up.
Dad used to love singing karaoke at the pub and one day he came home with a karaoke machine he’d bought for a few pounds when they were throwing it out. Mum just sat there scowling when he took it into the living room and plugged it in, and after he’d sung a couple of songs himself, he told me to sing some of the nursery rhymes I’d just learnt at nursery school. ‘I’m going to record them,’ he said. ‘Then, when you’re an old lady, you can listen to them and remember what you used to sound like when you were four.’
I was too young to understand the concept of one day being old, like my nan. But I can remember feeling really pleased when Dad said I had a nice voice, then laughed and added, ‘You must have inherited it from me,’ which made Mum scowl even more.
The only other happy childhood memory I have is of another day when I was four and Dad took me to a big garden that was open to the public, where there was a lake and a real elephant that he paid for me to sit on and have my photograph taken. I can still remember how rough the elephant’s skin felt where it touched my bare legs.
Maybe Dad did other things with me on other days as well, but I can’t remember any of them now. I just remember that I loved him and that although he didn’t often do anything positive to make my life better, he wasn’t ever violent or mean to me when I was a little girl.
My nan was though – mean rather than violent – and I knew from a very young age that she didn’t like me. She and Granddad didn’t come to our house very often, but one day when they were there – I think it was around Christmastime when I was five – I asked Granddad to go upstairs with me because I wanted to show him something in my bedroom and Nan gave me a really cold look, then insisted on coming too.
When we got up to my room, they both sat on the bed while I looked for whatever it was I wanted to show him. I wasn’t used to having an audience and I was chattering away excitedly when I noticed that Granddad was staring at me in a peculiar way. Glancing quickly at my nan for reassurance, I realised she was scowling at me, for some reason I couldn’t understand. I’d had a lot of practice reading my mum’s facial expressions by the time I was five – trying to guess how angry she was with me and what she might be going to do next – but I didn’t have any idea why Nan was cross with me. So I just burbled away inanely, hoping to deflect her disapproval and not knowing why I felt so uncomfortable. Then, after a few minutes, she got up, stared at Granddad until he did the same, and we all trooped back down the stairs.
I did sometimes go to my grandparents’ house after that, but I wasn’t ever left there on my own again, until Granddad died when I was ten.
Maybe what I’d wanted to show my granddad that day was a new toy that had been sent to me as a Christmas present by one of Dad’s sisters. Mum and Dad used to give us a few presents too, which we’d open on Christmas morning before my brothers went to Nan and Granddad’s house for their dinner, Dad went to the pub and I stayed at home with Mum. It was the same every year, and it was always horrible. Mum didn’t ever eat very much, so I don’t know if she ate the meal she always cooked on Christmas Day, which I’d eat on my own in the living room, and Dad would have later in the evening when he got back from the pub.
Mum and Dad would both be very drunk by that time, and as soon as Dad got home they’d start to argue and shout at each other. Then that would escalate into a fight, which always resulted in the Christmas tree getting knocked over. There were very few consistencies in my life when I was child; what happened on Christmas Day was one of them.
A few years ago, when I asked my brother Ben what he’d thought at the time about him and Jake – and later Michael – being invited to Nan’s house every Christmas while I stayed at home, he said he’d never really thought about it at all. I suppose he was so used to me being an outsider in the family that it just seemed normal. Based on what I found out later about Mum’s childhood, one explanation might have been that Nan was trying to protect me, although I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the reason, because she didn’t like me and because she only ever did anything that benefited her.
I didn’t watch much television as a child. I was usually banished to my room when the rest of the family were watching the videos my parents regularly rented. And although I hated sitting upstairs in solitary confinement, I don’t think I resented it: it was just another part of the ‘normal’ I’d learned to accept. There were a few exceptions to that particular norm, however, such as the time when I was five and Mum let me watch The Little Mermaid, which I loved, despite the fact that every time she walked past me as I was sitting, transfixed, on the living-room floor, she pulled my hair or pinched me, twisting my skin tightly between her thumb and bony finger, then laughing when I cried out in pain.
I was in the reception class at school at that time and not long after I’d watched The Little Mermaid, I found a small, empty perfume bottle in the bathroom, which I slipped into my school bag because it reminded me of her. At break time that day, I filled the bottle with water and offered my friends a sip of the magic potion that would turn us into mermaids and enable us to live under the sea and have adventures. Before long, a queue of excited children had formed at the water fountain, because although everyone could see that I was just filling an empty bottle with water, it tasted sweet, like fruit and flowers, when they held it to their lips and took a sip.
‘It’s true,’ I heard them telling each other. ‘It really is a magic potion.’ And eventually I got swept up by their enthusiasm and began to believe it myself, perhaps partly because I so desperately wanted there to be a reality somewhere that was different from the one I was living in. So I was almost as disappointed as they were when playtime came to an end and we all trooped back into the classroom, still children rather than the mermaids and mermen we had expected to be. For me though, it was worth the disappointment to have shared all the excitement and been part of something, even if it had only lasted for one break time.
I learned to read quite quickly after I started school, and by the time I was six I had developed a passion for books that remains with me to this day. For some reason, although I had very few toys, Mum didn’t seem to mind me having the books Nan and Granddad gave me, most of which had belonged to her when she was a little girl. So, finally, as my reading skills improved, I had something to do during the hours I spent alone in my bedroom. I still ate supper in my room almost every night, except when Mum didn’t bring me any because she was angry or forgot and I went to bed hungry. But even a rumbling tummy can be ignored for a while when you’re able to step out of the real world into a Grimm’s fairy tale, one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, or any of Roald Dahl’s wonderful books.
It was also when I was six that Mum finally gave me permission to use the toilet in the bathroom. I wasn’t allowed to wipe my own bottom though; I had to shout for her when I’d finished, then stay on the loo for however long it was before she came. Sometimes I’d be sitting there for ages, until my legs were tingling and numb. When she did finally appear, she’d be even more irritable and impatient than she usually was with me and would make me bend over and touch the floor while she scrubbed my bottom with the rough surface of a sponge she kept in a bucket beside the toilet exclusively for my use.
My brothers thought it was really funny, and Mum used to encourage them, and Dad, to laugh at me, while at the same time making a huge deal of the fact that the bucket and sponge were dirty and disgusting and no one else must ever touch them, which made me feel even more embarrassed and ashamed about having to go to the loo at all.
Sometimes, Jake and Ben would come into the bathroom while I was waiting for Mum, but even though Jake was always very aggressive and I was scared of him, not even his demands to ‘Get off
