Please Don't Make Me Go Read online

  Please Don't Make Me Go

  Please Don't Make Me Go

  How One Boy’s Courage

  Overcame a Brutal Childhood

  JOHN FENTON

  Dedication

  For Shelley and Maggie

  Your support and faith were inspirational to me.

  Chapter 1

  Mum and I were sitting at the kitchen table, eating bread and jam and talking about what we would do if we won the football pools. The top prize, £75,000, was a fortune to us. We often discussed this and I never got bored of speculating about all the great things we could do together, such as buy a big new house, go on holiday to the seaside, and get a television set of our own. I loved those moments of closeness with my mother when I got home from school in the afternoon. It was just the two of us in our private little world.

  I flung my arms out to indicate how big my new bedroom would be and my sleeve accidentally caught the edge of my plate. It toppled off the table then seemed to fall in slow motion to the floor, where it smashed into tiny pieces. My remaining slice of bread fell jam-side down on the wreckage.

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said, slipping from my chair to pick up the pieces.

  ‘Not to worry. Accidents happen. Careful you don’t cut yourself.’

  Suddenly we both froze as the floorboards of the room above creaked. My mother looked up at the ceiling fearfully. The sounds of my father moving around his bedroom always signalled the end of our little tête-à-têtes. She hurried into the scullery and lit the gas under the kettle, holding her finger to her lips to signal that I should be very quiet.

  I quickly gathered the broken plate and dropped it in the bin, then hurried to the far side of the table, opened my English homework book and pretended I was engrossed in my studies. I could hear my father’s footsteps stamping down the stairs and all of a sudden I wanted to pee. I always got the urge to pee when trouble was imminent.

  The scullery door burst open and my father rushed in. He scowled angrily at my mum and strode purposely over to where I was sitting.

  ‘You little bastard.’ His right hand shot out and slapped me hard around my ear. ‘How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet when you get in from school?’

  My Dad worked nights as a bus cleaner, so he slept during the day.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Mum screamed. ‘We were just talking quietly.’ Acknowledgement

  ‘This one doesn’t know the meaning of the word “quiet”.’ He clipped my ear again and Mum rushed over to try and grab his arm.

  ‘Stop it!’ she yelled. ‘You only pick on him because he’s too young to hit you back. You wouldn’t dare pick on someone your own size.’

  Mum’s sharp tongue often got her into trouble with Dad. This time, he drew back his fist and punched her hard in the centre of her face. She stumbled backwards and held up her hands to protect herself as Dad let loose a flurry of punches. One of them hit her high on the head and she slid down and sat dazed on the floor. Her nose and mouth were bleeding and she was totally at his mercy.

  I was screaming at him to stop and in desperation I kicked him on the shin. It was the first time I had dared to attack him. I was only nine years old and a skinny, wiry kid – definitely no match for him – but I had to do something to protect my mother. He turned and backhanded me across the room.

  ‘So you think you’re big enough to fight me, do you?’ He smiled as he picked me up by the scruff of my neck and one of my legs. ‘I’ll show you how big you are, you little bastard.’ He threw me with all his strength across the kitchen. I crashed onto the table and bounced into the chairs. They toppled over backwards and I landed on my back on the chair legs, hurt and winded.

  Dad glanced round at Mum, who was slumped on the floor, then back at me, and he seemed satisfied with his handiwork. I’d seen that expression before. He got real pleasure from being violent, as if it released all his pent-up tension. Through the pain I heard the scullery door slam shut and the sound of his footsteps going back up the stairs.

  I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t catch my breath. I just lay gasping. Suddenly my mother was beside me and her hands were desperately trying to disentangle me from the chair legs. She was sobbing bitterly. ‘Are you alright, darling? Oh, he’s a wicked man.’

  She lifted me up by my waist and I saw that her nose and mouth were bleeding, dripping large drops of blood onto the floor.

  ‘Please tell me you’re alright.’ Once she had got me upright, Mum wrapped me in her arms and we clung to each other for ages, both trembling and crying.

  I watched my mother as she rinsed her face under the cold tap in the scullery. I had seen her do this so many times before and it always broke my heart. I loved her so much but there was nothing I could do to stop the endless misery she was suffering at my father’s hands.

  Later, after Dad had left for work, we listened to our favourite programme ‘Journey Into Space’ on the radio, and tried to pretend nothing had happened. We were big fans of Jet Morgan and his crew and I always imagined that one day Mum and I would blast off into space on a spaceship like the Luna: travelling far, far away, through countless galaxies, never returning and living a life full of happiness and amazing adventures.

  There is something comforting in dreams. Anything is possible and you can escape the misery of your day-to-day life. I often wished I could just live in a dream world and never wake up.

  My Mum and Dad should never have married. They didn’t love each other. They only married because he got her pregnant in a moment of lust and in those days, with the stigma attached to being a single mother and the shame that would be brought on the whole family by her condition, there was only one course of action left open to them. But right from the start it was a marriage made in hell.

