by Sandra Smyth
I woke up the next morning and the fever had passed. I was weak as a kitten and had to be rushed back into hospital. The doctors told me there was an abscess on my stomach. It had to be removed but I was too weak to undergo an operation.
They kept me in hospital for a week before they removed the abscess and the operation was horrendous. They had to freeze my stomach and then they put a tube in to suction it out. I was given a local anesthetic but I could feel everything and the pain was excruciating.
Johnny sat outside the operating room playing the dutiful husband. I remember when they wheeled me out on the trolley afterwards, he was standing there.
“Jesus, they must have heard your screams in Cork,” was all he said.
The following year I found myself constantly ill and in and out of hospital. I had severe problems with my bowels and they also discovered a cyst on one of my ovaries, which could have required a hysterectomy. As it happens, I didn’t need one but they removed the cyst and it was a big operation.
I seemed to be always recovering from operations at the time. It was as if my body had given up. What’s more I went into a deep, post-natal depression after the birth.
I suppose I was having a form of a nervous breakdown without realising it. The beatings were worse than ever. At one stage a doctor pulled me aside.
“Frances can I talk to you,” he said gently and I knew what was coming. “The nurses have been talking,” he looked me straight in the eye. “Frances you have to tell me, are you being abused by your husband?”
I was taken aback. In all the years I’d been in different hospitals around Dublin I had never been asked outright about the abuse I suffered. No member of staff had ever volunteered to help me and I honestly didn’t know how to react. I’d told them about Aoife the time she cut her lip and I couldn’t cover up for Molly when Johnny had hit her over the head with a saucepan but I had never admitted the abuse I suffered myself.
Back then I was so vulnerable, so tense, so afraid; I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell the doctor the truth. “He’ll kill me as soon as I go home,” I thought.
“Johnny Smith will kill me stone dead.” But more than anything I felt ashamed. I blushed profusely at the attention the doctor was giving me. I didn’t want him to know the truth and I felt acutely embarrassed.
“No doctor,” I shook my head as I stared at the ground. I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Of course I’m not being abused,” I pretended to be shocked. “As I said, I fell down the stairs.”
The young doctor was annoyed with me.
“I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth Frances,” he said.
I said nothing and I kept my head bent and eventually he left the room. He never brought the subject up again.
All the time I was in hospital and afterwards recovering I couldn’t have managed without Molly. She took over the housework and looked after the baby when I took to my bed. The other girls helped out too and between all of us we managed.
Aoife and Molly still called around every day and we remained as close as ever. Frances was a bit different to the other girls. She was too young to remember all of the violence and she had always been Johnny’s favourite.
On one occasion Johnny came in drunk from the pub and there was no dinner made for him. I’d been feeling sick all day and it was all I could do to lift myself off the couch and answer the door to him. He’d forgotten his key.
He strode into the kitchen and sat purposefully at the kitchen table as he usually did.
“Where’s my dinner?” he demanded. “Johnny, I’ve been awful sick today. I just wasn’t able to make it. I’m terrible sorry. The girls have been out all day too. I was hoping one of them might do it.”
“So what have you been doing?” he asked and I knew he wasn’t pleased.
“I’ve been lying down,” I said and the words almost choked me. I knew what was coming next and I couldn’t take the tension. I grabbed a kitchen chair and sat down. My head felt dizzy. I hadn’t eaten a thing all day because I was sick.
“You what?” he roared at me in disgust. “You lazy bitch. I’ve been out working all day and you don’t even have a meal ready for me when I come home. I’ll show you.”
Before he got out of the seat I felt an overwhelming desire to use the toilet. I stood up and made a run for the stairs. I got as far as the hallway before he pulled me back by the hair and a big clump came off in his hand. My scalp stung but I didn’t care, all I could think of was reaching the toilet.
Then he grabbed me again. This time by the arm, he swung me around and punched me in the jaw. I fell to the floor and he began kicking me in the groin. I screamed with the pain.
I tried to hold it but it was no good. Suddenly my bowels opened up, it happened partly from fear and partly because I was unwell. The stench was unbearable. Johnny looked down at the ground and took a step back. I was mortified. I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me at that moment.
“What’s that?” he said looking at the ground. Then he lifted his head.
“You filthy bitch,” he screamed. “Look what you’ve gone and done now.”
He leaned down and threw me another punch in the face before he walked off. I was left a snivelling mess lying in my own faeces.
After that beating, I tried to commit suicide again. Once more it was a failed attempt. This time around I didn’t even give the drugs time to kick in. I panicked and phoned an ambulance myself, and then I was rushed to the hospital where they pumped my stomach before I lost consciousness.
It’s a horrible feeling to have your stomach pumped. They stick a long tube down your throat and deep into the stomach. It feels sore and very un- comfortable. Then they start to bring up this horrible, tar-like muck from inside you. Just to look at it makes you want to retch but you can’t because you have a tube in your mouth. The pump goes on and on for what seems like an eternity until the entire contents of your stomach have been emptied into a bucket beside you.
