Don’t Tell Mummy (14 page)

She must have said something to my parents for the next night they stayed at home and when it was time to go to bed it was my mother who came to tuck me in, not my grandmother. She sat on the end of the bed, the role of caring mother firmly in place, a role that she completely believed in.

‘Your grandmother tells me that you were upset last night that we didn’t take you with us, but you know we can’t
take you everywhere we go. I thought it would be nice for you to spend some time with her. It’s you she really comes to see.’

‘But she comes to see all of us,’ I mumbled.

‘Oh no, dear, my brother’s her favourite, always has been. And his wife is so like her. No, dear, if it wasn’t for you I doubt if I would ever see her. So I think it would be selfish to leave her alone. Don’t you, dear?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, for what other answer could I give?

She smiled at me, pleased that I understood. ‘So we won’t hear any more of this silly nonsense will we dear?’ She looked at me for the reassurance she knew would come.

‘No,’ I finally whispered, and with a fleeting kiss that hardly touched my cheek she left me in the darkness to fall asleep thinking how selfish I’d been towards the grandmother I loved.

The next time they went out I told my grandmother that it had only been that one film I wanted to see and that my mother would take me to see a Norman Wisdom film in the school holidays. I was happy they’d left us because I loved spending time with her, I assured her. That part was true, but I still did not like being excluded. I knew it was another sign of how little I was loved. I think my grandmother did too, but she appeared to accept my words at face value and later we happily played a game of gin rummy. A game I won, which suggested she was not concentrating as much as she should have been.

That night she made me a milky drink of cocoa and gave me an extra biscuit. The next day she was waiting at the school gates. She informed me she had decided to take me out for tea and had told my mother that I would do my homework later.

Proudly, I took her arm. She was dressed in her smartest blue tweed coat with a small blue hat perched jauntily on her head. I wanted the other children to see I had a relative, one who not only cared for me, but was also so pretty.

I was rewarded the following day when my classmates remarked on how nice my mother looked. I took great pleasure in their astonishment when I told them that the pretty red-haired woman they had seen me with was my grandmother.

The weeks with her sped quickly by and all too soon it was time for her to leave. Seeing my woebegone face on the morning of her departure, she promised me that her next visit would not be too long away; in fact she had made her mind up that she would visit before my summer holidays. That seemed too far away for me because the Easter holidays were looming up and even the release from the school I hated could not compensate for the three weeks I knew I would be back in my father’s power. Weeks when I knew he would change back to the nightshifts and I would have little escape.

T
he last day of term I was surrounded by the excited babble of my peers. Plans were being made for meeting up, and there were discussions about the fun they were going to have in their weeks of freedom. For once I was pleased not to be included, for what could I have said?

On her departure my grandmother had pressed some notes into my hand, with instructions to buy something for myself. Then, to make sure I did, she told me to write to her and tell her what it was. I had already decided: I wanted a bicycle and I knew where there was one for sale. I’d seen a card pinned in the local shop, informing anyone who was interested that a lady’s bicycle was being offered for £2 10s. Now I had the money I was determined to buy it. In my head I could see myself cycling to school after the holidays and parking it next to the other ones.

A quick phone call informed me that it was still available, so on the first day of my holiday I walked to the given address. The transaction only took a few minutes and then I was riding it triumphantly away. The front wheel wobbled dangerously with my inexperienced pumping of the pedals but within an hour I had mastered the intricacies of the three gears and my balance. Delighted with the new sense
of freedom it gave me, I thought I would cycle into the next town, which was Guildford, and explore the cobbled streets that I had seen when my mother and I had taken the bus there.

I still had money left, so not only could I visit its many second-hand bookshops but my mother’s favourite bakery as well. There my mouth would water as soon as I smelt the warm aroma of freshly baked bread. I decided I would purchase one of the crusty loaves that my mother loved and return with it for our tea.

In my head my whole holiday was planned. I would spend time taking Judy for long walks, visit the library where I could pass hours just browsing, and explore the countryside on my bicycle. If I could manage to complete the housework while my father slept I could make my escape from him before he awoke.

Each evening at supper I would tell my mother my plans for the following day and sense the tension within my father. But if I had promised to return from Guildford with the bread she liked, he could not ban me from going. Or so I thought.

By the end of the first week of my holiday I became more adventurous, staying in Guildford until the early afternoon. I arrived back happily intending to take Judy for a walk and then make tea for my mother. My happiness quickly evaporated when, as soon as I entered the house, I heard my father’s roar of rage.

‘Antoinette, get yourself up here.’

Quaking with fear I did as I was told.

‘Where have you been, my girl?’ he shouted, his face red and contorted with rage. ‘I’ve been awake for an hour, wanting my tea. You pull your weight in this house, do you hear
me, Antoinette? You’re nothing but an idle lump. Now get down those stairs and make me some tea!’

I shot down the stairs, put the kettle on with shaking hands and looked at the clock. It was gone four o’clock, my mother would be home in just over an hour. It was too late for him to touch me tonight, but I knew that moment had only been postponed.

As soon as the kettle had boiled I hurriedly made his tea, placed a biscuit in the saucer and took it to him. As I went to walk out of the room I heard the menacing tones of his voice.

‘Where do you think you’re going? I’m not finished with you yet.’

My legs went weak as thoughts spun around my head. Surely he could not mean what I thought, when my mother was due back so soon?

‘Pass me my cigarettes, then get yourself down those stairs and get the tea ready for your Mummy. Don’t you be thinking you can sit around on your backside all night either.’

He glared at me and I felt terror, knowing his temper was barely under control.

He took my bicycle that evening. He told us it was so that he could get to work faster, giving us his wide smile and a wink as he rode off on my treasured possession. My mother said nothing.

The following morning my bicycle was in our back yard with a flat front tyre, and my first period had started.

