I Did Tell, I Did (2 page)

I loved Tom and looked up to him, and used to hang around him trying to copy whatever he did. In my little girl’s head, I reasoned that if I did what he was doing, surely Mum wouldn’t have any reason to be nasty to me? She was never nasty to him. But sadly it didn’t work that way, and I couldn’t understand why. What was I doing wrong?

Most little girls have hugs and love, are told they are princesses and that they are treasured. All the love they need, they are given by the person whose love they should have by rights—their mother’s. But I knew from an early age that my mother never wanted me and, consequently, never loved me. I didn’t feel anyone loved me—whatever love meant.

One of the earliest memories I have is of some huge stone steps in front of an official-looking building. I must have been three or four at the time. Years later I realised that these stone
steps led up to the Guildhall, the home to what was then called the Welfare department, and is now Social Services. We climbed these steps and went in. Mum talked to the receptionist first, then a lady in a tweed suit came out, holding a booklet in her hand.

‘Here’s the child,’ Mum said. ‘She’s all yours. I don’t want her so it’s up to you lot to take care of her.’

I looked around. Did she mean me? There was no other child in sight.

‘We can’t take a child just like that. That’s not how it works,’ the lady said, sounding very surprised.

Take me where? No one had said I was going anywhere. What did she mean?

Mum suddenly turned and hurried off down the steps, leaving me behind. ‘I’m not having her back,’ she shouted. ‘I’ve brought her here to you and it’s your job to take her off my hands.’

I stood in shock and confusion, my face burning bright red. The woman in the tweed suit kept arguing with Mum and I stared at the ground. Life was already scary for me at home because I knew Mum hated me, but she was the only mother I had, the only little bit of security. What would happen to me if I were left with the lady in the tweed suit? Would
she
look after me then? There was a loud rushing sound in my ears so I didn’t hear everything that was said, but eventually Mum must have caved in.

She charged back up the steps, grabbed me by the arm and yanked me towards her. That’s when I started crying, because
she really hurt my arm. It felt as though she was nearly pulling it out of its socket.

‘I’ll be back!’ Mum yelled over her shoulder. ‘Either that or I’ll find some other way. I don’t want her!’

All the way home, she berated me. ‘You’re nothing but a nuisance, always getting under my feet. What did I do to deserve the trouble you bring?’

When we got home I was sent to my room. Tom and my sisters were out at school and I couldn’t wait for them to return because I felt so lonely. Why didn’t Mum want me? I was her little girl. Was this normal? Did other mothers not want their children as well? How could a real mother say that to her daughter?

From my storybooks, I’d heard about wicked stepmothers, and I began to fantasise that maybe Mum wasn’t my real mother. Maybe my real mum was out there somewhere and one day she would turn up and take me away to live with her. She would love me and be nice to me and not shout at me the whole time. She would certainly never call me Plain Jane and tell me that I’d ruined her life.

There were some people in my young life who were kind to me. My two nans—Dad’s mum, who I called Nana B, and Mum’s mum, Nana C—were both nice people. We saw Nana C every weekend, Nana B less frequently. I got the impression that there had been some kind of falling out between Mum and Nana B, because Mum was always very curt with her, but she was good to me when we saw her.

Nana B broke her leg when I was about three and Mum and I had to go out collecting rent for her round some houses that
she owned. Mum was good at it because she was so fierce. I remember some people telling her that they didn’t have the money and Mum crossed her arms and told them she would stand there all day until they gave it to her. I tried to hide behind her, upset and embarrassed that she was being rude to strangers, but she was in her element.

Nana C was a tiny lady, quite frail, but she was very kind and gentle with me when Mum wasn’t looking. She told me about the dreams she had had when she was a little girl—dreams that unfortunately were never fulfilled. She’d always wanted to be a dancer, but after her mum died when she was very young she was put in a workhouse along with her sisters and two little brothers and the dancing dream came to an end. As soon as she was old enough to get a job, albeit a menial one, she took it to save enough money to get her brothers out of the workhouse. She continued to work until she met and married my granddad, so she never did get the chance to be a dancer. She told me that whatever happened I had to make sure I followed my own dreams so I would be happy.

