I couldn’t talk to anyone about my feelings and became more and more withdrawn, avoiding even the few friends I had. I would wait until after the time to go to school and then go to the big park near by and spend the whole day there alone, wandering and sitting and hurting. I wondered if this was the way Mammy had felt, and whether she had come to the park all those times when she had disappeared from the house for the whole day.
After Mammy’s death, my father spent little time at the house, and for this I was very grateful, because our mutual tragedy had not altered his attitude towards me in the slightest. He still beat me, sometime savagely, and forced me, with escalating threats and occasional physical ‘persuasion’, to indulge him in his vile night-time activities.
As before, my cries of pain in the night never brought Granddad or Nanny to my rescue, and on only one further occasion were the beatings my father gave me ever mentioned between the two men. It happened at breakfast, when I was sporting a black eye after a particularly nasty bedroom session the previous night.
To my regret and disappointment, this time Granddad did not punch Daddy on the jaw and knock him on his backside. But he did stand over him at the breakfast table and punch him quite hard, and repeatedly, on the shoulder while he told him to stop hitting me.
‘It’s your last warning, Joe Seed,’ he stormed. ‘If you want to be master in the house, then you’d better get your own bloody house, because you won’t do it in mine. This is the last time I’m going to tell you. If it happens again, you’ll be out of here, and this time there’ll be no sneaking back in.’
Daddy’s only response was to nod meekly. He may have been an inch or so taller than Granddad but, like most bullies, he was a coward when someone called his bluff.
It didn’t change anything, of course, but what none of us knew at the time was that I would only have to put up with the two of them for another month.
In fact, Granddad’s attacks on me had stopped altogether. It may be that Mammy’s suicide had affected him more than he cared to openly admit, or that age and illness were finally telling on him, but we rarely heard his voice raised in anger any more and he now spent most of his waking hours in his favourite chair in the living room. Neither watching television nor listening to the radio, he would just sit there dozing or perhaps daydreaming.
It meant one less trial for me at home, but meanwhile pressures on me outside the home were fast becoming unmanageable. I recognise now that at this point in my life I had become mentally ill.
Mr Bleasdale must have spotted the danger signs because he called in the Bolton Social Services and they appointed a special inspector to look after me. His name was Mr Maurice Ffelan, a bearded man in his early twenties who had recently graduated from university. He was unlike anyone I had ever met before.
He took me on days out, which we spent in the park or in the countryside, chatting about anything and everything. Part of his wisdom was that he never talked to me directly about my problems, but simply spent as much time as possible with me, listening to everything I had to say. He was the first person to whom I was able to open up and discuss my real feelings, though some things were still taboo, like the beatings I received at home and the things Daddy made me do to him in bed.
Mr Ffelan must have realised the amount of damage that had been done to me already, because he arranged for me to see a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, I took an instant dislike to her. She had enormous glasses, like Dame Edna Everage, and was more witchlike than my grandmother in Halewood and even more frightening.
Nanny had to accompany me to these sessions at a special clinic in Bolton and I think she found them just as strange as I did. I would sit in front of the psychiatrist and do little games with blocks and circles and draw shapes. She tried to get me to answer her questions but I refused to say anything. I wasn’t communicative.
I had blocked out everything and was totally withdrawn. Even if I could have brought myself to talk to the psychiatrist, how could I have told her about my intimate thoughts in front of Nanny, who sat in on all our meetings?
At every weekly session, I hated the blocks and the games I was asked to play and in the end I wouldn’t do anything at all. As an eight-year-old, I don’t think there was any way the woman could have counselled me on my loss or my problems, even if she had fully understood what they were.
I had become utterly withdrawn. I was off the Richter scale. But when I was with Mr Ffelan it was different. Then there were just the two of us and he never tried to draw me out or got me to play stupid games. He became a very good friend.
But in the end I simply could not stay at that school, and everyone knew it. I needed a new environment, they said, where I wasn’t known and nobody would know about my mother’s suicide. What I needed was to switch to a school away from Bolton, I was told, but I did need to go on attending school in order to get a proper education.
After the social workers talked with Daddy, it was decided that this was the right thing to do. I would go back to Halewood and live permanently with the Wicked Witch. But none of those charged with my care realised how much I loathed Grandma Seed. As with everything else in my life, I had always refused to talk about my feelings towards her, so nobody knew the extent of the horror they were sending me back to.
But even I could never have guessed how truly horrible my life was about to become.
Chapter Nineteen
The Scouse accent is unique, and in their devotion to all things Liverpudlian the majority of that city’s people are true zealots, unshakeably proud of the way they talk. And that boded ill for me.
It is hard to imagine that I could have been judged more alien by my new fellow pupils if I had gone out of my way to provoke them. I spoke with a Manchester accent while they, without exception, spoke pure Scouse. I was a stranger arriving at a new school, the Catholic primary school of St Andrew the Apostle, at age eight when the others had all started there aged five and knew one another.
I lived in a privately owned bungalow in an exclusive enclave with a snobbish well-off grandmother, while they all came from working-class, mostly hard-up families who lived on council estates.
