Abandoned (2 page)

Chapter 4

K
athy was only nineteen when she fell pregnant with me, and neither she nor her married lover knew what they were going to do. Because their affair had to remain a secret she had no one she could talk to about it either. Even if my father hadn’t been a married man, life would not have been easy for an unmarried girl who found herself pregnant in the small-town Ireland of the early 1970s. Everyone was still under the fist of the Catholic Church at the time, and unmarried mothers, I was always told as a child, were still being put away in sanatoriums, their babies taken from them and put up for adoption as soon as they were born. Many chose instead to catch the boat to England or America, to have their babies and start brand-new lives.

When she could no longer conceal her pregnancy, Kathy came to England to find her eldest sister. Mummy had lost touch with her family, but Kathy knew she was living somewhere in London. While she was in Ireland, Mummy was the only one who had ever found out that Kathy was having an affair with a married man.

‘Don’t come crying to me when he gets you pregnant,’ was the last thing she warned Kathy, washing her hands of it before she left for England.

‘I won’t,’ Kathy said.

But two and a half years later, that was exactly what she did.

By that time it wasn’t easy to find her sister in London because she’d moved several times without giving any of the family her new address. She’d divorced too, something that would have brought disgrace on her family in the Ireland of the time, and would have been the main reason for not keeping in touch with them. But somehow Kathy found her.

Years later, Kathy told me she was sure she must have had the wrong address when, late one evening, she turned up at the one she’d scribbled on the back of her ferry ticket: a block of flats in the middle of a sprawling, red-brick council estate in a run-down part of East London. She walked up the dark stairwell to the second floor landing and knocked on the red front door, half hoping her sister didn’t live there. But when her sister opened it, with Michael—who was a toddler by then—hanging off one arm, and rocking an even younger child, who she’d had illegitimately, in the other, Kathy realised why her sister had lost touch with her family. She knew then that she would help keep her secret from their parents because, staring at baby Liam, she saw that her sister had been keeping secrets of her own.

I’m not sure what Kathy planned to do once she came over to England. Maybe she was going to have an abortion and her sister or her conscience talked her out of it. Maybe her lover did. Maybe she believed he would leave his wife and his ‘empty-shell’ marriage, as I was later told it was, and come over to take care of her and her baby in London. Or maybe she was going to have me no matter what.

Fate made the decision for them in the end. A telegram arrived, two weeks before I was due to be born. It was from her father. And it ruined everything. Her mother had suffered a serious stroke and the outlook wasn’t good. Until that moment, post had been going only one way, with Kathy sending ever-briefer letters and postcards home, trying to edit out any clues, while making excuse after excuse for extending her holiday.

There can’t be too many excuses you can use for extending a holiday when a telegram arrives bringing news of your mother’s illness, but they had no choice but to rustle another one up; this time a broken leg which hadn’t reset properly. For all they knew, though, their mother could have been on her deathbed. They couldn’t phone to find out because neither Mummy nor her parents had a telephone then. But whatever her mother’s condition, she couldn’t possibly go home a few weeks before she was due to give birth to an illegitimate child. So in the end Mummy agreed to go instead.

Mummy had her own reasons for being reluctant to go home. She had divorced without telling her parents, and instead of just the three children they knew about—my elder sisters Marie and Sandra and my brother Michael—she now had my brother Liam as well.

Liam’s father, my uncle, was the kind of drunken, irreligious Irishman her mother would probably have crossed the street to avoid. Mummy had never married him, but they were living together, ‘in sin’ as it was called in those days, which to her Catholic parents would have been worse. On top of it all they were living in a council flat on a run-down estate.

Theirs was a good Catholic family in small-town Ireland, and their parents would never have accepted her lifestyle. Maybe, as her new partner drank more and more, and started to become violent, she was too ashamed to tell
anyone
what her life had come to, let alone her parents. A false pride I can now understand only too well, given how I ended up living years later, too ashamed to bring myself to let anyone know.

With her sister gone to Ireland, Kathy was left to deal with the final two weeks of her pregnancy alone, which no doubt gave her a taste of her own possible future as she struggled to look after her sister’s four children in an already cramped, three-bedroom flat. After almost a week, Mummy decided her mother’s condition was perhaps not critical, and returned to help Kathy with a pregnancy which, since she couldn’t phone to find out, might already have been over. It wasn’t, but within days of her sailing home I was born, already six days late, and even on the day of labour in no hurry to arrive. Maybe I realised that it wasn’t the greatest ticket to come in on, and needed the extra coaxing: labour began at 2 a.m. and ended just the right side of midnight the following evening.

A few days after my birth another telegram arrived. Again it was from their father, this time even more urgent than the first. Their mother had had a second stroke, almost immediately after Mummy had left Ireland. ‘Critical’, the telegram said, and this time it didn’t leave it to Kathy’s conscience to do the right thing—it ordered her home. No excuse on earth would have done.

