I came close to doing myself in a few times in that period. Estelle found me sitting in my flat in Birmingham with a belt round my neck. I was just sitting there like a fucking dick, my hands tightening this belt, the telly flickering in the corner. On another occasion we had a row about something, she walked out and I slit my wrists. I didn’t do it big. I didn’t want to go the full way. I just wanted to give myself the option to do it. It wasn’t even really a cry for help because I didn’t tell anybody about it, but it bled badly enough for me to have to bandage myself up.
Mostly, I used to think about hanging myself. I thought that would be the best way. In fact, I was reading a lot of stuff about quick ways to die at that time. It was all the stuff about making sure the length of rope was right for your weight.
But when it came to it, I didn’t have the bottle for that either. Not then, anyway. Now it’s not bottle that’s stopping me. I’m not sure what stops me now. Sometimes, especially since the dogging was exposed and I was ridiculed again and my relationship with Estelle finally crumbled, I still think suicide is just around the corner. But back then I used to sit there thinking about what would happen if I was on a fucking tree branch 30 feet up and I’m just stuck there dangling and I can’t breathe but I don’t die. If it had been a case of just doing it so it would all be over and done with, then great. But it never happened because I think more than anything the mere thought of suicide was just this release valve. Rather than staring into space thinking about ways of dragging myself out of this depression, rather than taking tough decisions, I could just go out into the garden or into the woods and it would all be over. How I got through that time, I don’t know. I just kept telling myself to grind on through it. But there were plenty of days when I thought the only way out was to pull the chain on it.
Perhaps I didn’t do it because my mum never pulled the chain on me. Perhaps it was because when I thought about what she had been through, it seemed somewhere in the back of my mind like cowardice to take an easy way out. Perhaps it was because when I asked her about what her life with me and my dad was like, the realisation of how strong she had had to be gave me some strength, too.
It wasn’t easy for her talking about it. When other families go through their photo albums, they see happy, smiling faces staring back out of them. But one of the pictures we remember best is one of my birthday parties. She’s there with a birthday cake, gazing into the camera with a black eye that my dad had given her. She wept when she talked about those days in my early childhood:
I made a dreadful mistake when I left my first husband. He was a really nice fella. He was a director of a small firm in Cannock and he worked hard. When he worked in Wolverhampton, he would cycle all the way there and all the way back. But we married when I was 19. We had three kids. I suppose there wasn’t much glamour in my life.
Stan’s dad was a charmer. He was a good-looking fella, tall and handsome. Everyone liked him. Particularly women. I had a blonde beehive hairdo back then and I caught his eye. When I left my first husband, we went to Barbados for a few weeks and stayed in a kind of shack amid the sugar cane where he had been brought up. I started to realise I’d made a terrible mistake when I saw him smash that shack up in a fit of anger.
I tried to leave Barbados without him but he followed me back to England. By then, my first husband had found somebody else so Stan’s dad and I moved back into the council house I had been living in before. He was 13 years younger than me. He went to work in the tax office in Cannock and pretty soon Stan was born. But everything had already gone terribly wrong by then.
When I was seven months pregnant with Stan, we had an argument about something and he put a telephone cord around my neck and tried to strangle me. I called the police, obviously, but in those days they were far more blasé about domestic violence. They just said, ‘Have a cup of tea and talk it over and everything will be all right after a good night’s sleep.’
When Stan was a few months old, his dad began to teach at a college in Birmingham. I was called in one day to be told that one of his students had had a nervous breakdown because she had got entangled in a love affair with him. She was just the first. Soon after that, I got a phone call from a woman who said she and my husband were getting married and who then asked when I was moving out of the house.
One of his girlfriends was the daughter of the manager of the Co-op in Cannock, and that poor girl even bought a wedding dress. She was so convinced that she was his sweetheart. I don’t know if it was because he was frustrated at not being able to be with these women more, but he began to hit me regularly then and things got worse and worse.
During the four years we were married, I had to go to the hospital several times. He broke my jaw with a punch once. On another occasion he cut me over the eye when he clouted me with a heavy brush. That was the time Stan tried to intervene; that is Stan’s first memory. I went up to the hospital to have it stitched because the cut was bleeding dreadfully and they found the bruises on my arms and stomach. I told them I had fallen off a ladder.
Mostly, he would drag me up to our bedroom by the hair and beat me there. I think his logic was that the bed sagged when he was hitting me so the punches wouldn’t bruise me as badly and it wouldn’t be so obvious what he was doing. The lady that lived next door to us always knew when there was a problem, because when I knew I was going to get a beating I would beg Stan’s dad to let me close all the windows first so the neighbours wouldn’t hear. I’d plead with him not to shout, so the neighbours wouldn’t know I was being beaten up.
He was such a strange mix, Stan’s dad, very formal and always immaculately dressed to the point where he might change his shirt two or three times a day. He would ring me from work and tell me when I could go shopping but that I mustn’t be away more than an hour. And I would have to be back, because if he rang and I wasn’t there he would come and look for me and I would get knocked about again at home.
And then, of course, there was the abuse we used to get as a family, the racial abuse that almost hurt more than my husband’s punches. Jeff’s mum was one of the worst. It was always stuff about how I should move away because I had married a black man. The things she said to me were so dreadful that once, when she had said something particularly cruel to Stan, I went round and asked her to come out into the garden so I could give her what she deserved. I’m ashamed of that now. I wonder if she’s ashamed. She wouldn’t come out into the garden anyway.
Stan won’t talk about it much but they used to do terrible things to him, too. One day, I was walking over to the garages at the other end of our circle of houses and I saw a group of boys coming across the field, making another boy crawl through the grass on his hands and knees. The boy on his hands and knees was Stan and they were weeing on him, actually weeing on him, as he crawled.
Stan used to get it from his dad, too. Not physical abuse, but he would do really strange things. He bought Stan a toy cat once and then one day when he came round he took the cat upstairs with him and disappeared for ages. When he had gone, I went to look for it and he had cut it up into tiny pieces and left it scattered across the bed.
People always wonder why I didn’t leave him earlier but where was I going to go? My mother lived with us and by that time she had Alzheimer’s disease. There was nowhere to go. They didn’t have refuges for battered wives then. And I felt I had made my choice and I had to live with it. I’d lost a lot of my friends, too, because they were too ashamed to come round and see me any more. I found out afterwards he had been visiting a few of them and they … well, they liked him.
Eventually, though, I just couldn’t put up with it any longer. He started hitting one of my daughters, too, so I got a divorce and got him kicked out. Even after that he would prowl around on the land at the back of the house. He rang me and threatened to cut my throat,