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Helpless: The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and exploited by the neighbour she trusted
Toni Maguire
Marianne Marsh
Neglected by her careless parents, Marianne turned to her neighbour, the one person that she thought she could trust….Eight year old Marianne, the eldest of five children, was neglected by her slovenly mother and her violent alcoholic father. Uncared for and unkempt she was rejected at school by her peers and scarcely tolerated by her teachers. Only one person gave her the affection she craved; a neighbour who seeing the vulnerable child knew she was easy prey for his perverted desires.‘Little Lady’ he called her over the few months he groomed her. Less than twelve months later she was caught in a trap of fear - if she talked she would be punished. With no one to turn to she kept ‘their secret’. At thirteen she fell pregnant.Still too frightened to speak out she refused to tell the social workers who the father was. Without family support the teenager gave birth to a daughter in the unmarried mother's home.Six weeks later the baby she had already grown to love was taken away for adoption. Marianne returned home, but the neighbour's abuse continued and a year later she was pregnant again.This time her father literally tried to beat the baby out of her but she failed to miscarry. Scared for her life and that of her baby's she ran away from home carrying only a plastic bag stuffed with her few possessions.Marianne who still missed her first child desperately struggled to keep her second daughter. Two months after the birth she realized that for the baby's sake she would have to hand her over for adoption.Helpless is Marianne’s heartbreaking story as told the bestselling author of Don’t Tell Mummy.


Marianne Marsh
with Toni Maguire

Helpless
The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and
exploited by the neighbour she trusted


Prologue (#ulink_801cdd45-e0cc-55b7-80f5-51645b235048)
The man had been looking for a little girl like me even before I was born.
A special little girl, he told me; one who needed love.
He widened his social circle to include young married couples, watched as they became parents and smiled with an inward sly delight when asked to be a godfather.
‘He’s so good with the young ones,’ his friends said.
He married when I was still the baby he had never met and considered his own small daughter for his needs. But his wife had grown to know his soul. She kept her children safe.
Unobserved, he watched me walking down country lanes as I went backwards and forwards to school. Saw my marks of neglect and knew then that I was the one; the one he had been waiting for.
He started frequenting the pub my father drank in and made himself known to him.
Listened to his tale of woe – low wages and small mouths to feed – and recommended him for a job that came with a decent-sized house.
It was no problem, he told my father; a pleasure to help.
People said he was such a fine man, his wife a lucky woman, and how fortunate my parents were to have met him.
He was everyone’s friend; the one who remembered wives’ birthdays and brought their children presents.
He was the trusted visitor, the favourite uncle.
He always kept sweets in the glove compartment of his car.
I was seven when I first met him, that man; the one who called me his little lady.

Years have passed since he and I last spoke. But still those memories are imprinted on my mind as clearly as though everything that happened happened just yesterday.

Contents
Title Page (#ucefd66aa-706d-595e-93cd-68ed1a804975)
Prologue (#ulink_97b6d657-059d-5c4e-83d9-bb486c72c65f)
Chapter One (#ulink_56fafa89-3fb9-500d-a911-c0482bc06e87)
Chapter Two (#ulink_4ad7a9c1-67cd-59c8-aa74-8859acd9f1cf)
Chapter Three (#ulink_09bf8249-21c0-534f-9548-0d3fd42d1de3)
Chapter Four (#ulink_daf37f5d-b289-51e6-9a71-b55bf7a52f5b)
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One (#ulink_350f543e-3ca1-5f30-b976-c63eadb313a3)
‘Tell us a story,’ my children used to say to me.
‘Where do you want me to begin?’ I would ask as I picked up a well-thumbed favourite book.
‘At the beginning, of course, Mum,’ and dutifully I would turn to page one.
‘Once upon a time …,’ I would start.
But when that story is my own and I have more years behind than in front of me the question is: where should I start?
The tale that I try to keep locked away in the recesses of my mind; that haunts my dreams – that started when I was seven.
My real story, though, started when I was conceived, or maybe even before, but it was not until I sat in my kitchen holding a piece of foolscap paper, with its small neat handwriting covering both sides, that I accepted the time had finally come to confront my past.
But where do I start? I asked myself.
At the beginning, Marianne, my inner voice replied. Your beginning, for you have to remember the years that came before to understand everything that happened.
So that is what I have done.