Happy? What was that? I had no idea what she meant.

I think Nana C knew that Mum shouted at me a lot because she witnessed it on plenty of occasions, but she was always careful not to be too friendly to me when Mum was watching. It was as if she was scared of her own daughter.

Dad was the same. He was always lovely if I went out to visit him in his shed, where we’d have little chats on our own, but in front of Mum he would never dare stand up for me. He never
stood up for himself either. No one stood up to Mum. It just wasn’t worth it.

The other person who was nice to me was my godfather, a man I knew as Uncle Bill, although he wasn’t a real uncle. He was always round the house in my younger years, before I went to school, and he’d make a huge fuss of me. Bill was tall, with jet black hair and twinkly eyes, and every time he came round he’d stop to give me a hug and tell me how much he loved me.

‘How’s my special girl today?’ he’d ask, and I’d beam with pleasure. ‘You’ve got such pretty hair, Cassie. What are you playing at today?’

He’d pull me onto his lap for a cuddle and I’d giggle in anticipation, knowing that his cuddles usually turned to tickles before long.

When Uncle Bill came to visit Mum at the house, I was often sent out into the garden to play for a while because they said they had grown-up business to discuss, but after they’d finished, Bill sometimes took me out. We’d have picnics together in the park, or he’d take me for a drive on his motorbike. He and Dad were both motorbike enthusiasts and our families would all meet up at rallies. Bill was married to a woman called Gwen, who was always nice to me when I saw her although I don’t think she and Mum got on. I can’t remember Gwen coming to the rallies very often, but when she did she would usually stand with my dad, or with her four sons, who were just a bit older than me.

One time Bill and I won a competition at a rally, where he was riding on his bike and I was sitting on the petrol tank
holding an egg and spoon. It was the first thing I had ever won in my life and I was over the moon about it. The judges gave Uncle Bill a silver cup that gleamed in the sunshine and he handed it to me.

‘I’ve got lots of cups at home, Cassie,’ he smiled. ‘You keep this one.’

It was quite heavy and I could hardly hold it, but I was so ecstatic to have this little bit of treasure that I struggled to keep it in my grasp. Then Mum saw it.

‘Give that back straight away,’ she hissed. ‘You’re not bringing that home. It’s Bill’s cup, not yours. You don’t deserve it.’

And so I had no choice but to hand it over to Uncle Bill, all the while struggling to hold back my tears.

Every child needs to feel special to someone, and I knew I was special to Uncle Bill. He’s the only person who ever hugged me as a child, or who told me that he loved me. He brought me presents—little things like new socks, my favourite sweetie cigarettes or a tiny bar of chocolate—and he took an interest in me. He kept telling me how clever I was, and what a great dancer, and he was always asking me to walk across the room on tippy-toes for him, or he’d put the radio on and ask me to do a little dance.

He was
my
godfather,
my
special uncle, and he paid attention to me rather than Tom or Ellen or Rosie. I felt proud when we rode off down the road on his bike with me balanced on the petrol tank. Proud that at least I had someone who cared about me, someone whose life I hadn’t ruined by being born.

W
hen I was about four years old Ellen and Rosie went off to board in a Sunshine School. These were special schools for children who had suffered physical or emotional trauma during the war, and I assume they were sent there because of the trauma they’d experienced when Mum’s house had been bombed. It was in a large naval port and had been hit twice, the second hit completely destroying it.

Although the age difference was too great for us to have been close, I really missed my sisters once they were gone. It was just Tom and me left in the house with Mum: Tom the favourite, and me the unloved, unwanted child. Dad came home from work late, and once Tom started school it was just Mum and me in the house during the day, and she hated that with a passion. It seemed I was always under her feet, no matter how hard I tried not to annoy her.

Every morning Mum used to make me sit and brush my hair a hundred times on each side. Of course, I couldn’t count to a
hundred in those days but I knew it was a big number and that I had to keep on brushing for ages until she said I could stop. One morning Mum had gone into the back garden and I could hear her chatting over the fence to Mrs Rogers, our neighbour. I sat in front of the electric bar heater, brushing and brushing, trying to make my hair gleam in the hope that Mum would be pleased with me.

