I ate it, even though every mouthful stuck in my throat. As I forced it down a hopeless rage rose inside me; hatred was born that Christmas. Laughter around the table became the sound of adults conspiring and my childhood, although still not completely gone, only hung on by a few threads.
Crackers were pulled, hats were placed on top of heads and faces grew flushed, both from the heat of the fire and the whiskey diluted with water that everyone, except my mother and I, drank in copious quantities. She had her bottle of dry sherry while I drank orange squash.
My mind stayed on the big gentle bird that had looked so forlorn when he had lived in that tiny back room for the last days of his life. I felt shame that Christmas had meant he had to die and shame that to protect myself from ridicule I had swallowed that meat.
The Christmas pudding was served next and my portion had the silver coin. Then it was time to open our presents. My grandparents gave me a new jumper, my aunt and uncles hair ribbons, slides, trinkets and a doll. My parents handed me a large parcel with an English postmark. Once opened it revealed several Enid Blyton books with my name written in them from my English grandmother. I was filled with a feeling of such longing to see her again as memories flooded in of my earlier, happier days. I saw again her small, neatly dressed figure, heard her voice calling ‘Antoinette, where are you?’, heard my own laughter as I pretended to hide and smelt her perfume of lilies and face powder as she bent down to kiss me. Somehow, I thought, if she was there our home would be happy again.
My parents gave me a pencil case for school and two second-hand books. Fairly soon after that it was time to go.
That night we drove back to the thatched house and I went straight to bed, too tired to hear the scurrying in the thatch, or to switch on the torch.
On Boxing Day I went for a walk on my own, for once leaving the dogs behind in the hope of seeing rabbits and hares playing. There was a field at the top of a slight hill where I could lie to watch them. That morning I was to be disappointed. The weather was too cold for me and for them.
It was not until Easter that my patience was rewarded as I lay motionless on top of the daisy-spotted hillock. I held my breath, scared that the slightest noise would alert the rabbit families. I stayed out of sight, but close enough to see the whites of their bobtails. Whole families left their burrows to gambol in the field below and welcome the spring in. That day I came across a baby rabbit that seemed to have been abandoned by its parents. It sat, unmoving, with its bright eyes flickering nervously as I bent to pick it up. Tucking it under my jumper for warmth I could feel its heart beating rapidly as I raced home.
‘What have you got there?’ exclaimed my mother, seeing the bulge of the rabbit.
Pulling my jumper up I showed her and she gently took it from me.
‘We’ll make a home for it until it’s big enough to find its family,’ she said.
Gathering newspapers, she showed me how to shred them so that they would provide a warm nest, then she found a wooden box and the first of the makeshift cages was made. When the farmers found that we had one rescued rabbit they brought us several more. They explained that dogs and foxes often killed the parents, leaving the young unable to fend for themselves. The care of these orphaned rabbits was something my mother and I did together. We put straw, water and food into the cages and fed them by hand.
‘When they’re big,’ she warned me, ‘you can’t keep them as pets any more. These are wild rabbits. They belong in the fields. But we’ll keep them until they’re strong enough to be released.’
My father silently watched my mother and I doing this together. Always sensitive to his moods, I felt his growing resentment, aware of his gaze. For once he said nothing, as it was an interest my mother shared with me.
A few weeks after the first rabbit had been rescued and we were preparing to release it into the fields I came downstairs to find my mother glaring at me, her face white with anger.
Before I could duck her hand rose and struck me full in the face. Her hands, surprisingly strong for someone of her size, took my shoulders and shook them. My father was watching us furtively as he warmed himself by the range with a complacent smirk on his face.
‘What have I done?’ were the only words that I could manage to stutter as my hair flew into my eyes and my head bounced on my neck.
‘You’ve been in to the rabbits. You left the door open. The dogs got in. They’ve torn them to pieces.’
‘I shut the door last night,’ I tried to protest. ‘I’ve not been down since.’
Again her hand rose. This time she told me the slap was for my deceit. Then she dragged me into the back room to show me the carnage. Bits of tail were on the bloodstained floor, clumps of fur were scattered everywhere and the only parts left whole were the paws. I wanted to scream but my throat seemed to close as my body shook with suppressed sobs.
On her instructions I filled a pail with water and started to scrub the blood from the floor. As I worked the one thought that filled my head was that I knew I had shut the cage door.
Chapter Eight
Life at the thatched house continued, each day blending into the next: the walks to school, my weekend tasks and ‘the drives’. Occasionally the routine would be broken by a visit to my grandparents, but the joy of visiting them had diminished since Christmas.
One Saturday, when I collected the milk from the nearby farm, the farmer’s wife invited us all for high tea on the following Sunday. She gave me a note to give to my mother and to my delight my parents accepted.
High tea in the country was served at six o’clock, as the farming community rose at dawn and retired early in the evening. The game of happy families started as soon as I, freshly bathed with neatly brushed hair, was dressed in my best outfit. I had been hoping to explore the farm, so I was reluctant to put it on, knowing my mother, fearful of it getting dirty, never liked me to play in it.
