Читать книгу Please, Daddy, No - Stuart Howarth - Страница 9

Dad had an allotment. Not one of those little strips of vegetables with a makeshift shed at the end, but about an acre of land, like a smallholding, filled with ramshackle outbuildings. It was known as ‘the pen’. Sometimes there would be twenty or thirty kids following him across the wooded piece of land behind the house and up the hill to the pen, with Shirley in her wheelchair, making him look like some sort of grubby Pied Piper.

The ground amongst the trees along the route was always strewn with litter and the pen itself was surrounded by a makeshift wall of house doors, so that no one could break in and passers-by couldn’t see what was going on. It was Dad’s little private kingdom. Behind the wall and padlocked gates was another world where he raised chickens, geese, ducks and pigs and stored yet more scrap salvaged from his rounds. There was a big black boar called Bobby, and a sow, terrifying, stinking great creatures that wallowed and snuffled in their own filth. An abandoned car stood, stripped and rusting, just inside the gates, waiting for someone to turn it into scrap.

In one of the sheds lived my dad’s dad, whom we knew as ‘Granddad from the Pen’, a dirty, toothless old man who would always smell of whisky and grab me between my legs, or pinch my bum and rub his bristly chin against my face, which he thought was funny but which hurt. His clothes, which he wore day and night, were rags, like a tramp would wear. He also thought it was funny to throw his false teeth at me, even though I hated it. Dad used to do the same thing sometimes with his. Even at that age I could sense there was something about Granddad from the Pen that wasn’t trustworthy.

I think his wife must have chucked him out years before and he went to live with Auntie June, Dad’s sister, but she got fed up with him too and now he just had a camp bed in the corner of one of the sheds. He kept a pile of dirty books underneath the bed, which he was happy to get out for us, making us giggle with embarrassment and exclaim in horror. I’m sure the magazines must have been rescued from the dustbins, just like everything else in our lives. Granddad from the Pen spent a lot of his time down the pub. Only later did I discover he was an alcoholic; then I just knew he always smelt of booze, like Dad, only worse.

There had been some sort of falling out between Mum and Granddad from the Pen, although I never knew the details, but he stayed away from the house for a while. The day he did come back he came with a present for me, a pink bike. I didn’t care what colour it was, it was a bike, something that none of the other kids in Smallshaw had, unless they were old ones with solid tyres that you couldn’t use to jump on and off kerbs without jarring every bone in your body. Granddad from the Pen was obviously drunk, having just come out of the pub, and went in to see Mum, leaving me outside with my new possession.

I set off proudly to pedal round the neighbourhood. It was a glorious summer’s day and I felt like the king of the area, until I was stopped by a policeman, who enquired where I’d got my bike from.

‘It’s a present from my Granddad,’ I said, wondering why the policeman was being so nasty. ‘I think we should go and talk to your Granddad,’ he said. It turned out Granddad had nicked the bike off some little girl when she got off to go into her house just as he was passing. It broke my heart to see the policeman taking it away.

Going up to the pen was like visiting a little zoo, and all the local kids loved it. We would play hide and seek and other games. They would always be coming round pestering to find out if we were going up there. I used to love to root through the drawers around the sheds because they were always crammed with so much rubbish, just like our house. It seemed like a treasure trove to a four-year-old, another Aladdin’s cave, although a bit different to my Nana and Granddad Albert’s.

The pen was one of four, like some peasant farms left over from the Middle Ages, partially illuminated at night by the street lamps on the lane outside. It wasn’t far to walk, but it was hard for me to keep up with Dad’s long legs when it was just him and me going up there. If it was just us he would grow impatient with waiting for me to catch up and would stride off ahead, forcing my little legs to go faster, almost as if he didn’t want anything to do with me, as if he was trying to get away. If Mum was with us he would put me on his shoulders, but if it was just us he would become angry as I lagged behind and would grab my hand and drag me off my feet, nearly jerking my arm out of its socket. Dad would go up to the pen every day because the animals needed feeding. He would collect any bit of food he could get his hands on and boil it up in big pans at home, adding the scent of pigswill to the existing smells of pee, dogs and fags.

