She was becoming like the mother of the house, especially when Mum was out at work, but she still cried a lot, like a little girl. She would try to cook my tea while I was out playing, heating up beans and stuff even though she couldn’t really reach the stove properly. It always tasted pretty bad but I was happy to eat it; all the food in our house tasted bad so it made no difference. If you are hungry enough and you know there is nothing else coming, you’ll eat whatever you’re given. We used to pick chewing gum up off the streets and pop it into our mouths, chewing and spitting out the stones and dirt until it was clean and we could walk around feeling posh, like we were able to afford gum of our own.
The council gave us the money to build an extension in order for Shirley to have a room of her own with a lift, so she didn’t have to share a bedroom with Mum and Dad, giving them more privacy as a couple. Shirley had had an operation and had a bag fitted so she didn’t pee everywhere any more. The bag would fill up and we would have to empty it for her every few hours. We also had to try to keep her clean so she didn’t get an infection where the tube went into her. It was an improvement to her life, but it hurt her sometimes because her skin would become sore where the bag was attached to her with stickers and we would have to clean her with surgical spirit and friar’s balsam. The little stickers looked like silver smiles and Christina and I used to stick them over our mouths to make it look like we were smiling.
One afternoon I came in at the usual time, hot and tired from school and playing. Dad didn’t attack me and seemed in quite a good mood for once, so I asked if there was any pop. He gave me a bottle of what looked like lemonade. Thirsty, I took a swig and immediately gagged, realizing he had tricked me with some of Shirley’s urine. Not content with having executed his practical joke, he then forced me to keep drinking it. Seeing how much I hated it he added it to his list of regular tortures for me.
Chapter Six
OUR CLARE
When Mum discovered she was pregnant again, Dad told me that this time he was going to have a proper son, one who would be good. His words hurt, but I still looked forward to having a brother. The day Mum went into hospital, Dad came back home alone.
‘Your mum died in childbirth,’ he told us, collapsing down into a chair with his head in his hands.
The news was so terrible I could hardly take it in. How would we manage without her? If Mum were dead, we would be left totally at his mercy. Life would be unliveable without her. All three of us burst into tears of inconsolable grief and shock.
‘I’m only kidding,’ he said, apparently contemptuous of us for taking the joke so badly. ‘She’s had a girl. But it was a difficult birth; she could’ve died.’
We loved Clare to bits the moment Mum brought her home, even though she had some problems. She had borderline Down’s syndrome, and hydrochephalus like Shirley. For a while Dad acted differently, a bit more like a proud father, but as it became more obvious Clare had problems, his frustrations took hold again. He told Mum it was her fault that she had had two children with problems, that it showed she wasn’t a fit mother. The doctors said it was just bad luck, as if our family needed any more of that, but he didn’t believe them. He said Mum was useless because she couldn’t even give him a son. I didn’t understand why he would say that. She’d given him me, hadn’t she? Was I really so naughty that I didn’t even count as a proper son?
It was a relief to have Mum home from hospital, providing at least a bit of care and nurturing for us all, but at night we could hear her screaming downstairs and I knew that he was hurting her, just like he hurt me. None of us ever dared to go down to see what was happening. I didn’t even dare to go to the bathroom in the night in case I came across Dad and he would be angry, so if I knew I couldn’t hold on till morning I used to get up quietly and pee in a drawer or kneeling down on the carpet so it wouldn’t make any noise and attract attention. No one noticed the smell because the whole house stank of urine anyway. Only years later did I discover that Christina was doing exactly the same in her room on the other side of the landing.
One night I did pluck up the courage to come out of my room for some reason in the middle of the night. I got as far as the top of the stairs and noticed that Shirley’s door was open. Peering down through the banisters I saw that Dad was lying on top of her and she was stretching out her hand, as if trying to reach me. I scurried back to my bed, not wanting to believe what I had seen. In the morning I told myself to forget the scene, convinced myself that I must have been mistaken. I had too much to think about already, I couldn’t cope with any more.
Mum was as scared of him as we were, with all his shouting and violence. He would quite often throw his dinner at her for no good reason. She had given up work to have Clare but it wasn’t long before he was telling her she had to get another job, and she went to work at the bakery on a shift from two till ten, leaving him alone with us again every afternoon and evening. Clare would cry a lot and Dad’s answer was always to stuff some chocolate in her mouth. Her grown-up teeth turned black and had rotted away before they even had a chance to come through.
One night, when Clare was about six months old, she was crying so loud and so long I plucked up the courage to come out of my room again and tiptoed down to the next landing to see what was wrong, my heart thumping with fear at what I might find. I saw Dad bringing her out of their room, where her cot was, and I froze, terrified he would see me, unable even to run back to the safety of my room. As I watched he deliberately dropped her down the stairs. As she bounced from step to step, I wasn’t able to stop my screams from escaping, making him look straight up at me. As she came to rest at the bottom, her screams echoing mine, Dad suddenly started acting as if it had been an accident. He ran down just as Christina came out of the sitting room and scooped up poor, crumpled baby Clare. All three of us were crying and Dad was insisting he had slipped and she’d fallen out of his arms. It was the first time for sure I knew he was lying about something. I’d seen exactly what he’d done. I couldn’t understand it; she was only a baby, she couldn’t have done anything naughty enough to deserve that, could she?
