To Wear a Gown of Thorns by Eleanor Boyce M.A.

Chapter One

SOUR FRUIT

To judge an apple by its skin is to miss the possibility of bitterness beneath.

A screech of brakes and a hiss! A large lorry came to a halt at the curbside where my sister and I had been walking, stopping right beside us. The passenger door flew open. There was our mother, after months of absence, perched high on the seat, waving a piece of chocolate at us, smiling strangely, urging us to get in quickly. Next to her, at the wheel, sat a broad man, his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal thick, muscular arms. In an instant, my sister started clambering to get into the cab, reaching for the prize that was being waved so enticingly. I was overcome with terror and grabbed her dress, pulling her backward, whilst yelling ”No!!!“ at the top of my voice. With my sister, Denise, back safely on the pavement, I looked up to see the cab door slam shut. Immediately, the lorry sped away up the hill to disappear over the skyline. After helping a bemused Denise to her feet, we continued our journey back from Infant School. I was still trembling when we reached the house. Although the incident had happened so very quickly, it had caused us to be a few minutes late and Mrs. Dix launched into a scolding as soon as the front door closed behind us. After a while she paused for me to ”explain myself“. I related, in full, the lorry incident. Mrs. Dix’s face contorted and turned the colour of beetroot. She pushed her face so close into mine that I was showered with particles of saliva as she shouted. ”You filthy little liar! You ... YOU ... it was YOU that wanted to go with her!!“ Her hand moved so quickly it blurred and came down hard across my face. I stumbled and smashed my head into the wall of the narrow passage. All went black.

When I came to I was lying on one of the beds upstairs in the front bedroom. My head hurt. I touched the spot to discover a large swelling growing on the right side of my skull. As the room came into focus so did Mrs. Dix’s daughter, Sarah, standing, arms folded, in the open doorway. ”Right, I’ll tell mum you’re awake and okay,“ she said curtly, before going out and shutting the door.

I lay staring at the ceiling, musing. Maybe ... I should not have pulled Denise from the cab ... maybe ... we both should have just jumped in ... at least we would have been away from THIS! I cursed myself for my cowardice and vowed, next time, we would go. But, there was not to be a next time. The lorry never came again. The opportunity failed to be seized when it had been presented. Later, I would wonder, had we got into that cab, on that particular afternoon, whether things would have been any better. We were never ever to see our mother again.

Memories of her are so vague as to be almost non-existent, only fragmented snatches, akin to isolated and disconnected stills from a movie. Amongst them an image of her falling down a staircase in a café; another of her screaming at me to take a doll’s pram back to neighbour who had given it, and one of her standing before a mirror putting on sparkling diamante earrings. Two snatches of memory come from a time in this house. One of sitting upon the stairs crying due to hunger whilst nursing the knowledge of biscuits in a cupboard in the room in which she was sitting, and another one of her angrily pulling my legs - pulling me from a bed where my father lay, he having hold of my arms, in this very room. Neither do I have a clear picture of her physical appearance. I only know that she was slim and her skin was pale. And though I could not recall as to just why, I was very frightened of her.

It was Friday, so I guessed Mrs. Dix was hoping that the bump would rise and fall by the coming Monday when I would be attending the Infant School again. If not, my sister would have to be escorted by Sarah, together with a note to say that I had a ”tummy bug“ or some such thing again. Sarah would resent that and give me a hard time, so I, too, was willing the bump a speedy disappearance.

”Tea! Get down here!“ Mrs. Dix bellowed from below. I made no hesitation and slipped off the bed in obeyance and dizzily descended the steep stairs.

A veil of cigarette smoke hung mid-air in the small ‘living’ room situated in the middle of the ground floor of this dark three bedroom Victorian terraced house. The room was dimly lit, crowded with furniture and bodies. In an area no more than twelve by ten feet were a three-piece suite, a table with a television atop and a dining table with four chairs. Either side of the open tiled fireplace built-in alcove cupboards reached floor to ceiling, whilst two doors and a window ate up even more space. The decor was chipped, stained, dingy and flowery, with no seemingly past attempt at co-ordination or harmony. But the once garish colours had now been subdued by age, coal dust and nicotine giving, at least, some sort of tonal value to the whole. At the rarely opened window a once white half net had long yellowed and displayed large damp stains. The thin shiny curtains on either side hung sadly limp a few inches short of the sill, underneath which another damp stain darkened the wallpaper, its shape that of a goblin in profile.

Gangly, big nosed, Sarah was the closest to me as I entered, sitting at one end of the sofa with her legs up, seemingly absorbed in concentration on the picking of them. Her teenage acne, which had erupted over her face, had made its way down to her legs too. She suddenly raised, not only her head in triumph, but also her forefinger, upon which perched a little white maggot of puss she had just extracted from a blackhead. ”Tea!“ she grinned, looking in my direction with an inane grin so wide as to almost reveal her back molars. I made no response and crossed the back of the room towards the kitchen, picking my way around the massive German shepherd bitch that lay sleeping before it.

The kitchen was neither flowery nor fancy. Next to the back door was a wooden draining board butted up to a Belfast sink set onto bricks, above which a tap jutted from a pipe in the wall. The corner housed a built in copper boiler with a small opening near to the floor for the burning of coals to heat it. On occasion this was lit for boiling sheets, pillowcases and towels. A tall green and cream unit with glass sliding doors and pull down surface was placed against the chimneybreast and another alcove was shelved to hold pots and pans. A free-standing gas cooker, small refrigerator and a wooden table covered with a plastic tablecloth were pushed against the other wall and a small door less recess under the stairs served as storage for broom, mop, bucket and other cleaning tools. Dull red uneven quarry tiles covered the floor. The ceiling was grey-white with an area of tiny brown dots above the cooker and the walls, along with the copper, were painted pink with the cream of a previous colour revealed where paint had flaked.

On the draining board was a plate with the customary slice of bread and jam along with a half cup of luke warm tea. My sister and I always had our meals in the kitchen, separate from the family, and, for the most part, these were served up on this draining board, we being required to stand, rather than sit, to eat. I stood eating the bread slowly, or rather sucking it, to make it last as long as possible, and stared out of the window. My view wasn’t one that particularly inspired, or stimulated, being merely the face of a high brick wall separating the small yard from the neighbouring one. After washing, drying and returning the plate and cup in the cupboard, I re-entered the room and found a place to sit on the floor next to the television. Sarah had continued the research of her legs and paid me no further attention.

