Don’t Tell Mummy (10 page)

Later she returned to my bedroom where, still dazed, I was trying to calm myself by escaping into
Little Women
.

Our eyes met and I knew that the protection I had felt when the Giveens were present had gone. She, I knew, had
chosen to humour my father and I was relegated to being a child who was a nuisance.

‘Try not to make your father angry again, Antoinette,’ were her only words as she removed the oil lamp from my room and departed. I closed my eyes. As I was now unable to read, my mind invented a story. A story where I was once again loved, surrounded by friends and invited to many parties.

Back in the hospice I made myself some coffee and lit a cigarette as I tried to stop the flood of memories, but Antoinette, the ghost of my childhood, was still there. I heard her again.

‘Toni, remember on your own, remember the truth.’

I had believed my past had been dealt with, but Antoinette’s face kept coming back to haunt me. I had destroyed nearly all the photographs many years before, photographs that showed the life of the child who once was me, but now one by one they flashed before me.

I saw her as the chubby curly-haired toddler with shining eyes, smiling confidently into the camera, sitting crossed legged with her plump little hands holding one knee. In that photograph she was dressed in her favourite dress, smocked by her mother.

A few years later, she was wearing a checked dress, too short for her skinny frame, no socks and second-hand sandals. Her empty eyes had dark shadows under them as she looked at me. She stood on the lawns at Cooldaragh holding Judy, with her other friends, the dogs, at her feet.

In another photograph she was by the rhododendrons of Cooldaragh with the mother she loved so much. There were no photographs of her with other children or playmates.

I forced the mental pictures away and went back to my mother’s bedside. As I closed my eyes I found myself looking back through the years and I remembered the unhappy, isolated child who had lived at Cooldaragh. A child whose birthday was marred, not only by the brutality of her father, and her mother’s indifference to her plight, but also by her inability to interact and relate to her peers. How she watched them as though through a window, playing, laughing and chattering. She was only imitating them when she tried to join in.

It was too late for her to feel at one with them, her childhood had already gone. By her tenth birthday she knew that any happiness she felt was only a momentary illusion.

Sitting by my mother’s bedside, I remembered one act of sly rebellion and it brought a wry smile to my face. It happened just after my birthday and showed that the little girl could still feel anger and that she was not a complete puppet.

At Cooldaragh all the unused fireplaces were blocked by newspaper, not only to keep some of the cold out, but also to stop birds and bats getting in. When I fetched water at dusk, I had often seen the bats swooping around the outside of the house, exploring their unseen world as darkness fell.

Watching them, I remembered that day at the church when the ringing of the church bell had disturbed one of them. I had seen the fear that its blind flight had instilled into the female section of the congregation.

I chose my night carefully, knowing that when my father took his car into Coleraine on a Friday morning, he always returned home late and drunk. I knew my mother’s routine on those occasions. When she finally gave up waiting for him, she would walk down the long dark corridor that led
from our sitting room to the kitchen, holding a candle to light her way. Here she would make a pot of tea, before she climbed the servants’ staircase to her bedroom.

That night, knowing my mother would have thought I was asleep, I rose from my bed stealthily, determined that the bats would have maximum access to the house. I poked holes into the newspaper stuffing above the fireplaces. After that was done, I opened the back door, to where only the small courtyard separated the house from the disused stables where the bats were.

Patiently I crouched at the top of the servants’ stairs, awaiting my nocturnal visitors, the instruments of my minor revenge. I was rewarded. One brave flying mouse, swooping low, entered by the back door. Once I was sure it was far enough into the house, I crept down the stairs on my bare feet and closed the door quietly.

Shivering with cold, I returned to my post on the stairs to await the results. I did not have to wait long.

I saw an orange glow as the door of my parents’ sitting room opened. Then came the flicker of the candle’s flame as it lit the way for my mother. I heard her scream as the bat, with its radar senses, swooped around her head.

I knew she was frozen with fear in that semi-darkness. Quickly I came down the stairs, put my arms around her, took the candle from her shaking fingers and led her back to their sitting room where I helped her into a chair. I told her I had been in the bathroom when I heard her scream.

As she sat with tears streaming down her face, I took her candle, went down to the kitchen, where the sleeping dogs hardly stirred, and made her tea. Placing a cup, milk jug and sugar on a tray where I had carefully balanced the candle, I led her up the main staircase to her bedroom, thus avoiding
the bat. I placed the tray by her bedside and hugged her, because I still loved my mother.

Through my adult eyes, I tried to understand what my mother’s life must have been like during those years. I could understand why she wanted to escape into her fantasy world of ‘happy families’, where there was nothing wrong with our lives. After all, what else did she have? After Mrs Giveen’s death she had virtually no contact with other people. She had no friends or family in Northern Ireland and certainly no financial independence. Without transport, her isolation must have grown because I could sense the depression that was falling over her.

A woman of today would have choices that my mother was denied, but if she had been given them, would she have accepted a different route? What happened in later years made me doubt this.

