I switched the phone off and just kept driving west. I could understand exactly why she would think the way she did; I’d let her down often enough in the past, why should she have faith in me any more? But there wasn’t enough space in my head to think through what I might be doing to our relationship, the best relationship I had ever had in my life. Feelings, thoughts, memories, confusion and enormous pain were all mixed together. The thing I wanted most of all was to try to make some sense of it all, to find some sort of resolution with the past.
Chapter Two MUM AND THE BIN MAN
He always seemed to be there, part of my life – my dad. But it must have been around 1972 that he first started courting Mum. He would be in the garden, sweeping up for her, or coming round to see us, bringing sweets, or presents that he’d picked up on his bin rounds. He was a great collector, was Dad, a real magpie. Anything he found that he thought still had any life in it he would cart home: furniture, broken toys, even a telly, which was the first we’d ever had. From having absolutely nothing, our house suddenly started to fill up with stuff that other people didn’t want, much of which we needed badly and some of which just cluttered the place up.
His bin round was in an area of Ashton-under-Lyne where the residents threw out things that were better than anything we had ever had. Some of the things still worked. The telly did sometimes if you banged it very hard on the side in just the right place. Most of the time the screen was pierced with a single, tiny white dot. I would get up close and try to peer through the dot, in the hope of seeing the picture through it, like a ‘What the butler saw’ peep show. My efforts were usually only rewarded by a short period of blindness while my eyes tried to refocus. I loved pushing the buttons in and out. I discovered that if I pressed two together they stuck in, but if I pressed a third button it would release them. Intrigued by these experiments I tried pushing all six while Mum was out at work, and they all jammed. Dad was furious, slapping me hard on the backs of my legs, making my skin burn, punching and kicking me until I went numb.
‘Please, Daddy, no! I’m sorry!’
He threw me up the stairs and I dragged my battered body to bed, sobbing myself to sleep, crying for my mum. I was so sorry for being such a naughty little boy. I wanted to turn the clock back to just before I’d committed my crime and to make my daddy love me again. I vowed to myself that I would make an extra effort to be good for him.
He was always very scruffy, as you might expect a bin man to be, always wearing his welly boots however hot the weather, but no small boy worries about details like that. I was often out in the street with no clothes on at all myself, caked in dirt. None of the men round our estate was exactly what you would call smart, although Dad was probably one of the worst. He was big, over six feet tall with black hair, which he would wear with a side parting on the left. I would watch him combing it over with his left hand in the mirror and then patting the top of his head to flatten it out, imitating the action even though I had hardly any hair of my own. He had a moustache too, although it never seemed to grow that well. Thinking back now, I suppose that was because he was still a young man himself, barely out of his teens. When he was around the house he liked listening to sentimental songs like ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’, or anything by the Carpenters.
He had a slight limp from some childhood accident, and there was always a skirmish of dogs swirling around his boots. Mum had her Alsatian, Tina, and Dad had his Jack Russells, Bobby and Trixie – a working man’s terriers, dogs that were quick enough to catch a rat when necessary and intelligently loyal to their master. Mum had got Tina while she was living on her own with us, as protection. This was a time when the Moors murders were still fresh in people’s minds, when lone women felt nervous and vulnerable.
Our street was full of big families with no money. Most of them had no fathers around either, the mothers struggling to bring up as many as ten children on their own, in any way they could. Most of the kids would have different dads and even some of the women weren’t sure who the fathers were. My sisters and I felt special because we had a dad and we believed he would protect us if we needed it, because he was big and tough and hard. I believed fervently he could fight anybody and win; he was the best, my dad; he was my hero.
Mum had been brought up in Mullingar, in Southern Ireland. My Nana came over to England to get work, promising to send for the children once she was settled. Mum loved it in Ireland, living with her Grandma Lacey. But when my Nana met and married a man called Albert in England she sent for her children and Mum had to leave Ireland.
After an unhappy few years, Mum met George Heywood. She was sixteen and he was much older, somewhere around forty. She stumbled getting off a bus one day and had to go to hospital. The ambulance that arrived to take her was already carrying George, which was how they met. She always said she married him to get away from her family life, and I have no reason to doubt her. Their first baby, Shirley, was born in 1965 with spina bifida and other problems. Christina followed a year later, at a time when Shirley was being operated on in another part of the same hospital. I came along two years after that in 1968. Life for Mum at that stage must have seemed hopelessly tough, but she never considered giving any of us up or handing us over for someone else to look after.
There wasn’t even enough money to buy me a cot, so I would sleep in drawers or whatever Mum could find to hold me. Then I was put into a bed with Christina, which I liked because it made me feel loved and comforted, although it meant that if one of us wet the bed both of us got wet. Sometimes we would share with Shirley as well but if we wriggled in the night we would catch her spine, making her cry out in pain.
George, I’m told, proved to be a heavy drinker and a bit of a womanizer, and found the strains of family life, particularly with a disabled child, too much to handle. He and Mum parted soon after I was born, although she was always vague about the exact timing, and the council moved us all to a semi-detached house in Smallshaw Lane on the Smallshaw estate. I guess our area was where they put troublesome families whom they thought might disturb the tranquillity of nicer neighbourhoods. There were no fences or gates; doors were always open, with people going neighbouring all the time, scrounging knobs of butter or cups of sugar off one another. There was always a whiff of hostility in the air as everyone struggled to ensure their own survival.
Knowing that I was too young to remember any different, Mum decided to pretend that George was nothing to do with me.
‘You know,’ she would say to me from time to time, when Dad wasn’t around, ‘you are a very special little boy. You know you really are your Dad’s, don’t you? He’s not the real father of the girls, but he is yours. But we don’t want to make the girls feel left out, do we? So we’ll pretend he’s your stepdad too.’
I felt sorry for the girls, having a different dad who had gone off and left them, but proud that Dad was mine, even if he did have his faults. Knowing who my dad was meant I knew who I was and where I’d come from. He gave me an identity that not many of the kids around our way could hope for. What kid doesn’t want to have a real dad? Sometimes Mum would spot George in the street and point him out to the girls, and I felt I was better than them because my dad was the one taking care of us at home while George had deserted them. In my mind my dad was better than theirs.
‘You’re my fucking son,’ Dad would say to me sometimes, almost as if he was angry with me for allowing any element of doubt in the matter.
There were no carpets on the floor in our house, nor in most of the houses in Smallshaw, and no curtains at the windows. Families that wanted privacy would stick up newspapers, or smear Windolene on the panes, which would serve the dual purpose of keeping out prying eyes and providing us with a canvas to play noughts and crosses or draw silly faces on. My earliest memory is of sitting outside the front of the house in the dirt, digging a hole with a discarded lollipop stick.
Things just kept coming