When my prayers were answered, it was such a huge relief, because I knew that when Daddy fell asleep, he never stirred again until 7 a.m.
He would get out of bed the minute he woke up and rarely said a word to anyone. Every day he put on his dirty clothes off the floor, smoothed Brylcreem through his greasy black hair, washed his teeth over the kitchen sink using a bar of carbolic soap and the family’s one toothbrush, splashed on some Old Spice and stormed off to work.
That was his routine every working day, and I loved hearing the door slam behind him as much as I loved hearing him fall asleep at night.
Even if Daddy left me alone in bed, though, I never slept well. My head itched really badly. It didn’t matter how much I scratched and scratched, the lice kept crawling all over my scalp, driving me mad.
I clawed and dug my fingernails deep into my scalp to make them stop, but that made the itching worse.
My skin crawled too, because all our beds were jumping with fleas. I knew this because if ever we had a visitor, Mammy used special powder to get rid of them, but otherwise she mostly didn’t bother.
I could feel them biting me all over as I lay there. I’d try my best not to itch, but when I couldn’t stand it any longer I would rake at my skin with my fingernails, making the bites bleed and weep. It felt like a thousand fleas gnawed at me every night, but however deeply I scratched the itching never stopped.
There was no heating in our house either, save for the coal fire in the living room, so in winter the bedroom was freezing cold. All the blankets and sheets smelled terrible and had dirty marks all over them. Some had blood and other nasty stains, but it was so cold I had to use them.
When there weren’t enough blankets to go round I put coats on top of me to keep warm. They prickled my skin and smelled of dust and dirt, but the cold was so bad I’d have huddled under anything to stop myself from freezing.
I always slept in just my vest and knickers, or just my knickers. I never owned a pair of pyjamas.
Mammy usually slept in her clothes. She did own a few satin nightgowns, given to her by one of my aunts, but she rarely bothered changing into them. She stayed up all night. Sometimes she didn’t come upstairs until just before 7 a.m., when Daddy got up. It meant they were hardly ever in bed together. Mammy said she had jobs to do downstairs at night like cleaning and washing, but our house was never clean and our clothes were always filthy.
The lino on the floor had a thick layer of dirt on top, the white bits on the patterned wallpaper were stained yellow like Mammy’s fingers and the kitchen at the back of the living room was covered in thick grease and grime. Daddy had to shout at Mammy to get her to wash his shirts for work when they got too dirty.
I felt very lonely lying in bed in the dark feeling smelly and dirty and itchy. I always stared into the blackness for hours, only falling asleep when misery and discomfort had sapped my very last drop of energy.
It was pitch black in the bedroom, even in summer, because Mammy insisted we always had a thick black blanket nailed over the window. It was the same with all the front windows in the house. The downstairs was just one room, and the front window looked on to the street, but you could never see out.
Mammy told me it was to keep the sun out, which I thought was a shame, because it meant the house always felt cold and gloomy and suffocating.
Mammy was forever telling us that what happened at home was ‘nobody’s business but ours’. I wondered if she put the black blankets up because really she didn’t want people to look in. ‘Don’t you go telling anyone what goes on in our house,’ she’d warn. ‘I don’t want anyone poking their nose in our business, do you hear?’
I knew she felt strongly about this, because usually she gave me a clout round the ear to emphasize her point. ‘Keep your mouth shut, you little bitch. Don’t answer the door. Don’t let anyone in, d’you hear me?’
The hall window was the ‘strictest’ window of all in the house, and Mammy was always going on about it.
‘Don’t you dare move that blanket, you little cow!’ she warned me, time and time again, raising her hand to show me what I would get if I disobeyed her.
Mammy only allowed us to have one lightbulb in the house, and that was usually used in the living room. I hated going to the toilet at night, not just because I was scared of spiders crawling up my ankles outside in the dark, but because I was terrified of picking my way through the pitch-black house and into the backyard to use it.
Mammy would sometimes put extra lightbulbs in if one of her relatives visited, but she took them out as soon as they left. It made me think that it couldn’t be right to keep the house in darkness - so why did she do it? Why didn’t she want us to see at night?
She told me it was because we couldn’t afford lightbulbs, but she said it with an odd look on her face, which made me think it wasn’t true. I knew we could afford cigarettes and alcohol, because we always had lots of Mammy’s favourite drinks, and she and Daddy smoked sixty cigarettes each a day. Lightbulbs cost less than cigarettes, didn’t they? I didn’t think we could be that poor.
The front
