I watched the news of the first moon landing while waiting in a queue holding a metal tray.
Some six years previously we watched incredulously as John F. Kennedy was assassinated and since then everyone said they could tell you where they were when it happened.
That moon landing was happening around 239 thousand miles away but to me, and the others standing in that queue, it might as well have been 239 trillion miles away because it didn’t mean anything to us at all.
Didn’t mean anything to us? Well, it didn’t touch us. It could not affect our lives in any meaningful way. It could not do anything to change the lives of most people who watched it. And it seemed that it especially could not do anything to change the lives of that bunch of untidy teenagers standing in that line at that time in history, in that particular place.
The tray I was holding was about the size of an A3 piece of paper. It was a shiny stainless-steel thing. Indentations with a depth of about 1 inch covered the tray, two bigger ones to the right and two smaller ones to the left. It was a dinner tray.
The queue comprised twenty-five young men queuing for their lunch at a servery in a large house that was part of a complex of buildings in what was then called a Borstal.
A Borstal was a generic name for a type of young offender’s institute. The first young offenders institute of this kind was opened in the village of Borstal, near Rochester, in Kent, in 1902. From then on places with the same purpose, that were established up and down the country, all became known as Borstals. The idea behind the introduction of the Borstal was the separation of young offenders from older, more hardened criminals who, it was thought, would have a bad influence on them.
Some of these establishments were ‘closed Borstals’; the young people were guarded and locked in especially at night. Some were ‘open Borstals’ where offenders were thought not likely to try and escape, were not closely guarded and were not locked in. Still other places were designated as ‘semi-open Borstals’ where some of the houses within a complex would be ‘open’ and some ‘closed’.
The ‘semi-open’ Borstal I spent approximately 13 months in was in Dover, in Kent. Having been assessed as someone unlikely to abscond I was put into an ‘open house’. The standard sentence meted out to young offenders at that time was 6 months to 2 years. The length of time that any individual spent in the Borstal could vary depending on the type of crime committed, how long the person had been held in remand (assuming they not been able to get bail) before appearing in court, and how long they had been in the assessment system before arriving at the Borstal proper. Most offenders were in there for about a year.
One of the core aims of the Borstal system was ‘the rehabilitation of offenders’ i.e. efforts were made to train them up – as much as was possible - in a trade, and allow them to get some qualifications. For example, some were taught carpentry or painting and decorating. Others, like me, went for academic studies and came out with some, what were then called ‘O-levels’, now called GCSEs.
I was viewed by the justice system as a ‘petty criminal’ but I did not want to progress to serious offences. I had genuine regret for the crimes I had committed and regarded my punishment as justified. My relatively short time ‘inside’ persuaded me that I must never get into trouble with the law again. Many of the other convicts though, swapped their ‘tricks of the trade’; ways of conning innocent citizens, breaking into properties – private and commercial – to steal goods, money, and drugs. Borstal became for them a school for criminals.
All the offenders in the system that I developed any relationship with talked of having come from what was then called ‘a broken home’; usually the father had left but sometimes the mother. The effect of this on each of these young men was devastating in varying degrees. Not having a father as a good role model seemed to have taken its toll on these young lives.
After getting out I managed to find a job and stay out of trouble, but I feared for some whom I was sure were already trapped in a cycle of re-offending.
The moon landings offered such promise for the future. But it seemed for these young men with their underprivileged backgrounds, lack of education and lack of opportunities, a bleak future had already been dictated.