Nobody's Child

by Father Michael Seed

  Chapter Nine

  The summer before my sixth birthday seemed more than usually sunny and I spent most of my time playing in the back yard or in the lanes with other boys from the neighbourhood.

  Despite our shared concern over Mammy’s suicide attempts, my relationship with Daddy had not been improved, and whenever she tried again he either ignored me or cursed me as usual.

  The beatings kept on but now when he was mad he tended to concentrate his anger on me rather than on Mammy. Not that he gave up hitting her entirely. But her black eyes and split lips became less frequent as his attacks on me intensified. I was still not certain why I was being so severely punished. But at the same time I had been told so often that I was a bad and stupid child I supposed it had to be true and therefore I deserved to be beaten.

  Yet, before I celebrated my sixth birthday, my relationship with Daddy was to become even more weird and cruel. It was something that troubled me greatly at the time and is still able to stir very strong emotions even now.

  No doubt he was struggling to cope with the breakdown of his marriage and Mammy’s awful depression and suicide attempts, but even so I found it hard, in my heart, until many years later, to forgive him for taking repeated advantage of my age and innocence. There is no possible excuse for the way he forced me to take part in his perverted actions. What he did was morally corrupt and utterly indefensible.

  The beatings and my constant fear of being attacked were difficult enough to endure, but the new element he introduced into our relationship created a different and much more pervasive fear in me. And, because the threat was never clearly defined, it was all the harder to bear.

  It began shortly after the second time Mammy tried to end her life. Now, even when awake, she was far less responsive than before and spent most of the time in a kind of permanent dream which cut her off from everyday life.

  Unless Daddy insisted and dragged her there, which he now did less and less often, she no longer made any attempt to sleep in the bed she had previously shared with him.

  Instead, she took over my customary place on the sofa, wrapping herself in Daddy’s old RAF great coat, which normally acted as a blanket on their bed, and I was demoted to sleeping in one of the armchairs.

  But, one night, when Mammy was in one of her now habitual drug-induced stupors, Daddy told me I was not to sleep in the chair but to go into the big bedroom and wait for him.

  I have never, for one moment in my life, ever forgotten the most minute and horrific detail of every single second of what was about to happen, and yet, in the 45 years since it first happened, I have never mentioned it to another soul. I only do so now, in all its gross and awful detail, not to shock, but in the hope that others, facing similar torment, can identify with me and start to believe that there is some hope in the future.

  My father’s order to go to his bed seemed a weird one but I did as I was told, knowing from experience that showing the slightest reluctance to comply with anything Daddy wanted was likely to unleash another brutal attack.

  I was wearing my pants and vest as normal for sleeping, but when he came into the bedroom he told me to strip off completely before getting into bed. The sheets were quite chilly, so I snuggled down and clutched the meagre bedclothes around me and settled down for sleep.

  But Daddy had other plans. He undressed until he was also completely naked before switching off the light and climbing into bed.

  For some reason, I felt very nervous and wriggled nearer the edge of the bed until I was almost hanging over the floor.

  Daddy just lay there silently on his back, next to me, for several minutes. When he did speak to me, it was in a voice I barely recognised. It was really strange. There was none of the usual harshness. He spoke quietly and in a slightly lighter tone. Not like Daddy at all. He told me I was there to do some milking. He had to produce milk and I was going to help him. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and didn’t utter a word. I just couldn’t work out how we were supposed to do milking in bed.

  Then his hand touched my arm and he slid it down until it covered my hand, which he started to pull towards him. I don’t know why but suddenly I felt even more nervous. I think I knew instinctively that we were embarking on something that was very wrong.

  ‘I’ll show you what to do,’ Daddy told me. ‘It’s very easy. Very simple.’

  He carried my hand across until I felt the bare skin on his thigh and then he pressed my hand against a hard object. I knew straight away that it must be his willy. But it was long and very stiff and sticking straight up. I tried to take my hand away but he grabbed my wrist and forced it back.

