Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy’s Struggle to Survive. A Mother’s Shameful Secret. The Power to Forgive.. David Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ of the time you’re the best Mummy in the whole world. But then you change. You get angry and make me do things I don’t understand. Why do you want me to do those things? Please tell me why. Why can’t you make my dark Mummy go away? I’m afraid of her. Don’t you see what she does? Don’t you see what she makes me do? Why do you pretend you don’t know?

      I am only five but I’ve already got so many questions I can feel them pressing on my heart. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe. There aren’t any answers, just more questions. I don’t know if I will ever have the answers. All I know is that my questions are piling up inside me. I try to bury them but there are too many. I feel like an unexploded mine.

      * * *

      The house in which I am born, on 6 April 1968, is in an idyllic setting: the small rural village of Calder Bridge, near Halifax in West Yorkshire. The village is picture-postcard perfect with beautiful cottages made from Yorkshire stone, a small village pub and post office, all wrapped up in the incredible rolling landscape of the Pennine Hills. I love the glorious countryside feel to it – the large wide-open spaces, the rolling fields, the luscious woodland, the sense of freedom. Even aged three or four, my mother lets me wander through the woods to play with other kids. Everyone knows everyone else and there’s a real sense of community.

      Our house is quite isolated though. It stands in a fork in a country lane and is one of four terraced charcoal-grey-stone cottages, smothered at each end with dark-green ivy, surrounded by trees and perched above a steep ravine through which a sparkling river runs over mossy rocks and boulders. Although from the front of the building the cottages seem squat, with small, poky rooms where the light never spreads, the back of the building slopes steeply down towards the ravine. So there are only two floors on the front of the house, but two more floors at the back. They tower over the river, and even in summer the whole building is gloomy and mysterious like a gothic mansion.

      My earliest memories are of these strange contrasts – the warm, cosy, intimate times when I play with my mother; the cold, isolated, dark, forbidding times when things are completely different – in my family life as well as in the places surrounding it.

      Years ago, there was a cotton mill a hundred yards along the ravine and you can still see signs of it along the brick banks of the river. A hundred yards from my home, between where the mill used to be and the house, is an old scrap-metal yard which may very well be the most beautiful scrapyard in the world, as it virtually hangs over the river.

      The scrapyard is a second home to me. I love looking up at all this wonderful metal piled up as far as I can see. It’s dirty and greasy, a perfect place for a small boy. I play hide and seek with the owner’s young son Jeff, in and around the stacks of rubber tyres, dustbins, stripped doors, racks of trellises, lead piping, stained and damaged cast-iron baths and wash basins, wrecked car parts, and all the other layers of junk that have settled one on top of the other like geological strata in this metal wonderland. Jeff’s father is gruff but kindly, a good-humoured, plain-speaking Yorkshireman who sometimes smiles but never says much to me.

      When I’m not playing with Jeff, I play by myself or sometimes with George, a lad of my age who lives a few fields away, and whose mother gets on well with mine. My earliest memories are of forever playing outside. Although as a young child I am not very adventurous or physically courageous, I am naturally inquisitive and am always looking for birds and animals in the fields and fish in the river.

      One day, playing in the scrapyard, I find a bird’s nest, embedded deep within some rusty metal boulders. Even as a four-year-old I am amazed at how tough, tenacious and adaptable life is; how such a vulnerable thing as a bird’s nest with its firm outer ring and its gentle cosy lining can find a home in this alien place; how life can grow and thrive here, in the shadows.

      The next time I go to see the nest, the chicks have hatched. I stare at the broken shells in amazement. Only yesterday they were tiny fragile pear-shaped eggs with beautiful, delicate patterns. When I return later in the day all the shells have gone.

      I ask the scrapyard owner what’s happened to them.

      ‘Mother’s eaten ’em, lad, or chucked ’em away,’ he says. ‘She likes to keeps things clean and tidy.’

      ‘I liked the eggs,’ I say.

      ‘Aye lad, but as they always say, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

      I think about this Omlet and wonder how many eggs you must break to make it. Are all the chicks baby Omlets and what happens to the mother Omlet? Do they all stay in the nest together or do they fly away and never see each other again?

      I go down to the nest every day after that and look at the chicks.

      One day when I go to the nest, I find it empty. I wonder what’s happened to the chicks and where they’ve gone. I think they must have all turned into Omlets and flown away.

      Dad has a lock-up garage near the scrapyard where he stores something special. One day he shows me what he keeps inside: it’s a red Volvo P1800. I’m very excited as this is the car used by Simon Templar in the TV show The Saint. The Volvo is impossibly beautiful with swooping curves and looks very exotic – as good as any other car on the road. We also have a Rover called Bluebell which Dad keeps on a patch of grass on the side of the house. It’s a gorgeous car – the kind Jim Callaghan drives and Mum says he’s a very important man and one day he might even be Prime Minister.

      My father, Keith, is a big man, a foot taller than my mother, with a large face, horn-rimmed glasses, short black hair combed back from his forehead and a thick black beard. He doesn’t have a moustache though, so when I’m older I think his beard looks like one of those joke beards you stick on your chin to make you look like a monkey or a rabbi.

      He likes making jokes, my Dad, but in other ways he can be a bit of a cold fish – he’s not affectionate with me and there’s never any rough and tumble with him. He is genial and patient towards me but he’s also strict – firm but fair. Unlike my mother, he isn’t sociable or gregarious. He doesn’t smile a whole lot.

      Dad works as a draughtsman but his true obsession is his motorbikes and engines. We have lots of space in the house and he even has a garage underneath the house just for his motorbikes, which he rides up and down the lane. He may not have built this garage himself but he’s changed it to make it the way he wants it to be. Down in the garage, I peer up at him in wonder as he takes apart the engine. He lets me watch and answers my questions.

      ‘What you doing, Dad?’

      ‘I’m just changing the oil in the gearbox.’

      ‘Why, Dad?’

      ‘To keep the gears all working nicely, son.’

      ‘How d’you do it?’

      ‘Well, you have to remove the drain plug from the gearbox, drain the oil, and then remove the gearbox fill plug and fill it with new oil. Then you wipe away any oil you’ve spilt so it’s all clean and replace the chassis protector . . . ’

      And on he goes, carefully explaining what he’s doing. I don’t really understand what he’s saying though. After changing the oil, he’ll start on the nuts and bolts.

      ‘Can I help you, Dad?’

      ‘Yes, you can hand me that spanner, lad.’

      ‘What’s that for?’

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