I Won't Forgive What You Did (5 page)

But in some ways, looking back, it wasn’t such a bad thing. There was one girl, Anne, to whom I’ll always be grateful, who, alone among her friends, invited me to her party, all through primary school. This once-a-year event was both a pleasure and a torture, so much so that sometimes I was sick and couldn’t go. I was socially inept, paralysed by anxiety, and so overwhelmed by being in a home so unlike mine, that seeing their laughter and friendliness actually made me want to cry. Looking back, I was a wreck; so distressed and sad, always just sitting, watching, unable to join in. I wonder now if anyone noticed my distress, or did I just about pull it off? I’ll never know.

What I did know was the shadow that hung over being invited to Anne’s birthday parties was that I’d never be able to reciprocate and invite her to mine. No one was welcome in our house.

No one, that was, except more babies. Since starting school, and feeling so alone, I’d become particularly sensitive to my mother’s disappearances. When she went away for long periods, I became desperate – walking from room to room, looking for her, as if she would miraculously appear if I looked for long enough. I couldn’t understand where she was when she went away, because she used to just disappear without explanation. I’d go to sleep, or to school, and she’d be there, and then I’d wake, or come home, and she’d be gone. I’d then spend long periods, day and night (I couldn’t sleep), sitting in my bed with my back against the wall, just staring, completely still and silent.

The thought of being in the house with just my father was unbearable, even with an aunt coming to look after us while he was at work. And though my mother not being there meant a brief respite from Grandpops, I would rather have endured that than not see her. When home from school, I counted every minute my mother was away and every minute felt like an hour, but when she eventually returned, generally with lots of commotion, she didn’t acknowledge me in any way.

A few months after I started school, and my mother returned from yet another disappearance, she was brought in on a stretcher by some ambulance men. By now I’d come to realize that her longer disappearances often ended with her bringing home a baby. She had one with her now, and she was laughing and joking with the men who were carrying the stretcher. I watched them come in, and all I could think of was how much I hated the baby, for stealing her away from me. Adam was born just after my fifth birthday, two years after my brother Jack. My mother’s sixth pregnancy had been particularly awful, and when my new brother came along, it was clear he had suffered as well. He was born physically damaged, with one badly deformed leg, which apparently would never, ever grow.

My mother talked more about Adam’s disability than I’d ever known her talk about anything. It was almost as if it made her feel important, and she’d sit him in his huge pram in the centre of the living room as if he was a circus attraction. He was all at once the centre of attention and even more neglected than the rest of us. Though on permanent display, strapped in, immobile, he was, for most of the time, ignored by her. He would put his hand in his nappy and eat his own poo, and laugh, and I couldn’t understand why he’d do that. Was it because he was hungry or because he was bored? And why did my mother always laugh when he did it and then just leave him and his pram smeared in poo?

She always referred to him as ‘Adam who is crippled’, and seemed to have decided because of his physical disability he’d never be able to achieve anything. She’d laugh at him as if he had something wrong with his brain too, even though nobody knew that. Once Adam was born the rest of us got even less attention than before. In order to get some, I’d make it my business to deal with his endless dirty nappies. I hated doing it all the time, but it was better than doing nothing; at least it made me feel I was useful.

My mother would never let me help her with Adam in any other way, and secretly I was relieved. Deep down, I didn’t like him and wished him dead. I was frightened of him and only too happy to leave her to it; because nothing had ever been explained about what was wrong with him, I was terrified to touch him, because I thought I might catch whatever it was he had, and end up a spectacle, like he was. Even so, there was a part of me that envied him, because though the ‘attention’ she gave him was mostly talking about him to other people and laughing, it was attention even so, and I craved it. It didn’t help that every day I was made to go to school. I was sure she’d soon forget me altogether.

My father, of course, was completely uninterested in Adam, just the same as he was about the rest of us. My nan, however, was incensed.

‘Breeding like rabbits, the pair of you!’ I remember her shouting at my mother one day. ‘Couldn’t stop, could you? Not until you’d brought a cripple into the family!’

Though she did have a point about that, she was wrong. My mother, my father, Grandpops, Daniel. Did I but know it, we were a crippled family already.

Not that anyone in the outside world knew. As well as my father’s policy on visitors – no one was entertained by him willingly,
ever –
my mother, I realized, was as good at pretending to be a model mother and homemaker as she was bad at both activities behind closed doors.

Periodically, she’d take her growing brood out, and it was very stressful. Going out meant looking and acting our very best, so that everyone my mother knew could see how well she was doing. And my mother, having lived in the area all her life, knew lots of people.

She’d always dress up for these trips. Red lipstick, rouge, her long black hair carefully brushed. She’d also take great care over her children’s appearance – particularly the girls. My sisters and I would be identically dressed – often, when we were small, in pink-and white-striped dresses with silver stars on them, and the matching pink cardigans that would almost become heirlooms. It felt strange being trussed up so neatly in this way – such a contrast to the squalor indoors. She’d take a flannel and then scrub all the bits that showed – our hands and our faces and our knees.

Once satisfied that we’d not embarrass her visually, at least, she’d warn us about our behaviour. She always said the same thing; if she had to speak to any of us more than once about anything, then as soon as we were home we’d be hit – hard.

We’d set off then, and my mother became someone else. People would regularly stop her on the street. ‘Oh, Pamela,’ they’d say, ‘they all look so nice. I don’t know how you do it. They are
so
well behaved!’ And she’d laugh, her tone of voice very different from usual, brushing aside the compliments but obviously loving them. Inevitably, she’d have to reprimand one of us about something, and, once home, the charade would be over.

