Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed. Stuart Howarth
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behind the sofa if men came knocking at the door. Because I was the youngest in the family and most innocent looking, she would send me to the chip shop most days, usually with no money. ‘Tell them you’ve forgotten it,’ she would say.
I hated doing it, but I hated being hungry even more. When the lady behind the counter asked for the money I would burst into tears. She would then feel embarrassed in front of the other customers and tell me to bring it later. After a while she started asking for the money before she served me. In those days you could take your own plate to the chip shop to be filled up. Mum would send me with a bowl, which the lady would fill up with gravy, giving us more to go round. Even when I was only two or three years old I would lurk outside the chip shop late in the evening asking customers for a chip as they came out with their dinners, having spent the evening in the pub. If they were in a really good mood they would buy me a whole portion of my own.
Shirley’s spina bifida meant she had a hole in the middle of her back and this caused a deformity of the spine. She was paralysed from the waist down and didn’t have any control or any mobility or any feeling in her legs. She was also hydrocephalous, a condition creating fluid around the brain. There was nothing wrong with her mind, but she had to be constantly lifted and cared for and had a shunt to drain the excess fluid from around her brain. She had a hump on her back as well, which was the result of an operation to stitch over the hole in her spine. Life had been cruel to her from the moment she was born.
To make matters worse, she also had epileptic fits from time to time. She always knew when they were coming because her mouth would get dry and she would start smacking her lips together. The first time I saw it happen I was about five years old. Mum and Dad had gone out for the night, leaving us on our own. It didn’t bother us. As a small kid Shirley was always in and out of hospital with Mum, which meant Christina and I were often left to fend for ourselves.
‘I don’t feel well,’ Shirley told us that evening. ‘I think I might be about to have a fit.’
The next thing she was shaking in her wheelchair and there was white foam coming out of her mouth. I remembered Mum saying we had to get her tongue out so she didn’t swallow it, but we didn’t really understand what that meant. Christina ran to the kitchen and came back with a big dessert spoon and I tried to prise her teeth open with it, screaming and crying: ‘She’s dying, she’s dying!’
Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer and ran to get my aunt from a few doors away, who came and laid Shirley out in the recovery position on the floor.
Christina and I loved Shirley and felt sorry for her; there were so many things you couldn’t do in a wheelchair at the beginning of the Seventies. All the local cinemas and theatres, and a lot of the shops, had steep steps and no access for wheelchairs. We were always trying to find things to do that would cheer her up. One day, when Mum was outside hanging up the washing, we were sitting on Shirley’s bed. I had found a box of Swan Vesta matches and had beckoned Christina to come to Shirley’s room with me. Perching on the bed beside her I started to strike them, one by one, letting her blow each one out like a candle on a birthday cake, which made her laugh. Match after match flared and was snuffed. It felt good to be able to make her happy.
‘Let me do one,’ Christina demanded.
‘No.’ I turned away. ‘I’m doing it. I found them.’
Christina made a lunge for the matches so I stretched my arms out at full length to keep them away from her and struck another.
Christina grabbed my arm and shook it. The match fell and the nylon bedclothes seemed to ignite instantly, the flames leaping to the curtains and spreading within seconds. Christina and I jumped up, screaming for Mum, wanting to run away, but Shirley couldn’t move, and the flames were spreading over her lifeless, motionless legs as we desperately tried to wave them away. Mum ran in and ripped away the curtains and sheets, smothering the flames. But it was too late; Shirley’s legs had ballooned up, red and blistered, and then blackened like charcoal. She couldn’t feel any pain, but she could smell the charred flesh just as we could. Mum picked her up, cradling her in her arms, shouting furiously at us, and we watched in horror and bewilderment as she carried Shirley out of the smoke-blackened room. We were sure we’d killed her, and although she survived she was horribly burned and had scars that never really healed.
Having a dad who brought home stuff made us better than everyone else in the street, that’s how I saw it. All the others used to come round our house to watch the telly, when it was working, sometimes as many as twenty people at a time all crammed into our front room, with Mum at the centre of it all. We didn’t own a kettle so there were always people in the kitchen boiling up pans of water to make themselves hot drinks. Mum was only in her early twenties and liked having friends around her. She always loved a party. We would often wake up and find that other people were sharing our beds, having crashed out after too much drink, empty cans and bottles everywhere. The thing Christina and I hated the most was the way the grown-ups all smoked so much. We used to get up early while they were all still unconscious and go round the house collecting up all the packets of cigarettes we could find and then hiding or destroying them.
One day Dad brought home a washing machine, and from then on all the neighbours would bring their washing round for Mum to do. There were always bags of dirty clothes everywhere, adding to the chaos and the smell.
There was always a lot of thieving going on around Smallshaw because it was the only way some families could survive. The women would bring back the stuff they had lifted from the shops, whether it was margarine or tins of coffee, and would share it all out. It sounds like everyone was getting on with one another when I put it like that, but there was always a current of jealousy and resentment bubbling below the surface, waiting for an excuse to surface.
‘It’s all right for Maureen,’ the other women would mutter to one another behind Mum’s back, ‘with all her things.’
Dad even had a van and used to take us out on drives, which made the other families even more resentful. We came back one day to find the house had been broken into and robbed. Everyone knew it had been people from the street but there was nothing we could do about it and Mum said she wanted to move to a better area. Our gas and electricity meters were always being broken into for coins, food was stolen from our cupboards, and nothing was ever safe. The Electricity Board sent some men round to cut us off, but when they saw Shirley in her wheelchair they refused to do it.
Mum was often down the road at work in the off-licence and we would be left in the care of older children, who would bully us and drag us about the place, and beat me with sticks. It was just the way life was for us.
‘You want to come round to our house for ice cream?’ the older boys would ask me. I always said ‘yes’ because I was always hungry, and I always fell for it when they force-fed me a spoonful of margarine. I so much wanted the offer to be genuine I was always willing to give them the benefit of the doubt one more time.
There were some swings in a nearby park and we used to play a game where we jumped off in mid-air. I would always fall and graze my legs, which would mean Mum would stick me in the sink when I got home, using a scrubbing brush to try to get the tiny stones out of the cuts. I would fight and wail.
‘Keep still,’ she’d grumble, ‘or you’ll have to go to hospital for an operation.’
There was no way I wanted to risk that. I’d seen how Shirley would disappear to the hospital for days on end and then come home covered in bandages. When I did eventually have to go to hospital, because of measles, I was amazed to find it was actually more like a magical kingdom than the chamber of horrors I’d imagined. I was pampered by the nurses and given proper food three times a day for the first time in my life. The whole place felt warm and loving and there was nothing to fear, everyone smiling and laughing all the time despite the fact that we were all sick or in pain. I saw our home life in a different light after that, realizing for the first time that not everyone in the world was always angry and shouting at their kids.
We were always having to be treated for nits as well. Christina and Shirley both had Mum’s thick ginger hair, which made the nit comb much more painful for them than for me. As