Mummy rang our ‘uncle’ Brendan and asked him to go down to her mother and monitor the situation. She arranged for him to call her every night at the same time, on the red telephone box outside the pub where she bought her ‘Irish’ cigarettes. The reports that came back can’t have been good.

Kathy stayed with me as long as she could. I was hastily christened, keeping her surname rather than taking Mummy’s married name, the name all the other children in the family had. After all, if Kathy was going to be coming back for me there was no reason for me to have any name but hers. Ten days after I was born she flew home to Ireland to take care of her mother. There was no other option.

I can’t imagine what it must have taken for her to do that. What pain she must have been in, before she shut her emotions down, taking care of her mother in that sealed-off world, without a telephone to contact her sister to find out how her baby was doing. Maybe wondering how angry my uncle was at my still being there week after week, and having no one but her married lover to tell her secrets to. Not wanting her mother to die, but knowing too that that was the only way she could go back to get her baby. As her mother’s illness worsened—her mind slipping away into dementia, her behaviour more and more childlike by the day—maybe Kathy saw it as some kind of divine retribution, left there washing, dressing and feeding her, nursing her mother instead of the baby she had left behind in England.

As a little girl I heard various versions of what Kathy had planned to do as soon as her mother died or was well enough to leave. In them all she was going to come back to get me. But my grandmother didn’t die, though she didn’t recover either. Her condition deteriorated and Kathy stayed there looking after her at home for another nine years.

Meanwhile, I grew up in London with my aunt and uncle. And from then on my aunt was the only mother I knew or wanted. And the only one I ever called ‘Mummy’. I called my uncle ‘Daddy’ too, just like my four elder brothers and sisters, and ‘the girls’ Stella and Jennifer, who came along a few years after I arrived. There were seven of us children in all.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mummy would always whisper after their drunken—often violent—rows, when my uncle would threaten that he wanted me gone by the time he got back from work, ‘I won’t ever let him send you away, or let anyone come to take you from me.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

Chapter 5

M
y uncle was a big, well-built Irishman who worked as a labourer on building sites. He came from a large, chaotic family in rural Ireland, and had probably known nothing much more than poverty and abuse in his own childhood. He had small grey eyes, which seemed to follow my every move, and fair hair, which, in the early days, he used to wear almost to his shoulders, with bushy sideburns. He had big, heavy shoulders and hands, and a back full of pimples that he was always getting us to squeeze.

He’d come over to England with three of his brothers to work on the roads, as soon as he’d saved enough for the fare and could legally leave school. Very soon he ended up living a hand-to-mouth existence with Mummy, who was divorced by then with three children of her own and soon pregnant with his first child, my brother Liam. It was a harsh life, which he must have felt completely powerless to change.

It was a struggle just bringing up their own children; another child to feed and clothe can’t have been easy. But there were a lot of big families, and poverty and deprivation all around us in the flats at the time, so we weren’t really different to the rest.

But the expense of looking after me always came into his tirades against Mummy and me. When she was short he would usually blame her for spending it on me. But he would still refuse to accept any ‘hush money’ as he called it from Kathy, who as well as caring for her mother had quickly progressed in her career over the years and was relatively comfortably off over in Ireland. Nor would he accept any money from our Uncle Brendan, who in those days was the richest person we knew.

He wanted to get me out—so that they wouldn’t keep coming over and interfering in his home—not to be paid to have me there.

It was their visits that really infuriated him. He didn’t like anybody from outside coming into his home when we were young, and apart from his brothers we never had any visitors in the flats. When she met him, Mummy had only recently moved down from the North of England, and he knew she had no other family in the country. No one to see what he was doing, or to judge.

But when I was left there all that changed. From then on, to his intense displeasure, both Kathy and our Uncle Brendan would come over and visit us frequently. It must have been a lonely, frightening situation for Mummy before that, knowing no one in London but him, especially when the shine went from their relationship and all the ugliness behind closed doors began.

Mummy was never one to take things lying down. From the stories she told us we knew that even as a child she had been headstrong and unruly, and constantly at war with her own father. She described herself as being the ‘black sheep of the family’, ‘rough and ready’ and a ‘fighter’.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she’d whisper to us those nights when we’d all tiptoed back down after he had staggered off to bed. ‘I’m as tough as old boots, me.’ But she wasn’t; though neither was she quite ready for the monster my uncle turned into after swallowing beer and vodka all night. She just wasn’t willing to be a victim.

