Wake Up, Mummy (3 page)

Paul and Judith were brought together by their mutual love of alcohol – apart from which, they seem to have had little in common. Paul was a couple of years older, a short, stocky, violent and vicious bully with an almost palpable air of aggression and a deeply rooted, immutable hatred and distrust of women. He clearly wasn’t the sort of young man Judith’s parents would have approved of – which may well have been part of his appeal for her.

When she was just 16 years old, Judith became pregnant – whether as a deliberate act of defiance or as the result of a drunken accident, no one knows. If it
was
intended as a means of giving one more twist to the knife
she’d embedded in her mother’s heart many years previously, it had the desired effect. As deeply religious people, her parents were mortified by the thought of what their priest (and neighbours) would say if it became known that their teenage daughter was about to become an unmarried mother. So, although they disliked Paul, they insisted the couple should marry.

In fact, Judith’s father also had another reason for wishing his daughter to be married before her child was born: having been abandoned by his own mother as a small boy, his experiences had left him with the unshakeable opinion that children need two parents.

Three months after the wedding, I was born – the daughter of a mentally ill, alcoholic, teenage mother who could barely take care of herself, and a violent, misogynistic, drunken and abusive father.

I didn’t stand a chance.

MY MOTHER WAS
a horrible teenager and a dangerously indifferent, self-absorbed parent. Perhaps her behaviour was due to having grown up feeling unloved – or, at least, less loved than her siblings. Or perhaps she’d absorbed some of her own mother’s guilt and felt as though she was somehow responsible for the death of the brother she never knew. Or maybe it was all entirely due to her mental illness and alcoholism. I’ll never know. But, despite all the terrible things that happened to me over the next few years, the consequences of which I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life, and despite all the misery my mother caused, I’ve always loved her. I think I’ve always known she couldn’t really help herself. So although I can’t actually forgive her for opening the door and pushing me into the lion’s den when I was six years old, I do know that, sober and in her right mind, she wouldn’t have wanted me to suffer in the way I did.

My father, on the other hand, seems to have had no ‘medical’ excuse that I’m aware of for his cruel treatment of his mother, my mother and me. He may have had traumas in his own childhood. I know how that feels. But I know also that although some of the things that happen to you as a child may leave deep scars which never really heal, you still have a choice about how you behave towards other people. And he chose to treat his own daughter with cruel contempt.

My father wasn’t present during my birth – I don’t think most men were, in those days. He arrived at the hospital when it was all over, glanced into my cot, hissed at my mother, ‘You can both fuck off,’ and left. He’d wanted a son, and he saw no reason to hide his disgust at being presented with a worthless daughter. He felt that he’d been forced into marriage by his wife’s parents, coerced into shouldering responsibilities he’d normally have avoided, and he was bitterly resentful.

He returned to the hospital a couple of days later to take me and my mother home. Then he went to the registry office, where he registered only the first of the two names my mother had chosen for me. And that, he felt, was all he was required to do. While I was a baby, he totally avoided having any contact with me – he never held me, fed me or changed my nappy – and he never spoke to me other than with anger and dislike.

My mother’s father worked in construction, doing contracts that took him all over the world, and after I was born he found jobs for himself and my father in the Middle East. So, when I was one month old, my parents, my grandparents and I left England and went to live there for a year.

Some years later, on one of the many occasions when my father was shouting about how useless I was and how he cursed the day I’d been born, he told me he’d tried to sell me to a man he’d met in the Middle East when I was baby. Apparently, the man had admired my blonde hair and blue eyes and wanted to ‘buy’ me as a wife for his son when I reached the age of 12. My father could hardly believe his luck. He agreed to an immediate down-payment and then a second, larger, sum of money when the man came to England to ‘collect’ me 11 years later. The man explained to my father that once he’d accepted the initial payment, there would be no going back on the deal, and that, wherever we were living when the time came, he
would
find us. My father just laughed and assured him he wouldn’t change his mind. His discovery that he could sell his ‘worthless’ daughter was the silver lining to what had previously seemed a very dark cloud, and he certainly wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip from his grasp.