At the other end of the sofa was another of Mrs. Dix’s daughters, the oldest, Vera, heavily pregnant and knitting. The story was that her husband, a Frenchman, was away overseas and would soon return, but it was also suspected that no husband existed. When out of earshot from the Dix family, my sister and I referred to her as ‘Popeye’, though in appearance she was very much more like Olive Oil, with dark hair scraped back and tied in a knot, thus accentuating an extraordinary length of neck. Behind her large glasses she had the most enormous bulging eyes, one of which, uncannily, seemed to be often searching out something to the far right of her vision, whilst the other one focused ahead. Karen, another of the daughters, bleached blonde and lardy, slouched in the chair by the window. Her husband, a weedy speckled American named Bob, sat on the floor beside her. Both were engrossed in the 6 o’ clock news on the television and puffing on imported cigarettes. These last two were just visiting. Perhaps they did not have a television at their own place.

Mrs. Dix, sitting in a chair in the centre of the room, had her skirt pulled right up over her thighs and her feet immersed in a plastic bowl full of suds. She was like some hideous old witch, or beast, as described by the writers of fairy-tales: black-dyed hair with a fading perm, always showing an inch or two of white roots, and a face so wrinkled as to resemble a dried up prune set with small, cold grey eyes in sunken sockets. The dry, scaly flesh of her arms hung loose, and her legs were red blotched, blue veined and lumpy. My sister was kneeling by the bowl, with a towel spread across her small legs, holding pumice stone to the ready. Without warning, Mrs. Dix raised one of her feet from the suds and plonked it on the towel, whereupon Denise set to her work of rubbing the hard skin of its underside with the pumice. This was my sister’s only task, but mine were many, me being the elder by a year and a day. These chores including sweeping the stairs with a hand brush, washing, drying and putting crockery away, scrubbing the kitchen floor, cleaning the fireplace and the outside lavatory. On Sunday mornings I would beat the Yorkshire pudding batter with a wooden spoon for what seemed like forever, causing so much pain in my arms that I had to bite hard on my lip. It was only years later I learnt that one and a half hours, or more, of batter beating were not only unnecessary, but also decidedly excessive. Since I was always called ‘bad’ and always being punished I was unsure whether the batter beating was some form of punishment for unspoken crimes.

Mrs. Dix let out a groan of a sigh as she leant her head back, resting it upon a cushion at the rear of the chair and closed her eyes. Everyone was so engrossed in their respective tasks that not one of them blinked when the black sleeping dog let out a loud fart. All, save my sister, of course, who shot me a couple of quick glances, but fortunately we both managed to avoided a bout of giggling.

When the foot ablutions were over, with the bunions massaged, the corn pads stuck in place, everything dried and powdered, I rose to carry the bowl to the kitchen for emptying, as was my preordained task. Slowly, very slowly, I poured the grey soapy water with the foot skin debris from the bowl, all the while envisioning that it was the whole of the woman’s skin circling and being sucked down the plug hole into the drain, and that this action resulted in transforming her, in the other room, to just a pile of dead old bones in a chair. My hatred was pure and unadulterated.

Before the Dix family had taken over the house it was the residence, for a short while, of my mother, father and us girls, having been secured for rental agreement from the Brewery, our grandparents being publicans. Initially, our grandparents ran The Wheat Inn at the far end of town (in which I was apparently born), then The Grouse, next door but one to this house, but they had long since departed to another, bigger Northamptonshire town. My parents moved away shortly after my birth to reside in two other places within a twenty-mile radius. My sister was born elsewhere. I have no memories of that time, save for the fragments already mentioned. We hadn’t been in this house long before the descent of the Dix family. Mrs. Dix had been a one- time friend of my mother, moving in when my father had become absent. When my mother also took her leave, Mrs. Dix settled here. I believe not only was it made rent-free for her, but that she was also in receipt of a generous allowance in respect of my sister and I being allocated to her ‘care’. Our situation was synonymous with the unrelated children to the wicked stepmother and ugly daughters in Cinderella and other such tales, but the potential fairy godmother sadly lacked awareness.

Periodically, an officer from the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) would visit. A smart, elderly, dumpy woman, who wore her silver hair pinned up in a bun atop her head, and went by the name of Miss. Lupin. She was totally oblivious to the fact that cruelty to children was under her very nose. Mrs. Dix had us well trained and well rehearsed. All questions were answered with positive response and we had to spout lyrical about how happy we were for fear of a beating. On those occasions we were scrubbed up, put into dresses and had ribbons tied in our hair. Mrs. Dix also cleaned herself up, became all artificial and waxy, sweetly smiley and crooned on about what delightful children we were and what a pleasure it was to have us around. Miss. Lupin failed to spot the reflex cringes when Mrs. Dix patted our heads, missed the unnatural way Denise stared wide-eyed at cake on a plate, did not notice me squirm and wince as the zip of the pretty dress rubbed on the raw whip lashes on my flesh beneath. She had no idea of what lay on the underside of this rosy façade, knew nothing of us having to sleep on newspaper lain on the quarry tiles in the cold kitchen when ‘guests’ were entertained, the beatings, the lack of food, the locking into cupboards, the cruel games and twisted threats. If only she had just looked up, examined our faces, peered into our eyes, perhaps, just perhaps, it might have occurred to her that maybe things were not as they seemed, and perhaps, just perhaps, I could have secretly communicated something to her. As it was, so intent was she on the scribbling of her papers in order to quicken the visit so as to attend to things elsewhere, that she always took this little piece of theatre for real.