  ‘Do what I tell you – or you’ll regret it,’ he snarled in the voice he normally used with me.

  Now I knew for certain that this wasn’t supposed to be happening. But I was far too frightened not to do as he wanted.

  He told me to put my hand around his willy and then he closed his hand over the top of mine. I was amazed at how large his willy was. I had never noticed it being this big when he was dressed. It was so big my fingers only just closed around it.

  Then, with his hand still clamped over mine, he began to rub it up and down.

  ‘Do you think you can do that by yourself, Michael?’ he asked, again in that funny non-Daddy voice he had used earlier.

  ‘Yes,’ I told him.

  There was nothing else I could have said. I was almost breathless with fear. I was in totally unexplored territory. The whole thing was completely bizarre and I was scared silly.

  I began to pump my hand up and down, and after he had moved it further up, towards the end of his willy, he took away his hand completely.

  ‘You mustn’t stop until the milk comes,’ he told me. ‘Whatever happens, you mustn’t stop until I tell you.’

  After a while, my hand started to get tired, but I didn’t dare stop. Daddy had ordered me not to, and I had so many bruises on my body to remind me what would happen if I didn’t obey him and made him angry.

  Suddenly he threw the sheet and thin blanket back and began to breathe heavily. ‘Keep going,’ he told me in a hoarse voice. ‘The milk is about to come.’

  Then he gave a great groan and a long sigh and I felt warm liquid splash on to my hand and arm.

  Daddy’s hand clamped over mine again and kept it moving for a few moments longer, then he pulled my hand free and pushed me hard away from him, back towards the edge of the bed.

  I lay there very still and kept as far away from him as I could, listening as his breathing became less noisy.

  He didn’t say anything else and I assumed that the milking must have been successful. It had been the strangest experience of my life, but I figured that probably all daddies needed milking from time to time, and that it was quite normal for them to get their sons to help them. To me, it was a very odd explanation, but it was the only one I could come up with.

  In the morning, Daddy’s voice was back to normal and he was already dressed when he woke me. He told me to sit on the edge of the bed and listen to him very carefully. He remained standing in front of me and I felt very small and vulnerable as I looked up at him.

  ‘This is something we don’t talk about to anyone else,’ he told me sternly. ‘It’s our secret and must not be shared even with Mammy. If you ever mention this to another soul, then awful things will happen to you. Worse things than you could ever imagine.’

  This was the most dreadful kind of threat, precisely because it wasn’t spelled out. I had a very vivid imagination as a five-year-old and, if Daddy was threatening something worse than I could imagine, I knew it had to be very bad indeed.

  Of course, at that time, I had no idea that what had happened was a sexual act, or that by involving me in his ‘milking’ he was guilty of abuse. I had nothing to compare it with. I thought this was something that grown-ups did. None of the boys I knew had mentioned doing anything like this with their fathers, but I also assumed that, if their fathers had issued the same thr
eats to them as mine had to me, this was probably the reason it wasn’t talked about.

  After that first night, it became quite normal for me to be sent to sleep in the big bed, and if Mammy ever thought this was odd she kept it to herself. Milking Daddy became a fairly regular chore. Sometimes it would happen every night of the week. He would come to bed and wake me up and make me do things and afterwards I would be allowed to sleep again.

  I didn’t realise until many years later, when it was far too late, that Daddy had made me his sex slave. How could I have known? I knew instinctively that what Daddy was making me do was wrong, but I didn’t know why he wanted me to do it and, apart from those gasping moments just before he produced the milk, he appeared to get very little pleasure from it.

  He never thanked me for my efforts at the time and they were never mentioned outside of the bedroom. Nor did it bring us any closer together or lessen his animosity towards me. He still appeared to hate me with a passion and continued to beat me for no apparent reason; apparent to me, that is. For Daddy to believe that I was a bad boy seemed to me reason enough for him to go on hurting me.

