Don’t Tell Mummy (8 page)

‘What have I done?’ were the only words that I could manage to stutter as my hair flew into my eyes and my head bounced on my neck.

‘You’ve been in to the rabbits. You left the door open. The dogs got in. They’ve torn them to pieces.’

‘I shut the door last night,’ I tried to protest. ‘I’ve not been down since.’

Again her hand rose. This time she told me the slap was for my deceit. Then she dragged me into the back room to show me the carnage. Bits of tail were on the bloodstained floor, clumps of fur were scattered everywhere and the only parts left whole were the paws. I wanted to scream but my throat seemed to close as my body shook with suppressed sobs.

On her instructions I filled a pail with water and started to scrub the blood from the floor. As I worked the one thought that filled my head was that I knew I had shut the cage door.

L
ife at the thatched house continued, each day blending into the next: the walks to school, my weekend tasks and ‘the drives’. Occasionally the routine would be broken by a visit to my grandparents, but the joy of visiting them had diminished since Christmas.

One Saturday, when I collected the milk from the nearby farm, the farmer’s wife invited us all for high tea on the following Sunday. She gave me a note to give to my mother and to my delight my parents accepted.

High tea in the country was served at six o’clock, as the farming community rose at dawn and retired early in the evening. The game of happy families started as soon as I, freshly bathed with neatly brushed hair, was dressed in my best outfit. I had been hoping to explore the farm, so I was reluctant to put it on, knowing my mother, fearful of it getting dirty, never liked me to play in it.

On our arrival, as though reading my mind, the farmer’s wife said to her two sons, ‘Take Antoinette out and show her around the farm. She likes animals.’

I rushed eagerly outside with the two boys before my mother could warn me about keeping clean. Even though they were a couple of years older than me they’d always
seemed shy but once outside, away from the adults, they became friendly. Firstly they showed me a sty with a fat sow lying motionless on her side, each teat covered by greedily guzzling piglets, she seemingly oblivious to them. On hearing our voices she opened one white-lashed eye; seeing we were no threat to her young, she sleepily shut it and resumed her slumber. Next I followed the boys to where the cows were being electronically milked. The large bovine creatures paid us no attention as they stood patiently while the machinery drained their udders. Nearby was an outhouse where butter was still made with a hand-turned churn. Finally we entered a barn where the hay had been made into bales and stacked up to roof height. A ladder rested against the tallest pile and, squealing with laughter, we played a type of hide and seek until the farmer’s wife called us in.

The boys had to go and wash, because they had been helping their father on the farm that day, even though it was a Sunday. The farmer came in to get ready for tea, and my mother offered to help his wife lay the table.

‘Antoinette, when you went out, did you see the kittens?’ the farmer’s wife asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

My father was the nice father that day and took me by the hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘While they’re getting tea ready I’ll take you there, we’ll look for them together.’

It was the last day I believed in the nice father.

Still holding my hand, he led me to the barn where just a few minutes earlier the boys and I had been playing. Going to the back we found the nest of multi-coloured kittens, ranging from jet black to a marmalade gold, so young their eyes were still a milky blue. As I looked at them one yawned, showing dainty white teeth. Between them protruded a
small, very pink tongue. Lulled by the intoxicating farm aromas and enchanted by the wriggling bundles of fluff, I knelt down to stroke their silky fur. I looked up at my father longingly, hoping that maybe he would let me have one. As my eyes met his I froze: the nice father had disappeared; I saw the gleam in his eyes, saw his mocking gaze and felt again that lump of fear that controlled my voice box, rendering me speechless.

As though in slow motion I felt his hands roughly lift my frock, felt the yank on my knickers as they were pulled down to my ankles, felt the roughness of the straw on my bare body, felt him penetrate me and felt his shudders a few seconds later. Slime trickled down my leg but when I looked down all I could see were my freshly polished black shoes with my white knickers draped on them.

As he buttoned up his flies he took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and threw it at me. As though through a tunnel, I heard his voice say, ‘Clean yourself up with that, my girl.’