Soon she was fighting fire with fire, matching him vodka for vodka as they tried to scream and pummel one another into the kind of partner they wanted each other to be. Mummy would fight with her last breath to protect her children. And although
she
could say whatever she liked about her own family in Ireland, she saw red whenever my uncle turned on them: especially Kathy. He knew that was the easiest way to get to her, through her red-haired sister with her ‘airs and graces’ and her distrust of him—Kathy ‘the whore’. And so Kathy appeared in our front room like a bad genie out of the vodka bottle every Saturday night, and if that wasn’t enough to hurt Mummy, he’d then start on me.

From as early as I can remember hardly a day would pass without my uncle reminding me, in some way or another, that I wasn’t a part of that family—that I didn’t belong there, and that I wasn’t wanted anywhere else either. ‘Do you understand?’ he’d scream, leaping over to me, the pouf kicked noisily out of the way to intimidate me, or the coffee table upturned, his face turning its purply-red colour in rage.

‘Yes, Dad. I’m sorry, Dad,’ I’d say, cowering on the settee, my arms covering my head as he punched down on my small body, or my hands clamped over my mouth, trying to stop the crying that would infuriate him even more.

He took his anger out on all of us at times, but even when he was blinded by drink there was still a hierarchy amongst us. His own three children—Liam and ‘the girls’, Stella and Jennifer—were treated one way, and Mummy’s other three children from her earlier marriage—Marie, Sandra and Michael—were treated another way. And then there was me.

But despite the violence and abuse, Mummy stayed with him. ‘You make your bed and you lie in it,’ was always her philosophy, and he must have shared it because that’s what the two of them did.

And so most of my childhood was lived in constant fear. Fear of him and of when he might get Kathy to take me away. It led to me being an insecure, clingy, anxious child, and especially around him I would withdraw into my shell, terrified. But the worse things became, the more I wanted to be there with Mummy and all my brothers and sisters. Like any child I just wanted to fit in and to belong, to be accepted as one of the family I knew as my own. But he seemed just as determined that I never would.

As the years went by I mastered numbness and the near invisibility he demanded, and was almost unreachable by anybody but Mummy. But no matter how good I was, or how useful I became, there was rarely any let-up in his verbal attacks or threats to send me away. There was never a time in all those years when I wasn’t terrified of him. And of course the worse he became, the more I dreaded being separated from Mummy.

Even when he was in a good mood, he seemed to enjoy upsetting me. Sometimes, if Mummy had just slipped out on some errand, and one of us noticed and someone asked where she was, he’d say, ‘She’s not coming back. She’s gone for good this time.’ He’d be watching me as he said it, amused by the look of shock on my face, nudging one of the boys or winking over at them to make them laugh at my distress. And I would sit rigid until the front door was pushed noisily open and she came back in.

Often, I’d be yelled back out of bed at night during one of their arguments and forced to sit there and listen while his monstrous anger stormed around me and his violent threats to get me out continued. He’d warn me not to cry, but hard as I tried I rarely managed it. Sometimes he’d force me to sit at the oval, smoked-glass table in the dining room to write letters to Kathy telling her I wanted to go over to live with her in Ireland.

The first time I remember it, was not long after one of her visits. Screaming at Mummy through the archway separating the two rooms to go and find paper and envelopes, he made me sit there and write. I can’t have been much more than five and could barely write anything without copying out the words. But he made me finish it, hitting me every time I couldn’t spell one—my tears, which he screamed at me to stop, turning the words into blue forget-me-nots of ink as they dripped down on to them.

The blood pounded in my ears and my body was stiff with fear while he stood over me, or staggered through the archway between the rooms, shouting out the words, or forcing me to write my own.

Dear mum

Please can i come to live with you in Iland there. Becuause I want to. you are my mum not mummy and i will prefur it there. I am cuming tomorrow on the next boat.

Mummy was forced to stay in the front room on the other side of the arch, watching me falling to pieces as I wrote the words that over the years I couldn’t bear even to think.

‘Don’t worry, Anya,’ she shouted over him, crying loudly, ‘I’ll always be your mother. You’re going nowhere…I’ll never let that be posted. Don’t worry about him.’

As I sat there, trying to block out their screams, I was unable to stop trembling. I leaned across the table, squinting to see what I was writing, hot splinters of pain darting beneath my eyelids, my teeth chattering as I willed Mummy to stop arguing back, and myself to stop crying.

‘Look at her, look! Look what you’re doing to her, you heartless bastard,’ she screamed at him.

When I finished I sat tugging down my pink nightdress, trying to control my tears and the pain in my head, waiting for him either to go to bed or to let me go back. I stared down at my pale legs, turned brown under the smoked glass, shrinking them down in my mind to the size of one of the china figures on the mantelpiece, so still and quiet sitting up there that nobody noticed them, hoping my uncle would forget me one day the same way.

