Daddy's Little Earner (6 page)

D
ad did little more towards looking after Terry and
me when he had sole charge of us than he had when
Mum was there. We had to feed ourselves most of the
time. I would make jam sandwiches if there was any
bread in the house, or we’d dig up some spuds from the
back garden and make chips. I suppose I’d seen Mum
doing these things and I was a fast learner but it’s scary to
think I was heating a chip pan at such a young age. Dad
kept chickens in the back garden, about twenty of them,
and they provided us with eggs but they were always
escaping and causing problems with the neighbours.
I hated those birds, especially the cockerel and the aggressive
way it would fly at me, flapping and squawking
when I was sent out to collect the eggs. Dad always said
his dream was to have a smallholding out in the country
where he could be completely self-sufficient but he never did anything about getting one. He never actually did
anything about improving any of our lives, just taking
refuge from it all in the pubs, hoping to win enough money
on the horses to make all his problems go away.

If he hardly ever bothered to feed us, he didn’t give a
second thought to clothing us; in fact he expected me to
help him rather than the other way round. From the
moment Mum left I was the one washing and ironing his
shirts every day. I’d learnt how to do it by watching Nanny
when we visited her bungalow. I had to become good
at it because if I made the slightest crease in the wrong
place he would give me a slap and shout at me for being
stupid, like some eighteenth-century plantation owner
overseeing his slaves. But at the same time he would boast
to his friends about how wonderful his little girl was,
doing all these things for her old man, as if it was evidence
of how much I loved him. In a way it was. I felt proud
when he talked about me to other people like that but
confused that the things he said to my face were completely
the opposite. I never knew where I really stood
with him, which was one of the ways he kept control in
all his relationships and friendships.

Terry and I didn’t have any opportunity to wash our
own clothes and Dad wasn’t worried about how dirty or
smelly they became, but he did take an uncomfortable
amount of interest in our bath times. He always boasted
about how at ease he was with nudity around the house and quite often he would make us have baths with him.
The bathroom was off the kitchen, a tiny room containing
a sink and a bath that had been crammed in under the
slope of the staircase. He’d get in the bath first and then
he would call us in when he’d had time for a bit of a soak.
Once Terry had washed and got out Dad would tell me
to stay and he would sit up on the end with his legs open,
ordering me to turn round and look at his naked body
while he played with himself.

‘I don’t want to,’ I would protest, staring hard at the
taps at the other end, knowing something was wrong
with what he was doing but not sure what it was. ‘Can’t I
get out now?’ But he would make me stay there until he’d
had enough and was ready to get out.

I had long blonde hair, which he was fanatical about,
always insistent that I shouldn’t have it cut. Every week
or two he would wash it for me in the bath and would
always rinse it in freezing cold water, laughing as I gasped
at the shock of the cold but becoming furious if I cried or
made a fuss of any sort. He was like a sadistic little schoolboy
sometimes. He had all sorts of mad theories about my
hair, like deciding to rinse it in vinegar to give it a shine,
and when it came to brushing the knots out he would
turn what should have been a pleasant experience for
both of us into the most horrifically painful ordeal possible,
laughing gleefully all the way through it as I
squeaked and squirmed under his brutal tugging.

He had a cruel, warped sense of humour, like a little
boy with his practical jokes. When Mum was still with us,
he used to pee in the vinegar bottle and watch joyfully as
she sprinkled it on her chips. He often used milk bottles
to relieve himself in when he was upstairs and couldn’t be
bothered to come down to the toilet. He would shout for
Terry or me to go up and fetch them from him and empty
them. If he didn’t have a milk bottle handy he would
just open the bedroom window and piss through that. He
didn’t believe any of the rules of normal decent behaviour
applied to him; he believed he could do whatever he
wanted whenever he wanted.

Dad also seemed to get pleasure from inflicting any sort
of pain on people weaker than himself. Sometimes Terry
and I would be sitting with him watching television or playing
a game quite peacefully and he would suddenly jump
up and give one of us a Chinese burn, twisting our little
arms as if he was wringing out a wet towel. If we cried out
in surprise or pain he would start laughing or would shout
at us to ‘shut up!’ like it was some sort of initiation ceremony
designed to toughen us up and we had to be brave.