Believe me it’s not pleasant and you feel totally drained and slightly spaced. I remember lying in the hospital bed afterwards. I felt very low—utterly ashamed and humiliated. The doctors and nurses were polite but I could see they had little sympathy for me.
One of them phoned Johnny and he arrived to take me home that evening. Helen had to come in to visit and was helping me get dressed at the time.
“What the fuck is she doing here?” said Johnny when he arrived into the hospital. “Get her out of here before I throw her out,” he roared at me. “I can dress my own wife.”
I had to ask poor Helen to leave.
There was silence as we drove. I knew he was angry with me for trying to take my own life again but there was an air of triumph about him too. For years he’d been telling me I was mad.
“I’m not the one with the problem,” he used to say. “It’s you, you’re crazy”.
Now I was proving him right; I was living out his insults. I had reached an all-time low in that two-year period. The beatings were more and more frequent back then and he was getting more vicious too. Once the baby was born I realised that I had to get away from him somehow before he killed us all.
After my second suicide attempt, first Molly and then Aoife followed suit and tried to kill themselves.
They both took overdoses as I had. It makes me feel guilty that they followed my example but neither succeeded and I honestly don’t think they wanted to die. It was before they both moved out and I think each of them had reached the same level of despair as I had.
Molly was the first to do it. It happened one night after a fight with Johnny. She was sobbing un- controllably afterwards and she went upstairs to clean her face. She didn’t come down for a long time but I didn’t think much of it. I knew she was upset and I thought I should leave her alone. When she did appear in the front room she was pale as a ghost.
“Oh Ma,” she screamed at me. “Ma, I’ve gone and done it. I’m after taking a load of painkillers. I feel sick Ma, what
am I going to do?”
I got her into the car as quickly as I could and rushed her to the hospital. Thank God we got her in time. They were able to pump her stomach and she lived to tell the tale.
Then a short while later Aoife did the same thing. It was as if once I’d done it, suicide had suddenly become an option. I found Aoife on the bathroom floor one night and I rushed her to hospital.
Neither of the girls ever attempted it again.
“Don’t do it,” I warned them both afterwards. “Why should you let him ruin your life? If you do, then he has won.”
I should have taken my own advice however. In that two-year period I took five overdoses in total and each time in a state of absolute despair. Johnny was drinking like there was no tomorrow and he was continuously violent and belligerent. He became impossible to live with and I just didn’t know what else to do. I’d given up.
After each attempt, the doctors in the hospital would question me as to why I tried to kill myself. I’d lie; tell them I was depressed. I couldn’t admit the truth. On the second last attempt, they sent to see a psychiatrist in the hospital.
“What made you want to kill yourself Mrs. Smith?” he asked me.
I simply hung my head and told him I’d been severely depressed. He told me I needed a rest and recommended that I spend two weeks in a psychiatric hospital.
When I came home and told the Johnny he went mad. “There’s no way you’re going to a fucking mental home,” he screamed at me.
He knew I would have been happy to escape his abuse for two weeks.
“But Johnny I need to go,” I begged him. “It’s only two weeks and then I’ll be back.”
“The answer is ‘No,’” he roared at me and I didn’t try to argue any more.
My last attempt at suicide was the worst. Molly found me on the floor of the bedroom and I was rushed to hospital by ambulance. After they had pumped my stomach I was in such a bad way that my heart stopped momentarily and they had to resuscitate me. I was in intensive care at the time and the doctor told my family I wouldn’t pull through. Helen was in terrible state. She phoned Johnny to tell him I was dying. He was in the pub.
I remember lying on the operating table at the time and thinking,
“Well this is it. I’m finally going to die.”
I’d come so close to death on numerous occasions that it now felt like an old friend and I was ready; I’d had enough.
My life flashed before my eyes and I felt removed from it, as if I was seeing the events of the last few years at a distance. I saw my father walking through the inner city on his way home from work on a sunny evening. He was smiling at me. Then I was standing in the doorway of our first flat, I had Aoife in my arms and she was just a baby. There was an image of young Frances chasing a butterfly in the back garden when she was a toddler and Molly running after her. And Anto as a teenager on a bike before he had AIDS and my mother standing talking to my grandmother.
Then I saw myself sitting on the back of Johnny’s motorbike at the age of 13. I was laughing and the wind was blowing in my hair as we sped along the street. All those images and more flashed, one after the other, in my mind and I suddenly felt at peace.
Then the thought occurred to me that if I died, Johnny would have won and with that realisation I became angry and the anger gave me energy and made me want to fight back. Suddenly the images disappeared and something deep inside me made me gasp for air. I fought back with every ounce of energy in my body.
And as I sucked the air into my lungs, everything seemed clearer, as if a cloud had lifted. I knew then I had to get away. I was going to leave Johnny Smith for once and for all.
chapter twenty-eight
I LEFT THINGS as they were for a few days after I returned from the hospital and then I went to the guards. My GP had instructed me to take photo- graphs of my body the last time Johnny had beaten me up and although many of the scars had healed I still had the photographs. I was terrified that Johnny might find them so I had hidden them under a loose floorboard in the girl’s bedroom.