The happiness I had felt that day dissolved, the sun disappeared and in its place twilight coloured the world, turning it into a grey unfriendly place. I did as he’d told me, while he watched.

‘Ready, Antoinette?’ he asked as he brushed me down. Then, putting on his ‘nice father’s’ face, he took my hand and led me back to the house for tea.

The farmer’s wife was all smiles. Thinking my downcast face was because my father had not let me keep a kitten, she said: ‘They don’t make good pets, Antoinette. Farm cats are only interested in catching rats.’

I looked at her mutely. Speech eluded me and numbly I took my place at the table. We sat down for a generous Irish
high tea. She had laid out a spread of home-cured ham, roasted chicken, hard-boiled eggs, salad, potato cakes, soda bread and homemade jam. She kept saying: ‘Antoinette, come on, eat.’ Then she remarked to my mother: ‘She’s very quiet today.’

My mother’s eyes caught mine with a look of disdain that froze me, and then she turned to the farmer’s wife with her polite smile fixed firmly in place and answered, ‘She’s such a bookworm, my daughter. She’s not a great chatterer.’

Other than visiting my grandparents, I can remember no other family days out during that period of my life.

As I sat in the hospice lounge, I thought about that little girl who had once been me. I thought about her when she was a trusting toddler, trusting in the love of her mother, and having no reason to doubt other adults. I saw again the picture of her smiling confidently into the camera when she was three. I thought of her excitement at travelling to Northern Ireland, her joy at starting a new school, her love of her dog. I wondered then what Antoinette would have been like had she been allowed to grow up normally.

I felt her presence as another picture was forced into my mind. I saw a dark room; in it a small, frightened child was hunched tightly up in bed, a thumb in her mouth for comfort. Her dark brown curls were plastered damply on the back of her neck while her eyes were wide open. She was too scared to close them in case her nightmare returned: the nightmare of being chased, of being out of control; the nightmare that still haunted my sleep began with her then.

Knowing that the days of calling out to her mother had gone, she could only lie and shiver until sleep returned to force her eyes unwillingly shut.

Then I remembered for the first time in many years the ultimate betrayal of that little girl, the betrayal that sealed her fate. Only by hiding her in the depths of my memory and creating Toni could there have been survival.

If I could have reached my arms out to her through the decades, I would have picked her up and taken her somewhere safe, but Antoinette was no longer there to be saved.

I kept coming back to the same question: ‘Why did my mother go into such a state of denial that enabled such a childhood?’

I’d always thought of my mother as having had a ruined life, never having any happiness, her life destroyed by my father’s selfishness. I’d always seen that she came from a comfortable English middle-class background, had never been happy in Northern Ireland and believed she had simply married the wrong man. But there, for the first time, with no diversions to take my mind away from these memories, it dawned on me exactly what my mother had done. She knew when I told her of that kiss what would inevitably follow. She was thirty-six years old when I told her, a woman who had gone through a war. She took me away from the school where I was happy. A school which had some of the most qualified teachers in Northern Ireland, and where the headmistress, a diligent and intelligent woman, would have recognized the change in a child and questioned the reasons why. That was when my mother, I realized, became my father’s accomplice.

‘Now do you understand, Toni?’ came the whisper. ‘Now do you understand what she did?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘No, I don’t understand what she did. I want her to tell me. I want her to tell me why.’

‘Remember the games, Toni,’ came the whisper.

First there was his game of ‘our secret’. Then there was the game of ‘happy families’, and her final game of Ruth, ‘the victim’.

My mind went back to the many occasions that she used her English accent and lady-like demeanour to talk herself out of situations, convincing people I was the difficult child and she was the long-suffering mother of one.

She knew that with a four-mile walk home from school there’d be no time for me to have friends. The children who attended the village school all lived near to it, so during the weekends and holidays I would be isolated. There was nobody I was going to confide my troubles to.

I suppose, I thought sadly, that was something I’d always known. I had never stopped loving my mother, for that is something children do. I was never able to stop, never had the desire to stop. But I wondered now, when she only had such a short time to live, if finally she would offer me some explanation. Would she finally admit that she had not been a victim, that the guilt she’d tried to make me feel was not my guilt? Would some plea for forgiveness come from her lips?