Mummy would always refuse to give him Kathy’s address in Ireland, and that night she pleaded with him to have a heart, saying it had gone on too long now, that there was nowhere else for me to go, that it would kill her mother if she ever found out Kathy had had a child. He wouldn’t listen. While he went off to look for envelopes himself she ran across and tried pulling the letter from me and pushing me out of the chair to get up to bed. But I was paralysed with fear. Tears and mucus streamed down my face as I pushed her away in case he came in and saw her trying to comfort me.

She’d never tell him where the envelopes were either, but he always found them.

‘Search all you like, there are none left, you madman,’ she screamed, as he stamped around the rooms, slamming drawers in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, pulling things out onto the floor. He finally came back with some, throwing the blue airmail envelopes with their stripy red and blue border down with the address book onto the glass and ordering me to find Kathy’s address in it and to write it on one.

‘I’ll get a stamp for that tomorrow…I don’t want their left-behinds here, do you hear me?’

I went to bed convinced each time that the letter would be posted and that his threats to send me over to ‘them’, ‘on the next boat’, would finally be carried out.

Saturday nights were the worst, the times when the arguments always exploded into violence, him threatening and intimidating and finally lashing out. Sometimes the boys got hit too, but mostly it was me and Mummy.

We were primed by Tom and Jerry earlier in the evening, who showed us that violence was funny. We laughed the cartoon violence off loudly, looking around at each other as we sucked and chewed our way through a bag of pick ‘n’ mix and slurped our fizzy drinks. Me, the only dark-haired one amongst all my blonde brothers and sisters, trying my hardest to fit in and be invisible to my uncle—trying to put out of my mind the tension I could already feel building between him and Mummy.

But sitting there, waiting for the evening to start, it was hard to shake the pictures of last time still in my head. Pictures I still see now: of Mummy, looking frail and tiny, her small body up against the living room wall; his big, heavy, calloused hands around her throat, the diamond in the gold signet ring on his little finger flashing under the wall-lights as he tightened his grip; her face almost scarlet, her feet lifted off the ground, her eyes bulging, choking. I can still see her collapsing to the ground when he let go; thinking she was dead this time, all the breath gone from my lungs, my heart slamming almost to a stop as I watched her being dragged across the purple carpet by her hair.

She was probably almost as drunk as him by then, kicking and screaming at him to leave us all alone, her skirt up around her hips as he kicked and spat down on her, but still refusing to tell him who my father was. Her voice was tiny and hoarse with emotion and exhaustion but she still defended her sister from being a ‘whore’ and me from being ‘a whore’s child’.

I was forced to sit and watch it all after the others had been shouted off to bed. Warned not to cry, pushing my fist or my fingers or my shirt cuffs into my mouth, chewing down on them or the inside of my cheek until my mouth filled with the taste of blood. My shoulders heaving up around my ears, unable to breathe properly as Mummy’s screams tore through me. I feel myself slipping away, the room floating in and out, the sounds of her blouse being ripped as he drags her through the archway, shouting that he wants her out too, his knees and fists punching into her as she struggles up and kicks back; vile names I don’t yet know the meaning of screamed into both of us. I sit wedged between orange cushions on the end of the fake-leather sofa, shivering, helpless, contorted with fear and the effort to stop my crying, waiting for him to start back on me. The terror of what he is doing and of Mummy leaving forcing my mind out of my body, until the sound of her head being knocked like a coconut against the living room wall jolts me back—not knowing whether to look or not look, listen or not listen, trying to reverse the flow of tears—to stop feeling.

That was the hardest part of growing up: learning not to cry, not even allowed to express the pain of it. Pretending to feel nothing.

Huddling around Mummy after one of the worst fights one night, the TV screen kicked in and glass all over the purple carpet, we planned how we’d get rid of him: a drop of arsenic in his vodka, a sprinkling of rat poison in his stew, a pillow over his face while he slept, or his skull smashed in with one of the girls’ heavy, brass lion money-boxes that stood empty either side of the fire surround. We passed one around solemnly, lifting it above our heads, bouncing it up and down on our small, clammy palms, coldly assessing its effectiveness as we demonstrated our love to Mummy through what we were prepared to do.

The solemnity didn’t last long. Soon we were laughing away our tears, picking through the evening’s violence to find some funny detail to hold on to, to neutralise it, finding some way to release the stored-up emotions, letting them out through tears or laughter. When Mummy joined in, the worst of the pain dissolved, but even though she said he was in a drunken coma in the bedroom by then, I couldn’t relax fully; I never could. I always had one eye on the door or, when we eventually moved into a house, on the ceiling, shushing them all if I thought I heard my uncle moving about in his room. My head would be throbbing, my teeth still chattering after his threats to get rid of me again. I would listen out for the creak of floorboards, convinced he would overhear us and come thumping down the stairs two at a time.