Nobody's Child (9 page)

T
he first time I heard that my mother had killed herself by jumping in front of a train was in the playground at school, from a bunch of eight-year-old boys and girls.

Even at that age, I thought I was capable of putting on a brave face and coping with anything life could throw at me, but this was the most awful episode I had encountered. It was more than a crisis. It was a catastrophe.

The children were extremely cruel, and the bullying and the name-calling so revolting that I came close to being physically sick. Every conceivable foul name was used to describe Mammy and me. It was the start of my crucifixion.

At first, my mind went completely numb. I just
couldn’t accept what they were screeching at me: that Mammy had deliberately hurled herself from the bridge into the path of a train. They used words like ‘splatter’, ‘mangled’ and ‘buckets of blood’ and laughed about it. But it wasn’t their mammy they were talking about. It was mine.

To them, it was just a juicy new titbit of information with which to punish the school dunce. To me, it was my whole life.

I couldn’t hold back the tears, but crying in front of the other children didn’t seem that important compared with the dreadfulness of the things I was hearing.

I kept shouting at them, ‘It’s not true. It’s not true,’ and they kept shouting, ‘Yes it is. Yes it is. Your mother was mad and you’re mad too.’

In the end, I lost all control and rushed at one of my worst tormentors, a ginger-haired boy in my class, who had always poked fun at me. I ran into him with such force that I knocked him over backwards and ended up sitting on his stomach and pummelling with my fists at his head and chest.

‘You’re lying,’ I shouted. ‘It’s all lies.’

He flailed his arms in an effort to stop my blows connecting, and shouted back, ‘It’s not a lie. It was in yesterday’s paper.’

Another voice yelled in my ear, ‘My dad told us all about it, and he heard it straight from your dad, so it must be true.’

This was worse than awful. Why hadn’t they told me
at home, where I could have let my grief come out in private? Why had they exposed me to this baiting from my fellow pupils? Why hadn’t anyone cared enough to tell me the truth?

At that moment I went into complete withdrawal. I wanted to die right there and then. The only way forward that I could see was to copy what Mammy had done and kill myself. I could see no point in living at all.

She’s shown me the escape route, I reasoned. Now all I need to do is take it and I’m free. It was a thought which was to stay with me every day for the next seven years, and on several occasions I looked death in the face from very close quarters in my determination to kill myself.

The next most difficult moment of that hellish day came on the way home. Mr Bleasdale had insisted on walking me home from school because he wanted, he said, to talk to my father and grandparents. I learned much later that they had sent me to school that day in the hope that thrusting me into my normal routine would provide the best therapy for me to cope with Mammy’s death. They were hopelessly wrong, of course, and I think Mr Bleasdale had recognised their mistake and perhaps guessed what was in my mind – the thought of jumping off the same bridge from which Mammy had leaped to her death.

When we reached the middle of the bridge I stopped, and Mr Bleasdale took my arm.

‘Is this where it happened? I asked him.

He nodded. ‘Yes.’

I don’t know what I expected to feel but all I could think about was that this was where Mammy had stood when she was last alive. I took a deep breath through my nose, knowing I was being crazy but hoping that I would smell her perfume or the scent of her lipstick or powder, anything that would bring her back to me, however fleetingly.

But of course there was nothing but the smell of the smoke from the coal fires of late winter. I think that is when I really accepted that Mammy wasn’t coming back.

‘She’s gone for ever,’ I told Mr Bleasdale

He nodded again. ‘I’m afraid so, Michael,’ he said, and we walked on.

I don’t know what was said to Nanny and my father, but the next morning, instead of being sent to school, I was told by Daddy that he had arranged for me to go away for a few weeks. I didn’t care. They had betrayed me by not telling me what had really happened. Right then, I hated them.

Daddy said a change of scenery would do me good. After my day at school, I thought so too. The other children had acted like monsters and I knew it was pointless to think they would let it drop after just one day. They had tasted blood and they would want more.

Then he told me he was driving me to his mother’s home in Halewood and my heart sank. Oh no, this is not rescue, I thought.

I was being delivered directly into the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West. 

T
he Wicked Witch was thin and bony and had a big nose, tiny squinty eyes and a thin rat-trap mouth. Even her laugh was cruel and, though she smelled of lavender, there was nothing sweet about her.

When we arrived at her bungalow, which was in a tiny oasis of posh dwellings surrounded by thousands of council houses, occupied almost exclusively by car workers at the Halewood factory and their families, she had not a word of sympathy to offer me about Mammy. The opposite was true.

