Although I was still only four, my new dad’s arrival in my life made such an impact that the memories are burned indelibly into my mind. They play like short films complete with sound and colour, disjointed in places but vivid nonetheless. Before he came I was relatively carefree and settling into my new routines with Mummy and the family, adjusting to life without Nanny twenty-four hours a day–but that was all to change very quickly.
As ‘Dad’, as I was told to call him, made the sudden progression from simply being the stranger with the black leather coat who groaned in Mummy’s bedroom a few nights a week into living with us permanently, he appeared, initially at least, to make an effort to be friendly, and we thought maybe things were going to be OK.
He brought us sweets and a kite, which he promised to help us fly on the green when it was windy enough. It sat in the packet in the corner for weeks and never got flown, but at least the thought was there. He also taught us loads of jokes, with naughty words in them. One was about a lady who gave birth to a head, which she kept on a red velvet pillow.
‘The mother said, “Fuck me, I’ve just given birth to a head”, and when it was the head’s birthday, the mother said, “Guess what I’ve got for your birthday?” and the head said, “I don’t care what it bleedin’ is, as long as it’s not another fucking hat!”’
Dad thought this was hilarious, and so did Davie, but when he repeated it to Nanny she got very annoyed.
‘Fancy teaching that to a child!’ she exclaimed. ‘What sort of heathen has Donna moved in over there?’
One evening Dad splashed out on a meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a treat for everybody. I remember us all gathered in the front room. It was dark outside. The glow from the coal fire and the flickering TV provided the only light in the room. The fried chicken was laid out on a low coffee table in front of the sofa, where Mummy and Dad sat side by side. Davie, Cheryl and I sat on the floor. Diane wasn’t there because she had gone to her boyfriend’s. Dad was talking and laughing, and Mummy’s adoring eyes never left his face. We were all smiling.
Suddenly Dad reached for a piece of chicken and realised that somebody had eaten the last drumstick. His face clouded over and his small dark eyes narrowed as he yelled at us.
‘You greedy fuckers! Who the fuck has eaten all the chicken?’
We froze and looked round at each other, taken aback by the anger in his voice.
‘Was it you?’ he asked each of us in turn, jabbing with his finger.
I whispered ‘No’ when it was my turn, terrified of his aggressive tone of voice and the furious way he was staring at us. He looked as if he might murder the person who owned up, so no one did.
Mummy offered to make him an egg sandwich but he shouted ‘Stuff your fucking egg sandwich up your arse,’ and swept the remains of the meal onto the snowflake-patterned carpet. ‘Greedy bastards!’
We cowered in the face of his mood, scared of setting him off again, and slipped off to bed shortly afterwards leaving Mummy to try and appease him.
A couple of days later Dad bought Davie and me a comic each and we settled onto the sofa happily flicking through them, glad to be in his good books. Then we heard Mummy and him rowing in the kitchen. Davie and I looked at each other nervously. We couldn’t hear what they were arguing about but there was the crashing sound of cups breaking and then a yelp from our dog, Eddie. Dad stormed back into the room, snatched the comics from us, and ripped them to shreds. Only a few minutes before he had ruffled the hair on our heads; now we both got a whack round the ear because we were ‘ungrateful fuckers’.
I soon learned not to trust Dad’s moods. I knew that if I said or did anything he didn’t like, he could flip. Davie called him ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’–behind his back, of course–and that’s the way we all thought of him. He’d quite often be nice to me, playing at batting a balloon in the air or jiggling me on his knee, but the whole time I was bracing myself for a sudden change.
Mummy had never been much of a cook–she was always too busy–but on the rare occasions when she did have both the time and the inclination to cook anything other than something on toast, the food was delicious, almost as good as Nanny’s. She would make Diane’s favourite cheese and potato pie, or another crowd pleaser like toad in the hole with onion gravy, or shepherd’s pie. But these times were few and far between, and we mostly ate simple food like eggs, beans, Heinz spaghetti and tomato soup. Even this level of choice ground to a halt after Dad’s arrival. The cupboards were bare most of the time, except for the stuff she bought especially for him. Dad was the only person Mummy cooked for now, and she’d spend money she could ill afford making him his favourite steak and chips.
On the nights we didn’t get any dinner, we’d either go without or Mummy would send us over to Nanny’s for a meal there. Nanny, Jenny and Freda made it clear they didn’t think much of Dad.
‘He’s a bad ’un,’ I heard Nanny muttering.
‘The sooner she gets rid of him, the better,’ Jenny agreed. ‘Says he’s a window cleaner but I bet he’s never done a day’s work in his life. He’s just sponging off her.’
Dad seemed to sense their opinion, or maybe someone had told him, because he decided to use me as an emotional pawn. ‘If that old Geordie bitch thinks she’s seeing her again,’ he said, nodding towards me, ‘she’s got another think coming.’
He knew how much it would upset Nanny to be denied access to me, and whenever he was upset with them or in a bad mood, I would be banned from going over the road. His temper wasn’t just taken out on Nanny, though. He’d punch walls, smash windows and rip cupboard doors off their hinges. Then he moved on to precious family mementos like photographs, ornaments and our meagre record collection. He didn’t care who the things belonged to, or what heartbreak he would cause by destroying them. The day he smashed Davie’s ship in a bottle, Davie gave a heart-wrenching wail before running out of the flat and going to stay with Nanny for a few days.
‘Go on, fuck off over there, you fucking nancy boy,’ Dad shouted after him. ‘How old’s he meant to be? Eleven?’
Unbelievably, at times like this Mummy always sided with Dad. ‘He should put his stuff away. Stupid boy,’ she said, stooping down to pick up the thick shards of glass and the splintered wooden boat Davie had cherished for so long.
‘Cunt!’ said Dad, stalking back to his position on the sofa, a finger already poised to pull the ring on another can of extra-strength lager.
I couldn’t understand why Mummy would let him do all these things, but she was different when he was around: giggly, and smiling, and always trying to catch his eye or get his attention. She never seemed to look at us any more.
‘She’s in love,’ Cheryl told me, raising her eyebrows, and next time I saw Dad, I peered at him, trying to figure out what it was that Mummy loved. He was tall and slim, but had a pot belly which he seemed proud of–‘It takes ten pints a night to get a gut like this,’ he used to boast–and his eyes were small and puffy above a long, sharp nose. Cheryl said he was fourteen years younger than Mummy, but he didn’t look it.
‘She thinks she’s landed the jackpot, doesn’t she?’ she remarked to Diane. ‘She didn’t think she’d get anyone else, not with four kids in tow.’
‘All my friends think he’s quite dishy,’ said Diane, ‘but I can’t see it myself. Have you seen the way he keeps scratching his arse? No thanks.’
Within a few weeks of Dad’s arrival the flat’s assorted wounds were patched up with duct tape, unsanded mounds of polyfilla and pieces of corrugated cardboard in lieu of glass. The shelves were devoid of the photo frames and various knick-knacks that had previously made the flat home. Diane, Cheryl and Davie, being older than me, were able to spend more and more time out of the way–but as the