I continued to sit by her bedside, the night-light casting a faint glow over her. I looked at her small, helpless form and saw that sleep had smoothed out some of the lines caused by pain. I felt the same conflicting emotions that the little girl had felt as she held her mother that night: bewilderment, anger and a strong desire to comfort and protect her.

N
ow that the Giveens had all left, my father started coming to my bedroom again. On the days that he knew he was going to come home late, he would take his car into the town. When he returned, my mother and I would be asleep at opposite ends of the house. My room was dark, the only light coming from the moon that seemed, on fine nights, to be floating outside my window. I would often drift off to sleep, trying to see the friendly and reassuring face of the man in the moon. I had, a long time ago, lost my torch, so now that my mother had taken my lamp, I only had the candle that lit the way to my bedroom. Lying there in the dark with my fists clenched, I would squeeze my eyes tightly shut, hoping if I didn’t open them, he wouldn’t be there. But he always was. I would try and huddle deeper under the bedclothes. Then I would feel the cold on my body, as he pulled them down and my flannelette nightdress up.

He’d whisper into my ear, ‘You like this, Antoinette, don’t you?’

I’d say nothing.

He’d say, ‘You’d like some pocket money, wouldn’t you?’

He’d take half a crown out and push it into my fist. Then he’d take his trousers off. I’ll remember always the smell of
him. That whiskey breath, the stale smell of cigarettes and his body odour – no deodorant for him. He’d get on top of me. Now that I was a little bit older, although he was still careful, he could afford to be a little rougher. And he would push himself into me. I could feel those eyes of his boring through my closed eyelids. He’d tell me to open my eyes. I never wanted to. At that age, he hurt me. I heard him give a gasp before he rolled off me; he’d get off the bed, quickly pull on his clothes and go to my mother’s bed.

I would be left holding half a crown.

As the visits to my room increased, so did the physical violence. One night I was playing in what had been Mrs Giveen’s lounge. I’d gone in there to be alone, to be away from my parents. He came in with a newspaper and sat down. I had one of those little trinkets that looked like frogs, and came out of crackers. I was sitting aimlessly playing with it listening to the click-click sound it made. Then I felt his gaze on me.

‘Antoinette,’ he said, ‘stop that, stop it now.’

I jumped with fear. The trinket flew out of my hand, making its final click. That was the only excuse he needed. He picked me up and threw me backwards onto the floor.

‘You stop when I tell you to stop, my girl!’ he shouted.

Often in the nights I would be woken by my usual nightmare. I would be dreaming of falling and falling into darkness. Then my father’s presence blended into that nightmare as he woke me up. After he’d left, sleep did not return easily. In the morning I would be tired as I walked down to the kitchen to bring up my hot water to wash. I made sure that I always washed well between my legs on those mornings. It’s very hard for me to remember what I felt, but I seem to remember I felt very little.
Now, with him coming to my room so often, I was getting regular ‘pocket money’ and I could buy friend-winning sweets again. Children, like animals, can sense when someone is weak, different or vulnerable. Even though these were nicely brought up children, where cruelty wasn’t part of their make-up, they had an instinctive aversion to me. So in the early evenings, when I ate with the boarders, I avoided the ones who were my own age as much as possible. I tried to sit either with the younger girls, with whom I could play, or the older ones who were kind to me. Apart from the mealtimes I spent my time in the library with my homework. I knew I was not popular, and I could tell the teachers also knew it. The staff at that school were kind to me on the surface, but I could sense a detachment. At the age of ten, I had stopped expecting people to like me.

The bus journey home took about thirty minutes and I would try and finish my school homework, reading paragraphs of books that I knew I would be questioned about the following day. One night, my father got on at the next bus stop. He didn’t sit next to me. He sat nearly opposite so he could look at me. He put on the smile of the nice father. But I no longer believed there was one. That evening I couldn’t find my ticket. I could feel my father gazing at me and I felt sick with fear as I searched my satchel and pockets. I tried to whisper to the bus conductor.

‘I can’t find my ticket. Please don’t tell my father.’

But the bus conductor just laughed. He knew I had a weekly ticket because he worked on the bus every day.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Sure your father won’t be cross with you. Look at him. He’s smiling at you. Don’t be a silly girl.’

Sure enough there sat my father, with those bloodshot eyes of his twinkling. Then he winked at me. I recognized that wink. The journey seemed to me to take for ever, even though it was only a few miles. It was dark that night and when I got off the bus it was cold. Once the bus disappeared into the distance he seized me, as I knew he would. He beat me. Across the bottom, across the shoulders with his other hand at the back of my neck, holding me roughly. He flung me about, shaking me. I didn’t cry. Not then. I didn’t scream. I’d stopped screaming out loud a long time ago. But as he walked me up to the house, I felt the tears trickling down my face. My mother must have seen the tracks they’d made. But she said nothing. I picked at my supper, too upset to want it, too scared to refuse it. I finished off the small amount of homework I had to do, then went to bed. I knew then I was not a child who tried to make her parents angry, but that I had a parent who looked for every excuse to find fault and hit me.

