- Chapter 2 -
Sam was always kicking before he was born and then, as a little baby, he both exhausted and delighted me in equal measure. He was late and, two weeks after his due date, I was admitted to hospital to be induced. So, I was on my own overnight in a ward full of very pregnant women. At the end of the corridor was a smoking area where some of these women would sit smoking beneath the poster of a foetus in the womb warning, “Smoking can damage your unborn child.” I had a fat book with me to read and I read a lot of it that night. By eight in the morning, I was really in pain and another patient called the nurses who seemed not to come for a long time as they were changing shifts. I had planned for a drug free birth but by the time I was in a labour room, still on my own, I had got stuck into the Entonox and they said they had called Danny.
“We told him not to hurry but to have breakfast before he comes,” one told me.
They gave me pethidine and I threw up all over the floor and I was out of my head when Danny finally arrived.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to have any drugs,” he said.
“Fuck off and have a cigarette will you.”
I counted my way through the contractions shouting “A thousand and one. A thousand and two. A thousand and three,” keeping track with the squares of an air vent in the ceiling.
Sam arrived. Seven pounds, eleven ounces. And so beautiful. They thought he had jaundice and put him under the lights for a few hours, but I think it was just his Egyptian heritage. I, of course, fell in love immediately.
He did all the things babies should do, ahead of cue or right on cue, smiling, speaking, rolling over, sitting, standing, walking. I remember calling my sister, Amanda, and boasting about what he could do, “Yes, but he is fat isn’t he?” she responded. She was never comfortable when I seemed to be getting a bit big for my boots. Sam loved Megan the dog and used to crawl after her with a foam ball in his mouth. Danny and I used to laugh and call him dog-boy.
When he was seven months old, he started to sleep through the night, and I wanted another little baby. I fell pregnant the first time we tried. Again, I had bad morning sickness and tiredness and struggled to get through the days with a lively toddler.
One weekday night, Danny came home drunk from the pub. I heard his bike approaching and then pulling up into the front garden. I was in bed trying to appear asleep when he started grabbing me. I moved away from him, turning my face away from the alcohol fumes. He was laughing about someone - a rather foolish but gentle hippy called Alan, who liked to wear tight leather jeans and strut about wearing mascara.
Alan was married to Angie, a young Austrian woman who had worked as a local au-pair. Her English was not great, and Danny and I used to joke that once she understood English better, she would realise what a twit she had married.
“Alan was there in his lederhosen. He’s such a wanker,” said Danny.
“Was Angie there?”
“He was well pissed – she’ll be like, ‘Oh Al-ann, vere haff you been? You are soo dronk.’ when he gets home.”
I thought about Angie at home, alone with their baby, waiting for Alan to return, probably wanting sex.
I said, “So what’s the difference between him and you?”
He landed the first punch in my face and then kicked me to the floor. I knew I had stepped over a line - he had never hit me before. I lay curled up with my arms across my face and my pregnant belly on the carpet beside the bed holding my breath and listening for Sam. Danny went into the sitting room to roll a joint.
I was shaking as I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I crept into the nursery, picked Sam up from his cot, shushed him as I collected my keys from the hallway table, and Icrept out of the house with him in my arms, I opened the back door of the car as quietly as possible, then threw Sam onto the back seat and slammed it shut - no time for niceties like strapping him in - jumped into the front seat and drove, adrenaline flooding my body.
I took refuge at my friend, Mandy’s, place using a hand towel as a makeshift nappy for Sam. The following morning as I stood by her bathroom mirror inspecting and gently prodding the purple bruising around my left eye, and she let Sam play with her dogs, Danny pulled up outside in his white van with “Strippers” and our phone number written across the side.
This was the business that he had recently started, dipping Victorian pine doors and furniture into a caustic tank, then pressure-washing them and polishing them with Briwax. It was hard graft and he earned good money. Everyone was into stripped pine back then. He used to joke that the price he charged went up according to the length of the customer’s driveway. One of his claims to fame was stripping the varnish from Chris Rea’s toilet seat.
Danny sauntered into Mandy’s kitchen with a rueful smile and presented me with two dozen white roses.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry.”
“You really hurt me.”
“It won’t happen again.” He twinkled his eyes, “Come on Weenie.”
I believed he meant what he said. And I needed it to be true. I had another baby on the way.
Business was booming. Our phone never stopped ringing and nor did our front doorbell. People would call all the time; they would sit and smoke with him. Sam was crawling and into everything.
“I don’t think it’s good for Sam – all this dope smoke.” I said to Danny.
“Well, keep him in the other room then,” he said.
