Please, Daddy, No. Stuart Howarth

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СКАЧАТЬ would be stuck to his feet, rock hard with sweat after spending so long in his boots.

      As he got used to having control, he started to become stricter about the way our lives were run. Finding he had so much power went to his head. We started to be given definite bedtimes, when before we had pretty much run wild. He didn’t like it if he had to carry Shirley around and if she wet herself he would shout at Mum to ‘get her fucking changed’. The atmosphere was getting much worse, but he was still my dad and I still loved him. I had no one else to compare him with anyway.

      After his afternoon nap he would wake up again about seven in the evening and go back down the pub. We would all try to get to bed before he reeled back in and the rows really started. We could hear the shouting and screaming downstairs and even then I knew Mum was getting beaten. He told her she had to get a full-time job to help with the money, and she did as she was told. Until then she had at least been there sometimes, or at least not far away, and suddenly she was gone for long periods of the day, and I felt lonely.

      The glimpses of nastiness and aggression that I had seen up at the pen, which had exploded on the beach in Wales, now became regular occurrences, and they escalated almost daily.

      ‘Don’t touch those fucking crusts,’ he would yell if I went to eat some bread. ‘They’re mine.’ Whenever any of us had bread we had to cut off the crusts and give them to him if we didn’t want a beating.

      If I touched something that was his, or was naughty in any way, I would get battered. The trouble was I didn’t always know when something I was doing would turn out to be on the forbidden list, although in the end it covered just about everything I did.

      ‘Don’t pick your nose!’

      ‘Stop picking your nails!’

      ‘Stop itching your bum!’

      ‘Stop scratching your head! Have you got nits?’

      ‘Dirty legs!’

      ‘Dirty knees!’

      ‘You’re a filthy little bastard. Go and wash!’

      ‘Look at the mess you’ve left round this basin and taps!’

      ‘Clean the fucking soap.’

      ‘Your bedroom’s a mess.’

      ‘You’ve left dirt on the sofa.’

      ‘Your coat’s dirty.’

      ‘Your trainers are dirty.’

      He had started grabbing me regularly, screwing my face up in his powerful fingers and slapping me round the head. He would suddenly appear behind me when I was least expecting it and slap me or throw me against the wall, knocking the breath out of my body. I wished I wasn’t so naughty because it seemed my behaviour was making him really hate me, but I just didn’t seem to be able to work out what I was about to do wrong next.

      I was constantly scratching and itching because I always had nits and worms; it was impossible to stop myself, and it seemed to drive him mad. Sometimes I’d itch my bottom and pull out a whole handful of worms.

      To deal with the nits, he decided I had to have my head shaved regularly, for hygiene, which revealed the little points I had on my ears, giving him the opportunity to tease me, calling me ‘Spocky’ after Mr Spock in Star Trek, or Kojak. The other kids at school were taking the piss too, warming their hands on the top of my head in the cold weather. I hated it all.

      The more he went on at me, the more I just kept thinking, ‘Please, Daddy, no,’ but he never stopped, never let up on me. He was changing, becoming angrier every day, and more and more disgusted by me. I knew I must be bad and naughty, because he kept telling me I was. I knew I was ugly, because he kept telling me, so I could understand why it must be so hard for my parents to love me, but I didn’t know what to do to make myself better and more lovable.

      Sometimes I did know I was being naughty, and just wasn’t able to resist temptation. We were nearly always hungry and he would eat chocolate biscuits in front of us and forbid us from having any; then he would go out, leaving the packet in full sight. Like most small boys I was unable to resist sneaking one, not realizing he had marked the packet before he went, and would receive a battering when he came back.

      ‘Your dad’s going to adopt the girls now,’ Mum told me soon after we moved into Cranbrook Street, ‘so we can be a proper family. Even though you really are his son, Stuart, we’re going to play a game. We’re going to go to the courts and pretend that he’s adopting all three of you together, so the girls don’t feel upset.’

      I was willing to go along with that; it was a game we had been playing at home for as long as I could remember. When we got to court, playing the charade of a happy family, wearing the first brand-new clothes I think I’d ever had bought for me, we were sat in front of two men and a woman. They asked a few questions.

      ‘So, Stuart,’ the lady said, ‘do you like your new daddy?’

      ‘I like my daddy,’ I replied politely, ‘but I don’t like it when he hits me and hurts me.’

      I glanced over and saw the look of anger flickering across his face. I smiled quickly, as I always did when I was afraid, and everyone started laughing, seeing the little exchange as proof that my dad and me could laugh and joke together. The adoption was approved.

      Our days fell into a regular routine. After I came back from school Mum would be at work and I would be sent out to play, even though he would insist that Christina and Shirley went to bed with him for an hour for a rest. Now and then I would be allowed to join them for the rest and on one occasion Shirley started playing with my private parts.

      ‘Gerroff Shirley,’ I said, indignantly.

      ‘Stop fucking about, you two!’ he barked. ‘Go to sleep.’

      ‘She keeps playing with my widget!’ I protested.

      Shirley was always there in the afternoons after being brought back from her special school, a constant scowling presence in the corner of the sitting room in her wheelchair, her arms folded and her face unhappy.

      On the afternoons when I was sent out I knew that if I came back before I was allowed, which was seven o’clock, I would be in for a battering, so I never did. Even if I needed to go to the toilet I would find somewhere outside rather than disobey him and go into the house. I was not allowed to use the front door, always coming in through the back garden, which was the one part of our home that was kept neat and tidy, bracing myself for the expected battering.

      I seemed to be an outcast from every group of children in the area, so it was hard to find things to do to fill the hours until I was allowed back into the house. I didn’t look like the others at my new school because I was so dirty, I didn’t sound like them and I didn’t dress like them. But I no longer fitted in with the kids from Smallshaw either, because they thought I believed myself better than them.

      There was a disused railway line running not far from Cranbrook Street and some of the older kids would make dens in the arches along the side, where they would meet to smoke and drink and sniff glue. If I couldn’t find anyone else to play with I would wander up there on my own, finding some comfort in the wind that always seemed to whip along between the embankments. I was only five years old and the bigger boys would watch me from their dens, taking СКАЧАТЬ