or ult, many events to come were prox. Registering a parcel you dripped melted wax on the string knots. An official might write, “I am instructed by the Ministry to ask you . . .” You didn‘t shoot him, he was only the messenger. Claiming to be your obedient servant was a thoughtless lie. No-one I know ever toppled a ministry. I have just finished reading Newton’s (2002) book on feral children. Fascinating. And well written too. He says that the story of one child in Northern Ireland shaped the whole course of his work. Strangely perhaps, he doesn’t say much about this boy, called Kevin. But then, he was interested primarily in kids who survived in the wild. Kevin survived in a hut. I had forgotten all about him until I read Newton’s book. So, in looking-back mood, I spent several hours in the Belfast Telegraph archives in the city centre. This piece is based on reports published in the 1950s. One day, a schoolboy, Desmond, aged eleven years, went into the field of a widow named Mrs. Halpenny. In the field were two wooden henhouses. To get from Mrs. Halpenny’s farmhouse to the huts you had to cross a stream. In only one of the houses were there hens. As Desmond passed the second he thought he heard someone walking about. The door was locked and there was sacking on the windows. Someone in the hut lifted one of the bags. “I saw a wee boy or a wee girl with long hair“ he was later to testify, “I could only see down to its waist, and it had no clothes on that I could see”. Desmond asked the child its name but got no reply. As he walked away he thought he heard the child crying. Days later Desmond returned with a boy called Joe. He knocked at the window. A child appeared again “and put its hands up to the netting wire”. He was to return twice more with other boys. One thought the eyes peering out were those of a dog. The police, NSPCC and welfare officers became involved and Mrs. Halpenny was brought to court accused of ill-treating and neglecting her seven-year-old son, Kevin. The first witness was Inspector A. Mahood of the NSPCC. Mrs. Halpenny had told him in an interview in her house that Kevin slept with her at nights and that only when she was out working around the farm or went shopping did she put him into the hut. And never for more than two hours at a time. She and the inspector then walked across the garden and over the stream to the outhouse. He noticed the smell of urine and saw that the floor was covered with crushed paper cemented into animal matter. Mrs. Halpenny told him that she hadn’t kept hens in the hut for many years. Medical witnesses told the court that, when found, Kevin showed signs of gross rickets caused, possibly, by deprivation of sunlight and, to a lesser extent, of food containing vitamin D. They also said that he appeared to be mentally subnormal (a term then in wide use) but that he would need to be observed over a longer period of time before a definite conclusion could be reached. In the early stages of assessment it seemed he had no speech, but could hear. When admitted to the children’s home he was markedly underweight, could not walk, and could not hold himself upright for more than half a minute. Although there were no hens in the outhouse, there was a chicken brooder. A member of the staff of the Forensic Science Department in Belfast told the court that although there was little evidence of contact between the brooder and chickens, it was polished in places to a degree that indicated prolonged or frequent rubbing contact. He also said that hair samples found on the floor very closely matched those of the boy. The court was also given information about Mrs. Halpenny’s background. Then forty-five, she had been widowed twenty years. When her husband died she was left to bring up three girls and a boy. She also had to manage the farm. Judge Hanna highlighted the difference between the love and affection she showed her four children and her attitude towards Kevin. The prosecution withdrew the charge of ill-treatment. Mrs. Halpenny pleaded guilty to the charge of neglect and was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. Judge Hanna told her: You deprived him of something that God gave to him (sunlight). You also deprived him of something that the State was prepared to give for nothing - medical attention. In a follow-up report a year later it was stated that Kevin had started to walk, was watching television and appeared to be a happy wee boy. The case was the “talk of the country” and attracted very wide publicity. Kevin is now living in a home for, I believe, persons with a learning disability. Let Newton have the last word: . . . for me, the most powerful conjuring of the wild child motif is found in Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Bye-Child”, part of his 1972 collection “Wintering Out”. The poem imagines a situation in which a boy enclosed in a hen-house looks up to the “yolk of light” glimpsed in the back window of the home from which he is exiled. Real pity is here - both for the boy and for the woman, so put upon by social conventions as to cause his suffering out there in the dark. The poem does not exactly refer to that real case from the 1950s in Northern Ireland, in which a mother is reported to have confined her child to a hen-house . . . Long before I came upon Heaney’s poem, I found myself thinking of a boy locked out in the winter cold, surrounded by the smell of beasts and the mechanical, slightly deranged cluckings of hens. The image goes deep, and its resonance for Heaney goes beyond the complex and doubtful realities of the case. (Pages 232-233).

D. N. MacKay

Muckamore Abbey Hospital