Nobody's Child Page 3

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I promise. I won’t spoil our secret by telling Daddy. I want to go out with John again. It was fun.’

  Over the rest of that summer and autumn, then into winter, John became the only bright spot in my life. From the end of one outing, I would long for the next one.

  When it became too cold and wet to visit the countryside, he would take us to other places. One trip was to a museum, another to the zoo. And one of the best was when he took me to a big shop in Manchester to see Father Christmas. He asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I told him I would like a big toy truck. I didn’t really expect to get it, though. I was hardly ever given toys for presents, except by Nanny Ramsden, who had given me a football for my birthday.

  Daddy always gave me hats as presents, for Christmas and for my birthday. I had a prison warder’s hat, a policeman’s, a fireman’s and various others. They weren’t much to play with but I liked them and sometimes lined them up and pretended that people were wearing them and imagined how they would act. Occasionally, Mammy gave me crayons and pencils and drawing books, but neither she nor Daddy ever wanted to look at my drawings.

  I had always thought that our outings with John were too good to be true, and I should have known that something that nice wouldn’t be allowed to go on. I was a bad boy. Daddy told me that all the time, and I knew that nice things didn’t happen to bad boys. Only bad things. But I could never have known just how frightening the consequences of our secret would be.

  The beatings from Daddy had gone on throughout the time that John was taking us out, but they were no worse than before. The slaps and the kicks were just as unpredictable and painful, and some of the things he said were still as hurtful, but by now I had almost become accustomed to it all. I’d learned to cope with it. Daddy had always been like that, for as long as I could remember and, at least, since the night he had cut my cheek, he hadn’t used the buckle end of his belt on me.

  But, on the night we learned he had found out about our secret trips with John, it was terrifying. I really believed he was going to kill us both.

  It was dark when he came home and the fire was burning in the living room, where Mammy and I were watching television. I could tell by the smell of his breath, almost from the moment he came into the room, that he had been drinking, and I was anticipating the usual punishment even before he began to shout.

  Mammy, who had gone back to her regular zombie routine in between our outings with John, was only half-awake when Daddy hauled her out of her chair and, with no warning, hit her hard across the face with the back of his hand.

  It was so sudden it took us both off guard. Daddy usually had to work himself up into a temper before he started lashing out.

  Mammy screamed and fell back in her chair but he just bent forward and gave her another hard slap across the face, which made her scream again.

  Then he started to yell just as loudly as her. ‘You whore! You dirty, bloody whore! You’ve been seeing a bloke behind my back. How did you think you could get away with it, eh, you slut? And you took this stupid bastard brat with you. Did you want him to watch you in action? You’re a right bloody pair, aren’t you! A whore and her bastard son out with her fancy man.’

  ‘He’s not a fancy man,’ Mammy screamed back. ‘He’s just a friend who was being nice to us.’

  She managed to struggle to her feet and then Daddy began punching her in the chest. She was screaming more with every blow but he just kept on. He seemed to be out of control.

  Then he hit her across the face again and she went crashing down into the fireplace, scattering the fire tongs and brush and knocking over the coal scuttle as she landed hard on her bottom. Her left arm, which was bare almost to her shoulder, struck against the horizontal bars of the iron grate, and suddenly her screams grew even louder.

  ‘You’ve branded me, you swine!’ she shouted.

  He laughed at her. ‘Serve you right, you bloody whore,’ he said, and raised his fist again.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was far worse than he had ever beaten Mammy before and I was afraid he was going to kill her. I rushed over to him and started kicking his legs and punching at his stomach but it had absolutely no effect on him. He just smashed me across the face with his hand and that took all the fight out of me.

  ‘You bloody little nobody,’ he shouted. ‘You need to be taught a lesson just like her. One that you won’t forget.’

  He grabbed me by the arm and neck and hauled me over to the fireplace. Mammy had crawled away and was lying on the carpet, sobbing, and nursing her burned arm in her good hand.

  ‘Let’s see if a little of what this slut has had will teach her bastard to behave,’ he growled. Then he took my arm and pressed the side of it, between the wrist and elbow, against the hot bars that had burned Mammy.

  It was the worst pain I had ever experienced, and I screamed out as loudly as Mammy had done. He held my arm against the grate for a second or two, but the pain seemed to go on for ever, and I could feel the agony everywhere at once – on my arm, in my head, all over. I could smell it too – singed hair and scorched flesh.

  When I looked at my arm it had turned bright red and I think a blister was already starting to come up.

  I was weeping and probably hysterical, and so was Mammy. Sobbing, she crawled over to me and put her arms around me. She could have been trying to protect me from anything else Daddy might decide to do, or maybe she just needed comforting herself.

  The amazing thing is, despite all that screaming, none of our neighbours came to see what was happening, even though they must have heard everything. It was just that kind of place. People minded their own business and nobody ever involved the police. But there was always gossip and everyone in the street knew every detail of one another’s lives.