The pen was a great place for a small boy to go, but sometimes I would make Dad cross and there would be flashes of nastiness as he gave me a push or a pinch to let me know I had disappointed him yet again. I knew that I must always be good and never anger him. He was only in his early twenties at that time, but he had a presence even then that made me wary. I had a feeling that he didn’t like me and I was willing to do anything in order to change that. He used to insist that I collected the eggs from under the hens, which used to terrify me. They made so much fuss, flapping their wings and pecking at me with vicious beaks. I never wanted to do it, but I knew I had to do what he told me because he was my dad and he wasn’t someone you would disobey. He used to keep ferrets as well, to help keep down the rat population, and he liked to put them down his trousers, and down mine. It was a horrible experience, feeling their claws digging in, believing they were biting, but he thought it was funny and that I should learn how to be brave about it. He was always trying to ‘make a man’ or ‘make a farmer’ of me.

I didn’t like the way he would read magazines full of women while he was having a wee; at least I thought that was what he was doing. It was a bit confusing and very frightening.

Violence and bullying were the norm around Smallshaw. There was one family in particular who used to bully everyone. We used to go round to their house quite a bit, even though we thought they were disgusting, often ending up sleeping on their couches or several of us to a bed. Their mother was a big brute of a woman with no teeth, who used to sit there with her legs apart and no knickers on. Even as kids, Christina and I knew she was repellent. She would get her boys to give her love bites on her neck so people would think she had a man. She organized all the robbing in the area, like a sort of modern Fagin, sending the kids off to pinch clothes off washing lines, taking the spoils back to her house to be shared out. She was always picking fights and her kids followed her example.

One day Christina got into a fight with one of her daughters in the street and came in crying. I think she’d had clumps of her bright red hair pulled out in the heat of the battle. That family was always fighting and bullying one another and anyone else they could pick on, but this time Mum decided it had gone too far and went round to tell their mum what she thought of her. Christina and I watched from the window as the two women set to fighting in the street outside, punching and scratching and kicking, until eventually Mum came back in with blood all over her face. I was frightened but proud at the same time that our Mum wasn’t scared to stand up to such a woman. She had stood up for Christina, just like I liked to believe Dad would have stood up for me in the same circumstances.

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I kept saying, trying to calm her crying when she came back in, cuddling her and wiping away the blood.

That fight was the final straw that convinced Mum and Dad that we should move from the street. Just at that time Dad’s sister, June, announced she was moving out of her house in Cranbrook Street, a much better area, and asked Dad if he would like to buy it off her. Moving to the ‘private sector’ was like moving to another world for us. I guess Dad must have been able to get a mortgage at a good rate, working for the council, because they started to lay plans.

Despite this good news, there had been another incident that had left me troubled. We were on a family holiday to North Wales. We had driven down there in Dad’s old Transit van, which was always getting punctures and having to pull over for repairs, but we would all be piled happily into it, with me, Christina and Shirley sitting or lying on mattresses in the back. Travelling loose like that was hard for Shirley because she was always in so much pain and there was nothing to stop her from bouncing and rolling about on every bump and corner. Christina and I would try to comfort her, reassuring her it would be all right, but the pain was terrible for her.

Dad’s other sister, Doris, lived in a place called Penmaemawr, not far from Llandudno, and we stayed in a caravan at the Robin Hood camp in Prestatyn. I had never stayed in a caravan before and it all seemed like a great adventure. Being able to go to the seaside was so exciting and it reinforced the feeling we had that we were special and better than the other families around us in Smallshaw Lane. No one around our way ever went on holiday and I felt proud to have a dad who could organize such a treat.

Still being so small, just four years old, the beach appeared enormous. We spent the first afternoon building sandcastles and the girls were as happy as I was to be playing somewhere where there was no one picking on us or trying to spoil our fun. We felt completely carefree. At some point I decided to go down to the water by myself. The tide was out and I had to splash for what seemed like miles across the wet sand to get to the sea. The sky was bright blue above my head and the ocean stretched away forever into the distance, its edges lapping and rolling across my bare feet as I danced with delight in the foam, the rest of the world forgotten, including my family sitting behind me on the beach.

Back on the dry sand Mum must have noticed that I had strayed too far for safety, and Dad must have told her not to worry, that he would go and get me. I didn’t hear him coming, didn’t hear him calling me to come back, then suddenly I was aware of his presence and he was on me, grabbing me hard, hurting me.

‘You naughty little bastard,’ he yelled as he squeezed me with all his might. ‘I’ve been shouting for ages.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t hear you. I was splashing.’

‘You are a fucking liar. You’re just plain fucking naughty, aren’t you?’