She stood in the doorway, hands on hips and dressed in one of the ankle-length skirts she always wore, and glared down at me. ‘We shan’t miss her,’ she hissed. ‘If you want to know what I think, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish.’

And during the next three weeks she took every opportunity to remind me of her sickening verdict on my mammy.

Her first order to me was to forbid me to call her just Grandma. To me, she was Grandma Seed, and to remind me if I slipped up she kept a special cane that she would wield, with some pleasure, I suspected, across my bare backside.

Her daughter, whom I was instructed to address as Aunt Sheila and never as ‘Auntie’, was at that time only slightly less frosty. But she mellowed considerably after her mother died, and years later became a kind and caring maiden aunt to me. She was a district nurse and a spinster, who had given up her own chance of marriage to care for her mother, who in return treated her as a slave.

Sheila had once been in love with the famous entertainer George Formby, who had been a close friend of my father when they were fellow borders at St Joseph’s College in Dumfries in Scotland. Daddy used to take him home to Halewood for holidays, and that’s when the singer began dating my aunt. It might have progressed, but, after her husband died in 1946, Grandma Seed refused to let her daughter leave home and be with George, and the romance fizzled out.

Nothing was simple or casual in Grandma Seed’s home. For everything there was a specific place, and it was expected to stay in it, and that included me. I was allowed to sit only on certain chairs and was permitted
to watch only one hour’s television a day. Grandma Seed sat in a 1930s armchair, very austere and not at all comfortable, to the right of the fireplace. The television was in the corner of the room on the other side of the fireplace, giving her a direct view. Sheila sat directly in front of the fire and my seat was against the wall, which meant I was watching everything at an impossible angle of 30 degrees. And because they thought themselves so grand, I was forced to ‘dress properly’ in shirt and tie all the time, even to watch television. Radio was confined to the dining room and only during meals.

Grandma Seed was a snob and never tired of telling me that in marrying my mother her son had strayed way beneath his own class. As for me, I had no class at all, she said.

‘You are dirt,’ she told me on more than one occasion. ‘It’s a great pity we can’t just wash you away.’

She had a dog, a lazy and bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier which would frequently pass wind with a loud explosion of foul-smelling gases. Grandma Seed would smile her evil smile and say, ‘Please, Michael, can’t you control yourself?’ and chuckle to herself.

It wasn’t very funny the first time she said it, but it always amused her and she never tired of her little joke.

In truth, the dog was responsible for most of the smells in that house. It always sat too close to the fire and its awful body smell filled the whole place.

I swear, though, that that dog received better treatment than me. He slept in a warm blanket-lined
basket in the kitchen. I was banished to the only upstairs room in the bungalow, an attic bedroom which had no heating. A throwback to the Victorian era, it was dark, dank and gloomy, with huge horrible furniture and a big lumpy bed. Even the bedclothes were damp and I think my grandmother deliberately didn’t air them before she put them on my bed. They were always clammy and stuck to my body when I first climbed in.

During those three weeks, I spent most of my time grieving and alone, banished to my room, which was one of Grandma Seed’s favourite punishments. The rest of the bungalow could be deliciously warm but my room was always cold. She would say in her coldest voice, ‘Get out of my sight, you stupid boy,’ and point towards the ceiling. That was my signal to go directly to my room.

Even my father disliked being around his mother, and just 15 minutes after dropping me off he had made his excuses and was away. Clearly, he much preferred my kind and gentle Nanny Ramsden to his own mother.

Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, I don’t think Grandma Seed liked children at all, and she hated me, I believed, because I was a constant reminder of the mistake Daddy had made in marrying my mother. She frequently told me she was appalled that the Seed name would be carried on by such a wretched and backward boy as me.

One of her most calculated pieces of nastiness occurred towards the end of my first week there, though
I didn’t realise just how spiteful it was until I was much older. ‘Well,’ she announced at breakfast, which we took, like all our other meals, in the dining room, ‘we’re finally shot of your mother. Her funeral was yesterday.’

When I asked her what she meant, she smiled her wicked, sneering smile and told me my mother had been burned in a furnace and her remains reduced to ash and shovelled into a hole in the ground in Bolton Cemetery. ‘Though she committed a mortal sin by killing herself and should not have been buried with other decent Christians, as there is no chance of her going to heaven,’ she added.

‘But Nanny said she was already in heaven and was an angel who would watch over me,’ I told her.

