Please, Daddy, No
Stuart Howarth

A BOY BETRAYED

WITH ANDREW CROFTS

Copyright

HarperElement

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

The website address is: www.thorsonselement.com

and HarperElement are trademarks of HarperCollinsPublishers Limited

Published by HarperElement 2006

© Stuart Howarth 2006

Stuart Howarth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007279975

Version 2019-10-22

TO MY SISTERSHIRLEY ANNE HOWARTH

1 FEBRUARY 1965 – 8 FEBRUARY 1991AGED 26 YEARS

I miss you, ‘Shirl the Whirl’,and today I know that you escaped awayto peace and freedom.

I watch you dance in the summer meadows,running free and chasing butterflies.

Today I smile for us all –love you!

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One Driving West

Chapter Two Mum And The Bin Man

Chapter Three The Pen

Chapter Four A More Private World

Chapter Five A Very Naughty Boy

Chapter Six Our Clare

Chapter Seven Just Messing Around

Chapter Eight The Man Of The House

Chapter Nine No Answers

Chapter Ten My Rock

Chapter Eleven A Time Bomb

Chapter Twelve Tracey

Chapter Thirteen The Lump Hammer

Chapter Fourteen Forget Everything

Chapter Fifteen Kicking Off

Chapter Sixteen Strangeways

Chapter Seventeen Did You Enjoy It?

Chapter Eighteen Guilty Or Not Guilty

Chapter Nineteen Pictures Of The Outside World

Chapter Twenty A New Father Figure

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Introduction

There are thousands of kids out there, just like me, who suffer abuse on a daily basis. You can turn a blind eye and consider this too nasty to read about, or you can take a courageous step forward and share a few moments from my world. We can only bring about change by doing something positive and being prepared to listen. This is my story.

Chapter One DRIVING WEST

I know when I set out from Mum’s pub that evening, 20 August 2000, I intended to go to pick up my girlfriend, Tracey, from her house. I know I intended to because otherwise I would never have taken the road I did. If I had set out with the intention of driving back to Wales I would have taken a more direct route.

Something happened inside my head between leaving Mum’s and getting to Tracey’s place, which stopped me from turning off the road. I just kept on going west. I know I didn’t have any set plan in my head; I just wanted a lot of answers to a lot of questions. Why had he done the things he’d done to me and the girls? Did he still love me? Was he sorry for what he’d done to the family? Was he really my dad or not?

A good few miles down the road, when it dawned on me where I was heading, I phoned Tracey. ‘I need to sort this thing,’ I told her. ‘I need to see him.’

‘You’re lying,’ she said, ‘aren’t you? You’re just going out with your friends again to do more drugs, aren’t you? I thought this was going to be a new start for us, Stuart, but you aren’t going to change, are you?’

I switched the phone off and just kept driving west. I could understand exactly why she would think the way she did; I’d let her down often enough in the past, why should she have faith in me any more? But there wasn’t enough space in my head to think through what I might be doing to our relationship, the best relationship I had ever had in my life. Feelings, thoughts, memories, confusion and enormous pain were all mixed together. The thing I wanted most of all was to try to make some sense of it all, to find some sort of resolution with the past.

Chapter Two MUM AND THE BIN MAN

He always seemed to be there, part of my life – my dad. But it must have been around 1972 that he first started courting Mum. He would be in the garden, sweeping up for her, or coming round to see us, bringing sweets, or presents that he’d picked up on his bin rounds. He was a great collector, was Dad, a real magpie. Anything he found that he thought still had any life in it he would cart home: furniture, broken toys, even a telly, which was the first we’d ever had. From having absolutely nothing, our house suddenly started to fill up with stuff that other people didn’t want, much of which we needed badly and some of which just cluttered the place up.

His bin round was in an area of Ashton-under-Lyne where the residents threw out things that were better than anything we had ever had. Some of the things still worked. The telly did sometimes if you banged it very hard on the side in just the right place. Most of the time the screen was pierced with a single, tiny white dot. I would get up close and try to peer through the dot, in the hope of seeing the picture through it, like a ‘What the butler saw’ peep show. My efforts were usually only rewarded by a short period of blindness while my eyes tried to refocus. I loved pushing the buttons in and out. I discovered that if I pressed two together they stuck in, but if I pressed a third button it would release them. Intrigued by these experiments I tried pushing all six while Mum was out at work, and they all jammed. Dad was furious, slapping me hard on the backs of my legs, making my skin burn, punching and kicking me until I went numb.

‘Please, Daddy, no! I’m sorry!’

He threw me up the stairs and I dragged my battered body to bed, sobbing myself to sleep, crying for my mum. I was so sorry for being such a naughty little boy. I wanted to turn the clock back to just before I’d committed my crime and to make my daddy love me again. I vowed to myself that I would make an extra effort to be good for him.

He was always very scruffy, as you might expect a bin man to be, always wearing his welly boots however hot the weather, but no small boy worries about details like that. I was often out in the street with no clothes on at all myself, caked in dirt. None of the men round our estate was exactly what you would call smart, although Dad was probably one of the worst. He was big, over six feet tall with black hair, which he would wear with a side parting on the left. I would watch him combing it over with his left hand in the mirror and then patting the top of his head to flatten it out, imitating the action even though I had hardly any hair of my own. He had a moustache too, although it never seemed to grow that well. Thinking back now, I suppose that was because he was still a young man himself, barely out of his teens. When he was around the house he liked listening to sentimental songs like ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’, or anything by the Carpenters.

He had a slight limp from some childhood accident, and there was always a skirmish of dogs swirling around his boots. Mum had her Alsatian, Tina, and Dad had his Jack Russells, Bobby and Trixie – a working man’s terriers, dogs that were quick enough to catch a rat when necessary and intelligently loyal to their master. Mum had got Tina while she was living on her own with us, as protection. This was a time when the Moors murders were still fresh in people’s minds, when lone women felt nervous and vulnerable.

Our street was full of big families with no money. Most of them had no fathers around either, the mothers struggling to bring up as many as ten children on their own, in any way they could. Most of the kids would have different dads and even some of the women weren’t sure who the fathers were. My sisters and I felt special because we had a dad and we believed he would protect us if we needed it, because he was big and tough and hard. I believed fervently he could fight anybody and win; he was the best, my dad; he was my hero.

Mum had been brought up in Mullingar, in Southern Ireland. My Nana came over to England to get work, promising to send for the children once she was settled. Mum loved it in Ireland, living with her Grandma Lacey. But when my Nana met and married a man called Albert in England she sent for her children and Mum had to leave Ireland.

After an unhappy few years, Mum met George Heywood. She was sixteen and he was much older, somewhere around forty. She stumbled getting off a bus one day and had to go to hospital. The ambulance that arrived to take her was already carrying George, which was how they met. She always said she married him to get away from her family life, and I have no reason to doubt her. Their first baby, Shirley, was born in 1965 with spina bifida and other problems. Christina followed a year later, at a time when Shirley was being operated on in another part of the same hospital. I came along two years after that in 1968. Life for Mum at that stage must have seemed hopelessly tough, but she never considered giving any of us up or handing us over for someone else to look after.

There wasn’t even enough money to buy me a cot, so I would sleep in drawers or whatever Mum could find to hold me. Then I was put into a bed with Christina, which I liked because it made me feel loved and comforted, although it meant that if one of us wet the bed both of us got wet. Sometimes we would share with Shirley as well but if we wriggled in the night we would catch her spine, making her cry out in pain.