On our arrival, as though reading my mind, the farmer’s wife said to her two sons, ‘Take Antoinette out and show her around the farm. She likes animals.’
I rushed eagerly outside with the two boys before my mother could warn me about keeping clean. Even though they were a couple of years older than me they’d always seemed shy but once outside, away from the adults, they became friendly. Firstly they showed me a sty with a fat sow lying motionless on her side, each teat covered by greedily guzzling piglets, she seemingly oblivious to them. On hearing our voices she opened one white-lashed eye; seeing we were no threat to her young, she sleepily shut it and resumed her slumber. Next I followed the boys to where the cows were being electronically milked. The large bovine creatures paid us no attention as they stood patiently while the machinery drained their udders. Nearby was an outhouse where butter was still made with a hand-turned churn. Finally we entered a barn where the hay had been made into bales and stacked up to roof height. A ladder rested against the tallest pile and, squealing with laughter, we played a type of hide and seek until the farmer’s wife called us in.
The boys had to go and wash, because they had been helping their father on the farm that day, even though it was a Sunday. The farmer came in to get ready for tea, and my mother offered to help his wife lay the table.
‘Antoinette, when you went out, did you see the kittens?’ the farmer’s wife asked.
‘No,’ I replied.
My father was the nice father that day and took me by the hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘While they’re getting tea ready I’ll take you there, we’ll look for them together.’
It was the last day I believed in the nice father.
Still holding my hand, he led me to the barn where just a few minutes earlier the boys and I had been playing. Going to the back we found the nest of multi-coloured kittens, ranging from jet black to a marmalade gold, so young their eyes were still a milky blue. As I looked at them one yawned, showing dainty white teeth. Between them protruded a small, very pink tongue. Lulled by the intoxicating farm aromas and enchanted by the wrig
gling bundles of fluff, I knelt down to stroke their silky fur. I looked up at my father longingly, hoping that maybe he would let me have one. As my eyes met his I froze: the nice father had disappeared; I saw the gleam in his eyes, saw his mocking gaze and felt again that lump of fear that controlled my voice box, rendering me speechless.
As though in slow motion I felt his hands roughly lift my frock, felt the yank on my knickers as they were pulled down to my ankles, felt the roughness of the straw on my bare body, felt him penetrate me and felt his shudders a few seconds later. Slime trickled down my leg but when I looked down all I could see were my freshly polished black shoes with my white knickers draped on them.
As he buttoned up his flies he took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and threw it at me. As though through a tunnel, I heard his voice say, ‘Clean yourself up with that, my girl.’
The happiness I had felt that day dissolved, the sun disappeared and in its place twilight coloured the world, turning it into a grey unfriendly place. I did as he’d told me, while he watched.
‘Ready, Antoinette?’ he asked as he brushed me down. Then, putting on his ‘nice father’s’ face, he took my hand and led me back to the house for tea.
The farmer’s wife was all smiles. Thinking my downcast face was because my father had not let me keep a kitten, she said: ‘They don’t make good pets, Antoinette. Farm cats are only interested in catching rats.’
I looked at her mutely. Speech eluded me and numbly I took my place at the table. We sat down for a generous Irish high tea. She had laid out a spread of home-cured ham, roasted chicken, hard-boiled eggs, salad, potato cakes, soda bread and homemade jam. She kept saying: ‘Antoinette, come on, eat.’ Then she remarked to my mother: ‘She’s very quiet today.’
My mother’s eyes caught mine with a look of disdain that froze me, and then she turned to the farmer’s wife with her polite smile fixed firmly in place and answered, ‘She’s such a bookworm, my daughter. She’s not a great chatterer.’
Other than visiting my grandparents, I can remember no other family days out during that period of my life.
As I sat in the hospice lounge, I thought about that little girl who had once been me. I thought about her when she was a trusting toddler, trusting in the love of her mother, and having no reason to doubt other adults. I saw again the picture of her smiling confidently into the camera when she was three. I thought of her excitement at travelling to Northern Ireland, her joy at starting a new school, her love of her dog. I wondered then what Antoinette would have been like had she been allowed to grow up normally.
I felt her presence as another picture was forced into my mind. I saw a dark room; in it a small, frightened child was hunched tightly up in bed, a thumb in her mouth for comfort. Her dark brown curls were plastered damply on the back of her neck while her eyes were wide open. She was too scared to close them in case her nightmare returned: the nightmare of being chased, of being out of control; the nightmare that still haunted my sleep began with her then.
Knowing that the days of calling out to her mother had gone, she could only lie and shiver until sleep returned to force her eyes unwillingly shut.
Then I remembered for the first time in many years the ultimate betrayal of that little girl, the betrayal that sealed her fate. Only by hiding her in the depths of my memory and creating Toni could there have been survival.
If I could have reached my arms out to her through the decades, I would have picked her up and taken her somewhere safe, but Antoinette was no longer there to be saved.
I kept coming back to the same question: ‘Why did my mother go into such a state of denial that enabled such a childhood?’
