by Ford, Donna
After Helen left my Dad, Auntie Mae came round to the house once or twice to check on us. On one of these occasions, she asked me what had happened between Helen and my Dad. I said that I wasn't sure, but that they had been rowing and then Helen just left. My Dad had told me that Helen had picked up one of his crutches and hit him with it, and I told Auntie Mae about this. She replied that was funny because Helen had said my Dad had hit her with the crutch.
Whatever the real reason was, Helen just left.
She left behind her belongings . . . and she left behind her three children.
Everything went quiet that night. It was late December, round about the time of New Year as 1969 faded into 1970. The next morning, the whole impact of what happened sank in. From now on there was to be no more Helen. No more being locked up. No more starvation. No more silence. No more restrictions and hours upon hours being spent on punishments.
No more abuse. Or so I thought.
I would be able to eat. I would be able to talk. I would be able to go outside – I would be free! I just knew she wouldn't be back this time because my Dad was so angry with her. In fact, I had never heard or seen him so furious. Thinking back, and putting two and two together, this may have been the time he found out who Karen's father was. In later years, he told us that up until that point we all thought he was Karen's Dad too. He had known before Karen was born that he wasn't the father – he'd been told by doctors that he couldn't have any more children after he'd had an operation on his prostate gland.
No-one seemed to share my sheer joy in Helen's departure apart from my older half-brother. My Dad was very sad but also angry. Helen's two boys were tearful, and baby Karen just needed attention.
On the day that followed Helen's departure, my Dad shouted through tome as I lay in bed. In my mind, I had been going through the things I would now be allowed to do, dreaming of a normal childhood and a happy life. When I heard his voice, I dragged myself out of my thoughts and rushed through to the living room. It was such a normal thing for a father to call through to his child, and yet, for me, it was alien to think that he would be doing anything other than chastising me for something Helen claimed I had done.
'Donna?' he said as I walked into the room. 'Sit down, lass. We need to talk.' I don't think I'd ever been asked to sit down in that room before, never mind be offered a two-way conversation. On top of that, I was alone with my Dad – something that had rarely happened on a positive level for years. I remember that he sighed a lot and seemed to be finding it difficult to work out what he wanted to say. Eventually, the words came out. 'Donna, you're the woman of the house now,' he said simply. I was 11 years old! I asked him whether Helen was really gone, and whether she had taken her children with her. He said that, even though she wouldn't be back, all the kids were still there, even the boys whom she had seemed to dote on.
'You'll have to take care of the barns, Donna,' continued my Dad. 'Helen won't be back, I can promise you that, but you'll need to take her place. Cooking, cleaning – you understand, hen? That's your job now.'
'Just me, Dad?' I asked.
'Aye – the boys can help you when they can manage, but you've got responsibilities now,' he told me. Frances had long gone, but Adrian and Gordon were old enough to help. Even Andrew, although younger, was bigger than me in size. None of that seemed to matter. I was the girl, so it was my responsibility. 'Things will be tight, Donna,' continued my Dad. 'I'll no' work again, and everyone will muck in when they're able, but you . . . this is up to you now.'
I was so relieved that Helen had gone – and that my Dad had reassured me she wouldn't be coming back – that I didn't really dwell on the unfairness of it all. A starved, beaten, abused, neglected 11-year-old being in charge of a whole household was still preferable to her returning.
Or so I thought.
'Everything will be fine, Dad,' I said, over and over again. 'Everything will be fine. You won't let her back, will you?' He gave a little snort and said, 'No, no, I won't – you can rest assured of that. And, Donna?' he asked. 'The bairn? Karen's yours now.' She had left the baby! I shouldn't have been surprised really – my own mother had proved just how easy it was to leave babies. 'You'll have to be her Mummy – best start now, best go see what she wants.' I walked through to Karen's cot where she was standing, gurgling and smiling at me as soon as she saw my face. Her nappy was soaked and stinking; Helen obviously hadn't changed her before she left, and my Dad hadn't given it any thought either. I picked her out of her cot – it was a strain on my skinny little arms – and started telling her that I was her Mum from this point on.
Initially, it was hard work. I was a tiny little girl, very weak from being starved. Now I had the workload of a grown woman. I cooked the food that I'd learned about in home economics at school: soup, cheese scones, apple crumble and suchlike. I was given a book by my Dad called Home Management from my Auntie Nellie's collection, and I learned from this how to cook other things too – smoked haddock in milk being my Dad's favourite. I was always trying to make him proud of me – doing his perfect meal, running the house, dealing with Karen – but he never really said much, nothing about being proud of me or that I was doing well.
