S
omehow hearing the words that I was hungry for, words that told me I was special, were no longer enough to halt the unease I was beginning to feel. I wished there was someone whom I could ask if it was true that what we did was right. Or maybe I wanted someone to make him stop because I knew I couldn’t without making him angry and making him stop liking me. But who? I asked myself despairingly. Of course my dilemma was always whether I wanted to lose his companionship, for then I still believed he was my friend.
Instinctively I understood that this was not something to be talked about. And whom could I go to in any case? What I decided to do instead was avoid him.
Naively I believed that those words he had whispered to me for so long were genuine: that I was special to him, that he missed me when he did not see me, that I was his little lady. Believing that, I thought withholding my company from him would make him miss me. Then he would want to make me happy again and stop making me do things I did not want to.
But I was only just eight and did not understand that my wiles were useless when pitted against a man in his mid-thirties, and to my chagrin he appeared completely unperturbed by my absence. I had expected him to knock on our door and ask me how I was, or if I wanted to help polish his car, go for a walk with his dogs or just bring my brother over to play, but he did none of those things. I watched him from my bedroom window, head down, working on a car, and after what seemed like months but was probably barely a couple of weeks, my willpower broke. Out of the house I went and nervously approached him.
I cleared my throat, hoping he would look up with a smile. But for the first time ever he did not respond with his customary wide smile of greeting. He acted as though he was, if not unaware, then indifferent to my presence. I stood there for a moment feeling that I was being ignored, and then in a tiny voice asked if there was anything I could do to help.
He raised his head slowly without a flicker of a smile and looked at me dismissively.
‘No, Marianne, I don’t think so. You are still a little girl. I thought you were different but you aren’t. I don’t want help from little girls, so run along and play now.’
I felt something cold in the pit of my stomach that made me tremble.
All thought of what I had been trying to achieve left my mind. I was scared then, scared that he meant it, for if he was no longer my friend then who did I have?
‘I’m not just a little girl,’ I managed to reply as, with head down, I shifted from foot to foot.
‘Well, if you are not a little girl who are you then?’ he asked. But I had no answer for that and just hung my head.
‘Well, are you my little lady then?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, and he smiled at the victory that had taken him such a short time to win.
That was another boundary pushed to the limit, and another step was taken.
I once heard a famous actress say in an interview that we have to experience misery to appreciate the times when we find happiness. I think that she got that sentiment wrong. We don’t know how unhappy we are until we experience the opposite emotion. We only feel the need to be loved once we have experienced it and, at eight, I knew I did not want to lose affection from the first person who had shown it to me.
I had no understanding of what was really happening, that he was watering the seeds of my dependence with his kind words and caresses, nurturing my need for his friendship.
But it was when I met the man with no legs that the biggest step of my childhood was taken.
I
t only took a week for my confusion to return. We were parked in the woodland area, and once again I had done something I did not want to. This time there had been little of the gentle stroking and the cuddles that I liked. Instead his hand had gripped my head and forced it firmly against his chest and my hand had been pushed down into his lap. I did not hear the gentle voice murmuring endearments into my ear but instead the sound of deep grunts that left his mouth as his body stiffened against mine.
A warm sticky fluid spread under my fingers, then clung to them. A sour smell rose into the air. I held my breath, not wanting to breathe it in.
He lifted my wet hand up to my mouth, forcing one of my fingers into it.
‘Suck, Marianne, you’ll like it,’ he said, watching me closely. My finger tasted salty and the odd smell had come even closer to my nose. I tried to pull it from my mouth and he laughed. For the first time since I had met him I felt his laughter was not with me but at me.
Those treacherous tears of mine had flooded my eyes, overspilled and trickled down my cheek. My face was turned from his but I could feel the warmth of his body next to me on the car seat, hear his breathing, smell his aftershave and hear his voice.
‘Come on, little lady! Don’t be a silly little girl. Come on, look at me.’
