The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (6 page)

CHAPTER 3

All on Our Own

With dad coming and going whenever he felt like it, it soon became very clear that if we were going to survive we would have to look after ourselves. Occasionally, he would turn up and, when he did, he would leave us some food, but it was never enough and after a few hours, it would be all gone. And when dad was home, he was nearly always drunk and he would just sleep until he was sober enough to go back to the pub again; and while he was drunk, he never once thought about us for one second.

I remember one day he came home with a dead rabbit, it must have been road kill or something as it was almost flat and it looked a mess. He walked into the kitchen with it and he chucked the rabbit onto the table, and with one swift swing of his arm he picked up a large kitchen knife and chopped the rabbit’s head off and then its feet, and then he pulled at its fur and skin with his hands until it all came off the rabbit’s body. We all stood around and looked at him as he put the rabbit and its feet into a pot of water and then he began to make dinner for us all; but as the pot began to warm up, the rabbit began to stink and the kitchen quickly filled with a nasty smell.

When the rabbit was finally cooked, dad put the whole pot onto the kitchen table and he sat down and ate most of the rabbit himself, while we all stood around him and watched. And when he had finished and his belly was full, he pushed the pot into the middle of the table and left all of us to fight over the scraps, but he had only left a few bones and what looked like the skin for us kids to suck and chew on. And he began to laugh at us as he left the kitchen, and as he walked away he said that we were all little beggars and he told us to fuck off out of his sight.

I grabbed the pot and I ran out of the house with it, but I had forgotten all about the step outside the front door and, as I ran outside, I fell. The pot flew out of my hands and then it hit the ground and rolled over, tipping what was left of the rabbit onto the ground; and within a second, the dog ran over and savaged the remains of the rabbit. I was so unhappy and hungry, I got up and walked back into the house and towards dad, but he just looked straight through me like it didn’t matter that I was starving. Then he walked off back to the pub, with the dog following behind him, both with stomachs full from the rabbit they had just eaten, and I stood hungry and sad in the middle of the garden, watching them as they walked away happy and content with themselves.

At the end of each day, I would try to have a wash, but dad never had a boiler in the house, he only had a wood-burning stove to heat the water and it was never lit, so the water was always cold. We never had soap to wash with and I never once saw a towel in the house, so I always smelt bad, my skin was always dirty and my clothes were never washed. I was only five years old, and after playing outside all day, I would be filthy, but no one cared; and at the end of each day, I would climb into my bed covered in dirt and I would have to make the best of a bad situation.

But with four of us girls all sleeping in one bed, it meant that almost every night one of us would wet the bed and we would all have to lie on the wet sheets until morning. Then, when we all got up, we would leave the bed covers pulled back so the sheets could dry out on their own during the day, then in the evening we would climb back into a dry bed again. However, most evenings when I got back into bed, the smell from the sheets was so bad that I would gag and choke for the first few minutes until I got used to the smell again, and I would get dizzy from the fumes off the sheets, but eventually I would fall asleep. I slept in the bed for months until the smell got so bad that I couldn’t sleep or even stay in the bedroom without coughing or choking, so I decided to change the sheets myself; but we never had any, so I went out and I stole some from other people’s washing lines.

Over the next few months, our situation went from bad to worse and I never heard a thing about mum, our aunty hardly ever came around to see if we were ok and we soon realised that we had to look after ourselves if we were going to survive, as no one else was going to do anything for us. We knew that our dad loved us, but that was about as far as he would commit himself to us; he would never look after us and he used any money he had to drink himself stupid, down at the pub every day. I found it very difficult adjusting to my new life in Ireland and it just became harder and harder for me every day and because we had very little food to eat, if any at all, I began to lose weight fast. My older brothers and sisters could see the state that I was in, so they began to take me out with them each day and they explained to me that I could get potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables from the fields if I used my hands to dig for them.

And while we were in one of the fields and they showed me how to dig into the earth, I had a go and I managed to dig up some carrots, but we couldn’t cook them so they told me to eat them raw. I shock the carrots and rubbed the dirt from them with my hands and then I put a carrot into my mouth and I dug my teeth into it, but I couldn’t chew it. The carrot was so hard that my teeth became stuck and everyone laughed at me, and I had to pull on the carrot to get it out of my mouth and I thought my teeth were going to come out with it. I was hungry and felt like crying, so one of my bigger brothers took the carrot from me and he put the carrot into his mouth and he began to chew the carrot for me and then he spat the bits out into one of his hands and he gave the bits to me to eat.

He said that my teeth were baby teeth and I was too small and weak to chew the food, and everyone thought it was funny, including me. The farmers knew what we were doing in the fields, but they never stopped us and the only time we got shouted at or chased by them was when we ran past the small farmers’ shops in the village and we took an apple or a turnip to eat from outside the front of the shops. We would grab at anything and then run off into the fields with it and hide until we had finished eating what we had stolen.

Most mornings before I left the house, my brother Ted would grab Daisy, Simon and me, because we were the smallest and the easiest of the kids to pick on, and he would make us all stand in line in front of him while he gave us our orders for the day. One of my jobs was to pick up all the fag butts and all the round pebbles that I could find along the roads around the village. The fag butts were for him and my older brothers to make their own fags with and the pebbles were for him to use in his slingshot. He told me that the pebbles had to be perfectly round to do the most damage and if I didn’t get it right, he would shoot me with the pebbles that would not work well for him, so I had to get it right or I would be in trouble.

I had to do this for him every morning; even when it was cold and raining, he still sent me out and I had to walk along the road looking down on the surface for pebbles and fags. But after a while, my back would ache from bending over and I would feel sad for most of the time, but I had no choice, as it was my job. Then, when I had finished, I would hand Ted the pebbles and he would go out and use them around the village, doing as much damage as he possibly could, by breaking windows and anything else that caught his eye.

