LITMIR.BIZ

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Careful you don’t cut yourself.’

      Suddenly we both froze as the floorboards of the room above creaked. My mother looked up at the ceiling fearfully. The sounds of my father moving around his bedroom always signalled the end of our little tête-à-têtes. She hurried into the scullery and lit the gas under the kettle, holding her finger to her lips to signal that I should be very quiet.

      I quickly gathered the broken plate and dropped it in the bin, then hurried to the far side of the table, opened my English homework book and pretended I was engrossed in my studies. I could hear my father’s footsteps stamping down the stairs and all of a sudden I wanted to pee. I always got the urge to pee when trouble was imminent.

      The scullery door burst open and my father rushed in. He scowled angrily at my mum and strode purposely over to where I was sitting.

      ‘You little bastard.’ His right hand shot out and slapped me hard around my ear. ‘How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet when you get in from school?’

      My Dad worked nights as a bus cleaner, so he slept during the day.

      ‘Leave him alone,’ Mum screamed. ‘We were just talking quietly.’ Acknowledgement

      ‘This one doesn’t know the meaning of the word “quiet”.’ He clipped my ear again and Mum rushed over to try and grab his arm.

      ‘Stop it!’ she yelled. ‘You only pick on him because he’s too young to hit you back. You wouldn’t dare pick on someone your own size.’

      Mum’s sharp tongue often got her into trouble with Dad. This time, he drew back his fist and punched her hard in the centre of her face. She stumbled backwards and held up her hands to protect herself as Dad let loose a flurry of punches. One of them hit her high on the head and she slid down and sat dazed on the floor. Her nose and mouth were bleeding and she was totally at his mercy.

      I was screaming at him to stop and in desperation I kicked him on the shin. It was the first time I had dared to attack him. I was only nine years old and a skinny, wiry kid – definitely no match for him – but I had to do something to protect my mother. He turned and backhanded me across the room.

      ‘So you think you’re big enough to fight me, do you?’ He smiled as he picked me up by the scruff of my neck and one of my legs. ‘I’ll show you how big you are, you little bastard.’ He threw me with all his strength across the kitchen. I crashed onto the table and bounced into the chairs. They toppled over backwards and I landed on my back on the chair legs, hurt and winded.

      Dad glanced round at Mum, who was slumped on the floor, then back at me, and he seemed satisfied with his handiwork. I’d seen that expression before. He got real pleasure from being violent, as if it released all his pent-up tension. Through the pain I heard the scullery door slam shut and the sound of his footsteps going back up the stairs.

      I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t catch my breath. I just lay gasping. Suddenly my mother was beside me and her hands were desperately trying to disentangle me from the chair legs. She was sobbing bitterly. ‘Are you alright, darling? Oh, he’s a wicked man.’

      She lifted me up by my waist and I saw that her nose and mouth were bleeding, dripping large drops of blood onto the floor.

      ‘Please tell me you’re alright.’ Once she had got me upright, Mum wrapped me in her arms and we clung to each other for ages, both trembling and crying.

      I watched my mother as she rinsed her face under the cold tap in the scullery. I had seen her do this so many times before and it always broke my heart. I loved her so much but there was nothing I could do to stop the endless misery she was suffering at my father’s hands.

      Later, after Dad had left for work, we listened to our favourite programme ‘Journey Into Space’ on the radio, and tried to pretend nothing had happened. We were big fans of Jet Morgan and his crew and I always imagined that one day Mum and I would blast off into space on a spaceship like the Luna: travelling far, far away, through countless galaxies, never returning and living a life full of happiness and amazing adventures.

      There is something comforting in dreams. Anything is possible and you can escape the misery of your day-to-day life. I often wished I could just live in a dream world and never wake up.

      My Mum and Dad should never have married. They didn’t love each other. They only married because he got her pregnant in a moment of lust and in those days, with the stigma attached to being a single mother and the shame that would be brought on the whole family by her condition, there was only one course of action left open to them. But right from the start it was a marriage made in hell.

      My mother was a fun-loving girl of eighteen. She was very bright, but was forced to leave school at fifteen and work in a shop in London to help support her mother. The fifteen shillings a week she brought in was all that kept the family from going under. My father was thirty years old and had recently arrived from Wexford in southern Ireland. He’d come to England looking for work and had got a part-time job as a barman in the West End. It was in this bar that he met my mother.

      Elizabeth, my sister, was born in May 1939 just six months into their marriage. Four months later the Second World War broke out and my father enlisted in the army. Because he had flat feet, he was given a home posting in the big army stores in Southampton. This meant that he could get back to London quite regularly and, as a result of one visit, my mother gave birth to my second sister, Jean, in October 1942. Then, on April 22nd, 1944 I exploded into the world. My mother told me that I had rushed my way out – but maybe it was because a V1 rocket had gone off a few streets away at the critical moment.

      My father was a small, slightly built Irishman. He was strictly teetotal; both his parents had died from alcohol abuse and, like so many small men, he walked around with a permanent chip on his shoulder. He fancied himself as a ladies’ man and went from affair to affair without a shadow of remorse. He had no qualms about hitting women and it was not long before my mother felt the power of his fist in her face. He had a job on London Transport as a night cleaner for the buses. He was not averse to hard work, so earned a decent wage, but never divulged the amount to my mother and only gave her the minimum for food. All of his extra money went on keeping up his appearance and conducting his extramarital affairs.

      My earliest memories are blurred snatches of pictures here and there, but violence was always around – from the Carmelite nuns who used to whack our hands with a bamboo cane at my first primary school through to Dad’s explosions of temper at home. By the age of seven, just after my kid sister Jennifer was born, I had a pronounced nervous stammer and had to attend a speech therapy clinic in Hanwell. The therapist gave me tongue-twisting exercises to repeat. I still remember one: ‘Look at Lily, Lily up the lamppost; come down Lily, you do look silly.’

      Because of my stammer I became a prime target for the bullies in my school. Having a stammer was nearly as bad as having to wear glasses, which got you called ‘four eyes’. Whenever I had to stand up to read aloud, the entire class would look in my direction and start sniggering. This made me stammer even more and the teacher would tell me angrily to sit down again. It wasn’t long before I developed a massive inferiority complex and tried to hide in the background away from the cruel jibes and laughter.

      St Gregory’s Catholic Primary School was situated in an affluent part of Ealing and most of the children came from quite wealthy backgrounds. Mum had very little money, so while the clothes I wore were clean, they never came close to being like the other children’s. She had a nose for finding the best bargains in a jumble sale and she’d carefully scrub them in the large stone copper in the scullery. I was always excited when I tried them on, never noticing the odd frayed collar or sewed-up hole in my trousers. I’d feel proud as I strutted off to school with my nice new clothes but I was soon brought back down to earth when the children laughed and taunted me unmercifully about the way I looked. I stood out like a sore thumb in my shabby, secondhand clothes.

      I hated having to get changed into my sports kit to play football. My underwear, vest and pants, were always hand-me-downs from my two older sisters. I complained to mum on several occasions about wearing girl’s knickers but she told me

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