Toni Jarvis’ physical wounds have long healed but the emotional injuries are still raw.
Tears flow easily when the 59-year-old recounts his childhood and adolescence.
He has been asking questions since he was 16.
"That place" was Cherry Farm Hospital, the former psychiatric hospital north of Dunedin.
At 19, he found out he had been adopted.
More questions followed.
"My whole life was an effing lie. Who the hell am I?"
To finally be heard was "huge", he says.
"Not all the money in the world could replace the opportunity I’ve been given."
That opportunity came first in an affidavit presented at the damning Waitangi Tribunal Oranga Tamariki Urgent Inquiry last year, and second, giving verbal evidence in his role on the Survivor Advisory Group for the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in Care earlier this week.
The findings of the Maori-led tribunal inquiry were released in a 286-page report on April 30 and found the ministry was beyond repair.
The ministry acknowledged the presence and impacts of structural racism within the care and protection system and reiterated its commitment to addressing it.
It also acknowledged Maori perspectives and solutions in the care and protection system had been ignored.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry hearings continue, and Mr Jarvis is among 16 survivors giving evidence of abuse in care at public hearings in Auckland.
AS he tells it, his evidence in both inquiries mirror each other.
His treatment at the hands of the State cost him "everything", he says.
"It cost me who I am as Maori, my whakapapa, and my identity."
Mr Jarvis says he was illegally adopted in 1961, at 5 weeks old.
His mother, hoping to give him a more secure childhood, placed him with a child welfare officer for adoption.
Her condition was that he be placed with a Presbyterian family — Child Welfare crossed out this requirement.
He was placed with a Maori Mormon family, where he was given a new name — Lee (he will not disclose his surname) — and was subjected to serious abuse at the hands of his adoptive parents.
Child Welfare was aware of the abuse, but did not intervene.
Eventually, he was taken from his adoptive family when he was 9 and placed in Cherry Farm for six weeks until he could be placed into appropriate care.
"I got there and thought ‘Where’s the cherries?’
"I was stripped naked and put in adult-sized blue and white pyjamas."
Later, he would he would see Holocaust movies and documentaries and equate the pyjamas with the same feeling of alienation and dehumanisation as that experienced by Jews.
He was placed with people he describes as "severely mentally ill men".
"It was a horror show."
His file recorded bad behaviour, such as throwing billiard balls at patients.
It was to protect himself.
"They were touching me, they were fondling me."
He does not blame them.
"They were disturbed."
He was not — a barrage of tests proved that he was a normal 9-year-old child.
Despite this he was flagged as a "problem", due to the billiard ball incident, and was given anti-psychotic drugs which, he says, were to control him.
"They knew I was being corrupted."
Authorities knew that already and clinicians had recommended against placing him there, he said.
He would leave still confused as to where the cherries were.
His treatment would only get worse.
Sent to Hokio Beach School in Horowhenua he would discover there was a "pecking order".
"The older boys were the ‘king pins’ and little Lee was at the very bottom."
Sexual assaults and rapes at the hands of older boys followed.
"In the day that could happen anywhere, where no-one could see; the boiler room, for example."
At night, it became more insidious.
"Four to five boys come into my room and raped me every night."
In his evidence to the Royal Commission, he was asked to place a figure on the number of times he was raped.
"I said 200."
That was, in hindsight, conservative, he says.
"Four to five boys every night? That’s 35 times per week."
HE pauses and wipes away more tears.
"Then there’s the daytime ..."
Eventually he and the next two in the "pecking order" — boys aged 12 and 13 — were to run away, less than a year after his arrival.
He would end up at Awatea Street Family Home in Levin. It was the first time — apart from when two nurses who took him under their wing at Cherry Farm — that he felt cared for and nurtured.
That lasted six months — until the main perpetrator of his abuse at Hokio Beach was transferred to the care home.
What followed was a constant game of cat and mouse — Mr Jarvis was the mouse to avoid more sexual abuse.
His ticket out was to "play up".
He did so by stealing a bike and leaving as much evidence as he could, because "I wanted to be caught".
That led to him being sent to Holdsworth Boys’ Home in Whanganui, a "massive old Victorian former boys’ boarding school" that had recently been converted.
The abuse he was to suffer there came from those charged with looking after them, as well as other boys.
It was house masters and the deputy principal John Drake, he says.
Mr Jarvis says most names were suppressed following his evidence — Drake’s remains.
"He would come around the dorms and kiss all of the boys good night.
"It was on the lips and with tongue and he would fondle us at the same time."
He was used to being touched, but the kisses somehow felt more invasive.
"I’d never really been kissed before."
Another house master was particularly sadistic and instead of sexual abuse, he got his kicks from violence.
"He would make us stand on a line on the tennis courts. Whenever anyone faltered he would whack us."
Again he eventually began to rebel.
"We were small, we’d could climb right to the top of trees and the bigger boys and the adults couldn’t get us."
On one occasion, he and another boy were chased by the house master and climbed a tree at the front gate.
"The matron came back in a taxi and stopped. This boy threw a little cone at her and knocked her glasses off."
When the boy went to throw another, he fell and landed on the sealed driveway on his head.
The matron saved him from "drowning in his own blood", but the brain injury was permanent.
"We wouldn’t have been in the tree if it wasn’t for that house master."
It was because of that house master he and seven other boys ran away.
They didn’t get far.
On stolen bikes, one was hit by a car and suffered horrific injuries, he says.
At a subsequent visit to the boy in hospital, the boy accused Mr Jarvis of pushing him.
Mr Jarvis later believed the boy had died.
"I though I had killed him, that I had pushed my brother."
He lived with that guilt until 2017, when he found out the boy had survived, he says.
That man will testify before the Royal Commission on Monday.
Mr Jarvis was discharged into the care of his adoptive father.
"I didn’t last in school."
He ended up in Invercargill, where his cohorts were all former wards of the State.
"I stole bikes for them and ended up in borstal."
A stint in Paparua Prison in Christchurch followed and it was only with the birth of his daughter (now aged 40) that he began to turn his life around, Mr Jarvis says.
But the effects have lingered, including drug and alcohol addition, problems with relationships, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
AFTER he reconnected with his biological mother, she tried to become actively involved in his life.
Mr Jarvis says because of all the abuse he had suffered, he did not know how to reconnect with her.
His mother eventually learned of his abuse and neglect, and died carrying the guilt of that knowledge.
Mr Jarvis says "she didn’t have to die like that, knowing and telling me that she should have just kept me".
Mr Jarvis describes how he had to fight to find out who he was, as Child Welfare kept his state ward records from him.
It wasn’t until 2001 that he got a court order directing that his files be released.
He was so distressed reading them that he ripped them up.
When he requested another copy, the records concerning the severe bruising and injuries he received while in the care of his adoptive parents were not included.
In 2002, his adoption was ruled as illegal and "little Lee" would be consigned to history.
"The judge said ‘What name would you like conferred on you?’
"I thought ‘I could be Jimi Hendrix’."
He eventually settled on Toni Lee James Jarvis, the name his mother gave him and her maiden name.
He planned to add his biological father’s name, Rei in future.
The sense of relief with being heard comes with a sense of forgiveness for the boys who abused him.
"I would say ‘Why did you do that to me? What was going on for you?’
"I’d ask what their story of being state care is. What about when they were little boys like me?"