On every one of my birthdays, during the time I lived at home, before even a card had been opened or a present received, my mother told me how it had rained on the day I was born.
Not just showers, she always said, but great gushes of water that lashed the house and turned the country lanes into muddy paths.
The gutters, which my father never thought to empty of their dead leaves, overflowed. Rainwater streamed down the side of the house and then gushed noisily into already over-burdened drains. Over the years the outside walls had become stained a deep moss green and the blocked gutters had caused large patches of damp and mould to grow on the bedroom walls.
It was the early hours of the morning, before even the farmer’s cockerels had welcomed in the day, when I decided to enter the world. My mother had woken to stabbing pains and a damp nightdress and knew I was about to appear. Suddenly she was terrified.
She shook my father awake and he, grumbling at my inconsideration, hastily pulled on his clothes, tucked his trousers into thick boots, placed his bicycle clips over his ankles and rushed out of the house in search of the local midwife.
My mother heard the words ‘woman’s business’ and ‘no place for a man’ floating in the air behind him before the front door slammed and she was alone with only her pain and fear for company.
In what seemed like hours, but was in fact less than twenty minutes she always eventually admitted, the midwife was standing at the foot of her bed.
A sensible little square of a woman, she quickly took charge and tried to sooth my mother’s fears by informing her that she had delivered hundreds of babies. After a hasty examination she confirmed my imminent arrival.
‘Then do you know what she said?’ my mother would always ask at this point of the story. Obediently I would play the game and shake my head.
‘She just said that there was nothing she could do until my pains were closer together, and that,’ and my mother would draw breath to put emphasis on her next words, ‘all I had to do then was push! And then she asked where the clean towels she had asked to be left out for her were.’
My mother then continued to tell me about the remainder of that long, pain-filled day.
Tutting noises had come from the midwife’s mouth when she saw that my hungover father had forgotten to leave out all the items that she had requested, but with my mother’s help she eventually found everything she needed.
The next thing she accomplished was bullying a neighbour into agreeing to come next door and help when the time came, but until it did there was little to do. My mother listened to the buzz of conversation downstairs as numerous cups of tea were made and the two of them exchanged gossip. Over the day drinks were brought to her room and her face was wiped with a cool cloth, but mostly she was left alone.
‘Call me when you need me,’ were the words uttered by the midwife that failed to reassure, far less comfort, before she took herself downstairs to sit before the freshly lit fire.
I sometimes wondered how my mother remembered so much detail, but she assured me she did.
All that day she lay on her back, her legs raised, her knees apart and her hands moist with the perspiration of both agony and fear clutching hold of the twisted sheet. Her bed faced the window and, as she watched the water streaming across the glass, her body was wracked by more pain than she had thought anyone could endure.
Her throat ached with the screams that had been torn from it. She was drenched in sweat; it ran down her face, plastered her hair to her head and dripped from her chin.
More than anything, she wanted someone who loved her there; someone who would hold her hand, wipe her brow and tell her she was going to be all right. But there was only the midwife.
Evening came, and still it rained. She looked out through the window and saw glimmering in its panes her own face’s reflection, streaked with raindrops. It was as though, she thought, a million tears were running down her cheeks.
Eighteen hours after I had pierced my mother’s waters she gave that final push – the last one she thought her body was capable of – and I finally entered the world.
Luckily as I slid out of the warmth of my mother’s body I did not know how much my presence was resented. That took a few years to discover.
