No One Wants You (28 page)

I wanted to be important to them and I wanted them to say to their neighbours and friends, ‘This is my daughter or sister or aunt,’ whichever particular title applied. I really wanted to hear those words being said by my family to someone who was not a family member. I just needed them to be proud of me. But it never really happened.

I felt that they were ashamed of me and, no matter what I did, I would never be acceptable to them. Within that family I felt an affinity with certain individuals, but as a group, I always was made to feel like an outsider. I should have been considered one of them. Yet that was not to be.

I was their own flesh and blood yet I was considered as something lower than them. I felt less than human. Just because my parents were not married when I was conceived and born, decisions were lightly made which changed my life utterly, especially compared to the life of my full natural brothers and sisters. All different kinds of things kept bringing this home to me. I can remember first having my hair washed with shampoo at Kit’s home, when I was 12 years of age. Imagine never having had your hair washed with shampoo. It is something everyone in my family took as a basic human right from the day that they were born. I did not know what shampoo was until then. I had never even been properly clean. While I lived with my foster-parents, sometimes I used to wash myself in a pond at the corner of a field near the house. The pond had formed at the juncture of two streams, that flowed along the boundary of the property. The pond feature was probably designed to allow cattle or other domestic animals to get a drink or to wallow in. The bottom of the pond was muddy but you only
sank
a few inches into it. In springtime I remember it was full of tadpoles but in summer it was always full of green algae. That pond was my only washing facility until I was 12 years of age. The more I talked to my brothers and sisters about their childhoods, the more I would think no shampoo, no toothpaste and no toothbrush. Washing was just one example. Even though only a few miles separated me from my siblings physically, our daily lives were worlds apart.

My relationship with my new-found family, and in particular my mother, began to deteriorate. When my father was over with me and we were trying to entice the non-too-enthusiastic Thelma into a career in nursing, my mother wrote a letter to my father, which he showed me. It was a detailed letter about how much she missed him. In fact much of the detail was about how much she missed him, especially sexually, in bed. She was angry that he was still in London. He phoned her to try to calm things down but it didn’t help. I felt that her anger was really directed towards me. She was furious, mainly because my father and Thelma had not called her.

My father put Thelma on the phone to talk to her. When Thelma said hello, she called her ‘Mud’. Afterwards when I mentioned it, she told me that it was a nickname. She told me that they all had nicknames for each other, Tommy was ‘Toss’, Eileen was ‘Shinny’ – it was no big deal.

It was to me. I was jealous.

I was insanely jealous.

I wondered if I would have a nickname, but of course, I didn’t.

I asked Thelma, ‘What will my nickname be?’

She just laughed.

I also realised during this conversation that all my siblings had second or even third Christian names, such as Thelma Dolores Ellen. But I had only one – Celine. Instead
I’d
had a few different surnames. I realised that I would never be part of that family unit.

And the jealousy set in again.

Compared to what I had growing up, they had a perfect life. They had food, clothes and beds to sleep in. Every time that I felt excluded, it brought back horrible memories for me. They never had to steal food. I was always hungry because I was barely ever fed. I had to take food whenever and wherever I could get it.

In summer I could eat raw vegetables that were being cultivated in the surrounding fields. I ate raw potatoes, swedes, turnips, cabbages and onions, anything I could get. Later in the year I could rely on mushrooms from the fields, while blackberries, strawberries and raspberries all grew wild in the hedgerows. In winter and other times I could always rely on the bounties of the Catholic Church. At the worst of the worst, when I was really starving, I would go to the Catholic Church in Kilmallock and eat the wax candles. These were always in good supply. They were on sale for a penny, to people who wanted to ‘light a penny candle’ for a special intention.

I think that by lighting a candle people were led to believe that it would give them a special intercession with God. He was supposed to look more favourably on their request if they bought a penny candle. I can still taste the candle wax to this very day. I realise now that I was very lucky not to be caught eating the candles. I would probably have been arrested and brought to court but not taken away from my foster-parents. I would have been killed if they had found out. It was bad enough knowing that God and Our Lady were watching me and could come and get me. I believed that they were real and could throw you into hell. I used to look up at the stained glass windows, with all the saints looking down and I knew they were watching me being bad, eating the candles.

Although I did not know it, my reputation was probably not great at that time. I was called a lot of different names by the local children and adults alike. I was not held in very high esteem. People would call me, ‘ride’, ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’ among others. I didn’t really know what the words meant but I knew from the vicious way that they were said to me, they were not good.

By the age of ten years my body had acclimatised itself to abuse and its attendant pain. I felt no pain or feeling in the lower half of my body. If men wanted to abuse my body, then they went ahead and did it, as long as they had the approval of my foster-mother. I realised after a while that the men gave my mother money for ‘fucking’ me.

I found that if she got paid for letting somebody ‘fuck’, then she treated me with a type of fondness. ‘Good on ya, ya little ride ya,’ she would say, as she pushed me out of her way or gave me what could be considered a playful whack on the back of the head, as she was counting the money. A push was about as much as I could expect in the way of affectionate physical contact from her. She was so nasty most of the time that I could not afford to go near her to try to get some affection. However, I found that she could be even nicer if I gave her money that I had ‘earned’ from my own enterprise rather than from her contacts.

I found that some of the men who wanted to ‘fuck’ me were even quite pleasant before the event and some even after the event. If they met me in the street they studiously ignored me. But if they met me somewhere where there were no other people, then they would talk to me and say nice things to me. They would make me feel special. But then it always had to end with them saying that they were going to ‘fuck’ me.

