Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed

by Stuart Howarth

  I started to find work and went out with a couple of girls, although both times I became very jealous and possessive again. I could never understand why any girl would be interested in someone as bad and worthless as me. I enjoyed the sex, although I was still a bit afraid of it.

  Mum’s next boyfriend was Trevor, who was divorced with two kids. He was a big guy, but not intimidating, and I liked him. He was always in the pub when Mum was there but I noticed he would be helping her. When he eventually moved in with us I was pretty difficult, jealous of the love and affection she was showing him when I wasn’t getting any. But Trevor was a good man. He had a job and a car and he worked out a bit. He would run us down to visit Shirley, and take her out places. He was always softly spoken, no shouting and no violence.

  I was pretty much pleasing myself, staying out too late and smoking too much pot. Mum kept telling me that I had to straighten myself out or get out of the house, but I just saw that as more evidence she was putting Trevor before me, increasing my sense of isolation and unhappiness, making me want to do more bad things. One day I was in the kitchen and Mum and I were arguing about Trevor. My anger boiled up and I threw a plate down on the floor, shattering it. I stood up and stormed over to the door, smashing my head through it. The only trouble was, I couldn’t get it back out again, a shard of wood having jammed into my neck. Trevor had to cut me out with his tool kit. On another occasion I punched through the glass of the front window. It was like the anger and resentment bottled up inside me would just erupt every so often.

  ‘You’re like a ticking time bomb, Stuart,’ Mum would say. ‘I never know what’s going to happen with you.’

  When Christina was seventeen she met an Italian man called Seb, who was about thirty. He was a good-looking guy and manager of the local swimming baths. I liked him right from the start and we became good friends. Even though I was worried about the age gap to begin with, he soon reassured me and I could see he was good with her, even when she sometimes gave him a hard time with her insecurities. Christina fell pregnant at eighteen and they got married, but she suffered terribly from both pre-natal and post-natal depression. For a while she became very unbalanced and told Seb some of the things Dad had done to her as a child. One night she went wandering off in the snow, saying she could hear Dad calling for her; on another occasion she ended up on all fours, barking like a dog. Seb wanted me to give him Dad’s address.

  ‘That man has ruined my wife and my family,’ he told me over a drink. ‘I want you to tell me where to find him.’

  But I wouldn’t tell him. Part of me still loved my dad, despite everything he had done, and I felt I needed to protect him.

  The first job I did was as an engineer, which I didn’t really enjoy, standing in one place cutting the same bits of steel all day long. I went to college and did a sheet-metalworker apprenticeship. Then I joined a firm of steeplejacks as an estimator and really took to the work. They gave me a company car and for the first time in my life I felt important. The firm was involved with lightning protection for buildings as well as repairing high chimneys. Whenever I went for any sort of interview I would always do the most enormous amount of research on the subject beforehand, going to libraries, reading books, putting together presentations. I always wanted to impress everyone with what a good boy I was. As a result of all my hard work I excelled at the job and started to get recognized. I had seen how hard Dad had always worked, so I knew what had to be done, and I was terrified of falling into the poverty trap that had engulfed my parents.

  When I was eighteen I met a girl called Angela out walking her dog. She was still only sixteen, a lovely girl with long dark hair. I knew her by sight, and knew where she lived. We got talking and became a couple almost there and then. A lot of our early courtship was spent round at Christina and Seb’s house, trying to sort things out, like the time Christina went for him with a knife, or the time she smashed a bottle over his head, and scratched his face.

  It wasn’t until Seb was injured in a motorcycle accident, and I was standing beside his bed in intensive care, looking at all the tubes going in and out of him, that I realized how much I loved him. I stroked his hair, telling him how much we all cared about him and how he must fight to survive. He’s told me since that he could hear my voice, even though he couldn’t respond. His last request before he lost consciousness was that they didn’t cut off his legs, because he lived for his sport, but sadly they were only able to save one of them.

  Although I wasn’t as out of control as Christina, I was still insecure and possessive, and a bit pathetic at times in my relationship with Angela. But overall I was happy, because I was successful at work. I put my all into it and my efforts were recognized. When I wasn’t at work I was going out and enjoying myself, a bit wild at times, one of the lads, and I actually managed to push the memories of my childhood to the back of my mind most of the time. Occasionally I would have a flash of a memory, or a bad dream would wake me up in the night, but I felt I was in control of it. I never talked to Angela about anything that had happened and only very occasionally mentioned to other people that I had been abused as a child, without going into any detail — usually when I’d had a few too many drinks. I still didn’t know for sure if Dad was my real dad, or whether it was George Heywood, the same as the girls, and he was just my stepdad, but I was too busy getting on with my life to brood on it any more — I made sure of that.

  I was offered a management job up in Scotland and I took it, seeing it as a way to move up in the world, even though it meant Angela and I were apart a lot, which I didn’t like. Above anything else I wanted my bosses and my customers to love me, to recognize that I was good at my job, and to that end I was willing to travel to the ends of the earth. Not having any friends or social life in Scotland meant I was able to concentrate on work while I was up there, putting in even more hours than I had before the move. On one of my weekends home Angela announced that she had something to tell me. With my usual insecurity, I thought she was going to want to talk about our relationship and what was wrong with it. She took me upstairs to the bedroom and put her arms around me. I could see my face in the wardrobe mirror over her shoulder as she told me she was pregnant. There was a big smile on my face, but I felt very afraid; how could someone who was still a little boy inside possibly be a good father to a new baby?

