Читать книгу Please, Daddy, No - Stuart Howarth - Страница 8

He always seemed to be there, part of my life – my dad. But it must have been around 1972 that he first started courting Mum. He would be in the garden, sweeping up for her, or coming round to see us, bringing sweets, or presents that he’d picked up on his bin rounds. He was a great collector, was Dad, a real magpie. Anything he found that he thought still had any life in it he would cart home: furniture, broken toys, even a telly, which was the first we’d ever had. From having absolutely nothing, our house suddenly started to fill up with stuff that other people didn’t want, much of which we needed badly and some of which just cluttered the place up.

His bin round was in an area of Ashton-under-Lyne where the residents threw out things that were better than anything we had ever had. Some of the things still worked. The telly did sometimes if you banged it very hard on the side in just the right place. Most of the time the screen was pierced with a single, tiny white dot. I would get up close and try to peer through the dot, in the hope of seeing the picture through it, like a ‘What the butler saw’ peep show. My efforts were usually only rewarded by a short period of blindness while my eyes tried to refocus. I loved pushing the buttons in and out. I discovered that if I pressed two together they stuck in, but if I pressed a third button it would release them. Intrigued by these experiments I tried pushing all six while Mum was out at work, and they all jammed. Dad was furious, slapping me hard on the backs of my legs, making my skin burn, punching and kicking me until I went numb.

‘Please, Daddy, no! I’m sorry!’

He threw me up the stairs and I dragged my battered body to bed, sobbing myself to sleep, crying for my mum. I was so sorry for being such a naughty little boy. I wanted to turn the clock back to just before I’d committed my crime and to make my daddy love me again. I vowed to myself that I would make an extra effort to be good for him.

He was always very scruffy, as you might expect a bin man to be, always wearing his welly boots however hot the weather, but no small boy worries about details like that. I was often out in the street with no clothes on at all myself, caked in dirt. None of the men round our estate was exactly what you would call smart, although Dad was probably one of the worst. He was big, over six feet tall with black hair, which he would wear with a side parting on the left. I would watch him combing it over with his left hand in the mirror and then patting the top of his head to flatten it out, imitating the action even though I had hardly any hair of my own. He had a moustache too, although it never seemed to grow that well. Thinking back now, I suppose that was because he was still a young man himself, barely out of his teens. When he was around the house he liked listening to sentimental songs like ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’, or anything by the Carpenters.

He had a slight limp from some childhood accident, and there was always a skirmish of dogs swirling around his boots. Mum had her Alsatian, Tina, and Dad had his Jack Russells, Bobby and Trixie – a working man’s terriers, dogs that were quick enough to catch a rat when necessary and intelligently loyal to their master. Mum had got Tina while she was living on her own with us, as protection. This was a time when the Moors murders were still fresh in people’s minds, when lone women felt nervous and vulnerable.

Our street was full of big families with no money. Most of them had no fathers around either, the mothers struggling to bring up as many as ten children on their own, in any way they could. Most of the kids would have different dads and even some of the women weren’t sure who the fathers were. My sisters and I felt special because we had a dad and we believed he would protect us if we needed it, because he was big and tough and hard. I believed fervently he could fight anybody and win; he was the best, my dad; he was my hero.

Mum had been brought up in Mullingar, in Southern Ireland. My Nana came over to England to get work, promising to send for the children once she was settled. Mum loved it in Ireland, living with her Grandma Lacey. But when my Nana met and married a man called Albert in England she sent for her children and Mum had to leave Ireland.

After an unhappy few years, Mum met George Heywood. She was sixteen and he was much older, somewhere around forty. She stumbled getting off a bus one day and had to go to hospital. The ambulance that arrived to take her was already carrying George, which was how they met. She always said she married him to get away from her family life, and I have no reason to doubt her. Their first baby, Shirley, was born in 1965 with spina bifida and other problems. Christina followed a year later, at a time when Shirley was being operated on in another part of the same hospital. I came along two years after that in 1968. Life for Mum at that stage must have seemed hopelessly tough, but she never considered giving any of us up or handing us over for someone else to look after.

