I Won't Forgive What You Did (2 page)

My brother survived, but the circumstances of my arrival were further complicated when my father was dismissed from his job as a farmhand. This was because it emerged that he’d been having an affair with the farmer’s teenage daughter. As the family’s house went with the job, they’d lose that as well, and when I was born they were about to become homeless.

He did eventually find another job that came with accommodation, working as a lorry driver for a haulier, ferrying farm animals – sheep, pigs and cattle – to market and to slaughter, with a little furniture removal on the side. The accommodation that came with this new job was in a tiny village close to where my father had grown up. It was rented by his employer, along with some land for his lorries, from a local aristocrat.

The village had about forty houses, two shops, a pub, three farms and a telephone box. It consisted of one through road, about two miles long, which could be accessed from the busy country roads at either end. Nobody ever came there. Why would they? Apart from the pub, which was really only for the locals, there was no reason to. Its inhabitants were either wealthy, and treated with awe by the locals, or old country folk, some of whom were dirty old men, who scared me, and who were employed by the farmers and upper-class people.

Like any other isolated rural community, everyone – superficially – knew everyone else’s business. Enough, at least, for everyone to know we were poor and treat us accordingly. This sometimes meant a freshly baked roll for my siblings when they were on errands, or, more often, it seemed to mean that because we were poor we were unable to understand how to behave and had to be spoken to in a particular way. The villagers were kind to me, almost too kind, in some cases – to the point of leaving me feeling humiliated. It often felt as if they were patting me on the head and saying ‘there, there’, almost as if I belonged to a different species.

Most of the village homes were huge private houses with massive gardens, and their owners were rich and influential. We had a solicitor, a magistrate and a successful author, among others. Most of the other dwellings were tied cottages belonging to the big houses and farms.

Our new home was one such, a tiny mid-terrace dwelling, almost derelict and virtually uninhabitable. It had two small rooms upstairs and two small rooms downstairs, and no electricity, heating, hot water or bathroom. The narrow, unkempt garden sloped downwards towards a river, and the toilet was in a shed halfway down. There was a tin bath my mother occasionally carried into the house and filled, so we could all take turns to have a bath. By the time the youngest got in it was invariably cold and dirty, and there it would stay until my mother could be bothered to move it, which was usually hours, or even days, later. The house was filthy when we moved in and grew even filthier, and was also damp and very dark. The only real source of light was the picture window at the front, where I could watch the horses and hounds go through the village. It was the only home I knew in my young life and it was an unpleasant prospect. Aside from the physical manifestations of squalor, my home, whenever my father was in it, was a place I inhabited in fear.

My father was a terrifying person. A giant of a man, well over six feet tall, he had masses of wavy dark hair, a long face with a pointed nose, and both his hands and feet were enormous. He seemed to always wear the same clothes, a blue or green cardigan, checked shirt, navy trousers and brown shoes. He worked seven days a week, and from a very early age I felt enormous anxiety and fear when he was due home. Where I didn’t understand why Grandpops made me so uncomfortable and distressed, with my father it was simple. I was terrified of him because he was a terrifying man, and I dreaded his arrival, all his shouting and swearing, the unthinkable prospect of upsetting him without meaning to, and so becoming the focus of his furious temper. My father frightened everyone who knew him, man, woman or child. Even Grandpops mostly avoided him.

Throughout my childhood, when he took off his shoes straw and hay would fall from his socks and trouser turn-ups. He always smelled of farmyard dung, and he’d doze in front of the fire with his feet on the mantelpiece – the steam rising from his wet socks smelled dreadful. He sat so close to the fire he gobbled up every last bit of heat, leaving just the sofa behind him, which is where I would sit, cold, and too afraid to make a noise in case I woke him up.

He also seemed to hate my attempts to clear up, which, as I grew old enough to try to make my environment nicer, was something I did all the time.

