Helpless: The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and exploited by the neighbour she trusted. Toni MaguireЧитать онлайн книгу.
still, when things were really bad, handouts.
I hated those times when, standing next to her, I heard her stumbling excuses and knew that not only the shopkeeper but the other customers in the queue behind her did not believe her story. I felt a wave of shame as I saw their looks of pity mixed with contempt and wondered if their whispered comments were about us. I watched the blush of embarrassment and shame spreading across my mother’s cheeks as she realized she had not been believed.
The cheapest cuts of meat were bought from the butcher. The scrag end of a piece of lamb could last for a week when a bone thick with marrow was added for additional body and flavour. Generous portions of potatoes plus an assortment of whichever vegetables were in season turned it into a nourishing stew that was served night after night.
There was another period, worse than the others, when my father was hardly home. When he finally did appear his face was unshaven, his eyes bloodshot. The smell of the pub, that mixture of alcohol, cigarettes and stale sweat, clung to him, and his pay packet was empty.
It was on these occasions that my mother had to beg the butcher for the meaty bones normally set aside for the well-off customers to give to their dogs. He looked pityingly at her haggard face and at my own pale one. ‘Think you deserve these more than pampered Fido and Rover,’ he said, also slipping some fatty lumps of meat trimmings cut from his dearer joints into the paper parcel. ‘No charge, luv,’ he would say and shrug aside her grateful words of thanks. Each time his niceness used to somehow embarrass my mother more than his usual brusqueness would have done.
At these times my mother’s stews became even thicker with potatoes and cabbage leaves, but thin with meat. Shepherd’s pie became mash and gravy, and greasy white dripping replaced butter and jam on our bread.
‘Have to leave the meat for your father,’ she would say to me each time she gave me cabbage and chunks of pale potatoes swimming in the grease-topped gravy.
I would just look at my father’s empty chair and the place that was laid for him at the table and wonder if he would come home after I was in bed.
The rows between my parents escalated; cuffs came in my direction too until even the sound of my father’s raised voice made me quake with fear. In the mid-fifties there were a number of factories springing up in Essex. They produced a wide range of goods, from Yardley’s perfume to Ford cars and tractors, and every time a new plant opened my father’s moods would worsen. He bemoaned the way new housing estates had covered once green agricultural fields, putting farm labourers out of work. He sneered at the factory workers and grumbled at the amount of new shiny cars that splattered him with mud as he cycled down the country roads.
His visits to the pub seemed to fuel his anger and he returned back home wound up like a spring. He was a man whose temper simmered just below the surface, ready to boil over at the slightest provocation. Whether it was an imagined slight in the pub, my mother not being understanding enough, or me sitting in a place he wanted for himself, each was enough to send him into a towering rage. And when it did, the power of coherent speech appeared to desert him, leaving only bellows of rage and flailing fists as his means of communication. Flushed and belligerent, his eyes would sweep the room, searching for something to vent his anger on, and I nervously hoped his gaze would not fall on me.
But more often than not I would be curled in a corner trying to make myself as small and invisible as possible.
Although when I hid with my eyes tight shut or lay quaking with fear in my bed, I had heard the screams and shouts and recognized the sound of blows, it was not until I was four that I actually witnessed him hit my mother.
The evening meal had been ready for an hour and she had already put our two portions out when the door crashed open. My father, face flushed with anger, staggered into the kitchen. He leant over the table; his fingers splayed on it for support and the sour smell of his beery breath blasted into our faces as he spewed out his anger, anger that was fuelled by resentment of the better-paid factory workers who had begun to drink in his local pub.
‘Those bloody boyos! Who do they think they are? Think they are better than everyone else. They don’t know what an honest day’s work is. Still wet behind the ears, they are. Bleeding little sods, think they know everything. Do you know what they told me?’
I could sense my mother desperately searching for the right words to calm him down but, not being able to find anything appropriate, she stayed silent.
She just looked at him helplessly, as his angry words spouted from a mouth twisted with rage; words that I had very little understanding of, but I recognized the venom in them and quaked with terror.
‘They’ve put down their names for that new estate that’s being built. Going to buy their own houses now. Renting’s not good enough for them. Would have thought driving around in those flash cars was enough. They look down their noses at us – us who’ve worked hard on the farms when they were still at school. Mortgages they’re getting, is it? Well, I call it debt. It’ll ruin them, see if it don’t.’
All the time he ranted about the factory workers his frustration at his lack of achievements kept spilling out. He blamed my mother for trapping him into marriage, blamed me for being there. If, he said, he did not need a job that provided us with a home maybe he too would be driving a new car instead of riding his bicycle.
I pushed myself tighter against the back of the chair as I listened to my mother’s murmured conciliatory tones. His dinner was quickly put in front of him, fresh tea was made and poured, a slice of bread cut and buttered, but nothing was going to assuage his fury.
He glared at both of us before picking up his fork and shovelling food into his mouth.
‘For God’s sake, woman! Can you not cook anything else but this bloody awful stew,’ he exclaimed the moment he had tasted the first mouthful. For a moment I thought he was going to throw it onto the floor, something I had seen him do in the past, but some sense of self-preservation, or maybe the knowledge that there was little else to eat, prevented him. Instead he continued to eat, and between mouthfuls he cursed my mother. Then he went quiet.
Judging from the increased colour in his face his temper had not receded; he was just thinking of another reason to blame my mother for his overall dissatisfaction. I could feel both her apprehensive tension and his erupting anger. I felt a knot in my stomach that made me feel sick. I wanted to leave the table but I didn’t dare move. I knew better than to draw his attention to me.
He scraped the plate, using a crust of bread to gather up the last drop of gravy. Then with a clatter of cutlery he pushed it to one side and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. With a venomous look, his eyes raked up and down my mother’s body.
‘Jesus, what a bloody mess you are. It’s no wonder I don’t want to come home. You’re enough to make a man ashamed. This house’s a midden. Think we could ever ask anyone here? My old Ma was right about you: she said you were a dirty cow. She always kept a clean home, and she had four of us to take care of. But you, you lazy bitch, just don’t care.’
His face became even more flushed as the insults rained down. My mother cringed as though each word was a physical blow, but she made no attempt to offer a defence.
Suddenly my father’s chair was flung back as he rose from the table. My mother must have known what was going to happen next. She tried to retreat but he was too fast for her. She covered her face with her hands as his clenched fists rained blows on her shoulders and her arms. Tears oozed through her fingers, I could hear her soft moans of pain mixed with pleas for him to stop. Then as suddenly as he had started he stopped and his arms fell to his side.
‘Naw, bloody waste of time beating you; you never learn. Look at yourself, woman. Really gone to seed, haven’t you?’
His hand rose again this time to poke her in the chest with one meaty finger. ‘Look at your damn slip.’
As the derisive words left his mouth my gaze