Nobody's Child (11 page)

M
y evil grandmother told me that my father’s illness had caused his face to become very deformed and that he now resembled a character in the worst kind of horror movie. It’s not difficult to imagine the appalling effect that crudely worded statement had on an impressionable and imaginative nine-year-old.

The most noticeable result was a series of terrible nightmares in which I usually pictured Daddy in bed, next to me, forcing me to do things to him, while he snarled threats through rotting teeth in a gash of a mouth set in a terrifyingly distorted face.

I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming with horror and drenched in sweat, but nobody ever came to comfort me, or even ask what was the matter,
and if I did try to explain my nightmares to Grandma Seed she would grin in that gloating way she had and, far from easing my fears, give me even more lurid details of Daddy’s deformities.

Had I been able to see him, just once, I am sure the reality would not have been anywhere near as bad as my imagination painted it, but I was forbidden to go with Grandma Seed and Aunt Sheila to the hospital. It would be too frightening and distressing, they said, and Grandma would grin her evil grin again. I’m convinced it was because she preferred to torture me with her own deliberately twisted description of my father’s disfigurement. Her determination to break my spirit was relentless.

I’ll never know for certain what might have happened had I gone on living with her, but I believe that, had I been left in her care for much longer, I would have found a way of escaping – and that would probably have been achieved by killing myself.

She was one of the only truly evil people I believe I have ever encountered in my life, and I have no doubt that she really hated me as much as she made me hate her. Despite all this, my heart and faith have since led me to forgive her. Though I admit it wasn’t easy.

But once again my lovely Nanny Ramsden came to my rescue and, in typical story-book ending, rescued me from the Wicked Witch in the nick of time.

With my father dying in hospital and officially registered as incapable, Nanny managed to have herself
appointed my legal guardian, and her first act with this new authority was to summon me back to live with her in Bolton.

What joy!

Even the unpleasant prospect of a return to St Osmund’s and further confrontation with my playground tormentors appeared a far more attractive proposition than life with Grandma Seed and her unremitting cruelty. She made no attempt to oppose the order, and it was unquestionably evident that my departure was just as welcome to her as it was to me.

‘I’m glad to be rid of you,’ she hissed, after breaking the news to me that I would soon be leaving. ‘You were not wanted when you came here and you’re not wanted now. I should never have given you house room. You should have been taken into care, where you belong. Not in a decent home with decent people. You’re a nasty, horrid little boy and no good will ever come of you. Mark my words, you’ll come to a bad end, and it’s what you deserve. Good riddance to you is what I say. Good riddance.’

I know I could have let it be and left her house without any further punishment, but I also knew inside that something had to be said on behalf of Mammy and myself. I had to make a last stand against Grandma Seed and I was prepared to have my ears boxed as the price of saying my piece – and that’s exactly what happened. But it was worth it, just to tell her to her face, ‘Mammy was right about you. You are a witch,’ I yelled. ‘The Wicked Witch of the West.’

It was Aunt Sheila who drove me back to Bolton and all the way home I hugged myself with satisfaction for having had the courage to say what I felt. It was worth a hundred slaps around the face for the rare and exquisite pleasure of seeing the shock on her face when I unmasked her as the witch she really was.

Mammy would have loved it too.

On this occasion Aunt Sheila actually entered Nanny’s house to hand me over, and, though she wasn’t friendly, she was at least courteous, and Nanny thanked her, just as politely, for bringing me home.

It was a wonderful reunion. Nanny hugged me and kissed me and made a tremendous fuss, and I revelled in it all. It had been more than a year since I was taken from her to live with Grandma Seed, and she told me I had a year of hugs owing to me.

Even Granddad managed a smile and a welcome, though I noticed straight away that there had been big changes in him. Somehow he looked smaller sitting in his chair and his eyes didn’t look as sharp. Even his voice seemed frailer and he no longer exuded the aggression and intimidation of before. At that moment I suddenly realised that I wasn’t frightened of him any more.

All at once, the future started to look quite rosy. Daddy was safely tucked away in hospital and unlikely to return, the Wicked Witch was out of my life for ever and I was to have my own warm, big bedroom with a big bed which nobody but I would ever sleep in. That’s when I
started daring to believe that everything was going to be all right.

I should have known better, of course. Within days, these fragile feelings of happiness were smashed to smithereens. 