On top of that, I was an illiterate dunce suffering from severe withdrawal problems and had to make weekly visits to the council psychiatrist. I was as different from them as it was possible to be. In short, I was the perfect victim.
It was a nightmarish scenario and was never destined to have a happy ending. From day one, I faced physical and verbal attacks; the second were not as gross as in Bolton, because these children had not heard about my mother’s suicide, but their jibes hurt me all the same, just as their blows did.
Perversely, I could only identify with those same council-house kids who despised me. The children who lived in our road, Mansell Drive, were all from snobbish homes like mine and considered themselves a cut above the council hordes who lived on their doorstep. But I too was considered an outsider and they looked down their noses at me. It was a ridiculous situation. They considered me too common and the kids at my school thought I was too posh.
The residents of our tiny cul-de-sac lived in almost siege-like conditions. At the end was an enormous wall that divided us from the council estates beyond, and behind every house was a massive fence topped with barbed wire, to keep the council tenants at bay. To the Wicked Witch and her neighbours, what lay on the other side of those physical barriers was as alien to them as the far side of the moon.
Sometimes I managed to sneak away into the forbidden area beyond the wall and play with some of the younger children. I was occasionally invited into their homes by the other kids’ parents and made very welcome, and would be given things to eat like mushy peas and chips, which I loved. But, on those very rare occasions when I risked taking one of my few friends home with me, my grandmother was incredibly rude to them and ordered the ‘council scum’ out of her house.
None of this helped my reputation at St Andrew the Apostle, where I continued to ignore classwork
and learned precisely nothing. I supposed that the headmaster and teachers in Halewood had been briefed by social services and my headmaster in Bolton, because I was never punished for mentally absenting myself from classes.
Often I went for days without speaking. The teachers knew never to ask me questions and I learned not to respond to verbal abuse from the children; while at home one of Grandma Seed’s favourite punishments was to subject me to the ‘silent treatment’. I would be made to stand in a corner for hours on end and was forbidden to speak, and at weekends I would often be confined to my awful attic room for the whole day, banned from having the light on, even though in the winter it was dark by four in the afternoon and it became very scary and lonely up there alone.
It was a form of psychological warfare and Grandma Seed had the power to do anything she wanted. Sometimes her vindictiveness made me almost hate my dead mother for opting out and leaving me a slave to someone else’s whims.
In the whole time I stayed with her, the Wicked Witch never once used the word ‘please’ when she told me to do something or ‘thank you’ after I performed some chore she had set me. Her comments were nearly all demeaning: ‘stupid little boy’, ‘naughty boy’, ‘hateful child’, or brief orders such as ‘Shut up’, ‘Be quiet’ or, the most frequent, ‘Silence, boy’.
Mealtimes were a constant battle of wills. There was none of the delicious food that Nanny gave me, like egg and chips or shepherd’s pie. I recognise now that the Seeds followed a far healthier diet, with lots of fresh vegetables and fish, but it wasn’t food I was used to and I didn’t like it.
Grandma Seed would torture me if I didn’t eat everything she put on my plate. She would pinch my arms and any other exposed parts of my body and pull little clumps of hair from my temples, where it hurt the most. Sometimes she and my aunt would try to force-feed me, just as Daddy had done, and I wondered if this was something that had happened to him when he was a boy.
The first time was when we were eating fish and spinach and leeks. To me all three were revolting. They had finished theirs but I hadn’t eaten a single mouthful when Grandma Seed set to. She brought a clothes peg from the kitchen and, while Aunt Sheila held my arms to my sides, she fastened it on my nose and squeezed my cheeks with the fingers and thumb of one hand, forcing my mouth to open. Then, with the other hand, she tried to spoon a mixture of the stuff on my plate into my mouth.
I struggled and kicked out, but my chair was well forward, pressing my tummy against the edge of the table, and my flailing legs were trapped underneath the table, where I couldn’t hurt my attackers.
But in the end nature took its course and I suddenly vomited, not only all over the plate and tablecloth but also on to Grandma Seed’s dress. She screamed and leaped backwards and then started to whack me on the sides of my head with her open palms.
My ears rang from the pummelling, and then I threw up again, this time over myself and the carpet.
Aunt Sheila finally released me and I pulled the clothes peg from my nose and covered my head with my arms. But this time I refused to cry. I stifled the sobs in my throat. I was not, I swore to myself, going to give them the satisfaction of reducing me to tears.
I don’t know how long I sat there, with my eyes tight shut and my arms wrapped around my head, but when I looked again Grandma Seed was standing there with a bucket and a cloth and a large spoon.
‘I’ve a good mind to make you lick it all up, you filthy little animal,’ she hissed. ‘But you can clean your own mess up with these,’ she added, handing me the spoon and cloth.
I had to spoon up as much of my vomit and spilled food as I could and wipe up the rest with the cloth, then pour the whole lot down the toilet and wash out the bucket and cloth in the kitchen.
Then she ordered me to wash myself and go to bed. There was no question of my having anything to eat. It meant lying there, in my damp sheets, with a rumbling tummy, until sleep rescued me, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that Grandma Seed hadn’t won.
