Daddy's Little Earner (9 page)

There was one publican who used to feel sorry for me
and ask if I would like to go up and sit in his living quarters
above the pub rather than always waiting out in the
cold. Sometimes Dad would agree but mostly he would
say no. ‘She’ll be all right outside,’ he’d say dismissively,
not wanting to be beholden to anyone.

It was confusing. If he was as wonderful a father as
everyone told us, how come there was never any food in
the house? How come he never went shopping for us?
How come he never went to work to support us all? How
come he didn’t make our bedrooms habitable or buy us
birthday cards or cuddle us when we cried? How come
he beat us so often when we hadn’t done anything really
bad? It’s only looking back that I question all this,
though. At the time I never thought it was unusual that
he spent all his money in the pub and behaved the way
he did; that’s just the way things were, it’s what I was
used to.

Dad hated the idea of buying anything in the normal
way from the shops. He would never have belittled himself
to walk around a supermarket with a basket and buy
things over the counter like everyone else; he would
rather we just went without. There was never any breakfast
in the house when Terry and I got up. Some mornings
on the way to school I would strip the leaves off
bushes and pull up stalks of grass just to give myself
something to chew on to stave off the pangs of hunger.
Some of these things used to taste surprisingly nice and
juicy but they never did much for the hunger pains. After
school Terry and I used to wait outside the chippy at the
bottom of our road, tortured by the delicious smells of
frying and going in every so often to ask for ‘the crispies’,
which were the scrapings from the frying vats.

We were always moaning at Dad for not going shopping
so one day, after he’d had a win on the horses, he
gave us five pounds each to shop with. ‘That means you
can’t eat any of my potatoes or eggs,’ he warned. ‘I’m not
feeding you for a week, you can sort yourselves out if
you’re so bloody clever.’

Terry and I thought this was wonderful and headed
straight down to the shop to buy ourselves a big box of
cereal and milk and sugar, bread and jam and butter, all
the things that were never usually in the house. Within a
few days we had to go to him and admit that we’d messed
up. We’d spent all the money and eaten everything we’d
bought. He wasn’t angry because he liked being proved
right. Our failure had demonstrated that we couldn’t
manage without him and gave him another opportunity
to mock our feeble efforts at being independent.

Because there was never a meal ready for us when we
got home in the evenings, whenever Terry and I managed
to go to school we would make sure we ate everything
on offer for lunch, always going up for second
helpings. Every so often, however, that would backfire on
us and we would get home to find Dad had decided to
come off the drink and had suddenly transformed into
the perfect father. Where usually Terry and I did all the
housework, we would come through the door and find
him on his hands and knees scrubbing the house from top
to bottom, or stripping wallpaper or painting something while cooking an enormous meal for us at the same time,
usually a sausage and potato casserole, or sausage, mash
and peas. I would be so proud of him when that happened
and would tell all my friends at school the next day that
my dad had given up drinking and loved me just as much
as their dads loved them.

Because we never had any warning of when these
mood changes would happen, however, we were often
stuffed full with school lunch and unable to do justice to
the food he was proudly laying out in front of us, which
would lead to another explosion of temper. He would
rant on about how ungrateful we were and how he slaved
for us. Under his watchful eyes I would force myself to
keep eating, pushing in mouthful after mouthful, even
though each one was making me feel sick, just to avoid
making him angry or hurting his feelings. Sometimes
these ‘perfect father’ phases lasted a few days and Terry
and I would decide to skip school lunches to ensure we
still had our appetites by the time we got home, but the
first day that would happen we would get in to find he
was back down the pub. We would be starving, the cupboard
would be bare once more and we would know
there was going to be nothing until school lunch the following
day.

Other days when we came home from school we
would still find no food in the kitchen but the house
would be full of his hangers-on, people he had brought home from the pub with him. They were nearly always
alcoholics or prostitutes and they were often taking
refuge in our house because they were in some sort of
trouble and needed a place to go. Dad would never turn
anyone in need away; he was always the first one to invite
someone in and offer them a couch to sleep on if they
came to him with any sort of sob story. He liked people to
be dependent on him and grateful to him for being such a
great guy, although he would turn on them in a second if
he thought they were starting to take liberties or were
taking him for granted.

I remember a couple of Christmases when for some
strange reason he decided to make an enormous effort for
us. To start with he would buy a box of After Eights
because they were ‘your mum’s favourites’. I hated the
bloody things, partly because I knew it would mean he
would get all emotional and upset as he ate them and we
would have to listen to him reminiscing about her again
and moaning on about his broken heart. He never stopped
talking about her for long and any woman he went out
with always knew that she came second to ‘his Jane’.

‘She’s all right,’ he’d say about any girlfriend who was
on the scene, ‘but no one will ever measure up to my Jane.’

He made sure we had enough food for a proper Christmas
lunch for the three of us by spending days beforehand
plucking turkeys in the kitchen and in the bathroom for a
mate of his, thus earning some extra money to buy the food we needed. His fingers would be bleeding from the work
and every time that happened I would be convinced he had
changed. At moments like that it would be hard to be
angry with him for the way he behaved on the other three
hundred and sixty days of the year. If he had decided to
change the way he behaved at any stage we would have
forgiven him for whatever might have happened before,
putting it down to the effect of Mum leaving. But if anything
his behaviour grew worse over the years, not better,
and the little respites became fewer and further between.