George, I’m told, proved to be a heavy drinker and a bit of a womanizer, and found the strains of family life, particularly with a disabled child, too much to handle. He and Mum parted soon after I was born, although she was always vague about the exact timing, and the council moved us all to a semi-detached house in Smallshaw Lane on the Smallshaw estate. I guess our area was where they put troublesome families whom they thought might disturb the tranquillity of nicer neighbourhoods. There were no fences or gates; doors were always open, with people going neighbouring all the time, scrounging knobs of butter or cups of sugar off one another. There was always a whiff of hostility in the air as everyone struggled to ensure their own survival.

Knowing that I was too young to remember any different, Mum decided to pretend that George was nothing to do with me.

‘You know,’ she would say to me from time to time, when Dad wasn’t around, ‘you are a very special little boy. You know you really are your Dad’s, don’t you? He’s not the real father of the girls, but he is yours. But we don’t want to make the girls feel left out, do we? So we’ll pretend he’s your stepdad too.’

I felt sorry for the girls, having a different dad who had gone off and left them, but proud that Dad was mine, even if he did have his faults. Knowing who my dad was meant I knew who I was and where I’d come from. He gave me an identity that not many of the kids around our way could hope for. What kid doesn’t want to have a real dad? Sometimes Mum would spot George in the street and point him out to the girls, and I felt I was better than them because my dad was the one taking care of us at home while George had deserted them. In my mind my dad was better than theirs.

‘You’re my fucking son,’ Dad would say to me sometimes, almost as if he was angry with me for allowing any element of doubt in the matter.

There were no carpets on the floor in our house, nor in most of the houses in Smallshaw, and no curtains at the windows. Families that wanted privacy would stick up newspapers, or smear Windolene on the panes, which would serve the dual purpose of keeping out prying eyes and providing us with a canvas to play noughts and crosses or draw silly faces on. My earliest memory is of sitting outside the front of the house in the dirt, digging a hole with a discarded lollipop stick.

Things just kept coming through the door as Dad increased his collection. There was a PVC suite to replace our ripped and stained old sofa. The arrival of new furniture would always bring a troop of neighbours in to have a look, to admire or to mutter jealously.

‘This will be good for Shirley,’ Dad announced. ‘It won’t soak up her piss and we can just wipe it.’

My sister Shirley was incontinent and the house always stank of urine, although it wasn’t all hers. The smell of urine, dogs and fags pervaded everything. The grown-ups were always having to change poor Shirley because there was nothing she could do about it herself. The trouble with the plastic material on the new suite was that it stuck to the backs of our bare legs after we had been sat on it for a while, and it would hurt to tear ourselves away, like ripping plasters off cuts.

I never realized when I was tiny that we were washed less often than most kids, that we were always dirty and covered in dog hairs. It was only when other kids started to take the mickey that the penny dropped. We always wore shorts, swapped between me and Christina, and Mum would only ever buy us new stuff from jumble sales, or nick it off the washing lines of the better-off areas.

We were always being sent out to scrounge things off the neighbours. Once I’d been given whatever I’d been sent to ask for I would walk back home slowly. If it were margarine it would be wrapped in a bit of foil and would start to melt, giving me a chance to lick the sweetness from my dirty hands. Mostly we ate jam and sugar butties, or sometimes lard or dripping. Anything we could get hold of we crammed into our mouths to stave off the continuous pangs of hunger.

The ice cream man hated coming up our street because he always got hassled for broken lollies and wafers; twenty kids all milling round the van shouting at him at once. Sometimes he would feel sorry for me if he found me on my own and would give me a chocolate flake. ‘Don’t tell the others,’ he’d warn, and I never did.

Mum always seemed to owe people money and we would have to hide behind the sofa if men came knocking at the door. Because I was the youngest in the family and most innocent looking, she would send me to the chip shop most days, usually with no money. ‘Tell them you’ve forgotten it,’ she would say.

I hated doing it, but I hated being hungry even more. When the lady behind the counter asked for the money I would burst into tears. She would then feel embarrassed in front of the other customers and tell me to bring it later. After a while she started asking for the money before she served me. In those days you could take your own plate to the chip shop to be filled up. Mum would send me with a bowl, which the lady would fill up with gravy, giving us more to go round. Even when I was only two or three years old I would lurk outside the chip shop late in the evening asking customers for a chip as they came out with their dinners, having spent the evening in the pub. If they were in a really good mood they would buy me a whole portion of my own.

Shirley’s spina bifida meant she had a hole in the middle of her back and this caused a deformity of the spine. She was paralysed from the waist down and didn’t have any control or any mobility or any feeling in her legs. She was also hydrocephalous, a condition creating fluid around the brain. There was nothing wrong with her mind, but she had to be constantly lifted and cared for and had a shunt to drain the excess fluid from around her brain. She had a hump on her back as well, which was the result of an operation to stitch over the hole in her spine. Life had been cruel to her from the moment she was born.

To make matters worse, she also had epileptic fits from time to time. She always knew when they were coming because her mouth would get dry and she would start smacking her lips together. The first time I saw it happen I was about five years old. Mum and Dad had gone out for the night, leaving us on our own. It didn’t bother us. As a small kid Shirley was always in and out of hospital with Mum, which meant Christina and I were often left to fend for ourselves.

‘I don’t feel well,’ Shirley told us that evening. ‘I think I might be about to have a fit.’

The next thing she was shaking in her wheelchair and there was white foam coming out of her mouth. I remembered Mum saying we had to get her tongue out so she didn’t swallow it, but we didn’t really understand what that meant. Christina ran to the kitchen and came back with a big dessert spoon and I tried to prise her teeth open with it, screaming and crying: ‘She’s dying, she’s dying!’

Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer and ran to get my aunt from a few doors away, who came and laid Shirley out in the recovery position on the floor.

Christina and I loved Shirley and felt sorry for her; there were so many things you couldn’t do in a wheelchair at the beginning of the Seventies. All the local cinemas and theatres, and a lot of the shops, had steep steps and no access for wheelchairs. We were always trying to find things to do that would cheer her up. One day, when Mum was outside hanging up the washing, we were sitting on Shirley’s bed. I had found a box of Swan Vesta matches and had beckoned Christina to come to Shirley’s room with me. Perching on the bed beside her I started to strike them, one by one, letting her blow each one out like a candle on a birthday cake, which made her laugh. Match after match flared and was snuffed. It felt good to be able to make her happy.

‘Let me do one,’ Christina demanded.

‘No.’ I turned away. ‘I’m doing it. I found them.’

Christina made a lunge for the matches so I stretched my arms out at full length to keep them away from her and struck another.

Christina grabbed my arm and shook it. The match fell and the nylon bedclothes seemed to ignite instantly, the flames leaping to the curtains and spreading within seconds. Christina and I jumped up, screaming for Mum, wanting to run away, but Shirley couldn’t move, and the flames were spreading over her lifeless, motionless legs as we desperately tried to wave them away. Mum ran in and ripped away the curtains and sheets, smothering the flames. But it was too late; Shirley’s legs had ballooned up, red and blistered, and then blackened like charcoal. She couldn’t feel any pain, but she could smell the charred flesh just as we could. Mum picked her up, cradling her in her arms, shouting furiously at us, and we watched in horror and bewilderment as she carried Shirley out of the smoke-blackened room. We were sure we’d killed her, and although she survived she was horribly burned and had scars that never really healed.

