Chapter 3

 I limped around the flat in pj's and dressing gown doing housework to keep warm. Grabbed the duvet off the bed and snuggled on the sofa. Hot water bottle and an extra one for my feet. Aching more today.


During the school holidays we were left to fend for ourselves. My sister and brother would play games excluding me as I would always be bossy and want to be in charge.
I got so wound up arguing with them that I decided I would make them feel bad. I got a sharp knife from the kitchen drawer and cut across a wrist. It was only like a small scratch but I panicked when I saw a few pin pricks of blood seep through. I didn't do it again.

My bedroom window sill was my main sulking place. Though it was covered in dead moths and the remnants of spiders, were I had pulled there legs off to see how they would move with one leg.
Looking down from the open window I was always daring myself to jump, thinking that would make everyone feel as bad and guilty as I did.

A cousin had started her own dancing school in a community hall.
My sister and I were made to attend ballet and tap classes to encourage other pupils to join.
It was a half hour bus ride away. We were warned not to get into my uncles car if he offered us a lift home. He had just been released having raped his younger daughter.
I hated the ballet. "Find a focus point and pirouette across the room". Pink leotards and ribbons yuk. 
I quickly discovered tap shoes were great for kicking kids ankles. So it wasn't too long until I got banned.

In the group of girls that hung around me, for safety, one was tall and broad shouldered. She was more developed than I was. I would think about her while I avoided sleep. I got her to skip lessons with me and one afternoon I took her home. I instigated the kissing. She didn't object. I touched her skin lightly and it tickled. It tickled her more as I worked my way between her legs. Such a precious moment until the bedroom door burst open and mum appeared, stood still for a few seconds and then flew into a rage. My friend was almost kicked down the stairs. She avoided me at school after that.
Mum kept slapping me while she screamed obscenities and drummed it in that I was sick in the head. I had never heard my mum swear before.
When she calmed down she said I had scared her as she thought I was a burglar. I was not to tell my dad about this as it rude and indecent.
Something broke between me and mum that day.
She was cold and could barely look at me and we only had necessary conversation.
I had to go to the bedroom everyday after dinner. No TV or interactions with anyone for what seemed forever at the time.

I hated being alone and sulked. I would think about my grandfather and still blamed him for how my life was.
That was when I started wondering why mum hadn't protected me. She knew my grandfather was a bad man. She let me and my sister go off with him. There had been blood in my underwear.
It made no sense why hadn't she protected me.
  
I was given permission to mix with my friends.
Saturday mornings in town for the cinema and a church youth club after school two days a week.
I would meet my friends in the toilets of the church. Kept the fee for cigarettes and we got changed, put on make up and then ran along by the river and into town.
We all had invisible boyfriends and tall tales of how far we had gone with them. I of course made out that we had gone all the way on several occasions as I was sexier than all of them.

Down by the river we met up with a group of boys a few times and then we all paired off. I sat on a bench kissing one and he suddenly ran to the riverside and was sick. He said he didn't like girls. I got everyone jeering at him for being a poof and we chased him away and threw mud at him.

The nightmares continued. It was like my grandfather lived in my head. Digging away and causing trouble.

As usual we got ready in the toilets and made our way in to town.
When I got home that evening dad was waiting.
Where had I been all evening?
Had I really stayed in the church all evening?
I thought then that someone must of seen me.
I said one of my friends had had no dinner and so that she was safe we walked with her into town to Uncle Sams so she could get a burger.
Did she eat it all???? Of course.
Turns out Uncle Sams burger bar had closed down a month previously.
The belt stung and marked my legs and I was banned from ever going back to the youth club.

My sister finished school and went to secretarial college.
Dad was so proud as no one in his ever increasing side of the family had ever gone to college before.
My brother had turned into a spoilt brat. He could do no wrong and he played on it making out I had hit him just because he couldn't get his own way.

I joined an amateur dramatics group in the theatre in the centre of town, which occupied me in the evenings and some Saturday afternoons.

