Don't You Love Your Daddy? (28 page)

As I got to know them, I grew fond of them, and much of my hard-earned cash went on buying small presents for everyone I knew was going to remain there for the festive season. Some of the more sprightly were going to their families for a few days. They had talked to me with excitement of seeing their children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. They repeated to themselves the exact time that they were being picked up, and recited greedily the details of what they would have to eat. Old eyes shone as if the telling reassured them that they were not forgotten.

They also told me stories of their distant families. Treasured photographs were held out in trembling fingers for me to admire. Excuses for their family’s long absences were uttered in a vain hope that perhaps they, too, would believe them.

They tended to dwell far more in the past than the present. As I listened to them I tried to imagine the people they had once been, when their faces had been unlined, their hair thick and glossy and their limbs supple. Some recounted stories from their youth. They had lived in a time before the war, and they told how their lives had changed when the Prime Minister had grimly informed the nation that Britain was at war. Rheumy eyes dampened as, with faraway expressions, they talked of the young men who had left, never to return, and the camaraderie that the tragedy of war had brought.

‘They were the best years of my life,’ said one, and I wondered, as I saw other heads nod in agreement, how they could think that, given that bombs had flattened whole areas of the north, extinguishing many lives decades before their time. But it was the comradeship they had missed when it ended and the opportunities that those years had given them. For the war not only heralded the end of the class system, but the need for land and factory workers meant that women were no longer told that their place was in the home. It was during those years that women of all ages had tasted the sweetness of independence and a sense of self-worth.

I thought of Sue’s father telling me I spent too much time with my head in my books. Here, I was listening to volumes of stories, told especially for me.

There were some, of course, who had turned into children trapped in an old person’s body. I only hoped that if I lived to their age I would not be caught for ever in childhood memories. But at fourteen that seemed too far away to imagine.

I volunteered to work on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve I tied up my tiny parcels with rolls of brightly coloured paper and gold string, then wrote the names on the cards. Edna, Violet, Edith, Ray and Joe, all names from a different era than my own. I was rewarded with smiles and delight as the paper was removed and, with the practice that years of frugality had engendered, carefully folded and put to one side to be reused on another occasion, should they live to see it. I felt my face stretch into a wide smile when I watched the reactions to my gifts. Delicately scented lavender soap was held up to the noses of frail old women, and fine cotton lawn handkerchiefs, which once their generation had treasured, were enthusiastically admired before being placed on their bedside tables with the card. Old men with badly fitting dentures, or none at all, sucked noisily on the boiled sweets I had parcelled up, and effusive thanks rang in my ears as I was told over and over that my gifts were exactly what they wanted.

I stayed on to help serve the Christmas lunch – thin slices of turkey, with thick gravy and mashed potatoes. Taking into consideration loose dentures and toothless gums, the vegetables were also mashed and easy to spoon in. I pulled crackers and placed paper hats on heads where the hair was so thin the scalp was visible and stayed until silence was called for and the radio turned up loud for us to listen to the Queen’s speech.

It was that Christmas when I decided what I wanted to do. I wanted to train as a carer and spend my time with people who were reaching the end of life, not those who were just entering it.

I made one friend there who was not much older than I was and who, like me, had not been happy at home: her inability to pass exams had enraged her parents. She was a tall, gangling girl with red hair and freckles and her pale myopic eyes looked seriously at me from behind the thick lenses of her glasses.

It was she who introduced me to another world – the one of citizen’s band radio. Like today’s Internet chat rooms, the old-fashioned clumsy device, which we thought was so modern, could connect us to far-flung countries as well as neighbouring towns. It was our way of talking to strangers and reinventing ourselves as anyone we wanted to be. I saved up the money from my weekend work until I could purchase my own set. Hidden in my room, it came out in the evening as I talked to other isolated and lonely people, truck drivers and those in search of cheap dates.

It was then that I remembered my childhood daydreams of being popular, where friends hung on my every word, of standing on a stage listening to admiring applause, of being successful, of feeling important. All those fantasies could, for a short time, be brought alive when I talked on the radio into the night. In turn I was a secretary in a large company, a model who was tired of only being dated for her looks and occasionally, just occasionally, I was me, Sally.

They asked to meet me, those men I talked to late at night. I refused: I didn’t want to spoil my imaginary adventures.

I left my father’s house a few months after I had taken my GCE exams – not to work in the home where I had been for two years but at one in another town. I wanted to put distance between Sue, my father and myself. Surprisingly, when I told my father that I was leaving he made no protest.

‘Well, you’re a woman now,’ he told me, with that lop-sided smile of his. Then he added, ‘I helped to make you one, didn’t I, Sally?’ He gave me some money and, just as when I was younger and he had cuddled me after doing terrible things to me, I felt the same conflicting emotions that being near to him always gave me. That yearning for the old father and the hatred for the cruel and abusive man I knew him to be.

I quickly found a bedsitter and permanent work, using the glowing reference that the matron had given me. For companionship I had my radio and, of course, faithful little Dolly who, at ten, adapted to her new quarters very quickly.

When I left home at nearly seventeen, I thought that at last I was free – free of my father, his threats and his control – but I wasn’t. Just his ‘daddy’s voice’ on the phone, when he played the role of the concerned father, was enough to transport me back to my childhood. No: freedom took another twenty years to arrive.

The CB radio was my salvation and my companion: on it I could talk to lonely strangers in the darkness of the night. Our anonymity gave us the confidence that life had failed to do, and we talked with the ease that so often strangers have with one another when they believe that they will never meet again. In our case we were even more protected for should we pass each other in the street, we would do so unknowingly.