My imaginings had been so delicious that I had taken a long time emptying and washing the plastic bowl, so by the time I re-entered the room it was immediately ”Upstairs to bed!“ Two double beds had been squeezed into the space of the front bedroom along with a chest of drawers, wardrobe and bedside table. All this furniture was heavy and dark, and rather than arranged within the room, it squatted like a group of fat toads, burdening it with its cumbersome presence. Another pair of shiny limp curtains hung at the window and the room was conspicuously unadorned. No pictures broke up the pale yellow patterning of the aged wallpaper, no trinkets or ornaments adorned the dressing table or chest, and the light was unshaded. One of the beds, my sister shared with Mrs. Dix, the other, I with Sarah, though Sarah did not know how to share. She would kick my legs and thump me into the wall until she had taken up almost the whole bed, and I was often left shivering as she snuggled warmly with all of the bedding. Sarah was the most vicious, the most spiteful, of Mrs. Dix’s daughters. Venom slid from her tongue whenever she addressed us, and the flesh of our arms and legs, more often than not, showed traces, in the form of small bruises, of her incessant pinches and kicks. Vera, miserable and sour-faced, merely displayed blatant irritation at our presence, and Karen, laughingly referred to us as ‘the brats’. Indeed, the latter incessantly cracked jokes, at ours, and other’s expense, but appeared to be alone in finding them amusing.

It was still light, and once under the covers of the respective beds Denise and I began to whisper to each other. I told her of my imaginings of Mrs. Dix’s skin going down the plughole and her being but an old pile of bones in a chair, and we soon launched into other fantasies of a similar nature, like her exploding from the inside out into tiny bits, having such bad diarrhoea that she shat herself away and of her being force-fed Sarah's ‘skin maggots’. We managed to stifle our giggles with the bed covers so well that Mrs. Dix did not hear us when she strained her ears at the bottom of the stairs, as she always did, so we were, mercifully, saved from being whipped by the dreaded thick, plaited leather dog lead that night. We both fell asleep in a cocoon of the most delightful dreaming, nestled cosily in fantasised revenge.

CRUSHED ROSEBUDS

A discarded thing may not die but simply grow a little differently from other blooms.

The weekend came and went, but not so the bump on my head. It was hardly likely to be particularly visible due to my hair, but, nonetheless, it was decided I should wear a ribbon over the spot. Vera separated and gathered a section of hair into an elastic band, threaded an orange ribbon through and tied it into an enormous bow. Not only was it ridiculous, causing my head to resemble an Easter egg, but it was painful, the elastic having been fastened so tight as to pull my hair by the roots on the still tender injury. As soon as we had turned the corner and were safely out of sight of the house, I disentangled the thing and put it into my pocket.

The Infant School, just a little way up the road and around the corner, was always thick with a strong perfume of cabbage and custard, which, once through the door into the tiny cloakroom, would instantly fill our throats and nostrils. The school was a small low brick building surrounded by a neat hedge with two classrooms and another all-purpose room with tables where we would engage in messier activities such as scrapbook making, painting and playing with plasticine. Daily this room would be cleared and we would carry our chairs from classroom to tables to eat a midday dinner. Since breakfast was an unknown in the Dix household, Denise and I were ‘Oliver Twist children’ when this school dinner was served, always asking for ‘second helpings’ and forever keeping our eyes on the plates of others to see what they would leave and gobbling that up too. After dinner we were supposed to have an afternoon nap on small cot beds resembling mini army camp beds, but few of us actually slept, just lay there, bored, awaiting the teacher to grant permission for us to get up and plunge into the box of holey plastic balls and bean bags for the school yard exercises. Denise’s bed was next to mine and we frequently amused ourselves by competing to see which of us could pull the ugliest face, faces that could even scare the gargoyles on the nearby church. We’d giggle and titter into our respective thin cream blankets, not that blankets were necessary for the large radiators gave off more than adequate heat, and the teacher would ”Shush!“ us more than once.

Never was I considered ‘bad’ at school, indeed, I was often congratulated for both my behaviour and work, only two or three times being mildly reprimanded and all of those for getting the stuffed mole out of the cupboard and sitting it on my knee to stroke. I had developed quite a fondness for that small taxidermy creature, and loved the feel of the velvet-like fur, his little pink nose and feet, so much so I had named him ‘Inky’, and felt a little pang of guilt if I did not take time to acknowledge him daily. School was actually a joy to my sister and I, unlike the other children who spent a great deal of time crying for mummies. Always, I dreaded the sound of the bell that loudly summoned us to gather our things and leave the building.

The large bubble gum pink bloomers of the teacher have blanked any of her other features from memory. She would take up a position on a low chair, with us children gathered around sitting cross-legged on the floor, her legs wide apart and the bloomers dominating our line of vision. The repeated initial novelty of the distraction soon faded and I enjoyed the stories, my imagination brimming with rabbits that wore trousers, bears that talked and all manner of sunshine adventures. As a consequence, I quickly learned to read, progressing from book one to nine somewhat faster than the other children.

One time I was graded top of the class and awarded a prize - an illustrated book entitled Brer Rabbit and The Tar Baby. Brimming with pride and beaming wide, I strutted around with head held high convinced I had achieved something that was, indeed, praiseworthy. However, I only possessed the book a mere three days. Mrs. Dix, as a punishment, threw it onto the open fire. As the flames licked around Brer Rabbit’s ears in the picture on the front cover, a hard lump formed in my throat. It was with great difficulty that I fought back the tears that time. I felt the urge, not only to shed tears for myself, but also because, as the cover bubbled black and dripped, I believed the little tar baby was melting, being burnt alive, and the accompanying hissing sounds were its screams. Yet, even at that tender age, I had made a solemn vow to myself that I would never give old woman Dix the pleasure of seeing me cry. The vision of Mrs. Dix herself set in black tar helped. I did not know for sure why she threw the book into the fire. Only some of the time did I know for what I was being punished, at others not, just merely confused as to what I had done to warrant it. This was one of those times, receiving only a vague hint that being ‘clever’ was unacceptable – a crime deserving of punishment, not praise.

