Please, Daddy, No. Stuart Howarth

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СКАЧАТЬ there were always people in the kitchen boiling up pans of water to make themselves hot drinks. Mum was only in her early twenties and liked having friends around her. She always loved a party. We would often wake up and find that other people were sharing our beds, having crashed out after too much drink, empty cans and bottles everywhere. The thing Christina and I hated the most was the way the grown-ups all smoked so much. We used to get up early while they were all still unconscious and go round the house collecting up all the packets of cigarettes we could find and then hiding or destroying them.

      One day Dad brought home a washing machine, and from then on all the neighbours would bring their washing round for Mum to do. There were always bags of dirty clothes everywhere, adding to the chaos and the smell.

      There was always a lot of thieving going on around Smallshaw because it was the only way some families could survive. The women would bring back the stuff they had lifted from the shops, whether it was margarine or tins of coffee, and would share it all out. It sounds like everyone was getting on with one another when I put it like that, but there was always a current of jealousy and resentment bubbling below the surface, waiting for an excuse to surface.

      ‘It’s all right for Maureen,’ the other women would mutter to one another behind Mum’s back, ‘with all her things.’

      Dad even had a van and used to take us out on drives, which made the other families even more resentful. We came back one day to find the house had been broken into and robbed. Everyone knew it had been people from the street but there was nothing we could do about it and Mum said she wanted to move to a better area. Our gas and electricity meters were always being broken into for coins, food was stolen from our cupboards, and nothing was ever safe. The Electricity Board sent some men round to cut us off, but when they saw Shirley in her wheelchair they refused to do it.

      Mum was often down the road at work in the off-licence and we would be left in the care of older children, who would bully us and drag us about the place, and beat me with sticks. It was just the way life was for us.

      ‘You want to come round to our house for ice cream?’ the older boys would ask me. I always said ‘yes’ because I was always hungry, and I always fell for it when they force-fed me a spoonful of margarine. I so much wanted the offer to be genuine I was always willing to give them the benefit of the doubt one more time.

      There were some swings in a nearby park and we used to play a game where we jumped off in mid-air. I would always fall and graze my legs, which would mean Mum would stick me in the sink when I got home, using a scrubbing brush to try to get the tiny stones out of the cuts. I would fight and wail.

      ‘Keep still,’ she’d grumble, ‘or you’ll have to go to hospital for an operation.’

      There was no way I wanted to risk that. I’d seen how Shirley would disappear to the hospital for days on end and then come home covered in bandages. When I did eventually have to go to hospital, because of measles, I was amazed to find it was actually more like a magical kingdom than the chamber of horrors I’d imagined. I was pampered by the nurses and given proper food three times a day for the first time in my life. The whole place felt warm and loving and there was nothing to fear, everyone smiling and laughing all the time despite the fact that we were all sick or in pain. I saw our home life in a different light after that, realizing for the first time that not everyone in the world was always angry and shouting at their kids.

      We were always having to be treated for nits as well. Christina and Shirley both had Mum’s thick ginger hair, which made the nit comb much more painful for them than for me. As they struggled and squawked she would tell them how blessed they were to have such long, thick hair. I was more of a strawberry-blond colour and had my head shaved most of the time.

      There were some new houses being built down the bottom of Smallshaw Lane, which meant there were wagons full of earth streaming up and down all day long. A bunch of us used to stand at the top of the road and shout out to the men driving the trucks to give us rides. For a while they obliged and then the foreman told them to stop. The other kids persuaded me to hide in the bushes and jump out in front of one of the huge vehicles at the last moment, forcing the driver to stop with an explosive hiss of air brakes.

      ‘What you fuckin’ playing at?’ he wanted to know.

      ‘I don’t know where my mummy is,’ I replied, as I had been instructed, and started crying.

      ‘Come on up here then,’ he said, his heart softening.

      As soon as he opened the cab door the others would all troop out of the bushes.

      ‘Fuckin’ ell, your mammy’s been busy.’

      The ruse worked every time, and usually resulted in us getting to share their lunch and drinks. Once they dropped us off on the site we would play happily amongst the diggers and tractors.

      Quite often it was just me and Christina in the house because Shirley would be in hospital having operations on her legs, head and back, or my Nan would be looking after her. She and my Granddad Albert lived about five miles away and we often used to go over as a family for Sunday lunch. Granddad was a short, sturdy sort of chap who used to shout at me a lot. They lived in a private house and had lots of ornaments everywhere, like an Aladdin’s cave, which I just ached to pick up and look at but wasn’t allowed to. They had a little dog, Sparky, who felt so soft and smelled so clean compared to our filthy, smelly dogs. On the way home after Sunday lunches Christina, Shirley and I would lie on the floor of the van, half asleep, and I would watch the orange streets lights flashing past the windows and imagine we were on a magic carpet ride.

      Sundays were good because we could go to Sunday school, which the Salvation Army organized in a hut a few doors down from our house. We would sing songs and be told stories and even did some colouring-in of pictures of Jesus. They would give us presents like little gollywogs holding banjos and other musical instruments. They were the sort of thing you could have got for free off jam jars, but we loved them because they were pretty much the only presents we were ever given.

       Chapter Three THE PEN

      Dad had an allotment. Not one of those little strips of vegetables with a makeshift shed at the end, but about an acre of land, like a smallholding, filled with ramshackle outbuildings. It was known as ‘the pen’. Sometimes there would be twenty or thirty kids following him across the wooded piece of land behind the house and up the hill to the pen, with Shirley in her wheelchair, making him look like some sort of grubby Pied Piper.

      The ground amongst the trees along the route was always strewn with litter and the pen itself was surrounded by a makeshift wall of house doors, so that no one could break in and passers-by couldn’t see what was going on. It was Dad’s little private kingdom. Behind the wall and padlocked gates was another world where he raised chickens, geese, ducks and pigs and stored yet more scrap salvaged from his rounds. There was a big black boar called Bobby, and a sow, terrifying, stinking great creatures that wallowed and snuffled in their own filth. An abandoned car stood, stripped and rusting, just inside the gates, waiting for someone to turn it into scrap.

      In one of the sheds lived my dad’s dad, whom we knew as ‘Granddad from the Pen’, a dirty, toothless old man who would always smell of whisky and grab me between my legs, or pinch my bum and rub his bristly chin against my face, which he thought was funny but which hurt. His clothes, which he wore day and night, were rags, like a tramp would wear. He also thought it was funny to throw his false teeth at me, even though I hated it. Dad used to do the same thing sometimes with his. Even at that age I could sense there was something about Granddad СКАЧАТЬ