Toni Maguire - Helpless - The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and exploited by the neighbour she trusted

‘Sodding liar, that’s what you are,’ was his normal response. ‘Now give it to me if you know what’s good for you.’

My little body would shake with fear and I would slither quietly from my chair and creep behind the settee. With hands held over my ears and eyes screwed up tightly, I tried to block out the images and sounds of what was happening. I would hear the scrape of his chair being pushed violently back, the sound of his feet in their heavy working boots stamping across the room, the crash of saucepans thrown to the floor and the clatter of sideboard drawers being emptied onto the floor.

Those sounds mixed with my father’s angry shouts of ‘Where are you hiding it, you bitch?’ and my mother’s wasted protests of ‘There’s nothing left’, until the kitchen rang with the sounds of his search and her pleas.

The roars of rage would increase and were followed by the unmistakable thuds of fists connecting with a body. My mother’s sobs, the thunder of heavy feet on the wooden stairs and then finally his triumphant shout would let me know that his search had finally yielded its booty.

‘There, you useless slag, I said you were hiding it from me.’

Once again the lure of the pub had won. It called out to my father, its siren’s call erasing all thoughts of his family’s needs.

When the door slammed, announcing his departure, I would remove my hands from my ears, open my eyes, uncurl myself and hesitantly come out from behind the settee. Each time it happened I felt a lump in my throat when I saw my mother sitting slumped in utter despair.

The red marks of a handprint were on her face, a trickle of blood smeared round the edge of her already swelling mouth, a bruise was beginning to stain her arm and the tears of despair were sliding silently down her face as she surveyed the chaos around her. It would make me want to run to her and offer her comfort. There were times when, without the energy left to push me away, she let me nestle against her knee, but mostly, as soon as I said the word ‘Mum’, she gave me a look of such frustrated anger that I shrank back from her.

‘Mum what, Marianne? Can you not leave me alone for one moment? Now what do you want?’

At that age I did not have the words to tell her that I wanted to feel safe, that I wanted to crawl onto her lap and have her arms around me and be told that everything was going to be all right.

Instead, faced with her rejection, fat tears would spurt from my eyes as I wailed with my answering misery.

Anger usually left her face then, to be replaced sometimes by a mixed expression of fleeting guilt and resigned impatience.

‘Oh, stop your whingeing now! It’s not you he went for, is it? Let’s find something to dry your tears.’ She would fumble in her pocket for the grubby rag that passed for a hanky and hastily dry my tears. ‘You know it’s not your fault, Marianne.’

Those brief moments of rough maternal kindness would temporarily console me but I still believed that somehow it must have been my fault that she was angry. After all, there was no one else there to blame.

When there was not enough money left for even the most basic of groceries, my mother had to rely on the good nature of others to give her credit or, worse 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.

Chapter Three

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?’