Along the way loneliness made me break my rule twice when I arranged to meet those strangers. At seventeen I chose a brightly lit wine bar where the fluorescent lighting and the crowd of jostling people made me feel safe. At thirty it was the bar of a large hotel. Twice I heard the words ‘You’re special,’ and the need to hear them more often was the reason I married, over a period of thirteen years, both of those men. My first husband was a sweet young man who said he adored me and gave me two children, before my inability to love him in return drove him away.

The second man was tall and blond, with a winning smile. He took in me and my two children, asked me to marry him and smiled with joy when I said yes. Watching me showering love on my small daughter and son, for their youth made them defenceless and thus incapable of hurting me, he pleaded with me to show that I also cared for him. I told him I did for I could only use words to show him my feelings. When frustration turned his pleas into shouts of rage I left him.

‘Selfish,’ both of my husbands said. ‘Cold, unfeeling and ungrateful,’ were the last accusing words they uttered before the front door shut and I was left standing in the quiet, a captive of my fears. Love, I had found, given to the undeserving, can turn into a weapon wielded by a monster.

It was when I finally received a phone call that I had not been expecting that the glimmer of freedom beckoned.

‘Your father is dead,’ said Sue.

‘Our father is dead,’ said Billy.

‘I’m not coming to the funeral,’ was my reply.

Instead on that day I sat alone in a bar and ordered a drink. As I thought of his body being lowered into the earth I tried to remember the man he had once been, the one I had loved.

But the other memories crowded in; the ones that I had for so many years pushed into the recesses of my mind. I heard his voice, saw his conspiratorial smile and remembered more than anything my fear. But still I whispered goodbye.

For a week I went to the same bar, took a book and tried to look nonchalant. I didn’t want to talk to anyone but I needed to be around the warmth of strangers. The barmaid came to me on a night when pouring rain had kept her customers away.

‘What’s wrong, dear?’ she asked me. ‘I’ve seen you sitting here with your book, but the pages don’t get turned, do they?’

‘My father has just died. The funeral was only last week,’ I told her.

‘Are you sad because you miss him?’ she enquired.

‘No, because I don’t.’

She said nothing to that, and only gave me a reflective look from blue eyes that had lost their customary sparkle. ‘I see,’ she said, and I wondered if she did.

After that I ordered another drink, then another – oh, not enough to be really drunk but just enough for euphoria to come. I got into my car and that’s the last thing I remember of that night. The next day I woke up in hospital. I had laughed at the police, I was told, when they managed to stop my speeding car. Whatever they said I kept laughing and laughing, and I was still laughing when the medics arrived – I couldn’t stop. They had contacted my husband, a nurse said.

‘He’s gone,’ I replied, although I didn’t really grasp her words. But the police had searched my bag for identification and found something with his address on it. He came to see me. He said he would come back; maybe treatment would help my coldness. I sent him away.

Once he had gone I cried. Then, as I had done the night before, I laughed. It mixed with my tears and I couldn’t stop. Harsh and loud, it bounced off the walls until nurses came and I was given an injection.

The next day a doctor visited me. He sat by my bed and asked me questions. What had happened to me? Did I even remember being brought into the hospital? I turned away, my shoulders shaking with the sobs of the child I had once been.

I was transferred then. I needed a different sort of help, they said, as they took me to a ward with putty-coloured walls. There, blank-eyed people stared out of windows at sights only they could see.

‘Breakdown’ was the word I heard, when tablets were handed to me. Why now? I asked myself. Why now, when he’s gone?

I had therapy and drugs, but I still couldn’t tell them the reason I was there or describe the feeling of being cast adrift and explain my loneliness.

My children, now teenagers whose schooldays were behind them, came to visit, patted my hand and gave me flowers. They looked much as I must have done when I was a child visiting my mother in a similar room: uncomfortable.

I asked for cigarettes, and once all the visitors had left, the other patients and I went to the smoking lounge. We were as relieved to see them go as they were to leave. Conversation was spasmodic as, lost in our own thoughts or in some drug-induced calm, we sat with the wreaths of smoke swirling around our heads.

Gradually, as the days passed, as though they were drawn by some inexplicable force, a small group gathered around me. There were hesitant smiles, desultory conversation started and, knowing there was a purpose to their closeness, I waited for one to tell me what it was.

The first to tell her story was Bridie, a young Irish girl who had fled her home just a few years prior to her admission to the hospital; a girl younger than most whose arms bore the scars of the self-harmer. She turned to me as she told it, and as I listened to her lilting accent, and prompted her with the odd question I was transported into her story.

Her tale took me to Ireland, and as I went with her to that mist-covered island, I saw it through her eyes, a cold place steeped in narrow-minded bigotry, and I seemed to hear an Evangelist minister as he preached of hellfire and damnation. Her hypnotic voice introduced me to her harsh stepfather, a man who had ruled his small household with a rod of iron, a man who believed that women were second-class citizens and that every child is born with sin. Finally she led me into the world that had become hers within weeks of her mother, a widow, marrying her second husband. It was a world I understood, the world of the abused child.

At night when the lights had been dimmed and I lay listening to the disturbed sounds of others’ sleep, I reflected on Bridie’s story. I asked myself why she had wanted to confide in me. Is there a secret badge we wear, a mark only visible to one who belongs to the same group? I learnt over the course of the next few weeks that often we did recognize ourselves in the faces of people we met. We know that they also are the ones: the ones whose families destroyed their childhood before casting them aside without direction.

It is on days when we are troubled that we become aware of our lack of roots. Those roots that keep others secured firmly to the ground are missing in us. We, who were never nurtured when young, drift aimlessly when faced with the storms of life. It is then that we find each other, sometimes fleetingly when help is needed; at others we can bond for ever.