Suddenly I heard a crackling noise and when I looked up into the mirror I saw flames shooting out from the side of my head. I rushed out into the garden screaming as loud as I could, ‘Mum! Help!’

The flames flared up into a big bright mass as I reached the two women. Mrs Rogers had been hanging out her laundry and she quickly grabbed a wet towel from her basket and threw it over my head, putting the fire out. There was a sizzling noise and a strong smell of burning.

When Mum pulled the towel off, I was horrified to see that huge clumps of my hair were still in it, having come away from my scalp.

‘You
stupid
girl!’ Mum yelled, smacking me hard across the back of the head. ‘You were sitting too close to the heater, weren’t you?’ She slapped my face. ‘Look what you’ve done.’ Mrs Rogers was more sympathetic. ‘Poor thing, you must have got such a fright.’

‘Fright? I’ll give her a fright!’ Mum commented before saying to me, ‘Get back inside and I’ll deal with you in a minute.’ She turned to our neighbour again. ‘She’s the blight of my life, that one. You’ve got no idea what I have to put up with from her.’

Back inside, she sat me on the tall kitchen stool and started roughly chopping the rest of my hair off with a big pair of scissors. I cried quietly to myself as she yanked my head to one side then the other, muttering the whole time: ‘Stupid girl. Can’t even be trusted to brush her own hair without causing trouble.’

Fortunately the flames hadn’t burned my scalp, but my hair was so badly singed that Mum had to crop it close all over and I looked like a boy when she’d finished. When I peered in the mirror, I didn’t recognise myself at first, and I was sad because Uncle Bill always told me I had such lovely hair. He wouldn’t be saying that now. I was definitely Plain Jane.

Dad seemed really shocked when he got home. ‘Did you need to cut it back so far, Kath?’ he asked sadly.

‘You didn’t see the state of her!’ Mum cried. ‘She could have had the whole house up in flames.’

He backed down straight away. It was never worth his while getting into conflict with her because he couldn’t win no matter what he said. Once, only once, do I remember Dad criticising Mum for the way she treated me.

‘She’s just a child,’ he said. ‘Why are you always picking on her?’

Mum was so shocked at this intervention that she was speechless for a minute, then she started screaming: ‘How can you speak to me like that? You’ve got no idea what I have to put up with from her. You’re out at work all day so you don’t see the way she’s always under my feet, always being a nuisance, constantly getting on my nerves. I turn round and
there she is, in the way again. If I speak harshly to her sometimes, I’m only doing it for her own good. She needs to learn.’

Dad opened his mouth to speak up in my defence again, when Mum suddenly collapsed dramatically on the floor with a crash.

‘Kath, Kath my sweet, talk to me! Can you hear me?’ Dad knelt down beside her but she remained still, her eyes closed.

I was overcome with guilt. It was my fault she had collapsed, because I was such a nuisance. I tried not to be, but somehow I couldn’t help it. What if she died? It would be all because of me and I would go to Hell, which I had learned about at Sunday school.

‘Help me get her to the bedroom, Cassie,’ Dad said. ‘You take her feet.’

Between us we managed to carry her through and lay her on the bed, and she began to murmur incoherently.

‘I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean it,’ Dad said. ‘It was wrong of me to question your judgement. Of course you know best when it comes to the children.’

I was crying by this stage, petrified about what I had done. ‘I’m sorry I made you ill, Mum. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m really, really sorry.’

She opened her eyes and pulled herself up in the bed a little bit, and I could swear she was half-smiling, as if pleased with herself. ‘Could you get me a cup of tea, love?’ she asked Dad in a weak voice, and he scurried off to obey. She looked at me coldly. ‘That’ll teach you,’ she remarked. ‘Now get out of my sight, and stay out.’

Another time when I had upset Mum and Dad dared to speak up in my defence, she actually disappeared and was missing for hours. Dad and I walked the streets, me in tears, asking everyone we met if they had seen her but no one had. Eventually we went home when it got dark and I was terrified that she had left us for good. She may not have loved me or been kind to me but she was the only mother I had and I needed her. Who else would look after me? After all, I was unlovable, wasn’t I?