Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed. Stuart Howarth

thick hair. I was more of a strawberry-blond colour and had my head shaved most of the time.

      There were some new houses being built down the bottom of Smallshaw Lane, which meant there were wagons full of earth streaming up and down all day long. A bunch of us used to stand at the top of the road and shout out to the men driving the trucks to give us rides. For a while they obliged and then the foreman told them to stop. The other kids persuaded me to hide in the bushes and jump out in front of one of the huge vehicles at the last moment, forcing the driver to stop with an explosive hiss of air brakes.

      ‘What you fuckin’ playing at?’ he wanted to know.

      ‘I don’t know where my mummy is,’ I replied, as I had been instructed, and started crying.

      ‘Come on up here then,’ he said, his heart softening.

      As soon as he opened the cab door the others would all troop out of the bushes.

      ‘Fuckin’ ell, your mammy’s been busy.’

      The ruse worked every time, and usually resulted in us getting to share their lunch and drinks. Once they dropped us off on the site we would play happily amongst the diggers and tractors.

      Quite often it was just me and Christina in the house because Shirley would be in hospital having operations on her legs, head and back, or my Nan would be looking after her. She and my Granddad Albert lived about five miles away and we often used to go over as a family for Sunday lunch. Granddad was a short, sturdy sort of chap who used to shout at me a lot. They lived in a private house and had lots of ornaments everywhere, like an Aladdin’s cave, which I just ached to pick up and look at but wasn’t allowed to. They had a little dog, Sparky, who felt so soft and smelled so clean compared to our filthy, smelly dogs. On the way home after Sunday lunches Christina, Shirley and I would lie on the floor of the van, half asleep, and I would watch the orange streets lights flashing past the windows and imagine we were on a magic carpet ride.

      Sundays were good because we could go to Sunday school, which the Salvation Army organized in a hut a few doors down from our house. We would sing songs and be told stories and even did some colouring-in of pictures of Jesus. They would give us presents like little gollywogs holding banjos and other musical instruments. They were the sort of thing you could have got for free off jam jars, but we loved them because they were pretty much the only presents we were ever given.

       Chapter Three THE PEN

      Dad had an allotment. Not one of those little strips of vegetables with a makeshift shed at the end, but about an acre of land, like a smallholding, filled with ramshackle outbuildings. It was known as ‘the pen’. Sometimes there would be twenty or thirty kids following him across the wooded piece of land behind the house and up the hill to the pen, with Shirley in her wheelchair, making him look like some sort of grubby Pied Piper.

      The ground amongst the trees along the route was always strewn with litter and the pen itself was surrounded by a makeshift wall of house doors, so that no one could break in and passers-by couldn’t see what was going on. It was Dad’s little private kingdom. Behind the wall and padlocked gates was another world where he raised chickens, geese, ducks and pigs and stored yet more scrap salvaged from his rounds. There was a big black boar called Bobby, and a sow, terrifying, stinking great creatures that wallowed and snuffled in their own filth. An abandoned car stood, stripped and rusting, just inside the gates, waiting for someone to turn it into scrap.

      In one of the sheds lived my dad’s dad, whom we knew as ‘Granddad from the Pen’, a dirty, toothless old man who would always smell of whisky and grab me between my legs, or pinch my bum and rub his bristly chin against my face, which he thought was funny but which hurt. His clothes, which he wore day and night, were rags, like a tramp would wear. He also thought it was funny to throw his false teeth at me, even though I hated it. Dad used to do the same thing sometimes with his. Even at that age I could sense there was something about Granddad from the Pen that wasn’t trustworthy.

      I think his wife must have chucked him out years before and he went to live with Auntie June, Dad’s sister, but she got fed up with him too and now he just had a camp bed in the corner of one of the sheds. He kept a pile of dirty books underneath the bed, which he was happy to get out for us, making us giggle with embarrassment and exclaim in horror. I’m sure the magazines must have been rescued from the dustbins, just like everything else in our lives. Granddad from the Pen spent a lot of his time down the pub. Only later did I discover he was an alcoholic; then I just knew he always smelt of booze, like Dad, only worse.

      There had been some sort of falling out between Mum and Granddad from the Pen, although I never knew the details, but he stayed away from the house for a while. The day he did come back he came with a present for me, a pink bike. I didn’t care what colour it was, it was a bike, something that none of the other kids in Smallshaw had, unless they were old ones with solid tyres that you couldn’t use to jump on and off kerbs without jarring every bone in your body. Granddad from the Pen was obviously drunk, having just come out of the pub, and went in to see Mum, leaving me outside with my new possession.

      I set off proudly to pedal round the neighbourhood. It was a glorious summer’s day and I felt like the king of the area, until I was stopped by a policeman, who enquired where I’d got my bike from.

      ‘It’s a present from my Granddad,’ I said, wondering why the policeman was being so nasty. ‘I think we should go and talk to your Granddad,’ he said. It turned out Granddad had nicked the bike off some little girl when she got off to go into her house just as he was passing. It broke my heart to see the policeman taking it away.

      Going up to the pen was like visiting a little zoo, and all the local kids loved it. We would play hide and seek and other games. They would always be coming round pestering to find out if we were going up there. I used to love to root through the drawers around the sheds because they were always crammed with so much rubbish, just like our house. It seemed like a treasure trove to a four-year-old, another Aladdin’s cave, although a bit different to my Nana and Granddad Albert’s.

      The pen was one of four, like some peasant farms left over from the Middle Ages, partially illuminated at night by the street lamps on the lane outside. It wasn’t far to walk, but it was hard for me to keep up with Dad’s long legs when it was just him and me going up there. If it was just us he would grow impatient with waiting for me to catch up and would stride off ahead, forcing my little legs to go faster, almost as if he didn’t want anything to do with me, as if he was trying to get away. If Mum was with us he would put me on his shoulders, but if it was just us he would become angry as I lagged behind and would grab my hand and drag me off my feet, nearly jerking my arm out of its socket. Dad would go up to the pen every day because the animals needed feeding. He would collect any bit of food he could get his hands on and boil it up in big pans at home, adding the scent of pigswill to the existing smells of pee, dogs and fags.

      The pen was a great place for a small boy to go, but sometimes I would make Dad cross and there would be flashes of nastiness as he gave me a push or a pinch to let me know I had disappointed him yet again. I knew that I must always be good and never anger him. He was only in his early twenties at that time, but he had a presence even then that made me wary. I had a feeling that he didn’t like me and I was willing to do anything in order to change that. He used to insist that I collected the eggs from under the hens, which used to terrify me. They made so much fuss, flapping their wings and pecking at me with vicious beaks. I never wanted to do it, but I knew I had to do what he told me because he was my dad and he wasn’t someone you would disobey. He used to keep ferrets as well, to help keep down the rat population, and he liked to put them down his trousers, and down mine. It was a horrible experience, feeling their claws digging in, believing they were biting, but he thought it was funny and that I should learn how to be brave about it. He was always trying to ‘make a man’ or ‘make a farmer’ of me.

      I didn’t like the way he would read magazines full of women while he was having a wee; at least I thought that was what he was doing. It was a bit confusing and very frightening.