The unsettling thing was that we could never predict
how he would react to anything; sometimes he supported
us to an almost lunatic level. He loved his football and one
year when Norwich City were in the FA Cup Final, he
settled himself down in front of the telly to watch his
home team, sending us out into the street to play. Terry got involved in some sort of an argument with another
kid and came back indoors crying. Dad was annoyed at
having his viewing disturbed but instead of giving Terry
a hard time for being a pathetic crybaby, as he normally
would have done, he stormed outside to deal with the
problem himself. The other lad’s dad then also got
involved and the two fathers ended up fighting so
viciously the police had to be called to separate them. Dad
was arrested and taken to the police station. He was
angrier about missing the game than anything else. For
years afterwards he would tell this story to anyone who
would listen, using it as proof of how much he loved his
children and how he would always stick up for them
when they needed it. But he was unpredictable and Terry
and I knew that he could just as easily have laid into him
for being a wimp that day and sent him back out into the
street to sort it out for himself.

If Terry and I ever started fighting with each other, as
we did sometimes like any normal siblings, Dad would
urge us to punch properly and not just pull hair or
scratch. I remember one time I made Terry’s lip bleed
with a punch and I felt terrible about it but Dad praised
me and wouldn’t let Terry hit me back.

I knew never to disobey Dad or to put up an argument
about anything. I might ask him to let me off doing something,
but if he said no that was the end of it. The moment
I heard his voice start to get angry I would always stop pleading because I would know it was hopeless and that if
I kept going I was bound to end up being beaten.

Despite being meticulous about his own appearance,
Dad didn’t care what we went out looking like. We could
stink to high heaven and be clad in rags for all he cared.
Once a week we would take our dirty washing up to his
mother’s house, and she would do it all for us so we could
pick it back up the following week. One set of clothes
always had to last us the whole week, even our socks and
underwear. We would take it back and forth between the
houses in black bin liners. Terry and I would have to carry
the sacks while Dad strode ahead as if he was nothing
to do with us. We would try desperately to keep up and if
I cried from the pain in my legs he would laugh at how
weak I was or become angry with me for complaining.
Even Nanny used to tick him off for the state my socks
got into, telling him to buy me more clothes so they didn’t
get so dirty, but he took no notice. No matter how bad
they got she always managed to get them clean somehow.
My most vivid memory of her is standing at the kitchen
sink surrounded by piles of wet washing, scrubbing away
like a demon.

It must have been obvious to everyone who saw us or
smelled us that we were in a desperate state, and one day
the headmistress of the school we were attending decided
things had gone far enough and wrote to Dad saying that
he needed to ‘clean Maria up’. Dad still couldn’t read or write so he made me read the letter out loud to him. The
idea that anyone else had the right to tell him what to do
with his children was impossible for him to grasp. He was
absolutely furious that anyone would dare to interfere
with the way he ran his family. He might be willing to
take that sort of criticism from his own mother, particularly
as he needed her to do the washing, but he certainly
wasn’t going to accept it from someone outside the family
setting themselves up as an authority figure.

‘You write down what I tell you,’ he fumed before
starting to dictate a letter to me, which was full of four letter
words and graphic insults. At one stage he sent me
over the road to ask a neighbour how to spell the word
‘whore’. Although I didn’t know exactly what it meant, I
somehow knew that this wasn’t a good thing to be calling
my headmistress. I’d heard him use the word often
enough when screaming abuse at women or venting his
anger at our absent mother, so I knew it was rude.

The neighbour obviously thought it didn’t sound right
that a child of my age should be asking him such a thing
either and came back over with me. Maybe he thought I
was trying to wind him up and wanted to check that Dad
really had sent me.

‘Why does Maria want to know how to spell a word
like that?’ he asked.