Luckily for me, though, my grandfather found out about the plan before any money could change hands, and he put a stop to it.

When the building contract came to an end, we all returned to England, my father joined the army and my parents and I went to live in a house on a military base. Our new home was some miles away from where my grandparents lived, and it may have been because they were no longer there to see what was happening to my mother that my father’s violence towards her escalated – and continued to do so even after she gave birth to the son he’d always wanted. She became little more than a punch bag, subjected to a constant barrage of physical and verbal abuse. And every time he viciously assaulted her, she lost a little more of her spirit.

My mother was still just a teenager, barely able to look after herself. So it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that she wasn’t very good at caring for two young children, particularly once the support of her family that she’d been used to was no longer available. She was too young, too self-engrossed and too mentally ill to find any consolation in loving us and looking after us. Her life was completely miserable, and she grew increasingly dependent on pills and alcohol.

My first memories are of around that time, although in fact they’re mostly feelings rather than memories of actual incidents. For example, I can remember many occasions when I was afraid and many when I saw blood on my mother’s face and tried to block out the sound of her
screams. My earliest complete memory is of when I was three and opened the living room door one day just as my father was beating up my mother.

I stood there, frozen to the spot by shock, and he suddenly swung round and screamed at me, ‘Hit her! Go on, hit her. She likes it.’

I looked at my mother, who was cowering in an armchair, blood pouring from her nose as she tried to protect her face with her arms, and I was really frightened. But when I looked back at my father, I felt an excitement that was even stronger than my fear, because he’d spoken directly to me, which he never normally did.

How to get his attention was something I often thought about as a child. He never touched me or cuddled me or let me sit on his knee – ever – and I used to fantasise about what it would be like if he treated me more like he treated my brother Chris, holding my hand and speaking to me without anger and dislike in his voice. And that day, as I stood in the doorway of the living room, I thought that this might be my chance at last. Perhaps if I sided with my father against my mother, he’d look at me and realise I was just as good as my brother. Of course, that’s how I explain it now, with the benefit of rational thought. At the time, though, I just had a mixture of emotions – fear and pity for my mother, and elation at the thought that, finally, my father was including me in something.

To my undying shame, I clenched my fist, walked across the room to the armchair and hit my already beaten mother.

‘Look at that!’ my father crowed triumphantly, pushing his face up close to hers. ‘Even your own daughter doesn’t like you.’

It was almost like getting his approval – for the first time in my life – and it should have felt good. But, somehow, although it was the one thing I’d always longed for, I was miserable, and too guilty to look my whimpering mother in the eyes.

Another early memory is of going into the garden, where my father was drinking with some of his mates. I stood against the wall of the house, watching them and listening to their laughter. I’d probably only been standing there for a minute or two when my father noticed me and called me over to him.

‘Stand there,’ he commanded, pointing to a spot on the grass near his feet.

I felt a hot flush of excitement: my father was speaking to me without cursing or shouting. I almost threw myself on to the grass in my eagerness to show him how well I could do what he told me.

He grinned at his friends, turned to pick up an empty tea chest and slammed it down over my head, trapping my fingers under one edge and imprisoning me in the dark.

I burst into tears. My fingers were throbbing painfully and I was shocked and frightened. I could hear my father and his friends laughing and I felt humiliated. I’d been stupid to believe that, for the very first time in my life, my father had had anything other than bad intentions towards me.

After a while, he lifted the edge of the tea chest a few inches, releasing my swollen fingers.

‘Aw, come on; it was just a joke.’ His voice was mocking. ‘Okay, then. Out you come.’

He raised the tea chest a little further, but just as I was scrabbling to my feet, he slammed it down again. This time, as well as the muffled sound of laughter, I heard the creaking of wood as he sat down on top of it.