There wasn’t even enough money to buy me a cot, so I would sleep in drawers or whatever Mum could find to hold me. Then I was put into a bed with Christina, which I liked because it made me feel loved and comforted, although it meant that if one of us wet the bed both of us got wet. Sometimes we would share with Shirley as well but if we wriggled in the night we would catch her spine, making her cry out in pain.

George, I’m told, proved to be a heavy drinker and a bit of a womanizer, and found the strains of family life, particularly with a disabled child, too much to handle. He and Mum parted soon after I was born, although she was always vague about the exact timing, and the council moved us all to a semi-detached house in Smallshaw Lane on the Smallshaw estate. I guess our area was where they put troublesome families whom they thought might disturb the tranquillity of nicer neighbourhoods. There were no fences or gates; doors were always open, with people going neighbouring all the time, scrounging knobs of butter or cups of sugar off one another. There was always a whiff of hostility in the air as everyone struggled to ensure their own survival.

Knowing that I was too young to remember any different, Mum decided to pretend that George was nothing to do with me.

‘You know,’ she would say to me from time to time, when Dad wasn’t around, ‘you are a very special little boy. You know you really are your Dad’s, don’t you? He’s not the real father of the girls, but he is yours. But we don’t want to make the girls feel left out, do we? So we’ll pretend he’s your stepdad too.’

I felt sorry for the girls, having a different dad who had gone off and left them, but proud that Dad was mine, even if he did have his faults. Knowing who my dad was meant I knew who I was and where I’d come from. He gave me an identity that not many of the kids around our way could hope for. What kid doesn’t want to have a real dad? Sometimes Mum would spot George in the street and point him out to the girls, and I felt I was better than them because my dad was the one taking care of us at home while George had deserted them. In my mind my dad was better than theirs.

‘You’re my fucking son,’ Dad would say to me sometimes, almost as if he was angry with me for allowing any element of doubt in the matter.

There were no carpets on the floor in our house, nor in most of the houses in Smallshaw, and no curtains at the windows. Families that wanted privacy would stick up newspapers, or smear Windolene on the panes, which would serve the dual purpose of keeping out prying eyes and providing us with a canvas to play noughts and crosses or draw silly faces on. My earliest memory is of sitting outside the front of the house in the dirt, digging a hole with a discarded lollipop stick.

Things just kept coming through the door as Dad increased his collection. There was a PVC suite to replace our ripped and stained old sofa. The arrival of new furniture would always bring a troop of neighbours in to have a look, to admire or to mutter jealously.

‘This will be good for Shirley,’ Dad announced. ‘It won’t soak up her piss and we can just wipe it.’

My sister Shirley was incontinent and the house always stank of urine, although it wasn’t all hers. The smell of urine, dogs and fags pervaded everything. The grown-ups were always having to change poor Shirley because there was nothing she could do about it herself. The trouble with the plastic material on the new suite was that it stuck to the backs of our bare legs after we had been sat on it for a while, and it would hurt to tear ourselves away, like ripping plasters off cuts.

I never realized when I was tiny that we were washed less often than most kids, that we were always dirty and covered in dog hairs. It was only when other kids started to take the mickey that the penny dropped. We always wore shorts, swapped between me and Christina, and Mum would only ever buy us new stuff from jumble sales, or nick it off the washing lines of the better-off areas.

We were always being sent out to scrounge things off the neighbours. Once I’d been given whatever I’d been sent to ask for I would walk back home slowly. If it were margarine it would be wrapped in a bit of foil and would start to melt, giving me a chance to lick the sweetness from my dirty hands. Mostly we ate jam and sugar butties, or sometimes lard or dripping. Anything we could get hold of we crammed into our mouths to stave off the continuous pangs of hunger.

The ice cream man hated coming up our street because he always got hassled for broken lollies and wafers; twenty kids all milling round the van shouting at him at once. Sometimes he would feel sorry for me if he found me on my own and would give me a chocolate flake. ‘Don’t tell the others,’ he’d warn, and I never did.

