Debbie Johnson - A Gift from the Comfort Food Café - Celebrate Christmas in the cosy village of Budbury with the most heartwarming read of 2018!

When she comes back into the room, she’s all wrinkled smiles and loveliness, and we watch an episode of ER together. It’s an exciting one, with a big fire and lots of drama. It may even have been that early brush with Nurse Carol Hathaway that planted the seeds of my later career.

By the time my mum drags herself away from her fight, Nan has put me to bed at her house. I’m in the spare room, which used to be Mum’s when she was little and still has a giant cuddly lion in it that’s big enough to sit on.

I lie scrunched up beneath the duvet, warm and full, and hear them talking down below. It’s one of those little terraced houses with the staircase right off the living room, so the noise carries. Mum sounds tearful and her voice is wobbling and going up and down, like your voice does when you’re trying to keep a cry in and can’t breathe properly. Nan is telling her to leave me here for the night, and to stay herself as well. Telling her to consider staying for good – to finally leave him.

‘There’s never going to be a happy ending here, Sandra. You’ve both given it your best, but enough’s enough, love,’ she says, and I hear how sad she sounds. Sometimes I forget that my mum is my nan’s little girl as well as my mum. Weird.

I wake up the next morning with my mum in bed with me, curled around me like a soft, protective spoon. She’s already awake, watching me as I sleep, gently moving my blonde hair from my face. For a moment, all is well in the world.

Then I see that her eyes are all crusted together where she’d been crying, and her face is all puffed up, and she has finger-shaped bruises on the tops of her arms like small purple paw-marks. I burrow into her, and give her a cuddle – she looks like she needs one.

The second time I run away, with any serious intent, I am fourteen. I’ve been staying with my nan most weekends, to the point where it is my second home. Mum and Dad are still at it, the years giving them more frown lines but no extra restraint.

The fights don’t get physical quite as often, but I still sometimes find the remnants of shattered crockery in the kitchen in the morning, or a mysteriously put-in window pane in the living room door, glass scattered on the floor in glistening zig-zags as I come downstairs for school.

I always creep down quietly, hoping they’re still sleeping it off, praying for a peaceful bowl of cornflakes before I leave. I’ve learned to tread carefully in our house, in all kinds of ways.

The year I turn fourteen, though, things change. They change because my nan dies, and my escape hatch is gone. It’s sudden and unexpected – a complication of diabetes. All those Parma Violets, I suppose. I am grieving and in pain and swamped with guilt – because as well as missing her, I am worried about myself as well. About how I’ll cope without her, and her kind smiles, and our cosy nights in watching ER and Casualty and Holby City , talking about nothing but saying such a lot.

Mum and Dad had gone out for a meal together, a pre-Christmas ‘date night’. As usually happens on those rare occasions, what started off well was ending with a row. Something to do with him drinking four pints of cider even though he was supposed to be the one driving, I don’t know.

The verbal missiles start as soon as they walk in, and had obviously been fired first on the journey home from their romantic night out. I make a sharp exit, stage left, not really knowing where I’m going or what I’m going to do when I get there.

They don’t even see me, and I stand outside the house on the driveway for a few moments, looking in at their drama unfolding. It’s dark, and it’s almost Christmas, and their row takes a festive turn when Dad gives Mum a mighty push as she screams at him. It’s not a push with intent – more of a push to get an irritating insect out of his face.

She loses her balance and topples backwards, staggering for a few steps before she finally lands sprawling in the middle of the Christmas tree, taking it down with her.

I stay rooted to the spot for a few seconds, just to make sure she isn’t, you know, dead or anything – but am strangely reassured to see her climb back up from the fake-pine branches, strewn in red and green tinsel. She’s grabbed the nearest weapon to hand – the star off the top of the tree – and is brandishing it like a shiv in a jailhouse movie, threatening to poke his eye out.

Okay , I think. God bless you merry gentlemen , and away I go. It’s very cold, and the streets are giddy with pitching snow and slow-moving cars inching through slush. I’m wearing a hoody and leggings, which isn’t really enough. I haven’t packed as well as I did last time, not even a spare pair of bed socks.

I wander the streets a little, wondering if I could hitchhike to London without getting murdered or locked in someone’s cellar, before my feet finally take me where I probably knew I was going all along.

I sit on the kerb outside my nan’s old house, ice-cold snow immediately soaking through the seat of my leggings, and rest my chin in my hands as I stare across the street.

Someone else lives there now, of course. The house was sold within a couple of months of her dying, which will always, always piss me off. I’m a teenager now, so I swear a lot more than I did when I was seven. And this? Imposters in her home? That pisses me off. It should have been kept as some kind of museum. At least had a blue plaque outside it. Instead, it’s like she was never even there.

I pull the cord of my hoody to make it tighter around my face, and look in through the front window. I see their brightly lit Christmas tree, and the cosy room, and occasionally even see a woman walking around, carrying a baby. I have no idea who they are, but I resent them. It might not be their fault that she died, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. The people who live there are pissing me off as well.

I’m so sick of my parents’ dramas. Sick of the tension, of not knowing when it’s all going to kick off again. There was a temporary lull after Nan died, and both of them were on their best behaviour, but it didn’t last.

Sometimes it comes after a flash point; sometimes it comes after days of simmering anger and snide comments and ‘your dinner’s in the dog’ sniping. He’ll go straight to the pub after work; she’ll sit at home planning her revenge.

And I know now – because my mother has said it to me – that I am apparently the cause of their determined grip on marital misery.

‘We didn’t want you to come from a broken home,’ she said – as though this was better. As though me bearing witness to a state of warfare throughout my childhood is beneficial, rather than filling me with dread.

I wade through a state of constant nervous energy every time I come home from school, standing in the hallway with my coat still on, weighing up the mood of the house, deciding whether I can risk venturing into the living room or if it would be better to run straight upstairs to my room, put on my headphones, and pretend none of it is happening.

So that’s how I live. Hiding in my room with my music; hiding at friends’ houses for way too many sleepovers, and running. Sometimes here, to my nan’s. Sometimes to town. Sometimes just buying a day pass for the bus and riding around all day.