It was she who volunteered to accompany me on the mile walk to school at the far end of Long Lane, and on the way even introduced me to some of her neighbours’ children so that I would have someone to talk to and walk with on the journey to and from school in the years to come.
I can see now that even back then Nanny had recognised that my mother was no longer capable of being a proper parent and was already standing in for her. Between them, Mammy’s husband and father were gradually obliterating my mother as a person.
On that first day, as she did every day for the rest of my time at school, Nanny had carefully prepared a snack, a first for me; and, remembering that I didn’t drink milk, she also tucked a bottle of orange juice into my satchel.
At St Osmund’s, Nanny walked me through the playground and into school, and introduced me to the headmaster, Mr Bleasdale, who would prove another great source of strength and encouragement in the future.
As I had feared, it didn’t take my teachers or the other kids long to realise how backward I was. I couldn’t do anything. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to learn. Nothing went into my brain. Nothing written on the blackboard made any sense to me and I never did learn to do the simplest of arithmetic. But, surprisingly, my teachers still put no real pressure on me, even at seven. There was a long way to go, they said, before the 11-plus, and they hoped there would be a marked improvement in my ability, or at least my will to learn, long before then.
Recognising my multiple deficiencies in academic and social skills, the other children soon labelled me the school dunce. This made me an instant figure of fun in the playground, someone to be teased and pointed and laughed at, the butt of a dozen daily jokes and pranks. It wasn’t easy to cope with, though it was no worse than I had expected. I was uneducated but I wasn’t stupid.
Very few boys, except for some of those introduced to me by Nanny, wanted to be friends and play with me, but I didn’t care. I was used to being a loner, and already conditioned, I suppose, to being ignored or disliked by others.
Besides, the situation at home was deteriorating again and that provided me with more than enough worries to occupy my mind and my time. Almost immediately after our arrival in Bolton, Mammy had started to act even more strangely than before. Poor Mammy, I think she was still trying to run away – but had nowhere to go. She would leave home early in the morning and stay away until late at night, and would never talk to anyone about where she had been. This made Nanny very unhappy.
I would sometimes find her in tears when I came home from school, and then she would talk to me about her fears. Though just a child of seven, I was the only person in the house she could talk to about it. Granddad and Daddy chose to ignore the fact that Mammy was missing for most of the time, and that, when she was at home, she was so drugged she never made any kind of sense when she did speak.
‘Your mammy is very unwell, Michael,’ Nanny would say to me. ‘I really don’t know what’s going to happen to her. It breaks my heart that she doesn’t feel she has anything to live for. It’s Joe Seed who has been her ruin. The only way she’ll ever be herself again is if she gets shut of him. But it’s gone beyond that, I think.’
I could see that getting rid of Daddy would make both Mammy and me much happier, but I didn’t understand an awful lot of what Nanny was confiding in me. What I remember most is that she was a comforting pair of arms to go to after I had been attacked by either Daddy or Granddad, though only if she happened to be in another room. She would never try to protect or comfort me in front of the men, no matter how badly they beat me, and I never blamed her for this. Instinctively, I knew that she was frightened of causing the same brutal aggression to be directed against herself should she intervene in any way.
Granddad’s initial warning to Daddy did not deter him in the slightest. He certainly didn’t stop his attacks on me or on Mammy. They were less frequent, but in no way less violent than before, but now they went on almost exclusively in the privacy of our bedroom. Of course, this didn’t mean that they remained secret, because time and again we bore the marks of Daddy’s assaults.
I understood Nanny’s reasons for not interfering, and I think Granddad’s policy must have been that, as long as he pretended he didn’t hear anything, he didn’t have to do anything. Either way, it meant that Mammy and I were still constantly vulnerable and often on the receiving end of a great deal of pain.
Sometimes Daddy would come into our room angry when we were in bed and drag us from under the bedclothes and begin pounding us with his fists while we were still half-asleep. It was a terrifying way to be forced awake – to feel the dreadful pain but momentarily not know where it was coming from.
Even worse for me was to realise that Mammy no longer offered any resistance at all; that she had completely given in. She would just let herself be hit until she was knocked over. When Daddy punched her, she no longer screamed but just moaned and didn’t try at all to stop him. It became much harder for me to witness her beatings than before, because I could remember how at one time she used to fight back or at least tried to dodge the blows. But now, after she was knocked down, she would lie there sobbing until she went back to the welcome cure-all of sleep.
My grandparents could not have been unaware of this brutality going on under their roof, but almost invariably they chose to ignore it. So the noise of our beatings was never mentioned, until one morning, after a particularly savage attack, when Mammy came down to breakfast with a black eye, cuts on her cheek and lip and a swollen jaw. I was in little better shape. My face was bruised and swollen in several places, though I had not been cut.
Granddad scowled but didn’t say a word, even after Daddy came in. He just stood up and hit Daddy on the point of his jaw with his right fist, very hard.
I don’t know whether it was the force of the blow, or the surprise, but Daddy went down backwards, hard on to his bottom, and sat there looking stunned. I heard Nanny’s loud gasp from across the room.