She’d then begin slapping and, much of the time, the main recipient was my poor younger sister. I was far too shy to do anything when out that would cause her to reprimand me. From when my sister was only about four my mother would slap her repeatedly, all over her bare arms and legs, only avoiding her head, as she always said hitting her head could cause brain damage. I could never bear to watch. I felt the slaps almost as if it were my own legs being hit, and wanted to scream at her to stop, but nothing ever came out of my mouth. My sister would go from happy and smiling to disbelief and misery in an instant. We’d then have to change back into our dirty, scruffy clothes while my mother went to make a cup of tea. She’d be humming to herself as she did so as well. As if the pain she’d just inflicted meant nothing. Almost as if it had never happened.

I hated going out of the house, full stop, but particularly going out with my mother. I was extremely timid and used to try to hide behind her but, for some reason, she always seemed to want to draw attention to me, pulling me out from behind her and pushing me in front, particularly in front of the men she used to talk to in the village. They’d be standing in their gardens and she’d always stop to chat, laughing and apparently enjoying all their banter and suggestive comments.

As I got older, I hated it even more. Particularly the men who bent down and put their faces close to mine, putting their fingers on my chin and saying: ‘You’re a little beauty. You’ll break a few hearts when you’re older, you will.’

I never understood my mother’s behaviour around these men. It felt all wrong. It made me feel horrible and upset. I found the men scary, intimidating, threatening.

I also hated that she used to make me lie. Where at home she mostly seemed not to register my existence, when we were out anywhere, or in company, or visiting relatives, she’d make me sit beside her and tell stories. She was insistent I tell everyone I’d seen Father Christmas, and explain in graphic detail what he’d looked like and said. I’d never seen Father Christmas and I knew everybody knew that, but she’d keep on and on. I could never understand why she’d do that. Up until the age of eleven she insisted he existed, and expected me to believe too – and the sad thing is, I did. I must have sounded so ridiculous.

She’d also tell everyone I had a friend who was a blue elephant, and make me describe him to people in great detail. Why would she do that? I couldn’t understand it at all. Why did she want to make me feel and sound so stupid? Why did she want to be so unkind?

A long time later –
decades
later – I’d have an answer of sorts, but for many years I would find it completely unfathomable. It must have been me, I thought. It just must have been
me.

In the winter of 1961, when I was six, we moved to a larger house, a mile away. The new house was up a lane on the side of the main road. The move happened because my father’s boss had been able to lease the house from the wealthy landowner, after a long lease to an old family had come to an end.

The move hadn’t looked too auspicious to start with. When my parents first went to see the house it was undergoing modernization, and looked more like a building site than a home. But by the time we arrived all the work had been completed and it looked, to me – used to the squalor of our current house – like nothing I’d ever seen before.

It was a large semi, constructed out of sandy yellow stone, and set among fields at the bottom of hills. Situated at the end of the lane, on its own, it was next to an apple orchard with pigs in and a stream running through. There were cows and horses in the neighbouring fields and a farm and further cottages at the top of the lane.

Inside it was spacious, with three bedrooms instead of two, which meant one for me and my sisters, one for my brothers, and another for my parents and Adam. And though there was still no heating, it had a sitting-room fire, plus a Rayburn in the kitchen to heat water and keep us warm, and, best of all, it had a bathroom.

Looking back I suppose I had grand ideas about how my life would be from that point on. I think we all did – we were terribly excited, and when the day came to move we were all falling over ourselves to help, running up and down the tailboard of my father’s lorry, bearing boxes. Even he seemed happy that day. Certainly, for once, he wasn’t shouting.

Though some of the boxes my mother had mindlessly filled would be destined to remain in the loft for all time, I unpacked in a flurry of excitement, the lovely smell of fresh paint everywhere, our few possessions looking lost in the large empty rooms. Here, or so I thought, life would be different. All the mess and the stuff and filth was all gone – never, I hoped naively, to return.

But it was the bathroom that most equalled happiness. My mother, for a short time, would bathe my siblings and me in it and I loved it. The frequency of this activity soon diminished, however, and before long it only happened rarely. Usually I bathed myself, and had clean school clothes once a week, and the rest of the time the bath was left filthy, with spiders running around in it. If not empty, it was used mostly to soak dirty washing, which would sit there, cold and scummy, for days. The lone slimy flannel would be chucked over the side of the bath or the basin, reeking of my father’s shaving cream. The same couple of towels used by everyone were so filthy and rank they were hard.

Our family now also started growing. My mother’s big ginger cat, called Winston, came with us, and straight after we moved in, given the big garden, my father began bringing other animals home. Rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens and a cockerel, which he picked up in the markets where he drove livestock.

Grandpops, too, visited regularly. He’d catch the bus from his house, often twice a week now, to go to the pub and the bookies and to pay us a visit, never forgetting, as well as bags of vegetables for my mother, to seek me out and ‘tickle’ me (and probably my sisters), just as long as my father wasn’t around.

Indeed, our new home was soon every bit as unclean as the last one, and every bit as unhappy.

But even greater unhappiness loomed. Towards the end of that year Adam fell seriously ill with pneumonia. As the youngest of a poor family with six children, his start in life hadn’t been promising. But with his disability and the fact that he’d been born into
our
family, he couldn’t have had a worse start.

He was taken to the General Hospital, in the next town. When I came home from school one day he was gone and very soon I felt afraid. I’d hated Adam since his birth, for taking my mother away from me – despite the fact that she looked after him so poorly and erratically, he nevertheless got what little attention she could muster – and now I felt worried this might be my fault. What had she done to him? Why was he in hospital? Why was my mother spending all her time with him while I was sent to school ‘out of the way’?