Long road towards justice for troubled life

Outside the tightly closed gates stands Brian Gracie, his black leather jacket tightly buttoned up against the November chill, his features craggy and weather beaten like a shady character from a Rebus novel.

He points into the distance. "Aye, that's where I used to do the housebreakings," he explains. "Marchmont, Morningside, all around here. I'd come back and do the houses.

"See the Sick Kids' hospital along the road? They had a rocking horse and I'd go along and play on it when I was young, then I'd go and steal something."

Brian is now 47, his life's journey mapped out by spells learning how to look after himself and rubbing shoulders with Scotland's hard men in Barlinnie and Saughton, and earlier, as a frightened little boy in hospital institutions pumped full of drugs or in care homes run by matrons with iron rods were he was beaten and kept away from his mother.

He would go on to steal, break into houses, con people and generally get into trouble - "but I was never ever violent," he quickly adds. When he recently saw a full list of his convictions -page after page, 127 incidents in all - even he was shocked.

He didn't know it at the time - indeed, it would take countless court appearances followed by 12 difficult years of painstaking, determined research to discover it - but it all started right where he is standing today, outside his old primary school.

And soon the fallout from a day in mid May 1965 and the impact it had on his entire life, will be played out in a civil court hearing to determine whether he should receive a 1 million payout.

"I was so happy when the letter arrived," he smiles, referring to Friday's letter from his lawyer confirming he has finally been granted Legal Aid to take his civil case for negligence against Edinburgh City Council to a Court of Session hearing - a case ten years in the making that could well make Scottish legal history.

"That letter means so much to me, it means that at last people are starting to understand what I've been through, that what I was doing was because of what had happened to me. I want people to realise if the accident hadn't happened, I wouldn't have been brain injured and my life would probably have been completely different."

It was May 19, 1965, when Brian, a perfectly ordinary five-year-old boy in his first few weeks at Sciennes Primary School was chased during a playground incident. Anxious not to be caught, he charged through the open iron gates at the front of the school - normally closed, they had been left ajar during school playtime after a late milk delivery. With no barrier to stop him, Brian pelted straight into the road.

The car that hit him was a police limousine being driven by a sergeant and containing Lothian's then Chief Constable, Sir William Merrilees.

Brian was unconscious for 30 hours, yet despite serious face and head injuries he returned home in Roseneath Terrace three days after the accident.

Soon parents Annette and John Gracie began to notice how their happy, easy-going younger son was gradually turning into a thieving troublemaker, withdrawn one minute, temper flaring the next. Soon the authorities would notice too - he stole from his school, he ran away, he caused trouble and, admits Brian, "went generally haywire".

It was a pattern that would continue for the next 29 years despite various attempts to control his behaviour: there was a spell at Ladyfield West, part of Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries where Brian spent three years pumped with drugs used to treat psychosis and Parkinson's disease. "There were a lot worse than me there," says Brian. "But OK, I had behaviour problems, I couldn't read and I couldn't write, my behaviour was away, my personality was away and I was away from my family - I was a wee boy and I was lucky to see my mum once a month.

"I hated my mum," he adds in a quiet, saddened voice. "All I knew was that she took me to Ladyfield and left me there and I absolutely hated her for that. Of course, I didn't know she had no choice, she was told to do it and that she hated doing it too."

His nightmare continued when he was shuttled from hospital to care home, via Corsbiehall in Dumfries, a school for troubled youngsters where two days after his arrival he approached the matron to ask for something and was promptly smacked. Other punishments involved him being locked in a cupboard and hit with a belt. The school's ethos of punishment came to a head when a little boy was hit so hard his skull fractured, the police were called and staff were charged.

"Is it any wonder I kept running away?" says Brian.

His behaviour worsened as he grew older. There followed years of petty crime, breaking into homes in areas close to his former home and school.

"I didn't even know that I'd lived in Roseneath Terrace until a few years ago and that's when it dawned on me why I always seemed to come back to there. I'd break into houses in Marchmont and Morningside and then I'd give the stuff away, I didn't want it.

"I suppose when there's something wrong with you, you find it hard to relate to people, and they struggle to relate to you. Maybe I was trying to find a way to get people to notice me and that there was something not right.

"I was like Jekyll and Hyde," he adds, "one day I'd be getting into all kinds of trouble, the next day I'd be totally normal and I'd want to be like everyone else, with a normal life and a normal job."

Brian was 34 years old when, suddenly, his life fell into place. He joined a friend visiting a man in hospital who had been knocked down - bizarrely on Sciennes Road, not far from his own childhood accident.

"Something just clicked in my head," says Brian. "I started to get flashbacks, I asked my family to tell me what had happened and it started to come together - no-one had mentioned that I'd had this accident before and I suppose I believed what everyone told me, that I was plain 'mental' or I drank too much. I didn't even know that I'd had a brain injury until I fought for my medical records - they took me days to read because I kept breaking down in tears- and found it there.

"It was only then that I realised that it was the past was responsible. Take away the road accident and I would have been a normal child, I could have had a successful job - no-one wants to employ me with my criminal record - I could have had something to pass down to my kids. I became so angry."

Brian's wife Suzanne, 28, nods in sympathy. "It's been like putting together a giant jigsaw," she explains. "Brian has spent ages gathering years of medical papers, legal documents.

"But he's got to do it, it's like showing everyone that none of it was his fault is the final piece of the jigsaw."

Brian started his legal battle almost ten years ago, but it is only now that the Legal Aid Board has agreed to fund what should be the final stage of his fight. "I can confirm that an action was taken against us in 1997. This has not been progressed and is still happening," says a city council spokeswoman.

Pictures of the couple's children Michaela, ten, Ryan, nine and eight-year-old Victoria, adorn their Ferniehill Road home. Brian is determined the up and coming court hearing will pave the way for a future free of the stigma that surrounds his criminal past.

"I haven't done a thing wrong in 12 years, ever since I started to realise that I have a brain injury and that's what has caused all of this. I've now spent that time fighting to gather the evidence I need to go to court - seven expert witnesses and papers going back 40 years.

"I want to do it for the kids. I want them to understand that there is more to me than five pages of criminal convictions."