His fingers went under my chin, turned my face towards him and tilted it upwards until his eyes looked into mine.
‘Marianne, have you seen your baby brother without his clothes?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered.
‘Well, what do boys have down there?’ And he pointed to that something that still flopped outside his trousers, that something that he wanted me to hold, that something that I had just seen grow as though it had a life of its own.
Still I couldn’t speak. I wanted him to put it away. It did not look like the little winkle that my brother had.
But he didn’t. Instead his voice, light and slightly amused, continued.
‘One of those, you silly girl. Every little boy has one, you know. It’s just that I’m a man, so it’s bigger. You’ll enjoy touching it soon. It’s what big girls like to do.’
I knew I wouldn’t. I had not liked its hard hot feel as it pressed against my stomach, nor had I liked the way it leaked all over my hand. But I could not find the words to explain how I felt.
He saw the confusion in my face and returned in a split second to being my friend, the man who cared for me. My fingers were wiped clean, my head was stroked, my hair was smoothed back in place and a sweet found its way from his glove compartment into my mouth.
He came to our house later that evening. ‘Got to go into town to see someone. Thought I would get us all a fish supper after,’ he said to my mother.
He laughingly waived aside her protests that she could not let him pay for it. ‘Don’t worry your head about that. I had a bit of a windfall this afternoon so it’s my treat. I’ll get enough for everyone. You can bring the kids over to mine. We’ll eat there.’
My mother, faced with an evening where there would be no samey meal of stew and no washing up, smiled a grateful acceptance of this generous offer.
‘I’ll get enough for your husband as well, so there will be a hot dinner for him when he returns. With nothing more for you to do, you can just relax round ours with Dora. I’ll only be with this chap about half an hour or so. I’ll take Marianne to help carry everything, if that’s all right.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ I blurted out.
‘Whatever’s got into you, Marianne?’ my mother asked furiously. ‘You just say you’re sorry for being so rude.’
I thought, ‘Why could she not guess? Why can’t she see why he wants me to go too? Maybe she doesn’t care?’ My head was spinning round as to how to get out of going. But I knew that further protests were useless. All they would earn me was her hand across the back of my legs and being sent to bed with no supper.
I sighed with resentment and, without answering, got up from my seat.
‘Maybe she’s a bit under the weather,’ he said, looking at me with a concerned expression. ‘Come on, Marianne, a drive in the car will do you good. Won’t it?’ he said, turning to my mother.
‘Course it will,’ she answered, throwing me a look bordering on hostility and quickly turning to smile gratefully at him.
The man next door stretched out his hand, closed his fingers round mine and then led me out of the house.
My skin prickled with bumps of fear. Surely there would be some sort of punishment for me, some recrimination for my outburst. A slap, perhaps, for my rudeness and for drawing attention to his interest in me. But I still had no understanding of the type of man he really was. He was never going to act as my father would have done when thwarted. Not for him a show of explosive rage, followed by the lashing out of fists. That he would have considered crude and barbaric. Neither would he have considered it dignified to emit harsh shouts and a torrent of foul language.
No. His cruelty was subtle, and I was just about to receive a lesson in it, a lesson I did not recognize that night as having been given. His method of winning control was made up of equal quantities of manipulation and intimidation. Once he was satisfied that he had inflicted a wound that had cut deep, he then applied a dressing of praise and justification. It was only done for my own good, he would say. Once he had hurt me, once I knew he had caused the pain, it was he who would make everything better.
As we drove into the town he turned into a dark street I had never seen before and pulled up in front of a row of derelict red-bricked houses. Remnants of tattered curtains blew out of broken windows and doors hung off rotten wood frames, showing the bare skeletons of staircases and crumbling inner walls.
My heart sunk. Where has he brought me now? I wondered.
Seeing my apprehension, he put his arm lightly on my shoulder and smiled at me – that warm smile I liked and trusted, and seeing it, I felt myself relax.
