by Lily O'Brien
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.
As we walked towards the house, we could see that it was quiet and no one was around. But as we got closer, I could see a filthy pillowcase lying on the ground at the foot of the front door and it was moving. I slowly walked up to the pillowcase and I poked at it with a stick that I was playing with and the pillowcase stopped moving. I could see that the open end of the pillowcase had been tied up with string, so I undid the string and I looked inside; and just as I put my face into the pillowcase, out jumped two chickens and they fell to the ground. And as I stood back, they began to run around, but they had nowhere to go so I ran after them, chasing them in and out of the house and trying to catch them, but they were too fast for me and I fell over.
Then Ted came out of the house and he asked us why I was playing with our dinner, but I just looked at him, not quite understanding what he had just said to me and then he just laughed at me as I continued to chase the chickens around the yard. Then Ted grabbed one of the chickens by its head and within a couple of seconds he twisted its neck until it snapped, and he pulled the chicken’s head clean off its body with his bare hands and dropped the chicken’s body to the floor. Straightaway, the headless body began to run around and the chicken was flapping its wings like mad, and then without warning it stopped moving and collapsed to the ground, dead.
So Ted picked the chicken up and walked back into the house, with it swinging by its headless neck. We all ran into the house after Ted and I asked him if he could do it again to the other chicken. ‘Please’, I begged him, but he said to shut the fuck up and then he put the chicken into a huge metal pot. He said that he was going to cook it for us and he began to light the stove; but he had not taken any of the feathers off its body, so I told him what to do. ‘Pull the feathers off it first or it won’t cook.’ However, he only pulled some of the big feathers off and then he filled the pot up with water again and put the pot back on the stove. I walked over to the stove and I looked inside the pot; some feathers and blood were floating around in the water and more blood was coming out of the chicken’s neck that was turning the water red. It looked a mess and I felt sick just looking at it, so I walked away and I went outside.
And by now, all the others had come back and they had seen the other chicken still running around the yard. I told them what Ted had been doing and then we all sat down in the yard and played with the chicken, while we waited for Ted to come out of the house and break the chicken’s neck. We sat waiting patiently with the chicken, and eventually Ted came outside and within a few seconds it was all over and the decapitated body of the chicken lay still on the ground and then we just sat and waited for the dinner to cook.
We waited for what seemed like hours and when the chicken was cooked, Ted put the whole thing onto a big plate and placed it in the middle of the kitchen table. It was steaming hot boiled chicken and nothing else, and the skin was pale and it hung from the chickens’ body as if it was too big and didn’t fit. We couldn’t wait any longer and we all grabbed and pulled at the chicken, breaking the legs away from its body and pulling at the skin to get at the meat inside.
Eventually, the chicken broke open and, as we continued to pull at it, the chicken split apart, steam rose up into the air and it smelt bad. Ted had cooked the chicken with all the guts and other stuff still inside and, as we pulled at it, the guts fell out of the body and spread over the table. We continued pulling at the chicken and, as we did so, the guts slipped down off the table and onto the kitchen floor and we all stepped in them as we continued to grab and pull at the chicken. We continued to pull at the chicken and we ate as much of it as we could, but the smell and slimy guts had put us all off and we couldn’t enjoy it as much as we had hoped; so eventually, I gave up and walked away.
It had now become so obvious that we couldn’t look after ourselves that people in the village had started to notice it too; we had done our best by scrounging food from people and from their rubbish bins, but it wasn’t enough, so we began to visit the rubbish dump just outside the village to look for food. We would walk to the dump almost every day and we would look through hundreds of black bags full of people’s rubbish, then we would go through all the rubbish bins we could find, searching for clothes and eating anything we could get our hands on. To us, it didn’t matter if it was dirty, old, smelling or covered in mould; we needed to eat and we did. We would rub any muck off the food and then put it into our mouths, and one of the best things to find was packets of out-of-date biscuits that supermarkets had slung out, as they would always taste nice.
But the dump smelt bad and it was full of things like needles and cotton with blood on it and other strange stuff from the hospital that would make us itch if we touched it. We would get cuts on our hands and knees from all sorts of things almost every day and our mouths would become so dry that we had to keep them shut; otherwise, bugs and big blue bottles would fly into your mouth. Then they would stick to the roof of your mouth and you would have to dig them out with your fingers or try to make some spit in your mouth so you could swallow them, and all the time the flies would be making a buzzing noise inside your mouth until they were gone.
And every now and then, a rubbish lorry would pull in with a new load of black bags and we would be the first to get on top of them and rip the bags open. We used to see many adults doing the same thing as us, but they would always wait until we had finished and moved on to another lot of bags before they came over to look through them. I think it was because we were the youngest and smallest in the dump that they gave us a chance to eat before they went through the bags. Even dad knew what we were doing and, some days before we left the house, he would tell us to look out for scrap copper wire and if we found any, to bring it home for him to scrap; and we did, but he never said thanks.
All this was fine and sometimes it was even fun; plus, down by the edge of the dump, there was a small stream and during the summer months we would climb down to it and wash some of the smell and muck off our hands and faces. Plus we would wash and swap some of our old clothes for newer ones that we had found in the dump, and at the end of the day, we would head back home with
bellies full and happy faces.
However, one day while at the dump, we must have forgotten about our baby brother Simon being with us, as it was only after we had arrived back home and it began to get dark that I asked everyone if they had seen him, but no one had. The last time anyone had seen him was earlier in the day when we were all at the stream by the dump; in a panic, we all jumped up and we went off looking for him and we ran almost all the way back to the dump before we found him.
He was walking along the road and he was all alone, and he was dirty and wet all over and he was wearing only his underpants and a pair of socks. I grabbed him by the arm and then I cuddled him and he told me that he had fallen into the stream and he had shouted for us, but nobody came. So, he managed to climb out of the stream on his own and he took his clothes off because they were wet and too heavy for him and he couldn’t walk in them. I grabbed his t-shirt out of his hands, I rung it out and then I put it back on him; then Ted picked Simon up and put him on his shoulders and we all walked home happy that we had found Simon and that he was safe. When we got home, we never told anyone, not even our dad about what had happened to Simon, as he would have killed us if he had known what had gone on; anyway, Simon was ok and everything was fine now.
After a few weeks, the days began to get colder and darker and I began to feel ill, my skin looked pale and it was thick with waxy dirt, and red patches with rings and dots began to appear all over my body and I looked very sick. My hair had become so stiff with dirt that it just stuck up into the air, and my scalp hurt and it bled if I scratched it. So one of my older sisters, Jenny, who was ten years old, decided that we had to have a proper wash with hot water and soap, but I had forgotten what soap was.
Later that night, Jenny took Daisy, Simon and me, as we were the youngest and dirtiest, with her to an old people’s home and she managed to lift us up through an open window on the ground floor and into a bathroom within the building. We could tell that she had done it before because she told us to be very quiet and she knew where everything was, and then she locked the bathroom door from the inside. We took our clothes off and we all stood still while she washed us all with hot water and soap and it felt so nice being clean; once she had finished, she helped us back out of the window and we all ran off back home.
