What Daddy Did (18 page)

By the time I started high school in the autumn of 1970, we had a home help allocated to us by the Social Work Department. Her name was Nora. Nora would come in three mornings a week and clean the house. That woman really had a job on her hands. The place was always filthy, despite my efforts. Sometimes Karen, who was only a toddler, would potter around after me with a cloth, but the boys and my Dad never lifted a finger to do any housework. No-one washed the bath out. The toilet was disgusting, the floors caked in dirt. The cooker could barely be seen for grime. Ironing was piled up in a basket behind the sofa. The fireplace was always full of ash and dog ends that my Dad would flick into it as he sat in his armchair reading the paper or watching television.

Despite having Nora around, there was still a lot for me to do. It was very hard going because my day was so long and I was still only 12. I'd get up around 6.30 in the morning to get Karen ready. I'd give her and the boys some breakfast and then I'd walk the three miles or so to Karen's nursery where I would drop her off around 8am. Then I'd walk a mile and a half to school. When school was finished, I'd walk back to the nursery to pick up Karen, then head home.

In the early days, my Dad would be at home when I got back from school and he'd give me a pound to go and get something for tea. When he started going to the pub in the afternoon and staying there for most of the day, I would have to go to the pub door and ask for him. I would then go off to Laing's, the butcher on Easter Road, and get rissoles or potted meat. If it was a Friday I'd sometimes go to the fishmonger's and get fishcakes. Once a week I went to the steamie to do the washing. After cooking tea and getting Karen into bed, it would be time to clear up, and that was pretty much my routine for every day. There was no-one there to say, 'How was your day?' or 'Do you have homework?' as I do with my little girl now. It was just work and sleep.

Even little things would take up so much energy – things like Karen's nappies. These had to be scraped, washed, steeped in bleach, rinsed, washed again, hung up to dry, taken in when it rained, put out again for a few minutes of sunshine, brought in, and then it all started again. Every part of me was in physical agony, but it came from hard work, not a belt buckle across my ribs.

The upside was that Helen never tried to come back, as far as I can recall. Maybe she contacted my Dad. I don't know – he certainly never said. I began to believe that I was safe. She
had
gone, and although my days were hard and long, I was more settled than I had ever been with her there.

And there was Karen.

I adored that little bundle of laughs and love and, as I've said before, I got something out of it too. I didn't just discover that I was able to love; I also found out that I was capable of
being
loved. The irony isn't lost on me that it took the child of my tormentor to give me something so precious. Karen's affection for me was unconditional. I was her world. I'd whisper to her, 'I'm your Mummy now, Karen,' even though she never once asked or cried for her birth mother.

MONEY WAS ALWAYS AN
issue in the house – there wasn't much of it at all. My Dad had a weekly pension from the GPO and a small army pension, but because he owned his house and still had a mortgage on it, he couldn't get any money from the 'social'. There was always a plan afoot in the house to make money, but the stack of bills behind the clock on the mantelshelf got thicker by the day. Most of them were unopened and unpaid, and it wasn't long before we had to pay for our electricity, gas and television by putting a coin into a slot. Our telephone was soon cut off, too, and food was what we could afford, mostly soup. We rarely had meat – only on high days and holidays, as my Dad would say.

My Dad found a few methods of trying to raise a bit of cash. One of the things he did – one of the things he got us all to do – was strip wire. Whoever was in and not doing anything would sit down in the living room and take the plastic covering off copper wire. This was time-consuming and unpleasant work, and by the end of it our hands would be aching and covered in tiny cuts. We would all sit on the floor and take lengths of electric wire covered in plastic. We'd cut the plastic off just enough to allow us leverage to tear it, revealing the bright copper wire within. The copper would then be rolled into balls and put aside ready for me to take down to the scrap merchant in Easter Road down by Hobs Football Club. Here it would be weighed and I'd be given cash for it.

My Dad would also get me to take rags there, and I'd get more money for wool than any other fabric. The rags were generally old clothes and blankets that we could no longer use or wear, but sometimes I would go around the doors of our neighbors pretending I was collecting for a jumble sale for the Brownies or Guides. I'd persuade people to part with their cast-offs, taking anything they 'donated'. Sometimes, I even got something one of us could wear. Helen hadn't taken her sewing machine, and this became valuable for me as I was able to alter cast-offs to fit. I'd learned to sew in school in the same way as I'd learned to cook; we were lucky that domestic science lessons were part of the curriculum back then.