I spotted dad in town with his arm over the shoulder of a woman. She was laughing loudly as they walked. I followed them until they went into a gentlemen's club.

I took sandwiches to the bus stop when dad was on our route and waited for ages for the bus so I could give them to him. He use to take me on round trips sometimes and would drive round roundabouts several times making us laugh at the reactions of the passengers.
But then that woman was always on the bus chatting to him and he would take the sandwiches and go.

Mum hadn't been to work for a while. She sat in the front room every day smoking and demanding coffee. My sister was home and we argued in the kitchen.
I went to the front room winging about it.
Mum moved out of her chair so quick, shrieking at me she hit me until I fell to the ground, then kicked and kicked me into the door.
Dad came home and forced the door open and grabbed mum. I was bleeding from my nose and lip.
I was sent up stairs with my brother and a doctor came. Mum disappeared for a while and dad bought us toys and cooked and cleaned.
I thought I had caused mums breakdown.
Again in my head  somehow it was my grandfather making my life bad.

Mum came home and I had practised hard for the first show. It was called Autumn Cavalcade. A mixture of comedy skits, dance routines and singing.
The audience was seated and the curtain rose.
As we sang I squinted through the lights and spotted my mum, sat next to my brother, he sat next to my dad and my dad sat next to his lady friend.
It was so weird.
It never got mentioned and I never saw her again.
I spotted Dad with several different lady friends after that.

My sister got a boyfriend and was never home. My brother was out a lot playing with his friends. Mum was back at work and didn't want to know when she was around and dad came home late at night.

My final year in school was good. The new intake of girls meant it was easy for the older girls to ransack the cloakrooms, demanding sweets or money and giving me the biggest cut. I was given a prefect badge but the headmistress took it back in assembly two weeks later.
I had a civics class and for the finals we had to do our own projects on anything political.
Dad had been going through the ranks of the Trade and General Workers Union and Mum had become a Trade Union shop steward at the factory. So it was easy to get any information I wanted on Unions.
It was the best project the school had seen and I got the highest marks in the school.
The rest of my subjects results were average.

My sister chose marriage to be able to move away from my parents.  
The DJ was a scruffy feller with a huge nose and masses of ginger hair. 
Mum and dad showed an instant dislike for him and said he looked like a gypsy. He was older than me and had a car so I asked him to be my boyfriend and he agreed.
He was a bit weird but a great free taxi service.

I wanted to go to art college but mum and dad were against it. Art students were weird and besides it would be good to have another wage coming into the house.
I just sat around sulking for days.
Dad got angry and told me to go out and not come back until I had a job.

I went to my sisters and stayed for a while.
I applied for three different art courses at college and got offered two of them. I chose a 3 year fashion course. I slept on benches in the park when my sister got tired of me and then I got a grant from the government and lived in chaotic and unsanitary student digs and survived on apples and onions, boiled up with lentils.

It was five weeks until I contacted my parents.
They weren't bothered.
Hadn't even looked for me.
So in my mind they really didn't care.
And probably never had.

Chapter 2

Another evening laying on the sofa. Jeans and sweatshirt under the blanket with my hot water bottle taking off the edge. I have allowed myself some heat from an oil radiator. Such luxury this near to Christmas.


No children were allowed at my grandfathers funeral.
I still remember the fuss mum and dad made of going through the photo tin to find the most recent pic of him to place in the coffin. It was one of him with his hand on my shoulder standing by a gate.
I don't know to this day if that was the photo used but the thought of it has stayed buried inside me.

I was upset, I am sure, I must of been. But the absolute horror was in going upstairs to have a bath. Must of been a Sunday, the family bath day. The first one in always got the clean hot water. Unlike the murky luke warm stew at the end of the queue.
Taps running I turned around and looked in the mirror and my grandfather stared back at me.
I screamed and cried and was 'uncontrolable'.
I was sent to bed, no bath and no dinner, for making such a fuss.

I went to France for a weekend with my class. We slept in dormitories, walked around never ending white tomb stones and concrete bunkers and ate strange food. We did country dancing on a flat roof with a 1ft brick wall around the edge. It was great to get away from everything.