With my head full of the golden chattering bears in the story read by ‘Pink Bloomers’ earlier that afternoon, I had forgotten all about the ribbon until Mrs. Dix grilled me about it on our return. I invented some story of a boy called Billy ripping it out, despite no boy with that name being in the class. I wasn’t believed, of course, I never was, even when I told the truth, but on this occasion, surprisingly, there was no punishment. Instead, she spoke of the taboo subject, our mother, a person who was never referred to in that household for she had forbidden it. She informed me that I was an evil child and that it was due to this fact our mother hadn’t wanted us. ”Couldn’t wait to get rid!“ she said. According to her, our mother had NOT come back for us because she wanted us with her, merely had gone through the motions at the persuasion of the ‘chap she had taken up with’, and she would have been very glad and relieved that we hadn’t gotten into the lorry. ”After all“, she said, ”she hadn’t hung around, had she?” At the age of five years, going on six, I had no conception of evil, but guessed it must be something like the other things she said I was, like ‘bad’, ‘rotten’ and ‘clever’ with the familiar twisted curl of her upper lip. It was certainly now clear that Mrs. Dix harbored a loathing for our mother for reasons I was never to know. For my 'badness', for 'cleverness', for being 'evil', I was both punished and threatened. The cupboard at the top of the stairs was a favourite. Mrs. Dix would lock me in that dark space for hours at a time, telling me that, in there, the 'Bogey Man would get me and teach me a lesson.' Once locked inside, though, all I could imagine was that there was something in the dark with me, a very tall, thin, stick-like thing made of black bogies, but he never did me any harm. I was much more fearful of another, more sinister character.

It was about ten minutes or so before bedtime when I caught sight of a paperback book lying upturned on the floor beside Mrs. Dix’s chair. The cover depicted a face. The eyes were like black pits and the skin very white, veined with a multitude of thin red threads to make it resemble a road map. She caught me looking at it and slapped the arm of the chair. ”That’s Jack Spot. Jack Spot drinks the blood of bad little girls, and he’ll drink yours if you don’t behave!“ she said with menacingly. It was a threat to be repeated by her many times over and for a very long time I could hardly sleep, believing that in the shadows, Jack Spot lay in wait underneath the other bed. I’d strain my eyes to discern any movement from that quarter, sometimes till dawn, sitting, leaning against the wall, as Sarah snored rolled up like a sausage in pastry amidst all the blankets. Instigated by the thought of this sinister figure, the gloomy cavernous spaces underneath beds and furniture, or that created by the wardrobe door being left ajar, became portals of potential danger wherein all manner of things lurked awaiting opportunity. During this period of increased disquiet, all colours drained from the ceiling, which was most often bejeweled by my sunnier imaginings, and, added to the general angst felt in company of Mrs. Dix and daughters, I loathed being in the house more than ever.

Easter and summer holidays from the Infant School, and later the Junior School, were not, however, anticipated with anxiety because they meant the freedom of the fields and woods. After all my morning chores were completed, usually before 10am, the back door was flung open to let us out with the instruction to return at teatime. We would run out into the yard, past the mangle, tin bath and lavatory, up the stone steps into the garden and out of the back gate like animals fleeing from the confines of a cage.

A short way up a little back road behind the house was a small single storey Rosebud Doll factory, beyond which lay the fields and the spinney. On the other side of the factory and to its rear, adjacent almost to the spinney, was the factory dump, enclosed on three sides by iron railings. Ignoring the large danger signs displaying skulls with red crosses overlain on them, but sensible enough not to put our hands into the noxious plastic overflow from upturned cans, Denise and I would spend hours rummaging through what had been discarded there. Dolls legs, arms, torsos, heads, eyes and hair were the treasures in the trash. We would collect and take them to our ‘secret home’ in the spinney, a small cave-like enclosure in a dip with walls and ceiling naturally formed of tree trunks, branches and bushes. The interior was decorated, by us, with celandines, cow parsley and purple clover, and carpeted with a found old hessian sack. It was our little palace, immaculately kept, being swept clear of leaves with a half-bristled broom head each time we visited. There we felt safe, and would sit and fit together the pieces, fashion strange doll sculptures that lacked symmetry, whose limbs hardly ever matched, with odd eyes or merely empty sockets. In the dampness of that enclosure they would, in time, grow clothes of moss and lichen to be accessorised with leaves, berries, flowers and odd bits of broken jewelry salvaged from the Dix household. These woodland dolls were all given names and to us they were beautiful, were our family. Each new addition was introduced to Mr. Thrush, a bird, unusually brave, who would perch on a branch nearby and watch us inquisitively with his head cocked to one side. All around us the tall trees linked together their multiple arms and were akin to ancient deities, protecting and shielding us. The largest, and obviously the eldest, was gnarled and bent, and we referred to it as the ‘old man of the wood’, ‘the boss’, and named him Alfred. Alfred grew to the left of the opening to our little abode and was always acknowledged upon entry and exit with a stroke and a few words of greeting or farewell.

None ever visited the spinney save for us. It was dark, tangled, over grown and bereft of footpaths. A certain nimbleness of feet and a pushing aside of foliage, especially when the cow parsley reached shoulder high, were required to traverse its floor, and eyes needed some time to adjust to the darkness. Leaving the sunlit world for the shadow world of trees, we found refuge and felt something akin to a sense of belonging.

Even mad Fritz couldn’t find us in our little woodland palace. Mad Fritz was a small weasel of a man who had a tendency to chase children and offer sixpenny bits to look inside their pants. We never took sixpences; instead we’d laugh, pull faces and call names until he became violently angry, stutter, swear and give chase – a sport we engaged in with frequency. On one occasion, whilst running from him, Denise fell and cut her eye and when we returned to the house Mrs. Dix gave me a heavy whipping for ‘not looking after my sister properly’, although I could have hardly have prevented her fall. A couple of weeks or so later, Mad Fritz was put away ‘somewhere safe’ due to him having tipped a small baby out of a pram outside a shop on the High Street. He and ‘goodie-two-shoes’, a sweetly sickly girly-girl, we teased and ridiculed for fun, and for this reason alone Fritz was actually missed by us after his removal.

Most often, when not rummaging on the dump or inside the spinney, we ran, walked and rolled on the grass in the fields with the sun beating down upon us, hop-scotched over cow pats, made daisy chains, picked violets from underneath the hedgerows and collected blackberries when they were in season. Sometimes we would take the narrow path to the right before the factory, a path that led down to more open fields and a river, venturing further to where more fields abutted tended gardens, slipping through fences and climbing over walls to pick apples, pears, berries, pull rhubarb, lettuce, and carrots. When the toll of the distant church bell reached our ears and we counted four, we would plod wearily back to the house in a distinctly different mood than as when we left it, our earlier high spirits damped in trepidation.

