Читать книгу Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy’s Struggle to Survive. A Mother’s Shameful Secret. The Power to Forgive. - David Thomas, Mark Schultz - Страница 12

One day, when I’m seven, Mum takes me to see someone. Reginald Arthur Brownstone is old, fat and bald, with a huge ginger beard. Mum tells me she does some cleaning for him. I have no idea why we’re there, apart from allowing her to introduce me to one of her friends. It’s a sunny day and the house seems very impressive to me – detached and in a beautiful setting, halfway up a valley.

Reg left school at the age of twelve because he was needed on his father’s farm. When I am introduced to him he’s still working in a textile factory but he only does so for a few months longer after 53 years of work. He seems a jovial man with a keen sense of humour. He certainly makes Mum laugh and that hasn’t been happening enough.

Back home, Mum asks me what I think of Reg. I say he seems OK. She’s pleased with that and I feel good inside too. I sense there is some kind of connection between them and he seems like a nice, kind man.

By April 1975 we have moved out of our house in Calder Bridge to live with him at his house in Ludden Vale, near the village of Bradling. When we move in he is already 65, while Mum is 30. But the age difference doesn’t matter to me and moving in is great news. He is going to be the missing father figure in my life and make Mum happy. We have a new home and are destined to have a wonderful future together.

But unfortunately, Reg isn’t all that he appears to be.

* * *

Because we have moved, I start at a new school, Bradling Primary. I like it immediately and it doesn’t seem to have the problems of the old one. It is light and airy with large rooms and friendly teachers. There are lots of kids around where we live too. Even though our new house is rural, with only twelve houses in the immediate vicinity, there are eight kids aged within two years of each other and we start hanging around together.

Our house is just a couple of fields from a council estate where many kids from the school live. The estate is very nice and the houses are well-maintained. But although the houses look great, going to the estate simply highlights how special our house is and how lucky we are to be living there.

Our new home is idyllic from the outside – a cluster of three early Victorian one-up–one-down cottages knocked into one, with lots of character – built on the side of a valley. The downstairs rooms from the three cottages form a group of three, the middle one (which we call the middle room) being the dining room. The house is detached and surrounded by fields and woodland, with a large garden full of fruit, vegetables, flowers and shrubs. The views from the front and back are breathtaking, showing the whole of the valley in one fell swoop. Inside, the house badly needed renovating. Reg has lived there a long time alone and hasn’t bothered to do anything to the property in ages. But Mum is on the case and is going to get things done.

Living at Ludden Vale seems just as good as Calder Bridge but without all the bad memories, initially at any rate. This is a time to renew and start afresh. We are living as a family and in a beautiful family home.

Mum has been taking typing lessons at night school and is soon doing secretarial work as a full-time job. Although she isn’t on a high wage, her money management is sensational. We go on holiday every year, have a nearly new car every three to five years and she manages to find the cash to get lots of work done on the house. We always have pets to look after too as both Reg and Mum are animal lovers. She smokes heavily and is still drinking. How she manages to do all this on the money coming into the house is a miracle. It helps that Reg owns the house outright: she doesn’t need to borrow money or pay a mortgage.

Looking back on this all as an adult, I still find it astonishing that even with no mortgage she never fell into debt or borrowed any money, as far as I was aware, considering the double whammy of low household income and her drinking which must have drained her purse.

* * *

When we move into the house, to my relief, Mum’s visits to my bedroom – the Special Time which I have now come to dread – suddenly come to a stop. As a seven-year-old I understand as little about why they stop as I understand why they started in the first place, but I think it’s because now that Mum is sharing a bedroom with Reg she no longer needs me in the same way as before.

In any case, in the last few months of living at Calder Bridge, things have begun to change. I am now much more aware of what is right and wrong and have been feeling uncomfortable about what she makes me do when she’s been drinking. I know we shouldn’t be doing it and I have already begun trying to resist her. But until now I have always ended up doing as I was told, especially as she is so forceful and aggressive when she is drunk.

I think she is also drinking less as she is happier and more settled with Reg than she has been in a long time. I know that she always drinks more when she is feeling stressed or unhappy. So her demands for me to play with her seem to have ended, I have a new ‘father’ and Mum is drinking less. It feels like a brand new start and the house move seems to resolve the issues of my early life. We have security, stability, a home life and a family unit.

That’s how it seems, at least.

* * *

In the first few months of living with Reg, Mum seems much happier. She loves gardening and sets about making the most of it. I think the garden looks a big mess and certainly isn’t going to win any awards, but Mum grows rhubarb, gooseberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, potatoes, cauliflowers and peas in the summer, tomatoes in the greenhouse, lots of flowers, particularly sweet peas, shrubs, plants and her own holly with proper red berries for the house at Christmas.

