The Sunday lunch menu rarely altered – it was always a home-made broth or lentil soup, followed by a large sirloin roast with all the trimmings. Then it was tart or home-made crumble with double cream, followed by coffee and pots of hot tea for the staff before their next shift. It was a huge job to prepare it all, and Mum never, ever cut corners when it came to food – every dish was made from scratch and from the finest ingredients.
As I watched, steam curled upwards from each large pot on the eight-ringed stove and Mum’s hands worked quickly as she threaded the pastry onto her tart, a look of intense concentration furrowing her brow.
I had been very patient, but I couldn’t wait any longer. My secret bubbled up inside me like a waterfall that could not be dammed. I had to say something.
I took a fistful of her apron and tugged hard.
‘Mum! Mum! I have to tell you something, Mum.’
But my mother seemed lost in her own world. She had finished the latticing now and turned her attention back to the stove, where she tasted one of the sauces from the back of a wooden spoon.
‘No, no, no,’ she tutted to herself. ‘More seasoning.’
Then she picked up the large salt cellar and shook it into one of the pots. I gazed up at her, wanting her attention. Mum was 5 foot 4 – she seemed like a giant to me – and wore her green apron that day over a beige Jaeger cashmere sweater and matching woollen skirt.
Nobody ever saw her expensive clothes, though, just the apron over the top. I tugged at it again.
‘Mummy, please make him stop. He’s really hurting me.’
‘Hang on a minute, will you? And stand away from the cooker,’ she instructed, still focused on her simmering pans.
‘Mum! Mum!’ I went on, more determined than ever. I’d come this far and I wasn’t going to give up now. I had to tell her; had to make it stop. Though I was too young to know what John was doing – I had no words to express the things that gave me such pain – I somehow knew it wasn’t good, despite my brother’s constant reassurances that it was ‘normal’.
Eventually, Mum swiped the back of her forearm over her brow and looked down at me.
‘Who?’ she asked sternly. ‘Who is hurting you?’
‘John.’
‘Okay. I’ll speak to him. I’ll speak to your brother.’
And that was it.
She didn’t stop her cooking long enough to ask me what he was doing.
She didn’t ask me exactly what was wrong.
She simply said she would speak to him – and then she returned to her cooking, as if that was the end of the conversation. She was on a schedule, you see, and she couldn’t break her stride.
I stood there by her side for a second, not quite knowing what to do. And then, because it seemed there was nothing more to say, I walked out and left her to it.
Later that night, after another painful encounter with John, I lay miserably in bed, replaying the scene with my mother in my head, over and over again.
It had meant so much to me to tell her what was going on. I had felt sick with nerves all morning, knowing what I was about to do. After all, John had told me not to tell so many times; he’d said the police would come and take me away if I told anyone; he’d said that I’d never see Mum or Dad again. He’d made me terrified that the world would come crashing down if I confided in a single soul about what he was doing. I’d risked everything to tell her.
And, yet, the world hadn’t stopped spinning. Mum had appeared unconcerned, nonchalant. She hadn’t even asked me what he was doing or why I was so upset.
Perhaps John’s right, I thought to myself. Perhaps this was normal and it was what big brothers did to their little sisters all the time.
I had told Mum – and it hadn’t stopped.
So what now? What do I do now?
Chapter 3
John Jay
‘Who is it?’ Mum called from the living room one Saturday morning after Dad had picked up the phone in the kitchen.
‘It’s John Jay,’ said Dad, cupping his hand over the receiver. Then, winking at me as I sat hunched over my maths homework at the kitchen table, he whispered conspiratorially: ‘It’s your mother’s boyfriend again!’
I smiled back, as I always did when Dad said this, but it was more out of habit than humour. I was still only six but I had known about John Jay all my life. He was Mum’s special friend from Australia. They had met many years before when she worked in Paris.