Left to his own devices for longer each day he became even nastier and I heard him shouting more and more at Christina and Shirley, which I knew wasn’t fair. I could understand why he was always angry with me because I was such a naughty boy, but I knew the girls were never naughty, so I didn’t think it was right for him to punish them. Christina spent her whole time trying to do things for us, and Shirley couldn’t move far enough to do anything bad. They were complete innocents, so why was he so angry with them?
When Clare was three or four years old he used to tell me he was going to kill her while I was away at school. ‘I’ll burn her fingers in the fire,’ he’d say, and laugh when I cried out at the thought. I had no doubt he was capable of doing such a thing, and each day during our morning break at school I would sneak out through some bent railings at the back of the playground, run all the way round the back of the houses, let myself into our back garden and creep towards the house, squeezing myself behind the shed, terrified he would look out of the window and see me. When I reached the house I would turn over the mop bucket, which always stood by the back door, and raise myself up just high enough to peer in through the downstairs window, holding my breath in case I gave myself away, desperate to see Clare moving around and to check he hadn’t hurt her. Sometimes, if the windows were open, I would be able to hear him upstairs with Mum in the bedroom and the sounds would make me feel sick, but I would still hang on, my heart thumping with fear, until I had seen Clare and put my mind to rest enough to go back to school.
He would always draw the curtains when he was watching the television in the early evening, so we were cut off from the outside world completely. We would all be in the room together and he would fetch his filthy magazines out and get us to look at the pictures. Sometimes they were just women in poses, sometimes couples doing things, sometimes they were pictures of men and close-up shots
of erect penises. I didn’t want to look at any of them.
‘Look at her,’ he’d say to me, pointing to some pouting, naked girl. ‘Do you think she’s a virgin? Look at her fanny.’
‘What do you think of that?’ he’d ask Christina, showing her another picture. ‘Look at the tits on that.’ Then he would grab Shirley’s breasts in front of us and laugh.
Sometimes he would show us dirty films on the wall with an old cinematic projector. We hated them but he wouldn’t let us leave the room while they were on. He said we needed to learn what life was about. ‘Please, Daddy, no,’ we would plead. ‘We don’t want to watch these films.’ He would take films of us as well, although we never knew what he did with them.
He would make us go upstairs and put on Mum’s little shorty nighties, dressing us up like dolls and then just making us sit there in the lounge with him. (Much later, I found out that he used to enjoy wearing Mum’s clothes himself sometimes, telling her he liked the feel of the material on his skin.) He had complete power over all of us, able to make us do whatever he wanted. We were all so traumatized we never found a way to talk to one another about the things that were happening and how we felt about them. All three of us just did as we were told, until he eventually left us alone and we could get on with our own lives together for a few hours.
He would put the chain on the front door whenever he was messing about with us, in case Mum came home early, which she did once or twice.
‘Why’s the chain on the door?’ she wanted to know, when she finally managed to attract his attention and was let in.
‘Because I was upstairs in the bathroom,’ he said quickly, ‘and I forgot to take it off again.’
Now that I was eight or nine years old, I would see other boys at school sometimes who had managed to get hold of dirty magazines like Dad’s. They would huddle in corners giggling over the pictures and want me to look at them too, but I was terrified, thinking they were all going to turn out to be like him. Everything was so frightening and confusing. On my way home from the school yard each day I used to hug the wall and cry, trying to get some comfort out of the cold stones.
However often experience taught me that nothing good would ever happen in our family, I always remained hopeful, especially as Christmas approached and all the other kids at school started to talk about the presents they hoped they would get. One Christmas morning, even before I opened my eyes, I was aware Dad was in my room. He was leaning over the bed, staring at me. I smiled at him hopefully, feeling excited at the prospect of at least one day of love and attention.
‘What are you fucking smiling at?’ he wanted to know.
‘Has Father Christmas been?’
‘Yeah, he’s been.’ I followed the direction of his gaze to a potato lying on the bed. ‘There you go.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Eat it.’
He sat and watched as I took a bite and started to chew, trying to force my tensed throat to accept the bitter-tasting pulp and swallow.
Everything he ever gave us was rubbish. He once came home with a sack filled with old broken toys that someone had thrown out.
There you are,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve got you a train set.’
He laughed at me as I took it up to my room and sorted it all out on the floor. It was exciting to have something constructive to do and I really wanted to get it working, to show him how clever I was. I went downstairs and found an old piece of Brillo and set about cleaning up the track, rubbing and polishing the years of grime away until it shone like new. All the time I was thinking, Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off. I was never allowed to swear out loud. It took hours of work, and I would get little electric shocks every time I touched it, but I actually managed to get the whole thing working, even the little light on the front of one of the trains. I used to put the light on at night, when the house was shrouded in gloom, and just sit watching the engine going round and round, feeling satisfied and proud of my achievement.