On a bright sunny morning, we suddenly came across something so horrible on this narrow path to the river that caused both of us to scream and run back to the house. A small white dog hung by its neck from a wire noose attached to a branch, cut and spattered with dry darkened blood. It had been deliberately killed. Mrs. Dix rang the police on hearing our report and we awaited the arrival of an officer until mid afternoon when we had to retrace our steps to show him where the dog was. When we reached the spot, the dog was no longer there, but a pool of blood had coloured the grass darkly, so our tale was given credence and taken seriously. Later, we heard that our immediate neighbour was found to be guilty of the crime. Denise and I, thereafter, avoided that pathway and as a consequence we were deprived of our habitual fruit and vegetable gorging.

With this source cut off, attention went elsewhere and I learnt to steal early in life on account of our frequent hunger. On occasion I was sent with notes to run errands to the shops and always had my eyes peeled for opportunity. The little shop, a short way down the street was run by an elderly woman and it was easy to pilfer sweets from there, for she was always distracted by her husband shouting from a room at the rear. When the Baker in the High Street was busy, the shop full of customers, and all distracted by the exchange of gossip, I took full advantage of the situation and slid whatever I could into the inside of my cardigan or coat. On the way back to the house I would search out hidey-holes in walls, alleys and gardens to stash my spoils in anticipation of my sister and I enjoying a feast later.

Although, in the house I would eat any leftovers on the plates I would wash, which was hardly anything, only once can I recall ever stealing food from there. Alone, in the kitchen, I took a small slice of pork pie from the refrigerator. That it was missing didn’t go unnoticed, I was thumped hard and sent to bed without tea. My story that the dog had taken it wasn’t very well thought out, since Mrs. Dix drew my attention to the fact that the dog couldn’t possibly open the refrigerator door with its paw. My right eye swelled to the size of a golf ball from the blow of one of these thumps, the lids closing to a slit to resemble a toad-eye. During the following three weeks it turned a variety of colours before it returned to normal. It was rare for me to look into a mirror but I did so more often during this time for the transformations of my eye held a strange fascination.

Being sent to bed earlier than usual (which was always early enough anyway) would not have been so bad if I were allowed something to read, but there was nothing to do but watch the flies play their crazy chasing games around the light bulb or count the cracks in the ceiling’s plaster. In fact, the ceiling was the part of the room I engrossed myself with the most. Although in daylight hours it was ugly and uninspiring, when darkness came it was different. I’d follow the lines of illuminations made by passing traffic along its surface, and in the night, when sleep would not come, its blackness and blankness seemed to fizz with dots, which, if concentrated hard enough upon, could be made to move and form pictures in imaged kaleidoscopic fashion. The entities that habituated this part of the room were of a different nature to those that skulked, lying in wait, in the underside shadows of furniture. Here, there would come into being a sparkling sea of aliveness, a glowing beauteous landscape swirling and dancing with all sorts of fantastical creatures – things with luminous wings, fishtails and scales, salamanders and undines, girls with long swirling hair which later I would see echoed in the paintings of Toorop, stars, moons and rolling Christmas tree baubles.

Actual Christmas times at the Dix house, however, were bleak affairs. On Christmas morning we would awake to find a carrier bag tied to the end of each bed with an orange, some sweets and a few games and toys without wrappings or indication from whom they were from. It was obvious to us that one of the family members had placed the bags there for we were already aware that the story of Father Christmas was a lie, a character used as yet another threat. Whilst the family busied themselves downstairs we were made to stay in the bedroom until after noon and we often spent those mornings in the company of Rupert Bear and his friends. Those annuals incorporated pages of ‘magic paintings’ and since we lacked paintbrushes or water, we would roll up a tiny piece of our nightgowns, or the corner of a blanket, wet it with our spittle and bring up the colours by lightly rubbing the areas with these makeshift brushes.

When allowed downstairs, we didn’t get a traditional Christmas dinner, though, indeed, we knew one was prepared because we could smell it, ‘because we had already had ours at school.’ Denise and I would be shut up in the front room for the majority of the holiday and we ate sandwiches and crisps, and the occasional chocolate penny took from the lower back branches of the tree where it would not be so easily noticed. Although there was a tree, decorated with tinsel, baubles and lights in the front window, it was more for the benefit of the passers-by than anyone inside the house. Whilst all other rooms groaned under the weight of furniture, this room, though of a similar faded decor, was comparatively sparse, merely having a bed-settee and a sideboard. It was hardly used and the room was very cold, due to it never having a fire and, certainly, it was unthinkable that one should be built for our benefit. The tiled grate, blackened with soot fall, remained a windy empty hole and our breath, more often than not, was mist before us as we spoke. In there, with loud voices and roarcus laughter coming through the wall from the other room, we amused ourselves with a few board games: Snakes and Ladders, Draughts and Tiddlywinks, along with pencils and paper. I’d tear the paper into strips and draw characters on them and we’d give them names and create little playlets. Some of the characters and playlets revolved around Mrs. Dix, Sarah and ‘Popeye’, which would, inevitably, end up with the paper effigies being wiped on our bums, chewed up or torn up into tiny pieces as their finales. ‘Popeye’ had birthed a red-haired, red-faced screaming fat thing that, in our playlets, was most often depicted by a red plastic Tiddlywink.

‘Guests’ were always entertained during this holiday, as well as various other times throughout the year, and due to this, in the evenings we were ordered into the kitchen. Here we were expected to sleep on a layer of newspapers placed on the quarry-tiled floor with a singular blanket over us. It was impossible to sleep, the cold prevented that, as did the draft blowing under the back door and noisily rustling the corners of the papers. Since the toilet was located outside in the yard, and the only access to that was through the kitchen, the trafficking of those needing to relieve themselves, both familiar and unfamiliar, constantly disturbed us. The unfamiliar, the majority of which were male, made us more nervous.

Male strangers sometimes also crossed the kitchen during our fortnightly baths and some would linger whilst Mrs. Dix cracked jokes at our expense. Since the house lacked a bathroom, a portable tin bath was utilised for the purpose, placed in the middle of the kitchen floor and half-filled with warm water. For sticking my tongue out at one of these males who simply stood staring at us for an inordinately long time, I received a hard slap across the face and a dunking under the water for being rude, causing me to choke so violently that she had to pull me out onto the floor and smack me on the back. Indeed, bath times were dreaded in general, for I was convinced that Mrs. Dix would get soap into my eyes on purpose since she always managed to snatch the covering flannel away from me to wipe something at a moment when my eyes would be most vulnerable to suds. At every opportunity, the woman would be mean and spiteful to me, and if there were no excuse for being so she would invent one.

