Читать книгу A Child Called Hope: The true story of a foster mother’s love - Mia Marconi - Страница 6

Mum and Dad had both had difficult childhoods, and they were also incredibly young to start a family; Dad was only seventeen when he married Mum, who was only sixteen herself. When my sister Rosa was born, Dad was eighteen, and only nineteen by the time I was born. He was the ripe old age of twenty-two when my brother Joe arrived, and twenty-three when Mum gave birth to Bianca.

Mum’s two older sisters, Lily and Daisy, were very successful in their own fields: Daisy in fashion, and Lily, the stunning beauty of the family, was a secretary for a big furniture company. They had got out of poverty, married quite wealthy men and had good careers. Mum was the poor one in the family and her sisters kept her financially while my nan, Hetty, helped her look after us.

Nan thought Dad was not good enough for my mum, so she continually told her, in front of my dad: ‘You are never going to have anything, because you’ve married a foreigner.’ Dad struggled to fit in as it was. He got called ‘English’ in Italy and in London they called him ‘Spaghetti’ or ‘Wop’. Wop was a derogatory term used for Italian immigrants. It was short for ‘Without Papers’, as many had come over without identity papers, and was common slang in the Sixties and Seventies. Not surprisingly, it upset Dad a lot.

It just brought home to Dad that he wasn’t really Italian and he wasn’t really English. Nan knew my dad never felt as though he fitted in and that the word ‘foreigner’ would really hurt him. It cut deep and she knew it. That’s why she said it.

Dad could never do anything right and all Mum’s family used to argue with him. If he spoke back, Nan would get up and roll up her sleeves. ‘Get outside!’ she would shout at him, and she would honestly have taken him on if he had gone with her. Instead, Dad would do the sensible thing and storm off until it all settled down. I dread to think what would have happened if they had come to blows.

Nan was a tiny grey-haired woman. She may have survived the war, but she was still deeply affected by her husband’s suicide, although she would never show it or talk about it. Since his death she had done nothing but work hard and care for her family, and every bit of softness and compassion in her had been trampled on. There was no doubt she could be a cow. If Mum brought a friend home, Nan would say: ‘Come on, clear off, she’s got things to do.’

There was only one way that Hetty showed her love and that was through control. She had to be in charge and no one messed with her – they didn’t dare. Hetty ruled the family with an iron rod and no one had better step out of line.

Although she could be terrifying at times, she was always there looking after us while Mum was at work, and I idolised her, simply because she was my nan and she was there for us.

My mum is a petite redhead with a lovely figure and a good sense of humour – if they had started making EastEnders in the 1950s, her family would have been mistaken for the cast.

You can imagine how volatile an Irish-Italian household could be, and Mum and Dad would often throw things at each other. They’d be having dinner and one of them would say something, and then, suddenly, there would be plates flying across the kitchen or saucepans being thrown at people’s heads.

Mum threw as many saucepans as my dad, but neither of them ended up in hospital. Arguments and fights became so regular in our house, we thought it was normal. We thought everyone’s parents fought all the time and threw things at each other.

It always seemed to me that my mum started the fights, but I suspect she was reacting out of frustration with my dad. Although they fought like heavyweight champions, they never gave up on each other, which is so easy to do now. I like to think that they loved and needed one another and fought to keep the family together, rather than ripping it apart. I don’t like to think that the fights had no purpose.

It is true that Dad was very violent and aggressive – not towards me, but towards my mum. As a child, I didn’t really understand why Dad was so needy, but it was because Mum could never give him as much love as he needed. I actually don’t think anyone could have, he was so damaged, so they would end up pushing each other around and me and Rosa would get in between them and try to calm them down, while Joe and Bianca sat on the sofa looking sad.

Like lots of other Italian immigrants, Dad worked at an Italian restaurant, but there was never any money. Dad was a gambler, so they had lots of money worries. He loved to bet on the horses, but he would also bet on football – anything, really – and his pockets were always full of little white gambling slips that he brought home from the bookies. He lost more often than not, but you knew when he had won, because he would come home with presents. If he had lost, he could go missing for days at a time.

Dad probably shrugged off a lot of responsibility, because my mum had her family network to support her, so why was he needed? When her family used to argue with him, I was always his ally and stuck up for him. He was never wrong in my eyes; he was never wrong until I was in my late thirties and I started to understand what kind of life my mum must have had with him.

I used to think Mum was mean and I hated her for shouting at Dad, but what I didn’t think about when I was a child was how much responsibility she had. I never understood my mother; all I knew was that my dad made me feel like I was the most special child in the world, and whatever I did wrong, he stood by me. My mum, on the other hand, had three jobs and four kids by the time she was twenty-two and she had no time to mollycoddle me. Not only that, she had a husband who gambled away his wages. If only I had taken that on board while I was growing up, I might have been able to understand the stress and strain she was under and given her an easier time. Instead, I was always angry with her for shouting at my dad. What chance did Mum have with me? She would have got more response if she had tried to reason with the cooker.

Dad should have been the main breadwinner, but the responsibility for putting food on the table was down to Mum. She was exhausted half the time, because when she wasn’t at home looking after us she was working shifts in the local pub or in the café, and when she wasn’t doing that she cleaned the local school.

Somehow, their relationship survived, but Mum got no sympathy from Nan. It didn’t matter how many plates got broken or how many saucepans got dented, how often she saw my mum sobbing her heart out or how often my dad went missing; Nan’s response was always the same: ‘You’ve made your bed, you lie on it.’

Was she right? I would say she was, because although it seemed harsh, she kept the family unit together.

We lived in Bermondsey at the time in a two-up, two-down. We had no boiler and no hot water upstairs, so we attached a hosepipe to the downstairs tap, threaded it out of the kitchen window and threw it up at the bathroom window until somebody caught it and we could fill the bath. The big problem was that by the time the bath was full, the water was lukewarm. The bathroom was freezing anyway, because you had to have the window open, so we sat and shivered as we washed ourselves clean. Even now, I can bath myself in two minutes flat.

I went to a Catholic school, obviously – being from an Irish-Italian background I would not have gone anywhere else – but I hated the nuns. I remember when I was about six, walking along the corridor to a class and because I started talking I was dragged out of the line. I had no idea I was doing anything wrong, but the next minute I remember getting the cane on my hand in the head teacher’s office. Four times she hit me with full force. She didn’t care that I was little; she held nothing back. The head teacher was a nun, and she was so terrifying I remember wetting myself, and then getting the cane again for wetting myself. I got no sympathy when I started crying; I was simply given a clean pair of knickers, told not to cry and sent back to class.