Mummy, Make It Stop (2 page)

We ate what we were given, whether we were hungry or not. There was trouble if anything was left on our plates. None of us would have dared to say we didn’t like the food, although Mum was no cook, so it was often pretty tasteless. Mostly we had sausages or egg, with chips and beans, though at weekends we had liver, which we kids all hated. Sometimes it was served with sprouts, which made Tanya gag. Afterwards, we kids washed and dried the dishes and did our chores - bringing in the washing or tidying our rooms. We were sent to bed at 6.30, even on long, light summer evenings, while Mum and George stayed in front of the telly.

Once a week it was bath night. The bath was run twice, first for me and Tanya and then for Paul and Jamie. I hated bath night. I was always at the plug end, and although Mum was in the house, it was always George who bathed us. He seemed to take pleasure in being cruel - especially to me. For some reason, he always had it in for me more than Tanya. He would wash my hair and hold my head under the water, or put loads of shampoo in my eyes to make me cry. When he held me under the water, my nose would sting and I’d start to struggle, getting more and more frightened, until he let me go, just as my lungs were about to burst. I soon came to dread bath night, and tried to get out of it, but there was no escape.

Goodness knows what kept Mum and George together. They didn’t row - I think Mum knew better than to cross George - but there was never any laughter or warmth between them. I think Mum liked being with George because everyone else was scared of him. Even though she was scared of him herself, being with a big, intimidating man like him gave her a sense of power. If people were scared of George, then they were scared of her too, and she liked that.

Mum never had any friends; she didn’t seem to know how to be friendly. She was always thinking that people were out to get her. According to her, all the neighbours were the enemy, and wanted to hurt us. Secretly, I didn’t think they seemed like the enemy at all. Some of them smiled at me in a friendly way, and I wished that we could be friends with them. But even if she managed to start a friendship, Mum soon fell out with them. She’d borrow money and not pay it back, or badmouth the person, or accuse them of something.

That’s one thing Mum and George shared - a hatred of the neighbours. Not that the two of them talked to one another much. Mostly they sat in front of the TV in silence. They may not have talked much, but they still had a sex life. They would go upstairs together sometimes and we could all hear them at it, grunting away, while we sat downstairs, too scared to move, even when they weren’t in the room.

It certainly wasn’t Mum’s looks that George went for; she looked really rough.

She was only thirty-one but she looked a lot older. She was short and very overweight - she must have been a size eighteen or twenty - with peroxide-blonde hair that she dyed herself, and her arms were covered with ugly scars from where she had cut herself. I hated to see them - I couldn’t imagine why she had hurt herself so badly - but she said it had been when she was younger and didn’t know what she was doing.

Mum was the youngest of four sisters. She was born on the estate and her parents still lived nearby, but her mother, who we called Nanna, was a long way from being a cuddly granny. Slight, with small features, she was grumpy and irritable. We never saw her smile, and she constantly had a cigarette in her mouth and a mug of tea in her hand and was often agitated. She worked in a clothing factory and spent her evenings at bingo. She was certainly never happy to see us. We never got presents or cards from her, and though most of the time she ignored us, she could lash out. Once she turned the rings on her fingers around before slapping Tanya, so that the stones in the rings cut her face.

Our grandfather was even worse. He spent his time fixing old cars outside their house, and Mum told us he used to beat her when she was a child. I thought he looked scary, but I never found out if he really was, because he took even less notice of us than Nanna did.

Most of the time, when she wasn’t at work, Mum lay around in front of the TV, eating sweets. She would buy herself big chocolate bars and I’d watch her eating them, longing for a little bit but not daring to ask. She’d look at me, grin, and then stick the whole lot in her mouth. She’d lie on the floor, with her feet on the sofa, and we’d have to rub cream into them, or tickle them, for hours at a time. Sometimes she’d make us draw with a pen on her back, because she liked the feeling, and then afterwards we had to wash it all off.