When Dad told him what he was doing the man tried
to dissuade him but it didn’t work and the next day I had to take the letter in, complete with every expletive copied
out in my best neat handwriting. I was mortified because
I knew that it wasn’t right. I’d always quite liked the
headmistress and didn’t want to antagonize her, but I was
more frightened of angering Dad by not doing as I was
told than I was of any teacher.

The letter was delivered and I suppose it was read but
nothing further was ever said to me on the matter from
either end, and Dad made no more effort to clean me up
for school. I guess the headmistress decided that it wasn’t
a battle worth fighting and Dad put it down as yet another
of his famous victories over petty bureaucracy and
nosey parkers.

Social services used to give Dad an allowance to take
us out and buy clothes but he would just spend it all on
drink. When the authorities realized what he was up to
they tried giving him vouchers instead but he worked out
he could sell them to his friends down the pub for cash.
He always had a dozen different schemes going to ensure
he had a constant supply of spending money for the pub.
Sometimes he put so much effort into trying to get something
for nothing that it would have been easier to just
have gone out and earned the money he needed, but that
wasn’t the point for him. The point was to win the game,
to get something over on the rest of the world, to show
that he was cleverer than everyone else, particularly the
people who tried to tell him what to do.

Although he didn’t care about Terry and me wearing
the same clothes every day he would be very strict about
the oddest things, like not chewing bubblegum or not
swearing, and he insisted on us polishing our shoes each
night. At that time everyone else at school was wearing
plimsolls, partly because they were comfortable and partly
because it had become a bit of a fashion statement. We
used to beg him to let us do the same but he always insisted
we wore some proper leather shoes that had been given
to us by a kind neighbour. Because we desperately
wanted to be like everyone else Terry and I would put our
plimsolls in our bags and once we were round the corner
from the house we would hurriedly change into them. He
must have suspected something was going on because one
day he decided to follow us. He caught us red handed and
dragged us back home, furious that we were trying to ‘get
the better of him’. I can’t remember what my punishment
was, but he forced Terry to wear a great big brightly
coloured orange and yellow patterned tie to school. He
looked ridiculous and he was crying and sobbing and
begging Dad not to make him do it because all the other
boys would take the piss, but Dad made him wear it for
days on end. Terry was far too scared of what his next
punishment might be to be willing to risk disobeying Dad
and taking the tie off as soon as he got round the corner.
These sorts of intimidations were Dad’s way of keeping
control of every little aspect of our lives. He loved to humiliate other people in order to demonstrate his own
superiority and power over them.

My eyesight as a child was terrible and I went for years
without being able to see the blackboard in class properly
but not wanting to say anything for fear of drawing attention
to myself. Eventually the school picked up on the
problem and advised Dad to take me to an optician. He
refused to do anything about it, saying I was just pretending
not to be able to see in order to get attention. In a way
I wasn’t too bothered by his reaction because National
Health glasses for children were not exactly fashionable
in those days and it would have been one more thing
making me different to everyone else. I was already a target
for some bullies at school and I didn’t want to give
them yet another reason to pick on me. Eventually one of
the children’s homes I went into got me glasses while Dad
was away on one of his stints in prison and my schoolwork
immediately improved, although my self-esteem
sunk a few notches further down the scale.

Although I loved Dad, I realized very early on that
our family life wasn’t normal because I had occasionally
managed to glimpse into other people’s lives and knew
they were all nicer than ours: there was that nice family
the Watsons who fostered us once and then a couple
called Ivan Bunn and his wife Ann, who lived a couple of
doors up the road from us. They had two daughters
called Frances and Denise and a little boy called Stephen, with whom I was very friendly. There was a piano in
their house that they let me have a play on whenever Dad
let me go round there, which wasn’t that often. Although
he didn’t mind us playing out in the street if it got us out
from under his feet, he was always nervous about us
becoming too involved with other families. Maybe he was
worried we would say too much about what went on
behind our closed doors, or that we would realize that life
with him wasn’t normal. Probably he just didn’t like the
idea of losing any control over us, of allowing any other
adult to have an input into our upbringing or to influence
our thinking.