Mum always seemed to owe people money and we would have to hide behind the sofa if men came knocking at the door. Because I was the youngest in the family and most innocent looking, she would send me to the chip shop most days, usually with no money. ‘Tell them you’ve forgotten it,’ she would say.

I hated doing it, but I hated being hungry even more. When the lady behind the counter asked for the money I would burst into tears. She would then feel embarrassed in front of the other customers and tell me to bring it later. After a while she started asking for the money before she served me. In those days you could take your own plate to the chip shop to be filled up. Mum would send me with a bowl, which the lady would fill up with gravy, giving us more to go round. Even when I was only two or three years old I would lurk outside the chip shop late in the evening asking customers for a chip as they came out with their dinners, having spent the evening in the pub. If they were in a really good mood they would buy me a whole portion of my own.

Shirley’s spina bifida meant she had a hole in the middle of her back and this caused a deformity of the spine. She was paralysed from the waist down and didn’t have any control or any mobility or any feeling in her legs. She was also hydrocephalous, a condition creating fluid around the brain. There was nothing wrong with her mind, but she had to be constantly lifted and cared for and had a shunt to drain the excess fluid from around her brain. She had a hump on her back as well, which was the result of an operation to stitch over the hole in her spine. Life had been cruel to her from the moment she was born.

To make matters worse, she also had epileptic fits from time to time. She always knew when they were coming because her mouth would get dry and she would start smacking her lips together. The first time I saw it happen I was about five years old. Mum and Dad had gone out for the night, leaving us on our own. It didn’t bother us. As a small kid Shirley was always in and out of hospital with Mum, which meant Christina and I were often left to fend for ourselves.

‘I don’t feel well,’ Shirley told us that evening. ‘I think I might be about to have a fit.’

The next thing she was shaking in her wheelchair and there was white foam coming out of her mouth. I remembered Mum saying we had to get her tongue out so she didn’t swallow it, but we didn’t really understand what that meant. Christina ran to the kitchen and came back with a big dessert spoon and I tried to prise her teeth open with it, screaming and crying: ‘She’s dying, she’s dying!’

Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer and ran to get my aunt from a few doors away, who came and laid Shirley out in the recovery position on the floor.

Christina and I loved Shirley and felt sorry for her; there were so many things you couldn’t do in a wheelchair at the beginning of the Seventies. All the local cinemas and theatres, and a lot of the shops, had steep steps and no access for wheelchairs. We were always trying to find things to do that would cheer her up. One day, when Mum was outside hanging up the washing, we were sitting on Shirley’s bed. I had found a box of Swan Vesta matches and had beckoned Christina to come to Shirley’s room with me. Perching on the bed beside her I started to strike them, one by one, letting her blow each one out like a candle on a birthday cake, which made her laugh. Match after match flared and was snuffed. It felt good to be able to make her happy.

‘Let me do one,’ Christina demanded.

‘No.’ I turned away. ‘I’m doing it. I found them.’

Christina made a lunge for the matches so I stretched my arms out at full length to keep them away from her and struck another.

Christina grabbed my arm and shook it. The match fell and the nylon bedclothes seemed to ignite instantly, the flames leaping to the curtains and spreading within seconds. Christina and I jumped up, screaming for Mum, wanting to run away, but Shirley couldn’t move, and the flames were spreading over her lifeless, motionless legs as we desperately tried to wave them away. Mum ran in and ripped away the curtains and sheets, smothering the flames. But it was too late; Shirley’s legs had ballooned up, red and blistered, and then blackened like charcoal. She couldn’t feel any pain, but she could smell the charred flesh just as we could. Mum picked her up, cradling her in her arms, shouting furiously at us, and we watched in horror and bewilderment as she carried Shirley out of the smoke-blackened room. We were sure we’d killed her, and although she survived she was horribly burned and had scars that never really healed.

Having a dad who brought home stuff made us better than everyone else in the street, that’s how I saw it. All the others used to come round our house to watch the telly, when it was working, sometimes as many as twenty people at a time all crammed into our front room, with Mum at the centre of it all. We didn’t own a kettle so 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.