Most days, I would just walk around for a while and then I would go back to the house to see what was going on or to see if dad had come home, and I would hide in the garden until Ted went off, and only then would I feel happy knowing that Ted was not around to bother me. And most of the time, Ted would be out for hours, just walking around, breaking things; but then sometimes he would get on the horse Rose and ride her bareback through the village, as fast as he possibly could, and he would only be holding on to the chain around her neck to steady himself. He would ride along, smashing as many windows as he possibly could with his slingshot and not stopping until he got back to our house.

Then, a couple of hours later, people would turn up at the house looking for our dad, to complain about Ted riding the horse through the village like a madman, and about him smashing all the windows and street lights as he had done so. But dad was never at home and we would tell the people that if they really wanted to find our dad, then they should go down to the pub and ask for him there, but they never did. Next to come along knocking on the door and looking for Ted would be the police, but Ted would just give them even more things to complain about, as he laughed and shouted at them, calling them all kinds of names and telling them to fuck off as he hung out of the upstairs windows. However, they would never go into the house to get him as he always threatened to climb out of the window and onto the roof if they put a foot through the front door.

Almost every time we went out, we would cause some kind of trouble for ourselves; it wasn’t because we were bad children, but because there was so many of us that something just had to happen. I remember one morning a woman came to the house and she asked to see our dad, but as usual he wasn’t in and no one had seen him for about a week. So, we told the woman that he was out at work and that he would be back after five o’clock and we told her to come back then.

And she did, but he still wasn’t back, so we kept the front door locked shut and we all kept very quiet, hoping that she would go away and leave us alone. But she didn’t leave and she just kept knocking on the door; so eventually, Ted opened the front door and he went outside. He told the woman that he was our dad and then he asked her what she wanted; he was only thirteen and straightaway she told him that she wasn’t stupid and that we had all better go to school or she would be back with more people who would make us go to school, and then she left. Ted came back into the house and he said that she was a bitch and that he had told her that he was our dad; and he said that he had told her to fuck off and she did and that was the end of it.

Ted then said that he was now the boss of the house, he was going to be our dad from now on and he was going to look after us. We all looked at him and then we all fell about laughing and I said that if he was now our dad, then he would help us; and because we were all starving hungry and we had no food in the house to eat, then he needed to get some for us. Ted looked at us all and then he said, ‘Ok, go sit down in the kitchen and I will be back in a couple of minutes with some food for you all to eat’; so we all went into the kitchen and we sat at the table and waited for him to come back.

And within a couple of minutes, he was back holding a frying pan with what looked like a long sausage sitting in the middle of it. He then put the pan onto the stove and began to strike some matches and within a couple of minutes he had the stove lit and we all sat patiently waiting for the food to cook. But within a couple of seconds of the heat reaching the frying pan, the sausage began to smoke crackle and stink all at the same time, and we all began to choke as the kitchen filled with thick smoke. The smell was so strong that I turned around to ask him what it was that he was cooking, but he had gone red in the face from the smell and smoke and he was choking too.

Then the smell got so bad that we all had to run out of the house and Ted ran out behind us, and he was chasing after us with the frying pan and he was shouting that we had to come back and eat our dinner. But the smell was so strong that even the outside of the house stunk, and thick brown smoke was still coming out of the sausage. ‘No’, I shouted, ‘it’s disgusting. What is it?’ ‘It’s a shit’, said Ted. ‘I done it’, he said; then he shouted that it went in one end and it came out of the other, so it must still be good for you to eat. Suddenly, he coughed again and he began to choke, so he stopped running and he slung the lot into the air and we all ran out of the gate screaming as he ran after us, shouting and laughing that we had to come back and eat our dinner. But I shouted, ‘Eat it yourself, we’re not hungry anymore’ and we just kept screaming and running as Ted fell to his knees choking.

We all stayed out for the rest of the day and we sat amongst some tall grass in a field, hoping that Ted would not be able to find us and make us eat the shit. But after a while, it began to get dark so we decided to head back to the house; we all got up and Daisy, Simon and myself slowly walked home, still laughing about what had happened earlier in the day, and hoping that the smell would be gone by the time we got back. No one was around when we returned to the house, so we went straight inside and off to bed; the last thing we wanted was to see Ted when he got back and it worked and we were left alone for the rest of the night.

However, the next morning, when the three of us kids got up and went downstairs, Ted was waiting for us in the living room and he told us that we couldn’t go outside until he did something. And then he made us stand in a straight line in front of him and he told us to hold out our hands as he took a big flat stick out of his trousers, and within a second he began to slap our hands with the stick. But before he could finish hitting us, dad walked in through the front door and he saw what he was doing. And without making a sound, he walked up behind Ted, leant over and gave him a huge slap around the head and told him to fuck off outside before he gave him a whipping around the head with his belt. Ted lifted his hands up to protect his head from dad and then he shouted at dad, telling him that we had no food and that he was hungry, then Ted ran like hell out of the house and as far away from dad as possible.

But Ted was right, we had no food in the house and we were all starving with the hunger. Dad looked down at us and then he said that he was going to get some food for us. But once dad left the house, we never saw him again that day and he never came back for a week. Ted did eventually come back and he decided that he had to do something fast or we would all die from starvation, so he gathered us all up and he told us all to go out and to do our best to find something to eat. We all walked off in different directions, hoping to find food; and within a couple of hours Daisy, Simon and myself had managed to find some apples and potatoes in a field, so we gathered them up and we headed back home, feeling very happy with ourselves.