A FORMER caretaker accused of drugging and raping young boys described the late-night attacks in a deserted college as their "little game", a tearful alleged victim told a court yesterday.

He said that John James Sanderson, 35, told him and another boy to sniff cloths soaked in chloroform as it would make them high.

They later awoke, he said, in the deserted teaching centre in Northgate, Darlington, groggy and with their trousers round their ankles.

The alleged victim, now 22, claims he suffered abuse at the hands of Mr Sanderson, of Dunholme Road, Newcastle, from the age of ten until he was an adult.

Giving evidence behind a screen and choking back tears, he told the jury at Teesside Crown Court: "I was wanting him so much to stop because I was frightened. If I refused to do it he would hit us, punch us."

When he got older, he said, he refused to take part in the abuse so Mr Sanderson, formerly of Bishop Auckland, Escomb and Shildon, began using chloroform.

On the first occasion, the court heard, Mr Sanderson took him and a younger boy to the centre one evening in 1995. "John would go to the cleaning cupboard and he'd come back with a bottle of chloroform and two cloths," said the alleged victim.

"I put it on my mouth and then I'd be unconscious."

He said he awoke alone in the college's lounge and found the other boy "curled up in a ball" unconscious.

Over a period of months, he said he went to the centre with Mr Sanderson alone about six times, and with him and the other boy about four or five times.

Mr Sanderson, who worked at the centre between 1994 and 1996, denies four charges of rape, three of serious sexual assault, indecency with a child and indecent assault between 1990 and May last year.

The case continues.