  I don’t know if Daddy realised he had gone too far or whether he had just run out of steam, but he didn’t try to hit us any more. Instead he just glared at us both for a long while and then snarled, ‘You two make me sick,’ before storming out of the room and down the stairs.

  I don’t know if he was going back to the pub or to work. I was simply in such agony that I was just relieved to see him go so that he couldn’t hurt me any more.

  That is how our secret trips with John came to an end. He never came back to see us in his big Jaguar, and Mammy rarely mentioned his name again. She did tell me that she had first met John on one of her fantasy shopping trips in Manchester. She couldn’t afford to buy anything, but she loved to go in the expensive department stores and clothes shops and pretend that she was one of the rich ladies who were shopping there. She always looked at her most beautiful when she was going out on one of these fantasy sprees.

  She had met John while having coffee in one of the big stores. He had shared her table and they had started talking. Mammy said he was the first man to treat her like a lady for years and that’s why she had agreed to go out with him. He was simply a nice man who had treated her with respect.

  But in Openshaw, as in all working-class ghettos, it was impossible to do anything without your neighbours finding out. There were too many eyes.

  John had picked us up outside our house at Mammy’s insistence. She hoped that by being open about our outings the neighbours wouldn’t get the wrong message. But one of them obviously had and, keen to cause trouble, had told Daddy about our secret trips. We never did find out who had betrayed us.

  It did achieve one result, though. It made Mammy and me more determined than ever to escape.

  Chapter Four

  Although we were to carry the scars of Daddy’s most brutal attack to date for many years, the actual pain from our burns lasted little more than a week.

  The day after my branding, the burn on my arm was a mass of broken, weeping blisters, so Mammy, whose own arm was in much the same condition, took me to the chemist’s. There she told me to show my burn to the man behind the counter and asked his advice on what she should put on it.

 
The chemist wanted to know how it had happened and Mammy told him the story we had concocted that morning before leaving home. She said I had been playing with a ball in the living room and had tripped over and accidentally banged my arm against the hot grate.

  ‘What about the bruise on his face?’ the man asked. ‘How did he get that?’

  ‘It must have been the same fall,’ said Mammy quietly. ‘He went head over heels with a big crash.’

  The chemist stared hard at me and at Mammy.

  ‘I just tripped over,’ I told him.

  ‘And I suppose the bruise on your face came from a fall too,’ the man said to Mammy.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied in almost a whisper. ‘A few days ago. I’m as clumsy as the lad.’

  I had told similar lies to our neighbours when they had asked about my cuts and bruises, though they probably all knew the truth anyway, but this was the first time I had given a total stranger a made-up story to cover up a beating from Daddy.

  I’m sure the chemist didn’t believe us but he finally turned away and selected one of the many small boxes that were piled up on the shelves behind him. He gave it to Mammy and told her, ‘Put the ointment on twice a day and keep it covered. He looks a healthy enough tyke, so it should heal up fairly quickly. But he needs to be more careful in future. And so do you.’

  Mammy didn’t say anything. She paid him and almost ran out of the shop, dragging me behind her. Outside, she stopped long enough to blow her nose, and I could see that she was fighting back the tears.

  ‘That man knew,’ she said in a trembly voice. ‘He knew that I’m married to a wife beater. Everybody knows. But it’s not my fault, so why should I have to suffer all the shame? I really don’t think I can cope with this much longer.’

  But inside I think we both knew that we would have to go on coping. We had nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Not at that time anyway.

  But that changed for me after I started school, or at least I thought it had.

  My fifth birthday was marked by a small party. A handful of local kids came in and we shared a cake that was decorated with five candles, which I managed to blow out in one go. It was the first party I could remember. We never even celebrated Christmas at home. No decorations or tree, not even a cooked meal.

  Daddy wasn’t there, but Mammy gave me a present, wrapped up in brown paper. I opened it straight away and discovered a small canvas bag with a long strap.

  ‘You’ll be going to school after the holidays like a big boy,’ Mammy told me, ‘and this is your new satchel. You wear it over your shoulder and can carry your school things in it.’

  I don’t think any child ever looked forward to starting school with more excitement than I did. I imagined it would be just like my days out with John. A safe friendly place, full of nice adventures and out of Daddy’s reach.

  Our little local Catholic primary school in Openshaw, St Brigid’s, was an old Victorian building. I was automatically sent there because my parents were Catholic, even though Daddy was lapsed and Mammy no longer bothered to go to church.

  She had taken me on a few occasions to nearby St Anne’s Church, a dark and gloomy building with very little lighting inside and dirty walls outside. The first time I was taken there, I was lost. Nobody was allowed to talk unless they were invited to by the priest, who said everything in a funny language I didn’t know and which Mammy told me was Latin.

  It was something to do with God, but, as there were never religious discussions in our home, I didn’t know who God was then. But I liked the smell of the incense and felt very safe there. The feeling that nobody could get at me.

  By the time I started school, even these rare visits had stopped, but were replaced by class visits to Mass at the same church on Monday mornings.