There’s a small lawn and the whole garden is dry-stone walled so that passers-by can’t look inside, which makes it nice and private. To me at the age of seven it is fantastic. However, as a garden it is drastically in need of remedial work and Mum does that over time as she loves gardening. As well as picking fruit in the garden, she spends many hours on a summer’s evening and weekend picking wild blueberries and blackberries in the surrounding countryside and in summer she goes to Halifax market at teatime on a Saturday and bulk-buys strawberries that would otherwise be thrown away. The traders have to sell them cheap because, although they’re fit to eat, they wouldn’t last until Monday to resell.

She loves growing and picking fruit and making jams and jellies. She makes at least a hundred jars every year and we have every type of jam imaginable. She also heats fruit and puts it into Kilner jars which can later be used for making pies. She bakes every weekend and is very good at it. The biscuit tins are always full of fruit scones, parkin, flapjack, buns of all kinds, biscuits and fruit pies. Jam and baked foods are a staple part of our diet. Whenever I’m hungry, Mum tells me to ‘go and get some jam and bread’, which is a real treat.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve started to develop a sweet tooth.

* * *

Not only is home life good but we now have an extended family. Reg’s daughter Pauline lives only 200 yards up the road with her husband and their children. She is a dour, bespectacled woman who rarely smiles and wears her hair piled on top of her head. To begin with I’m a little wary of her, but she and her family welcome us into their family too.

Reg’s brother Bert comes to visit him two or three times a year. Bert never knocks on the door and never comes into the house. He sits outside the house in his van, waiting for Reg to come out and talk to him. He’s a man of even fewer words than Reg, distant and curt in his speech to the point where I’ve wondered why he even bothers to drive all the way over to see his brother.

‘OK, Bert?’ says Reg.

‘Oh ay,’ Bert will reply.

‘I’m not bad myself.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Looks like rain.’

‘Oh ay.’

Pauline’s youngest son, Andrew, is a year older than me and is always coming down to the house. Andrew is fun to be around. He’s a little taller than me and often seems to be laughing, but I sometimes sense a kind of malice in his laughter. He’s mischievous, which makes things a little more intriguing. We have a chair in the living room that swivels around 360 degrees. We get told off if we get caught swivelling on it too much, but Andrew goes round at breakneck speed and hang the consequences.

It feels great to have someone I think of as family close by. My parents only have one sibling between them – my Uncle Jim, Mum’s older brother. I know he has been married at least once and I have cousins somewhere but I’ve never met them. I have even discovered that one of my cousins was born on the same day as me, which fascinates me and I want to meet her. But despite the fact that my uncle is collecting children and cousins that I never see, Andrew is as good as family to me. He lives nearby and we play together.

We have an even stronger connection when it comes to ‘naming’ Reg. His grandfather is my new father and the whole family situation is sealed when we agree I will call Reg ‘Grandad’, just like Andrew and his brothers and sisters do.

Reg can be very kind in these first few months and when he’s got time at the weekends he’ll spend time with me while I ride around on an old bike.

‘Easy on the brakes, lad,’ he’ll say. ‘Gently does it and if you just want to slow down but not stop, open them up again the same way, gently.’

I do as Reg says and it makes a big difference. I become more confident on the bike, and I’m soon whizzing around Ludden Vale and Bradling.

I can’t believe my luck and decide that Reg is the bee’s knees.

But things can’t last that well forever.

* * *

The first thing to bring my wonderful new life crashing down comes about when Mum and Reg decide to build another bedroom. Up until now I have been sleeping in the room next to Reg and Mum’s room. My bedroom is like a junk room with a camp bed in it. The room is bigger than my old bedroom at Calder Bridge but because it’s so full of bits of broken furniture, gardening equipment, old clothes which I think must have belonged to Reg’s old family, and other bric-a-brac, there’s barely room to move, and the camp bed isn’t too comfortable either, though I put up with it.

During the first summer at Ludden Vale, Reg and Terry, a builder friend, build a second storey on top of the kitchen on one end of the house to create a new bedroom for me. The room I’ve been sleeping in – which will now be the upstairs middle room – is to be turned into another living room, though in reality it will be Mum’s room where she can spend time on her own, maybe to have a little space from Reg as for the last few years since Dad left she’s been used to living on her own.

It’s amazing to see it develop and all summer I help Reg and Terry as much as I can. They are both retired so they are over 65 and it’s quite a task for them both. I sense this and do as much as I can to help them. My favourite task is to have my own measuring tape and fetch a stone of a specified height. Reg sends me off looking for what he needs and I run around until I find one.