Confined to the house with no transport and with cramping pains clawing at my stomach I had no escape, and he showed his fury at being denied his pleasure. First he made me clean the house, then run up and down the stairs with
numerous cups of tea. No sooner had I lain down than he called me again. It seemed that he needed very little sleep or, if he did, the desire to torture me was greater. That was the second week of my holiday.

For the last week my grandmother returned and with her return my life changed again, for she had come with a purpose.

I was not happy at school, she had told my parents. She did not believe I could stay there for another six years or I would give up before I got to university. My father, she knew, did not like England so she wanted to help them move back to Ireland. Private school fees were cheaper there and she would pay for me to return to my old school. She would even pay for another uniform. She had noticed I had no friends to leave behind and at least in Ireland there was my father’s large family.

My father wanted to return. He missed being with his family, where he was admired and through whose eyes he saw himself as successful, while he knew my mother’s relatives saw him as an uneducated ‘Paddy’.

My mother agreed, hoping as always that the grass would be greener at the end of a journey. The little house was put on the market and quickly sold, the tea chests came out again and at the beginning of the summer holidays we made our last journey as a family.

I too hoped this would be a new beginning. I missed Ireland and my grandmother was too infrequent a visitor for her love to compensate for the life I had in England. So the three of us, all with different hopes, left England and made the return trip to Coleraine.
Once again my Irish relatives gave us a rapturous greeting. My Irish grandmother stood in the street waiting with tears of joy running down her face. My mother, who disliked any public show of emotion, gave her a stiff hug while I stood shyly by. I now knew that their homes were classed as ‘the slums’ and their way of life was completely different from what my mother had been used to, but to me the warmth and kindness found there completely outweighed the lack of money.

Seen through older eyes the sitting room was claustro-phobically small and over-heated. And the small table covered in clean newspaper screamed poverty. When I went to the outside lavatory I felt touched that there hung a toilet roll, knowing it had been placed there for my and my mother’s sake. Pages of newspaper cut into squares were hung on a nail for those with less delicate sensibilities.

My Irish family must have seen me as a younger version of my mother. I spoke like her, I sat like her and the manners of the English middle classes had been drummed into me from birth. Now that I was no longer a small child they must have searched for similarities between my father and me, but they would have found none. They saw the daughter of a woman they tolerated for my father’s sake, but never thought of as family. Like her, I was a visitor in their home; loved because of my father but not for myself. I think that was what made their final decision about me two years later so easy.

This was Northern Ireland in the late fifties. This was Ulster, whose small grey towns painted their street curbs red, white and blue and hung banners proudly in their windows.

In my family’s home town the male population donned black suits and hats to march on ‘Orange Day’. Staunchly
Protestant, the residents of Coleraine stood for the national anthem but disliked the English – ‘their effete masters across the water’. Northern Ireland was steeped in prejudice and the people ill informed of their own history. Even though their dislike of the English stemmed from tales of horrors during the nineteenth-century potato famine, their history teachers should have told them that many of them had Catholic forefathers who had ‘drunk the soup’ for survival. It was that reward of thin broth for changing religion that created so many of them. But, to a man, they disliked the Catholics even more than the English. The Catholics, who had lost so much under British rule and were still seen as second-class citizens, could still have pride in their history. While the families who, like us, could have traced their history back to the chieftains who once ruled Ireland and defended it against invasion did not do so for they had renounced their forefathers. In the years there that I grew from child to young adult, I learnt that religion has very little to do with Christianity.

But it was also a country where the people in small communities looked out for each other. During my father’s childhood, when times were hard, food was shared with those who had none. A country that had known years of hardship was also a country, as I was to find out, where a whole community could take a united stand and kindness could be replaced by an unwavering lack of forgiveness. At twelve I did not see any of that; I just saw the place where I had always felt the happiest.

Although I knew my family no longer saw me in quite the same way they had nearly three years before, I still felt love for them. I was delighted when I was told that until my parents found a house of their own Judy and I would stay
with my grandparents, while my parents would move in with my aunt in the seaside town of Portstewart. Their houses were too small to accommodate us all together so, once I had been re-enrolled at my old school, my parents left and I tried to blend in to the mean streets of the slum area of Coleraine.

The children were friendly; they seemed to feel more fascinated than aggressive about my differences. Maybe that was because they dreamed of leaving their homes one day and searching for that elusive pot of gold in England. Young as they were, they saw it as a land of opportunity and fired question after question at me. Were the wages as high as everyone said? Was the work as plentiful? As soon as they could leave school they were catching that ferry and going to Liverpool or, if more adventurous, on to London.

Between the children who, with rough kindness, accepted me, and my numerous relatives who did their very best to make me welcome, the weeks I spent there were happy-go-lucky times. I was free to play outside from breakfast to bedtime, take Judy for walks in the park and play cricket, where I developed a skill as a bowler. I would squint my eyes, get that little white ball into focus, then aim it at the wickets drawn on house walls. I achieved two successes, scoring points and knocking opponents out of the game and, most important to the adults, I never missed the wall and hit a window. I would crow with glee at every hit, while my team would thump me on the back and tell me I played well, ‘for a girl’.

Yes, that was a happy summer, where Judy forgot she was a thoroughbred and became a street dog, running and playing with the multitude of mongrels that lived in the surrounding streets, and I was never scolded for appearing
dirty at suppertime. At the same time I looked forward to returning to school. Would they remember me, I wondered. Would the same girls be there? The answer was yes to both questions.

I settled in straight away, feeling a part of this school. I might not have been the most popular girl in the class, but I was accepted.

Just before my thirteenth birthday, one week after I had started the autumn term, my parents fetched me from my grandmother’s house. They had rented a prefab in Portstewart as a temporary home while they looked for a place to buy.