  My teachers clearly shared Daddy’s opinion as, after I turned six, I was old enough to be caned – something that didn’t happen in the first year. Caning appeared to be an integral part of the teaching programme at St Brigid’s. We were regularly lined up and every girl and boy slashed across the palm of the hand with a long, narrow bamboo wand. Some teachers preferred to cane the bottom and some chose to slap the back of our heads. Either way, it was all part of the daily routine for a six-year-old and something none of us ever thought to complain about.

  We were caned because we were naughty. That was the way things were. We had no choice in the matter.

  Chapter Ten

  Life with Daddy was never what you could call predictable. His rages now came with little warning, and the level of damage he inflicted on both Mammy and myself varied in keeping with his mood swings. But, by the time I was six-and-a-half, I thought I knew all the telltale signs and could more or less recognise whether it was the mild or the malevolent Daddy who had come home to us.

  Then he added a new factor to the battleground which was our home life and I was lost again.

  He arrived home one evening with a carrier bag in hand and announced that he had bought us tea, even though it was well after the time we normally had our meal.

  Mammy and I had already eaten our usual sandwiches, and I’d had a banana as well, and she told Daddy she wasn’t hungry at all.

  ‘You and Michael go ahead and eat,’ she said, and went back to dozing on the sofa.

  Daddy fetched two plates and knives and forks from the kitchen and put them on the little table in the living room.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ he told me, and took a paper-wrapped packet out of the carrier bag.

  The moment it was opened my heart sank. That Daddy should bring home food for our meal was unique in itself. With my luck, I might have known that he would have chosen something I couldn’t eat.

  Fish and chips. Other children loved them, and I too enjoyed the chips and the batter wrapped around the fish. But I found the fish itself revolting. I had never liked its slimy texture, its taste or its smell.

  Daddy, after adding salt and vinegar and tomato ketchup, tucked into his meal with obvious pleasure.

  I took my time over the chips and picked at the batter, hoping that Daddy would finish quickly and go out. But, after he had eaten everything on his plate, he sat opposite me and stared at my remaining food. Eventually, there was no batter left and the white flesh sat untouched in the middle of my plate.

  ‘I want you to eat that up,’ he told me, pointing at the fish with his knife.

  ‘But I don’t like fish, Daddy,’ I said.

  He stood up, came around the table and stood behind me and hissed, ‘Eat it now.’

  I started to cry. Partly because I was scared at what Daddy might do next and partly in the slight hope that it would put him off. Tears had never saved me before but it still seemed worth a try.

  He rapped me hard on top of the head with his knife and put his mouth right next to my ear and shouted, ‘Eat the bloody fish, you little bastard.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I shouted back.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ he said, and slapped me hard on both sides of my head.

  I screwed my head round to see if Mammy would come to my aid but Daddy was in the way. Suddenly, he grasped the hair at the back of my head and forced my mouth and nose into the fish. I kept my mouth shut but some of the fish was forced into my nostrils and, when I tried to breathe, I snorted some of it back into my throat. Mixed in with this was the feel and smell of blood. My nose had started to bleed when he had rammed it down on the plate.

  My stomach reacted immediately and I felt the whoosh of sick in my mouth. But Daddy was pressing my head down so hard it couldn’t come out. And I couldn’t suck any air in either.

  I started to hammer my fists up and down on the table top and bang my feet on the floor in terror, until at last he let go of my hair.

  As I raised my face from the plate and opened my mouth to breathe, all the sick shot out on to the plate and table before I could inhale. When I eventually sucked in some air, I deliberately blew it out down my nose to try to get rid of the fish that had lodged there.

  Bits of fish and blood added to the filthy mess already in front of me and this brought a roar of anger from Daddy. He slapped my head back and forth with his open palm and then dragged me by my collar towards the fire.

  I screamed, ‘Mammy, don’t let him burn me. Please don’t let him burn me,’ but she just sat there. Perhaps she had switched off when Daddy began shouting and didn’t understand what was happening, but I felt utterly abandoned.