Beating, demeaning, scolding and threatening were the only attentions Mrs. Dix would pay me, less attention was given to my sister, but when it was it took on a bizarre form. Although these performances didn’t occur with a great deal of frequency, there were times when Mrs. Dix appeared, in a manic sort of way, to be in high spirits. She’d remove whatever clothes she wore on the upper part of her body, undo her bra and cupping one of her saggy veined breasts in one hand, would chase my frightened sister about the room screaming ”Have a drop of titty, Neicy!“ and cackling with laughter. I’d sit and watch this spectacle wishing her to trip and fall, swallow and choke on her own ugly exposed breast, or even break her neck.

At that time, I was blissfully unaware that some would even consider these tones of my imaginings to be ‘evil’, because for me it was both a metering out of a justice of sorts, a comfort, and something that kept my spirit intact. Inwardly, I embraced and nurtured my righteous rage - outwardly, through fear of the woman; I had, of necessity, to keep it concealed. From a very early age I learnt to be vigilant of myself in potentially dangerous situations, to act meek when a fire raged within me, to pretend unconcern when excited, to be cautious of appearing too clever or too observant. I was a liar in a different way than that accused, one out of absolute necessity and one with a tongue that did not need to move.

The art of ‘cloaking’ was perfected as an infant, and along with my innate ability to visualise and instinctual affinity with nature, that I should, one day in the future, find my way into things metaphysical and the occult, into witchcraft, could be seen as inevitable. Yet, myself, as a discarded ‘ugly duckling’, had many more camps to fall into, many more species to be chastised by, before finding that particular form of kinship.

TINY HOBOS

The call of the wild is the sweetest of songs.

After tea, on Sunday afternoons, and occasionally during the week, we were allowed to watch the television. I really enjoyed the Sunday serialisations of the classics by Charles Dickens, George Elliot, Mark Twain and others -perhaps, because I could so easily empathise with some of the plights of the children in them. I attempted, of course, to hide my enjoyment for fear a punishment would be made of it and a disallowing of me seeing them.

It was under their influence, particularly the story of Tom Sawyer, that I planned my first ‘runaway’. I spent a week, or so, ensuring that one of my hidey-holes in an alley contained an adequate stash of jam tarts, chocolate and a bottle of water for the journey. Then, on a pre-determined day, rather than take our usual route to the spinney, we took a road that lead out of town of Rauthes. It was a hot, sunny day and we walked along a country road towards the next village, stopping several times to rest, eat and drink on its grassy edges. The birds appeared to be singing unusually loud that morning as if they shared in our excitement. I was exhilarated and felt on the road to freedom and a new life.

Denise, at the same time, was suffering from a bout of diarrheoa and some of it, periodically, would run down her leg onto the road. Fearful that someone may follow this trail to our whereabouts and eager to prevent such a thing from happening, I decided it was imperative to take drastic measures. All manner of things I stuffed into her knickers: rags, leaves, scraps of paper that had been blown by the wind and gotten tangled in the hedgerows, as well as grass from the verges and moss scrapings from stones. So well was she padded that her gait resembled a penguin.

For a little of the way, a friendly tractor driver who asked no questions, allowed us to ride in his straw-filled trailer. We lay back in the golden prickly strands, looking up at the blue sky above, the sun on our faces, savoring our wild adventure. I chewed a piece of straw and grinned wide, imagining it to be a pipe like Huckleberry Finn’s. As the trailer swerved with the chugging tractor around the bends in the country roads, further away from that dark house, our excitement and happiness grew. The driver whistled a little tune against the backdrop of birdsong, with the engine sound providing a rhythm section. We clicked our fingers, swaying our heads from side to side, dancing on our backs, and laughing. Jumping down from the trailer when the driver indicated that he was turning onto a dirt track leading to a farm, we thanked him and bid him goodbye. He doffed his cap with a ”Pleasure, m’ ladies!“ which we found to be delightfully funny.

Again we walked, and again we periodically rested on the grassy verges of the little winding road.

Denise’s stomach had appeared to settle, and walking was made easier for her by the discarding of the wadding in her knickers, which we buried under a hedge. It was dusk when we finally reached the next village, a small village consisting of one main street and a few smaller ones leading off from it. After resting a while in a doorway we proceeded to explore those narrow streets. Along one of these, a small woman wearing a headscarf and carrying an open shopping bag passed us by, and as she did so, I spied a chocolate Swiss Roll poking out of the top of this bag. Instructing Denise to stay where she was, I softly tiptoed after the woman, stalking like a jungle cat, sneaking up on her from behind and quickly snatched the cake. My movement must have been a little too clumsy, for she spun around on her heels and screamed ”Stop!“ I was already running as she gave chase. I shouted, ”Run!“ to my sister and we both sped away, managing to outrun the woman and darting down an alleyway. Panting for breath, laughing, we hurriedly stuffed the cake into our mouths, almost choking ourselves and showering each other with crumbs in the process.

On noticing the sky was darkening quite fast, we decided to search around for someplace cosy to sleep, perhaps a shed, a barn or a derelict cottage. We hadn’t wandered but a few yards, when, upon turning a corner, the shadowy bulk of a very large policeman loomed before us and seized us both by the arm. Our struggles proved useless and before too long we were standing before his desk, under interrogation, in a brightly lit office of a modern police house at the end of the main street. He, sitting on a chair the other side of the desk, appeared as an oversized bulldog, his jowls flapping as he spoke and his jacket buttoned tight up to his thick neck. Both of us had become sullen, quietly answering questions with our heads bowed. The policeman’s initial stern, but not unkindly manner, seemed to change dramatically when he discovered we resided with Mrs. Phyllis Dix. He became quite cold towards us. Asking why we had runaway, I raised my head, defiantly, and told him that she beat us and whipped us with a thick leather dog lead. He accused me of telling fibs, so I had my sister unbutton the back of my dress in order that I could slip it off my shoulders, then turned around to show him the marks the lashings it had made in my flesh. Since I had my back to him, I didn’t get to see his reaction to the red raised stripes. ”Cover your self up,“ he ordered authoritively, and went into the adjacent room. We could hear him talking on the phone, but not what he was saying. I tried the other door, but it led into a hallway and the front door had been locked automatically upon our entering. There were no windows. There was no escape route. The policeman returned to the room, a second before I did, and cleared his throat, ”Right, you two, I’ve just spoke to Mrs. Dix and I’m taking you back.“ Both of us instantly and simultaneously burst into tears, pleaded and pleaded with him, told him she would kill us, but it proved useless. Paying no attention to our sobs or pleas, holding both our arms, again, in a tight grip, he led us to his car, bundled us in and locked the doors. Without further word, he settled himself into the driver’s seat, revved the engine and set off back to the Dix house, with Denise and I, like frightened rabbits on the back seat, holding hands tightly, as lights flashed through the interior of the car from passing headlights. Our journey away from the Rauthes taken the most part of the day, but the return hardly took any time at all. The policeman hummed under his breath, but we felt no inclination at all to click fingers or smile.