‘Fucking little bastard,’ he’d say to my mother. ‘She’s been fucking tidying up again, where’s she put my fucking stuff? Fucking tidying, the fucking little bitch,’ he would roar. ‘Why can’t she just fucking leave things alone!’

I was so terrified of him that, by the time I was eight, I realised the best thing to do when he threatened, called me names, raised his hands as if to wallop me, saying, ‘Aah, I’ll give you a fucking doughboy in a minute!’ was to stand stock still and say absolutely nothing.

I took care, once I’d grown a bit, to never be undressed anywhere near him. If I was ever less than fully dressed – even if I was in a dressing gown – he’d shout and swear and demand I get dressed at once. As a child, I had no idea why he was like this. All I knew was that if he came into a room and I wasn’t fully dressed, his reaction made me feel as if I’d done something terrible, and something equally terrible was about to happen, if I didn’t immediately get out of his way.

My mother’s physical form was the opposite of my dad’s. She was short, and very tiny sometimes – a modern-day size 8 – but sometimes as large as an 18. She was always on diets, and either bingeing or starving, and knew the calories in every single foodstuff. She had very long, dark, wavy hair, and long fingernails, and seemed to exist in a parallel world, one that was impossible to penetrate. In the real world, at home, she seemed an almost ethereal presence, and as a consequence we lived in chaos. Every room was filthy and full of junk. The floors and the furniture were littered with dirty clothes, dirty nappies, dirty baby bottles and dirty crockery, and strewn with broken toys and rotting food.

In terms of squalor, it wasn’t a lot different from Grandpops’s house, where my mother had lived before marrying my father. She’d lived there all her life, a few miles from the village where we now were, and her family were real country folk – very poor – who were generally suspicious of outsiders.

She was the youngest of three; she had two older brothers whom she idolized and had always been close to. Both her brothers and her mother (my maternal grandmother, who suffered from chronic depression and who Pops treated appallingly) knew full well Pops sexually abused her. Today it’s clear that whatever the roots of her strange behaviour, her brothers knew her escape from their father was vital and when she met my father, and marriage was on the cards, they couldn’t get her out of the house quick enough. It would soon prove to be a case of frying pans and fires, but when, despite Pops’ objections, they wed and she moved in with my father’s mother and her husband, her brothers felt deeply relieved.

My parents didn’t stay long with my paternal grandmother however, only until my father completed his national service. His work soon took them both to a tiny hamlet where my mother now lived a life of virtual isolation. She had two tiny children and a third on the way but was cut off, both physically and emotionally. She was no longer sexually abused by her father, but still abused, albeit differently, by her new husband.

By the time I was born, though I obviously didn’t know it, my mother was suffering from anxiety and post-natal depression and seemed unable to function domestically. Though at this time she still sometimes dressed smartly and wore make-up, she was remote and unreachable and seemed to live in her own world.

More often than not, and particularly towards me, her ‘attention’ consisted of being cruel. One of my earliest memories is of the way she’d taunt me whenever the ‘scissor man’ was due to come. The ‘scissor man’ was a travelling knife grinder, who’d visit people’s houses to sharpen knives and scissors.

‘He’s coming,’ she’d tell me, ‘to cut off your tongue. To cut off your tongue with his knife!’

She’d go on to expand on and intensify her attack, her descriptions becoming more and more lurid.

‘He’ll put his knife in your mouth,’ she’d say ‘And slice right through your tongue, and it’ll fall to the floor, and you’ll never be able to speak again.’

She’d laugh then. ‘He’ll be here soon,’ she’d warn, as I cringed in fear. Then she’d look out of the window. ‘Is that him I can see coming?’ Then she’d laugh a bit more. ‘Unless,’ she’d add, ‘he’s been held up on the way, cutting out another little girl’s tongue.’

I’d be so frightened by now that I could hardly breathe. I’d run and hide, terrified I’d be sick on the floor or wet myself, and bring even more unspeakable horrors down on me. The eventual knock on the door would send me frantic, feeling trapped and defenceless and unable to think straight.