After being denied food for so long, I began to eat anything I could get my hands on, almost as if I was storing it all up in case things went bad again. This made me incredibly ill – in fact, at one point I needed an emergency appendectomy as my body couldn't take what I was doing to it. I'd had the most awful stomach pains, so my Dad took me to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh. I didn't see him for two weeks until he collected me. He told me it had been impossible for him to make any hospital visits due to the problems he was having with his feet, and also because he had to look after the other children. I do remember my Dad's sister, Auntie Madge, visiting, and I also remember having a lovely time in hospital because I got to do school work, play with toys and have meals cooked for me.
It was a very strange time for all of us as the dynamics of the house had changed overnight. Even Helen's boys were not as sure as they had been previously. Gordon and Andrew were used to talking down to me. They were accustomed to me being seen only occasionally, and being treated worse than the dog whenever I was let out. Now they had to face up to a different world. Dad sat us all down the day after Helen left and told us how things were to change. Helen's sons were really upset because their Mum had left. They didn't see her the way I did. She was their Mummy and here was my Dad, who didn't share blood with them, telling us she was gone and definitely wouldn't return. The youngest one was crying and the eldest just kept saying, 'What are we going to do?'
All I could see was that Helen, my tormentor and abuser, had gone.
I liked cooking and I liked looking after the baby. However, I didn't like the housework because I had done so much of it when Helen was around and it brought back bad memories. I also didn't like being left with Helen's older son, Gordon, when my Dad hobbled over to the pub twice a day. He would torment me, just as he had when Helen was still at home, calling me names like pissy pants, black sheep and bastard, and sometimes nipping me or kicking his football at me. Gordon saw no reason to stop now, even though my Dad would tell him off if he caught him.
Helen may have gone but her son was a constant reminder of her. I know that children are a product of parenting, and Gordon was certainly a child who had learned from his mother. Although I was a couple of years older than him, I was very small for my age and hadn't yet learned to stand up for myself. Gordon missed his Mum and blamed me for her leaving. He would often tell me that I drove her to it by being so bad. A big part of me believed that.
By the time I started high school in the autumn of 1970, we had a home help allocated to us by the Social Work Department. Her name was Nora. Nora would come in three mornings a week and clean the house. That woman really had a job on her hands. The place was always filthy, despite my efforts. Sometimes Karen, who was only a toddler, would potter around after me with a clo
th, but the boys and my Dad never lifted a finger to do any housework. No-one washed the bath out. The toilet was disgusting, the floors caked in dirt. The cooker could barely be seen for grime. Ironing was piled up in a basket behind the sofa. The fireplace was always full of ash and dog ends that my Dad would flick into it as he sat in his armchair reading the paper or watching television.
Despite having Nora around, there was still a lot for me to do. It was very hard going because my day was so long and I was still only 12. I'd get up around 6.30 in the morning to get Karen ready. I'd give her and the boys some breakfast and then I'd walk the three miles or so to Karen's nursery where I would drop her off around 8am. Then I'd walk a mile and a half to school. When school was finished, I'd walk back to the nursery to pick up Karen, then head home.
In the early days, my Dad would be at home when I got back from school and he'd give me a pound to go and get something for tea. When he started going to the pub in the afternoon and staying there for most of the day, I would have to go to the pub door and ask for him. I would then go off to Laing's, the butcher on Easter Road, and get rissoles or potted meat. If it was a Friday I'd sometimes go to the fishmonger's and get fishcakes. Once a week I went to the steamie to do the washing. After cooking tea and getting Karen into bed, it would be time to clear up, and that was pretty much my routine for every day. There was no-one there to say, 'How was your day?' or 'Do you have homework?' as I do with my little girl now. It was just work and sleep.
Even little things would take up so much energy – things like Karen's nappies. These had to be scraped, washed, steeped in bleach, rinsed, washed again, hung up to dry, taken in when it rained, put out again for a few minutes of sunshine, brought in, and then it all started again. Every part of me was in physical agony, but it came from hard work, not a belt buckle across my ribs.
The upside was that Helen never tried to come back, as far as I can recall. Maybe she contacted my Dad. I don't know – he certainly never said. I began to believe that I was safe. She had gone, and although my days were hard and long, I was more settled than I had ever been with her there.
And there was Karen.
I adored that little bundle of laughs and love and, as I've said before, I got something out of it too. I didn't just discover that I was able to love; I also found out that I was capable of being loved. The irony isn't lost on me that it took the child of my tormentor to give me something so precious. Karen's affection for me was unconditional. I was her world. I'd whisper to her, 'I'm your Mummy now, Karen,' even though she never once asked or cried for her birth mother.
Chapter Eighteen
GETTING BY
MONEY WAS ALWAYS AN issue in the house – there wasn't much of it at all. My Dad had a weekly pension from the GPO and a small army pension, but because he owned his house and still had a mortgage on it, he couldn't get any money from the 'social'. There was always a plan afoot in the house to make money, but the stack of bills behind the clock on the mantelshelf got thicker by the day. Most of them were unopened and unpaid, and it wasn't long before we had to pay for our electricity, gas and television by putting a coin into a slot. Our telephone was soon cut off, too, and food was what we could afford, mostly soup. We rarely had meat – only on high days and holidays, as my Dad would say.
