Wake Up, Mummy
Authors: Anna Lowe
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Self-Help, #Substance Abuse & Addictions, #Alcohol, #Social Science, #Sexual Abuse & Harassment, #Drugs, #Alcoholism, #Drug Dependence
‘I made a dash for the hallway and then my mind froze. Should I dart into the kitchen, where my mother would be swigging from a bottle? Or should I run upstairs and try to find somewhere to hide? It was a choice I didn’t really need to make, because there was no escape.’
Anna Lowe grew up on the doorsteps of pubs, waiting for her mum to come out. Giving up her bedroom to her mother’s drunken friends, and regularly calling out the ambulance, after finding her mother unconscious and covered in vomit. But it was when they moved in with her mother’s boyfriend, Carl, that things took the ugliest turn. He sexually abused Anna from the age of six – destroying any semblance of a normal childhood she had left.
Wake Up, Mummy is the heartbreaking true story of a little girl who eventually found the courage to break free from the past.
Anna Lowe is mother to three children, and today runs a successful business with her brother.
The heartbreaking true story of an
abused little girl whose mother was
too drunk to notice
ANNA LOWE
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First published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © Anna Lowe and Jane Smith 2011
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5 Carl: the end of the new beginning
10 As one door opens, another one shuts
13 Guilt, remorse and unfounded optimism
15 The decision that changed my life
16 Bereaved, betrayed and determined
THE EVENTS DESCRIBED
in the first chapter of this book took place before I was born and when I was just a baby, so what I’ve written about them is based on what I’ve been told by other people. I’ve included them because I think they help to explain some of the reasons why my mother was the way she was.
Many people had effects on my life when I was growing up, most of them negative. But one of the most significant influences of all was the abuse – mental, physical and sexual – that was inflicted on me by my mother’s boyfriend, Carl.
I didn’t understand what Carl was doing to me at the time, and it wasn’t until some years later that I realised he’d taken my virginity one morning when I was just six years old. I’d woken up with terrible earache and my mother had left me with Carl while she went out to get me some medicine. And it was then – as I lay in the bed beside him, crying with pain – that he did something to me that was quite different from the horrible, disgusting things he’d done so many times before.
Saying that my mother ‘went out to get me some medicine’ makes her sound like a considerably better parent than she actually was. In reality, though, she probably caused me more hurt and more long-lasting psychological damage than anyone else in my miserably unhappy childhood.
There were reasons why my mother failed so dismally in her duty to protect and care for me and my brother when we were children, and I suppose I understand – at least partly – why she behaved in the way she did. But when someone recently called me ‘an amazingly forgiving woman’, it made me wonder if I have, in fact, truly forgiven my mother.
For years, almost every aspect of my behaviour was influenced by anger and bitterness. I was resentful about what happened to me when I was a child and, above all, about the things my mother’s love of alcohol and lack of maternal care had deprived me of – including my childhood, a normal family life and any chance of being happy.
Living with my mother was like living in a nightmare in which the only certainty was that nothing good ever lasted. So I doubt whether I’d have been able – or willing – to start building a relationship with her as an adult if she hadn’t turned out to be a much better grandmother to my children than she had ever been a mother to me.
Perhaps ‘tenacious’ and ‘stubborn’ are better words to describe me than ‘forgiving’, because I think these are the characteristics that have been of most help to me on the many occasions when I’ve had to struggle to survive. And if I had to think of something positive that came out of my life as a child, it would be that I know how essential it is for children to have the love and stability that were so lacking in my own childhood.
My mother’s parents and some of my aunts and uncles showed me, briefly, that there is a better way to live, and I have a great deal to thank them for. I’m grateful, too, to my brother, for being there when I needed someone as a child, and for making me feel – then and now – that I’m not entirely alone.
For me, though, the most important driving force of all is the absolute love I have for my children.
I HATED BATH
time. The prospect of it hung like a black cloud over almost every single day. As soon as I got home from school, I’d start to dread it. I’d glance repeatedly at the clock in the kitchen or the one on the ugly mantelpiece in the living room and wish that the hands would stop turning and the minutes would stop ticking away so that bath time never came. However, I think it would have taken an earthquake, at least, to make Carl miss it. It didn’t matter how much I prayed, the time always came when he bellowed at my brother and me, ‘Bath!’