My grandfather chased me in my dreams which would usually end with me waking up in a panic, drift half way back to sleep and feel a presence in the room. Or I would fall down stairs, off of the mountainous edge of a pavement or going sideways and then crashing down in a lift shaft. The worst were the nightmares where I couldn't scream, couldn't wake up, paralysed on the bed. I tried not to go to sleep at night it was too scary.

My mum got work in a factory and my dad was a driver on the local buses.
Some weekends we would all get in the car and go to a beach with buckets and spades and have fish and chips or KFC in the car coming home, singing songs.
We had great fun days out and even dad would join in throwing the beach ball. It would go over my head and into the sea and I would paddle in after it.
Once a big wave took it and I followed and suddenly there was no sand under my feet. No one in the family could swim. I had hated the school lessons and could never keep afloat. But something took over and I managed to put my arms out and kick my legs like mad and made it to the shore.
I achieved several swimming awards at the swimming baths after.

My bad behaviour in junior school had escalated as had playing truant.
One lunch time I was at the end of the school field in the bushes with my friends lighting cigarettes and pretending to take the smoke into our lungs. Then someone noticed the bell must of rung. We legged it as fast as we could to class via the back of the senior school science rooms and they had their furry lab pets on the grass. Something lumpy squealed under my foot but I kept running.
The next day in school assembly all classes were made to sit in silence for 3 hours until the child that had cruelly stamped on and killed an innocent creature admitted it and faced up to there punishment.
I was guilty but there was no way I was going to say it was me. My threatening looks worked on my friends too. They knew I would make them pay if they said anything.

There was a tall metal fence and a large rusty gate separating the junior school playground from the senior girls school.
Word seemed to of spread that I was a little hard nut and my sister in the senior school was such a cry baby, weak and asthmatic and constantly picked on.
Her friends would gather by the fence and call me to help her. I would go in and fight her wars and be dragged back to the junior school by the teachers.
One junior school teacher really disliked me.
I was never in her class.
She would shout at me when she was on playground duty and when ever our paths crossed.
Then she caught me coming back to the junior school and to stop me from just running away and laughing at her she held my arms and stood on my toes. She wanted me to cry I am sure, but I wouldn't, so she put all her weight on my toes. I just looked up and sneered at her. She was so angry and said if I told on her everyone knew I was naughty so they wouldn't believe me over a teacher. I didn't tell.
My toes went black and bruised, but I got away without having to do detention.

As my mum was working long hours she paid one of my aunts to do her housework through the summer holidays. My aunt had a better idea. My sister and I would do it except my sister had asthma so couldn't cope with dust so I had to do it. I can remember gagging as I ironed my dads work shirts as they seemed to hold his sweat in them even though they were clean. They just smelt like my grandfather.

I was still aggressive, mainly with my sister at home. We would have to do the washing up and we would argue over which one of us would wash or dry. I inevitably won as I would grab her by the hair swing her round and round and she would end up in a crying heap on the dinning room floor.
She could be sly though with little things like when we could have a treat from the ice cream van. She would be given the money. Buy ice cream for everyone but me and by the time anyone realised her mistake the van would be gone and I would go without.

I went to my friends house. The back garden ended at a large park with a lake and woodlands that neither of us was allowed to go in to.
I broke through the fence and we sat on a grass hill talking and laughing. Then I felt a pain in my hand, turned it over from the grass and it was covered in wasps. We ran back to my friends house with wasps flying round us. Her mum pulled off some wasps that were stuck and held my hand under a running cold tap. There were nine visible puncture marks. It was very sore.
When I went home I said I felt to tired for dinner and went to bed with my secretly swollen hand, as I just knew I would get a good hiding if they knew where I had been.
In my head I blamed my grandfather.

