Mummy Knew: A terrifying step-father. A mother who refused to listen. A little girl desperate to escape.. Lisa James

      ‘I bet she’s going, “Oh, that Donna, she’s always picking the wrong men,”’ Mum said, imitating Nanny’s Geordie accent.

      Even though I was only eight, I knew that Mum had definitely picked the wrong man in Dad, and I vowed to be a lot more careful when I grew up. I remember wondering why she couldn’t just find someone else, someone nicer who wasn’t rude all the time. Why wasn’t she happy that Dad had gone? He hit her and yelled at her even more than he did to the rest of us. What did she love about him? But instead she moped around, gazing out of the window as if waiting for him to return and smoking endless cigarettes.

      Our happiness and Mum’s misery were short-lived. I got home from school a couple of days later to see the familiar leather coat on the kitchen door and heard grunting noises from the bedroom and I stopped dead, feeling as if there was a lead weight in my chest. He was back.

      Mum and Dad spent the first few days in bed together, then Mum gathered us all into the front room. She said they had an announcement to make, that they were getting married. Cheryl and Davie both cried. Cheryl’s tears slid down slowly, but Davie let out huge wracking sobs and cried in a way I’d never seen him cry before, even worse than when Dad smashed his ship-in-a-bottle.

      ‘What you crying about?’ Mum asked, her head cocked to one side, as if genuinely baffled by his reaction.

      ‘We won’t be able to go over Nanny’s any more,’ he said, and I saw Dad bristle slightly.

      ‘But we’ll be a proper family,’ Mum said gaily. ‘Won’t that be nice?’

      They had a bring-a-bottle party to celebrate and invited everyone in Dad’s large extended family, including his brother Keith, his sister Lesley and various other relatives we’d never met, as well as his numerous drinking buddies. It was as if Dad had invited everyone he’d ever met but Mum, on the other hand, invited nobody. It went without saying that she hadn’t invited Nanny and her many brothers and sisters because she hadn’t spoken to any of them since meeting Dad, and she didn’t have any friends of her own because she wasn’t allowed out without Dad. But it was quite a shock when Mum told us that none of us children could attend.

      ‘I’m not having you winding him up, not tonight,’ she said. ‘I can just fucking see it now, shown up in front of all his family. Not on your fucking nelly.’

      By this time Diane had moved back out again, so Cheryl went to stay with her. That left me and Davie.

      ‘Can we go over Nanny’s?’ I asked.

      ‘No, you fucking can’t,’ Mum snapped. ‘I’m sick of them knowing all my fucking business.’

      Davie and I were locked in a bedroom. Mum gave us a bottle of coke, some crisps and a packet of peanuts and instructed us to stay put until everybody had gone. She even left a bucket in case we needed the loo. The music was blaring into the early hours and our flat sounded like the pub on the corner did on special nights like New Year’s Eve. We could hear other children playing with our toys out in the passageway, but it seemed that Mum was ashamed of us because we weren’t allowed to join in.

      Mum and Dad got married at a registry office one day when I was at school and, as with their ‘engagement party’, none of us was invited. I had always wanted a proper family with a mum and a dad, and I would have loved to go to their wedding and maybe even be a flower girl, but it was made very clear to me that as far as I was concerned nothing had changed.

      Life continued pretty much as it always had, except that over the weeks and months I noticed Mum’s belly was getting bigger. At first I thought she must have been eating too much, but then I worked out that she was having a baby and I waited for the day when she would tell me. I would have asked her myself but I was shy. Talking about babies would mean talking about sex in a roundabout way and I was far too embarrassed to do that. Even though I had grown up hearing every grunt and groan Mum and Dad made in their bedroom and seeing Dad’s pornographic magazines lying around, I was still embarrassed about such things. My face reddened as I imagined the moment Mum would sit me down and tell me I was going to have a little brother or sister. But in the end, I was saved the embarrassment because it was Cheryl who finally said the words, straight after Mum had been carted off in an ambulance, screaming and clutching her huge distended belly.