‘There is so much I can’t remember’

Wednesday 5th March 2008, 2:29PM GMT.

Haut de la Garenne’s courtyard. Carl Denning said that the children were sometimes made to march around it. (0544663)

GUERNSEY boy Carl Denning only ever had one visit from the outside world while he was at Haut de la Garenne in Jersey, and only ever wrote one letter.

He wrote to his father one Christmas early during his stay at the infamous care home and, some time later, Carl was visited by his father, Leonard, and eldest brother Vincent, when he was camping in the Jersey countryside, a rare trip out.

Leonard remembers the States-funded trip to Jersey in the mid-1960s vividly, most memorably because of the sailing conditions on the journey over. ‘They were rough, to say the least,’ says 86-year-old Leonard, who still lives in Guernsey.