Back in the house, it was all plastic smiles and tea, with a ”Oh, you naughty little girls, I’ve been worried sick about you!“ The policeman, raising his eyes to the ceiling and tutting, gave us a scolding before departing, making us feel even smaller. Fortunately for me, however, he had made no reference to my accusations, or my attempt to convince him by revealing evidence of whiplashes. After the policeman left, the tone, of course, changed. I was repeatedly slapped around the face, on each side alternately, so fast that my head felt like a ping-pong ball between two bats. We were dragged upstairs by our hair and thrown onto our respective sleeping places. The lead was to the ready and as she whipped across the already swollen gashes I bit so hard into my hand I tasted my own blood. Denise was not spared this night. She, too, received a couple of lashes. ”“...And that’s for listening to that sodding thing over there!“ Mrs. Dix hissed breathlessly - the ‘sodding thing’ meaning me.

I felt so bad that Denise had been hurt on my account that, behind the closed door, I sobbed and whispered to her how sorry I was. She sniffed a little while before falling to sleep. For me there was no sleep. My back and bottom were raw with pain. In the dark, face in the pillow, I recalled our adventure - how free we felt on that sunny open road - but now with the sad realisation of how futile another attempt would be.

BLOOD TIES

Where some bindings hold of a blessing, others carry a curse.

My sadness deepened due to a partial separation from my sister. Not only had Mrs. Dix decided that she should, in future, sleep in the other room with Vera, but, I had now reached the age of seven with its consequent transfer to the Junior School. All the children of the town between the ages of seven and eleven attended this one school. It was at the further end of the High Street, past the square and accessed by a narrow path with iron handrail and a tiny brook running a little below and alongside it. The school, an older, larger building than the previous one attended, was red brick with a grey slate roof that, at intervals, pointed upwards in triangles over windows. Concrete playgrounds spread to two sides, complete with brick built toilet blocks, and the whole contained by a stone built wall. Inside, separating the cloakrooms, boys from girls, a short passageway opened out into a bare wooden floored hall with doors set into the walls to twelve separate classrooms, each painted a different colour. I would have very much liked to have been in the classroom with the yellow painted door where the sun shone through the window, but I was to go through the green door on the northern side of the hall. Uniform rows of double desks faced a larger desk at the front displaying a free standing globe and a huge blackboard fixed to wall. Other walls merely had empty peg boards attached to them and were devoid of pictures or illustrated poems. I felt unease, and that unease continued, and I missed my sister terribly. Though she missed me also, did not fret as much as I, for which I was grateful since I had no need to worry over her. ‘Pink Bloomers’ had become decidedly more kindly towards her after my leaving, having her help with the washing of paint pots and such like, little chores for which she was praised and given a sense of worth. I received no such kindness. The teachers at the Junior School appeared to be unaware of my presence, and theirs made little impact upon me. They were simply easily forgotten grey suits, twin-sets and spectacles. Attending school was no longer the pleasure it had been and my schoolwork suffered. No one wanted to sit next to me in the classroom and I’d stand alone in the corner of the playground at break times.

Denise and I had always been, for the most part, pretty much shunned by the inhabitants of that small town, adults and children alike, for reasons of which we were unaware. I had never given it any thought, but now, without my sister, it began to bother me. We did not look very much different from the others, though our clothes were, perhaps, dull, unfashionable, and our wardrobes limited, with me wearing the same green checked dress for school, day in and day out, but we were certainly not ugly or physically strange in any way. Neverless, it was not long before one of my new classroom peers began to pick on me, mildly at first. Perhaps it was my lack of response, or the tittering approval of others, but her bullying quickly escalated from verbal to physical abuse, pushing and pinching as she passed or sticking out her leg to trip me up. It reached flashpoint when, after a number of weeks, I retaliated and a fight broke out between us in the playground. A large group of jeering, cheering children surrounded us, enclosing us in a circle. After a few minutes of slapping, pulling of clothes and hair, I grabbed the back of her head, forced it down, whilst simultaneously bringing up my knee to smash it into her nose. Blood splattered my dress and the fight was over. The class teacher reprimanded me, as was his duty, but gave no punishment (perhaps her treatment of me had not gone unnoticed), and the girl was absent from school for a few days before returning and making a point of avoiding me at all costs, even with her eyes. Nothing further came of it and I assumed Mrs. Dix had remained ignorant of the episode. In the aftermath of the fight the other children became more wary of me, gave me an even wider berth. I gained nothing in respect of popularity, but none of them attempted to bully me again.

I was alone at school and left alone until the onset of autumn when a new boy, Mickie, joined the class. He was immediately and unmercifully scorned, and by more than one child, possibly on account of him being scruffy, dirty and exuding an unpleasant odour. They would call him horrendous names, shout things to each other in his presence, waft their hands in front of their noses, pinch their nostrils together or jump back from him as if he had some terrible infectious disease. I couldn’t help but notice the rage, the frustration, smoldering in his coal black eyes and the disdainful curl of his lip, but his opponents were too many for him to fight back. In the classroom he sat in the far rear corner with, like me, a double desk to himself, and at playtimes he’d often hide behind the toilet block, slouched, head bent, hands shoved into the pockets of grubby grey trousers. Everything about him fascinated me – his skinny angular body, pale skin, the mass of shocking red hair, the way he moved and the expressions he wore. There was arrogance and defiance about him despite everything. I watched him often, indeed, stared at him often. Sometimes he’d catch me doing so, but his raven eyes would instantly take flight on meeting mine.