My Dad found a few methods of trying to raise a bit of cash. One of the things he did – one of the things he got us all to do – was strip wire. Whoever was in and not doing anything would sit down in the living room and take the plastic covering off copper wire. This was time-consuming and unpleasant work, and by the end of it our hands would be aching and covered in tiny cuts. We would all sit on the floor and take lengths of electric wire covered in plastic. We'd cut the plastic off just enough to allow us leverage to tear it, revealing the bright copper wire within. The copper would then be rolled into balls and put aside ready for me to take down to the scrap merchant in Easter Road down by Hobs Football Club. Here it would be weighed and I'd be given cash for it.
My Dad would also get me to take rags there, and I'd get more money for wool than any other fabric. The rags were generally old clothes and blankets that we could no longer use or wear, but sometimes I would go around the doors of our neighbors pretending I was collecting for a jumble sale for the Brownies or Guides. I'd persuade people to part with their cast-offs, taking anything they 'donated'. Sometimes, I even got something one of us could wear. Helen hadn't taken her sewing machine, and this became valuable for me as I was able to alter cast-offs to fit. I'd learned to sew in school in the same way as I'd learned to cook; we were lucky that domestic science lessons were part of the curriculum back then.
It was a life based on scrimping and getting by – and my Dad's needs came before those of anyone else. He spent a lot of time in pubs – and I spent a lot of time outside them, desperately trying to catch him before he spent every last penny on booze for him and his mates. Sometimes, I'd venture inside and moan and moan at him until he relented and gave me a few bob for essentials. I hated doing it – I hated having to squeeze every last penny out of him – but it was rare for him just to give me cash voluntarily.
My Dad was also smoking a lot. Again, his fag requirements came higher than the family's need for food, clean clothes or other things. He smoked Embassy Regal by this stage – it had been Woodbine or Capstan in the past, but he had moved on to Embassy because they came with a voucher. These vouchers were meant to be saved and then, from a special company brochure, exchanged for things like household goods. That wasn't what my Dad did with them, though. Local shops were always willing to buy these vouchers, so we had a stash of them behind the clock on the mantelshelf, ready to be sold on.
Dad's drinking cost so much money, and it took him away from us as often as he could manage. When I asked him why he went to the pub so much, his reply was always the same – he needed the adult company. Dad started going drinking soon after Helen's departure. At first, it was just an occasional lunchtime pint followed by a flutter at the bookies, but soon it increased to him going in at opening time every day at 11.30am, and leaving when it closed for the afternoon around 2pm. He would say that he only went for the chat and to get out of the house, but he seemed perfectly content to sit there all day, playing dominoes, smoking and supping beer.
Whenever my Dad did come home, or when I finally managed to drag him back there, he would sit in 'his' chair by the fire and do little more than smoke, with either a can of Tennent's lager or a cup of tea by his side. My Dad's cup of tea was a ritual. It was made in an old tin teapot on the stove, with 'real' tea leaves, and would sit there all day. In his right hand would be a cigarette, and on his lap would be the Sun newspaper. He sat there with that paper in his lap, open either at the racing page or the crossword. His feet would be soaking in a basin of warm water and there he would sit for the rest of the day. Everything would come to him: cups of tea when he wanted; his dinner; the baby for a sit on his lap; a top-up of hot water in his basin; and us if we wanted to talk to him.
Because of his accident, my Dad wasn't very mobile, although he did manage to get to all of those sessions at the pub, and occasionally to the Hibs Club or bowling club! He was in a great deal of pain from his injuries, and on top of that he suffered from chronic bronchitis from the years of constant smoking. He coughed terribly when he got up in the morning; his breathing was laboured and he was developing a humped back due to his limited lung capacity.
My father continued his daily trips to the pub. As I got older, he increased his hours to those of the local licensing laws, going straight in at opening time, coming home for food when it closed for the afternoon, and then back again as soon as it opened at 5pm until closing time at around 10 or 11pm.
On Fridays or Saturdays, he started to bring people back after hours for more drink. They'd have a sing-song or listen to Billy Connolly on the old record player. Sometimes these would be fun times – if they were just singing and laughing, there was a good atmosphere and lots of hilarity,
plus I'd get to stay up late.
But, on other nights, there was a different atmosphere. If someone fancied an argument, or if the drinking had gone too far, there was another feel to the house. I hated it. I had thought that the days of parties, music and drunk men were long gone. Now they were back, I found it hard to accept that it was my father bringing these memories into my life again, and I hated myself for thinking it would ever end.
Not only that, he'd invite them to stay. He said that it helped him out financially and helped them out as they had nowhere to go. It was always men who stayed over, some for weeks at a time and others just for a few nights here and there.