Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight for Survival. Judy Westwater

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       Chapter Three

      As Freda’s beatings grew worse, so did my health.

      I was never warm, and felt like I was fighting an endless battle against the cold. Nor do I ever recall feeling full. After a few months, the cheese triangles and meagre scraps I’d taken from the bins took their toll on my body, which grew stick-thin and covered with sores. I slept badly as the abscesses on my back were oozing yellow pus, which made turning over agony.

      I’d wake in the morning feeling the sharp pain of hunger, which would persist every minute of the day. Once I found a plug of gum that someone had chewed and stuck to a window sill. It was grey and hard but I was so desperate that I peeled it off and put it in my mouth. I chewed it for a bit but it tasted of nothing; then I swallowed it. Soon afterwards I overheard two boys talking in the street.

      ‘Did you know that if you swallow gum it gets tangled in your lungs?’ one of them said. ‘And then you can’t breathe and you die.’

      I could almost feel the horrid, stringy stuff tightening in my chest and had to force myself to breathe in and out. I can’t tell anyone I’ve eaten it, so I’m going to die, I thought.

      One Sunday evening, a few days after Freda had beaten me with the curtain rod, Dad was home and he and Freda were having a row downstairs. Freda always wanted me out of the way when my father was around, so she had sent me up to bed early without any tea. I could hear my dad’s voice booming under the floorboards of my room, and Freda’s tone was as bitter as an acid drop.

      I wasn’t ready to go to sleep – my hunger pangs wouldn’t let me – so I sat on my bed feeling restless and ill. It occurred to me then that there might be some food I could steal in one of the boxes stacked up round the bed, so I started to rummage through them. Then I stood on one of the boxes to get a better look. It tipped a bit as I shifted my weight and suddenly I lost my balance. To stop myself falling, I grabbed instinctively at the pile of boxes next to me. At the top were stacked a few tins of ice-cream wafers and one of these toppled over and fell to the ground with a loud clatter.

      My heart almost stopped. Then I heard the voices downstairs go quiet and, a moment later, my father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. I looked down and saw that the tin had come open and broken wafers were scattered everywhere. Oh no! Don’t let them catch me! I started scrabbling at the wafers on the floor, cramming them into my mouth in a desperate attempt to swallow the evidence.

      The door flew open and my father stood there with Freda. They looked at me as though I was no more than a piece of dirt on the floor.

      ‘See what I mean? She doesn’t do anything I say,’ Freda spat at him. ‘Every bloody day I have to put up with this!’

      Now she’d got started, it all spilled out – every vindictive little piece of nastiness Freda had been storing up.

      ‘… and she’s always stealing … sneaking around getting the neighbours to stick their noses in … and dirtying her clothes when she knows I don’t have time to run around cleaning up …’

      My dad heard this torrent of poison, all the while looking at me.

      ‘You little brat!’ He took a step forward and grabbed my arm, pulling me up. My legs almost buckled under me. ‘You want something to eat? I’ll give you something to eat.’

      Dad dragged me downstairs and sat me on one of the kitchen chairs. Then he took off his braces. I didn’t understand at first why he was getting undressed but then he leaned over and stretched the braces around my body, tying me to the chair so I couldn’t move my arms. Then he crossed to the kitchen alcove and pulled out a loaf tin and a spoon from a cupboard.

      ‘You want food, do you?’ I stared back at him, mutely. ‘Answer me! Do you want some food?’ I didn’t know what to answer, but I knew that whatever I said wouldn’t stop him now.

      Dad squatted down at the hearth and picked up the coal shovel. He scraped at the back of the fireplace until there was a pile of soot in the grate and then he shoveled it into the loaf tin. I knew now what he was going to do.

      ‘Open up!’ He held a spoonful of soot in front of my mouth. I didn’t open my mouth at once so he jabbed the spoon between my teeth and forced it in.

      My mouth was already dry from the wafers. I tried to swallow, but the soot was clogging the back of my throat. It was bitter and made my eyes stream; then it got into my windpipe and I choked.

      My dad forced a second spoon of the stuff into my mouth.

      ‘Eat up, brat! There’s plenty to go yet.’

      When he couldn’t get any more soot in my mouth, my Dad untied me. My chest was heaving violently and my eyes were watery and unable to focus. All I could see through the blur was the terrifying face of my father, ghoulish white with eyes like two black coals fixing me with a cold and psychotic hatred. He reached for his braces and whipped me hard across the head with them before dragging me back up the stairs and flinging me on to my bed.

      ‘I hope that’s taught you a lesson.’ Then, pointing at the mess on the floor, he said, ‘You can clean that up in the morning.’

      I lay there, barely able to move my arm to cover myself with the rug. My mouth was sore and bleeding. Sleep came as a blessed relief, but when I woke the next morning the soot still stung my tongue as a terrible reminder of the night before.

      Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night feeling very dizzy. The ear that Freda had clouted, bursting my eardrum, was running with pus and my hair was stuck to my face with the fluid. My chest hurt and there was a hot, hard lump on the side of my neck which was making it difficult to breathe. My body was burning up and my throat felt too parched to cry out. It was like being in a bad dream when you try desperately to scream but no sound comes out.

      I tried to climb out of bed, but my legs gave way and I fell onto the floor. I crawled across the room in the darkness and when I reached the bedroom door tried to raise myself up to open it, but I didn’t have the strength to push myself up with my arms. Freda must have heard me fall out of bed because a moment later I heard her trying to open the door. My body was in the way so she couldn’t get in at first. When she managed to push her way in and saw me lying there, I heard her draw in her breath sharply, then run out of the room and down the stairs. She must have gone outside to call an ambulance from the public telephone box in the street because the next thing I knew, a man was lifting me over his shoulder and carrying me down the stairs.

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