At this, she laughed and told me, ‘That’s typical Salvation Army mumbo-jumbo. You’re a Catholic boy and shouldn’t believe such nonsense.’

When I started to cry, her smile became even wider. She seemed to be gloating over my misery.

Neither she nor my aunt had considered it worthwhile to tell me in advance about Mammy’s funeral. Not that I really knew what a funeral was at that age. But it did seem that it hadn’t occurred to anyone that I might have wanted to be there to say a proper last goodbye to her. As it turned out, Grandma Seed and her daughter were invited but declined to go. What hurt me later on was that they hadn’t even bothered to consult me.

The remainder of my stay with Grandma Seed was a
running battle of wills, but one that I hadn’t the slightest chance of winning. A few skirmishes, yes, but not the big battle.

Time and time again, if I hadn’t been ordered to my bedroom I was made to stand in a corner or, the ultimate punishment, made to bend over the arm of a large stuffed chair and whacked across my bottom with a cane. And, unlike the priest at my school in Bolton, Grandma Seed made me drop my trousers and pants and laid it on across my bare buttocks.

When Daddy came to Halewood to collect me at the end of my stay, three things were very plain. I hated being there, Grandma Seed hated having me there and Nanny Ramsden very much wanted me to return to Bolton.

Predictably, Grandma Seed’s last words were neither caring nor loving. ‘I’m glad to see the back of him,’ she told Daddy. ‘This stupid little boy is no grandchild of mine and that’s for sure. Good riddance.’

Just as with Mammy, she was happy to see me gone. But not half as happy as I was to be leaving her. It would have been for ever if I could have had my way, though by now I should have understood that nothing ever happened my way.

The 23-mile drive from Halewood to Bolton took place in total silence as usual. Obviously, Daddy had nothing to say to me and I could think of nothing I wanted to say to him. I was just longing to see Nanny again; to be able to talk to somebody about Mammy without them constantly doing her down.

Even the certain knowledge that I would again be exposed to regular beatings from Daddy and Granddad, and to Daddy’s upsetting nocturnal demands, couldn’t dampen my joy at escaping the clutches of the Wicked Witch. All that mattered was that I would be with Nanny again – the only person in the whole world who could offer me love. 

B
etween them, Nanny and my headmaster saved both my life and my sanity through the next few harrowing years of my youth.

Mr Bleasdale became like a second father to me, and a kinder, more helpful and supportive father than the one that fate had already handed me. He was tall and thin and had a small moustache and a permanent hangdog expression, and ages before smoking was considered a social disease he chain-smoked long thin cigars.

Had it been left to the teachers, I might, in time, have struggled through this bad period. They were all kind and gentle with me, and Mr Bleasdale told me I should come to school only when I wanted to. It was the other children who were the problem. They continued to be as
ruthless and pitiless as only children can be. They knew every gruesome detail of my mother’s suicide, which had been splashed across not just the Bolton Evening News but the Sunday national newspapers too.

I was mocked, taunted and verbally abused almost from the moment I set out on my journey to school in the morning to when I trudged my unhappy way home in the afternoon.

If I did go to school, I almost always refused to go into the playground at break times or at midday. If I did venture outside, this was the signal for the start of a barrage of insults and vicious questions. Some of the children would even mime being a grotesquely broken corpse. I was spat at and kicked as all the while they vied with one another to see who could regale me with the goriest details of my mother’s death. They claimed my mother was mad and a witch.

‘Your mother’s scattered in bits,’ they would yell. ‘We’ve seen her blood splattered on the front of trains.’

‘Why don’t you kill yourself too?’ they would chant, and when I didn’t answer they would push and punch me.

It became so bad that I couldn’t leave the house outside of school hours without being beaten and bullied.

I wanted to scream back that I would love to kill myself. It was what I wanted more than anything else. But each time I came close to doing it something held me back. I don’t know if it was just cowardice or whether I
didn’t want to leave Nanny for the unknown. But I couldn’t go through with it.

I would stand on the railway bridge from which Mammy had jumped and wait for the trains to see if there really was blood on the front of any of them, imagining her beautiful body being dismembered by the wheels.

On several occasions, I climbed on to the top of the guard wall and looked down, waiting for a train to come so that I could hurl myself down in front of it.

I felt abandoned, forsaken. There was no future for me. I simply wanted to die. But I couldn’t. Each time I would promise myself that I was going to jump and as the train approached I would close my eyes and tell myself, ‘Now.’ But each time I couldn’t go through with it, and that made me feel that somehow I was letting Mammy down and I hated myself for it.