‘Oh, he was very handsome, very handsome indeed,’ Mum recalled one evening in 1975 when the conversation turned to John Jay. Dad was at the bar in the hotel as usual so it was just me, Mum and Susy. Mum had the ironing board up and was working her way through a huge pile of washing. She loved talking about John Jay and she told us all about how they first met when she was just a teenager working as an au pair for a rich family. Her eyes now lit up at the memory and a rare smile played on her lips: ‘We were very much in love, you know, but he was from this incredibly wealthy family and, well, they had lined up this woman for him, who was the daughter of a famous lawyer. I don’t know why they chose her but either way, John didn’t have much of a say in it. He certainly didn’t love her but his dad threatened to cut him off without a penny if he didn’t marry her, so he really didn’t have a choice, did he?’
She put down the iron then and looked at us both, expectantly, so we both shook our heads, ‘no’, though I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant.
‘John was always very ambitious,’ she went on thoughtfully, picking up the iron once more and attacking the collar of one of Dad’s shirts. ‘Fiercely ambitious and I suppose I admired that about him. I understood, of course I did. The important thing was we stayed friends and he has been a great help to your dad and me over the years, a great help to this family. He got us on our feet with the hotel, for one thing. Gave us a very generous lump sum. Well, he’s a generous man, you see. That’s his nature.’
Their friendship had survived through the years and once a week without fail, John Jay called from Melbourne to chat to my mother. Dad didn’t seem to have much to do with John Jay himself, preferring to tease my mother about their friendship. He called him ‘Mummy’s boyfriend’ or ‘Mummy’s other man’, but Mum never paid any attention to this. She said he was ‘childish’ and ‘silly’ for saying such things. Now she raced into the dining room to take the expensive international call while Dad replaced the receiver in its cradle and returned to his job of peeling a stem of root ginger.
Today he was making one of his special curries, treating the kitchen like his own personal laboratory with every work surface covered in onion skins, garlic shells, ginger root, piles of chopped fenugreek and coriander and dozens of little spice pots with strange names like turmeric, cumin, chilli and galangal. This exotic combination had been added to a large pot on the stove, which already contained a whole pig’s head. It bubbled away, filling the kitchen with a heady, aromatic scent.
I liked to watch Dad when he was experimenting in the kitchen. It looked like a lot of fun, especially compared to Mum’s style of cooking which just seemed arduous. Besides, I had no one to play with today as Susy was out at tennis all day and John was up in his room as usual. Not that he would play with me anyway – well, not in the way I wanted him to.
Suddenly, something occurred to me.
‘Daddy,’ I said, sucking thoughtfully on the end of my pencil.
‘Yes, Dawn?’
‘Isn’t it funny, Daddy, that Australian John and our John have the same name?’
‘Hmmmm. . . ?’
‘Isn’t it funny, Daddy?’
Dad went on peeling the ginger and a heavy silence filled the room.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Dawn. Very funny.’
But he didn’t look in the least bit amused.
Ten minutes later Mum returned, flushed and excitable. She took one look at the kitchen worktops and pushed up her sleeves to her elbows. Now her hands worked at lightning speed, clearing aw
ay peelings, stacking up plates and running the tap into burnt, dirty pots.
‘I don’t know why you can’t clear up as you go along, Duncan,’ she snapped at him as she swiped at the worktops with a J-cloth. ‘Look at the state of this place! It’s a pigsty!’
‘Och, quit yer blether, Pip,’ Dad muttered.
‘No, I won’t. I won’t quit. It’s me who has to clear up all the time and if you weren’t so selfish and lazy I wouldn’t be constantly stuck in this bloody kitchen, cleaning up non-stop.’
Dad snuck a look at me and rolled his eyes: here we go again . . .
‘I can’t believe the state of this place. If you helped around here a little bit more and drank a little bit less, I wouldn’t have to slave away like a kitchen porter all the time. I could be out, shopping in Edinburgh or London, living the life I should be living, enjoying myself instead of this constant, unending drudgery all the time. I mean, look at this!’
She held open the lid of one of Dad’s discarded pots. We both peered in: the bottom was covered in a weird, sticky black goo.