My father came home only once last orders had been called and heard the news that I was a girl.
I cannot think that he was very happy.
Chapter Two (#ulink_52c077aa-30f8-5b80-b2d4-986db9d4a6fd)
My earliest memory comes to me: a time when, too young to walk far, I was sitting in a pushchair. I felt again the motions of its movements and the sudden weight of shopping bags thrown in carelessly on top of me. How I longed for the expected warmth of my mother’s arms when she would stoop and lift me out. I heard the buzz of voices coming from the blurred faces above me, saw them peering down at me, but still I could not see myself.
Myself at three, small for my age, with straggly light-brown hair, a pale face that was often far from clean, and round blue eyes that already looked at the world with a cautious and slightly untrusting expression.
I did not know then that I was unloved, for without the joy of being cuddled or the comfort of being tucked up in bed and read to, or the security of being made to feel special, I had nothing to compare it to.
I had no word for fear either, so I could not have explained what I felt when goose bumps crept up my arms, the back of my neck prickled and my stomach felt as though a swarm of butterflies were fluttering around inside. But by the time I took my first shaky steps and formed my first words, I knew it was the sound of my father’s raised voice that caused these feelings.
The moment the front door opened and he staggered into the room he would yell at me, ‘Who do you think you’re staring at?’ At first, when I understood the anger but not the words, my mouth would open and release a loud howl that resulted in more shouts from him until my mother crossly removed me from his view. Later I learnt that the moment his presence filled the room I always had to make myself very small and very silent or, preferably, invisible.
The house where I spent my first seven years was a small cottage in a row of six. The front door led straight into our sitting room where narrow stairs led to the two bedrooms. My parents’ was just big enough for a double bed and a chest of drawers while mine, with its bare plaster walls and floors covered with brown cracked lino, was hardly bigger than a cupboard. The only furniture in it was a small bed covered with an assortment of old coats and torn bedding pushed against the wall opposite an uncurtained window.
The farm where my father worked as a labourer owned it and, like many farm workers’ cottages, our occupancy made up part of his wages.
The farmer, being old fashioned and cantankerous, refused to accept the rising cost of living and paid his discontented workers a pittance. ‘They have free housing, don’t they?’ was his defence. Unfortunately he also believed that ‘free housing’ came with no maintenance obligation for the landowner, and during the winter months it was a cold damp place. Neither rolled-up newspaper, placed along the bottom of doors, nor plastic sheeting pinned to rotten-framed windows stopped chilly drafts nipping tiny ears and noses and wrapping cold fingers around bare legs. Shivering, we sought a place by the fire where, with our fronts warm and our backs cold, we would huddle round its inadequate small black grate where damp logs burned.
When the sky darkened and rain sleeted down, making playing outside impossible, I spent my days in the tiny living room which served as kitchen, sitting area and, on the rare occasions when a tin bath made its appearance, bathroom. Furnished by cast-offs given by both sets of grandparents, I remember a dull maroon settee with sagging springs that nearly poked through the threadbare and faded material, a wooden dining table with four rickety and unmatching upright chairs and a scarred sideboard piled high with saucepans and other kitchen utensils. The living room lacked even one feature that could have made it either comfortable or welcoming – it was a dreary, dark room in a dreary, small house.
There were three doors in it: one to the staircase that led to the bedrooms, one to the back yard, where the washing of both clothes and dirty pans was done, and the third, the front door, led, it seemed for my mother, to nowhere. For apart from going to the shops for our food and basic supplies, she appeared to have little life outside of those walls.