I started badly in the senior school as the teachers all knew my name and most had witnessed my aggression.
Being older and more sensible my sister was allowed to go out with her friends after school. I begrudgingly had to pick my brother up from a neighbour and take him home and cook the evening meal.
One day my mum had prepared a casserole so I only had to peel potatoes as the oven timer would start before I got in from school.
My dad had been home on a split shift from work for a late lunch.
The casserole started cooking but the gas ran out so dad fed the meter before he went back out.
The gas went to the cooker but the electric ignition didn't relight the oven.
I was late picking my brother up and I peeled the potatoes as soon as I got in and put them on the hob. I pressed the ignition button to light the burner and the oven door blew open and a fireball went up to the ceiling.
I panicked and ran around screaming as mum came through the front door.
My panic stopped as she slapped me hard around the face. My eyebrows and my fringe burnt off and my nylon school skirt had melted into hard rimmed holes. 
The wall behind the cooker and the ceiling were black.
The fact I hadn't smelt the gas and caused the explosion meant it was my fault and I was sent to bed.
In my head it was my grandfather that did it.

School was still great even though I could see the stares and laughter until my front tufts and eyebrows grew back.
Then a new girl started.
It was common knowledge that she had been expelled from 3 other schools.
She joined my class and was more disruptive than I had ever been.
I was always in trouble for not doing my homework especially maths I found it hard.
The maths teacher was running late so I decided to do my homework before he got there.
First she picked up my ruler and then she started nudging me while I tried to work and then grabbed my homework. We argued and the teacher walked in as I was laying into her, kicking her in the stomach under the tables at the back of the room and the class cheered me on "Bundle bundle". An ambulance was called they took her away and she never returned.
My punishment was that I would never be allowed in the maths class again, which they stuck to for the rest of my years in the school. But from then on it was MY school. People would do as I said as my reputation had intensified.

My brother started school and as mum was working I had to play mum and I despised him.
Nightmares kept me awake at night and dealing with him every morning, getting breakfast and getting him ready I just got angry and I would slap him when he didn't behave.
This also meant me being late everyday and creeping out of school early, not doing detention and lots of letters being sent home that I simply tore up. I walked to the other side of the estate and picked him up from school every day and cooked dinner before mum and dad got home.

Dad bought a 4 man tent and we had a  weekend holiday on a pebbly beach right next to a nuclear power station.
Funny how exciting it seemed.
Hurting our feet getting to the sea.
Sleeping bags on pebbles.
We lowered smelly fish portions on hooks down the beach drains and caught eels that I named and held alive in a bucket all the way home. Dad chopped their heads off and cooked them. I was devastated.

Apart from the usual trouble from fighting at school I do remember the headmistress calling my name out in assembly accusing me of something I hadn't actually done.
I felt so offended I shouted and swore at her and at the four teachers that carried me out of the hall, fighting with a limb each.  
Then I stood in her office as she prodded her middle finger on her desk telling me in her hoity toity voice that I was a "naughty naughty gurrrrl", before slapping me with her slipper.
I had been in her office several times.
It was dark wood everywhere with a fug of stale smoke from the butts in her overflowing ashtray.
I noticed that there was a phone box down the road in the view of her window.
Many times while I was in trouble an allegedly angry parent called from that phone and she would leave me in her office and go to the secretary's phone for privacy while I stole her cigarettes.

The first time I ran away from home was after I tried to get my parents to understand I was in trouble at school for being late and always having to look after my brother and I was fed up with it. I felt put upon and used.  It wasn't fair. My bloody sister was still swanning around going to friends houses and enough was enough. 
Dad got so angry and used his belt. I ran out the back door, holding back tears, all the way to the park and sat by the lake.
In my head my grandfather had caused that.
Can't remember what time I ran home but it was dark and I was afraid.

My brother walked to and from school with a friends mum after that.
He was still the favourite.
Mum and dad were always telling people they were proud of my sister getting good grades at school and what the teachers had said about her perfect behaviour.
They all said it was a pity I couldn't be more like her.

It was decided that I should spend time with my dad. So he took me with him to fish off of the sea breakwaters. It was great as we had one to one time and home made pasties and pop.
Dad taught me to bash the fishes heads on the wall to kill them and then gut them.
We would go home with 2 or more bin bags full of mackerel and then try to find people that wanted them. 

