Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed. Stuart Howarth

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СКАЧАТЬ able to stop my screams from escaping, making him look straight up at me. As she came to rest at the bottom, her screams echoing mine, Dad suddenly started acting as if it had been an accident. He ran down just as Christina came out of the sitting room and scooped up poor, crumpled baby Clare. All three of us were crying and Dad was insisting he had slipped and she’d fallen out of his arms. It was the first time for sure I knew he was lying about something. I’d seen exactly what he’d done. I couldn’t understand it; she was only a baby, she couldn’t have done anything naughty enough to deserve that, could she?

      Left to his own devices for longer each day he became even nastier and I heard him shouting more and more at Christina and Shirley, which I knew wasn’t fair. I could understand why he was always angry with me because I was such a naughty boy, but I knew the girls were never naughty, so I didn’t think it was right for him to punish them. Christina spent her whole time trying to do things for us, and Shirley couldn’t move far enough to do anything bad. They were complete innocents, so why was he so angry with them?

      When Clare was three or four years old he used to tell me he was going to kill her while I was away at school. ‘I’ll burn her fingers in the fire,’ he’d say, and laugh when I cried out at the thought. I had no doubt he was capable of doing such a thing, and each day during our morning break at school I would sneak out through some bent railings at the back of the playground, run all the way round the back of the houses, let myself into our back garden and creep towards the house, squeezing myself behind the shed, terrified he would look out of the window and see me. When I reached the house I would turn over the mop bucket, which always stood by the back door, and raise myself up just high enough to peer in through the downstairs window, holding my breath in case I gave myself away, desperate to see Clare moving around and to check he hadn’t hurt her. Sometimes, if the windows were open, I would be able to hear him upstairs with Mum in the bedroom and the sounds would make me feel sick, but I would still hang on, my heart thumping with fear, until I had seen Clare and put my mind to rest enough to go back to school.

      He would always draw the curtains when he was watching the television in the early evening, so we were cut off from the outside world completely. We would all be in the room together and he would fetch his filthy magazines out and get us to look at the pictures. Sometimes they were just women in poses, sometimes couples doing things, sometimes they were pictures of men and close-up shots of erect penises. I didn’t want to look at any of them.

      ‘Look at her,’ he’d say to me, pointing to some pouting, naked girl. ‘Do you think she’s a virgin? Look at her fanny.’

      ‘What do you think of that?’ he’d ask Christina, showing her another picture. ‘Look at the tits on that.’ Then he would grab Shirley’s breasts in front of us and laugh.

      Sometimes he would show us dirty films on the wall with an old cinematic projector. We hated them but he wouldn’t let us leave the room while they were on. He said we needed to learn what life was about. ‘Please, Daddy, no,’ we would plead. ‘We don’t want to watch these films.’ He would take films of us as well, although we never knew what he did with them.

      He would make us go upstairs and put on Mum’s little shorty nighties, dressing us up like dolls and then just making us sit there in the lounge with him. (Much later, I found out that he used to enjoy wearing Mum’s clothes himself sometimes, telling her he liked the feel of the material on his skin.) He had complete power over all of us, able to make us do whatever he wanted. We were all so traumatized we never found a way to talk to one another about the things that were happening and how we felt about them. All three of us just did as we were told, until he eventually left us alone and we could get on with our own lives together for a few hours.

      He would put the chain on the front door whenever he was messing about with us, in case Mum came home early, which she did once or twice.

      ‘Why’s the chain on the door?’ she wanted to know, when she finally managed to attract his attention and was let in.

      ‘Because I was upstairs in the bathroom,’ he said quickly, ‘and I forgot to take it off again.’

      Now that I was eight or nine years old, I would see other boys at school sometimes who had managed to get hold of dirty magazines like Dad’s. They would huddle in corners giggling over the pictures and want me to look at them too, but I was terrified, thinking they were all going to turn out to be like him. Everything was so frightening and confusing. On my way home from the school yard each day I used to hug the wall and cry, trying to get some comfort out of the cold stones.

      However often experience taught me that nothing good would ever happen in our family, I always remained hopeful, especially as Christmas approached and all the other kids at school started to talk about the presents they hoped they would get. One Christmas morning, even before I opened my eyes, I was aware Dad was in my room. He was leaning over the bed, staring at me. I smiled at him hopefully, feeling excited at the prospect of at least one day of love and attention.

      ‘What are you fucking smiling at?’ he wanted to know.

      ‘Has Father Christmas been?’

      ‘Yeah, he’s been.’ I followed the direction of his gaze to a potato lying on the bed. ‘There you go.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Eat it.’

      He sat and watched as I took a bite and started to chew, trying to force my tensed throat to accept the bitter-tasting pulp and swallow.

      Everything he ever gave us was rubbish. He once came home with a sack filled with old broken toys that someone had thrown out.

      ‘There you are,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve got you a train set.’

      He laughed at me as I took it up to my room and sorted it all out on the floor. It was exciting to have something constructive to do and I really wanted to get it working, to show him how clever I was. I went downstairs and found an old piece of Brillo and set about cleaning up the track, rubbing and polishing the years of grime away until it shone like new. All the time I was thinking, Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off. I was never allowed to swear out loud. It took hours of work, and I would get little electric shocks every time I touched it, but I actually managed to get the whole thing working, even the little light on the front of one of the trains. I used to put the light on at night, when the house was shrouded in gloom, and just sit watching the engine going round and round, feeling satisfied and proud of my achievement.

      Things became a lot worse up at the pen when it was just him and me up there. It was a longer walk now from Cranbrook Street than it had been from Smallshaw and he would go as fast as he could, shouting abuse at me as I lagged behind. But I still wanted to go with him because I was proud that I had a dad who wanted to share his life with me, and I desperately wanted to show him how useful I could be to him.

      ‘Come on, you little bastard, faster.’

      Sometimes he would get so far ahead that he would be able to hide in the hedges, particularly on dark evenings, and then jump out at me, frightening me half to death.

      ‘See that moon?’ he’d ask, pointing up into the sky. ‘He’s gonna get you.’

      From the time we moved to Cranbrook Street, Granddad from the Pen disappeared, and no one ever explained what had happened to him. I suppose he must have died.

      Dad would bully me relentlessly while we were there, treating me like a slave. He would make me fetch water from the well in a bucket that was too big for me to carry. I had to get down on all fours, float the bucket on its side and scoop the water СКАЧАТЬ