I couldn’t talk to anyone about my feelings and became more and more withdrawn, avoiding even the few friends I had. I would wait until after the time to go to school and then go to the big park near by and spend the whole day there alone, wandering and sitting and hurting. I wondered if this was the way Mammy had felt, and whether she had come to the park all those times when she had disappeared from the house for the whole day.

After Mammy’s death, my father spent little time at the house, and for this I was very grateful, because our mutual tragedy had not altered his attitude towards me
in the slightest. He still beat me, sometime savagely, and forced me, with escalating threats and occasional physical ‘persuasion’, to indulge him in his vile
night-time
activities.

As before, my cries of pain in the night never brought Granddad or Nanny to my rescue, and on only one further occasion were the beatings my father gave me ever mentioned between the two men. It happened at breakfast, when I was sporting a black eye after a particularly nasty bedroom session the previous night.

To my regret and disappointment, this time Granddad did not punch Daddy on the jaw and knock him on his backside. But he did stand over him at the breakfast table and punch him quite hard, and repeatedly, on the shoulder while he told him to stop hitting me.

‘It’s your last warning, Joe Seed,’ he stormed. ‘If you want to be master in the house, then you’d better get your own bloody house, because you won’t do it in mine. This is the last time I’m going to tell you. If it happens again, you’ll be out of here, and this time there’ll be no sneaking back in.’

Daddy’s only response was to nod meekly. He may have been an inch or so taller than Granddad but, like most bullies, he was a coward when someone called his bluff.

It didn’t change anything, of course, but what none of us knew at the time was that I would only have to put up with the two of them for another month.

In fact, Granddad’s attacks on me had stopped
altogether. It may be that Mammy’s suicide had affected him more than he cared to openly admit, or that age and illness were finally telling on him, but we rarely heard his voice raised in anger any more and he now spent most of his waking hours in his favourite chair in the living room. Neither watching television nor listening to the radio, he would just sit there dozing or perhaps daydreaming.

It meant one less trial for me at home, but meanwhile pressures on me outside the home were fast becoming unmanageable. I recognise now that at this point in my life I had become mentally ill.

Mr Bleasdale must have spotted the danger signs because he called in the Bolton Social Services and they appointed a special inspector to look after me. His name was Mr Maurice Ffelan, a bearded man in his early twenties who had recently graduated from university. He was unlike anyone I had ever met before.

He took me on days out, which we spent in the park or in the countryside, chatting about anything and everything. Part of his wisdom was that he never talked to me directly about my problems, but simply spent as much time as possible with me, listening to everything I had to say. He was the first person to whom I was able to open up and discuss my real feelings, though some things were still taboo, like the beatings I received at home and the things Daddy made me do to him in bed.

Mr Ffelan must have realised the amount of damage that had been done to me already, because he arranged
for me to see a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, I took an instant dislike to her. She had enormous glasses, like Dame Edna Everage, and was more witchlike than my grandmother in Halewood and even more frightening.

Nanny had to accompany me to these sessions at a special clinic in Bolton and I think she found them just as strange as I did. I would sit in front of the psychiatrist and do little games with blocks and circles and draw shapes. She tried to get me to answer her questions but I refused to say anything. I wasn’t communicative.

I had blocked out everything and was totally withdrawn. Even if I could have brought myself to talk to the psychiatrist, how could I have told her about my intimate thoughts in front of Nanny, who sat in on all our meetings?

At every weekly session, I hated the blocks and the games I was asked to play and in the end I wouldn’t do anything at all. As an eight-year-old, I don’t think there was any way the woman could have counselled me on my loss or my problems, even if she had fully understood what they were.

I had become utterly withdrawn. I was off the Richter scale. But when I was with Mr Ffelan it was different. Then there were just the two of us and he never tried to draw me out or got me to play stupid games. He became a very good friend.

But in the end I simply could not stay at that school, and everyone knew it. I needed a new environment, they said, where I wasn’t known and nobody would know about my mother’s suicide. What I needed was to
switch to a school away from Bolton, I was told, but I did need to go on attending school in order to get a proper education.

After the social workers talked with Daddy, it was decided that this was the right thing to do. I would go back to Halewood and live permanently with the Wicked Witch. But none of those charged with my care realised how much I loathed Grandma Seed. As with everything else in my life, I had always refused to talk about my feelings towards her, so nobody knew the extent of the horror they were sending me back to.

But even I could never have guessed how truly horrible my life was about to become.