T
o give him his due, Mr Bleasdale did do his best to protect me. During morning assembly, on my first day back at St Osmund’s, he read the riot act to the other children. He assured them that anyone caught bullying me would be savagely punished, promising six of the best with his cane to anyone who defied his order.

The effect was certainly not what he had been anticipating. It was as though he had announced open season on Michael Seed. Some of them couldn’t even wait until playtime to have a go at me. During our first lesson of the day, they passed me disgusting drawings and whispered vile comments about my mother. And at playtime many took the open risk of defying Mr
Bleasdale, teasing and poking me, even though a teacher was there noting their names for later caning.

Their behaviour was barbaric. Not content with pinching and punching, some of them would even stick hat pins into my arms, though it was the spitting I disliked the most. Sometimes my face would run with their revolting saliva. It would get in my eyes and ears and hair. I just hated it.

After school, the bullying intensified. That’s where the real nastiness occurred.

My worst tormentors were a wicked and vicious clique of ten-year-old girls who had for some reason picked on me as their primary victim. They were the ringleaders, who, through their own example of verbal and physical assaults, or by maliciously egging the pack on, would provoke their brothers and other boys to chase me along the pavement, hurling bricks and stones, along with their expletives, as I ran for home.

These screeching bullies made my life an absolute hell, and had it not been for my self-appointed band of bodyguards I would have been regularly kicked and beaten to a pulp. These were a handful of boys who lived close to my grandmother’s house and had befriended me when I first arrived in Bolton at the age of seven. Only one of them was as big, or slightly bigger, than me, while the others, including Peter, my favourite, were much smaller.

Looking back on it, this Praetorian guard they so proudly formed to look after me was, in reality, a
shrimps’ squad. But it was never more true to say that what they lacked in size they more than made up for in courage, and they became my guardian angels. They took many of the punches and missiles aimed at me and themselves became the victims of the school bullies when they were caught alone.

I will be eternally grateful to those brave young protectors of mine. They prevented, or at least deflected, some of the vilest abuse and physical attacks from the intended victim, and asked for nothing but my friendship in return. On occasion, they literally saved my life.

One of the most dramatic incidents occurred in early winter, and followed shortly after another most significant happening in Raikes Road in November.

Granddad Ramsden had grown progressively weaker during the autumn and had developed a constant hacking cough. It was painful just to have to listen to him. After each bout of coughing, he would sit in his chair, shaking all over from the effort of coping with his agony.

In mid-November, he became so ill that Nanny could no longer nurse him at home and an ambulance came to collect him and take him to the hospital in Bolton.

My last glimpse of him was of his pinched grey face, just visible over the edge of a dark blanket as they lifted him into the ambulance.

A few days later, I was delivered safely home by my protectors to find Nanny waiting by the front gate in
tears. Clutching me to her, she told me that Granddad had died that afternoon. I suppose I should have cried, but I couldn’t. I felt no sense of loss at all. Indeed, my first inward reaction had been: ‘Well, that’s one less.’ For this was a man who had frequently punched me black and blue for no reason, and did nothing to protect his own daughter being beaten up and driven to suicide while living in his house.

I felt sad for Nanny. But that was all.

Suddenly, we had become a two-person family, and it was I, Nanny now declared, who had to be the man of that family. I didn’t feel very manly, spending most of my time outside of classroom and home, it seemed, running away from a growing number of children whose dearest wish, they said repeatedly, was to see me dead.

Soon after Granddad’s funeral, which Nanny chose not to let me attend, my persecutors’ dearest wish was nearly granted.

It happened on a Saturday morning. I was playing with two of my friends in No Man’s Land. There were always dead mice and rats near the tip there and we would play a morbid game called Funerals, which I now understood only too well, in which we made coffins out of scrap cardboard and string and wire and buried the vermin in little graves marked with wooden crosses.

Suddenly, we found ourselves under attack from a screaming group of boys and girls from school. They raced down on us, hurling sticks and stones and pieces
of metal, missiles that were scattered around in plenty in No Man’s Land.

We immediately abandoned the mouse burial we were performing and took off fast. There were only three of us and about a dozen of them, so there was no question of staying to fight. We would have been slaughtered.