Feeding us, which was never an easy task, seemed to take up almost all of my mother’s time. My father, even though his contribution to the housekeeping came second to his visits to the pub, expected a warm meal every evening. Regardless of the time he arrived home, should it not be on the table within minutes, his bellows of rage rent the air and meaty fists rose in fury.
He was a binge drinker, as we have now learnt to call them. My mother never knew whether he would go straight to the pub after work or come home first for supper and then head to the pub to drink until his pockets were empty.
Knowing that on the last days before payday he would look for any remaining housekeeping money, my mother tried to hide small amounts so that she could always ensure that there was at least bread and milk in the house. Within hours of her finding a new hiding place for the few coins she had secreted away, my father’s desire to drink seemed to give him an uncanny power of detection and he always discovered it.
On those days the tension in the room was almost a palpable force. He’d slurp his tea, shovel his food into his mouth while his eyes darted around the room and my mother, knowing what was to follow, hovered nervously nearby. Maybe she prayed that just this time his mood would lighten and he would choose to stay in.
But he seldom did.
Sometimes he would ask for the money with a smile, other times with a grimace and sometimes with threats but, however he presented it, my mother knew it was a demand and not a request.

Her protestations that there was nothing left were always received with an angry glare.
‘Sodding liar, that’s what you are,’ was his normal response. ‘Now give it to me if you know what’s good for you.’
My little body would shake with fear and I would slither quietly from my chair and creep behind the settee. With hands held over my ears and eyes screwed up tightly, I tried to block out the images and sounds of what was happening. I would hear the scrape of his chair being pushed violently back, the sound of his feet in their heavy working boots stamping across the room, the crash of saucepans thrown to the floor and the clatter of sideboard drawers being emptied onto the floor.
Those sounds mixed with my father’s angry shouts of ‘Where are you hiding it, you bitch?’ and my mother’s wasted protests of ‘There’s nothing left’, until the kitchen rang with the sounds of his search and her pleas.
The roars of rage would increase and were followed by the unmistakable thuds of fists connecting with a body. My mother’s sobs, the thunder of heavy feet on the wooden stairs and then finally his triumphant shout would let me know that his search had finally yielded its booty.
‘There, you useless slag, I said you were hiding it from me.’
Once again the lure of the pub had won. It called out to my father, its siren’s call erasing all thoughts of his family’s needs.
When the door slammed, announcing his departure, I would remove my hands from my ears, open my eyes, uncurl myself and hesitantly come out from behind the settee. Each time it happened I felt a lump in my throat when I saw my mother sitting slumped in utter despair.
The red marks of a handprint were on her face, a trickle of blood smeared round the edge of her already swelling mouth, a bruise was beginning to stain her arm and the tears of despair were sliding silently down her face as she surveyed the chaos around her. It would make me want to run to her and offer her comfort. There were times when, without the energy left to push me away, she let me nestle against her knee, but mostly, as soon as I said the word ‘Mum’, she gave me a look of such frustrated anger that I shrank back from her.
‘Mum what, Marianne? Can you not leave me alone for one moment? Now what do you want?’
At that age I did not have the words to tell her that I wanted to feel safe, that I wanted to crawl onto her lap and have her arms around me and be told that everything was going to be all right.
Instead, faced with her rejection, fat tears would spurt from my eyes as I wailed with my answering misery.
Anger usually left her face then, to be replaced sometimes by a mixed expression of fleeting guilt and resigned impatience.
‘Oh, stop your whingeing now! It’s not you he went for, is it? Let’s find something to dry your tears.’ She would fumble in her pocket for the grubby rag that passed for a hanky and hastily dry my tears. ‘You know it’s not your fault, Marianne.’