That’s what I wanted, that’s what I hoped for, as I returned to my mother’s bedside and drifted into sleep in the reclining chair.

A
black fog of depression hung over the thatched house. It swirled around our heads, pervading our minds. It poisoned the atmosphere and became words; words which acted as tools of bitterness, reproach and anger. Hers were always the same recriminations. He gambled, he drank, he’d lost his severance pay. Her voice chased him from the house, following him to the gate. The force of his anger would float back, lingering like a black shadow in every corner of the house.

Tea chests again stood in the living room and the dogs, as though sensing a question mark over their future, hid under the table.

My mother had already told me that we would have to move. Upstairs, when I’d gone to bed, I would pull the bedclothes over my head to block out the anxiety, which the constant sound of their anger bred.

The isolation of the poultry farm, the cold and the lack of money, for however hard she worked there was never enough, stoked her fury. But one smile from my father could always dispel it.

My mother’s ambition had always been to be a house owner, as her family had been before her. Here her hopes of
a profitable business had folded; it was a struggle to pay the rent, and there was certainly nothing left over to save.

‘Antoinette,’ she informed me one evening, ‘tomorrow I’m going to take you to meet an old lady. If she likes you, we might be going to live with her. I want you to be on your best behaviour and if we move there you’ll go back to your old school. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

I could feel the hope rise up in me but I tried to conceal it as I replied: ‘Yes, Mummy, I would like that very much.’

That night I went to bed clinging to that nugget of hope. Could I really leave that village school where I was so disliked and go back to a school where I’d been popular? Then other thoughts came into my head: who was this old lady and why was my mother taking me and not my father? Questions that I could not find the answers to buzzed around my head until I fell into a fitful sleep.

I awoke early the next morning and the memory of the previous night’s conversation with my mother jumped straight to the forefront of my mind. A feeling of excitement coursed through my body, a feeling that I tried to suppress because I didn’t want it to be followed by disappointment.

Was I really going to have a day out with my mother, and might I be going back to my old school, leaving behind the village school that I hated so much? Hope burned inside me as I went down the stairs.

Pans of water boiling on the stove reassured me when my mother told me they were for my wash. By the time I’d finished breakfast the tin bath was filled. Undressing quickly I immersed myself in the water. First I soaped myself all over, enjoying the feeling of the soapy water trickling through my fingers, and then I rinsed my body
with my face-cloth, washed my hair in the heated rainwater and rinsed it until I could hear it squeak with cleanliness, before being briskly towel dried. Next my mother took her silver-backed hairbrush and with slow strokes commenced to brush. Lulled by the hypnotic rhythm of the brush and relaxed by the warmth of the stove, I leant against her knees, basking in the attention. A sense of security enfolded me with her ministrations. I wished they still took place every night, as once they had.

Once my mother had tied my hair back with a ribbon, she laid out my best outfit, gave me a pair of clean white socks and polished my shoes. When we were both ready my father drove us into Coleraine, where my mother and I caught a bus, which took us a few miles into the countryside.

When the bus dropped us off, we walked a few yards until we came to the entrance of a driveway that was partially obscured by overgrown hedgerows. On a tree was nailed a sign that simply read ‘Cooldaragh’.

No gate barred our entry so, with me holding her hand, we walked up the long drive. The trees on either side formed a latticework as their untrimmed branches spread above our heads until, almost touching, they created a cool green lacy ceiling. At their roots long, coarse grass tangled with nettles and encroached onto the gravel. Just as I was wondering where we were going we turned a bend and I saw Cooldaragh for the first time. I gasped. It was the biggest and most beautiful house I’d ever seen.

As we approached it, two dogs ran towards us with their tails wagging, followed by a stately old lady. She was tall and thin, with white hair pinned up on top of her head. Her erect stance belied the need of the walking stick that she held in her left hand, as she offered her right one to my
mother. She reminded me of characters I’d seen in sepia photographs of another era. As my mother shook her hand she introduced us.