When I was 12, a man whom I only knew as ‘the workman from Hannon’s farm’, in Kilmallock, used to give me a ten-shilling note if ‘you let me fuck you in the churchyard’. This happened many times over the summer in
the
long grass near the evergreen trees beside the thick town wall, behind the astonishingly large church in Kilmallock. I remember lying on my back as he had sex with me and thinking that the steeple of the church was so high that it must touch the sky. When he was finished, he was always very nice to me. He smoothed down and brushed my crumpled clothes. He always gave me a ten-shilling note, reminded me not to tell anyone about us and told me when to meet him again, behind the church.

When I used to give my foster-mother the ten-shilling note, she would really be pleased with me. ‘Ten bob, begor, that miserable auld so-and-so has it bad, what did the clergy ever do to him, good geril yerself.’ But I did not know what I was doing. How could a ten-year-old girl turn around and say no? Of course, giving my foster-mother money usually turned out the worse for me. I would be sent to Meade’s Pub for Guinness and whiskey. This would mean a party where everyone would get drunk. Back in the days when my foster-father was alive, he would get really drunk. When he got drunk, he would get aggressive and beat anyone who was near him. He never hit my foster-mother because he was afraid of her. She was well able to stand up for herself. If he had hit her, she would have hit him back twice as hard. He could only beat on somebody who could not defend themselves. I was beaten so often with the leather belt from the bellows beside the fire that I could only lie in pain, often for days, before I could move again. I gradually learned to take my cue from Spot the dog. When they began to get drunk, Spot would slink away and hide. He knew something was different and became uneasy. This was our time to head for my sleeping area. There Spot and I curled up together and hoped that they would forget about us. As they got progressively drunker, Spot would disappear altogether. He used to squeeze himself under a low cupboard where nobody could reach him. I was not so lucky. Of course, after my
foster
-father died, a party meant the same men calling to the house and I was never left in peace.

One major consequence of meeting all the members of my family was that I began to have these ‘flashbacks’. I rarely used to have them before that. I suspect that meeting my siblings and feeling so much jealousy caused these flashbacks to my horrific past. I could not help but compare my unhappy childhood to what I perceived as the idyllic childhood experienced by my siblings. These flashbacks that I experience to this very day can fill me with depression. Depending on the severity of the painful memory, it can take me days to recover. With all of my heart, I long to be free of these nightmares of my past.

After I had my hysterectomy, my father phoned me every night in hospital. When I went home, he called me every night as well. This caused a rift between my father and my mother. During one of the conversations, I told him that I was feeling worse at home with my mother and Harry fighting.

Immediately he said, ‘Come on home to Limerick and you can recuperate for six weeks.’

While I had by now realised that he was far from being the perfect father, I was still in awe of him. He was still the personification of my fantasy father-figure and of how I had visualised him to be, over all the years of not having a father. I respected him so I reluctantly decided to take up his offer and go to Limerick for six weeks of recuperation in the bosom of my family. I really wasn’t sure about going. I was ceding control to someone whom I did not really know and I was uncomfortable with that aspect of it.

I informed Mother of the travel arrangements. She wanted to go as soon as possible. She could not wait to get away from Harry and the house and London. Ronan and I, along with my mother, were to go to Limerick. Harry was to stay in London and look after Anthony, who was still at school. As I was under strict instructions from the hospital
not
to do any heavy work, I had to travel as an invalid. I bought tickets for Ronan and myself. The three of us headed for Heathrow to fly to Shannon.

As we prepared to board the plane, mother was offloaded. She was flying on a stand-by ticket. She was furious. As Ronan and I were being wheeled down the boarding chute to the plane, my last view of my mother was of two uniformed security men trying to restrain an irate, screaming woman. I was too unwell to care. I pretended that I did not know her. I knew that my father would be waiting for me at the other end of the flight, so I kept going.

My father collected us at Shannon and took us home to Janesboro. I told him what had happened to Mother. He was not bothered about it. ‘She knows what to expect, she will get a seat eventually.’ When we got home, I was put to bed to rest. Rosaleen, my sister, became real pals with Ronan.

The next day passed and there was no sign of Mother. It was a beautiful quiet day. The following day a hurricane blew in the front door. Mother was back.

She was really angry with everyone. When she was offloaded, she had to get a taxi back to my house from Heathrow. She got back to the house and knocked on the door. When the door opened, she barged past a bewildered Harry. She demanded that Harry would have to give her a lift back to the airport the next day. He made some excuse that he was unavailable. There was no way he was going to drive her to the airport, after the abuse he had been put through. Harry is a generous person in most respects, but he would have given anyone else in the world a lift to the airport before he would have driven my mother to Heathrow that day. She had to return to the airport by taxi.

As Shannon is a small destination in the world of aviation, there are few flights that go there each day. They are usually full. So stand-by is a bad way to get there. It may
be
cheap but you can get left behind. It wasn’t so much the time involved that bothered my mother, but it was the ignominy of having to admit to or being seen as a cheapskate.

She could not get a flight the next day. She had to go back to Harry again by taxi. She barged past Harry once again. He had not expected to see her because if he had realised that she could not get a flight for a second time, he would not have opened the door to her. She did not ask for a lift to the airport for the following day, as I think she knew that she would not get one. She got a seat on a flight on the third attempt.

Once she was installed in her own home, she took to her bed. She never got out of her bed to help me. Every morning my father would go off to work, thinking that my mother was looking after me. I had to light the fire each morning. I had to cook for Ronan and myself and anybody else that was there. When she did get up she complained that Ronan and I were eating them out of house and home. She flew into rages about our eating habits. I tried to explain to her that she was taking too many prescription drugs, particularly Valium. I thought this was the reason for her irrational behaviour towards me. She was on uppers and downers and so many tablets, that it was unbelievable. I was concerned, but she saw it as interference.

Once again I was getting no help and my health was getting worse. I weighed just over six stone at this time.