The atmosphere in our house was always tense and fearful. We felt we were walking on eggshells all the time. We crept around, trying as hard as we could not to upset Mum or George. No-one relaxed, or laughed, or chatted, or even spoke in a normal voice. George kept us all silent and permanently on edge with a chilling look that we knew meant ‘Cross me, and you know what you’ll get.’

We knew all too well. If we did anything wrong, like talking out of place, or dropping something, or not being quick enough to do a chore, or eating something we weren’t allowed, then George or Mum would order us upstairs for a beating.

Mum didn’t beat us herself - apart from the odd whack on the back of the head, or slap on the back of the legs. But she threatened us all the time. She used to put her clenched fist and her angry face right up against yours and say things like ‘Carry on ’n’ I’ll knock ya block off’ or ‘I’ll knock your fuckin’ head clean off ya shoulders’ or ‘I’ll hit you so hard you won’t be able to sit for a week.’ But she let George do the thrashing. She would sit downstairs in front of the telly, listening to whoever was being hit screaming in agony, and she wouldn’t react at all, she just carried on as normal.

As for George, he really seemed to enjoy it. It was impossible not to cry as you went up the stairs, knowing what was coming. We all tried to swallow back the tears, because if George saw you crying, he would beat you even more. He would be up there waiting, taking off his belt and flexing it so that it made snapping sounds, an evil glint in his eye.

For some reason he always punished us in Jamie and Paul’s little room. It stank in there, because Jamie wet the bed, and more often than not the sheets didn’t get changed. Jamie got beaten for wetting the bed, but it didn’t make any difference, he couldn’t help it. He stank all the time, and in the bedroom the rancid, sour smell of stale urine was so bad that most of the time the door was kept shut.

George would make you pull down your pants, and then kneel down and lean over the bottom bunk-bed. Then he’d hit you with the belt, sometimes using the buckle end, until your tender skin was a mass of welts and cuts.

We all dreaded the beatings, and we all got beaten, no matter how hard we tried to be good. Tanya once got beaten for breaking a vase when she hadn’t been near it. But it was Paul who suffered most. He was our half-brother - Mum had him when she was nineteen, before she met our dad - and both she and George seemed to have it in for him even more than for the rest of us. Nothing he ever did was right, and he was beaten more often and more viciously.

Virtually the only time George ever left the house was once a week, on Saturdays, when we all went to his mum’s house for lunch. We called her Nanna Gladice. She was very small and old and was partially blind and hard of hearing, so we always had to talk loudly to her. She had a cup which beeped, so that she could find it, and I was fascinated by it.

His brother, Trevor, would be there too. I liked these outings, because George’s mum and brother were both really nice. His mum would fuss over us, making beans on toast for lunch and giving each of us 50p.

On the way home from Nanna Gladice’s we would go to Morrisons and do the shopping, which we would all help to carry home. Sometimes we kids got a booty bag each - a bag with sweets and little toys in it. I loved those booty bags and used to look forward to them all week. When we got home I would go up to my room to open mine, looking excitedly to see what I’d got. Sometimes there was a little colouring book and crayons, sometimes a little plastic toy. I would sit on my bed playing with them for hours.

Once a month or so, George’s children, Chelsea and Lauren came over. They lived ten minutes away, so we’d walk over and collect them on our way to visit Nanna Gladice. We waited at their house while they got ready, and I was fascinated by what a mess it was. Their mum, Sue, had pots and pans all over the kitchen and clutter absolutely everywhere. They had a massive fish tank and a big, scary dog that bounded all over the place. It was so different from our house that I wondered how George and Sue had ever managed to be married.

Chelsea was the same age as Jamie - and, just like him, she was plump - although she was actually friendlier with Paul. Lauren was the same age as Tanya. They seemed all right, but we never really got to know them, because they were only with us for three or four hours and for most of that time George would be organising what everyone was doing. He would make a big effort to be pleasant and charming in front of them and we’d all have to play a game together, like Monopoly. After that we’d have tea at the table, and George would help to make it, keen to make a good impression on his kids.