‘This is my daughter, Antoinette,’ she said with her hand on my shoulder and a smile on her face. ‘And this, Antoinette, is Mrs Giveen.’

Shyness overcame me and silenced my tongue, but, seeming to understand that, the old lady smiled at me.

Mrs Giveen led us inside to a room where a tea tray was already laid. Even I, young as I was, soon realized that this was a type of interview and that I, as well as my mother, was being assessed and judged. She asked me several questions, such as what I liked doing and what my hobbies were. Then she started asking me about my school and whether I liked it.

Before I could answer, my mother jumped in. ‘She did very well when she went to her junior school in town. But unfortunately we had to move. Then it was just too far for us to send her. But she certainly liked it there, didn’t you, Antoinette?’

I confirmed that I did.

My mother continued. ‘If we moved here, there’s a bus that could take her to school every day. One of the reasons I would like to make this move is so that my daughter could go back to the school where she was so happy.’

The old lady looked at me and asked, ‘Antoinette, is that what you would like to do?’

I felt my heart move to my throat. ‘Oh, yes. I would like to go back to my old school very much.’

After tea she suddenly held her hand out to me. ‘Come, child. Let me show you around.’

Although she didn’t remind me of either of my grandmothers, having neither their warmth nor affectionate
natures, I instinctively liked her. She talked to me as she led me outside and introduced me to her dogs, whom she obviously loved. She placed her hand on the terrier, whose colouring reminded me of Judy.

‘This one has been with me since he was a puppy. He’s thirteen years old now and is called Scamp.’

She patted the larger dog, who gazed at her adoringly.

‘And this is Bruno. He’s a cross between an Alsatian and a Collie. He’s two now.’

She asked me about my dogs. I told her about Judy, how I got her for my fifth birthday, how I’d rescued Sally and brought her home. I even told her about June, the bantam. She reassured me as she patted me on the shoulder.

‘If you come here, you can bring your dogs. There’s plenty of space for them.’

I sighed with relief. It was the one question I’d not asked which had been on my mind. As I watched her dogs playing on the lawn, I noticed large flowering bushes big enough for a child to play in, which she told me were called rhododendrons. Behind them, was woodland with tall, shady trees.

‘I have my own Christmas tree plantation,’ Mrs Giveen told me. ‘So that at Christmas I’m always able to choose my own tree.’

I began to feel very comfortable with her. I continued chattering as she took me around to the side of the house, where small stocky ponies grazed in a large field. Trustingly, they came to the fence and gazed at us with their heavily fringed, dark, liquid eyes. As she leant over the fence to gently stroke them, Mrs Giveen explained that they were old retired ponies that had once worked carting peat from the bogs. Now they could roam free and end their lives in peace. Straightening up, she took some sugar cubes from
her pocket and held them out to the little ponies. I watched with wonder as their velvet noses nuzzled her hand, gently removing the sugar cubes.

‘So Antoinette,’ she asked out of the blue. ‘Would you like to come and live here?’

To me the house and grounds seemed to be magical, like places I’d read about in my fairy-tale books. I had never dreamt I could live in such a place. Still hardly daring to believe that she meant it, I looked up at her and simply said, ‘Yes, I’d like that very much.’

She smiled at me again as she took me back to my mother, showing both of us around the house. First we went into a huge hunting hall, muskets and an assortment of crude-handled knives decorating the wall above a large marble fireplace. I was later told they had been hung there by her grandfather, who had fought the Indians in America. A thick oak door opened from the hall into her private lounge, furnished with, to my untrained eye, very elegant, delicate and spindly-legged chairs and settees. I learnt over the following months that they were valuable antiques from the Louis Quinze period.

As the two women talked, I realized that my mother was being interviewed for the position of housekeeper and companion. Mrs Giveen, it seemed, no longer had enough money to staff a house of that size since the opening of factories in Northern Ireland had brought an end to the age of cheap labour.