I’d always thought of my mother as having had a ruined life, never having any happiness, her life destroyed by my father’s selfishness. I’d always seen that she came from a comfortable English middle-class background, had never been happy in Northern Ireland and believed she had simply married the wrong man. But there, for the first time, with no diversions to take my mind away from these memories, it dawned on me exactly what my mother had done. She knew when I told her of that kiss what would inevitably follow. She was thirty-six years old when I told her, a woman who had gone through a war. She took me away from the school where I was happy. A school which had some of the most qualified teachers in Northern Ireland, and where the headmistress, a diligent and intelligent woman, would have recognized the change in a child and questioned the reasons why. That was when my mother, I realized, became my father’s accomplice.
‘Now do you understand, Toni?’ came the whisper. ‘Now do you understand what she did?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘No, I don’t understand what she did. I want her to tell me. I want her to tell me why.’
‘Remember the games, Toni,’ came the whisper.
First there was his game of ‘our secret’. Then there was the game of ‘happy families’, and her final game of Ruth, ‘the victim’.
My mind went back to the many occasions that she used her English accent and lady-like demeanour to talk herself out of situations, convincing people I was the difficult child and she was the long-suffering mother of one.
She knew that with a four-mile walk home from school there’d be no time for me to have friends. The children who attended the village school all lived near to it, so during the weekends and holidays I would be isolated. There was nobody I was going to confide my troubles to.
I suppose, I thought sadly, that was something I’d always known. I had never stopped loving my mother, for that is something children do. I was never able to stop, never had the desire to stop. But I wondered now, when she only had such a short time to live, if finally she would offer me some explanation. Would she finally admit that she had not been a victim, that the guilt she’d tried to make me feel was not my guilt? Would some plea for forgiveness come from her lips?
That’s what I wanted, that’s what I hoped for, as I returned to my mother’s bedside and drifted into sleep in the reclining chair.
Chapter Nine
Ablack fog of depression hung over the thatched house. It swirled around our heads, pervading our minds. It poisoned the atmosphere and became words; words which acted as tools of bitterness, reproach and anger. Hers were always the same recriminations. He gambled, he drank, he’d lost his severance pay. Her voice chased him from the house, following him to the gate. The force of his anger would float back, lingering like a black shadow in every corner of the house.
Tea chests again stood in the living room and the dogs, as though sensing a question mark over their future, hid under the table.
My mother had already told me that we would have to move. Upstairs, when I’d gone to bed, I would pull the bedclothes over my head to block out the anxiety, which the constant sound of their anger bred.
The isolation of the poultry farm, the cold and the lack of money, for however hard she worked there was never enough, stoked her fury. But one smile from my father could always dispel it.
My mother’s ambition had always been to be a house owner, as her family had been before her. Here her hopes of a profitable business had folded; it was a struggle to pay the rent, and there was certainly nothing left over to save.
‘Antoinette,’ she informed me one evening, ‘tomorrow I’m going to take you to meet an old lady. If she likes you, we might be going to live with her. I want you to be on your best behaviour and if we move there you’ll go back to your old school. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
I could feel the hope rise up in me but I tried to conceal it as I replied: ‘Yes, Mummy, I would like that very much.’
That night I went to bed clinging to that nugget of hope. Could I really leave that village school where I was so disliked and go back to a school where I’d been popular? Then other thoughts came into my head: who was this old lady and why was my mother taking me and not my father? Questions that I could not find the answers to buzzed around my head until I fell into a fitful sleep.
; I awoke early the next morning and the memory of the previous night’s conversation with my mother jumped straight to the forefront of my mind. A feeling of excitement coursed through my body, a feeling that I tried to suppress because I didn’t want it to be followed by disappointment.
Was I really going to have a day out with my mother, and might I be going back to my old school, leaving behind the village school that I hated so much? Hope burned inside me as I went down the stairs.
Pans of water boiling on the stove reassured me when my mother told me they were for my wash. By the time I’d finished breakfast the tin bath was filled. Undressing quickly I immersed myself in the water. First I soaped myself all over, enjoying the feeling of the soapy water trickling through my fingers, and then I rinsed my body with my face-cloth, washed my hair in the heated rainwater and rinsed it until I could hear it squeak with cleanliness, before being briskly towel dried. Next my mother took her silver-backed hairbrush and with slow strokes commenced to brush. Lulled by the hypnotic rhythm of the brush and relaxed by the warmth of the stove, I leant against her knees, basking in the attention. A sense of security enfolded me with her ministrations. I wished they still took place every night, as once they had.
Once my mother had tied my hair back with a ribbon, she laid out my best outfit, gave me a pair of clean white socks and polished my shoes. When we were both ready my father drove us into Coleraine, where my mother and I caught a bus, which took us a few miles into the countryside.
When the bus dropped us off, we walked a few yards until we came to the entrance of a driveway that was partially obscured by overgrown hedgerows. On a tree was nailed a sign that simply read ‘Cooldaragh’.
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