‘I warned you about who’s the master in this house, Joe Seed,’ Granddad said angrily. ‘So you can bloody well get yourself out of here – now – and I don’t want to see you back.’
Mammy and I looked at Granddad, then at each other and then at Daddy, who was clambering to his feet. I think we both expected an explosion. But Daddy simply went upstairs to get his jacket and then walked out of the house without saying a word.
I heard later that he had gone to stay with his mother in Halewood, a suburb of Liverpool. A week later, he was back in Bolton. I don’t know how it was arranged or who negotiated the truce between Daddy and Granddad, but he suddenly appeared again one night, and nothing was said.
It was a big disappointment for me, and I imagine for Mammy as well. I had really believed that our days of being terrorised by Daddy were over; and that if I could steer clear of Granddad those vicious attacks were a thing of the past.
But nothing in my life was ever going to prove quite that easy.
Chapter Fifteen
The beating which caused Granddad to throw Daddy out of the house was also responsible for bringing social workers to our new home.
My class teacher at St Osmund’s and the headmaster did not believe my story that the bruises on my face were caused by a tumble downstairs. Mr Bleasdale repeatedly demanded to know who had attacked me and, in the end, in desperation, I told him I had been waylaid by a gang of older boys on my way home from school the previous evening and it was they who had inflicted the injuries to my face.
At this point, I squeezed out a few tears and sobs and told them I had been frightened to speak until now because the boys had threatened to hurt me even more if I told on them.
I could see that Mr Bleasdale still wasn’t fully convinced I was telling the truth, but this time I stuck to my story. It was just unthinkable that I could disclose that it was Daddy who had battered me, because retribution from him would have been ten times worse than from any gang of yobs.
Eventually, the headmaste
r gave up asking questions, though he warned me that he intended to investigate further and that someone from the social services would be calling at my home.
When two child-welfare officers, a man and a woman, turned up three days later, I had already passed on to Nanny the details of the story I had concocted for Mr Bleasdale. Nanny explained that only she, Granddad, Mammy and I lived there. It wasn’t a complete lie, because Daddy was at that time still conforming to Granddad’s order and living elsewhere. She and Granddad swore that no one had been ill-treating me, while Mammy dumbly nodded her agreement. I’m not certain that she even understood who the visitors were, and oddly they never questioned her about the damage Daddy had done to her face.
Granddad told them gruffly that he occasionally clipped me round the ear for being naughty, but never hard enough to cause any real injuries. What a whopper that was.
Then he and Nanny complained about the young hooligans terrorising the estate and inflicting pain and misery on the younger children. I was astonished at the way they embellished my original lie, adding the kind of details I could never have thought of.
Seemingly having run out of questions, the social workers finally went away – still suspicious, I’m sure, but lacking any evidence to pursue the matter further.
I was so certain that, even if they had known the truth, they could not have stopped my father or my grandfather from beating me. It never occurred to me that they could have taken me away and placed me in care for my own protection. Had that option been explained to me, I would have confessed everything in an instant. Only a complete fool would have chosen to go on taking the kind of regular punishment I was receiving rather than seek safe alternative accommodation. I knew that no threats or warnings from the authorities would have influenced those two men. They were bullies, both of them, and far too angry and mean to change their ways; especially since I was a convenient and easy victim, too weak and too small to fight back. And now Mammy had become the same.
Even so, after witnessing all those unsuccessful attempts she had made to kill herself with pills, I suppose I had come to believe that Mammy was indestructible and would always come back from the edge of the grave at the very last moment. And that is why, I think now, it was doubly shattering for me, at eight years of age, that, after talking about it for so many years, she had finally found a way to escape her tormentor for ever. Having chosen a more reliable method than pills, she at last succeeded in killing herself. But, in escaping from Daddy, she abandoned me.
She did it on a March morning in 1966, though it was to be days before I learned the full details of what had happened.
Normally on a Saturday morning, I would have been at the kids’ club in the Odeon cinema, Bolton, and Granddad, who was a part-time lollipop man, would have been supervising the children crossing the road outside the picture palace. Because of his job, he could get me in free. We would walk the mile from our house to the cinema together and sometimes he would ask me to carry his ‘Children Crossing’ sign.
But on that particular Saturday morning, for some reason I can no longer remember, we had not gone to Bolton. Instead, I was in the kitchen chatting with Nanny when a neighbour banged on the back door and then rushed in without waiting for an answer. She was very excited and panting and red in the face, from running I think; her eyes were big and round and she was clasping her hands together.
She just stood there in the doorway for a few moments, then blurted out to Nanny, ‘It’s poor Lillian, Polly. You have to come quickly.’
I thought it odd that someone should so urgently want Nanny to go and see my Mammy, who had gone out early that morning before I was up, as she so often did, probably heading for the secret hideaway where she had been spending so many of her days of late. She hadn’t said goodbye and that was not unusual either. But it was to become terribly important to me when I was told what she had done. I just couldn’t accept that Mammy would choose to go away for ever without saying goodbye to me. If she really loved me, as she had said, how could she have abandoned me?