  My mother was a fun-loving girl of eighteen. She was very bright, but was forced to leave school at fifteen and work in a shop in London to help support her mother. The fifteen shillings a week she brought in was all that kept the family from going under. My father was thirty years old and had recently arrived from Wexford in southern Ireland. He’d come to England looking for work and had got a part-time job as a barman in the West End. It was in this bar that he met my mother.

  Elizabeth, my sister, was born in May 1939 just six months into their marriage. Four months later the Second World War broke out and my father enlisted in the army. Because he had flat feet, he was given a home posting in the big army stores in Southampton. This meant that he could get back to London quite regularly and, as a result of one visit, my mother gave birth to my second sister, Jean, in October 1942. Then, on April 22nd, 1944 I exploded into the world. My mother told me that I had rushed my way out – but maybe it was because a V1 rocket had gone off a few streets away at the critical moment.

  My father was a small, slightly built Irishman. He was strictly teetotal; both his parents had died from alcohol abuse and, like so many small men, he walked around with a permanent chip on his shoulder. He fancied himself as a ladies’ man and went from affair to affair without a shadow of remorse. He had no qualms about hitting women and it was not long before my mother felt the power of his fist in her face. He had a job on London Transport as a night cleaner for the buses. He was not averse to hard work, so earned a decent wage, but never divulged the amount to my mother and only gave her the minimum for food. All of his extra money went on keeping up his appearance and conducting his extramarital affairs.

  My earliest memories are blurred snatches of pictures here and there, but violence was always around – from the Carmelite nuns who used to whack our hands with a bamboo cane at my first primary school through to Dad’s explosions of temper at home. By the age of seven, just after my kid sister Jennifer was born, I had a pronounced n
ervous stammer and had to attend a speech therapy clinic in Hanwell. The therapist gave me tongue-twisting exercises to repeat. I still remember one: ‘Look at Lily, Lily up the lamppost; come down Lily, you do look silly.’

  Because of my stammer I became a prime target for the bullies in my school. Having a stammer was nearly as bad as having to wear glasses, which got you called ‘four eyes’. Whenever I had to stand up to read aloud, the entire class would look in my direction and start sniggering. This made me stammer even more and the teacher would tell me angrily to sit down again. It wasn’t long before I developed a massive inferiority complex and tried to hide in the background away from the cruel jibes and laughter.

  St Gregory’s Catholic Primary School was situated in an affluent part of Ealing and most of the children came from quite wealthy backgrounds. Mum had very little money, so while the clothes I wore were clean, they never came close to being like the other children’s. She had a nose for finding the best bargains in a jumble sale and she’d carefully scrub them in the large stone copper in the scullery. I was always excited when I tried them on, never noticing the odd frayed collar or sewed-up hole in my trousers. I’d feel proud as I strutted off to school with my nice new clothes but I was soon brought back down to earth when the children laughed and taunted me unmercifully about the way I looked. I stood out like a sore thumb in my shabby, secondhand clothes.

  I hated having to get changed into my sports kit to play football. My underwear, vest and pants, were always hand-me-downs from my two older sisters. I complained to mum on several occasions about wearing girl’s knickers but she told me not to be stupid as no-one could see what I was wearing under my trousers. She had no idea the taunts I had to endure from the other boys when they saw them. ‘He’s got a fanny!’ was their favourite. I would feign illness to avoid school on days when we had physical education or sports. If I was forced to go I would sneak into one of the toilet cubicles and struggle into my kit in private.

  My home life was equally unhappy. My father seemed to hate me and would hit me unmercifully for no apparent reason. On my eighth birthday, I remember I went into the back garden with my mother and sisters to play a game of cricket with a bat and ball my grandmother had given me. I accidentally hit the ball against the kitchen window and cracked a pane of glass. My father rushed out into the garden and pulled one of the cricket stumps out of the ground then proceeded to beat me all over my back and legs with it. The beating went on for two or three minutes, and when at last he stopped, I was left on the ground unable to move. My mother kept me off school for over two weeks until the bruising had gone.

  Of course, she fared no better. I lost count of the number of times she came crawling into my bed of a night after yet another violent row. She was always inconsolable. I would cuddle up to her in the hope that it would make her feel better, but it was always to no avail. On these occasions it was the sound of her whimpering that sent me into a troubled sleep. I grew to hate my father and promised myself that when I was grown up there would be a reckoning.

  He usually got out of bed around four o’clock in the afternoon. I never knew what to expect when I arrived home from school. Sometimes I would hear the shouting before I entered the house and would sneak up to my room and bury my head under my pillow to shut out the noise. Other times I would arrive home to find my mother already crying and my father scowling angrily. These were the worst times. Invariably, my father would hit me for just coming into the room. One day, I had fled the room screaming out how much I hated him. I went to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep but awoke some time later to the agonising pain of my father hitting me with a piece of timber, which he was wielding with exceptional ferocity. The next day at school I passed a lot of blood in my urine. It was then that I decided that my best option was to arrive home after six o’clock, which was when my father usually left for work.

  My favourite place to go after school was Jacob’s Ladder railway crossing, where trains from Ealing Broadway and West Ealing passed under a bridge on their way to and from the West Country. I had a little book of train numbers and underlined them every time I saw a new train thundering down the track. It was always exciting when the Flying Scotsman came speeding by. I would run to the part of the bridge where the funnel smoke would engulf me in a thick cloud and breathe in the glorious aroma of smoke and steam. Sometimes I was enjoying myself so much that I would still be there at seven.