Having a dad who brought home stuff made us better than everyone else in the street, that’s how I saw it. All the others used to come round our house to watch the telly, when it was working, sometimes as many as twenty people at a time all crammed into our front room, with Mum at the centre of it all. We didn’t own a kettle so there were always people in the kitchen boiling up pans of water to make themselves hot drinks. Mum was only in her early twenties and liked having friends around her. She always loved a party. We would often wake up and find that other people were sharing our beds, having crashed out after too much drink, empty cans and bottles everywhere. The thing Christina and I hated the most was the way the grown-ups all smoked so much. We used to get up early while they were all still unconscious and go round the house collecting up all the packets of cigarettes we could find and then hiding or destroying them.

One day Dad brought home a washing machine, and from then on all the neighbours would bring their washing round for Mum to do. There were always bags of dirty clothes everywhere, adding to the chaos and the smell.

There was always a lot of thieving going on around Smallshaw because it was the only way some families could survive. The women would bring back the stuff they had lifted from the shops, whether it was margarine or tins of coffee, and would share it all out. It sounds like everyone was getting on with one another when I put it like that, but there was always a current of jealousy and resentment bubbling below the surface, waiting for an excuse to surface.

‘It’s all right for Maureen,’ the other women would mutter to one another behind Mum’s back, ‘with all her things.’

Dad even had a van and used to take us out on drives, which made the other families even more resentful. We came back one day to find the house had been broken into and robbed. Everyone knew it had been people from the street but there was nothing we could do about it and Mum said she wanted to move to a better area. Our gas and electricity meters were always being broken into for coins, food was stolen from our cupboards, and nothing was ever safe. The Electricity Board sent some men round to cut us off, but when they saw Shirley in her wheelchair they refused to do it.

Mum was often down the road at work in the off-licence and we would be left in the care of older children, who would bully us and drag us about the place, and beat me with sticks. It was just the way life was for us.

‘You want to come round to our house for ice cream?’ the older boys would ask me. I always said ‘yes’ because I was always hungry, and I always fell for it when they force-fed me a spoonful of margarine. I so much wanted the offer to be genuine I was always willing to give them the benefit of the doubt one more time.

There were some swings in a nearby park and we used to play a game where we jumped off in mid-air. I would always fall and graze my legs, which would mean Mum would stick me in the sink when I got home, using a scrubbing brush to try to get the tiny stones out of the cuts. I would fight and wail.

‘Keep still,’ she’d grumble, ‘or you’ll have to go to hospital for an operation.’

There was no way I wanted to risk that. I’d seen how Shirley would disappear to the hospital for days on end and then come home covered in bandages. When I did eventually have to go to hospital, because of measles, I was amazed to find it was actually more like a magical kingdom than the chamber of horrors I’d imagined. I was pampered by the nurses and given proper food three times a day for the first time in my life. The whole place felt warm and loving and there was nothing to fear, everyone smiling and laughing all the time despite the fact that we were all sick or in pain. I saw our home life in a different light after that, realizing for the first time that not everyone in the world was always angry and shouting at their kids.

We were always having to be treated for nits as well. Christina and Shirley both had Mum’s thick ginger hair, which made the nit comb much more painful for them than for me. As they struggled and squawked she would tell them how blessed they were to have such long, thick hair. I was more of a strawberry-blond colour and had my head shaved most of the time.

There were some new houses being built down the bottom of Smallshaw Lane, which meant there were wagons full of earth streaming up and down all day long. A bunch of us used to stand at the top of the road and shout out to the men driving the trucks to give us rides. For a while they obliged and then the foreman told them to stop. The other kids persuaded me to hide in the bushes and jump out in front of one of the huge vehicles at the last moment, forcing the driver to stop with an explosive hiss of air brakes.

‘What you fuckin’ playing at?’ he wanted to know.

‘I don’t know where my mummy is,’ I replied, as I had been instructed, and started crying.

‘Come on up here then,’ he said, his heart softening.

As soon as he opened the cab door the others would all troop out of the bushes.

‘Fuckin’ ell, your mammy’s been busy.’

The ruse worked every time, and usually resulted in us getting to share their lunch and drinks. Once they dropped us off on the site we would play happily amongst the diggers and tractors.

Quite often it was just me and Christina in the house because Shirley would be in hospital having operations on her legs, head and back, or my Nan would be looking after her. She and my Granddad Albert lived about five miles away and we often used to go over as a family for Sunday lunch. Granddad was a short, sturdy sort of chap who used to shout at me a lot. They lived in a private house and had lots of ornaments everywhere, like an Aladdin’s cave, which I just ached to pick up and look at but wasn’t allowed to. They had a little dog, Sparky, who felt so soft and smelled so clean compared to our filthy, smelly dogs. On the way home after Sunday lunches Christina, Shirley and I would lie on the floor of the van, half asleep, and I would watch the orange streets lights flashing past the windows and imagine we were on a magic carpet ride.

Sundays were good because we could go to Sunday school, which the Salvation Army organized in a hut a few doors down from our house. We would sing songs and be told stories and even did some colouring-in of pictures of Jesus. They would give us presents like little gollywogs holding banjos and other musical instruments. They were the sort of thing you could have got for free off jam jars, but we loved them because they were pretty much the only presents we were ever given.

Chapter Three THE PEN

Dad had an allotment. Not one of those little strips of vegetables with a makeshift shed at the end, but about an acre of land, like a smallholding, filled with ramshackle outbuildings. It was known as ‘the pen’. Sometimes there would be twenty or thirty kids following him across the wooded piece of land behind the house and up the hill to the pen, with Shirley in her wheelchair, making him look like some sort of grubby Pied Piper.

The ground amongst the trees along the route was always strewn with litter and the pen itself was surrounded by a makeshift wall of house doors, so that no one could break in and passers-by couldn’t see what was going on. It was Dad’s little private kingdom. Behind the wall and padlocked gates was another world where he raised chickens, geese, ducks and pigs and stored yet more scrap salvaged from his rounds. There was a big black boar called Bobby, and a sow, terrifying, stinking great creatures that wallowed and snuffled in their own filth. An abandoned car stood, stripped and rusting, just inside the gates, waiting for someone to turn it into scrap.

In one of the sheds lived my dad’s dad, whom we knew as ‘Granddad from the Pen’, a dirty, toothless old man who would always smell of whisky and grab me between my legs, or pinch my bum and rub his bristly chin against my face, which he thought was funny but which hurt. His clothes, which he wore day and night, were rags, like a tramp would wear. He also thought it was funny to throw his false teeth at me, even though I hated it. Dad used to do the same thing sometimes with his. Even at that age I could sense there was something about Granddad from the Pen that wasn’t trustworthy.

I think his wife must have chucked him out years before and he went to live with Auntie June, Dad’s sister, but she got fed up with him too and now he just had a camp bed in the corner of one of the sheds. He kept a pile of dirty books underneath the bed, which he was happy to get out for us, making us giggle with embarrassment and exclaim in horror. I’m sure the magazines must have been rescued from the dustbins, just like everything else in our lives. Granddad from the Pen spent a lot of his time down the pub. Only later did I discover he was an alcoholic; then I just knew he always smelt of booze, like Dad, only worse.