It was a life based on scrimping and getting by – and my Dad's needs came before those of anyone else. He spent a lot of time in pubs – and I spent a lot of time outside them, desperately trying to catch him before he spent every last penny on booze for him and his mates. Sometimes, I'd venture inside and moan and moan at him until he relented and gave me a few bob for essentials. I hated doing it – I hated having to squeeze every last penny out of him – but it was rare for him just to give me cash voluntarily.

My Dad was also smoking a lot. Again, his fag requirements came higher than the family's need for food, clean clothes or other things. He smoked Embassy Regal by this stage – it had been Woodbine or Capstan in the past, but he had moved on to Embassy because they came with a voucher. These vouchers were meant to be saved and then, from a special company brochure, exchanged for things like household goods. That wasn't what my Dad did with them, though. Local shops were always willing to buy these vouchers, so we had a stash of them behind the clock on the mantelshelf, ready to be sold on.

Dad's drinking cost so much money, and it took him away from us as often as he could manage. When I asked him why he went to the pub so much, his reply was always the same – he needed the adult company. Dad started going drinking soon after Helen's departure. At first, it was just an occasional lunchtime pint followed by a flutter at the bookies, but soon it increased to him going in at opening time every day at 11.30am, and leaving when it closed for the afternoon around 2pm. He would say that he only went for the chat and to get out of the house, but he seemed perfectly content to sit there all day, playing dominoes, smoking and supping beer.

Whenever my Dad did come home, or when I finally managed to drag him back there, he would sit in 'his' chair by the fire and do little more than smoke, with either a can of Tennent's lager or a cup of tea by his side. My Dad's cup of tea was a ritual. It was made in an old tin teapot on the stove, with 'real' tea leaves, and would sit there all day. In his right hand would be a cigarette, and on his lap would be the
Sun
newspaper. He sat there with that paper in his lap, open either at the racing page or the crossword. His feet would be soaking in a basin of warm water and there he would sit for the rest of the day. Everything would come to him: cups of tea when he wanted; his dinner; the baby for a sit on his lap; a top-up of hot water in his basin; and us if we wanted to talk to him.

Because of his accident, my Dad wasn't very mobile, although he did manage to get to all of those sessions at the pub, and occasionally to the Hibs Club or bowling club! He was in a great deal of pain from his injuries, and on top of that he suffered from chronic bronchitis from the years of constant smoking. He coughed terribly when he got up in the morning; his breathing was laboured and he was developing a humped back due to his limited lung capacity.

My father continued his daily trips to the pub. As I got older, he increased his hours to those of the local licensing laws, going straight in at opening time, coming home for food when it closed for the afternoon, and then back again as soon as it opened at 5pm until closing time at around 10 or 11pm.

On Fridays or Saturdays, he started to bring people back after hours for more drink. They'd have a sing-song or listen to Billy Connolly on the old record player. Sometimes these would be fun times – if they were just singing and laughing, there was a good atmosphere and lots of hilarity, plus I'd get to stay up late.

But, on other nights, there was a different atmosphere. If someone fancied an argument, or if the drinking had gone too far, there was another feel to the house. I hated it. I had thought that the days of parties, music and drunk men were long gone. Now they were back, I found it hard to accept that it was my father bringing these memories into my life again, and I hated myself for thinking it would ever end.

Not only that, he'd invite them to stay. He said that it helped him out financially and helped them out as they had nowhere to go. It was always men who stayed over, some for weeks at a time and others just for a few nights here and there.

Those first few months after Helen left were confusing. I was still sleeping in the boxroom, but now I kept the door ajar and the light on all the time. I still got very scared – how could I forget all that had happened, all that had been done to me? When things got too bad, I would sneak through to the living room and try to sleep on the sofa. Even if the nightmares were too much for me, or if sleep kept itself out of my grasp, I felt better away from where the worst abuses had happened to me.

I wanted Helen to be gone permanently but I was terrified that she might return at any moment. I was given so many responsibilities but didn't really have the physical or emotional capacity to deal with all of them. This might all have been bearable if my father had been more of a man – more like the man I wanted him to be, needed him to be. Helen had gone and my Dad needed to step into the breach. Instead, I was faced with a shadow of a father – drinking, smoking, barely having enough money to keep us all together. This was not the fairy-tale hero Daddy whom I had prayed would rescue me – and it wouldn't be long before I discovered, to my cost, just how useless he was at keeping me safe.