‘What’s in here? I mean, what is it? Why can’t you just clear up as you go along? Hmm? Lazy! That’s what you are – a fat, lazy slob. Look at you! Look at the state of you!’
I glanced in Dad’s direction – there were fresh brown stains down his shirt from where he had been tasting his new curry, his red bow tie was unfurled at his neck and his trousers were unbuttoned under his giant belly.
‘Urgh!’ exclaimed Mum, turning away from him. ‘I can’t stand the sight of you!
Basil and Sybil Fawlty; that’s what everyone called my mum and dad; they were the comedy couple from Fawlty Towers. The staff were used to the constant rows; the guests found it quietly amusing. She was always shouting at him and he was always ducking behind doors to avoid the pots and pans she threw. The more he laughed, the angrier she got. He goaded her, as if it was a game of cat and mouse, but her disgust when she looked at him was real enough.
My mother had started dating my dad not long after her relationship with John Jay ended. They were both living in France at the time and working for a large department store. She was a shop assistant; he was a buyer. According to my mother, Dad was a tall, handsome Scot, and so charming and good-looking, with his blond hair and sea-green eyes from his Viking heritage, that all the women wanted him.
‘But I got him!’ she’d tell us with a twinkle of triumph in her eyes.
Fifteen years and three children later, their married life at The Drayton Arms had settled into a familiar, if grinding, routine. Any dreams Mum had once had of a privileged, globetrotting life with the high-class elite were long gone – now this willowy, fair-haired beauty was trapped in a decaying hotel, serving up sausage, egg, mince and tatties seven days a week. It was hardly glamorous. And if she wasn’t cooking at the hotel, she was cooking for us at home.
‘I’m fed up,’ she’d say, ten times a day, hands planted on her hips. ‘Fed up of cooking sodding sausages, frying chips, stinking of bloody grease! The same old life. I’m just . . . just fed up!’
As a child there was no answer I could give to this, no comfort I could offer. Not that she wanted anything like that from us kids. She wasn’t the type of mother who offered cuddles or kisses when she saw us. Her usual greeting was a narrowing of the eyes and a cool, quiet inquisition: ‘Have you done your homework today? Have you cleared up your room? Have you done your chores yet? Did you brush your teeth? Properly?’
Mum did her best for us, though; we knew that. She was up at 6 a.m. for the breakfasts in the hotel, worked all day long and then only came back after she had fed the residents in the evening. After a full day’s work, she would fall asleep in her favourite chair at 7 p.m., a cup of Horlicks cooling at her feet.
Dad came and went as he pleased, but rarely paid us any attention, not minding about our homework, evening meals or chores. During the week he would pick me up from school in the early afternoon and as soon as we were home, he turned on the TV to watch the news and left me to my own devices. I liked to watch The Clangers or The Flumps in the playroom until Susy got back, and then she would engage me in a game or a fun activity.
‘I know! Let’s make pancakes today!’ she might announce. Or: ‘Let’s have a skipping competition.’
Sometimes John was home even earlier than Susy, though, and then Dad returned to the hotel, leaving John in charge of me.
That meant only one thing. As soon as the front door had shut, my brother would wander into the sitting room.
‘Come to my bedroom,’ he’d order and I’d follow him obediently.
I never said no. I never struggled. Now aged eight, I had come to accept that this was just another part of my life; a part I couldn’t change, like homework or bathtime. It was normal and because I didn’t like it, I learned to block it out while he did it. I’d stare at the ceiling and examine the tiny cracks in the plaster, imagining myself disappearing down those thin little lines and escaping through the walls. This way, I didn’t have to think about what he was doing to me. I could be somewhere else at the time he was doing it, put my mind in a place far away from my body.
I accepted the compliments he offered as if they were sweets. ‘You’re a good girl,’ he’d tell me. ‘You’re a good sister. You make me feel nice, feel happy.’
In his room, I was always welcome. As long as I let him do those things to me then I was his special sister and I was rewarded with his good feeling.