I think Nanny knew straight away what had happened. Suddenly, she looked as though she had had all the stuffing knocked out of her. At eight, you are fairly switched on to what is going on around you, and watching Nanny, whose ruddy cheeks had gone very pale, and who had started to shake all over, I could hardly miss that something very dramatic must have happened, and that it involved Mammy.
Our neighbour looked at me in a very odd way and then went over and whispered in Nanny’s ear, which made her look even more unwell.
‘Oh my God,’ Nanny said very quietly, almost to herself, and then went into the living room, before reappearing a few seconds later with Granddad, who also looked shocked.
‘Is Joe upstairs?’ he asked, and I noticed that his voice was quaking.
Nanny nodded and he went to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, ‘Joe, come down now. We think something terrible has happened to Lillian. You need to come with me, now, to find out what’s up.’
My father was downstairs in a flash, and moments later he and Granddad and the neighbour were gone without any of them saying another word.
By now I was very curious and more than a little apprehensive.
‘What’s happened to Mammy?’ I asked Nanny. ‘Is she all right? Is she coming home?’
‘I don’t really know, Michael,’ she said. ‘I think your Mammy may have had an accident. That’s where Granddad and your daddy have gone. We’ll just wait here until they come home.’
I began to feel very nervous and frightened. If Mammy had been in an accident, I thought, then she might be badly hurt.
‘I ought to go and help her,’ I said.
But when I tried to leave, Nanny grabbed my arm and held me back. ‘Best to wait here, Michael,’ she said. ‘We don’t know where she is at the moment. And Daddy will want you to be here when he gets back.’
It was ages before they did come home, but the moment they appeared in the doorway I knew something really terrible had happened. Daddy was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks, and he did something that he had never done before. He came over to me and gathered me into his arms and hugged me close to him. It was the first time I could remember him ever giving me a hug, and I was filled with terror. I knew that for this to happen something absolutely dreadful must have occurred. To cause this change in Daddy, it had to be something very bad indeed.
He didn’t even try to explain himself. He released me and went upstairs, pausing only to say to Nanny, ‘You’d better tell him, Mum. It’ll come better from you.’
By this time she was crying as well, and even Granddad had wet eyes. He looked quite horrified, as though he had been forced to look at something which nobody should be expected to see. His eyes were darting about all over the place and he was shaking worse than Nanny.
She came over and put her arms around me, as Daddy had done, and told me quietly that Mammy would not be coming home to us ever again – she had died in an accident.
Even when I heard the words, I couldn’t take them in properly. They just weren’t registering. I was stunned. It couldn’t be true, I told her. It wasn’t possible.
If you don’t actually see the dead body of somebody you know very well, it is very difficult to believe it has happened. Had her death followed an overdose of pills, I could have accepted it more easily. But this didn’t make sense. How could Mammy not be coming back – ever? I began to panic, and the tears started to flow.
Nanny just carried on hugging me and talking to me. ‘I’m so sorry, Michael,’ she said. ‘I know she loved you so much, but now, however hard, we have to accept that she is gone. That she is in heaven now and has found the peace and happiness she has always wanted.’
It was then that I finally started to believe the unbelievable, and I think I went slightly crazy. I screamed and shouted and cried and dropped to the floor. I can remember punching the rug until my fists throbbed. I have never forgotten how angry I felt. Mammy had finally escape
d, as she had always promised she would do one day, but she hadn’t taken me with her. She had lied to me all along. It can’t have been just Daddy she wanted to get away from. She obviously wanted to get away from me as well.
I was still sobbing on the floor when the police came to the house, and Nanny had to scoop me up and lead me into the living room while they all talked in the kitchen behind a closed door.
Later that afternoon, Nanny explained to me that Mammy had fallen on the railway tracks and been killed, but she didn’t mention that it was suicide.
I did rack my brains, though, trying to work out how she had come to fall. I crossed the Long Lane railway bridge, the main one in Darcy Lever, every morning and every afternoon on my way to and from school, and it had a brick wall on either side which I could barely see over. It was much too tall for Mammy to have accidentally fallen over.
I was still puzzling about this when the time came for me to go to bed. When Daddy told me I should get into the big bed, I didn’t think there was anything strange about that, as it was something Mammy had asked me to do so often.
I felt exhausted, but I couldn’t get to sleep, still unable to come to terms with the fact that Mammy was dead. I was scared and bewildered just trying to envisage a future without her.
When Daddy came to bed, I was still awake but was taken totally by surprise when I felt his hand grip my wrist. Even if I’d been asleep it would have woken me. He shook me slightly and asked, ‘Are you awake, Michael?’
I told him I was, and fully expected him to start talking to me about Mammy and the dreadful loss we must be sharing.
Instead, he remained silent and pulled my hand towards him until it touched his naked body. ‘You know what to do,’ he said in that strange voice I still remembered from the last time this had happened, over a year before, and which I had hoped never to hear again.
Nobody's Child Page 9