One day, in a history lesson, there were not enough books to go round and he was told to share with someone else. A silence descended on the class, and all children bent over their books as if with a sudden keen, albeit unnatural, interest in them. I reached my hand into the air above. ”He can share with me, sir!“ I mouthed. The teacher indicated and Mickie came forward to sit beside me. The others were too stunned to make response. Our friendship seeded on that day, and from then on, it blossomed and grew. Mickie never returned to the back of the class. The others were not so overt, then, with their nastiness, but grew sneaky and snidey, commenting and gesturing behind our backs. We did not care. We had each other. We were together in class, together in the playground and together, as much as possible, out of school hours.

Denise warmed to him straightaway for he had a mischievous nature and made us laugh. We three were bound as outcasts, in our wildness, our humour and our hatred for our respective guardians. His father beat him very badly with stick and a belt with a metal buckle. As we sat and showed each other the various marks left by our respective beatings, he too, would join us in concocting all manner of fantasies around what old woman Dix and his old man deserved in return. I loved Mickie. His imagination was equal to mine.

As a bond of our deep friendship, it was decided, on a grey afternoon, that we should ‘be united forever’ by the merging of our blood - to become ‘blood sister and brother’. Mickie brought forth a penknife and drew it across his thumb. A wide gash instantly oozed blood. As he put his thumb in his mouth, I held out mine while he made a similar incision with the blade, though not so deep. Pressing our bleeding thumbs together we bound them with a grubby handkerchief and smiled into each other's eyes. ”I now pronounce you man and wife!“ said my sister, who had shied away from being cut herself, and we fell about laughing, Mickie and I a little pink with embarrassment.

Mickie was stronger than both of us girls, and with his help, we were able to break into, and explore, empty derelict buildings. This activity was so much of an adventure that whilst we were involved we gave little thought to getting covered in dust or cobwebs, which would inevitably lead to a beating on returning to respective ‘homes’. Indeed, we’d laugh at the black smudges on each other's faces and the various bits of debris entangled in our hair, even sometimes have muck fights. In one particular derelict cottage, we even fell through the ceiling to the floor below, and became covered, head to foot, in plaster dust, and all of us having to return to our guardians looking as if we had just popped out from a bag of flour. The hilarity this caused us, however, on looking upon each other so transformed, was even worth the beating.

One day, in early December, Mickie simply disappeared without any trace or warning. Denise and I searched everywhere, waited and waited for him to show up, but he never did. Finally, we found the house where he had lived with his widowed father, only to discover it deserted. Crouching down in the yard of that house, we hugged each other and cried for a long time, hoping that Mickie was okay, still alive, that his father hadn’t been taken to prison for eventually killing him. I had never shed a tear for my mother, but for Mickie, I sobbed as if my heart would break. But I did so silently and secretly, and for a long time, during the early hours of the morning when none would be aware, not even my sister.

It was possibly due to my grieving of Mickie and a feeling of being more alone than before, that I did make one attempt to be accepted by the other children. For a time there was a fad amongst the girls at school for collecting and swapping loose beads, the most prized and sought after being the glass ones that resembled diamonds. I stole a small diamante necklace from a box Sarah kept in a drawer in the bedroom, broke it up and put the sparkling fragments in my socks. The next day, due to me having desired ‘diamonds’, I was welcomed, briefly, into a circle of girls in the playground and enjoyed both the acceptance and bartering.

Just how Mrs. Dix found out was a mystery, but that night she really frightened me. In the kitchen she grabbed, forced, and held my hand on a breadboard with one of hers, whilst in her other she brandished a large carving knife, at intervals bringing it down and dragging the sharp blade along my fingers, scoring but not cutting. Each time the knife flashed in the reflection of the electric light bulb that dangled from the centre of the ceiling. She was flushed and furious. ”You evil, thieving little bitch!“ she screamed, ”I’m going to cut these fingers right off!" That’ll teach you!“ She was almost hysterical. ”You are just like your pissing mother!! You’ve got her bad blood!!“

I was saved by a knock on the front door. She dropped the knife and spat in my face before leaving the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. I stood trembling, the glob of spit sliding down my cheek and chin. I was confused. I had come to believe that my mother had gone away, didn’t want me, because I was evil, now I am told that I am just like her. Was she evil too? Did I really have her bad blood? What, exactly, did that mean? What would it do to me? Was it due to this blood that Jack Spot lay in wait for me? I was not only frightened of Mrs. Dix returning to finish the job of cutting off my fingers, but also of what might be coursing through my own veins. Was my blood diseased? Had I contaminated my friend Mickie with it?

Mrs. Dix did not return for a long time and I stood in the darkening kitchen, frozen to the spot for what seemed hours. The trembling subsided to be replaced with a numbed shock and I dared not to move nor make a sound. A slice of light squeezed itself from under the closed door from the living room and caused a patch of the quarry tiles in its immediate vicinity to glow eerily - red like blood. The seed that had been planted by Mrs. Dix’s words in the aftermath of the lorry incident a year or so before, now grew, split and sent out a double twisted root deep into my being. Thereafter, I lived with a story that didn’t make sense and a shameful, though incomprehensible, birth inheritance.

When I was finally released from the kitchen and sent to bed. Denise, already under her blankets, popped up her head and quietly asked me what had happened. Not wishing to scare her too, with mention of knives and fingers and bad blood, I simply told her I had been made to stand in the kitchen.

Mrs. Dix’s lexis screeched like a harpy through my mind, spun threads that bound me in fear and in my fevered imagination, a picture of my mother emerged, more terrible than Jack Spot. It wasn’t an ugly picture, for Vera had once told us our mother was very beautiful, but one of a person who, for the most part, kept leathery wings and fangs concealed. My dread of getting into that lorry and lack of distress over her absence now made sense, but as her spawn, her likeness, I could barely relate, only think, that in some recess, at some depth, there was something poisonous in me, something Mrs. Dix recognised. I took to examining my eyes and teeth in mirrors and other reflective surfaces, searching for evidence of similitude with the imagined maternal portrait, but found none and abandoned the exercise after some weeks. Consequently, the anxious dread of what may be inside me gradually became submerged under the daily round as other things flitted in to grab attention, at least for a while, for it was to re-curdle later at the instigation of other tongues.