Those brief moments of rough maternal kindness would temporarily console me but I still believed that somehow it must have been my fault that she was angry. After all, there was no one else there to blame.
When there was not enough money left for even the most basic of groceries, my mother had to rely on the good nature of others to give her credit or, worse still, when things were really bad, handouts.
I hated those times when, standing next to her, I heard her stumbling excuses and knew that not only the shopkeeper but the other customers in the queue behind her did not believe her story. I felt a wave of shame as I saw their looks of pity mixed with contempt and wondered if their whispered comments were about us. I watched the blush of embarrassment and shame spreading across my mother’s cheeks as she realized she had not been believed.
The cheapest cuts of meat were bought from the butcher. The scrag end of a piece of lamb could last for a week when a bone thick with marrow was added for additional body and flavour. Generous portions of potatoes plus an assortment of whichever vegetables were in season turned it into a nourishing stew that was served night after night.
There was another period, worse than the others, when my father was hardly home. When he finally did appear his face was unshaven, his eyes bloodshot. The smell of the pub, that mixture of alcohol, cigarettes and stale sweat, clung to him, and his pay packet was empty.
It was on these occasions that my mother had to beg the butcher for the meaty bones normally set aside for the well-off customers to give to their dogs. He looked pityingly at her haggard face and at my own pale one. ‘Think you deserve these more than pampered Fido and Rover,’ he said, also slipping some fatty lumps of meat trimmings cut from his dearer joints into the paper parcel. ‘No charge, luv,’ he would say and shrug aside her grateful words of thanks. Each time his niceness used to somehow embarrass my mother more than his usual brusqueness would have done.
At these times my mother’s stews became even thicker with potatoes and cabbage leaves, but thin with meat. Shepherd’s pie became mash and gravy, and greasy white dripping replaced butter and jam on our bread.
‘Have to leave the meat for your father,’ she would say to me each time she gave me cabbage and chunks of pale potatoes swimming in the grease-topped gravy.
I would just look at my father’s empty chair and the place that was laid for him at the table and wonder if he would come home after I was in bed.
Chapter Three (#ulink_0c985aab-16f1-5b9b-adb9-0129ad18b8e7)
The rows between my parents escalated; cuffs came in my direction too until even the sound of my father’s raised voice made me quake with fear. In the mid-fifties there were a number of factories springing up in Essex. They produced a wide range of goods, from Yardley’s perfume to Ford cars and tractors, and every time a new plant opened my father’s moods would worsen. He bemoaned the way new housing estates had covered once green agricultural fields, putting farm labourers out of work. He sneered at the factory workers and grumbled at the amount of new shiny cars that splattered him with mud as he cycled down the country roads.
His visits to the pub seemed to fuel his anger and he returned back home wound up like a spring. He was a man whose temper simmered just below the surface, ready to boil over at the slightest provocation. Whether it was an imagined slight in the pub, my mother not being understanding enough, or me sitting in a place he wanted for himself, each was enough to send him into a towering rage. And when it did, the power of coherent speech appeared to desert him, leaving only bellows of rage and flailing fists as his means of communication. Flushed and belligerent, his eyes would sweep the room, searching for something to vent his anger on, and I nervously hoped his gaze would not fall on me.
But more often than not I would be curled in a corner trying to make myself as small and invisible as possible.
Although when I hid with my eyes tight shut or lay quaking with fear in my bed, I had heard the screams and shouts and recognized the sound of blows, it was not until I was four that I actually witnessed him hit my mother.
The evening meal had been ready for an hour and she had already put our two portions out when the door crashed open. My father, face flushed with anger, staggered into the kitchen. He leant over the table; his fingers splayed on it for support and the sour smell of his beery breath blasted into our faces as he spewed out his anger, anger that was fuelled by resentment of the better-paid factory workers who had begun to drink in his local pub.
‘Those bloody boyos! Who do they think they are? Think they are better than everyone else. They don’t know what an honest day’s work is. Still wet behind the ears, they are. Bleeding little sods, think they know everything. Do you know what they told me?’
I could sense my mother desperately searching for the right words to calm him down but, not being able to find anything appropriate, she stayed silent.
She just looked at him helplessly, as his angry words spouted from a mouth twisted with rage; words that I had very little understanding of, but I recognized the venom in them and quaked with terror.
‘They’ve put down their names for that new estate that’s being built. Going to buy their own houses now. Renting’s not good enough for them. Would have thought driving around in those flash cars was enough. They look down their noses at us – us who’ve worked hard on the farms when they were still at school. Mortgages they’re getting, is it? Well, I call it debt. It’ll ruin them, see if it don’t.’
All the time he ranted about the factory workers his frustration at his lack of achievements kept spilling out. He blamed my mother for trapping him into marriage, blamed me for being there. If, he said, he did not need a job that provided us with a home maybe he too would be driving a new car instead of riding his bicycle.
I pushed myself tighter against the back of the chair as I listened to my mother’s murmured conciliatory tones. His dinner was quickly put in front of him, fresh tea was made and poured, a slice of bread cut and buttered, but nothing was going to assuage his fury.
He glared at both of us before picking up his fork and shovelling food into his mouth.
‘For God’s sake, woman! Can you not cook anything else but this bloody awful stew,’ he exclaimed the moment he had tasted the first mouthful. For a moment I thought he was going to throw it onto the floor, something I had seen him do in the past, but some sense of self-preservation, or maybe the knowledge that there was little else to eat, prevented him. Instead he continued to eat, and between mouthfuls he cursed my mother. Then he went quiet.