  Angela’s parents believed everything should be done properly and set about organizing the wedding. We were happy to leave it to them as our time was taken up with finding a house in Scotland. I was always a bit jealous around Angela and her father because he hugged her a lot, and because of my twisted upbringing I would wonder what he was after and what might have happened in the past. There were always so many thoughts rushing around in my head that I knew I must never share with anyone else because they were dirty and shameful. I hated myself for having them. I was terrified of saying anything to Angela that might lead to her rejecting me. I couldn’t have stood any more rejection.

  The wedding day was so organized I just turned up at the church where I had played the bugle a few years before and it was sorted. I was very proud to see that Shirley was there. It poured with rain outside the church and the wind filled the Rolls-Royce with leaves as we made our exit as a married couple. When we got to the restaurant where a meal had been booked we discovered the owner had done a runner with all our money so there was no food or champagne. After the ceremony we went back to Scotland, to our little house, which we didn’t have enough money to furnish.

  In 1989 Angela gave birth to our son, Matthew, in a little local hospital. I got to bath him about five minutes after he was born and it was without doubt the happiest day of my life up to that point.

  ‘I will always look after you and protect you,’ I promised as I gently washed and dried his tiny, helpless, pink little body. I was so in awe of him and instantly loved him.

  I might have been a father and husband now, but I was still living on the edge of an emotional precipice. Angela
was breastfeeding and usually had Matthew in bed with her once we got home, so in the following months I wasn’t feeling as loved and nurtured as I wanted to be. One night I felt so sad and lonely I just took a bottle of rum that we’d had sitting around the house and drank it down. All I remember is sitting at the top of the stairs in our brand new, empty house, throwing up and crying for my mum. If there was ever a time when I told Angela a few of the secrets from my past, that was it, but I have no memory and I have never dared to ask her. I was still only twenty-two years old.

  I didn’t like living in Scotland and I would come back down to Manchester at every opportunity. If I were on my own I would go out with the lads, and even if I came back with Angela she would stay with her parents and I would stay with my mum. I wanted to be having a good time, afraid I was missing out on life on all the nights Angela and I just stayed in with the baby. When I went out I would deliberately get drunk, because that way I could have a laugh and drown out all the voices and pictures in my head. If I allowed myself to sit still for too long and didn’t keep busy I wasn’t able to stop the memories from returning. When I slept they returned in the form of nightmares.

  After a fairly miserable year in Scotland, not having any friends, we moved back down to Stoke-on-Trent and I started working for a new company, setting up a new division for protecting structures against lightning. We bought an idyllic house, a bungalow with dormer windows in the loft and a nice garden. On the surface things looked as if they were going well, but I was still putting my work before everything, always leaving home at six in the morning and not getting back till nine at night. I felt I was really achieving something on my own, starting with a plain sheet of paper and building something up from nothing.

  I was in a meeting with my team one day, briefing them about the jobs they were working on, when Angela called from home, something she hardly ever did.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m working,’ I said, puzzled as to why she would need to ask.

  ‘You’d better stop now and come home.’

  ‘I can’t come home now,’ I protested. ‘I’ve got all the steeplejacks in the office and we’re sorting out the jobs.’

  ‘Stuart,’ she said quietly, ‘your Shirley’s died.’

  Her words seemed to unleash every demon I had been keeping so carefully caged inside my head. I felt the same jolt of electricity and heard the same buzzing that I had experienced so often as a child when fear and misery and pain had all descended on me at the same time. There was nothing I could do to keep my emotions under control as I thought about poor Shirley and her miserable life. I shook and cried helplessly as the other men left me in the room to be alone with my grief, having no idea how to cope with the terrible sight and sound of a grown man falling to pieces in front of them. But I didn’t feel like a grown man, I felt like a little boy and I wanted to run back to the same playground I had spent so many years in as a child, and hug close to the wall for safety and comfort.

  Walking like a man in a trance, I went out to my car, determined to get to Shirley as quickly as possible to see if it was true. I don’t remember anything about that journey except that there was a song by Oleta Adams playing on the radio, ‘Get Here’, and it sounded like Shirley calling to me.

  I do remember arriving at Catherine House, walking straight into her room and seeing the empty wheelchair. I sank down on the bed and stared at it. At that moment I knew it was true, that she had gone.

  Shirley had drowned in her bathtub. She was still in there; the staff were waiting for the police to come and check for foul play because there was blood in the water, but it turned out to be menstrual. She had been lifted in by a helper at seven thirty that morning, to get her ready for college. The routine was that they would come back every so often to check on her, warm the water up and then lift her out when she was ready. At some stage between these visits she had had a fit and slid under the water, unable to save herself.