As we ran, I heard Peter yell, ‘Look out,’ but I was too scared to stop and find out what the problem was. I realised soon enough, as my feet started to slide from under me. The warning Peter had been shouting was that we were about to run out on to the iced-over pond. By that time I was out in the centre of the pond, whose water beneath the ice I knew was filled with filth and oil. Having tested it earlier on, I also knew that the ice was not very thick.

Peter and my other friend had separated and run around the edges of the pond but our pursuers, seeing me stopped in the middle, gathered by the edge, 20 or 30 feet away, and began throwing large stones and pieces of brick. I was aware instantly what they were trying to do – smash the ice and cause me to plunge into the horrible mixture underneath.

I started to edge towards the far bank, but they quickly realised what I was doing and spread out around the pond, trapping me. My friends had retreated to a hillock 50 yards away, from where they could do little but watch.

Once the gang knew they had me surrounded, their cries, like those of the circling Indians in the
Saturday-morning
films, became louder and their tactics bolder.
They soon realised that the ice around the edges of the pond was thicker and stronger than it was at its centre, and some of them, braver than the others, took a few paces towards me before launching their missiles at me.

Under such a bombardment, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened and the ice gave way.

When it did happen, it was both dramatic and fast. A large slab of concrete, hurled by one of the bigger boys, landed only a foot or so away from me. There was a sudden loud report and jagged cracks raced out across the ice in every direction. At the spot where the missile had landed, a large slab of ice tilted and the concrete slid beneath the surface. At almost the same moment, the ice on which I was standing disappeared from beneath my feet and I plunged into the freezing black liquid below.

As my head went under, I could hear my attackers’ whoops of triumph, mixed with laughter from some of the girls.

When I surfaced I was in a hole about six feet square, and out of my depth. I grabbed hold of the edge of the ice and tried to pull myself out but my hands kept skidding off and sending me back under.

I was screaming with fear by now. ‘Please help me.’

But not one of my tormentors made a move to assist me, even though they must have understood by this time that I was in real danger of drowning.

Instead, with barely a backward glance, and still a good deal of laughter, they turned their backs on the pond and headed in a group towards Raikes Road.

The cold was worse than I had ever experienced and I could feel my strength running out as I tried again and again to pull myself out of the water and on to the ice. But it was impossible.

Then I heard Peter’s voice. He had found a long broken branch and was crawling out on to the ice, pushing it in front of him.

‘Grab on, Michael, and I’ll pull you out,’ he yelled.

I went under again, but this time, when I surfaced, I found the ends of the branch awaiting my fingers instead of bare ice. I clung on and shouted, ‘I’ve got it.’

Peter began crawling backwards and I heard the voice of our other friend say, ‘I’ve got the end too, Michael. Hang on.’

Then came a strange thought: let go now and it will all be over. No one can ever hurt you again.

The temptation to let go and allow myself to slip beneath the water for a final time was almost overwhelming, but not quite. Something inside refused to let me give in. If I died now, I told myself, those kids would have won. It was one thing for me to kill myself, which I might do at any time, but it was a very different thing for my enemies to kill me.

I clung to that branch with all my remaining strength, and as my rescuers crawled backwards, tugging me with them, gradually, hand over hand, I started to haul myself out of the water.

With the arms of my two brave friends supporting me from either side, we staggered back to Nanny’s house
and told her simply that I had fallen through the ice while we were playing.

I must have looked a sorry bedraggled figure, but Nanny, as always, had a remedy and an answer. She stripped me and stood me in front of the kitchen fire and rubbed me down with a large white bath towel.

Her answer to why I had nearly drowned?

I had recently, on 13 November, along with all the other kids of my age at school, been confirmed into the Catholic faith, at St Osmund’s Church by the local bishop, Thomas Holland, and Nanny, still a strict Salvationist, had not approved.

‘No good will come of this,’ she had muttered at the time.

Now, as she rubbed me pink and warm with the towel, she chided, ‘I told you no good would come of that Catholic nonsense, didn’t I? Tomorrow we’ll go to the Salvation Army service and make sure the hex is well and truly off you.’

Nanny smiled. My soul and my safety would soon be back in the right hands.

At that moment, as far as my soul was concerned, I couldn’t have cared less. Catholics, Salvationists, anybody could have it.

As for my safety, I doubted anyone could really help in that direction. From infancy to adolescence, and especially right then, the thought of ever feeling safe was just a ridiculous dream.