Normally, I tried not to be in the same room as Carl when bath time came around, because I always clung to the hope that if he couldn’t actually see me, one day he might forget. But he never did.
On this particular day, Carl, my mother and I had been watching something on television and I was sitting on the dirty floor at the side of the sofa, clutching my knees to my chest, when Carl shouted the word. Instantly, my stomach tied itself into a tight, hard knot and a sour-tasting liquid
rushed into my mouth so that I had to keep swallowing to stop myself being sick.
I hated Carl and I was very frightened of him, but I was determined not to jump to my feet immediately and scurry off up the stairs like a scared little rabbit. Instead, I sat completely still, pretending to be engrossed in the adverts that had followed the television programme, despite the fact that my eyes no longer seemed to be able to focus on the screen.
Suddenly, Carl leaned forward, grabbed my ear lobe between his thumb and forefinger and squeezed it painfully, digging his yellow fingernails into the tender flesh and jerking my head to the side as he bellowed into my face, ‘Oi! Did you hear what I just said? Looks like those ears of yours are going to need a good scrubbing out in the bath tonight.’ Then he kicked me hard on my leg with the toe of his boot and shouted, ‘I said, it’s bath time.’
I twisted my head away from him, tugging my throbbing ear lobe out of his grasp, and scrambled to my feet. I knew without looking at him the expression that would be on his ugly, unshaven face – the triumph in his nasty, spiteful, piggy eyes and the self-satisfied smirk on his thin lips.
I glanced towards my mother, but she continued to stare at the television screen, showing no sign that she’d
seen or heard any part of what had just happened, until she reached out her hand to touch Carl’s arm and said, ‘You’re too good to that kid. How many other men would leave a comfy seat on the sofa to give their stepdaughter a bath? She doesn’t deserve you.’
‘I’m not his stepdaughter! He’s not my stepdad!’ I yelled at my mother.
But she was right about one thing, although not in the way she meant it: I didn’t deserve Carl’s attention. At just six years old, what had I ever done to deserve Carl’s relentless, brutal abuse?
By the time I reached the top of the stairs, my little brother, Chris, was already in the bathroom. I could see him through the open doorway, standing, shivering, beside the bath in his T-shirt and underpants, his scrawny little shoulders hunched in miserable resignation.
Carl had followed me up the stairs, and when he’d run water into the bath – not scalding this time, which was at least something to be grateful for – he told us to strip off and get in.
Chris climbed in first, feeling the water with his toes for a moment before sitting down with his back to the taps. Then I got in and sat facing him and Carl stepped into the water behind me, pushing me forward roughly with his foot to make space for his repulsive, naked, tattooed body.
I hated it when Carl sat behind me – I hated him being in the bath anyway, but my heart always beat louder and faster when I couldn’t see what he was doing.
My brother was shaking like a frightened dog waiting for the next vicious, unprovoked kick from its master and I smiled at him – a small, quick smile – and then nodded my head once to try to reassure him. Or perhaps I was trying to reassure myself.
At that moment, Carl almost lifted me out of the water from behind and I felt a sharp, burning pain, as though someone had tried to push a red-hot poker inside me. I screamed, twisting my body as I tried to wriggle free of Carl’s grip. And Chris cried out too, responding instinctively to the shocked fear in my voice, and then he leaped to his feet and jumped out of the bath like a tightly coiled spring being suddenly released.
Immediately, I shot forward into the space where Chris had been sitting and spun round to look at Carl, who was cupping his hands between his legs as if he was trying to hide something, and looking nervously towards the bathroom door. In the split-second that his attention was distracted, I seized my opportunity and followed my brother out of the bath and across the landing into our bedroom.
Carl shouted after us, but we were already tugging on our nightclothes over wet skin. Then we ran down the
stairs to where our mother was still watching television and drinking rum in the relative safety of the living room.
Carl got his revenge, though, as he always did, because that night he beat us with his belt for dripping water on the bathroom floor. And the next night he made sure that he held me more tightly when he climbed into the bath behind me.
Cause and effect
BERNADETTE RESTED HER
head against the spindles of the high-backed oak chair and looked down at the baby that was sucking with single-minded determination at her breast. She ran her finger along the downy softness of her daughter’s cheek and then turned her head towards the open door. It was early spring, but the day had all the sun-soaked languor of midsummer and Bernadette released a slow sigh of contentment as she listened to the sound of the children playing in the garden.