And that was the point at which she’d really laugh hard, throwing her head back in mirth and then watching my expression.

‘Here he is!’ she’d say, as she opened the door. ‘Here he is to cut off your tongue!’

Then, as I hid behind the sofa, she’d tell the scissor man all the things she’d told me about his purpose in coming to our house. And when she passed him the knives she’d be laughing even harder. ‘Which knife do you want to use?’ she’d ask gleefully. ‘Do you want the bigger knife, here, or the smaller, sharper one?’

My mother only ever really laughed for two reasons. When she was being disgusting – talking about wee or poo or ‘blowing off, for instance – or, as with the scissor man, when she was being cruel.

But my mother wasn’t just cruel on the spur of the moment; she often seemed to want to be cruel. And the most devastating cruelty she inflicted when I was small was one that would stay with me for decades. She told me that because I’d been born on a Wednesday, I was therefore a ‘Wednesday’s child’, and full of woe.

Just as I believed the scissor man would cut off my tongue, I absolutely truly believed this. Being born full of woe, she kept repeating, was my lot. It was used as the explanation for all of my feelings and, as a consequence, whatever feelings I had were dismissed, be they my terror of the scissor man or my fear of my father or the distress and revulsion I couldn’t articulate or understand every time Grandpops tickled me. After all, went the reasoning, those feelings wouldn’t have existed had I not been born on the wrong day.

For an adult who’s been brought up in an atmosphere of love and care, it’s obviously easy to realize such silly labelling cannot possibly matter. For me, though, as a small terrified child –
and
as an adult – it impacted on all areas of my life. I was so conditioned to believe it was a part of who I was, that it became an integral part of my being.

I hated being a Wednesday’s child. I used to cry and plead with my mother for me not to be a Wednesday’s child. Not to have this terrible burden to carry. To be a different child, a better one. A Monday’s child, maybe – fair of face. I liked that. Or a Friday’s child perhaps. If I was loving and giving like a Friday’s child, then maybe my mother would love me better. I’d happily have been
any
child other than the one I’d been born. But no, I was born on a Wednesday and was woeful, and as a consequence it seemed I could never please her. I tried so hard, but it never seemed to work, and she always called me ‘stupid, silly Faith’. Indeed, the only time she didn’t seem indifferent to my presence was when she was telling people how stupid and silly I was. Naturally, I soon learned to play along and act in role when required. Anything was better than what I mostly had – her total indifference.

She used to remind me of my woeful status throughout my childhood; not only that I’d been born a woeful Wednesday’s child, but also, wittingly or unwittingly (I didn’t know which), that I was the only Wednesday’s child in the whole world.

Not that the day of my birth mattered really. I had plenty to feel woeful about, whatever day of the week I’d been born, as I was about to find out.

By the time I was four I was no longer the youngest, my mother having now produced two further children: my sister Karen – eighteen months my junior – followed by my younger brother Jack, who was now six months old. My older sister was at school, but that still left four of us at home, under five, and our house was in constant chaos.

Though externally we might have seemed like any other family, behind closed doors we were not. There was always muddle. All the rooms had dirty clothes on the floor and strewn on the furniture. There was washing on the kitchen floor and outside in the yard. My mother would sometimes throw things behind the sofa, so there seemed less of a mess before my father came home, but there was little she could do about the smell, even if she noticed – and there wasn’t any evidence that she did. Mouldering food was left on crockery, next to soiled cotton nappies, which lay wherever she last changed a baby. These smelled horrible, as did all the dirty baby bottles, which had thick films of white lining their insides, where she’d added cereal to stop the babies crying.

My mother told me babies only cried for two reasons – because they needed feeding or changing. The trouble was that these two things were under her control, and she’d only attend to them when
she
decided. Most of the time, my siblings’ cries went unheeded, bar her remarking they were being ‘bloody little sods’.