Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight for Survival. Judy Westwater

wafers were scattered everywhere. Oh no! Don’t let them catch me! I started scrabbling at the wafers on the floor, cramming them into my mouth in a desperate attempt to swallow the evidence.

      The door flew open and my father stood there with Freda. They looked at me as though I was no more than a piece of dirt on the floor.

      ‘See what I mean? She doesn’t do anything I say,’ Freda spat at him. ‘Every bloody day I have to put up with this!’

      Now she’d got started, it all spilled out – every vindictive little piece of nastiness Freda had been storing up.

      ‘… and she’s always stealing … sneaking around getting the neighbours to stick their noses in … and dirtying her clothes when she knows I don’t have time to run around cleaning up …’

      My dad heard this torrent of poison, all the while looking at me.

      ‘You little brat!’ He took a step forward and grabbed my arm, pulling me up. My legs almost buckled under me. ‘You want something to eat? I’ll give you something to eat.’

      Dad dragged me downstairs and sat me on one of the kitchen chairs. Then he took off his braces. I didn’t understand at first why he was getting undressed but then he leaned over and stretched the braces around my body, tying me to the chair so I couldn’t move my arms. Then he crossed to the kitchen alcove and pulled out a loaf tin and a spoon from a cupboard.

      ‘You want food, do you?’ I stared back at him, mutely. ‘Answer me! Do you want some food?’ I didn’t know what to answer, but I knew that whatever I said wouldn’t stop him now.

      Dad squatted down at the hearth and picked up the coal shovel. He scraped at the back of the fireplace until there was a pile of soot in the grate and then he shoveled it into the loaf tin. I knew now what he was going to do.

      ‘Open up!’ He held a spoonful of soot in front of my mouth. I didn’t open my mouth at once so he jabbed the spoon between my teeth and forced it in.

      My mouth was already dry from the wafers. I tried to swallow, but the soot was clogging the back of my throat. It was bitter and made my eyes stream; then it got into my windpipe and I choked.

      My dad forced a second spoon of the stuff into my mouth.

      ‘Eat up, brat! There’s plenty to go yet.’

      When he couldn’t get any more soot in my mouth, my Dad untied me. My chest was heaving violently and my eyes were watery and unable to focus. All I could see through the blur was the terrifying face of my father, ghoulish white with eyes like two black coals fixing me with a cold and psychotic hatred. He reached for his braces and whipped me hard across the head with them before dragging me back up the stairs and flinging me on to my bed.

      ‘I hope that’s taught you a lesson.’ Then, pointing at the mess on the floor, he said, ‘You can clean that up in the morning.’

      I lay there, barely able to move my arm to cover myself with the rug. My mouth was sore and bleeding. Sleep came as a blessed relief, but when I woke the next morning the soot still stung my tongue as a terrible reminder of the night before.

      Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night feeling very dizzy. The ear that Freda had clouted, bursting my eardrum, was running with pus and my hair was stuck to my face with the fluid. My chest hurt and there was a hot, hard lump on the side of my neck which was making it difficult to breathe. My body was burning up and my throat felt too parched to cry out. It was like being in a bad dream when you try desperately to scream but no sound comes out.

      I tried to climb out of bed, but my legs gave way and I fell onto the floor. I crawled across the room in the darkness and when I reached the bedroom door tried to raise myself up to open it, but I didn’t have the strength to push myself up with my arms. Freda must have heard me fall out of bed because a moment later I heard her trying to open the door. My body was in the way so she couldn’t get in at first. When she managed to push her way in and saw me lying there, I heard her draw in her breath sharply, then run out of the room and down the stairs. She must have gone outside to call an ambulance from the public telephone box in the street because the next thing I knew, a man was lifting me over his shoulder and carrying me down the stairs.

      I was taken to a large hospital, where I was put in a steel cot. When the nurses tried to hold me down I struggled like a wildcat, so they had to tie my arms to the bars of the cot with bandages so they could dress my sores. Being tied up meant only one thing to me, so I punched and fought to get away, convinced I was going to get a beating.

      Eventually, one of the nurses managed to soothe me. I looked into her soft brown eyes and felt my terror ebbing away.

      The next day they took me into surgery and made cuts in my neck and arms and inserted tubes to help drain the big lump below my ear. One of them was threaded all the way down to my stomach. When I came to, I was back in the steel cot, covered from head to toe with bandages, and my arms tied to the bars again. I must have slept through the rest of that day and the next night, but don’t remember anything.

      On the second night, as I lay in my steel cot, arms tied and face covered, balaclava-like, with bandages, I tried to pierce the darkness with my eyes. I could hear the other children’s breathing and occasionally they would moan or say something in their sleep. But there was also another noise, which sounded sinister, as if something ghostly was roaming the room: swish, swish, swish, pause, then swish, swish, swish again. I felt like a fly trapped in a web waiting for a hairy, black spider to come and eat me. Swish, swish, swish. The noise was very close now, just the other side of my cot. Then I saw a face looking down at me and realized with relief that what I’d heard was simply the nurse’s starched uniform swishing against her legs as she patrolled the ward, pausing to check on her patients as she went.

      When I was well enough to look around, I saw that I was in a big square room with white walls and a brown lino floor. The sun was streaming in through two tall windows, and along one wall was a row of four steel cots. Facing them were four beds for the older children. In the middle of the ward was a blue table and eight small chairs.

      The gentle nurse I remembered from the night they brought me in was talking to me. ‘I know you’ll like being here between Christening and Lemon.’ She pointed at the kids in the cots on either side of me. What daft names, I thought. It was only later when another nurse came along to change my dressings that I realized that the children were in fact called Christine and Leonard. It was hard to hear anything clearly with my right ear.

      Having my dressings changed was horrible. Only the gentle nurse removed them slowly and carefully. The others all assured me in their no-nonsense way that it was much less painful if they ripped them off really fast.

      ‘There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ I hated that false chirpiness and the fact that they clearly didn’t want an answer from me.

      My first meal was a bowl of disgusting brown liquid that looked like dirty water. It must have been beef broth, or something similar, but tasted of nothing. The nurse spooned it into my mouth. ‘Come on, just a few more mouthfuls and then you can have jelly and custard.’ The spoon was very painful as my lips had cuts on them, so she brought a straw and I sucked up the lukewarm liquid with that. I really wanted the jelly and custard so I sucked away at the foul stuff until it was finished.

      Four or five times a day a nurse would put each of us little ones on our potties. I’d be lifted out of my cot, still attached to all my tubes. A few days after I’d arrived, the nurse on duty forgot about me half way through her potty rounds. She’d been distracted by one of the other kids, a naughty red-headed boy who was often in trouble, and had forgotten to come back to me. I waited and waited and after an hour or so thought to myself, I’m just going to have to go. I wasn’t used to asking for help so it didn’t occur to me to do so now. I set about trying to get free instead. I wriggled and wriggled my wrists in their bandage ties until one of them came free, then I managed to untie the other. I tried to get out of the cot but my tubes were preventing me, so I took them out of my neck and arms and grabbed hold of the bars to pull myself to my feet. The cot was quite high