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SURROGATE FATHERS
The Father Should Beat the Boy Who Calls for Him.
SEAN CONNOLLY
CHAPTER 1 - Crime And Punishment
Southport, June 1974 – Age 12
I Could not open my eyes and I had terrible shooting pains running across my head in every direction and suddenly I became frightened because I hadn’t a clue what had happened to me.
‘There was no need to punch him in the face though; he’s only twelve years old,’ Cruella shouted. Cruella was the name Robin, Billy (my brothers) and I had given to my father’s new wife Ivy, as we thought it was a name that best described the witch. Her voice came across as muffled and veiled and I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t seeing her properly. It was then that I realised that dried blood was gluing my eyelids together and that the severe headache was getting worse by the second.
‘If he bleeds on that bloody carpet, he WILL get a smack,’ I heard my dad shout as he left the house, slamming the front door behind him. I was in agony. I raised my right hand up to lightly touch my face, moving slowly from my chin and up towards the top of my head. The higher my hand moved, the more the pain increased but it was when my index finger fell into the wet hole above my eyes that the pain became too much for me to bear. I could feel the thin, sticky liquid flowing from my forehead. It was the tears that I found myself shedding that finally allowed me to open my eyes.
I felt anger deep down inside me, as I remembered how my father had poleaxed me. We (the children) were only allowed to sit on the couch on special occasions, so I knew there had to be a good reason for me to be granted this privilege. I didn’t feel special on this occasion though and it certainly wasn’t ‘badge of merit time’. My father had punched me square on, in the face, and that much I now remembered. What did surprise me though, was the fact that Cruella had questioned his actions, because under normal circumstances she would have jumped on the band wagon and ended up giving me a smack too. You know, ‘just for good measure’.
My dad would beat us on a weekly basis and when he did, I was left with very deep feelings of hatred for him, as well as the physical pain of course. My thoughts ranged from, ‘I hate you for this you fucking wanker and I hope you die in a hail of bullets,’ to ‘When I’m bigger, I’m going to come back and knock the shite out of you, like you’ve done to me all my life.’ I had to be careful with my mind still being fuzzy, not to actually say the words out loud. That didn’t bear thinking about.
My mind fell asleep again and then, almost immediately, Cruella was waking me. She was shaking my left arm and trying to offer me a bowl of heavily watered down ‘No Frills’ chicken soup. ‘Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,’ I thought. ‘My father knocks me into next week and you want to feed me this fucking wombat bile. Stick it up your arse.’ It looked about as exciting as being knocked out by my father. As I sat up on the couch, I opened my eyes again and the first thing I spotted, as the throbbing pain surged down from my scalp to my nose, was the amount of blood that was present on my school blazer and my once white shirt. There were going to be another two beatings coming my way if I didn’t stop the blood dripping on his precious carpet or if my dad came back in from the front garden and spotted the cigarette burn in the side of my shirt.
The clock on the mantelpiece was saying it was six-thirty. I was confused. I knew I hadn’t been late home from school this particular afternoon, so what the hell had happened? If we ever arrived home from school late, we would receive a kicking from my dad. Cruella needed to have prepared our meal and have it served up in time so she could sit down and watch Crossroads on TV. Obviously it was disrespectful to be late, especially after all the trouble she’d gone to, in preparing, cooking and serving up a tin of lukewarm soup!
Cruella was talking to me, though I couldn’t hear a thing she was saying. I had to process the veiled information that was echoing around my head and then decode the painful messages that were following it. It took a couple of minutes but it all came flooding back to me. My eyes filled with tears once more and I didn’t know if it was because of the pain, the fact that I was still struggling to see, or the confused state of my mind. I really thought I was going to die. I almost wished it had been one of my brothers or sisters sitting here, but I just couldn’t do that to them.
As children we were very close. There were five of us with Kay being the elder of the tribe. She was sixteen at this time and there were six years between her and the baby of the family, Robin. The second girl was Wendy. She was two years younger than Kay and very quiet. Wendy was great at dodging the bullets during the skirmishes. I often wished I had her prowess and tact. Billy was the eldest of the boys. One year and three days older than me. What he lacked in height, he more than made up with his speed. Billy Whizz we called him. He had the speed of a bullet, whereas I had the speed of a striking slug! Robin was the quiet one of the family, but the one that was so easily led. He made a mockery of the saying ‘If I told you to put your hand in the fire, would you do it?’ Robin’s answer would almost certainly have been, ‘Yes’.