There had been some sort of falling out between Mum and Granddad from the Pen, although I never knew the details, but he stayed away from the house for a while. The day he did come back he came with a present for me, a pink bike. I didn’t care what colour it was, it was a bike, something that none of the other kids in Smallshaw had, unless they were old ones with solid tyres that you couldn’t use to jump on and off kerbs without jarring every bone in your body. Granddad from the Pen was obviously drunk, having just come out of the pub, and went in to see Mum, leaving me outside with my new possession.

I set off proudly to pedal round the neighbourhood. It was a glorious summer’s day and I felt like the king of the area, until I was stopped by a policeman, who enquired where I’d got my bike from.

‘It’s a present from my Granddad,’ I said, wondering why the policeman was being so nasty. ‘I think we should go and talk to your Granddad,’ he said. It turned out Granddad had nicked the bike off some little girl when she got off to go into her house just as he was passing. It broke my heart to see the policeman taking it away.

Going up to the pen was like visiting a little zoo, and all the local kids loved it. We would play hide and seek and other games. They would always be coming round pestering to find out if we were going up there. I used to love to root through the drawers around the sheds because they were always crammed with so much rubbish, just like our house. It seemed like a treasure trove to a four-year-old, another Aladdin’s cave, although a bit different to my Nana and Granddad Albert’s.

The pen was one of four, like some peasant farms left over from the Middle Ages, partially illuminated at night by the street lamps on the lane outside. It wasn’t far to walk, but it was hard for me to keep up with Dad’s long legs when it was just him and me going up there. If it was just us he would grow impatient with waiting for me to catch up and would stride off ahead, forcing my little legs to go faster, almost as if he didn’t want anything to do with me, as if he was trying to get away. If Mum was with us he would put me on his shoulders, but if it was just us he would become angry as I lagged behind and would grab my hand and drag me off my feet, nearly jerking my arm out of its socket. Dad would go up to the pen every day because the animals needed feeding. He would collect any bit of food he could get his hands on and boil it up in big pans at home, adding the scent of pigswill to the existing smells of pee, dogs and fags.

The pen was a great place for a small boy to go, but sometimes I would make Dad cross and there would be flashes of nastiness as he gave me a push or a pinch to let me know I had disappointed him yet again. I knew that I must always be good and never anger him. He was only in his early twenties at that time, but he had a presence even then that made me wary. I had a feeling that he didn’t like me and I was willing to do anything in order to change that. He used to insist that I collected the eggs from under the hens, which used to terrify me. They made so much fuss, flapping their wings and pecking at me with vicious beaks. I never wanted to do it, but I knew I had to do what he told me because he was my dad and he wasn’t someone you would disobey. He used to keep ferrets as well, to help keep down the rat population, and he liked to put them down his trousers, and down mine. It was a horrible experience, feeling their claws digging in, believing they were biting, but he thought it was funny and that I should learn how to be brave about it. He was always trying to ‘make a man’ or ‘make a farmer’ of me.

I didn’t like the way he would read magazines full of women while he was having a wee; at least I thought that was what he was doing. It was a bit confusing and very frightening.

Violence and bullying were the norm around Smallshaw. There was one family in particular who used to bully everyone. We used to go round to their house quite a bit, even though we thought they were disgusting, often ending up sleeping on their couches or several of us to a bed. Their mother was a big brute of a woman with no teeth, who used to sit there with her legs apart and no knickers on. Even as kids, Christina and I knew she was repellent. She would get her boys to give her love bites on her neck so people would think she had a man. She organized all the robbing in the area, like a sort of modern Fagin, sending the kids off to pinch clothes off washing lines, taking the spoils back to her house to be shared out. She was always picking fights and her kids followed her example.

One day Christina got into a fight with one of her daughters in the street and came in crying. I think she’d had clumps of her bright red hair pulled out in the heat of the battle. That family was always fighting and bullying one another and anyone else they could pick on, but this time Mum decided it had gone too far and went round to tell their mum what she thought of her. Christina and I watched from the window as the two women set to fighting in the street outside, punching and scratching and kicking, until eventually Mum came back in with blood all over her face. I was frightened but proud at the same time that our Mum wasn’t scared to stand up to such a woman. She had stood up for Christina, just like I liked to believe Dad would have stood up for me in the same circumstances.

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I kept saying, trying to calm her crying when she came back in, cuddling her and wiping away the blood.

That fight was the final straw that convinced Mum and Dad that we should move from the street. Just at that time Dad’s sister, June, announced she was moving out of her house in Cranbrook Street, a much better area, and asked Dad if he would like to buy it off her. Moving to the ‘private sector’ was like moving to another world for us. I guess Dad must have been able to get a mortgage at a good rate, working for the council, because they started to lay plans.

Despite this good news, there had been another incident that had left me troubled. We were on a family holiday to North Wales. We had driven down there in Dad’s old Transit van, which was always getting punctures and having to pull over for repairs, but we would all be piled happily into it, with me, Christina and Shirley sitting or lying on mattresses in the back. Travelling loose like that was hard for Shirley because she was always in so much pain and there was nothing to stop her from bouncing and rolling about on every bump and corner. Christina and I would try to comfort her, reassuring her it would be all right, but the pain was terrible for her.

Dad’s other sister, Doris, lived in a place called Penmaemawr, not far from Llandudno, and we stayed in a caravan at the Robin Hood camp in Prestatyn. I had never stayed in a caravan before and it all seemed like a great adventure. Being able to go to the seaside was so exciting and it reinforced the feeling we had that we were special and better than the other families around us in Smallshaw Lane. No one around our way ever went on holiday and I felt proud to have a dad who could organize such a treat.

Still being so small, just four years old, the beach appeared enormous. We spent the first afternoon building sandcastles and the girls were as happy as I was to be playing somewhere where there was no one picking on us or trying to spoil our fun. We felt completely carefree. At some point I decided to go down to the water by myself. The tide was out and I had to splash for what seemed like miles across the wet sand to get to the sea. The sky was bright blue above my head and the ocean stretched away forever into the distance, its edges lapping and rolling across my bare feet as I danced with delight in the foam, the rest of the world forgotten, including my family sitting behind me on the beach.

Back on the dry sand Mum must have noticed that I had strayed too far for safety, and Dad must have told her not to worry, that he would go and get me. I didn’t hear him coming, didn’t hear him calling me to come back, then suddenly I was aware of his presence and he was on me, grabbing me hard, hurting me.

‘You naughty little bastard,’ he yelled as he squeezed me with all his might. ‘I’ve been shouting for ages.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t hear you. I was splashing.’

‘You are a fucking liar. You’re just plain fucking naughty, aren’t you?’

He punched me to the ground, forcing my face down in the sand so that it filled my mouth and nose and eyes.

‘Do you want me to tell your mum that you have spoilt the fucking holiday and you’ve ruined it for your sisters? Do you? Do you?’ Every question was punctuated by another punch.

‘No, Daddy, please.’ I tried to speak through mouthfuls of sand. ‘I’m sorry.’

I was struggling in his powerful grip, unable to breathe, panicked. After what seemed like forever he yanked me up.

‘Get up, you little cunt, and stop fucking crying. If you don’t stop crying I’ll tell Mum you’ve been bad and naughty.’

As he let go of me I pulled myself up on wobbly legs, still able to feel his grip on my neck. Dad was cross with me and I just wanted to please him, and I didn’t want him to tell Mum how naughty I was.

