Charlie Mitchell - The Nipper - The heartbreaking true story of a little boy and his violent childhood in working-class Dundee

‘Oh, is it too hot for yi, pal? Sorry, son, this’ll cool it doon.’

He looks straight into my eyes and then spits right into my face, his saliva mixing with the tears running down my cheeks .

Dad grins again and takes a swig of his vodka .

I’m just a nipper, and I’m frightened and I don’t understand. But I am still too young to realise what the effect of living with Dad is going to have on my life; too young to know that I will live the majority of my childhood as a virtual prisoner, and that my home in the Dundee tenements will be my torture den.

And it has only just begun…

It’s 1980 and a freezing September morning in a run-down tenement block in St Fillans Road in St Mary’s, Dundee. The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall…Snow is driving horizontally against the misty bedroom window and the Abba record has been repeating all night in the living room.

The time on my Mickey Mouse clock says 7.30 and it’s my first day at school – I’m nearly five years old and I can’t wait to meet new friends and play snowball fights with the kids I’ll meet. I’m a cheerful kid by nature, and as soon as I get out of my prison I always feel happy and excited and free.

I’m trying not to make too much noise getting up, as I don’t want to wake Dad. He’s probably not long fallen asleep. My head is pounding and my eyes have not yet fully opened as the swelling from last night’s head blows is dropping down my face and into my eyes.

I’ve opened my creaky bedroom door to go to the toilet, trying not to step on any loose floorboards in case Dad wakes up. The house is freezing and I’m shivering in my brown and yellow Y-fronts, the wind blowing through every nook and cranny in the door and windows.

I close the door and to my relief make it to the toilet, passing a broken mirror on the left-hand wall; I can only see the top of my head, so I stand on the side of the bath and stretch over with one hand on the sink, and peer in. I have never seen before what I see this morning – the shape and colour of what used to be my face is like a Freddy Krueger Halloween mask.

There is dried blood in the corner of both my eyes, and my neck has three long gashes down the back of my ear to my shoulder. My temples are swollen so badly that I can hardly see my ears. Then that creepy deep voice comes from the other side of the door.

‘ Charlie! What are you doing in there? ’

‘Nothing, Dad! I’m coming now! I’m brushing my teeth!’

‘Good lad, hurry up – I’m bursting for a piss.’

‘OK, Dad!’ I can hear him coughing his lungs up as he walks back up the hall towards the kitchen to release last night’s cigarettes into the sink.

Now I’m thinking, Why is he being nice? I thought he was annoyed with me after last night!…Maybe he didn’t mean to hit me. I open the door and he’s standing with his back to me in the hall, scratching his head with one hand and his arse with the other. He’s still a bit pissed from last night, I think.

‘First day of school today, son.’ He turns around slowly. ‘Get your clothes – oh, what the fuck has happened to you? Jesus Christ , your face, who the fuck did that?’

He looks angry, as if about to pop.

‘You, Dad! You told me to go to bed last night, and when I woke up you were punching me in the face for shouting and making a noise.’

I had obviously had a nightmare and must have been shouting in my sleep.

There’s a silence for about two minutes as he walks into the bathroom with his head in his hands. He sits on the edge of the bath and mutters something along the lines of, Please no again! Fuck no! Fucking hell! He turns to me with a confused look on his face.

‘Go back to bed, son, you don’t have to go to school, I’ll ring them and tell them you’re ill. Go on! Everything’s a’right, Charlie, close the door, son.’

I close the door and go back into my bedroom, totally confused at what has just happened. Did he batter me last night, or was it a dream? It’s absolutely freezing, so I’m just glad to get back into the warmth of my bed, avoiding the damp patch where I pissed it with fear the night before.

I lie down, pull the cover over myself and rest my head on the pillow, trying to work out what’s going on.

‘Ouch!’ I have to sit back up, as my head feels as if it’s in a vice when my temples hit the pillow.

I will never forget this pounding in my skull. It’s like having a heartbeat in my head, or in a cartoon when you watch someone hit their thumb with a hammer and it starts throbbing. I can’t sleep even though I am tired, so I climb back out of bed and walk over to the bedroom window to see if the snow is deep enough to build a snowman if I manage to get out later. It has gone off a bit and isn’t beating against the window any more, but it’s really deep, as it has been falling all night. I can see my downstairs neighbour with his mum and dad sliding him down the road with one hand each – on his way to school, I bet.

I really want to be out there and on my way with him, but no such luck. The state my face is in, I’m definitely not going out, as I look like I’ve just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

I hear Dad on the phone to school, telling them I have sickness and diarrhoea and that I’ll be in as soon as I’m better, then I hear the floorboards creak as he walks back towards my bedroom door. I quickly lie back on the bed and wait for him to come in, praying that he’s actually sorry and not coming back to finish me off.

You see, you never know with Dad. He can change in seconds. But although I’ve always known that he can be really scary after what he did to Mum and Mandy, this is the first time he’s done it to me, the first time he’s battered me. Even though I want to think I dreamt it, I know it really happened. I’m terrified that it will happen again and I’m now seeing Dad with new eyes. There’s always been something about him when he’s drunk that has frightened me, but he’s never taken it out on me like this before. Overnight my dad has become a scary monster and it’s something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.

The door opens, then he comes and sits next to me on the bed.

‘I’m really sorry, son, I can’t remember what happened.’ Then he puts his fingers on the side of my head and strokes it softly. ‘That will never happen again, son, I promise.’

‘It’s OK, Dad, I know you didn’t mean it.’

That isn’t what I’m thinking but he doesn’t have to know that.

‘Come on, son. I’ll make your breakfast – come through.’ He stands up and walks out of the bedroom.

I go through into the living room and sit on the couch next to the window, looking around the room. When I think back to it, I can’t imagine how he coped with a hangover looking at that crazy interior car crash of the early Eighties. That’s probably why he ended up as an alcoholic: he couldn’t handle walking into the front room sober, as the décor would have made him vomit.

We live on the middle floor of a grey, unloved three-storey tenement, up pee-stained steps to the front door. There’s a mouldy, dingy smell from the rotten carpet in the bathroom, the cluttered kitchen is further up, then three bedrooms and the living room at the end of a long corridor which I call the ‘Hall of Imminent Death’. It has cold, creaky floorboards and feels like a dungeon, very dark and grey. The dirty carpet and peeling wallpaper in the living room are flower-patterned but, bizarrely, totally different in colour: the wallpaper’s green and orange while the carpet is yellow and brown.

The living room has a two-bar electric fire with the grid broken off the front and the atmosphere’s always smoky from Dad’s cigarettes and butt-filled ashtrays. He makes new fags out of the butts with Red Rizla cigarette papers when he runs out of his ciggies. The TV in the corner is always on – if the money in the meter on the back of it hasn’t run out.