  I could feel the anger boiling up inside me and I had nowhere to direct it. I went to a pub and started drinking lager. I thought about everything else that had gone wrong in my life. Just a year or so earlier my best friend at the time, Mark, had been killed in a car crash. It had been a colossal shock. The feelings I had been able to control over Mark’s sudden death now mixed with my anger over Shirley’s. Was everyone I ever cared about going to be taken away from me like this? Was nothing safe or secure? All the fears I had experienced as a small, battered boy swept over me and I couldn’t see how I could keep going.

  I thought about Dad and all the things he had done to harm us. If it hadn’t been for him I would never have started the house fire and Shirley would never have gone into Catherine House. I couldn’t understand why everything in my life had to be such shit, and I considered killing myself. Without a thought for Angela or Matthew, I went back to my car and drove to a local beauty spot, high on a hill, looking down over miles of countryside, not another soul in sight. Climbing out of the car I looked up and started shouting at the heavens.

  I had found someone to blame. I screamed every name I could think of at him. I wanted to hit someone but there was no one there.

  ‘Why didn’t you take me? You had no right to take her. She’s been through so much pain and suffering! What purpose does my life have now? How am I going to survive without her?’

  All the pictures I had been storing away in boxes in my head came rushing to the front of my mind at once, and through it all I could see poor Shirley, grim-faced and long-suffering, sitting in her wheelchair in the corner of our sitting room while all the horrors of our childhood unfolded around her like a nightmare. At least Christina and I had been able to get up and walk away from time to time, but she had never been able to escape from her personal nightmare, not even for a moment, always reliant on other people for every tiny thing. That night I couldn’t sleep and just lay in bed, shaking, remembering things I hadn’t thought about for years, like Dad making me abuse the dogs with him. The pictures kept coming into my head and I couldn’t get rid of them.

  Dad sent Mum a five-pound note, telling her to buy Shirley some flowers.

  Chapter Eleven

  A TIME BOMB

  Shirley’s death seemed to unbalance all the blocking mechanisms I had built up over the years to keep myself going through the hard times, as if a dam had been dynamited and every memory, every pain and every emotion was flooding through the resulting hole. It felt like everything had changed for me and I was no longer able to keep any control over my life.

  I started going to the pub regularly to try to numb the pain with drink. At the funeral I carried her coffin but I wasn’t able to cry, even though I wanted to. Afterwards I went to the pub and the tears finally flowed. The girl behind the bar said how sorry she was; everyone in our area knew Shirley because they’d seen her being pushed around in her wheelchair for so many years. A guy sitting at the bar wanted to know what the matter was, why I was crying. I wasn’t in the mood to chat with a stranger, so I told him I’d just buried my sister and suggested he kept quiet. But he wouldn’t leave it alone. He told me he had asbestosis and to stop feeling sorry for myself

  ‘Do you mind,’ I said again. ‘I’ve just buried my sister.’

  Tuck your sister,’ he snapped.

  All of a sudden all my rage came roaring to the surface. I launched myself at him and gave him a terrible battering, having to be restrained by several other people before I did him a serious injury. An ambulance had to be called, and the police came, and I was just sat upstairs, crying and saying how sorry I was. It was as if I had reached the end of my tether; I could no longer cope with the effort needed to stay in control of my anger and my misery and my confusion.

  I started going back to places like the dens where I used to sniff glue, just so that I could be on my own, and I would talk aloud to myself, unable to talk properly to anyone else. Looking back now I can see that I was having a nervous breakdown.

  Not ever
ything in my life was bad. My bond with Matthew was getting stronger every day. I used to love it when I got in from work and he would be sitting on the windowsill looking out for me. He would rush over to cuddle me, gushing with unconditional love: ‘Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!’

  Sometimes, if he had done something naughty Angela would use me to threaten him. ‘Wait till your father gets home,’ she would warn. ‘Go on, tell Daddy what you did today.’

  I begged her not to do that. I wanted him to love me. I didn’t want him ever to be frightened or to dread seeing me. Luckily he was such a good boy she hardly ever had to tell him off. Although I had a great relationship with him, I knew he was closer to Angela, after all she was with him most of the time and she had breastfed him and bonded with him. I felt quite jealous and left out sometimes, and Angela seemed never to like to be parted from him, even if it was just for him and me to spend some time together. Sometimes I would come home late and they would be asleep in the same bed and I would have to go to the spare room. I felt very rejected at times like that, but guilty at the same time for coming home so late and not giving them more of my time.

  I was always buying Matthew presents; I couldn’t go out with him without coming home with some huge new thing for him, like a truck or a remote-controlled car or a tool set, which would exasperate Angela. I wanted him to have stuff that he would enjoy, not like the rubbish Dad would scavenge from the bins for us. I wanted to please him all the time, make him happy, and make him love me. I used to let him smack me on the head with the plastic hammer from his tool kit. One day I’d left my own tool kit out and he picked up the real hammer. Thinking he would be able to make me laugh as usual he came up beside me as I was watching telly and cracked me over the head with it. I buckled up with a scream, sending him scurrying away to hide, suddenly frightened by the unexpected reaction. It was lucky he didn’t do me a serious injury. I felt terrible for having frightened him by screaming.