Things became a lot worse up at the pen when it was just him and me up there. It was a longer walk now from Cranbrook Street than it had been from Smallshaw and he would go as fast as he could, shouting abuse at me as I lagged behind. But I still wanted to go with him because I was proud that I had a dad who wanted to share his life with me, and I desperately wanted to show him how useful I could be to him.
‘Come on, you little bastard, faster.’
Sometimes he would get so far ahead that he would be able to hide in the hedges, particularly on dark evenings, and then jump out at me, frightening me half to death.
‘See that moon?’ he’d ask, pointing up into the sky. ‘He’s gonna get you.’
From the time we moved to Cranbrook Street, Granddad from the Pen disappeared, and no one ever explained what had happened to him. I suppose he must have died.
Dad would bully me relentlessly while we were there, treating me like a slave. He would make me fetch water from the well in a bucket that was too big for me to carry. I had to get down on all fours, float the bucket on its side and scoop the water in with my hands, but it would keep on bobbing to the top and not filling up. When I did manage to get some water into it, it would be too heavy for me to carry and its rough edges would bite into my legs as I stumbled back, desperate to please him. Most of the water would have gone by the time I got to him.
‘What the fuck is that?’ he would demand, before hitting me to the ground. ‘Now go and get the fucking water, you useless little bastard!’
Sometimes he would push me into the pig slurry, half pretending he was joking, half punishing me for all my mistakes. It was impossible to remove the smell from my skin once we got home; it became ingrained into me. As well as using the dirty magazines he kept up there, he would also drop his trousers and have sex with the pigs, unbothered whether I saw him. Many years later I discovered he’d let Christina see him as well.
He would force me to do things like kill a chicken, even though my hands were hardly big enough to grip their necks. I so much wanted to please him by doing the jobs he told me to do, but some of them were too frightening.
‘I don’t want to, Daddy. Please don’t make me.
‘Fucking hold it! Put it under your arm, go on, under your arm. Now twist its head, on the neck. Fucking kill it!’
The first time I became hysterical as the giant bird flapped and pecked in my arms. ‘You soft cunt,’ he said, taking the bird from me, wringing its neck with one easy movement and then punching me to the ground before walking away.
Once he’d killed them he would take them round the pubs to sell them, or down to the market, sometimes taking me with him. To the outside world he showed such a different face to the one we all saw at home. To everyone else he was always laughing and joking, always working, a good husband, father and provider. From his family’s point of view he was a good man who had taken on a down-at-heel young Irishwoman and her three kids, one of whom was disabled, taking them from the worst council estate in the area to a private house. No one on the outside ever saw the way he treated us in that private house, or in that fortified pen.
‘I could snuff you out like that,’ he would sneer, snapping his fingers to show how easily he could dispense with such a worthless piece of rubbish as me.
The Jack Russells were often having litters of puppies, which he would sell around the pubs, but one day he decided on a different course. Christina and I had been playing with them when he came in with a black blanket and threw them into it.
‘Come on, Stuart, we’re going.’
We went out to the Austin Maxi he drove then and he tossed the blanket containing the puppies on to the floor in front of me. They were squealing for their mother.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Up the pen.’
When we got there he took the blanket, untied it and dropped the puppies on my lap. As I played with them and stroked them he fetched a bucket of water. He took each puppy in turn and held it under the water. At first
I didn’t understand what was going on as he tossed the limp, wet little bodies back into my lap, laughing at the puzzlement on my face. I kept stroking them, not able to take in what was happening. Then he took them, one by one, and hurled them over the hedge. I begged him to stop but he just kept going with a daft smile on his face, mocking me.
When he had puppies he wanted to sell he would cut off their tails with a big pair of scissors, making me cry as loudly as they did. Then he would cauterize the stumps with a red-hot knife from the stove. I suppose some of his actions were the traditional country ways of doing things, lessons he had probably learned from his own father, but I couldn’t understand the pleasure he seemed to take in hurting people and animals. On one occasion he castrated Bobby the boar and rubbed the blooded testicles on my face, pretending it was a joke, but not letting me wriggle free until he’d finished. For some reason he hated cats; whenever he saw one he would kick it as hard as he could.
Although I loathed all the things he did to me, he was still my hero, especially when he got himself a gun as part of his continuous campaign against the rats up at the pen. It was a 12-bore and he kept it in the bedroom, along with all the ammunition. I sneaked in there one afternoon to have a look at it. As I gazed at it in wonder, stroking it nervously, I was suddenly aware of his presence behind me.
‘What’re yer doing?’
‘Just looking.’ I knew something bad was coming.
‘Sit on the bed.’ I obeyed, trembling. He levered the gun open and loaded a bright red cartridge. He snapped the gun shut. ‘Open yer mouth.’
I was shaking so much my teeth chattered against the barrel as he forced it into my open mouth and held it there, reminding me yet again that he could snuff me out in a second. ‘I’m going to kill you now.’
Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed Page 5