My father, I gathered, was to carry on with his own work as a mechanic in the town. With no rent to pay and an income coming in from her new job, my mother hoped that she could save towards buying her own home.

After I learnt we were going to live there, I could sense I had passed some test and my mother was very happy and
pleased with me. I can’t really remember her packing up the thatched house, but we had very few possessions and much of our old furniture was, I think, left behind. The chickens were sold to nearby farmers, including my bantam, June, which made me feel sad. We still only seemed to have a few suitcases and the now battered tea chests to our name. As on all our previous moves, my mother filled them with clothes, bedding and books.

On our arrival at Cooldaragh, Mrs Giveen met us at the door.

‘Antoinette, dear,’ she said, ‘come with me and I will show you your room.’

She took me through the hunting hall, up the main staircase to a gallery with several doors leading off it. She showed me my large room, furnished with an old-fashioned brass bed, covered with a thick down quilt. Beside it was a cloth-covered bedside table with an oil lamp placed on it. By the window was a small desk and next to it a bookcase. Then she told me, to my delight, that her room was next to mine. That news made me feel very safe.

There were two other staircases, which led to the disused servants’ quarters. One had been for the male servants and one for the females. My parents had the housekeeper’s bedroom, which was near to the only bathroom in the house. In the past, when the house had a full complement of servants, the bath water had been heated on the peat-fired range in the kitchen and carried upstairs by an army of maids. Now carrying the numerous pans of water needed for our weekly baths became an onerous task.

At the base of those stairs were two more rooms, which had once been the butler’s and maids’ pantries. A door opened into a small courtyard, where a pump supplied our
drinking water. Rain butts collected more water for all our other needs and every morning buckets had to be filled and placed beside the range.

A long, red-tiled corridor led from the kitchen and pantries back into the main body of the house, where my parents’ sitting room was positioned.

Later, when I explored the house on my own, I counted twenty-four rooms. Only four bedrooms were furnished, two of which myself and my parents occupied. The smallest and dustiest rooms, which had no furniture, were the now unused servants’ quarters.

Not only was there neither running water nor electricity at Cooldaragh, with the whole house lit by oil lamps or candles, but the bus also only went into town once a day, leaving in the morning and returning after six in the evening. It was arranged that I would be a day boarder at school. That meant I could stay in the warm library to do my homework and have my supper with the full-time boarders, while I waited for the bus.

Once we had settled in, my mother had to take me shopping for a new uniform to go back to Coleraine High School. Even though I’d been pleased at the thought of returning, I was no longer the happy, confident child they had previously known, having become much more withdrawn. Because time had elapsed and the teachers had not seen the gradual change in me, they seemed to put it down to the difference that time had made.

My father was absent most weekends, ‘working overtime’ as my mother always explained, which was relief for me. On those days she and I would have lunch with Mrs Giveen in her dining room. Like her drawing room it was furnished with antiques, the surface of the mahogany sideboard
completely covered in silverware. We three sat at the glowingly polished table, which was big enough to accommodate ten people. My mother, who was never a wonderful cook, could manage a roast at the weekend. Looking back, I would say my father deliberately stayed away, because Mrs Giveen was one of a dying breed, the aristocracy of Northern Ireland. My father always felt intimidated by such people, whereas my mother was comfortable in their company. I think in her mind she could pretend to herself that she was a friend as opposed to the housekeeper.

The old lady was in her eighties and exuded a sense of pride and dignity. I intuitively knew she was lonely, and we shared a bond that so often exists between the very young and the old. After lunch, I would help my mother clear away and wash up at the deep white sink in the maids’ pantry. Then I would go out into the grounds with all the dogs. I would play in the rhododendron bushes, which were tall enough to stand upright in, or visit the diminutive shaggy ponies. If I gave them titbits they would let me fondle their soft noses and stroke their necks.

I felt safe in those days, because of where I was sleeping. My father didn’t dare come near me, with Mrs Giveen’s bedroom just the other side of the wall.

On rainy days I explored the house. Mrs Giveen had cupboards full of mementos from the American wars and would enjoy talking about her grandfather and showing me all his souvenirs.