Judging from the increased colour in his face his temper had not receded; he was just thinking of another reason to blame my mother for his overall dissatisfaction. I could feel both her apprehensive tension and his erupting anger. I felt a knot in my stomach that made me feel sick. I wanted to leave the table but I didn’t dare move. I knew better than to draw his attention to me.
He scraped the plate, using a crust of bread to gather up the last drop of gravy. Then with a clatter of cutlery he pushed it to one side and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. With a venomous look, his eyes raked up and down my mother’s body.
‘Jesus, what a bloody mess you are. It’s no wonder I don’t want to come home. You’re enough to make a man ashamed. This house’s a midden. Think we could ever ask anyone here? My old Ma was right about you: she said you were a dirty cow. She always kept a clean home, and she had four of us to take care of. But you, you lazy bitch, just don’t care.’
His face became even more flushed as the insults rained down. My mother cringed as though each word was a physical blow, but she made no attempt to offer a defence.
Suddenly my father’s chair was flung back as he rose from the table. My mother must have known what was going to happen next. She tried to retreat but he was too fast for her. She covered her face with her hands as his clenched fists rained blows on her shoulders and her arms. Tears oozed through her fingers, I could hear her soft moans of pain mixed with pleas for him to stop. Then as suddenly as he had started he stopped and his arms fell to his side.
‘Naw, bloody waste of time beating you; you never learn. Look at yourself, woman. Really gone to seed, haven’t you?’
His hand rose again this time to poke her in the chest with one meaty finger. ‘Look at your damn slip.’
As the derisive words left his mouth my gaze was drawn to my mother’s skirt and I saw that her underslip fell several inches lower than it.
A smile suddenly appeared on my father’s face, one that scared me as much as his scowl had. He stood so close to my mother that his body forced her to step backwards until her back touched the wall. Fear drained the colour from her face, leaving it a ghostly white. I heard her try and say his name, heard his harsh breathing, saw his hand snake into his pocket and withdraw a cigarette lighter. It only took a few seconds to flick it alight with his thumb. Before my mother had a chance to realize what he was going to do, to my horror he bent down and put the naked flame to the lace hem of her slip. His other hand was pushed against her stomach, stopping her moving.
‘Burt,’ she screamed, ‘please let me go.’ She tried to shove him away but he just laughed and held her in place. Panic made me leap from my chair and do what I had seen her do when a spark from the fire had landed on clothing drying in front of the stove. I picked up an old newspaper and, pushing in between them, started beating at the small flame that had taken hold. He sniggered at us and let her go. She rushed to the sink and drenched her skirt with water, and just for a moment I forgot how afraid of him I was.
‘You are bad. You are a bad, bad, mean daddy,’ I yelled, looking up into his surprised face.
‘Who do you think you’re shouting at?’ he roared back. ‘Don’t you be cheeking me, you little brat. Get up to your bed now, do you hear?’
His hand cracked against the back of my head and black spots floated in front of my eyes and I nearly fell with shock at the power of that blow. But some sense of dignity made me keep my balance and walk out of that room, up the stairs and into my room.
I kept my tears for when I was alone.
When the rows seemed to continue from one day to the next, my tiny bedroom became my haven.
There I could burrow under my bedding – a mixture of old coats and torn sheets – and pull them over my ears. With eyes tightly shut and my body trembling with fear, I tried to block out the noises that frightened me. Those shouts, screams and blows that I knew came from downstairs or my parents’ bedroom and not from my dreams.
But no matter how deep I wriggled under the bedding or how high I tried to pull it over my ears, the bellows of my father’s fury always reached me.
‘Bitch! Whore!’ he would shout, and although I did not understand the words, the ferocity of his rage always made me shudder.
My thumb would creep up into my mouth as my body shook with silent tears and my free hand clutched my rag doll with the painted face. Each time I would also hear my mother’s shrill pleas for him to stop followed by her heart-wrenching sobs.
Please make them stop, was the chant that repeated over and over again in my head; but when they did, the thick silence terrified me even more.
But there were days when the blackness of my father’s temper lifted. His scowl turned into a smile and he spoke in gentler tones. The trips to the pub, he told my mother, were a thing of the past; he was going to stay in after dinner. She had heard it all before and knew deep down that the period of sobriety would not last, but that did not stop her hoping every time that they would.
On those days, the premature lines that worry had etched onto my mother’s face lightened and the basket full of the various materials that made up a rug-making kit would appear. The only sparse flashes of colour in our home came from those homemade rag rugs which, apart from the cold brown lino, provided covering for the floors.
My parents would sit in front of the blazing log fire with the tools, necessary to turn the most basic of material scraps into floor coverings, spread out in front of them. Assortments of threadbare clothing, thrown out for rags by the farmer’s wife, a pair of scissors and a pile of sacks were mainly all that was necessary. My mother cut the salvageable material into long strips and sorted it into different colours, then passed it to him to patiently weave into the sacking. Wanting to be useful as well, I silently picked up scraps that had fallen onto the floor and placed them in another bag.

My father would take a long thin piece of metal with a curved hook at one end and a sharp point at the other that resembled a huge crotchet hook, and laboriously thread it with the strips of fabric. His second step was to pull it through what had once been Hessian potato bags from the farm. Then, finally, each fabric strip was knotted into place. My father’s calloused hands shook from the absence of drink as he repeated that exercise time after time until colourful rugs of various sizes appeared.
‘There’s one for your bedroom, Marianne,’ he once said gruffly to me when he had finished working on a particularly colourful one. ‘Stop your feet freezing when you get out of bed,’ and he tossed the completed rug to me.
‘Thank you,’ I said, grateful not just for the rug but for the unexpected attention. I smiled tentatively at him and received an answering smile back.
That night when I went upstairs I proudly spread the rug beside my bed, and when I woke in the morning I simply gazed down at it, admiring its warm glow. All I wanted then was for his good temper to last, my mother’s face to continue smiling and for the angry noises never to start again.
For those were the parents I wanted them to be.
But time after time I was to be disappointed.

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