He continued to laugh and joke with his visitors and swigged back the cans of Stella.
Jessica was the sweetest baby and was born with curly dark hair when Sam was almost seventeen months old. I was afraid to come home from the hospital and face the demands of Sam as well as the constant demands of the business, so I asked a nurse to underline to Danny that I needed some support when I got home. She planned to do this by bathing Jessie when he arrived and talking about the need for me to rest as much as possible and not to do too much.
“How long is this going to take?” asked Danny looking at his watch,” I’ve got deliveries to make.”
We went home.
That night Danny went out to wet the baby’s head with my brother, Quentin. Late in the evening Quentin, himself very much three sheets to the wind, delivered Danny home paralytically drunk. Danny fell over the front door threshold into the hall, crawled into the sitting room and shouted for me to take his boots off. I cut the laces, pulled them off and left him on the sofa then went back to bed.
The following morning, he went out early and a customer arrived to collect a wardrobe from our garage. I felt I had no choice but help him to carry it to his car despite having given birth just one day ago.
And here it is. The shame. I can feel it throbbing in my chest like a slow heartbeat radiating through my body and igniting a series of little shocks in my solar plexus. It makes me want to hide and never go out again. It makes me not want to tell this story. As I describe these early years, I just feel ashamed. Ashamed for choosing this man to have children with, ashamed that I carried on even when the signs were so clear. Ashamed of what his behaviour, and my reactions to it, did to me in front of them and more importantly to our precious children.
After a few months, I found myself doing a supermarket shop with Sam in his bright yellow dungarees and red wellies ‘helping’ to push the trolley and Jessica tucked up in the baby buggy. She slept through the night at six weeks old, so things were manageable, if hectic. I moved the trolley from one aisle to the next and dashed back to get the buggy and returned. The trolley was gone. My heart sank and I ran with the buggy from one aisle to the next trying to be methodical in my search. Then I caught sight of Sam’s blond curls bobbing along as he was ushered back into the shop by a woman wearing a name badge, with the loaded trolley. He had left the shop alone and pushed the trolley along the path that led straight to the dual carriageway.
If I took my eyes off him for a few seconds, he would be gone. He once did a runner in Marks and Spencer’s childrenswear. My heart pounded as scary scenarios ran through my brain and I bumped the buggy down the stairs, ran for the exit then made my way back from there. I knew his MO. A furore at the top of the escalator caught my attention and there he was, his wiry little body on the wrong side of the railing over the escalator well with his head still on the shop side of the railings. An elderly woman was importantly saving his life by gripping his arms tightly with her nails pressing into his flesh. No wonder he was shouting angrily. I bumped Jessie’s buggy back up the stairs, assessed the situation and said,
“You are going to have to let go of his arms so that he can climb back through.”
She looked doubtful.
“He can’t fall because his head won’t fit between the railings,” I said.
She loosened her grip, reluctant to abandon her heroic stance, and I threaded him back through.
“Thank you.” I said, sighing deeply, grasping his little hand in mine, manoeuvring the buggy with my other hand, and abandoning the little clothes I had been looking at onto a nearby rack.
Sam needed me to lie down with him to get to sleep and this was increasingly difficult as Jessie needed attention at this time. I read a book on how to get toddlers to go to bed and settle themselves. It took me weeks to gradually withdraw my presence, little by little, day by day but I got there. One night as I was settling Sam, I asked Danny to hold Jessie for a while. She was screaming unconsolably and wanted her mother. I heard him mutter to her, “Shut up …just shut up.”
Sam would often get into our bed at night and I would put him back into his own bed. Danny would just let him get in and then Sam would keep me awake kicking. I decided to make a stand. I sat in the hallway between the two bedrooms and kept calmly putting him back into his bed. He screamed for three hours, and I just sat patiently, carrying him back to his bed every time he got out and refusing to let him into our bedroom. I regret that so much now. It is such a painful memory for me. At the time I thought I was doing the right thing. Now, I seriously doubt it.
If Sam decided he didn’t want to do something, his determination was extreme. On one occasion he was lying on the pavement in the high street screaming and I was trying to cajole him to get up and walk. A woman in a woollen coat and a headscarf sporting a wheeled tartan shopping basket commented as she paused to view this,
“Aww. He’s tired and wants to go home.”
I picked him up and added him to the double buggy alongside his sister muttering sotto voce, “He is not fucking tired lady. He’s just doing what he does.”
Danny didn’t believe our third child was his for a while after he was born and this was understandable, because I didn’t have sex with him anymore, not since I got pregnant with Jess. I was too tired; he was too drunk and too distracted by other women.
