LITMIR.BIZ

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      My uncle was a big, well-built Irishman who worked as a labourer on building sites. He came from a large, chaotic family in rural Ireland, and had probably known nothing much more than poverty and abuse in his own childhood. He had small grey eyes, which seemed to follow my every move, and fair hair, which, in the early days, he used to wear almost to his shoulders, with bushy sideburns. He had big, heavy shoulders and hands, and a back full of pimples that he was always getting us to squeeze.

      He’d come over to England with three of his brothers to work on the roads, as soon as he’d saved enough for the fare and could legally leave school. Very soon he ended up living a hand-to-mouth existence with Mummy, who was divorced by then with three children of her own and soon pregnant with his first child, my brother Liam. It was a harsh life, which he must have felt completely powerless to change.

      It was a struggle just bringing up their own children; another child to feed and clothe can’t have been easy. But there were a lot of big families, and poverty and deprivation all around us in the flats at the time, so we weren’t really different to the rest.

      But the expense of looking after me always came into his tirades against Mummy and me. When she was short he would usually blame her for spending it on me. But he would still refuse to accept any ‘hush money’ as he called it from Kathy, who as well as caring for her mother had quickly progressed in her career over the years and was relatively comfortably off over in Ireland. Nor would he accept any money from our Uncle Brendan, who in those days was the richest person we knew.

      He wanted to get me out – so that they wouldn’t keep coming over and interfering in his home – not to be paid to have me there.

      It was their visits that really infuriated him. He didn’t like anybody from outside coming into his home when we were young, and apart from his brothers we never had any visitors in the flats. When she met him, Mummy had only recently moved down from the North of England, and he knew she had no other family in the country. No one to see what he was doing, or to judge.

      But when I was left there all that changed. From then on, to his intense displeasure, both Kathy and our Uncle Brendan would come over and visit us frequently. It must have been a lonely, frightening situation for Mummy before that, knowing no one in London but him, especially when the shine went from their relationship and all the ugliness behind closed doors began.

      Mummy was never one to take things lying down. From the stories she told us we knew that even as a child she had been headstrong and unruly, and constantly at war with her own father. She described herself as being the ‘black sheep of the family’, ‘rough and ready’ and a ‘fighter’.

      ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she’d whisper to us those nights when we’d all tiptoed back down after he had staggered off to bed. ‘I’m as tough as old boots, me.’ But she wasn’t; though neither was she quite ready for the monster my uncle turned into after swallowing beer and vodka all night. She just wasn’t willing to be a victim.

      Soon she was fighting fire with fire, matching him vodka for vodka as they tried to scream and pummel one another into the kind of partner they wanted each other to be. Mummy would fight with her last breath to protect her children. And although she could say whatever she liked about her own family in Ireland, she saw red whenever my uncle turned on them: especially Kathy. He knew that was the easiest way to get to her, through her red-haired sister with her ‘airs and graces’ and her distrust of him – Kathy ‘the whore’. And so Kathy appeared in our front room like a bad genie out of the vodka bottle every Saturday night, and if that wasn’t enough to hurt Mummy, he’d then start on me.

      From as early as I can remember hardly a day would pass without my uncle reminding me, in some way or another, that I wasn’t a part of that family – that I didn’t belong there, and that I wasn’t wanted anywhere else either. ‘Do you understand?’ he’d scream, leaping over to me, the pouf kicked noisily out of the way to intimidate me, or the coffee table upturned, his face turning its purply-red colour in rage.

      ‘Yes, Dad. I’m sorry, Dad,’ I’d say, cowering on the settee, my arms covering my head as he punched down on my small body, or my hands clamped over my mouth, trying to stop the crying that would infuriate him even more.

      He took his anger out on all of us at times, but even when he was blinded by drink there was still a hierarchy amongst us. His own three children – Liam and ‘the girls’, Stella and Jennifer – were treated one way, and Mummy’s other three children from her earlier marriage – Marie, Sandra and Michael – were treated another way. And then there was me.

      But despite the violence and abuse, Mummy stayed with him. ‘You make your bed and you lie in it,’ was always her philosophy, and he must have shared it because that’s what the two of them did.

      And so most of my childhood was lived in constant fear. Fear of him and of when he might get Kathy to take me away. It led to me being an insecure, clingy, anxious child, and especially around him I would withdraw into my shell, terrified. But the worse things became, the more I wanted to be there with Mummy and all my brothers and sisters. Like any child I just wanted to fit in and to belong, to be accepted as one of the family I knew as my own. But he seemed just as determined that I never would.

      As the years went by I mastered numbness and the near invisibility he demanded, and was almost unreachable by anybody but Mummy. But no matter how good I was, or how useful I became, there was rarely any let-up in his verbal attacks or threats to send me away. There was never a time in all those years when I wasn’t terrified of him. And of course the worse he became, the more I dreaded being separated from Mummy.

      Even when he was in a good mood, he seemed to enjoy upsetting me. Sometimes, if Mummy had just slipped out on some errand, and one of us noticed and someone asked where she was, he’d say, ‘She’s not coming back. She’s gone for good this time.’ He’d be watching me as he said it, amused by the look of shock on my face, nudging one of the boys or winking over at them to make them laugh at my distress. And I would sit rigid until the front door was pushed noisily open and she came back in.

      Often, I’d be yelled back out of bed at night during one of their arguments and forced to sit there and listen while his monstrous anger stormed around me and his violent threats to get me out continued. He’d warn me not to cry, but hard as I tried I rarely managed it. Sometimes he’d force me to sit at the oval, smoked-glass table in the dining room to write letters to Kathy telling her I wanted to go over to live with her in Ireland.

      The first time I remember it, was not long after one of her visits. Screaming at Mummy through the archway separating the two rooms to go and find paper and envelopes, he made me sit there and write. I can’t have been much more than five and could barely write anything without copying out the words. But he made me finish it, hitting me every time I couldn’t spell one – my tears, which he screamed at me to stop, turning the words into blue forget-me-nots of ink as they dripped down on to them.

      The blood pounded in my ears and my body was stiff with fear while he stood over me, or staggered through the archway between the rooms, shouting out the words, or forcing me to write my own.

      Dear mum

      Please can i come to live with you in Iland there. Becuause I want to. you are my mum not mummy and i will prefer it there. I am cuming tomorrow on the next boat.

      Mummy was forced to stay in the front room on the other side of the arch, watching me falling to pieces as I wrote the words that over the years I couldn’t bear even to think.

      ‘Don’t worry, Anya,’ she shouted over him, crying loudly, ‘I’ll always be your mother. You’re going nowhere … I’ll never let that be posted. Don’t worry about him.’

      As I sat there, trying to block out their screams, I was unable to stop trembling. I leaned across the table, squinting to see what I was writing, hot splinters of pain darting beneath my eyelids, my teeth chattering as I willed Mummy to stop arguing back, and myself to stop crying.

      ‘Look

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