We went to the bus depot social club with mum and dad. It was horrible. Drunk, loud and sweaty men being crude and flirting with giggling teenage girls at the bar. We had to sit still and not speak unless we were spoken to and drink our lemonade.
Dad was the drivers union rep and they treated him like he was special telling us that we were lucky to have him as our father.
They had adult only evenings sometimes and mum and dad would make go to bed and then leave us for the evening.
It was dark and I was laying in bed awake when I heard footsteps creaking on the stairs. They got closer and closer and the bedroom door started to open. I tried to scream but couldn't make a sound. I was paralysed with fear.
My dad switched the light on and I got hysterical. I woke up my sister and brother and
dad grabbed me from my bed and dragged me downstairs and used his belt assuming I had been caught out doing something bad.
In my mind it was my grandfather.

My 13th birthday was on a Saturday. Not at school for a change. I got up excited expecting cards and a present. There was nothing.
No one even said happy birthday.
I decided they were playing a game and would suddenly surprise me so I played along.
It was a very long day.
9 o'clock in the evening we were told to go to bed.
"But it's my birthday". 
Mum and dad just argued over the date as no one had realised. 
It was decided mum would take me to town next weekend to buy something as she would be working all week.

In my mind my grandfather was always there manipulating and getting his revenge.

Chapter 1

Laying on the sofa with a hot water bottle under a blanket trying to keep warm. Gloves touching the keyboard sticking out from my prized mans dressing gown and cotton pyjama's.



52 years since I entered the world with my head down a toilet, if my mothers tales are true and not just demeaning!
I am the second of 2 daughters.
My parents were young lovers. 
Mums parents disowned her as she ran away from home, lived in a squat and got pregnant.
After my sister was born, in an unmarried mothers home, dad got a licence through the courts, they got married and lived with my dads parents.
My nan disliked my mum for being lazy and laying in bed half the day and my grandfather attempted to rape my mum, when she was pregnant with me, but got caught by my dads brother before the deed was done. They then managed to get a small 2 bedroom flat in a village nearby.

Looking at photographs you see an ordinary happy looking little girl. My sister was very pretty, blond with blue eyes, while I had long dark brown hair that grew into natural ringlets until 3 days before I started school.
I made a fuss about mum washing it in the bath and I cried when she tried to comb it, so she whisked me off to a helpful neighbour and I started school with a crew cut.
I got teased that I looked like a boy and In my first week I got paraded around school with a lock of blond hair that I had cut from the ponytail of the little girl sitting next to me in class.

I didn't feel completely unloved but from the earliest memories mum was never tactile and dad hadn't hugged me since I was sat on his lap one day and gently moved my fingers around his palm "Round and round the garden like a teddy......" He threw me across the room swore at me and sent me to bed with no tea.

It was hard times for mum and dad. Dad would go out shooting and we sat and watched as he skinned rabbits on the kitchen table and mum cleaned other peoples houses. We survived mostly on eggy mountains, mashed potato with an egg on top.
I remember being happy on my 5th birthday. We went to the cinema and watched Chitty chitty bang bang and I had a large colouring book of the film.

Mum and dad made there peace with my grandparents that same year and we started visiting regularly.They had moved to another village and lived in a prefabricated home. It had a green lawn out the front with a plastic pink flamingo on metal spike legs in the middle.

My nan was great except for her greasy cakes we were told to accept and eat so as not to upset her. They were unique, crunchy topped, but you could squeeze oily fat from the paper cases. We loved her brawn though.

I never thought it was sexual when my grandfather sat me on his lap and started to hurt me with his hand between my legs.  I knew it was a secret. He would say if I didn't tell him I liked it he was going to touch harder. If I ever told anyone then something very very bad would happen and I would be taken away. I was scared and didn't tell. I would often be sitting on his hand in the same room as my parents with him talking while touching me, I hated skirts or dresses.
 
When I was 7 years old my brother was born. We went out less and we moved further away to a house on a council estate in a town. 