  But I couldn’t stay out of my father’s way all the time. There were still weekends to get through and the evenings when he started work at a later hour. By the time I was twelve years old I had become hardened to my father’s beatings and nastiness, and I no longer hid with fear in my room. Whenever I witnessed one of his violent outbursts against my mother I would do my best to help her. I would try to kick him or throw something at his head. This meant, of course, that I got another beating but at least it stopped him hitting my mother. I hated him with a passion that was almost as strong as the adoration I felt for my mother. Often I would lie in bed and think about how I would pay him back in kind when I was older.

  It seemed to me that things couldn’t get worse at home, but on a January day in 1958 I found out that they could. Dad and Gran had joint tenancy of the house we lived in. He hated her living with us, even though she only inhabited the front room and rarely came out of it. She hated him for the way he treated her daughter. They rarely spoke to each other and, when they were forced to, the conversation was always strained with underlying venom.

  On that day Gran had come into the scullery to fill her kettle with water and my father was shaving in the mirror over the sink. She reached across to turn on the tap and accidentally jogged his arm, causing him to nick his face with his razor. He screamed out, ‘You clumsy old bitch. Get back in your own room.’ She retorted, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t cut your throat.’ That was it. Sixteen years of pent-up fury was unleashed. He grabbed her by her scrawny throat and started to strangle her, making no allowance for the fact that she was an old woman, nearly deaf and half blind. My mother jumped on his back to pull him away and his anger was then diverted onto her. He started to beat her unmercifully and the sound of her screams brought me running into the room. I found my Gran on the floor, clutching her throat and gasping for air, and my mother getting beaten to a pulp over the cooker. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand – a three-inch, sharp vegetable knife.

  ‘Leave her alone, you bastard!’ I screamed.

  My father turned to me. I knew it was my turn to face his fury and gripped the knife tightly. His face blanched noticeably when he spotted it and he said quietly, ‘What are you going to do with that?’

  ‘If you don’t leave them alone, I’ll kill you.’ My voice was trembling with emotion but my eyes showed that I wasn’t bluffing. I knew that this could be my moment of destiny and I welcomed it. I made a move towards him and couldn’t believe it when he ran from the room.

  ‘Give me the knife, John.’ My mother gently took it out of my hand. ‘Help me with Gran.’

  We lifted Gran off the floor and sat her down in the kitchen. She was in shock and her whole body was shaking as if she had been out in the cold for days. My mother wrapped her in a coat and made her a cup of hot, sweet tea. It must have been at least two hours before she was fit enough to return to her room and, even then, she was still whimpering. We didn’t see my father for the next two days.

  Life slowly returned to normal, but in my heart I knew that it was only a matter of time until my father had his revenge on me. What was he going to do? Would he kill me? These thoughts troubled my mind and kept me awake at night worrying.

  The bright, early-morning sun shining through my threadbare bedroom curtains woke me from a troubled sleep. Momentarily, I struggled with drowsiness and reached down to adjust the coats that I had piled on top of my blanket to keep me warm. Suddenly, I became alert. Why was the sun shining? It was a school day. It was always dark when I got up for school in winter. I jumped out of bed
and shivered as I placed my feet onto the cold, lino-covered floor. The book I had been reading the night before, The Count of Monte Cristo, was lying on the floor so I picked it up and put it back on the mantelpiece. I hurried downstairs to see why Mum hadn’t called me. I found her sitting in the kitchen weeping silently. My father was sitting on his stool by the coke boiler, tracing patterns in the air with the glowing tip of his cigarette.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re coming out with me for the day,’ my Dad said as he looked up at me. ‘Get yourself dressed.’ I noticed that he was wearing his Sunday best clothes.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘Are we going to see Uncle John?’ I liked my father’s brother. He was nothing like my father and was always full of fun and mischief.

  ‘Maybe we will and maybe we won’t. You’ll just have to wait and see.’

  I hurried back upstairs and quickly got dressed in my own Sunday clothes – basically my school clothes, but with a nice blue jumper that my mother had knitted for me. I looked at myself in the mirror: with my dark hair in the typical short, back and sides of the day, dark eyes and scrawny features, I didn’t think I was anything special.

  When I came back downstairs there was a steaming bowl of porridge waiting on the table. I sprinkled it liberally with sugar and wolfed it down. I was eager to be on my way – treats in my life were rare and a day at my uncle’s was definitely a treat.

  My father looked at his watch. ‘Right,’ he said ‘it’s time for us to go.’ My mother followed us to the front door. I turned to kiss her goodbye and she wrapped me tightly in her arms. She whispered, ‘Take care of yourself, John. Remember how much I love you.’

  I was puzzled by her remarks and looked deeply into her tear-filled eyes. ‘I’ll be fine mum, don’t worry. I love you too.’

  I was surprised when my father led the way towards West Ealing. I thought we would have gone to Ealing Broadway to catch an underground train to Paddington. I walked by his side, not speaking, but curious as to where we were headed.