It probably sounds insane that I wanted to go back home, but I didn’t see it as returning to 4 White’s Villas. I saw it as returning to my friends and my siblings and everything that was familiar to me in Dalkey. The abuse had stopped after my second pregnancy. I assume, now, that I simply became too old to be a victim of child abuse, but I didn’t work that out then. I was just relieved that that part of my life was over. Looking back, I think I was so traumatized that some sort of self-defence mechanism kicked in, making me shut out the memories so I didn’t have to keep reliving the horrors of my past.
The sleeping arrangements had changed when I got back home. My nine-year-old brother was in the back bedroom. Little Theresa, who was five and like a sister to me, was in the double bed in the front room with my parents, and my other brother, also five, had the single bed in the same room, which I shared.
Almost as soon as I’d got back home, I noticed Mammy using Daddy as a threat to get Theresa into bed at night: ‘If you’re not in bed when Daddy gets home, he’ll get angry and beat me,’ she said.
Her words made me shudder, but I wasn’t sure why.
One night, I heard my sister whimpering very quietly in the dark. Next she was sobbing, and I could hear Daddy shuffling in the bed.
I lay awake, too scared to sleep. Surely Daddy wouldn’t hurt her? My own abuse was pushed so far to the back of mind I didn’t think about how he had abused me in the past. I didn’t want to remember. I was still a child inside, and a severely traumatized one at that. I didn’t have a clue how to handle the situation.
When it happened again the next night, I called out. ‘Daddy, are you talking in your sleep? I think you’re frightening Theresa.’
He was drunk and ignored me, so I crept downstairs and told Mammy that Daddy was scaring Theresa. Even at that age, and despite my rebellious episodes, I was still terrified of both my parents.
‘He’s just rolling around drunk,’ said Mammy casually. The words nearly killed me, because all of a sudden I remembered when she had said that to me. I erupted with anger. ‘Go up and get that filthy bastard off my sister or I will smash this house up.’ Mammy laughed and said I was crazy. The next night she sent me to sleep in the back bedroom, and I obeyed. Being in that house made me feel like a helpless child again.
I drank to forget whenever I could, but one night Theresa smiled at me with her beautiful brown eyes and I felt an enormous pang of guilt. How could I stand by and let her be harmed?
I now drank whatever I could get my hands on. For a while I even downed bottles of cough mixture, just to block out my past and what was happening now. I drank cider regularly with my friends at the youth club, too, and it was there that I met the man who became my first husband, when I was fifteen and drunk.
The first time I took him home, Mammy amazed me by welcoming him with open arms, and she seemed thrilled when he eventually proposed. I agreed to marry him, mainly because I desperately wanted to get out of 4 White’s Villas.
Around this time, I had dreadful flashbacks of Noleen dying. I saw blood on her face and a knitting needle in a hand. I knew something awful had happened in my childhood, but I was terrified of confronting my memories, and I just didn’t analyse them. I hoped moving out might help me leave the terrors of the past behind.
I was nineteen and pregnant again when I got married. Daddy came with me in the wedding car. I wanted to feel lovely sitting there in my flowing white gown, but when I looked at Daddy’s dirty fingernails and smelled the stale smoke on his breath, I just felt sick. I knew he was part of the horror of my childhood, but I didn’t dare think too deeply about it, even when the familiar feelings of pregnancy tormented me with dark and distant memories. They were just too horrible to explore.
I’d been elated when the doctor confirmed I was expecting, and I told myself I would cherish this baby and surround it with so much love you wouldn’t believe it. That was my plan. I was moving on to a happy new phase in my life, or so I hoped.
I gave birth in the summer. When my waters broke, it stirred terrible black thoughts in my head, but again I tried to block them out. Ma had offered to be with me for the birth, but I didn’t want her anywhere near me. She still scared me, even now I was a married woman. She offered to knit a jacket for the new baby, despite the fact she hadn’t done any knitting for many years.
Her behaviour baffled me at the time, because she was being uncharacteristically helpful, but I know now she was trying to put the past behind her too, to save her own neck. If only it were that easy.
It was a difficult birth, and my baby son was placed in an incubator. ‘Mammy loves you,’ I whispered, holding his tiny hand in mine. I felt an overwhelming surge of love for him. It was so powerful it took my breath away. I knew in that instant that I had never
