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

The L-shaped couch I’m sitting on takes up a fair share of the room. We got it from MFI. It has great big chunky square arms and is covered in some kind of potato sack material with a diagonal plum-coloured stripe, though it’s mainly faded to grey. This couch is where I spend most of my childhood getting battered.

The windows are black inside and out from never being cleaned, but it doesn’t really matter as there’s not much to see out of them – just the main road and a couple of semi-detached houses opposite.

Dad hoovers now and again but it’s rarely clean or tidy and there are always rings on the table from coffee cups. Even when Mandy stays, he does most of the cooking. We mainly eat chips, fish fingers and beans on toast, which is my favourite. (‘We had toast and beans, how posh are we?’)

I don’t have a bedtime. He doesn’t care what time I get to bed. Most nights when he’s drunk I want to go to bed but daren’t ask.

He’ll be sitting there dozing off with the telly on and then it will turn into that high-pitched whistle, or sometimes I’ll sit with him not daring to move, watching the Test Card with the girl holding the stuffed clown for hour after hour. We stick a quid in the meter and when that runs out he’ll just sit there swearing like a trooper for hours, but as always I don’t dare move.

However drunk he is, he never spills his drink. His head may be touching the floor but the hooligan soup – his vodka – will be intact.

Even if he’s hammered he’ll be on his best behaviour if I have friends over, but if they go to the toilet he’ll give me that snide look once they’re out of the room and will start swearing nastily. He’s able to control it though, and that’s why I know it isn’t just the drink that makes him do all the things he does to me.

Dad comes through from the kitchen with my toast and beans and a glass of water. There’s a fuzzy half-screen cartoon on the telly.

‘Here you are, son. I’ll be back shortly, I’m just nipping to the shops for milk.’

That means vodka – I’m not that daft.

‘See yi in a minute, Dad.’

The door closes and I start the difficult task of eating toast with lips like Mick Jagger’s. My jaw’s aching as well but nothing is going to stop me wolfing it down, as you can be sure that food is never spilling out of the cupboards in our house. You have to eat while you can, as you never know when it will be there again. It takes a few days for the swelling to go down and bruising to turn yellow and descend towards my cheeks, but I don’t care as I just want it to go, so I can get out into the snow and start school. Anything to get me out of this hellhole. I’m sure it’s colder in here than outside. The joys of living in a council flat.

My dad Jock is a big stout bloke in his early thirties, with dark curly hair and a squashed nose from getting it broken seven times. He’s always had a beard and moustache; sometimes it’s just stubble, but he’s never clean-shaven. His front teeth are like fangs, as he has broken his jaw three or four times and had it wired up with these strange-looking disc things that look like shirt buttons. He has a scar on his left cheek where one of his mates smashed a pint glass in it during a punch-up in the local pub (the Pheasant, I think it was called). He has big hands with great thick fingernails and massive footballer’s legs, and there’s a huge scar on his thigh where he had to have pins put in because someone ran him over after he had tried to run Mum over when she was seven months pregnant.

He’s a Jekyll and Hyde character, my dad. One minute he’s happy, asking me if I want to go camping, then in a flash he’s snapping about dishes not being done, or my bed not being made. Literally before he has taken a breath. It’s very confusing for me as a kid, as I have to adjust my thinking to cope with two different people, even though I only live with one. I don’t understand why he changes so quickly and there’s no one to help me deal with it. I’m on my own with him and I’m always scared of him.

Everyone who knows him says he’s one of the funniest blokes they’ve ever met, but a lot of them don’t know how mean and scary he really is behind closed doors. I, on the other hand, am a little short arse with fair mousy brown hair, and freckles on my cheeks and nose. Three foot nothing, built like the gable end of a pound note, with a home-made haircut that Worzel Gummidge’s idiot child would complain about and dressed in naff clothes that Dad buys me in jumble sales and bargain stores. Eighties tat.

Today I’m wearing a maroon jumper with patches on the elbows, Farah’s Stay-Press trousers with itchy wool, shoes that are at least one size too big from British Home Stores. Most of the time I wear hand-me-downs from Dad’s friends’ kids or from my Aunt Molly’s kids or from Barnardo’s, the charity shop in Reform Street. He gets a grant from the social to buy clothes – he sells it on sometimes for drink but will always make sure I have clothes for the start of the year – like today was going to be. He never takes me out shopping – he just gets the clothes on his own, which is why they’re always too big or too small. He mostly gets them bigger and says I’ll grow into them. It doesn’t matter to him that my shoes look like hand-me-downs from Coco the Clown.

I’ve also got some other footwear – some sand shoes like plimsoles and a pair of monkey boots, shaped like a meat pastie in front, with stitching like an Eskimo had got his hands on them.

People I know go snowdropping – that’s nicking off other people’s washing lines – but they leave clothes on our washing line. I remember one of Dad’s mates saying, ‘Jock, if your house was burgled they’d probably leave you a fiver and their shoes.’

It isn’t just us that are skint though: everyone’s in the same boat. They joke about it bitterly in the pub. Dad sometimes takes me in there with him.

‘What will the nipper have?’ one of his drinking pals will say.

‘Charlie will have what I have,’ he replies, but then gives a broad wink.

I sip a Coca Cola while he drinks his vodka and I listen to them all trading hard luck stories and generally having a moan. One of Dad’s friends says that when he has a bath he’s so poor he has to wash the dishes in there with him to save on water, with all the bacon and eggs floating around in his lukewarm bathwater.

The men in the pub drink their pints and moan and groan about the English and the state of the world. The English they call bloody animals, the police are bastards, the vatman’s a pig, the taxman’s a cunt – as if any of them have ever paid tax or VAT in their lives. All Dad’s friends spend all day in the pub and most of that time is spent talking about the English, but I don’t think they’ve ever even met an Englishman. They seem to have it in for the English, though, mainly because of a woman called Maggie Thatcher.

Dad blames everything on Maggie Thatcher. I used to think she was the old witch at number 47, the one with the moustache who stabs every ball that goes in her garden. But now I know who she really is. She’s a burglar from another rough area, who comes out at night and steals everyone’s worldly belongings.

Before I say what happens next, I need to tell you how all this began. I still don’t understand most of what went on when I was two years old, but I’ve managed to piece together what happened from my mum and from other people who knew how it was.

The story began around 1972 in Dundee on the east coast of Scotland, when a sixteen-year-old girl called Sarah (my mum) – who had just left school – met a twenty-one-year-old lad called Jock (my dad) from St Mary’s in Dundee. Mum was beautiful with blue eyes, a pale freckled face and long blonde hair which she wore in a fringe. She came from a decent family and was the middle of six children – with four brothers and one sister.