I have some clear and real memories of outings in the car when I was little when my parents didn’t argue. And when I wasn’t afraid. Or anxious. Or confused.
I remember that we went to the New Forest once to see the ponies. We stayed in a small hotel for a long weekend treat and went on outings every day. Walks and picnics. I enjoyed the ponies but was a little bit scared as they had quite big mouths. I watched one chewing the grass and I could see huge teeth.
Why don’t you offer the pony a Polo mint, Rachel? My father’s voice.
No way. And I remember thinking the pony would ‘have my hand off’。
I also remember my parents laughing and I’m sure that picture is real. I can’t be certain of my age – six, maybe seven, I reckon. But I don’t think my dad was drinking then.
My mum was a nurse. A really good one. She specialised in premature babies and worked part-time when I was in primary school while my father worked in a car factory. It was a very ordinary and solid sort of start, I guess. We owned our own little semi with a small garage and a small garden. My father worked hard and spent the weekends in the garden. And if you’d asked the little girl on that trip to the New Forest if she was happy, she would have said yes. But she would like a sister, please. Not a pony.
And then things started to change. Raised voices. More and more arguments. I don’t know what triggered the change but I would see my dad staying up late with a glass of Scotch. He liked crystal glasses and expensive Scotch. It upset my mum.
Why don’t you come to bed, love?
This went on for a while and then my dad lost his job. I learned much later that this was because of the drinking. I can only guess that towards the end of his time at the factory, he was what you would now call a functioning alcoholic. I didn’t see him drunk back then. I saw him with a beer often. I saw him with those glasses of Scotch. But I don’t remember as a small child seeing him drunk. Or difficult. Or belligerent.
That all came after he lost his job.
I’ve never properly talked it through with my mum. I don’t know why. I don’t want to cause her more pain or make her feel guilty. It wasn’t her fault. And there’s not much point now, so I’ve put all this together myself. I may have some of it wrong but I do remember the creeping awareness of a dangerous change. It was like playing Jenga when someone has much too early removed the wrong blocks and made the tower prematurely unstable. You know it’s all going to come down but you just have to keep playing. Moving ever so carefully.
Bottom line – my father couldn’t get another job and so his drinking got much worse.
He no longer had to try to look sober to hang on to a job, so he didn’t bother. My mother switched to full-time work, taking on the night shifts for better pay. She also signed up with an agency for extra weekend shifts and so was hardly home. She explained all this to me, sitting on my bed before she left for work, whispering that the ‘difficult time’ was temporary and she hoped with all her heart that she could be home more very soon. That things would improve when Dad got a new job.
He, meantime, became very argumentative and very bitter. He started to rant at the news on the telly. Rant at the news in the newspapers. Rant at anything and everything; and I started to see him drunk. A lot. They started to argue in the kitchen in the early evening when she was getting ready for work. I would be up on my bed, eyes wide and my hands over my ears, no idea what I was supposed to do.
And that’s when the battle and the humiliation over my packed lunches began.
Mum didn’t have time to make my lunch and Dad insisted it was his job. She was obviously wary and said that she would find time but it became like a red rag to a bull. An issue of pride. Don’t you trust me? Are you saying I can’t make a packed lunch for my daughter? Is that what you’re saying?
Hot lunches were expensive and Mum made me a cooked meal before she left for her night shift so a dangerous new routine was agreed. Dad was supposed to make my lunchbox before he went to bed. I think I was around eight so maybe I should have been more independent and stepped up to make them myself. But I didn’t.
My lunchbox became like this fuse. This ticking bomb.
The trouble started with small things. I would get to school and find that Dad had put something odd in. A lime instead of an apple. A can of sardines. People would laugh and I pretended it was a joke. That he did it deliberately to make me laugh.
I started to check my packed lunch in the playground. If there was anything too weird, I’d chuck the whole contents in a bin. But I got caught and the teacher got the wrong end of the stick; started to worry I had some kind of eating disorder.