They hadn’t made me eat. And they hadn’t made me cry. Tiny victories perhaps, but I desperately needed some victories, however tiny.
They tried the same tactic again a week later, and with the same result, so after that they never tried to forcefeed me again.
Grandma Seed simply changed her approach, and made me sit in front of my untouched food until bedtime. Often it meant going to bed without any dinner, but it was no worse than it had been in Manchester, and I was far too stubborn to seek a compromise. I was losing at everything else in life, so I felt I had to win this battle with Grandma Seed, no matter what the cost.
Even Aunt Sheila would sometimes lose her temper with her mother. It would have been difficult for an outsider to spot, but I learned to recognise the signs. When she was angry, her mouth would go very tight and round and she would call her ‘Florence’. A small thing, but it was like a warning slap in the face for Grandma Seed, who would pull in her witch’s claws and go easy with my aunt until she reverted to calling her ‘Mum’.
During the rest of that year, Daddy came to visit only three times, though he could never have been more than about 25 miles away. Not seeing him didn’t matter to me any more. To satisfy the curiosity of the few kids I did talk to in Halewood, I had reinvented my mother and father. They were a beautiful couple who lived in an exotic location abroad, where they pursued glamorous jobs. I wished with all my heart that Daddy really did live abroad and never came to see me, for in his case absence did not make the heart any fonder, and he gave me a sound thrashing during each of his visits.
The odd thing is that he carried out each of these attacks in front of his mother, almost as though he was performing them for her benefit. These occasions, when he beat me and reduced me to tears in her presence, were some of the rare occasions when I saw Grandma Seed smile. I’m convinced she derived pleasure from watching Daddy pummel me with his fists. What surprised me was that she didn’t actually clap her hands in approval.
I doubt, though, that she would have liked what her ‘dearest son’ later made me do to him in bed, in the privacy of my attic bedroom, before the bruises had properly darkened.
The last time I saw Daddy was on Christmas Day in 1966, the most miserable Christmas in my life, though it hadn’t started out that way. Carol singers had come to our front door on Christmas Eve and sung ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’ and ‘Oh Little Town Of Bethlehem’, and Aunt Sheila had taken them mince pies and allowed me to put some coins in their collecting box. For a short time, I let myself dream that this was going to be a merry Christmas for me.
But later, when I was asleep, Daddy came to my room and got into bed with me and forced me, with whispered threats and a hand clutching my throat so tight I could scarcely breathe, to perform the usual revolting service for him.
It was our first meeting in nearly two months and he hadn’t even said hello.
Christmas Day fell on a Sunday that year and the Wicked Witch insisted that we all go, as was her preference, to Bishop Eton Monastery for Mass, which oddly, for me, turned out to be the brightest part of the day. The monastery wasn’t our nearest place of worship but had a prestigious reputation, and was in Woolton, one of the richest and most snobbish suburbs of Liverpool.
Lunch, with none of the crackers and paper hats which the Ramsdens so much enjoyed at Christmas, took place, like all our meals in Grandma Seed’s house, in the dining room, and in silence until almost at the end, when she insisted I eat all my greens before I could have any pudding. She had deliberately and maliciously piled my plate with Brussels sprouts and broccoli, even though she knew I didn’t like them. I had forced down a few mouthfuls but she ordered me to finish every scrap on my plate.
Help came from an unexpected quarter. ‘It is Christmas, Mum. Perhaps just this once he can be allowed to leave it,’ said Aunt Sheila.
‘Rubbish,’ snapped her mother. ‘There are millions of starving children around the world who would do anything for the chance to eat what
he’s got. If he won’t eat it, then no pudding and no presents.’
Having no pudding was not a hardship, as I only really liked the sherry butter and the cream, but no presents? I hadn’t even known that presents were an option, as they hadn’t been mentioned before. But even that temptation wasn’t enough to induce me to eat that pile of soggy green stuff on my plate.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Did it speak?’ Grandma Seed demanded to know of the others. ‘Did that revolting piece of filth actually dare to speak?’ She looked hopefully towards Daddy, whose eyes had narrowed.
‘Stop being such an ungrateful little toad and do what your grandma tells you, or I can promise you’ll regret it.’
Now we were in well-trodden territory and I shivered in frightened anticipation of the pain about to be visited on me.
Grandma Seed’s eyes glittered. She knew what was coming as well, I could tell, and seemed to be eagerly looking forward to my getting another beating.
But even the thought of spoiling her fun wasn’t enough to make me eat the greens. I just accepted my fate, as I always did. I was too small and weak to do anything else.
‘I can’t,’ I said, knowing that with those words I was done for.
Grandma didn’t have long to wait for her entertainment. Daddy pushed back his chair and strode out of the room, before returning moments later swinging the dog’s lead, a leather and metal-chain affair, which he had doubled over.
He came straight around the table and hauled me from my seat by the hair, pushed me to the floor on my knees and began to flog me on the back and bottom with the lead.
I began to scream and Grandma Seed began to giggle. Even through my pain, I tried to work out what she must be finding so funny about the situation.
‘We wish you a merry Christmas.’ Fat chance.
Nobody's Child Page 11
