Toni Maguire - When Daddy Comes Home

She left the court with his words tucked safely into her mind; words that over the years she would take out for comfort, words that helped her face a family and a town who did not share his opinion.

It was 1961 and Antoinette had just turned sixteen years old.

Two years had passed since her father had been sentenced to prison for what the papers called ‘a serious offence against a minor’. The trial had been held in camera in order to protect her identity but that hadn’t mattered – the details were an open secret and everyone in Coleraine knew what had happened. They knew, and they blamed Antoinette. She had been a willing party, they whispered, or why had she kept quiet for so long? It was only when she got pregnant that she cried rape, and brought this terrible disgrace on her father’s family.

Antoinette was expelled from school. Her father’s family told her never to visit them again. The town shut its doors on her and shunned her wherever she went.

Ruth, Antoinette’s mother, had been desperate to escape the disgrace of her husband’s crime and prison sentence, and she wanted to get away as soon as she could from the gossip and whispers in the town. Nothing could have persuaded her to remain. The family house was hurriedly sold, as was Joe’s black Jaguar car, but even after both sales had gone through, she had been left very short of money.

Undeterred, she moved herself and Antoinette from Coleraine to the poor district of the Shankhill Road in Belfast, and a small rented house. Antoinette, relieved that they had left Coleraine but with her dreams of an education in tatters, took jobs as an au pair so that she could help to contribute financially while Ruth got a position as the manageress of a coffee shop in the city.

But the fear pursued her. The terrible feelings of rejection by everyone she cared about would not release their grip on her. She felt lonely, unloved and worthless. The only solution, she thought, was to leave the world she no longer felt wanted by. It was then that Antoinette took pills, washed them down with whiskey and cut her wrists fifteen times with a razor. She survived, just, and spent three months in a mental hospital on the outskirts of Belfast. Because she was only fifteen, she was spared electric shock treatment and sedatives. Instead, intensive therapy helped to lift her depression and eventually she was well enough to leave and resume her life.

Ruth had managed to buy a home for them while Antoinette was ill, and it was to this new place that she went, feeling that perhaps her life might be about to improve for the first time in many years.

The gate lodge was a pretty Victorian building standing on the edge of the town. It had small, cramped rooms cluttered with cheap, shabby furniture; the plaster on the walls was old and lumpy and cracks of age ran across the window frames and marked the skirting boards. Curtains with large flowery prints designed for larger windows had been shortened and hung in ungainly folds half way down the walls while the clashing floral carpets were faded and threadbare.

‘Here we are then, Antoinette,’ said Ruth, as they went in for the first time. ‘This is our new home. A room for you and a room for me. What do you think?’

From the first moment she went into the old house, Antoinette began to feel safe. She didn’t know why this place should be where she began to leave the past behind, but it was. Here, the fear she had lived with for eight years, that had stalked her waking hours and invaded her dreams gradually diminished. Antoinette felt that the lodge was her nest, somewhere where she was protected from the world.

Together, she and her mother began to turn the place into their home. Bonded by their desire to create something homely and welcoming, they covered the bumpy old plaster with two coats of fresh paint, applied with amateurish enthusiasm. They made the tired old sitting room into a pretty individual room filled with books and ornaments. Ruth’s collection of Staffordshire dogs were placed in one corner while willow-patterned plates were displayed on a scratched oak sideboard, alongside the little knick-knacks and pieces that Antoinette and her mother bought from Smithfield market in the centre of Belfast. It was there, among the stalls selling bric-a-brac and second-hand furniture, that they found their best bargains.

It was on one of those days when they went out exploring the market that Antoinette discovered a green wing armchair priced at two pounds. Full of excitement, she called her mother over to see it and together they quickly made the purchase. At home, it became Antoinette’s favourite chair. She loved the soft velvet that covered it and the wings on the back that protected her from draughts.

As the weeks passed and they settled into their new home, the closeness with her mother that Antoinette had craved since she was six returned and the trust that she’d once had began to grow again. She cherished it so much that she never asked herself why everything that had gone before had happened; she firmly locked away the memories of how her mother had once been and refused to ask herself the questions that had haunted her. Instead, she looked to the future. At last she was in a place where she felt safe, and at last her relationship with her mother was beginning to blossom. She discovered that the satisfaction of being free to love far outweighed the happiness of receiving it. Like a flower in the sunshine, she began to bloom.

Ruth got Antoinette a job as a waitress in the coffee shop where she was the manageress. The work was not difficult and Antoinette enjoyed it. In the evenings, after they got home from work, she and her mother would eagerly scan the newspaper and choose from the two available channels a programme they both wanted to see. With their supper on a tray, they sat engrossed in old black-and-white films or quiz shows, kept warm by the coal fire burning away in the grate. The television was Antoinette’s pride and joy – it was the only piece of furniture that had been bought new and she had saved the money to purchase it herself.

At the end of the evening, Antoinette would fill the hot-water bottles and carry them up the steep narrow staircase that led from the living room to a tiny square landing. On opposite sides of it, separated only by a few feet, were their unheated bedrooms with their sloping ceilings and ill-fitting windows. She would wrap each pink rubber bottle in a pair of pyjamas and tuck them into the cold beds to create a welcome patch of warmth for later.

Then, back downstairs, a final cup of hot chocolate would be drunk companionably before Ruth would depart, leaving Antoinette to tidy up. Her last job was to damp down the fire with coal rubble and tea leaves so that in the morning, once prodded by the cast-iron poker that stood with its matching shovel and brush in the stand beside it, there would be a welcoming glow.

Antoinette would rise first in the morning and go downstairs for a quick sponge wash, taken hurriedly at the kitchen sink. The steam from the kettle would mingle with the mist of her breath as she boiled water for their morning tea. Once a week, a paraffin stove was lit. It gave off obnoxious fumes as well as a faint heat; while it warmed up, Antoinette dragged an old tin bath out and then filled it with saucepanfuls of boiling water. She would bath quickly and wash her hair, as the kitchen heated up; then, wrapped in a flannel dressing gown, she would clean the bath and refill it for her mother. Clothes were still washed by hand and hung on a line suspended between two metal poles in the small back garden. While still damp, they were aired in front of the fire causing steam to rise as the smell of drying washing filled the room.

On Sundays, when the coffee shop was shut, Antoinette would cook breakfast and she and her mother would share it together while Judy, now an old dog whose rheumatism was beginning to slow her down, would sit at Antoinette’s side, her eyes following their every movement hoping that both mother and daughter were going to stay at home and not leave her. On the days that Ruth and her daughter left for work together she would follow them to the door, a look of abject misery which the years had perfected on her face.