Lost in Care Quotes

“I felt like Dirty Harry, only, my weapon wasn’t as big as his! I don’t know what it is with guns, but once you’ve got your hand on one, you think you’re one of the untouchables.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Once again, off this skinny prick of a copper went. BANG! SLAP! PUNCH! It was more like a Batman movie! He could hit me all night, but it wouldn’t make any difference.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“I’ll tell you, the screws’ faces painted an even greater picture than my words can describe. We kept emptying our pots in the hall for two weeks before the screws started emptying our piss pots for us, but this didn’t last too long after we started calling them bellhops.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“I waltzed into the hall with my escort of five screws like some rapper with his well-paid entourage. A fiendish looking, little bastard with blonde hair and a crooked nose came up to me and said, ‘Okay, Holland, welcome to Shotts. Welcome to the man-eater!”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Barlinnie Prison stands on dark and bloody ground. It is a temple of lost souls, and a place of living nightmares. It’s been the breaker of many a man’s dreams for more than a century. This prison works to a model of penitence with no pretence of rehabilitation. The criminal population that society has forsaken has filled this once, seemingly, bottomless pit to overflowing with their despair and nightmares of pain. More specifically, it is the battleground of an undeclared war that still ravages to this day, between the screws and the cons. The screws, backed by their authority, would use violence, but in return the prisoners would have to resort to their cunning, beguile, and the odd sudden act of violence.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“At that, every boy on that side of the hall let out a big cheer for the two of them. This went on for about three or four hours before the cold had got the better of the two of them. Without breaking any rooftop siege records, the bedraggled and wet pair came down into the arms of the awaiting riot screws. And surprisingly, for a change, they never suffered any beatings; they got taken to the digger and put on a rule, pending police investigation. Some nine months later, the two kings of the roof stood trial and received eighteen months apiece on top of their sentence … oh, and the roofing contractor was ecstatically happy.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“I got my lawyer to visit me in the jail. He couldn’t believe the bruising over my body, so he pulled the governor and asked why I was covered in marks. The governor said to my lawyer that it was ‘self-inflicted’ and was caused by my ‘running into walls’. That part was disproved because walls don’t leave footprints all over your body.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“I believe the most degrading thing in the world is to be treated worse than a starving dog by five growling, muscle-bound thugs, better known as screws!”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“I was seeing more stars than Patrick Moore; he didn’t half give me a sore fucking whack on the nut.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“My motto is: hit first, ask questions later....”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“SLAP! I saw a bright flash in front of my eyes, ‘Don’t you try and be a fucking smart arse in here, Holland, this is Partick cop shop you’re in,’ the irate copper retorted.
‘So fuck,’ I snapped.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Mind you, with all this emphasis on the householder now being able to use ‘reasonable force’ to protect their home, I wouldn’t even consider it. I mean, look what that Farmer Tony Martin did to those creepers!”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“I started to develop a penchant for the odd hot foil of smack. After all those years of calling junkies ‘the scum of the earth’, I had now fallen by the wayside and had become a junkie myself!”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“I was having a field day down the Westend; my deep pockets were jingling and full of money nearly every day of the week. My brother’s bird, Irene, wanted a fur coat, so I got her one by throwing a brick through the shop window and grabbing the coat off the shop dummy. Once I got to the bed-sit, I put the jacket on and waltzed in to the flat looking like Liberace, the two of them burst out laughing. Irene was like a tramp eating chips.
‘Let’s try it on, Jimmy, please?’
As she swooned around like Joan Collins with the fur coat on, she had the air of a council estate beauty queen about her.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“In Polmont, everyone was acting the hard man and giving it the large. I had to fight or cosh or do something to be accepted. I can tell you, it was better to be in a gang than being on your own, and I’d do anything in Polmont, no questions asked!”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“After a couple of weeks in Polmont, I started to become more assertive and began arguing with older, bigger boys. I loved it. This is where my ugly side would make some scary and unpredictable appearances. Even to this day, I can go from a happy-go-lucky cunt to the devil on acid.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“You can do almost anything if you put your mind to it. Be it the perfect murder, robbing a bank or owning your own company. I don’t go along with Prince Charles’ maxim that everyone should know their place and limitations.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Once I managed to get to a sink, staring up out of it at my empty-stomached face was a collection of facial hair, discarded razor blades, plasters, snot and phlegm, all fused together into one stomach churning mass. I retched, but nothing came up. My eyes watered at the festering sight and my stomach was in knots as I ran my hand over the surface of the water. It was freezing cold. I flung the cruel liquid over my hair, then, as if straight from Oliver Twist, I asked one of the two screws that were standing over us like bouncers, ‘Is there any toothpaste, sir?”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Once the cons were in the cell, they’d pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn’t placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn’t think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“What stood in one corner of the cell was disgusting: two empty disinfectant canisters and one well used and well stained piss pot, the sort of chamber pot that people would train their babies to be potty trained on before they would learn to use the toilet.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“The boy who initiated me into smack, who I will call Tim, was at that time eighteen years old, and came from Castlemilk. His life was a helter-skelter ride of drug-fuelled binges.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn’t look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Over the next sixteen years, I would grow close to the ringleaders of the infamous Peterhead Prison Riot and hostage-taking incidents would loom large in my life.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“This was a new buzz, better than anything I’d tried before. For the first time, I could fight back at others. I’d even fight with a parked car! I was totally kyboshed on these drugs, I didn’t care how many boys were standing outside the pub, I’d run over and fight the lot of them. Even though I came off second best, in my mind, I still walked away a winner. I showed them I wasn’t a little shit-bag that always got battered, not when I had the drugs in me.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Gazing out of the window, the gravel path roared as it was crushed into submission under the wheels of the car that was taking me towards a menacing looking medieval castle with two huge and terrifying turrets that seemingly reached out towards me. I imagined that I was the gravel and the wheels of the car were the social care system.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“If you could get anything at all off Santa, what would it be?’
I asked for a fire engine and sweets. Bunty exclaimed in delight, ‘Santa will get you that, but you and Scott will need to leave out a bowl of milk and some carrots for Rudolph.’
‘Who’s Rudolph?’ I asked.
Bunty told me in confidence that Rudolph was Santa’s reindeer and that he helped pull all the children’s toys in the world over the snow. I couldn’t wait.
In readiness for Rudolph, Scott, Martha, Bunty and I picked out four of the biggest carrots from a bag in the kitchen, which we then washed. We found a big bowl that we used to lick the cream out of, which we filled with milk. We put the bowl along with the carrots under the Christmas tree, with all the other children’s offerings. Then Bunty and Martha came in and washed us, put us to bed and read us a story, before kissing us good night. On their way out they said, ‘When you wake up, Santa will have been'.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“Leading up to Christmas, there was talk of Santa. But I’d never even heard of Santa. Bunty, one of the workers who I grew to love, tried to explain, ‘He brings little angels like you, presents.”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child