Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed. Stuart Howarth
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He sat and watched as I took a bite and started to chew, trying to force my tensed throat to accept the bitter-tasting pulp and swallow.
Everything he ever gave us was rubbish. He once came home with a sack filled with old broken toys that someone had thrown out.
‘There you are,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve got you a train set.’
He laughed at me as I took it up to my room and sorted it all out on the floor. It was exciting to have something constructive to do and I really wanted to get it working, to show him how clever I was. I went downstairs and found an old piece of Brillo and set about cleaning up the track, rubbing and polishing the years of grime away until it shone like new. All the time I was thinking, Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off. I was never allowed to swear out loud. It took hours of work, and I would get little electric shocks every time I touched it, but I actually managed to get the whole thing working, even the little light on the front of one of the trains. I used to put the light on at night, when the house was shrouded in gloom, and just sit watching the engine going round and round, feeling satisfied and proud of my achievement.
Things became a lot worse up at the pen when it was just him and me up there. It was a longer walk now from Cranbrook Street than it had been from Smallshaw and he would go as fast as he could, shouting abuse at me as I lagged behind. But I still wanted to go with him because I was proud that I had a dad who wanted to share his life with me, and I desperately wanted to show him how useful I could be to him.
‘Come on, you little bastard, faster.’
Sometimes he would get so far ahead that he would be able to hide in the hedges, particularly on dark evenings, and then jump out at me, frightening me half to death.
‘See that moon?’ he’d ask, pointing up into the sky. ‘He’s gonna get you.’
From the time we moved to Cranbrook Street, Granddad from the Pen disappeared, and no one ever explained what had happened to him. I suppose he must have died.
Dad would bully me relentlessly while we were there, treating me like a slave. He would make me fetch water from the well in a bucket that was too big for me to carry. I had to get down on all fours, float the bucket on its side and scoop the water in with my hands, but it would keep on bobbing to the top and not filling up. When I did manage to get some water into it, it would be too heavy for me to carry and its rough edges would bite into my legs as I stumbled back, desperate to please him. Most of the water would have gone by the time I got to him.
‘What the fuck is that?’ he would demand, before hitting me to the ground. ‘Now go and get the fucking water, you useless little bastard!’
Sometimes he would push me into the pig slurry, half pretending he was joking, half punishing me for all my mistakes. It was impossible to remove the smell from my skin once we got home; it became ingrained into me. As well as using the dirty magazines he kept up there, he would also drop his trousers and have sex with the pigs, unbothered whether I saw him. Many years later I discovered he’d let Christina see him as well.
He would force me to do things like kill a chicken, even though my hands were hardly big enough to grip their necks. I so much wanted to please him by doing the jobs he told me to do, but some of them were too frightening.
‘I don’t want to, Daddy. Please don’t make me.’
‘Fucking hold it! Put it under your arm, go on, under your arm. Now twist its head, on the neck. Fucking kill it!’
The first time I became hysterical as the giant bird flapped and pecked in my arms. ‘You soft cunt,’ he said, taking the bird from me, wringing its neck with one easy movement and then punching me to the ground before walking away.
Once he’d killed them he would take them round the pubs to sell them, or down to the market, sometimes taking me with him. To the outside world he showed such a different face to the one we all saw at home. To everyone else he was always laughing and joking, always working, a good husband, father and provider. From his family’s point of view he was a good man who had taken on a down-at-heel young Irishwoman and her three kids, one of whom was disabled, taking them from the worst council estate in the area to a private house. No one on the outside ever saw the way he treated us in that private house, or in that fortified pen.
‘I could snuff you out like that,’ he would sneer, snapping his fingers to show how easily he could dispense with such a worthless piece of rubbish as me.
The Jack Russells were often having litters of puppies, which he would sell around the pubs, but one day he decided on a different course. Christina and I had been playing with them when he came in with a black blanket and threw them into it.
‘Come on, Stuart, we’re going.’
We went out to the Austin Maxi he drove then and he tossed the blanket containing the puppies on to the floor in front of me. They were squealing for their mother.
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