My grandparents also moved into a bungalow in there same village. We would visit and my parents would be distracted in another room while he would hurt me. In the bathroom, bedroom, green house and the coal shed.... I got in so much trouble for making my clothes dirty.

As I got a little older my grandfather would take me and my sister out walking through the country lanes and across the poppy fields, (I hate poppy's), to the white chalk cross where a plane had once crashed. My sister would be lifted over the fence and would run to the cross to get a piece of the chalk from the top of the hill to draw on the path on the way back. I would be left to his big dirty hands.

I grew to dislike my parents as they never believed anything I said over my sister or brother, She was older so was allowed to go do things I wasn't and he was the precious baby of the family. I would argue fight and bully them at home. I couldn't tell anyone about my grandfather. He had told me no one would believe me anyhow and I believed him.
Dad was working long hours so we didn't see much of him or my grandparents for a while. But both my parents started getting heavy handed with me as I was angry, spiteful and aggressive. Dishing out my punishment at the dinner table. Dads belt or the bamboo stick across my legs and sent to bed with no food. I learnt to be defiant and not cry.

I had friends at school and we played and had fun until that fateful day we played kiss chase. Brian was in my class. He was always untidy and smelly and this day was no exception. He joined in our game and we all ran around excited but he caught me. He had a very green runny nose and I was pushing him away but he kept trying to kiss me. Then I grabbed his arm and swung him away from me. He screamed and cried. His arm broke in two places. I had to stand outside the headmasters office for every break until the end of term.
To the headmaster it was violence, but to me it was an accident. I decided I was being unfairly punished and would make it worthwhile.

My grandfather had got a job maintaining a graveyard.
He took me and my sister with him on several occasions.
My sister was given gloves, a little trowel and seeds or bulbs and told where to plant them while I was led into his work shed. It was new and had a strong smell of pine. (I still hate that smell).
I remember having my lower clothes removed and being lifted onto a shelf. My grandfather hurt me so badly using funnel shaped lids off of canisters. I would bleed and be sore walking after. I hated him, I hated everyone and I hated the world. If I cried I would be in trouble for making a fuss about nothing.
I told no one.

We had visits to my grandparents nearly every weekend when I was 9 and I did everything I could, making out I was ill, faking injuries and even rubbing grit in my knees, grazing them so I wouldn't have to go. I was told I was a nasty selfish child. I did anything to not be alone with my grandfather and was getting into so much trouble at home and school, fighting. At times I convinced myself that everything and everyone in the world was a cardboard cut out on scenery and only animated when I was in the room with just a tape recorder running behind closed doors. I wanted everything to stop.

It was in September 1972. I was going back to school on my 10th birthday after a hot calm summer. Then before school my mum said we would be spending the weekend at my grandparents. We hadn't been since July.
My week was fretful culminating near the end of the week in telling my best friend, through tears, that I was scared to go away for the weekend and why.
She told our teacher, he told the headmaster and I was hauled off to the office.

He asked me if it was true. Said I was causing a lot of trouble and then tried to contact mum and dad, but they were both working so they contacted one of my aunts that had children in my school.
My aunt took me from school to a shop and we got sweets and ice cream and went to her house for the afternoon. She asked me some questions about what had happened and then told me never to talk about it again to anyone, not ever, especially my mum and dad as it was going to be sorted out so not to worry.
She walked me to the bus stop and I went home on the school bus and said nothing.

The weekend came and on Saturday morning we headed to my grandparents. When we got there loads of relatives were milling around and cousins playing tag on the lawn.
We had sandwiches and fizzy drinks like a picnic and then later in the afternoon we were told to form a queue by the front door and they led us to into the bungalow. The adults stood at the door as one by one all the children were going into a bedroom to say goodbye. I was confused about whatever was happening and when I got to the door I froze, saw granddad laying in his bed with his arms out towards me. Dad started pushing me through the door but I had a tantrum refusing to go to his bedside.
My dad lost the plot, grabbed me, took me outside, and slapped at the flesh on top of my leg
until he ran out of steam.

That night my grandfather died and I thought I had killed him.