‘Now get back there and put a smile on yer fucking face.’

My legs were shaking as I tried to run to obey him, shocked and unable to understand what I’d done wrong. I just knew that I must try much harder to be good, so he wouldn’t be angry with me, so he would love me. I tried to hold his hand as we made our way back to Mum and the girls but he pulled it away and walked too quickly for me to keep up as I stumbled along.

‘Have you been having a good time?’ Mum asked when we reached her, and I just smiled and nodded, not able to trust my voice to be steady.

Starting school, just a little way from our house, was an eye-opener, like my visit to hospital. The teachers were so kind and caring, so different from the adults in my home world. The kids in the class were different from the ones who played in our street and came round our house. They didn’t want to pull my ears or my hair or hit me or be nasty to me. When I realized what a friendly world it was it was like a huge weight lifting off my shoulders. There were crayons and pens and paints, drums and even a violin, which I’d never seen before, and I was allowed to touch them and use them and everyone encouraged me and praised whatever I did. No one seemed to think I was naughty. There were some familiar faces from our estate, which was comforting once I realized they were going to behave differently at school from the way they behaved in the streets and houses. It was such a relief to be somewhere that didn’t seem at all threatening or frightening.

Shirley had to go to a special school because of all her physical problems, so she would be picked up in a taxi or ambulance each morning, and Christina and I would make our own way to and from our school. One afternoon we came home to be told that we were going to be moving to Auntie June’s house in Cranbrook Street. From now on, Mum explained, it would be our house. Overcome with excitement, I begged for us to go round and look at it, and Dad agreed to take me and Christina round there.

It wasn’t far, so we walked there together, him striding ahead in his Wellingtons, us galloping along, trying to keep up as he cut down all the back ginnels and alleys. We’d been there before, to visit our cousins, who seemed spoiled to us, always having everything that we didn’t – carpets, wall lights, proper cupboards in the front room, a gas fire in a stone-built fireplace and fancy patterned wallpaper. The carpet was purple and seemed to blend with the walls. I would get into trouble for keeping on turning the lights on and off because I’d never seen anything like it before. They even had a proper television, which worked all the time and didn’t have to be hit. It seemed such a big, grand place, three storeys tall, and with its own cellar. We always wanted to stay there. Then it had been their house, but now it was ours and we could hardly contain ourselves.

As we approached the house that our dad was going to get for us, I looked up in awe. It stood at the centre of the terrace, its front door opening directly on to the street; the slot for the post low in the bottom of the glass front door – I hadn’t noticed that before. I never knew you could have a letterbox there. It seemed like another sign that we were moving up in the world. The roof rose up to pointed eves, like the sort of houses families lived in on television. As Dad let us in it felt like we were walking into a big private castle.

The other kids in Smallshaw didn’t let us get away without some teasing: ‘Think you’re better than us, do you, just because you’re moving to a private house?’

‘No, we don’t,’ we protested, but we did.

Christina and I ran from room to room, exploring every nook and cranny as we went. The attic rooms at the top of the house were going to be ours, which we thought were the best rooms in the house. It all seemed so huge, and in our rooms there were even wardrobes built into the eves that we could actually walk in and out of. I stood at the window, staring down, thinking it was thousands of miles to the pavements below, feeling a delicious little frisson of fear when I got too close to the sill. I felt like the king of the castle. Dad told us the council might give us a grant so we could build a special bedroom for Shirley, maybe even installing a lift so Mum didn’t have to carry her up and down stairs all the time.

I did feel a little sad to be leaving some of the kids in Smallshaw who had been my friends, but I was too excited about moving away from the bullies to somewhere so new and different to grieve for long.

Chapter Four A MORE PRIVATE WORLD

The house in Cranbrook Street that had seemed like paradise on that first visit became as much of a junk heap as our house in Smallshaw within a few weeks of us moving in, filled with Dad’s scroungings. He found a huge reproduction of Constable’s famous Hay Wain picture on the bins and hung it in pride of place in the front room. I’ve never been able to see that picture since without thinking of him.

The house needed rewiring, but he didn’t bother, so the electric heaters never worked. The power kept failing upstairs and we would have to run cables up the staircase in order to use any appliances or lights.

We moved to a new school and whereas we had fitted in with other kids from the streets of Smallshaw, most of whom were pretty much as dirty and scruffy as us, now I really stuck out. We tried to make some new friends, but I think we were seen as little more than street urchins by the neighbours. I got a bit of bullying and teasing at school for my appearance and because we obviously lived in poverty. Because I was getting used to Dad hitting me, every time I saw someone raise their hand I would immediately fall to the floor and roll into a ball, covering my head to protect myself from the blows I knew were coming. It wasn’t long before the other kids realized how easy it was to get me to do this.

There wasn’t the same culture of neighbouring as there had been in Smallshaw; people didn’t just pop in and out of one another’s houses and sit around for hours. We were left pretty much to ourselves and Dad started to become more and more of a tyrant in his own little kingdom. He started shouting at Mum a lot, especially after he had been to the pub. She could never do anything right. Cranbrook Street was perfect for him, with the pub on one corner and the chip shop on the other, and he soon developed a regular routine. He would be up on his bin round early and then into the pub between twelve and three, before coming home for a sleep.

He always smelled of the bins and once he’d pulled off his sweaty wellies he would sit with his feet in a bowl or pan of hot water, ordering me to wash them and scratch them for him. It was a disgusting job because they stank so badly. I would peel his socks off for him and they would be stuck to his feet, rock hard with sweat after spending so long in his boots.

As he got used to having control, he started to become stricter about the way our lives were run. Finding he had so much power went to his head. We started to be given definite bedtimes, when before we had pretty much run wild. He didn’t like it if he had to carry Shirley around and if she wet herself he would shout at Mum to ‘get her fucking changed’. The atmosphere was getting much worse, but he was still my dad and I still loved him. I had no one else to compare him with anyway.

After his afternoon nap he would wake up again about seven in the evening and go back down the pub. We would all try to get to bed before he reeled back in and the rows really started. We could hear the shouting and screaming downstairs and even then I knew Mum was getting beaten. He told her she had to get a full-time job to help with the money, and she did as she was told. Until then she had at least been there sometimes, or at least not far away, and suddenly she was gone for long periods of the day, and I felt lonely.

The glimpses of nastiness and aggression that I had seen up at the pen, which had exploded on the beach in Wales, now became regular occurrences, and they escalated almost daily.

‘Don’t touch those fucking crusts,’ he would yell if I went to eat some bread. ‘They’re mine.’ Whenever any of us had bread we had to cut off the crusts and give them to him if we didn’t want a beating.

If I touched something that was his, or was naughty in any way, I would get battered. The trouble was I didn’t always know when something I was doing would turn out to be on the forbidden list, although in the end it covered just about everything I did.

‘Don’t pick your nose!’

‘Stop picking your nails!’

‘Stop itching your bum!’

‘Stop scratching your head! Have you got nits?’

‘Dirty legs!’

‘Dirty knees!’

‘You’re a filthy little bastard. Go and wash!’

‘Look at the mess you’ve left round this basin and taps!’

‘Clean the fucking soap.’

‘Your bedroom’s a mess.’

‘You’ve left dirt on the sofa.’

‘Your coat’s dirty.’