They never stayed the night, and years later I discovered that this was because George had been caught masturbating in front of them. They were protected from him - yet he had been allowed to move in with us and we had no protection from him at all.

After Chelsea and Lauren went, the games would be put away, the table pushed back into place, the smile would vanish from George’s face and he would go back to snapping and snarling at us. This dramatic change in him, the minute his kids were out of the door, made it crystal clear just how little George thought of us.

These Saturday routines - lunch and shopping, or games and tea on the days George’s kids came over - were the only little bit of normality we had as a family. Afterwards it was back to silence and fear and beatings.

I was only five, but I felt that my life was like being on a train in a dark tunnel that wasn’t going to come to an end, so there would never be light again. I used to cope by switching off and going into my own world, a world where no-one hurt me, where I got hugs and kindness and where I could feel happy and loved and wanted.

Chapter Two

The best days for me were the ones when I was allowed to go to school. Tanya could take or leave school, Paul hated it and Jamie wasn’t too keen, but I loved it - it always smelled nice and I felt happy there, even though I never really fitted in or made any real friends.

It wasn’t just that I preferred sitting in the classroom to being at home, at George’s mercy. There was something about school that drew me like a magnet; I loved the idea of learning.

Catton Primary School was a short journey away from our house - go up a couple of narrow lanes between the houses and along two streets and you were there. I walked the ten-minute journey with Tanya and Jamie, though he would often bunk off and go to his friends’ houses. Paul was already at the secondary school, so he went a different route.

Our day would always start with a visit to the shop round the corner from our house. We would wait for a couple of other people to go in and follow them. Jamie would keep a lookout and then, while the shopkeeper was busy with the other customers, Tanya and I would stuff any goodies we could reach into our coats and up our sleeves. I wasn’t very good at it in the beginning, and I’d come out with almost nothing. But I soon caught on and we’d come out of the shop with pockets full of sweets and crisps and biscuits and keep them there all the way to school, when we’d hide them in our coats while we went into class.

The school was huge; most of the kids from the three surroundings estates went there. And the classes were big too. We had a nice young teacher who was very kind. But I hid at the back of the class. I felt shy and afraid of being asked to do anything in case I messed it up. I used to sit with my head down and go bright red if anyone spoke to me. Once the teacher asked me to read out loud and I stood looking at the book, blushing and stuttering as I tried to get the words out. She didn’t ask me again after that.

Lessons were often confusing for me, because I missed so much school. Things often made no sense to me, and I was forever trying to catch up. But rather than helping me, the teacher would often tell me not to worry about trying to join in, preferring me to sit there and draw or just watch everyone else. It was a shame, because I wanted to learn. I didn’t want to be different from everyone else.

I thought I was thick. It was many years before I realised that I was actually pretty bright, and could have done well if I’d had the chance. Despite missing so much school, I had learned to read by the time I was five. And I liked maths and wasn’t bad at sums.

I was generally either ignored or bullied by the other kids. Being away half the time, I never had a chance to really fit in. And they could see that I was different. A lot of us were poor, but I was the only one in grubby, stained clothes and worn-out shoes.

There were two playgrounds - one for the older kids and another for the younger ones. Tanya was in the older half, so I didn’t get to see her at breaktimes very often. Mostly I would sit on a wall in the corner of the infants’ playground, watching all the other children playing - chasing each other, kicking balls around and skipping. No-one asked me to play, and mostly I didn’t mind - I was content just watching. I was used to being on my own, keeping quiet and not saying much - that was how we had to live our lives at home, so I didn’t expect it to be different at school and I didn’t expect anyone to ask me to play, or want to be my friend. I longed to have friends and to be popular like Naomi Watson - who was so good at running that she won medals for it - or as pretty as Amber Smith. But I was a small, plump kid and I hardly ever spoke, because I didn’t know what to say to people. So they tended to ignore me, or if they did decide to talk to me, it was to call me names and pick on me.