He punched me to the ground, forcing my face down in the sand so that it filled my mouth and nose and eyes.

‘Do you want me to tell your mum that you have spoilt the fucking holiday and you’ve ruined it for your sisters? Do you? Do you?’ Every question was punctuated by another punch.

‘No, Daddy, please.’ I tried to speak through mouthfuls of sand. ‘I’m sorry.’

I was struggling in his powerful grip, unable to breathe, panicked. After what seemed like forever he yanked me up.

‘Get up, you little cunt, and stop fucking crying. If you don’t stop crying I’ll tell Mum you’ve been bad and naughty.’

As he let go of me I pulled myself up on wobbly legs, still able to feel his grip on my neck. Dad was cross with me and I just wanted to please him, and I didn’t want him to tell Mum how naughty I was.

‘Now get back there and put a smile on yer fucking face.’

My legs were shaking as I tried to run to obey him, shocked and unable to understand what I’d done wrong. I just knew that I must try much harder to be good, so he wouldn’t be angry with me, so he would love me. I tried to hold his hand as we made our way back to Mum and the girls but he pulled it away and walked too quickly for me to keep up as I stumbled along.

‘Have you been having a good time?’ Mum asked when we reached her, and I just smiled and nodded, not able to trust my voice to be steady.

Starting school, just a little way from our house, was an eye-opener, like my visit to hospital. The teachers were so kind and caring, so different from the adults in my home world. The kids in the class were different from the ones who played in our street and came round our house. They didn’t want to pull my ears or my hair or hit me or be nasty to me. When I realized what a friendly world it was it was like a huge weight lifting off my shoulders. There were crayons and pens and paints, drums and even a violin, which I’d never seen before, and I was allowed to touch them and use them and everyone encouraged me and praised whatever I did. No one seemed to think I was naughty. There were some familiar faces from our estate, which was comforting once I realized they were going to behave differently at school from the way they behaved in the streets and houses. It was such a relief to be somewhere that didn’t seem at all threatening or frightening.

Shirley had to go to a special school because of all her physical problems, so she would be picked up in a taxi or ambulance each morning, and Christina and I would make our own way to and from our school. One afternoon we came home to be told that we were going to be moving to Auntie June’s house in Cranbrook Street. From now on, Mum explained, it would be our house. Overcome with excitement, I begged for us to go round and look at it, and Dad agreed to take me and Christina round there.

It wasn’t far, so we walked there together, him striding ahead in his Wellingtons, us galloping along, trying to keep up as he cut down all the back ginnels and alleys. We’d been there before, to visit our cousins, who seemed spoiled to us, always having everything that we didn’t – carpets, wall lights, proper cupboards in the front room, a gas fire in a stone-built fireplace and fancy patterned wallpaper. The carpet was purple and seemed to blend with the walls. I would get into trouble for keeping on turning the lights on and off because I’d never seen anything like it before. They even had a proper television, which worked all the time and didn’t have to be hit. It seemed such a big, grand place, three storeys tall, and with its own cellar. We always wanted to stay there. Then it had been their house, but now it was ours and we could hardly contain ourselves.

As we approached the house that our dad was going to get for us, I looked up in awe. It stood at the centre of the terrace, its front door opening directly on to the street; the slot for the post low in the bottom of the glass front door – I hadn’t noticed that before. I never knew you could have a letterbox there. It seemed like another sign that we were moving up in the world. The roof rose up to pointed eves, like the sort of houses families lived in on television. As Dad let us in it felt like we were walking into a big private castle.

The other kids in Smallshaw didn’t let us get away without some teasing: ‘Think you’re better than us, do you, just because you’re moving to a private house?’

‘No, we don’t,’ we protested, but we did.

Christina and I ran from room to room, exploring every nook and cranny as we went. The attic rooms at the top of the house were going to be ours, which we thought were the best rooms in the house. It all seemed so huge, and in our rooms there were even wardrobes built into the eves that we could actually walk in and out of. I stood at the window, staring down, thinking it was thousands of miles to the pavements below, feeling a delicious little frisson of fear when I got too close to the sill. I felt like the king of the castle. Dad told us the council might give us a grant so we could build a special bedroom for Shirley, maybe even installing a lift so Mum didn’t have to carry her up and down stairs all the time.

I did feel a little sad to be leaving some of the kids in Smallshaw who had been my friends, but I was too excited about moving away from the bullies to somewhere so new and different to grieve for long.