‘Your trainers are dirty.’

He had started grabbing me regularly, screwing my face up in his powerful fingers and slapping me round the head. He would suddenly appear behind me when I was least expecting it and slap me or throw me against the wall, knocking the breath out of my body. I wished I wasn’t so naughty because it seemed my behaviour was making him really hate me, but I just didn’t seem to be able to work out what I was about to do wrong next.

I was constantly scratching and itching because I always had nits and worms; it was impossible to stop myself, and it seemed to drive him mad. Sometimes I’d itch my bottom and pull out a whole handful of worms.

To deal with the nits, he decided I had to have my head shaved regularly, for hygiene, which revealed the little points I had on my ears, giving him the opportunity to tease me, calling me ‘Spocky’ after Mr Spock in Star Trek, or Kojak. The other kids at school were taking the piss too, warming their hands on the top of my head in the cold weather. I hated it all.

The more he went on at me, the more I just kept thinking, ‘Please, Daddy, no,’ but he never stopped, never let up on me. He was changing, becoming angrier every day, and more and more disgusted by me. I knew I must be bad and naughty, because he kept telling me I was. I knew I was ugly, because he kept telling me, so I could understand why it must be so hard for my parents to love me, but I didn’t know what to do to make myself better and more lovable.

Sometimes I did know I was being naughty, and just wasn’t able to resist temptation. We were nearly always hungry and he would eat chocolate biscuits in front of us and forbid us from having any; then he would go out, leaving the packet in full sight. Like most small boys I was unable to resist sneaking one, not realizing he had marked the packet before he went, and would receive a battering when he came back.

‘Your dad’s going to adopt the girls now,’ Mum told me soon after we moved into Cranbrook Street, ‘so we can be a proper family. Even though you really are his son, Stuart, we’re going to play a game. We’re going to go to the courts and pretend that he’s adopting all three of you together, so the girls don’t feel upset.’

I was willing to go along with that; it was a game we had been playing at home for as long as I could remember. When we got to court, playing the charade of a happy family, wearing the first brand-new clothes I think I’d ever had bought for me, we were sat in front of two men and a woman. They asked a few questions.

‘So, Stuart,’ the lady said, ‘do you like your new daddy?’

‘I like my daddy,’ I replied politely, ‘but I don’t like it when he hits me and hurts me.’

I glanced over and saw the look of anger flickering across his face. I smiled quickly, as I always did when I was afraid, and everyone started laughing, seeing the little exchange as proof that my dad and me could laugh and joke together. The adoption was approved.

Our days fell into a regular routine. After I came back from school Mum would be at work and I would be sent out to play, even though he would insist that Christina and Shirley went to bed with him for an hour for a rest. Now and then I would be allowed to join them for the rest and on one occasion Shirley started playing with my private parts.

‘Gerroff Shirley,’ I said, indignantly.

‘Stop fucking about, you two!’ he barked. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘She keeps playing with my widget!’ I protested.

Shirley was always there in the afternoons after being brought back from her special school, a constant scowling presence in the corner of the sitting room in her wheelchair, her arms folded and her face unhappy.

On the afternoons when I was sent out I knew that if I came back before I was allowed, which was seven o’clock, I would be in for a battering, so I never did. Even if I needed to go to the toilet I would find somewhere outside rather than disobey him and go into the house. I was not allowed to use the front door, always coming in through the back garden, which was the one part of our home that was kept neat and tidy, bracing myself for the expected battering.

I seemed to be an outcast from every group of children in the area, so it was hard to find things to do to fill the hours until I was allowed back into the house. I didn’t look like the others at my new school because I was so dirty, I didn’t sound like them and I didn’t dress like them. But I no longer fitted in with the kids from Smallshaw either, because they thought I believed myself better than them.

There was a disused railway line running not far from Cranbrook Street and some of the older kids would make dens in the arches along the side, where they would meet to smoke and drink and sniff glue. If I couldn’t find anyone else to play with I would wander up there on my own, finding some comfort in the wind that always seemed to whip along between the embankments. I was only five years old and the bigger boys would watch me from their dens, taking the mickey but not in a threatening way. They all had plastic bags and I would watch as they put them over their faces from time to time and breathed deeply of whatever was inside. They seemed quite friendly and I hung around on the edge, partly curious, partly desperate for company.

As I grew braver I would go into the dens with them when they invited me, pick up the bags and breathe deeply, as I had seen them doing. The fumes from the glue bottles inside the bags would make my ears buzz in a pleasant way, and my unhappiness and pain seemed to become fuzzy around the edges. I got a feeling of love and peace and nothing seemed to matter quite as much. By the time I got home I was walking in a semi-dream. When I got inside and Dad hit me it didn’t hurt so much because I was already partly numb, and the glue would help me to fall asleep after my beating.

Once I had discovered it I liked the feeling and I would go back to the railway lines almost every day for the next five or six years. The bigger boys became used to having me around and were happy to share their escape route with me because they thought I was funny, like a live toy, a sort of mascot I guess. They all knew who I was and what my family was like. We were easily recognizable because of Shirley being in her wheelchair whenever we were out. Sometimes I would bring the glue home with me and take it up to my bedroom, so I could keep the feeling going later, when I needed it.

I always knew when Dad was angry with me because his upper lip would curl up at the sides, and the night that things got worse he was waiting for me inside the back door with that familiar look on his face.

‘What fucking time do you call this?’ he snarled.

I couldn’t properly tell the time by then, but I had taught myself to recognize seven o’clock and I could see the hands were in the right place on the kitchen clock behind him. I tried to tell him that I wasn’t naughty, that I had got it right, but he didn’t seem able to listen to any reason and started to lay into me with a ferocity I had never experienced before, kicking and punching me so hard I was thrown around the room as if I weighed nothing and as if he didn’t care how damaged I might become. Whenever I was terrified, which by then was most of the time, I used to experience a sort of buzzing noise all around me, like a static charge. It would get inside my head as well, as if all the sounds around me were slightly distorted. The fear constricted my throat, making it hard to talk or swallow. My chest would always hurt from sobbing.

‘Get upstairs and get cleaned up, you little bastard,’ he shouted, kicking and pushing me towards the stairs. ‘And get to bed.’

I struggled to obey, my body feeling broken and painful. I was so cross with myself for being naughty again and making my father so angry. Why couldn’t I just be a good boy? Why did I have to make him have to punish me? I had an overwhelming feeling of being so sorry as I sobbed into my pillow, wishing Mum would come home and give me a cuddle and tell me everything was all right. I tried to hug the wall, which was covered in footballing wallpaper, left over from when my aunt and uncle lived there. All I wanted was for my mum and my dad to love me, but I understood they couldn’t for as long as I went on being such a bad little boy. I knew my mum wouldn’t be able to cuddle me, because I’d heard Dad telling her not to. He said I needed to toughen up. Looking back now, I realize he was jealous of my relationship with her even then.

I don’t know how long I lay there that night before he came upstairs to my room, pushing the door shut after him. I stayed as quiet as I could, determined not to do anything else to anger him. He lay down on the bed beside me and the familiar odour of his stale sweat enveloped me. He had never hugged me in his life, but he put his arm around me. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming again.

‘You know you’re a naughty boy, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You know I don’t want to shout at you, but you have to learn.’