That night he came to my room when I was still awake. He wrenched the bedclothes off me. I could feel there was more violence in him than usual. I felt very afraid of him and started to cry in fright.

‘I don’t want any pocket money,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to do it to me.’ Feeling hysteria rising in me, I continued to plead. ‘Please, please don’t do it. You hurt me.’

It was the first and the last time I cried when he came into my bedroom. My mother was in the hall and heard me.

She called out, ‘What’s going on?’

My father called back to her: ‘Nothing. She was having a nightmare. I just came in to see what it was. She’s alright now.’

As he left he hissed in my ear, ‘Don’t you be telling your mother, my girl.’

She came into my room a few minutes later where I was huddled under the bedclothes.

‘Antoinette, what happened?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘I was having a nightmare.’

On that she left the room. She never asked me again.

On other nights I could hear the crunch of the gravel as his car drew up. Quaking with fear, I would lie in my bed, hearing the creak of the floorboards as his stealthy step approached my room. I would feign sleep on those nights, always hoping he would not want to wake me. But he did.

Not every time he came would he leave me half a crown, but at least twice a week he did. After the first night of wrenching my fingers open and jamming it into my fist, he started mockingly to put it into the china jar on my dressing table that held my gold locket. He’d say to me, ‘There’s your pocket money, my girl.’

On the evenings when he came home early, I would curl up on the settee with the dogs at my feet and open a book. Often, when I read of children with loving and caring parents, the tears would spill from my eyes and slide down my face, giving my father the opportunity he was waiting for. He’d look up.

‘What are you crying for, my girl?’ he’d ask.

I would try and avoid looking into his eyes, as I muttered, ‘Nothing.’

At that, he would get off his seat, catch hold of me by the scruff of the neck, shake me and then hit me, usually around the shoulders.

‘Well, then,’ he would say quietly, ‘now you have something to cry about, don’t you?’

My mother said nothing.

After that I stopped reading children’s books about happy families. I started reading my mother’s books. I did not tell her the reason. She never asked. The first adult books I read were called the White Oak Series. They were not unhappy books. But there were no children in them.

One day a man was waiting for me as I finished school. He introduced himself as a friend of my father’s. He had obtained permission from the teacher who supervised the boarders to take me out to tea. I went to a teashop with him where he treated me to scones and cake, followed by ice cream. Favourite foods of little girls! He chatted to me about school. Gradually he drew me out to talk to him about my dogs. Then he asked me what I liked reading. I told him I was in the middle of a book called
Jalna
that came from the White Oak Series.

‘You are very grown up for a little girl if you are reading books like that,’ he said.

I glowed with happiness at his kindness and obvious interest, and the compliments he paid me. After we had finished eating and chatting, he walked me back to my school and told me how much he had enjoyed my company. He asked me if I would like him to take me out again. I replied that I would.

He visited me several times after that. I told the teachers that he was a friend of my father’s and they always gave permission for him to take me. I looked forward to his visits. I felt he was interested in listening to me, which made me feel grown up and important. I could always order what I wanted. He seemed fascinated by my childish chatter. To me, who had so little interest shown, I felt I had a grown-up friend, until the final day that I saw him.

That day, on the way back from school, he took me to a grassy area. He told me again how much he liked my company. He told me he liked little girls, especially little girls as grown up as me. Then he stared at me, with what suddenly seemed like my father’s eyes. He picked some blades of grass and ran his fingers up and down, up and down them suggestively.

‘Antoinette,’ he said, ‘do you know what I would like you to do now?’

I knew.

‘I know you would like that, wouldn’t you, Antoinette?’

Like a rabbit caught in the sudden glare of headlamps, I froze.

‘I know that you do it with your father,’ he said. ‘Tell the teacher; next time I come, I will take you home. Then we can spend the afternoon together before you catch your bus. You would like that, wouldn’t you?’

I could only nod, as I’d been trained to do.

That night I told my father about his friend. With his face red with rage, he shook me.

‘Don’t you be doing this with anyone but me, my girl,’ he hissed raising his fists.

But this time he lowered them without hitting me and left my room. I never saw my father’s friend again and I never found out how he came to know about my father and me. It can only have been my father who told him. Even monsters, it seems, feel the pressure of living a lie; even they must have someone who knows and accepts the real person.

My life at Cooldaragh continued for a couple more months. Then my mother broke the news that the house had been
sold and, yet again, we would have to move, this time back across the Irish Sea to Kent. She as well as my father needed to work, she explained, for now that we could no longer live rent free my father’s income alone would not support us. Employment for her, she believed, would be easier to find in England.

My mother then told me that in the two years we had spent at Cooldaragh she had managed to save enough money for a deposit on a house. The harsh lines that had appeared around her mouth over the last few years seemed to soften as she talked, for finally she could see that her dream – that of owning her own home – was drawing closer.

I saw the enthusiasm on her face but I could not share it with her, as I had grown to love Cooldaragh.