  I found that many of the kids in our immediate neighbourhood were at my school, some starting with me that year, as well as older ones that I knew from playing in the streets or from the homes I had visited with their younger brothers.

  Like most of my clothes, my school uniform was a mixture of new and second hand. Mammy had bought the blazer and grey shorts from a neighbour whose son had grown out of them. My grey V-necked sweater came from a second-hand clothes shop but I had new black shoes and grey socks. On that first day, I felt like a prince in my, to me, new finery. It was as though I really belonged when the final school bell of the afternoon jangled and I joined up in the playground with a crowd of other boys and girls to walk home together.

  After that first morning, Mammy never took me to school again, and she was never outside with the other mothers when school turned out in the afternoon.

  Some of the other mums found it strange and would ask me where she was, but I never expected her to be there. I used to make up stories about her and Daddy having to do more important things, and after a while people stopped asking me. I was always careful not to tell these tall tales when other kids from my road were about, though I’m sure some of them were telling similar stories to cover up secrets of their own, not to hide the shame of their fathers beating them or their mothers’ neglect, but just to conceal the poverty we lived in.

  These fantasies took root and grew throughout my school years, as I tried to hide the truth about my nightmare home existence from my teachers and classmates and their parents. As time went by, I became more confident about lying to the teachers about my bruises and other injuries caused by Daddy’s beatings. Many of these, though, were in places that were not normally visible.

  One of my injuries, more painful than most, happened a few weeks after I started school. It was on a bath night and, as usual, Mammy had half-filled the battered tin bath, which stood on a tattered plastic sheet spread out on the carpet in front of the fire in the living room. She carried the hot water, which was heated by a gas geyser on the kitchen wall, to the bath in a plastic bucket.

  I was sitting in the bath and she was soaping my shoulders and back with a flannel when Daddy came in, reeking of beer and with the wide-eyed stare and mean look on his face that usually came before an explosion of temper.

  That night was to be no exception. Just the sight of me in the bath seemed to set him off. He must have seen me when he got to the top of the stairs and had already armed himself with a fish slice from the kitchen, which he was slapping against the side of his trousers.

  ‘You’ve always got time for that little bastard and never any time for me,’ he growled at Mammy, who was kneeling on the carpet next to the bath and had to look up at him.

  ‘He’s got to have his bath,’ she protested meekly.

  ‘Then let the stupid brat bath himself,’ he bellowed, and pushed her roughly away by her shoulder.

  I felt very exposed sitting naked in the bath, so I stood up and bent over the edge to take the towel from a chair next to where Mammy had been kneeling.

  ‘I’ll tell you when you can get out,’ Daddy shouted, and raised the fish slice above his head.

  I could see him over my shoulder and I knew what was coming, but I had nowhere to escape to. The flat metal end of the implement, which was covered in holes, landed squarely across the bare right cheek of my bottom with a huge thwack, and the force of it shot me over the side of the bath.

  I screamed at the top of my lungs and then again as the fish slice connected violently with the other bare cheek of my bottom. The pain was awful. It was as though the whole of my bottom was on fire.

  By this time, Mammy was back on her feet. ‘Stop it, Joe,’ she cried. ‘You’re going to maim him for life if you carry on. He’s only a five-year-old child.’

  Daddy’s answer was to grab hold of the end of the bath and up-end it over the two of us. Mammy was soaked through and water went everywhere. The bath ended upside down, almost on top of me, and, by the time Mammy had pulled it clear and checked that I wasn’t badly hurt, Daddy had done his usual disappearing act.

  Mammy flopped down on her bottom on the wet carpet next to me and we both sobbed our hearts out. I had to kneel beca
use I had discovered that sitting was far too painful. When I reached around to rub my sore bottom, I found that it was all lumpy. The fish slice had left its pattern on both buttocks.

  That time, like many others, the teachers couldn’t see the marks and ask difficult questions, but I spent several very uncomfortable days being unable to sit down without it hurting.

  Chapter Five

  After this latest beating I was more determined than ever to run away from home, and very soon I believed a real opportunity had come when I heard that the circus was in town.

  The big top had been set up on a large bombsite about half a mile along the Ashton Old Road from where we lived. Several gypsy caravans parked there all year round and some of the gypsy children attended my school. Even at my age, I had heard frightening stories about little boys and girls being carried off by the gypsies and never being seen by their families again. When I found out that two of the boys I had palled up with in the playground were gypsies, I remembered the stories and wondered if I might be lucky enough to be stolen.

  On one occasion, I had gone back with them to where they lived, to play after school. I had been nervous at first, because of the tales I had heard, but that changed within a few minutes of getting there. The boys were members of two large families, who seemed to have at least four dogs between them and two red-faced, round-cheeked, cheerful mothers who welcomed me with smiles and offers of drinks and biscuits. After my home, it was like being in heaven and I was very sorry when the mother of one of the boys told me to get along home because my own mother would be worrying. There was no point in telling someone nice like her that my mother would not even have noticed I was missing. But it was true.