He started stroking me, which was comforting and strange. Then he took my hand and held it against himself, moving it rhythmically back and forth. The bed started shaking and after a few moments I could feel that he had peed on to my hand. He wasn’t cross with me any more and I felt very happy to have been forgiven. It felt great to know that he thought I was a good boy.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

I was always hungry.

‘Wait up here,’ he said, ‘and I’ll make you some potato hash. Come down in a bit.’

I lay there feeling happy with myself for the first time in a long while, wondering how long ‘a bit’ was, not wanting to spoil things by going down too soon or too late. I must have drifted off to sleep because he had to send Christina up to tell me the food was ready. I rushed down, expecting to be in trouble again, but he was still in a good mood when I got to the kitchen.

To have him pleased with me and to be given something to eat was wonderful. Even to this day I can’t eat potato hash without remembering that first time. We used to eat it a lot, with meat that the butcher sold for pets, and vegetables, anything that was cheap. Nothing was ever thrown away or allowed to go to waste; everything was fried up again and again until every last scrap had been eaten. Sometimes I tasted the stuff he prepared for the pigs and it was nicer than the stuff we all ate.

Chapter Five A VERY NAUGHTY BOY

That first time was the gentlest time, and although it was a little while before he became really violent, from then on the abuse in my bedroom became a regular feature of our daily family routine. The glow of approval after the first time didn’t last long and his verbal abuse towards me escalated as quickly as the physical abuse.

‘You’re fucking ugly.’

‘You’re a bad boy and I’m getting the police to come and take you to a fucking home!’

‘Your mum doesn’t fucking love you.’

‘I’m gonna give your mum a fucking beating, I’m really gonna hurt her, and it’s because of you, because you’re such a naughty little bastard.’

Every day was like a test, a horrible repeat of the day before but with some new insult or pain added on. He was becoming almost as bad towards Christina as well, even though I knew she wasn’t naughty like me and worked really hard to try to keep the home going when Mum was at work. He used to shout for us to come in when he was sitting down in the front room, and we would hurry to do his bidding. I was always smiling in the hope of defusing his anger, looking up at him, my head bowed, waiting docilely for whatever would come next. I was always nervous about looking at him directly. ‘Are you eyeballing me?’ he would demand if I looked up, and my eyes would shoot back to the floor.

‘Fight each other,’ he would order me and Christina. ‘You both need to toughen up.’

There was no getting out of it, because if we didn’t fight each other, really punching and kicking and slapping, then he would hit us, and he hit much harder than we did. Even if Mum was there, witnessing it, he didn’t care.

‘Stop it, David,’ she would protest, but he overruled her, shouting encouragement at us like a trainer beside a boxing ring. All the time Shirley would just be sat there, in her wheelchair, watching the horrors going on around her, looking bored and bemused and sulky. If it was bad for Christina and me, God knows what it was like for her, day after day after day just sitting or lying around stinking of piss, listening to the shouting and watching the beatings.

After one of those fights he would send us up to bed, and I would be able to hear Christina sobbing in her room, just as I was in mine.

‘Are you all right?’ I would whisper, trying to send my voice across to her room but terrified he would be listening in and would exact some extra punishment.

‘Yes,’ she would gulp. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I’m sorry too.’

We would keep on telling each other how sorry we were until one of us eventually fell asleep.

Whenever I came in the back door of an evening he would be lying in wait for me with some new complaint about my behaviour, and he would start shouting and punching and hurting me, spitting at me to show his contempt. It was all about power. I was never allowed to do anything without asking his permission.

‘Dad, can I go to the toilet?’

‘Dad, can I have a drink of water?’

‘Dad, can I stand up?’

‘Dad, can I sit down?’

I always assumed that he was right about everything, because he was a grown-up and he was my dad. If he said I was bad, then I must be. He watched my every single move, just waiting for me to put a foot wrong, constantly thinking up new rules that I mustn’t break. If I sneaked myself a butty to eat and left a few crumbs, I would have to be punished in a frenzy of anger. If I had a slice of bread or a piece of cheese, or if I left a cup out, it didn’t matter what I did, it was always wrong and meant I had to be taught a lesson, ‘for my own good’. He took to checking my underpants and if I had left any sort of stain, which I often had if I had been to the toilet outside, I would have to be punished again. The questions he asked me made me squirm with embarrassment; no part of my life was private from his probing.

‘Have you been shaking your willy after you’ve been for a wee?’

He would inspect me all over, checking my willy, then taking his own out to show me what it should look like. ‘Feel it, so you know what it should feel like.’

He started stripping me naked in front of the girls and tying me up with ropes after beating me up at the back door, so tightly I couldn’t get free however much I struggled or cried. Sometimes he would tie my hands and my neck to my feet so I would be twisted into painful shapes, as the dogs ran around me, barking with excitement at all the noise.

‘Try and get out of that!’ he would sneer as my panic mounted. ‘Look at him, Shirl, look at him!’

Shirley would stare at me with blank eyes and an unchanging expression, knowing that if she said anything she ran the risk of him turning his wrath on to her.

My greatest priority was to be a good boy and make both my parents love me, so I never told anyone outside the family what was going on. I assumed it went on in lots of other houses as well and no one would be that interested anyway; they would just tell me not to be so naughty. And then there was the fear that if they found out how bad I was someone would tell the police and I would be taken away to a children’s home. However bad my life with my dad might be, the unknown was even more frightening. At least in Cranbrook Street I had Mum and my sisters. If I was taken to a home I wouldn’t have anyone to love, nothing familiar to cling on to at the lowest moments.

Some days he would send me up to bed the moment I came in and then come up to batter me there, away from the girls. Then he would come up and lie next to me, telling me to masturbate him. I didn’t like it, but at least it didn’t hurt and I knew it would make things better – it was part of my punishment and afterwards he would be pleased with me. I would have done anything not to be battered any more.

There was an old sideboard in my room, which he’d brought back from his rounds but had been unable to sell, and sometimes I would open the cupboard doors and squeeze myself inside, holding my breath and hoping he wouldn’t find me when he came up. But then I would become too scared of what would happen if he did catch me trying to hide from him and I would come back out and get into the bed to wait. Other times I would get into the walk-in cupboards that Christina and I had thought were such a game when we looked round the house. The place I felt safest was on the floor under the bunk bed, staring up at the slats, feeling like I was in a prison cell and couldn’t be touched, but my nerve would always go before he actually came up to deal with me and I would crawl back out to face whatever was in store for me.

Given a choice between a battering and masturbating him, masturbating was always preferable. But after a few months it wasn’t enough to satisfy him and he told me to put his penis in my mouth. Then he started masturbating himself over me, hurting me while he did it, pushing my face down so hard into the pillow that I had to struggle to get enough air, hitting and shouting abuse at me at the same time as relieving himself: ‘You dirty little scum! You fucking maggot bastard!’ The power he had over me with his great strong hands seemed to drive him to a frenzy of excitement.

Having started with checking my underpants he went on to inspecting my bottom whenever I came in, making me bend over so he could see if I was clean. I was always sore because of the worms and bad hygiene and he got some cream to treat the sore patches. He insisted on applying it, as if he were really a caring dad, but he actually played roughly with me with his fingers while he did it, which made me bleed when I went to the toilet. He started putting his erection between my legs and then moved on to pushing it inside my bottom, spitting into his hand to provide himself with the necessary lubrication. The sound of men hawking up phlegm still makes me shiver. The pain was immense and made me cry even though he wasn’t being as vicious as before, as if he was trying to coax me into letting him do new things. Whenever I went to the toilet, once he had started penetrating me, there was usually blood in the bowl, which frightened me.

