Becoming Myself: The True Story of Thomas Who Became Sara (3 page)

‘Come here, you bastard. I said come here! I’ll teach you to lose money. You’re nothing but a fucking troublemaker. You bastard. I’ll fucking kill you the next time you lose money … the next time to tear your clothes … you come home late from school again!’ He would get up from his chair, taking the belt from his trousers. He would come at me with his fists, his huge fists pounding against my little head. His huge fists pounding my little face and me peeing again on the floor. ‘I’ll give you something to piss about!’

Shouting abuse at me while he pounded me. Telling me how worthless I was while he lashed his belt across my bottom, across my back and across my face as he lost control and started to kick me around the floor. At other times he would use a two-by-one piece of wood and beat me wherever he could inflict the most pain. Then came the kicking. He would kick me around the floor with his army boots; all the while shouting and screaming at me while I tried to get away, which just made him worse, more vicious.

While he was beating me to a pulp, she would be screaming: ‘Don’t do it, Frank. He’s not worth it, the bastard! Frank, the bastard isn’t worth it. Frank, please, he’s not fuckin’ worth it.’ These words and the vehemence with which they were spoken still haunt and hurt me; still strike at my heart.

However, I wasn’t alone in being beaten. One of the worst and most savage beatings I ever witnessed was that of my
brother, Peter. He was given a flask to take to school, but unfortunately for him, he dropped it. Of course, it broke and he had to come home and tell my mother. She in turn told my father, who was repairing the television at the time. ‘How did you manage to break the fucking flask?’ he roared.

‘It slipped out of my hand, Dad.’

‘Come here, you stupid little bastard,’ he shouted back.

Peter had a tendency to laugh whenever he was nervous or distressed and the more distressed he became, the more he laughed. My parents always interpreted this as him not caring, but nothing could be further from the truth.

My father went into a complete rage and started beating Peter with his fists. The more he did this, the more distressed Peter became. The more distressed he became, the more he laughed. The more Peter laughed, the more viciously my father beat him. The more he laughed, the more my father screamed, ‘Cry, you bastard. Cry, you bastard!’ He punched him, broke a stick across his back then proceeded to kick him with a viciousness I had rarely seen, even against me.

The reason I think that I remember this beating above all is that Peter was always my star. I loved him like none of the others. We were just eleven months apart in age, I being the older of the two. I loved his company and his cheerfulness. I loved being out with him amongst our friends and felt so proud to be by his side. Because of my own sense of inferiority towards him and my other brothers and sisters, it was vital to me that he accept me and that he would allow me to get close. We did play together a lot in the younger years: our beds were used very frequently during our playtimes. Peter and I would play a game called the Funny Men on the bed. We would pretend that we were working up ladders painting walls. Suddenly, we would push each other off the imaginary
ladder to fall into a bath of paint. At other times we used the double bed as a pick-up van and the bunk beds as a double-decker bus. We would drive our Dinkies around the bedroom floor, imagining the legs of the beds as corners of high-rise buildings. However, as Peter became more aware of how I was perceived by others, as a cissy, as different, he started to avoid me at every opportunity and even joined in the name-calling and put-downs. We had come a long way from the days of playing the Funny Men and football and going on our long adventures together with our friends. Peter would be lost to me out of his need to be loved and to be popular amongst our friends.

My relationship with my brother Fred was fraught with sibling rivalry. We fought at every turn and it took very little to provoke either one of us to fight the other. He was eighteen months older than me and was understandably closer to our oldest brother James than to me. It seemed that no matter what I did, he had to find a way of beating me. I hated it and tried my best to avoid it and him, not an easy thing to achieve in such a small house and where we had to share the same bed.

Fred suffered terribly with asthma and frequently missed school because of it. He had very nasty attacks and on a number of occasions we thought he was going to die. As much as I didn’t like him at times, I certainly didn’t want that. And, in spite of my feelings towards him, I wanted to protect him.