I am dazzled and amazed by the building work. To me it seems almost magical that out of all this brick and stone and mortar we – Reg, Terry and I – have managed to conjure up a part of the house that looks to my eyes as if it has always been there. I’m very proud of it.

I’m also discovering how clever Mum is – she has a knack of making money stretch a long way and getting things done. She finds the money to get this extra bedroom built, to renovate the rest of the house, install a new fitted kitchen, and re-paper and re-carpet every room. She has fresh furniture put in too. This may not be new but it doesn’t matter. She knows how to find good quality secondhand furniture at bargain prices, all on a secretary’s wage and a retired man’s state pension.

Working with Reg on the building and the praise he gives me has been wonderful. I feel that he wants me there, and that, for the first time in my life, there is a father–son bond between us that I’ve never had with my own father. But in reality, building a new bedroom means something very different: I am getting my own room.

This is to cause me more pain than anything else in my childhood although for the time being I am delighted at having my own space. But one of the barriers preventing my mother from gaining full access to me has been removed.

* * *

Another thing that has changed at Ludden Vale is that we have our first family holiday. From now on ‘holiday’ for me means staying in tents on campsites.

I hate camping, particularly as we don’t have good quality gear when we first start. Camping is rough at the best of times but when the three of us are squashed into a small tent without decent protection and waterproofing it can be downright miserable if the weather turns against us. In the next few years we go all over the country camping, although on this first holiday camping trip with Reg we actually break this rule by staying for two nights in a hotel in Paignton, Devon. This feels so luxurious, especially as our house in Ludden Vale has still not been renovated. I love the sea air and it feels like a real adventure travelling so far.

I am used to going to the seaside as Mum has occasionally taken me to Blackpool, on England’s north-west coast, to see the illuminations. But Devon is different. It feels wild and exotic.

Once on holiday we’re determined to make the most of it. Family photos show us enjoying ourselves on the sands and paddling in the sea. This is really my first family holiday as I don’t remember any with Mum and Dad in my years at Calder Bridge.

But one thing hasn’t changed for Mum as a result of moving in with Reg. It isn’t long before she starts drinking heavily again. Her need is too great and she must feel she can get away with it – after all, he is 66 and she is only 31. When I’m older it occurs to me that one of the reasons she was with someone so much older than her was that she was able to have her own way with Reg.

In the first year we live with Reg he never seems to drink much and then after that he stops drinking altogether. I don’t know if this is so that he can help Mum when she’s drinking and unable to look after herself or if he’s just decided to stop of his own accord. In any case, he isn’t the kind of man to spend time in a pub chatting with his mates so I don’t think it’s an issue for him or that he misses it. For whatever reason he doesn’t drink like Mum, though, and I’m grateful for the fact.

On the second night at the hotel, however, Mum does get drunk and it marks a turning point in my life.

* * *

I have been in bed for some time when she comes into my hotel bedroom. She’s plainly drunk as she staggers in, switches on the light and sits at the end of my bed.

‘David,’ she says, in a whisper.

I don’t wake up.

‘David!’ she says more loudly.

I wake up with a start, wondering what’s going on. I don’t know what time it is but going by Mum’s drinking pattern, it must be around 10 pm.

‘What’s happening, Mum?’ I ask, blinking in the light and rubbing my eyes.

‘Nothing, David,’ she says. ‘I just want to know if you love me.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ I say, just wanting to roll over and go back to sleep.

‘Well, give me a kiss then.’

‘Aw, Mum, do I have to?’

‘Yes. Go on. Give me a kiss, on the lips.’

She is reeking of alcohol and as she leans her open mouth towards me I start to feel sick. She tries to kiss me with her open mouth and for a moment I get a sensation of her tongue on mine. It feels odd and furry and strange and I want to recoil from it, but I know that the most important thing I can do is to satisfy her so I give her the kiss she wants. All I want to do is go back to sleep and forget about it.

I wipe my lips clean and she doesn’t even notice me doing so as she has climbed on to my bed and is pulling my hand towards her.

‘Play with me, David, play with your mummy. Mummy wants you to play with her.’

She’s making me rub her down there and she’s starting to moan and as usual I do what she wants me to do.

At last I can tell that she’s got what she needs. Without another word she gets off the bed and leaves my hotel bedroom, turning the light off as she goes.

* * *

What is so different about this incident from what went on at Calder Bridge before we moved to Ludden Vale is that there has been an interval where she has left me alone. In these few months I have changed. I now know for sure that what she wants from me is wrong and yet, now more than ever, I know that I must please her and satisfy her, because I’m frightened of consequences of not doing so far more than before.