So those afternoons when John was entrusted to care for me, we would always head on up to his bedroom, with him leading the way quickly. Once inside, I would be hit by the smell of incense – John burned it to disguise the smell of his smoking – and the sounds of Deep Purple playing on his record player. His bed was set tight against one corner of the room, with a bedside table to the left, fitted wardrobes straight in front and a large shelving unit further to the left, housing his collection of toy cars. He had a bureau further down that had a pull-down desk meant for studying, with more cars stationed on top. Inside the bureau, behind his junk, there was a large tub of Vaseline.
The Vaseline was for me.
I would stand and play with the cars; my favourite was the old-fashioned open-top London bus. As I pushed around the red bus on the counter, he’d walk towards me, lifting the tub of Vaseline, and I knew that was the sign for me to take off my pants. He was usually hard already, Vaseline smeared on his penis. Then he would rub Vaseline between my legs before I was placed in the usual position, the one that satisfied him most, where I was on top facing him.
Once he finished, I would leave. I never liked the pain, I never liked what he was doing, but I never stopped him. I simply didn’t know how. I had tried telling mum but that hadn’t worked so now I just put up with it. Year after year after year.
The rest of the time, John kept himself apart and rarely bothered to make contact with the rest of the family. We were all in our own little worlds. It was only later, when I visited friends at their homes, that I realized how distant we all were from one another. Every evening we sat together at the big wooden table for mealtimes, but then we would retreat back to our own spaces. There were no board games played together as a family, no bonding over favourite TV programmes, no hobbies to be shared. We three siblings were all too far apart in age to have much in common, although Susy was kind and did make time for me. Even so I spent a lot of time in my room, colouring in and drawing. We mostly did our own thing while Mum and Dad worked their long shifts at the hotel. They were there if we needed them, but we weren’t encouraged to interrupt them.
Life went on this way, seemingly unendingly: Mum’s complaints, Dad’s escalating drinking and expanding waistline, John’s abuse and my increasing detachment from the world because of what he was doing to me. I had learned to switch off as a defence mechanism. My teachers thought I was day-dreaming or not paying attention, when really John’s abuse was constantly in my mind, making me seem as if I was in my own little world.
&n
bsp; There was no life for us outside of school and the hotel – no friends or family close by. Occasionally we were visited by my mother’s younger sister, Aunt Jenny, who put herself at a considerable inconvenience by travelling up to Glasgow by train, all the way from Kent. Or so she said.
Jenny was like Mum in a lot of ways: cool, stand-offish and impeccably well-dressed. Mum always cooed over Jenny’s clothes and hairstyles, purchased in the high-end salons and boutiques of Mayfair and Knightsbridge. She complained that up here in Glasgow she was stuck in an ‘unfashionable backwater’ and Jenny tutted sympathetically, though I suspected she gleaned a secret joy from her elder sister’s envy. Jenny had done very well for herself, according to Mum, marrying a banker and carving out a life in London’s commuter belt. Though she was ‘poor Auntie Jenny’ as she had no children of her own; that’s how Mum probably made herself feel slightly superior to her sister.
They had both come from ‘good stock’, she was fond of telling us children, and though Mum refused to say anything more about her family, she hinted that she was educated more highly than most. In her view, there was no one of her intelligence in our working-class suburb of Glasgow. She believed herself to be a cut above her customers: the men generally worked in factories and their wives or girlfriends, who joined them at the weekend for a bevvy and a scampi meal, were also factory workers or cleaners.
‘I’m sick of these people,’ Mum would gripe when she came home from the hotel, exhausted and bitter from overwork. ‘These uneducated women! They know nothing about art or culture – all they want to do is talk about the bloody bingo or what’s on offer at Tesco’s. Tesco’s! I ask you! It’s so common. I mean, they’re nice people, don’t get me wrong, but they’re so working class. They don’t speak any languages, they never travel further than Blackpool and they have nothing to say for themselves. It’s depressing. Depressing and very dreary.’
I Own You Page 3