My brothers — and sisters — and I spent the best part of nineteen years in our bedroom. It was this bedroom that kept our secrets, that witnessed all our emotional highs and lows and wherein we held our little confabs about the injustices
that were so much a part of our lives; well, at least some of us. This was the room in which we expressed our joys and sorrows. The place in which we found comfort, but which also served as our prison cell. It was the holding area for those who were to be victims of the most vicious beatings and the place we would go to in order to soothe our wounds, both physical and emotional. It was here that I kept my record player, cassette recorder, records, cassettes and my wonderful books; the few that I had. The record player was on my side of the bed so I was able to listen to my music through my headphones. We grew up on all kinds of music including Jim Reeves, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Slim Whitman, Dean Martin and Connie Francis, Glen Campbell and Patsy Cline, to name just a few. As we got older we developed our own tastes. Music was to be one of my greatest comforters and also my greatest inspiration for coping with all my difficulties.

After some time Peter realised that I had been getting out of bed after everyone else was asleep and he came downstairs to see what I was doing, which was cleaning the kitchen and sitting room. He kept me company some of the time and so we started to play football between the table and chairs which we’d placed at either end of the sitting room to act as goal posts and used a tennis ball as our football. It was very enjoyable and made us tired enough to go back to bed after all the work was done. It was a bit like the story of the ‘Elves and the Shoemaker’, except of course that this little elf was doing the domestics rather than making shoes for the poor cobbler. Looking back to those times, it is so obvious how completely natural it was for me to act instinctively as a girl and to play homemaker, because that is, in effect, what I was doing.

One exception to the stress of our household was Christmas, which could be truly wonderful. My mum would pull out all the stops to make sure it was the best ever. Christmas was the one time of the year — along with Easter — that we never wanted for anything. We loved to put up the Christmas tree and decorations and to see all the other preparations being made, including the puddings. I had a strong liking for raw pudding mix and used to go to where they were hidden in the kitchen and stick my fingers in and scoop out nice big amounts and eat them till I made myself sick, not realising that we would have none left for Christmas if I kept eating it. We loved putting up our Christmas stockings on the bedposts and looking forward to the surprise fillings when we awoke on Christmas morning. They would be filled with Lemon’s sweets and we would get stuck into them, even before we came down for our toys. We would sneak down stairs about six or seven in the morning, trying not to wake our parents. The atmosphere of coming into the sitting room and seeing all the presents under the tree was just the best thing ever and so very exciting.

Our aunts and uncles came to our house every year to say Happy Christmas and to get their Christmas drink. That was also very exciting. There was such a wonderful and for the most part, peaceful, atmosphere for these few days, before we would revert to what was to be our version of normality. We loved most of the Christmas programmes on the telly, especially
Wanderly Wagon, Ludín and His Magic Flute, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, Top of the Pops, Mike Yarwood,
the
Morecombe and Wise Show
and so on. On Christmas morning we would all be marched off to mass at Our Lady of the Assumption. We were like the Von Trapp children, all wearing identical clothes and shoes. The girls always looked
so pretty in their dresses and lovely ribbons. I always loved looking at girls in their curls and ribbons and wondered why I couldn’t wear them.

I was quite a performer and storyteller as a youngster. During the mid-60s, I would stand on the road and tell tall stories to whoever would listen, of how I saved my father’s life while he was in the Congo with the United Nations. He was being crushed to death by a huge python and I would come to his rescue by getting a knife and fighting the snake until he released my dad. I was paid a few pennies for telling this story. I also sang ‘Walk Tall’ by Val Doonican and, ‘Walking the Streets in the Rain’ by Butch Moore. In fact, I got the nickname, ‘Butch Moore’. These songs became my party piece whenever we had some special occasion. I loved to sing at special occasions, but was often upstaged by Peter, who would get in my way and put me off singing, normally with some kind of derogatory remark that had everyone laughing except me.

There is no doubt that times were hard financially when we were growing up. I can distinctly recall a period during the 70s when my father was taking home about £16 a week, which had to feed at least ten of us at the time. He had to work extra hours in order to supplement his income and to try to provide us with a decent living. It wasn’t always possible and this necessitated the older children giving up school in order to go out to work for a living.

