Wake Up, Mummy (13 page)

I should have been happy. But I seemed to have lost the
capacity for happiness. Although I loved my children with all my heart, and I was pleased that they were getting all the things I didn’t have as a child – the material things as well as the love I’d always longed for – I still seemed unable ever to relax. I always felt as though there was more I could be doing for them, and I was always haunted by the fear that people would realise I wasn’t really the person I was pretending to be.

I tried to remind myself that what had happened to me in my childhood wasn’t my fault, but when Carl abused me he planted a tiny, destructive worm in my heart, which kept gnawing away at my self-respect and confidence. The best I could hope for was to be able to keep my depression locked up inside me so that I could get through each day and be ready to face the next one.

It sounds melodramatic to say that my children saved my life – and that they continue to do so every single day. But it’s true, because without the thought of how terrible it would be for them, there were – and still are – many, many days on which I’d have given up the endless, exhausting battle to keep going and taken my own life.

WE’D BEEN IN
our new house for a couple of years when I began to notice that Ken often let his phone ring without answering it. There’d already been the occasional sign that we might be running short of money, and then,
one day, he told me he’d taken out a very large loan because he was having problems with the business.

‘But I don’t understand,’ I told him. ‘What’s happened? Have people stopped coming to the bars? How can they be popular and making good money one minute, and then running at a loss the next?’

I thought he was going to hit me, but he just snarled, ‘Don’t interfere in things you don’t understand,’ and left the room.

A few days later, after the children had gone to bed and I was tidying the kitchen, he came in and sat down at the table.

‘I’m going to have to remortgage the house,’ he told me, and although his voice sounded casual, he refused to look me in the face.

‘What do you mean? Why?’ I asked, not really understanding what he was saying.

‘Oh, it’s nothing important.’ I could tell he was starting to get irritated, and that he was struggling not to show it. ‘I’ll pay it back before the end of the year. I just need some money upfront to keep the business going.’

The thought of losing the house made me feel physically sick. To me, it wasn’t just bricks and mortar; it represented respectability and acceptance for my children. It was a house in the sort of neighbourhood I’d always wanted to live in, a neighbourhood where normal
people lived, with children who were contented and well cared for and who were going to have the opportunity to make something of their lives. I’d worked hard to drag myself up out of the filthy chaos of my childhood to live in that house, and I wasn’t sure that the ragged remains of my self-esteem would survive losing it, because that would mean I’d failed, and I’d sworn to myself long ago that I wasn’t, ever, going to let my children down.

‘I just need you to sign the papers.’ Ken was still refusing to look directly at me, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to hide his impatience.

‘No!’ I almost shouted. ‘I’m not signing any papers. You can remortgage your share of the house, but you’re not touching mine. This is all I’ve got, and I’m not going to risk losing it, not even to save the business. There
must
be another way.’

‘There’s no other way, you stupid bitch,’ Ken screamed at me. ‘Do you think I’d be doing it if there was another way? This is the
only
way. So just sign the fucking papers.’

I held out against him for as long as I could, while he shouted and threatened and swore at me. Then I signed the papers and went to bed, where I cried myself to sleep.

I hadn’t had any idea about how bad things were with the business. It had all happened so quickly. I knew that Ken’s business partner, Barry, had disappeared. But both bars had remained open after he’d gone and had, apparently,
continued to be as popular as they’d ever been. And then debts had started to build up that Ken had refused to explain to me – not that he’d ever really discussed his business with me anyway.

Even after I’d signed away our security by enabling Ken to remortgage the house, he seemed to continue to become paler, older-looking and more strained with each day that passed. Eventually, when it seemed that he was near breaking point, he sat me down in the living room and explained what had really happened.

‘After Barry left, these guys came to the bar,’ he told me. ‘They said Barry owed them money. They were debts that weren’t connected with the bars, or with me, but they didn’t care who paid them.’

His hands were trembling and as he leaned forward to pick up his glass, he splashed drink on to the sofa.

‘It was a great deal of money,’ he continued. ‘More than a hundred K. I told them I didn’t have that sort of cash, but they just said I had three days to find it. At first, they told me it was just one payment and that, once I’d paid it, they wouldn’t need to bother me any more. I kept trying to get in touch with Barry, but he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the fucking earth. So I had no choice.’

After that, they kept coming back for more money, until Ken eventually told them that all his sources had
run dry – which is when they’d held a gun to his head. He cried when he told me that, and when he said he’d thought he was going to die, all alone in the stockroom at the bar. He’d already borrowed from the bank and from every loan company he could think of, and then he’d remortgaged the house. In the end, he’d paid them more than half a million pounds.

‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ I asked, torn between sympathy for him and fury at the thought that we had nothing left, except huge debts we couldn’t possibly ever pay back.

‘I thought I could handle it,’ he said, an edge of arrogant irritation creeping back into his voice. ‘The first time, I believed them when they said it was just one payment. I thought Barry had left owing them some money and they’d just take it and go. But they kept coming back. Then they started threatening to wreck the bars and they told me they’d kill you and the kids if I didn’t keep paying. So what else could I do?’

I wanted to scream at him, ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ I knew it wasn’t fair to blame him – he’d been frightened and out of his depth and it had been far too late to back out by the time he realised they were never going to leave him alone. But I couldn’t help it: everything we’d built up was starting to fall apart. We’d remortgaged the house for almost the full market value, and now we were going to
have to sell it to pay off just one of the loans. We’d never get out of debt, however hard we worked.

The next day, we put the house up for sale. But before the agent had a chance to show anyone round, we decided to do a flit and go to Spain, where my mother was living with her new husband. We couldn’t tell anyone what we were planning to do, and I felt like a child again, having to keep secrets. Within a few days, we’d packed up the house, taken the kids out of school and fled the country.