When the pubs closed at two thirty in the afternoon,
Dad would make his way to the bookies, scooping me up
from wherever I had been waiting outside. I would trot
obediently in his wake like a nervous puppy desperate for
approval, desperate not to be left behind. He wouldn’t
talk to me much before disappearing into the bookies and
I would know that I had to wait outside again, staring
into shop windows at nice clothes and toys, or gazing
longingly at any food on display, always hungry, always
imagining that one day he might come out with enough
winnings to decide to buy me something to eat, but
knowing deep inside that he would never do that, no
matter how much he won. Sometimes, when he did finally
emerge, I would try to hold his hand as he strode off.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he would scold, brushing me aside,
‘people will think you’re my girlfriend.’ Holding hands
with a child would have made him look soft, I suppose, whereas he thought having me trailing along behind him
made him look cool in some way.

How well he did at the bookies would determine what
sort of mood he would be in for the rest of the day and we
would either be taking a taxi home or he would be walking
and I would be running to keep up. I sometimes tried
to ask him how much he had won or lost, but he always
ignored the questions, as though I didn’t exist, as though
I wasn’t worth talking to.

On the way home we would sometimes walk past a
men’s public toilet and Dad used to tell me to wait again
while he disappeared inside. I could never understand
why he took so long in there as I sat on the wall outside
watching other men coming and going. Eventually he
would come strutting back out and I noticed that he often
then had enough money to get us a taxi for the rest of the
journey. It was only years later that it occurred to me
what might have been going on inside that toilet while I
waited. If he thought all women were ‘sitting on a goldmine’
and should exploit it, maybe he felt the same about
himself.

If he had no money at all but he had decided to make
egg and chips for tea he would send me into the little
supermarket we passed on the way home to nick some
sausages or bacon to go with it. I was terrified of being
caught, but I was more terrified of the consequences of
disobeying him. He would make Terry do it too, but Terry wasn’t as good at it as I was, more nervous. Maybe
the shopkeepers kept a closer eye on him, being a boy and
a year older. I used to just shove things under my coat and
head for the exit and never seemed to get caught. I was
quite proud of my skill and always hoped it would make
Dad be nicer to me.

But his moods were largely unpredictable. Sometimes
when he got fed up with Terry or me at home he would
lock one or other of us in the coal shed, which was just off
the kitchen and was rarely full of coal. I think I was about
seven the first time it happened, soon after Mum left.
Most often he would do it for no apparent reason at all,
just because he felt like it. To begin with I would plead
with him as he dragged me closer and closer to the door.

‘Daddy, please don’t, I’ll be good, I promise, please
don’t, Daddy. I love you, Daddy. I’m sorry.’

But he would just laugh at my pleading or simply
ignore it. He never relented once he had decided he was
going to punish us. He would have seen that as showing
weakness, which he would never have been able to do.
Once we were inside with the door locked behind us, sitting
in the dark and cold on whatever coal was in there,
we didn’t dare to call out or make any sound at all. It was
so black that it didn’t make any difference whether you
kept your eyes open or shut. I would sit huddled in the
corner with my legs drawn up close to my chest and wait,
my ears straining for any sound. Were there snakes in there? I wondered. Were there rats or mice that would
eat me before anyone came to save me? Hearing noises
from the normal world outside the door like a telephone
ringing or a door closing or Dad’s voice would give me
hope, reminding me that I was only in a coal shed and
that I would eventually be released.

Sometimes once he had silenced us in the shed Dad
would fall asleep in his chair and forget we were even in
the house, leaving us alone in the dark for hours at a time.
Eventually he would wake up in a drunken stupor, amble
to the coal shed door and seem surprised to find us still sitting
there. If I had been in the blackness a long time the
sudden light would hurt my eyes when it finally arrived.

Neither Terry nor I ever dared to intervene when the
other one was being locked up because we knew that we
would suffer a worse punishment if we did. It was tempting
sometimes to go and unbolt the door when I knew he
was locked in the shed and I know he felt the same thing
when I was in there, but the beating we’d have got from
Dad just wouldn’t have been worth it. In every other way,
Terry and I stuck together – him and me against the outside
world – but we never had the courage to gang
together and stand up to Dad.

It was always up to one of us to fetch the coal from the
shop because such a menial task would have been beneath
Dad’s dignity. The merchant wouldn’t deliver it to the
house because Dad never paid his bills, so he used to send us down the hill to the shop to buy it and we would
have to carry it back up on our shoulders.

But these punishments and humiliations would have
been bearable if that was all he had done to us. I could
have found excuses and forgiven him for all of them if it
wasn’t for what he started to do to me next.

O
ne of the things Dad liked us to do was read the
evening paper to him each day when he got back
from the pub because he couldn’t do it for himself. He’d
look at the pictures and ask us what the headlines were
saying. If they interested him then he would tell us to
read on. I suppose it was quite good practice for us,
although some of the words were hard. I remember having
trouble getting my head round the way they spelled
jail ‘gaol’.

Believe it or not, that was how the next level of abuse
started, with me reading to my father. He had a collection
of pornographic magazines and he would order me
upstairs the moment he walked in through the front door,
usually when he was fuelled up with drink, but not
always. He would get me to sit on the edge of the bed and
read explicit stories to him while he lay beside me and masturbated. Not that I realized that was the name for
what he was doing; I was only eight or nine years old at
the time. I didn’t understand what he was doing to himself
at all, any more than I understood any of the things
that I was having to read out to him – I just knew that
none of it felt right and I didn’t like it. To begin with I
would beg him not to make me do it and I would be
unable to stop the tears from flowing, but then he would
become angry and shout and I would be terrified of what
he might do if I didn’t keep reading. There was no reasoning
with him when he was in that frame of mind and
I knew I had no choice but to obey. It was preferable to
taking a beating from the slipper or the stick. I would try
not to look at him or what he was doing, although it was
impossible to ignore the shaking of the bed beneath us,
and I would try not to focus on the pictures in the magazines
either, concentrating on the words on the page and
trying to block out everything else. I just wanted the
whole thing to be over as quickly as possible.