Robin and I had arrived home at four o’clock. As usual I had picked him up from junior school. The two of us had ridden my bike home, which under normal circumstances (and if we hadn’t been involved in a school gang fight), took us exactly thirty-five minutes to cover the few miles. Along the way we were both singing aloud and it would have been clear to anyone that we were happy and had enjoyed our day at school. We had arrived home at the normal time and certainly no later than any other school day.
We had brought my Raleigh Chopper to a halt by the front bumper bar of my dad’s 1968 Triumph Spitfire, which was parked in the front drive. There was no way on earth I was attempting to manoeuvre the bike past his pride and joy, fearing the risk of scratching the thing, so I had put my bike on its side stand. The idea being, that when the car was moved later, I would return and push my bike into the back garden without worrying about damaging his pride and joy. Robin had made his way down the side of the sports car and I’d watched him disappear through the large single gate at the side of the house. All was going well up to the point when I heard my father’s voice, ‘Pass me that seven inch adjustable spanner lad.’
What followed could only have been the result of me answering his request with the word, ‘Why?’ I may as well have told him to ‘fuck off’, as that one word had prompted my father to scramble from underneath the car where he’d been working. He’d jumped to his feet, cocked his right hand back and unleashed a punch not dissimilar to that which Chuck Wepner had received from Mohamed Ali in the fifteenth round back in January. I vividly remembered it connecting with my face before the lights went out. No pain, no reaction from him, just BANG. Although he had viciously beaten us five kids all of our lives, this was the first time, to my knowledge, that he had punched any of us square in the face. I guess I had been the unlucky one; it was ‘goodnight Vienna’. The painful memory of this one punch would remain with me into adulthood and it will remain with me for the rest of my life. However, every cloud has a silver lining and so did mine at this time, I felt the excruciating pain only for a matter of seconds before unconsciousness rescued me.
‘Pinch your nose,’ was the cold, callous remark from Ivy. One of the two comments I wanted to answer her with was ‘Fuck off, my nose hurts’ or my second one, which confirmed my mind was starting to return to normal functionality in was ‘Go boil yer head, you stupid cow’. I thought it better not to return with either and complied with her instructions. Quincy M.D she was not. The last thing I needed now, was for her to shout out of the front window, ‘Bill, this little shit is still being a gobby wanker’ and for Big Daddy to come bounding back into the living room, to carry on where he’d left off on my face. I just wasn’t up for it.
God! How I missed my mum. She’d been the peace-keeper in the family and to a certain extent, she could contain my father when he was off on one. We never knew why their marriage fell apart and at that age we wouldn’t have understood it anyway. I was sure that none of this would have happened had she still been there. She’d worked hard when we were children, but when she was at home she would bake cakes for the family. I remembered, how one of us kids, would be allowed to go to town with her every fifth Saturday morning. What a treat. I would count down the five weeks until it was my turn to spend a little time with her. Whoever was the lucky one would always be rewarded with a big bag of sweets. Oh, how I missed those days since my parents split.
It dawned on me soon after the court case that my mum was gone. There was never the closeness between us that some of my friends had with their mums, but it was enough to make me cry silently every night while I lay awake in my bed. I guessed Billy and Robin did the same too. The judge’s words kept repeating in my head. Words like; divorce, separation and custody, which I was becoming more and more familiar with.
I slowly got used to not seeing my mother when I got up in the morning and the house felt as cold as a dentist’s waiting room as a result of her absence. As well as being a nurse, my mother had been working nights at the sweet factory in Southport and whenever I managed to have a rare cuddle with her I could smell the sweetness of an ingredient in a toffee that was popular at the time called a ‘Hobo’. It wasn't until forty years later, that I rediscovered that sweet. When I was a skip-wagon driver, I attended the same sweet factory and was reunited with that sweet smell of my mum. There was no smell of perfume or lacquered hair... just Hobo’s.
My dad on the other hand was a six foot two inch ex Royal Marine boxer who had fought hard during the Burma campaign. He was built like a brick shit house and was never defeated in the ring, or out of it, throughout his military career. He would fight with the gloves on or off, but mainly abiding to the Marquess of Queensbury Rules. It was common knowledge throughout his days, that he would take a fight any which way his opponent wanted it. Bare knuckle was his favourite, as he had hands the size of wooden euro pallets but twice as hard. I now felt I had the words ‘Please stack this way up’ stamped on my forehead as a result of my so called back chat. Of course, knowing all about my dad’s skill as a boxer reminded me that I was a long way from giving him the pasting he deserved.