My eldest son has always been very close to my mother, but, of all the children, he was the one who found it most difficult to settle in Spain. The others were younger, and although they were initially upset about leaving behind everything and everyone they were used to, they soon adapted to their new life. But it was different for my eldest son: he was a teenager, with friends and a life of his own in England, and he started to become withdrawn and depressed. I worried about him constantly, and about how Ken and I were going to start our lives all over again.

I felt as though I’d suffered a bereavement. We’d lost everything and we were completely broke. It seemed so unfair, and I began to hate Ken. The house in England was empty and when the agent did eventually find a buyer for it, the price he offered was less than we owed on the mortgage. I deeply regretted having signed the papers to remortgage it, which I never would have done
if Ken hadn’t threatened and bullied me. I tried to tell myself that it was just a house; that what really mattered was that Ken and the children were safe and we were all together. But it was more than just a house to me. It was a symbol of all the things I didn’t have when I was growing up, all the things I’d wanted my children to have, and all the things I’d worked so hard and overcome so much to get for them.

Whatever people like to think, everyone makes judgements based on appearances and first impressions – and not always without good reason. If you live in the dirtiest, most run-down house on the worst council estate in the area, people make assumptions about you, even when you’re a child. They never stop to think that maybe you hate living there, that maybe you spend hours trying to combat the filth and make some sort of order out of the chaos, and maybe you’d give anything in the world to live somewhere nice with someone who cared about you. Because the truth is that no kids like ‘living in their own shit’, as our neighbours believed all those years ago.

I don’t know how much Ken really cared about me. In the days before things started to go wrong, he
had
worked hard, but then he’d spent most of his non-working hours drinking with his mates, which meant that the only time he really gave me any attention was when he was drunk and spoiling for a fight. That hadn’t mattered, though,
because I’d never expected anyone to love me and because he’d provided for me and the children, which was the most I’d ever hoped for.

We’d been in Spain for three months when I suddenly felt as though I’d woken up. It was wrong that the children and I had lost our home. I hadn’t signed the papers willingly; I’d had no choice at the time, because Ken had threatened me and told me that the people he’d got tied up with were going to kill him if he didn’t raise the money to pay them off. I became obsessed with the belief that if there isn’t a law to protect people in that sort of situation, then there should be. Our creditors hadn’t needed to fight, because I’d just given in and let them take our home away from us.

My whole reason for staying alive is because I know my children need me. The nearest I come to feeling happy is when I know that they’re happy. And as my eldest son became increasingly depressed, I felt as though I’d let him down. I’d spent my entire life trying to run away from something, and suddenly I realised that I could never escape the thing I was really running away from: me.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew that I wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

THE NEXT DAY,
I told Ken and my mother and stepfather I was leaving. Then I packed suitcases for myself and the children, and two days later we were back in England, staying at my aunt’s house. Ken followed us after a few days, but our relationship wasn’t strong enough to survive so much stress, and we split up. The children and I moved back into the house, Ken rented a flat not far away, and I began to try to work out how I could fight the mortgage company for the right to continue to pay the mortgage on our home.

I knew it was going to be an uneven fight and I don’t think I really held out much hope of winning against a large company and its team of legal experts. But it felt as though all my life people had been making me do things that clearly weren’t fair or just, and I’d never even realised I might have the right to say, ‘No. This isn’t what I want.’ On the occasions when I had tried to express an opinion,
no one had listened to me; in fact, no one had ever seemed to hear me at all. So although I didn’t know what I was going to do, I did know that I had to try to do
something
, because I was sick to death of being pushed around.

The mortgage company was in the process of taking us to court so that they could repossess our house, and Ken had given up. He’d been arrogant to think he could deal alone with the low-lifes he’d inadvertently become entangled with. He’d given them everything we had, as well as all the money he could borrow, before realising he might never be able to get them off his back. I knew he’d been really frightened when they’d threatened his life, so, in some ways, I could understand why he wanted to walk away from the whole mess, let the mortgage company have the house, and just be thankful he was still alive.

I was glad he hadn’t been hurt, of course, but I was still furious with him for not going to the police right at the start. When I tried to explain to him what the house meant to me, he was defensive, shrugging his shoulders and saying spitefully, ‘I can’t see what you’re moaning about. You came from a council estate. So, if we lose the house, you’ll just be going back where you came from.’

And, although he was sneering at me, he’d actually identified what lay at the very heart of what losing the house meant to me. It wasn’t the house as a material possession that mattered; it was what it represented. For
as long as I can remember, ever since I was a small child and, first, my father ignored and disliked me, then Carl abused me, I’ve lived with the knowledge that I’m worthless – literally, worth nothing. There have been many, many days when, if it hadn’t been for my children and for my own, immensely painful, childhood memories of finding my mother unconscious after she’d tried to commit suicide, I’d have killed myself without a second thought. But, however tempted I’ve been, I’ve never done it, because I know that, just like I needed my mother and suffered because she was never there for me, my children need me. The nice, clean, comfortable house I’d worked so hard for represented all the things I wanted to give them, including stability, a decent, well-ordered family life in a home they weren’t ashamed to bring their friends to, and normality.

It wasn’t living on a council estate that I objected to. It was all the terrible things in my childhood that would have been associated with taking that step backwards. It was as though my past was an animal with sharp teeth that was always snapping at my heels, waiting for me to stumble so that it could pounce and drag me back down into the nightmare from which I’d finally managed to escape. It was an image that haunted my dreams – both waking and asleep – and I knew it was my responsibility to prevent my children ever having to experience a childhood
like the one I’d had. I’d worked hard to build a protective cocoon around them, and I knew that if I made one false step, I could pull them down with me into a life without hope.