Member-only story
Keeping House
He loves to make me feel bad. He thinks I’m stupid. Just because I left school early. I would have gone back. I’m sure I would. I didn’t have a choice really.
Ma was ill. If I didn’t leave and go to work, we’d have starved. It didn’t hurt that I really hated school, mind. Dad was a drunk. Ma used to put the money in jars in the larder. Before a night out, he’d go in there and tip em all out into his pocket. When Ma was well, she’d catch him. She’d get half of it back if she was lucky. If she wasn’t lucky she’d get none and a clout round the head as extra. He used to knock her over. She’d have bruises all over. She’d send me to hide till he’d gone out. I used to sit on the stairs and listen. He screamed at her. She tried to calm him. Then it came, the thump, and a crash as he sent her flying into the pots and pans that stood on the floor in a pile.
Once, when he did that, I saw a rat dash out before she fell and run past me into a hole in the floorboard. Then he’d go out the back, slamming the door, making the house shake. When I went into the kitchen, Ma would be sitting on the floor in the middle of the pile of pans. I’d try to help her up, but she’d slap my hand away. “Go on, child. Away with ye” she’d say in her lilting Irish accent that really didn’t fit in this tiny welsh mining village.