I was frightened of the darkness, and I was frightened of the feeling of not being able to breathe, so by the time my father eventually let me out, I was sobbing hysterically.

‘Look at her,’ my father sneered to his friends. ‘She’s nothing but a great big baby.’ As he spoke, he pushed me so that I fell on the grass, and as I struggled to get to my feet, he shouted, ‘Go on, fuck off back inside the house.’

Still crying, I ran up the garden, away from the sound of the men’s scornful, mocking voices. And by the time I reached the back door, my father had already forgotten I existed.

My mother, my brother and I lived in a permanent atmosphere of fear and nervous apprehension. Every day, as the time approached when my father was due home from work, my mother would become tensely anxious and would shout at me to clear up my toys. Sometimes, he’d be in a good mood and she’d be pathetically grateful and relieved. But he could change without warning, and we lived in constant fear of doing something that might irritate or upset him.

One day, he beat up my mother so badly she had to be taken to hospital by ambulance, and he was arrested by the military police. As soon as he was released, he collected me and Chris and drove with us to the hospital. Although he didn’t speak to us at all, I could sense the anger radiating from him, and I can still remember his painfully tight grip on my wrist as he marched down the hospital corridor, literally dragging us behind him.

There were other women on the ward, and there must have been nurses, too, although I don’t recall seeing them. But not even the presence of other people could shame my father into controlling his fury. He stood beside my mother’s bed and screamed abuse at her, while she just sat there crying, her swollen face almost unrecognisable beneath all the cuts and bruises. Then he turned abruptly on his heels, grabbed Chris’s hand and stamped off back down the ward.

My mother called after him, pleading, ‘Please, Paul. I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. Please come back.’

I felt really sad for her, until I realised that my father was going to leave without me. I ran after him, begging him to wait for me, but he ignored me and kept on walking away with my brother.

Although my father’s physical violence was largely directed towards my mother, he sometimes hurt me, too, and I still have a small, round scar from a cigarette burn he made just below my knee – a permanent reminder of how much he disliked me.

He used to go to the pub almost every night, and my mother resented being left behind to look after Chris and me while he was out having a good time. In reality, though, she was too selfish simply to accept the fact that she had two young children and had to stay at home to look after us. She’d often put us to bed, give us some medicine that made us sleep and then sneak out to a different pub to meet a boyfriend. Although she always made sure she got home before my father, it seems strange for her to have risked him finding out what she was doing, particularly when she was so afraid of him. It was as though she couldn’t help herself. Perhaps she was driven by the same devil inside her that made her do things that almost tore her family apart when she was a teenager.

As a child, I didn’t know there was anything ‘wrong’ with my mother, although I
was
aware from a very early age of her manic-depressive episodes.

One night, I was woken up by the sound of someone crying and I lay in the darkness, anxiously listening. I shared a bedroom with Chris, but clearly the crying wasn’t coming from him and after few moments he whispered, ‘Are you awake? Can you hear it?’ He sounded as scared as I was.

The wailing grew louder, until I knew we couldn’t simply ignore it.

‘We’ll have to go and see what it is,’ I told my brother, trying to sound braver than I felt. ‘We’ll be okay if we go together.’

I’m sure he didn’t believe that any more than I did, but the only thing more frightening than coming with me would have been for him to stay in the bedroom alone. So he climbed out of bed and felt for my hand in the dark.

I took a deep breath and slowly opened the bedroom door, my heart thumping with terror as I tried not to imagine all the horrifying things that might be on the other side of it. But the landing was empty. We tiptoed along it together, our pyjamas damp with the cold sweat of fear, and crept halfway down the stairs, where we stopped and crouched low so that we could see through the spindles of the banister. We had a clear view of the
open living-room door and of a large part of the room itself, and could see a woman pacing up and down, cradling her empty arms as though she was holding a baby, and talking agitatedly between loud, heart-rending sobs.