Nobody's Child (5 page)

M
ammy’s repeated attempts at suicide provided irresistible ammunition for the kids at St Brigid’s, who, with typical childish malevolence, nicknamed her ‘Suicide Lil’. Sometimes a group of these tormentors would surround me in the playground chanting things like, ‘Old Suicide Lil, she keeps taking the pill.’

At that age, I’m not sure if they understood what it was they were saying, but that didn’t make my distress any easier to endure. It was so easy for teachers and other adults to say, ‘Words can’t hurt you’, but I can only assume that, as five-year-olds, they had never experienced the misery of their mother’s repeated attempts to kill herself and then been forced to suffer their classmates’ persecution over it.

It didn’t take much of this torture for me to start hating the other kids at school, and what few friendships I had formed by that age quickly fizzled out under the daily verbal onslaught in the playground and classroom. I wasn’t a coward by any means, but I knew I couldn’t fight them all. So I took the only way out open to me. I became a loner.

I stopped talking to my classmates or trying to join in their games. I became an outcast by choice, although, in truth, few of them wanted my company anyway. It was a role I was to perfect during the remainder of my wretched childhood.

I think I could have coped better had some of the boys chosen to physically attack me. I didn’t look for pain, but I had learned to handle far worse beatings than any of my classmates could have handed out. It was the verbal bullying that was so wounding. Yet I was determined I would never give my tormentors the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I did most of my crying when I was alone.

One evening, after a particularly hurtful day at school, I was so upset I stupidly mentioned it to Daddy. I should have had more sense and known from past experience that he would be far from sympathetic.

He immediately turned on me, his eyes starting from his head. ‘You’re such a spineless wimp,’ he snarled. ‘You should stand up to them. Not come snivelling home like a bloody girl. You’re useless. Not worth a bloody damn. No real son of mine would act like that. But then it’s
probably your fault your mother is trying to kill herself in the first place. It certainly isn’t mine.’

I gasped out loud. Daddy had said a lot of awful things to me in the past, but this was the nastiest thing ever.

‘If it wasn’t for you coming into our lives. things would never have got this bad,’ he said harshly.

I began to cry. I couldn’t help it. Could Daddy be right? Was I really the reason Mammy was trying to kill herself? I turned to where she was sitting, on the sofa as usual, hoping she would deny what Daddy had said. But it was one of her switched-off times. Her eyes were open and I knew she was awake but she appeared to be taking no notice of anything going on around her.

‘What a bloody useless pair,’ Daddy snarled. ‘A clapped-out tart and a stupid little bastard.’

Then Mammy spoke. That in itself was amazing, because in that state she rarely said a word. But more amazing to me was what she said.

‘Don’t upset your father any more, Michael. You’ll only make him angry and then you know what will happen.’

Daddy laughed out loud, a nasty mocking sound, and he slapped me hard across the face. ‘See what I mean,’ he crowed. ‘Your mother knows it’s your fault as well.’And he hit me again across the other side of my face, knocking me off my chair.

I was in total shock. Not from the slaps, which I was used to, but from what Mammy had said. Surely she didn’t really blame me for all our troubles. It wasn’t me
who was making her try to kill herself. I desperately needed her to tell me I was wrong, but she just sat there, silent, back in her zombie state.

‘It’s not my fault,’ I screamed at Daddy. ‘It’s not.’

His answer was to kick me in the side, the casual way he might have kicked aside a piece of old rubbish. It knocked the wind out of me and I felt quite dizzy for a few moments, though instinct and experience made me curl into a ball in case there was more to come.

‘You’re useless,’ he shouted. ‘A complete waste of space,’ and he kicked me again, this time on my thigh.

I screamed and my sobs became even louder. I could feel the tears washing down the side of my face and on to the floor. The pain in my side was getting worse all the time and I thought that, if Daddy kicked me there again, I would probably die.

But he had apparently tired of the sport of treating me like a football and, after a last half-hearted kick to my bottom, he stomped downstairs and took off.

I lay on the floor for ages and, when I eventually tried to sit up, there was a deep stab of pain from my side, which made me gasp out loud. I lifted my shirt and saw that the area around where he had kicked me was already turning bluey-purple and I knew it would turn into a massive bruise. As so often, it was not in a place where anyone would see it.

Eventually, I managed to get back on my chair at the little table and I rested my head on my arms. On the sofa, Mammy kept staring at nothing.

I had never felt so utterly lonely in my life. I couldn’t think of anyone in the whole world who was likely to offer me so much as a kind word – except perhaps my Nanny Ramsden, and we hadn’t been to see her for more than a year.

If anyone had to die, I thought, it ought to be Daddy, and I sat there wishing with all my being that he would die that night. Right then. Wherever he was. That he would never come home again.

But at that moment I heard his steps on the stairs and was suddenly terrified. What if he had somehow felt what I was wishing and had come back to punish me. It was very unusual for him to come back after he had handed out a beating and left the house.

I would have dived to hide behind the sofa but my side was still hurting too badly for me to move that quickly. So I kept my head on my arms and closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ I told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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