  And when I looked up at Daddy he was actually half smiling.

  ‘Let’s see if this will teach you to do as you’re told,’ he said.

  I could feel the heat coming off the fire from several feet away and knew from the last time he had branded me just how awful the pain was going to be. At least I thought I did. But this time it was far worse than I’d imagined.

  He pulled my shirt sleeve up my arm, tearing the button off the cuff with the force. Then, with both hands, he grasped my arm at the elbow and the wrist and pressed the middle bit against the top bar of the grate.

  It sizzled and the hairs on my arm were singed away and there was a smell of me burning. I screamed and screamed and wet my trousers. The pain was worse than anything that had ever happened to me before.

  After a couple of seconds, Daddy pulled my arm away from the fire and pushed me towards the kitchen.

  ‘Stop that screaming, you dirty little brat,’ he shouted. ‘And get yourself cleaned up. You’re disgusting. When you’ve cleaned yourself up, then clean up the table and the floor where you’ve made a mess. You’re not fit to call a boy. You’re like a bloody animal, and that’s the way I’m going to treat you in future, like a bloody animal.’

  After I had washed my face and changed my trousers for a dry pair, I got out a bucket and cloth and cleaned up the mess in the living room. My only relief came when I scraped the fish into the dustbin. At least I hadn’t given in. But at what a cost.

  I quietly sobbed myself to sleep in the corner and later, after Daddy had led Mammy off to their bedroom, I went into the kitchen and found the remains of the burn ointment Mammy had got from the chemist after the first time Daddy had burned us.

  I smeared it on my blistered arm and swore to myself that one day I would get my revenge – or run away.

  Meanwhile I dreaded our next encounter, because, knowing Daddy, he would not let it end like this. Forcing me to eat food I hated was a new way of punishing me, and he wouldn’t stop after only one victory. Sure enough, attempts to force-feed me became a regular feature of our violent confrontations.

  Chapter Eleven

  For me life was a battle for survival. I had no idea what Daddy was fighting for. Or wh
y he had so much anger against Mammy and me. I told myself I must be the baddest boy in the world to warrant so much punishment.

  In her rare lucid moments Mammy would try to reassure me. ‘You’re not really a bad boy, Michael,’ she would say. ‘Daddy doesn’t mean all the things he says and does. It’s just his rages. He gets so angry he doesn’t even realise he’s hurting you. Deep down he loves you really.’

  But it was very hard to remember that Daddy loved me when he was in the middle of knocking me senseless or branding me on the grate.

  Mammy also blamed Daddy’s drinking. She had been brought up strictly temperance, she told me. Which meant, she was proud to say, that alcohol had never passed her lips.

  ‘The devil is cunning and uses alcohol to gain easy entry into a drinking man’s mind,’ she said.

  I think the devils who had such easy access to Daddy’s mind must have had a special dislike for Mammy and me, because I never heard of him hitting anyone else when he was drunk.

  After the fish incident, Daddy made a point, at least once a week, of bringing home for my tea something that he knew I didn’t like. Brawn was his next choice. This cold meat dish, not eaten much outside the north of England, is made from all the unwanted and unmentionable bits of animals that no one would ever dream of eating. Guts, fat, gristle, bone and skin are cooked up and disgusting brown jelly holds it all together in a lump.

  Mammy had once tried it out on me and my stomach had rebelled after just a tiny taste. Knowing this, Daddy bought some sliced brawn for my tea. He put two whole slices of the revolting concoction on a plate, which he ordered me to eat. There was lots of goodness in it, he told me with a nasty sneer.

  ‘So why aren’t you eating it as well?’ I asked him, and instantly regretted it. Daddy was the very last person who needed any provocation.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody cheeky,’ he snarled. ‘Get it down you now or I’ll have to force it down and you won’t like that, I can tell you.’