As the days and weeks and months go on, so does Mum’s drinking – as well as her growing control over Reg. It’s obvious to me that he is so grateful to be with an attractive woman 35 years his junior that he is prepared to put up with anything. It never fails to amaze me how pliable Reg is in Mum’s hands and how much she dominates him. To the vast majority of men it might be seen as unacceptable behaviour but Reg is quite prepared to put up with it just to be with my mother. He has retired from the mill and is effectively a househusband, looking after me when I come home from school and doing household chores – not easy for a man of his age.

Every evening Reg will open the garage for Mum. It’s a short distance from the house up a steep lane. When she comes past the house going up the lane she beeps her horn; he then has to drop whatever he is doing and dash up to the garage. She turns the car round and he has to have the garage doors open by the time she is ready to drive in. Even though by now I am eight years old I can never work out why Reg has to run out and open the garage doors for her and why she doesn’t do it herself. Once in the house, he has to make her a cup of tea and sit at the table with her while she relates the day’s events. For Mum, this inevitably means bitching about someone at work.

With family or friends, at the vets or other social areas Mum is happy to mix with others and will talk the hind legs off a donkey. But she seems to find it difficult at work. She often comes home and complains about the other girls in the office. I get the feeling she’s on the outside looking in. I don’t think she goes for a drink after work or joins her work colleagues in social events and I think she finds working with other people quite stressful.

At home, even small things can cause a major row. Reg is old and often seems to float around in a world of his own. One thing he regularly does is leave the door open. Mum will go ballistic, especially if he doesn’t jump up to shut it immediately.

‘Reg, you’ve left the door open.’

‘OK, well you’re stood there. Please shut it.’

‘Why the hell should I shut the door for you? You left it open.’

‘But, Carol, you’re stood there. Just shut the door.’

‘I’m not shutting the door for you. You’re the one who left it open, as always.’

‘But I’m sat down now. Please shut the door, Carol.’

By now, she is incandescent with rage. ‘Reg! Get up and shut this door right now!’

At this point, Reg has lost the will to live, let alone fight about the open door so he’ll get up, glare darkly at Mum and slam the door shut.

She needs to be in control in every area of our lives – of Reg as much as of me – even when sober. She dictates when to go shopping, planning holidays, what to buy for the house, what to watch on television and even what time she and Reg go to bed. He just falls into line. Later in my life I realize that most men wouldn’t have put up with it but Reg does and manages it well.

For me, there is the same pressure to do exactly what she says. Mostly, this means doing chores and keeping time. When playing out I often go to Andrew’s and even venture as far as the estate. Mum isn’t too bothered where I go as long as I am back on time. If I am close to returning even slightly late, I panic and get really stressed out. I would rather run until my lungs are on fire than be late home. If I am late, I never hear the last of it and she will restrict future playing out times.

In the house, dealing with Mum is about doing the jobs she asks of me. From an early age I have a daily cleaning job. Fridays, for example, means cleaning the cooker. I don’t mind, except that she doesn’t seem to do it at all, so it’s never a simple wipe down but always requires hard scrubbing. She also makes me clean my shoes every day on newspaper on the kitchen floor and as I get older she shows me how to iron my clothes.

Later as a teenager I will have to iron all my own clothes and perform many domestic chores in the house. No doubt she is teaching me this so that I can do jobs in the house that she doesn’t have to do. But it does help me to develop valuable skills and teaches me to be independent.

Despite her overbearing behaviour, Reg is happy to put up with it, and I am too young to complain or think any differently. Besides, in the beginning it creates something I have never experienced before: a proper family life. We are living as a family unit in a nice house.

But it can’t last. Cracks are starting to appear. My first awareness of this is an odd intimation that Reg has quickly lost interest in being a father. Mum’s drinking is starting to increase and her behaviour when drunk is just as erratic as at Calder Bridge. I am soon beginning to realize that although I thought I had left the bad memories behind, they have actually followed me to our new house and new, worse ones are about to be created.

Mum once told me that life had been difficult for her with Dad and I think that may have influenced her decision to come to me for physical affection. I have no recollection of them being affectionate with each other or Dad being affectionate to me. Most people have at least one good parent. I now have three bad ones: an absent father who shows me little love or affection, a mother whose demands for something more than affection are to rise again and inflict themselves upon me, and a stepfather whose behaviour towards me is about to change in a way I could never have expected.

I have no-one to turn to, no-one to confide in and help me through the dark times. I have to deal with all that is coming my way on my own. As a young boy this becomes a torture for me. It turns me into a lonely, disturbed, angry child, which in the months and years to come is to have serious long-term consequences for me and those around me.