I pulled them out one night when he was in the pub. They were horrible and it killed me to look at them. I felt so ashamed. At the same time I knew that I had to act quickly and inform the guards.
The young guard in the local station was sympathetic. It was difficult to talk about the years of abuse but I told him everything. I was determined to get rid of Johnny and even shame couldn’t stop me. The guard showed me how to fill out a form and sent me to the courts where I got a barring order against my husband. The judge was a nice, gentle man and he gave it to me without a problem.
When I showed the barring order to Johnny that evening he went crazy. He was sitting in the front room at the time and he jumped off the couch and locked the door. He always made a point of locking the door or pulling the phone lines out when he was going to beat me up. Johnny planned his attacks.
Then he grabbed the barring order out of my hands. He read it for a few minutes and then he grabbed me by the hair and tried to shove it down my throat.
“You bitch,” he screamed. “How dare you!”
I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to suffocate. Helen had given me a lift home from the court and she was in the kitchen at the time but she couldn’t get in because he’d locked the door. She could hear him screaming at me and she banged on the door. “Frances, are you alright?” she shouted out but I couldn’t answer.
Johnny beat me black and blue that evening and left me on the ground, crying. He was furious that I’d dared to stand up to him. Afterwards he went to bed. When he’d stomped upstairs Helen came running in and picked me off the floor.
“Oh Frances, what has he done to you?” she said and now she too was crying.
I was in terrible pain. My whole body ached and he had hurt my throat so badly that I could hardly speak. My sister knelt down on the ground beside me and hugged me. We sat like that for ages, the two of us sobbing.
When I did finally pull myself together, I decided I had to get out before he woke up. We tiptoed around the house, gathering bits and pieces of clothing and shoving them into a small suitcase with Helen helping me. My heart was racing the whole time and all I could think about was getting away. Then I took Caitríona in my arms and young Frances by the hand.
Helen’s son was also there at the time and he came with us. “Come on now,” I whispered to young Frances. “We’ve got to run.”
The five of us managed to get out of the house quietly without waking Johnny and we ran down the road together.
It was raining that day and we got soaked, but we didn’t care. We literally ran as fast as our legs could carry us. I was too scared to even look over my shoulder.
We’d got a few hundred yards up the road when I heard a car behind us and turned around to look. It was Johnny. He’d obviously heard us leave the house and now he was following us.
“Quick,” I shouted to Helen. “Get that bus.”
I pointed at a bus, which had just pulled up beside us. We made a dash for the bus, me with Caitríona in my arms. We made it. I fumbled for the fare as the bus pulled off. I watched out the back window as Johnny’s car pulled over to the side of the street and I heaved a sigh of relief. We’d escaped.
I had nowhere to go to at that time, Johnny knew Helen was with me and he’d come looking for us if we went to her house, so I decided I’d have to level with Johnny’s brother Brian.
I’d ask him if we could stay there until I figured out a plan. We arrived at his house late that evening. We had to get another bus from town. Young Frances was tired and Caitríona was crying.
Brian nearly died when he opened the front door. I hadn’t seen him or his wife for years. Johnny’s family knew he was an alcoholic but none of them knew the full extent of his drinking and the violence. I told Brian everything and he was very shocked. He agreed that the two girls and myself could stay with him for a few days. I was relieved. At least we had somewhere to sleep that night.
It was only a matter of time however until Johnny found out where we were. He came banging on the door two days later. Of course he was drunk out of his mind. Brian refused to let him in; he opened the door and told him to go away.
“You’re drunk, Johnny and Fran doesn’t want to see you.”
Johnny had to leave. He wasn’t able to stand up to his brother.
We stayed with Brian, his wife and three kids for a week and a half. They were very kind to us, but I knew I couldn’t stay there for much longer. It was small house and we all barely fitted into it. Young Frances was still in secondary school and it meant she had to get two buses to school. Besides we only had a few pieces of clothing with us and I had no money.
I went to visit my father and while I was there Johnny phoned. He was sober for once and reasonable on the phone.
“Please come home,” he begged. “I promise you it won’t happen again.”
I gave in. I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. We would have been destitute, living on the streets and no matter how bad things were at home at least we had a roof over out head. I returned home but of course nothing changed.
A few weeks later Johnny beat me up very badly. This time I decided to go back to the guards and they persuaded me to get him charged with assault.
I had to go to Kilmainham District Court to give evidence against him.
I’ll never forget the morning of the trial. I arrived and two of his mates were waiting outside the door of the courtroom. I recognised them both, they were hard men with reputations. Before I could get past them, one grabbed me by the arm and pulled me aside.
“If you give evidence against Johnny, I’ll shoot you,” he whispered in my ear. “You won’t walk out of that courtroom alive Frances Smith.”
He was a huge man with a firm grip and I was terrified. I didn’t know if he had a gun or not but people used to say he carried a blade which he used to slice open people’s faces.
I was shaking with fear when I walked into that courtroom but I was defiant. I didn’t care if they killed me; I was going to give evidence against Johnny Smith come hell or high water. I sat down and waited to be called to the stand. I looked straight ahead and tried to remain calm. But the two thugs kept turning their heads to stare at me.