Our situation was made worse by my mother’s constant borrowing in order to make ends meet. It was a case of constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul. It had to be deeply frustrating for him to see her spending money the way she did and yet she needed to do what she thought was right, based
on the way she was brought up. It was a no-win situation for either of them.

My mum kept a beautiful house. Everything was immaculate. She had a definite talent for interior design, as amply demonstrated over the years with the various designs she came up with for the house. The house décor was kept up to date. I recall the very vivid colours on the walls and floors, which were typical of the 60s and 70s. We had linoleum in every room which made them very cold during cold months of the year. We couldn’t afford carpets back then. Keeping up with the trends meant getting knee-high in debt and this affected how were dressed and fed. We never starved, but some of the meals were decidedly short on substance. My mother’s need to keep up with the trends created problems for my father as he was the one who had to do the painting and decorating, and later build the new kitchenette. The debts angered my father greatly; as did the constant changes and they had ceaseless rows because of it.

The fact is, we were poor throughout my earliest years and into my early teens, and this was reflected in our meals and clothing and the fact that we rarely, if ever, got new books for school. We got a lot of our meals from the Stew House on Glass Lane. It was also reflected in the fact that all of the older boys never got to finish school. They were all taken out of second-level, except me: I left when I was just eleven years old. The truth is that school was never really a priority for my mother. She preferred to have us do the housework and go out to work as soon as we were old enough.

Some of us were expected to do housework when we came in from school, sometimes before we could eat. And we would be sent to bed around 6 or 7 p.m. depending on our mother’s mood. There was very little time for doing our
homework after our chores and even when we did, we would be too tired. This meant getting into trouble with the teachers. Sometimes my mother would not give me a note for the teacher even though it wasn’t my fault that the homework didn’t get done. Sometimes I would be slapped or clattered and then get lines to write:

When we went to the Stew House we would have to stand in a queue and we would be taunted by people passing by on their way to and from school. We would put in our three or four pots and out would come the aromatic smell of fresh, hot food. We would get large pots of stew and potatoes for just two shillings a pot. We also got corned beef and chicken-and-ham roll. The food tasted fabulous and it certainly beat the usual bread and jam, bowls of soup or bread and margarine which we frequently got as our main meals. The nearest we ever got to butter and ham was when we would have visitors. Sometimes, we would try and hang around until they left, to see if they had left any sandwiches behind. That was a rare treat.

A lot of our clothes came from the Iveagh Market on Francis Street, in the Liberties. They came to us via the O’Keeffe’s from Ballyfermot Drive. Up the road they would come with their oversized Dick-Whittington-style sack, except it was a loud orange sheet with all the clothes inside. Of course, there was the usual mortification at the sight of the sack being taken into our house, but we weren’t too mortified if it meant getting a new pair of much-needed shoes,
albeit second- or even third-hand. Sometimes, I was so desperate to get a pair that I would pretend they fit, even though they were crushing my feet. I couldn’t take any more of sticking pieces of linoleum tile into my shoes because of the gaping holes in my soles, or because the soles had come away and were constantly taunting me with their incessant flapping up and down. It was especially noisy when walking up the school corridors.
Here’s flapping-soles Dunne!
I would be taunted. But wearing tight shoes was to prepare me for fitting into another form of tight shoes many years later, I suppose!

We had very little money so my mother would borrow money from Mr Beagle. He would come to the house on Fridays with a box of groceries. Sometimes, there would be long slim bars of Cadbury’s chocolate and we would wait to see if we would receive a piece. Sometimes we did and sometimes we didn’t. At other times she would borrow money from Mrs Tallan, a neighbour, or from men who would call to the house every Friday. It was at a young age that we were taught to lie; at least when it suited her to have us go to the door and tell the callers that she wasn’t at home. I could never understand why it was okay for us to lie when our parents told us to, but that we were never to lie on our own account. When I questioned this double standard, I would be beaten and told that I was a ‘cheeky little bastard’.