When he was doing things to me I would detach myself from what was going on, staring at the footballs on the wallpaper, just wanting it to be over as quickly as possible. I wished I wasn’t such a bad boy all the time, so that I didn’t always have to be punished.

After he had finished he would usually be quite nice to me for a while. He would sometimes put me in a warm bath and even to this day I still find it comforting to be immersed in warm water. Some nights he would take me with him in the van to pick Mum up from work at the bakery where she did her shifts. I used to like sitting between them on the engine cover on the way home because it was warm and it soothed my soreness through my pyjama bottoms. I would try to cuddle up as close to Mum as possible on the way back, without him seeing, just touching her arm or trying to smell her. It felt wonderful to have a bit of softness and kindness, even though I knew by then that she couldn’t protect me from him.

There was a hatch in the floor under the stairs at Cranbrook Street, leading down to the cellar. Sometimes when I came in from playing and deserved to be punished Dad would beat me and strip me off and send me down the concrete stairs into the cold and damp room below instead of sending me up to my room. It was dank and there was always a puddle of stale water at the bottom of the stairs, which I had to paddle through in bare feet, trying to find a dry patch.

‘You stay down there with the rats,’ he would shout, before slamming the hatch shut, extinguishing the last sliver of light. I would feel round in the darkness with my bare feet, trying to find a dry patch to stand in. I would try to hug the walls for comfort but the damp made the plaster flake and it would come away to my touch, crumbling in my hands. It felt like even the wall was rejecting me and I would cry uncontrollably, realizing Dad must be right and I must be really, really naughty.

I had no way of knowing how long I was left down there, but it felt like hours. The chill would spread through my bones as I crouched there, hugging myself for warmth, teeth chattering and muscles trembling, waiting for the moment when he would decide I had learned my lesson and could be allowed back up into the light.

He started bringing things that he could use to hit me home with him from the rounds – a heavy buckled belt one day, a brass fork the next. He would keep these weapons beside him as he sat in his chair, lashing out at me with them whenever I displeased him, claiming he’d asked me to turn over the television or make him a drink and that I had ignored him. I knew it was all lies because I listened for every word, terrified of making a mistake. He didn’t care how hard he hit, leaving bruises all over my legs.

He had his booty on display on the walls, everything from brass plates to ornamental swords with jewels in the handles, and nearly all of it could be used to inflict pain when he wanted it to.

‘See this brass crocodile?’ he’d say when he got home with some new trophy. ‘It’s for you.’ And then he’d hit me with it.

The buckle on the belt used to cut my skin so deeply I would have to sit in a cold salt-water bath afterwards to bring down the marks he’d left. No matter how hard I fought to keep control the salt would sting and make me cry.

‘See,’ he’d say, standing over me as I shivered and sobbed in the cold water, ‘this is what happens when you’re a naughty lad. Why can’t you be good?’

The teachers at school used to ask me where my bruises came from, but I didn’t want them to know what a naughty little boy I was in case they sent me away to a special school. ‘I’ve been out,’ I would lie, ‘playing army, climbing trees and that.’

It was easy for them to believe, I guess, because I used to fall over a lot at school, banging my head. Sometimes I even did it on purpose because I liked the attention it got me from the teachers when they put me on their knees and rocked me to comfort me and stop my tears.

Bath times were always frightening because I felt so vulnerable, being wet and naked. Sometimes he would come into the bathroom, tell me to open my mouth and then pee into it, thinking it was funny. Or he would grab hold of me, shove me under the water and hold me there. I would thrash around in panic, trying to get back to the air, certain he was trying to kill me.

Often he would pee in the sink in the kitchen; sometimes he would do it while Christina was trying to wash up, doing it all over the pots and all over her hands. She used to make a huge effort to be cleaner and tidier than the rest of us, scrubbing her trainers and socks every night. She was mature for her age.

At other times he would make me eat some of the swill he had made for the pigs, or he would make me come downstairs in just my underpants.

‘Sit there.’ He would indicate the floor. Then he would feed the dogs next to me and ask if it smelt nice. I didn’t know what to say because I knew he would hit me whatever I said. I would try to nod and shake my head at the same time, so it wasn’t a yes or a no. Then he would rap his knuckles on top of my head over and over and say, ‘You’re a naughty little bastard. Nobody likes you.’

Sometimes I would just be sitting at the table and he would ram my face into my dinner with no warning. ‘You’re a naughty little bastard, aren’t you?’ he would say as I sat there with food all over my face.

‘Yes, yes I am. Sorry, Daddy.’

If Christina had angered him he might punish us together, like the times when he would feed the dogs and then make us eat bread and milk out of the same bowls. ‘This is what you would be eating if you were in prison,’ he’d tell us. ‘Make sure you eat it all up. Lick the bowl clean.’

He didn’t seem to punish Shirley in the same way he punished us. I would see her crying sometimes and would wonder why, but I would never ask; we all knew better than to talk about personal things like that. Besides, I wouldn’t have known how to start.

At night I used to make Christina tell me stories before I went to sleep. She had always been a bit of a reader when she could get hold of books, particularly at school. ‘Tell me a story, Christina,’ I would wheedle. ‘Tell me about Goldilocks.’

If she didn’t tell the story exactly the same way each time, forgetting some tiny detail, I would pick her up on it. If she tried to get out of her storytelling duties I would threaten to tell Mum and Dad that she’d been swearing, because she always was. ‘I’ll go downstairs and tell them,’ I would threaten, although she must have known I would never have dared. She was always there for me, Christina, at home and at school, and I will always be grateful to her for that.

She was becoming like the mother of the house, especially when Mum was out at work, but she still cried a lot, like a little girl. She would try to cook my tea while I was out playing, heating up beans and stuff even though she couldn’t really reach the stove properly. It always tasted pretty bad but I was happy to eat it; all the food in our house tasted bad so it made no difference. If you are hungry enough and you know there is nothing else coming, you’ll eat whatever you’re given. We used to pick chewing gum up off the streets and pop it into our mouths, chewing and spitting out the stones and dirt until it was clean and we could walk around feeling posh, like we were able to afford gum of our own.

The council gave us the money to build an extension in order for Shirley to have a room of her own with a lift, so she didn’t have to share a bedroom with Mum and Dad, giving them more privacy as a couple. Shirley had had an operation and had a bag fitted so she didn’t pee everywhere any more. The bag would fill up and we would have to empty it for her every few hours. We also had to try to keep her clean so she didn’t get an infection where the tube went into her. It was an improvement to her life, but it hurt her sometimes because her skin would become sore where the bag was attached to her with stickers and we would have to clean her with surgical spirit and friar’s balsam. The little stickers looked like silver smiles and Christina and I used to stick them over our mouths to make it look like we were smiling.

One afternoon I came in at the usual time, hot and tired from school and playing. Dad didn’t attack me and seemed in quite a good mood for once, so I asked if there was any pop. He gave me a bottle of what looked like lemonade. Thirsty, I took a swig and immediately gagged, realizing he had tricked me with some of Shirley’s urine. Not content with having executed his practical joke, he then forced me to keep drinking it. Seeing how much I hated it he added it to his list of regular tortures for me.

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