Then for one night, one night only, I relented and submitted saying, “Please, be careful because I haven’t had my coil fitted yet since Jess was born.” He wasn’t careful. I jumped straight into the bath hoping to get away with it and I now thank heaven that I didn’t. My younger son, Josh, is the kindest, gentlest man and I love that he is in this world. Sam was two, Jessie was nine months, and I was pregnant for a third time.
When I was expecting Sam, I had asked my mother,
“What do you want him or her to call you”.
She said, “What’s wrong with Miranda? – That is my name.”
“Oh! OK.” I was surprised but couldn’t really think of an argument against this.
“You do realise that I’m not planning to be a hands-on grandparent, changing nappies and all of that, don’t you?”
My dad didn’t insist on not being called Grandad, but he clearly had no intention to be a hands-on grandparent either. They were both very supportive of me and I would visit often with children in tow, but they were true to their intentions, and I can count on one hand the occasions they had one or more of the children to take care of. I think that, if they had married a few decades later than they did, they might well have would have chosen not to have children at all. I did not have a sense of being a joy to either of them as a child, more of being a nuisance and an effort, and my father would often comment that he so valued our relationships now we were grown up.
When I was a couple of months pregnant with Joshua we went to my parents’ place for Christmas lunch. My mother had been up since six cooking a complicated meal which, of course, it was almost impossible to get a toddler and a baby to participate in. My dad twitched with anxiety every time Sam touched anything that wasn’t a designated toy. Danny, Quentin, and Amanda were all knocking back wine and lager.
I had morning sickness and fatigue as I always did in the first trimester, and I had a nap in the afternoon which was such a blessing and was just not possible at home. By the evening Danny was pissed on my dad’s brandy and I wanted to put Sam and Jessie to bed. He didn’t want to leave yet and so my sister, Amanda, gave me a lift the short distance back to our, now, carefully restored, and well-equipped bungalow.
“I’m really struggling at the moment. He just keeps getting drunk and I’m scared to even talk to him.” I was sitting slumped against the hallway wall beside the Christmas tree with its colourful lights blinking away, tears flowing, wiping my face with my sleeve.
Amanda looked at this me and raised her eyebrows a little scornfully,
“Well, what did you expect? You did marry Danny Gaston!”
Then she left me sitting there to carry on drinking with Danny and Quentin. I think I expected him to grow up. I think I expected her to care.
I climbed into our big pine bed with Sam beside me, too tired to try to get him into his own bed. I was woken a little later as he wet the bed. With Sam fussing around me I ran the wet sheets through the washing machine, then put them into the tumble dryer. Jessica started to wail so I picked her up too, then crawled onto the spare room sofa-bed with both the children and pulled the covers around us all. Danny had decorated the spare room with green sprigged Laura Ashley paper, and I had handstitched matching cotton curtains. The window overlooked the garden where their climbing frame stood on the grass beneath the winter stars. It felt deliciously peaceful and cosy lying there in the dark with Sam and Jessie breathing beside me and I drifted into a deep sleep.
For a split second I didn’t understand what was happening as my head exploded with pain. Danny had kicked me, hard, in the head. He was raging, “What the fuck kind of wife are you that you can’t even put the sheets on the bed?” Both children woke and started crying. Danny was smashing things and shouting. I was scared by how out of control he was. He went into the sitting room at the front of the house. I went into the dining room at the back, where I put a chair under the door handle, sat Sam in the furthest corner and gave him Jessica to hold which he did obediently and wide-eyed.
Then I called the police, whispering our address into the handset. Ten minutes later, two uniformed officers rang the doorbell. Danny opened the door,
“What do you cunts want? Who asked you to come?”
I stood behind him and said,
“I did.” Then, turning towards the police officers, I said, “Please, can you just stay here for a few minutes while I sort out the children and take them somewhere else?”
Danny slammed the door onto them and turned, stumbling towards me,
“You fucking bitch!”
They could see us through the glass panels either side of the door. One shouted,
“Leave her alone and let us in or we’re coming through the door.”
There was a short pause and then they smashed through the door and tried to wrestle him to the ground. Reinforcements arrived and it eventually took eight of them to constrain and arrest him. Both children were scared of going near the front door for months after that.
Danny was released from the cells at ten the following morning without charge. There were no white roses this time.
“Why call the fucking pigs? Why didn’t you just call your brother or your dad?”
“What could they have done?”
“You just shouldn’t have called the police.”
“I was really scared.”
“You know I wouldn’t lay a finger on you.”
“But you did.”
“Bullshit.”