John Gater walked by the working men's club in Humberstone Gate one morning a few weeks ago, writes Lee Marlow.
He didn't go in. "I wouldn't ever go in," he says. He hasn't set foot in a working men's club for nearly 40 years.
But the doors were open and he could smell it. That signature bouquet of beer and polish.
The smell stopped him in his stride. It took him back, to a place in his memory he doesn't like to see – the lounge at Gypsy Lane Working Men's Club.
'Where's the little ginger kid without a dad? Mr Janner wants him...'
John Gater walked by the working men's club in Humberstone Gate one morning a few weeks ago, writes Lee Marlow.
He didn't go in. "I wouldn't ever go in," he says. He hasn't set foot in a working men's club for nearly 40 years.
But the doors were open and he could smell it. That signature bouquet of beer and polish.
The smell stopped him in his stride. It took him back, to a place in his memory he doesn't like to see – the lounge at Gypsy Lane Working Men's Club.
It was a splendid hideaway for an eight-year-old, the lounge at Gypsy Lane Working Men's Club. There was velour everywhere, he remembers. Hoyes pop and Golden Wonder crisps.
And The Good Man who was kind to him, The Important Man who asked about his schooling and plied him with more pop, more crisps.
The Caring Man who would drape his arm around John's young shoulder and stroke his hair and make him feel – this kid, this eight-year-old kid from Northfields who didn't have a father – that he mattered.
That's how it began, says John. Him and The Kind, Caring, Important Man who looked after him.
It ended, he says, in the worst kind of violation; a sordid sexual assault that would play out in the velour lounge of Gypsy Lane WMC every month over three years.
The Man who was the respected Labour MP for Labour West. The Man who died last month, escaping the justice that John and a small band of other unsuspecting boys, now middle-aged men, their lives all scarred by what happened to them, had hoped he would receive.
The Man who was Greville Janner.
Finally, John, 50, of Leicester, can tell his story. (more...)
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