We didn’t need to book a seat on Mastermind to understand why my father hammered us. He had received some horrific beatings from his father, when he was a boy. Granddad practically lived in the Crawford Arms pub in Red Rock, near Wigan and would take great pleasure in leathering my father when he was drunk, which incidentally, was every day. It was considered quite normal for my father to carry on with this draconian way of discipline. A short sharp shock was what he believed in and a short sharp shock was what, on most occasions, he dished out. I didn’t know it at the time, but I wanted to be the one to break this violent cycle.
I tried to stand up, but even before my knees locked-out, I nearly fainted and fell backwards, my head crashing into the back of the couch. As I slumped back, once more, I remembered thinking how I could murder a cigarette right now. My thoughts drifted to the hole in the garden wall at number 309 Guildford Road, where I used to tuck my cigarettes into the cavity. It was a cracking hiding place which had served me well. However I had already received four severe beatings from my father over the last twelve months for smoking, so the last thing I wanted now, was to take him up on his offer of the beating of a lifetime should he catch me at it again.
When he beat me senseless the last time he caught me smoking, he concluded, as I lay on the bedroom floor crying, that should he ever catch me again he would take me up to my bedroom, lock the door behind us and beat me to within an inch of my life. The phrase ‘to beat someone to within an inch of their life’ had been one of my favourite quotes up until this point. It was something I liked to say to scare my opponents during my school fights. I had sort of lost interest in the phrase after this latest threat, though. Of course the easiest thing would have been to stop smoking, but as a young kid I always knew better than my parents. Looking back, this may have been part of the reason that I wouldn’t stop smoking: The other part was that I was addicted to nicotine, having started smoking at the ripe old age of nine.
All this tied in nicely with where I was currently sitting, trying to find the inside of my head. The last time I was sitting exactly where I was now, was when my father had caught me smoking some months ago. After the usual physical beating from him, he had taken it upon himself to make me smoke twenty Capstan Full Strength cigarettes, while sitting on the couch in front of him. As I had finished one, he lit another, ready for me to continue smoking.
‘If you like cigarettes lad, you can smoke them as much as you like. Now go on, smoke it,’ he’d said, as he was pushing another one directly under my nose. I had put the last one out in the ashtray in front of me, on the coffee table, before reaching out to take the next one.
After finishing the fourth cigarette, I had felt a nauseous feeling take over my body. It had become too much. I had thrown the cigarette down into the ashtray, ran through the kitchen and into the downstairs bathroom. When I had reached the toilet and I was dropping to my knees, to pray to the water gods, the vomit was already rising. I was violently sick to the tune of ‘Hurry up you and get back in here’ being sung by my father. I had dried my mouth and nose with toilet paper, flushed the toilet and quickly returned to the living room. My dad had been waiting with the next cigarette.
‘You‘re not leaving here until you have finished them all,’ he had snapped. He was staring into my eyes and the evil that was coming from him had made me take the cigarette from his hand. I was scared shitless, he had no need to verbally threaten me - his eyes said it all.
By the time I had smoked ten cigarettes, I’d been sick four or five times. As I ran to the toilet for the fifth time, I could hear his new girlfriend ask, ‘Don’t you think he’s had enough, Bill?’
‘No! If he likes smoking that much, he can smoke the bloody lot,’ he had snapped back at her. I was now puking nothingness into the toilet; my stomach had no more to give. My vocal chords were going through the motions and my shoulders were heaving, but I had nothing left inside.
By the time I had finished the next cigarette, I didn’t need to leave
the confines of the living room to be sick, as although I sounded like the
town tramp vomiting all over the monument and wretching like a chicken with
epilepsy, I knew there were not going to be any carrot and sweet corn offerings
for the new carpet, so I didn’t move. With the tears filling my eyes, my
priority now, was to finish the full pack of twenty and get out of the house as
soon as I could. I had never in my life felt so ill. The closest I had come to
this had been when my two brothers, two sisters and I had been thrown into
foster homes while my mum and dad went through their divorce. I had jumped out
of bed early one morning and landed on my left knee. Much to my discomfort, a
large darning needle had driven its way through my knee cap. That had made me
feel somewhat sick, but not to the extent that I felt now.
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