‘I remember all your stories, you know, Marianne,’ he said. ‘Especially those ones about the people who once lived in the farmer’s old house.’ Surprised at the turn of conversation, I gave him an inquiring look.
‘Come on, out you get. I’ve got something to show you here.’
Pushing aside my misgivings, I obediently followed him through one of the doors and saw that he had led me into the husk of what must have been the street’s corner shop.
Standing there looking around that empty place, he told me that as a boy his grandmother had lived in one of the houses and he had played in the street outside where we had parked. ‘Look around you,’ he said, pointing to the empty shelves. Then he started describing what the shop had once looked like. Its shelves had been full of jars of sweets, packets of tea, tinned food, fresh eggs and household items. The shopkeeper had stood for nearly twelve hours a day behind the battered counter, wrapping goods in paper parcels and selling cigarettes singly to the poor and giving credit to women who were waiting for their husband’s weekly pay packet to arrive. As he spoke, I too imagined what that once fully stocked shop had looked like.
‘See that nail,’ he said, pointing to one near where he told me the till had been placed. ‘That’s where he hung the book after he wrote down everything that was owed. Lots of people had to live on tick then.’
As a paintbrush delicately paints pictures on canvases, so his words coloured in scenes of life in that street before the war broke out. I saw groups of scab-kneed raggedy boys playing hopscotch and cricket, rolling brightly coloured marbles and collecting John Player’s cigarette cards. Enthralled by his story-telling, I listened to how the same boys earned pennies for running errands for someone richer and older than they. How they then came into the shop clutching their shiny coin as they chose between buying a toffee apple, a packet of pink bubble gum or a black and white gobstopper.
‘I always liked those big stoppers,’ he said with a grin, and I tried to imagine him as he was then, but I couldn’t.
He told me what it was like when war broke out and smooth-skinned teenage boys still too young to vote left the street to fight for king and country. How women said goodbye to their sons and husbands and waited for news of them. He described the air of despair that hung over the street when a telegram boy was seen calling on a house, for its arrival normally announced the death of someone serving in the war. He told of the bombers that droned in the night and the loads that fell over the East End and Essex and how the Battle of Britain had raged in the skies overhead.
He described the street party that was thrown to celebrate the end of the war and how the street waited impatiently for its men to return.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this street was once a great community, but now it’s being pulled down to make way for some of those new blocks of council flats.’
He paused then and looked at his watch, and I knew his story telling had finished.
‘Anyhow, you have a good look around these rooms and behind the counter. I’ll pop round the corner to see that mate of mine and come back for you.’ And before I could protest, he had gone.
And it was then that two things happened simultaneously which made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.
I saw a door I hadn’t noticed before on the other side of the counter slowly open, letting in a dim light that cast shadows across the floor, and I heard a slithering, sliding noise that I did not recognize. The shadows in the doorway deepened, then moved, and as I watched a shape materialized, a shape that was smaller than me.
The light was behind it and I could not at first make out what it was. Then as it emerged further into the shop I could see what appeared to be the head and shoulders of a man who would not have reached my waist – for he had no legs.
His torso, clad in an old army jacket, was resting on a thick mat, while in each hand he held an oblong brick. It was these he used to propel himself along and it was the mat moving with him that had made that foreign slithering sound.
Long grey hair fell in greasy strands to his shoulders, while his mouth was almost obscured by his thick yellow-stained moustache and unkempt beard.
Run
, silently screamed a voice in my head, but fear kept me rooted to the spot as I gazed in horror at what looked like a creature from some macabre fairy tale – a creature that, by some freak accident, had been lifted from the pages of a book and thrown into a world he did not know, and only ever having existed with the reading of a story, his red-rimmed pale-grey eyes, where both anger and fear lurked, blinked at a world he knew he did not belong to.
I saw a monster! Hadn’t my mother threatened me with them when I had been naughty? I did not see his deformity as being tragic, for I was too young to feel pity yet. Instead the revulsion I felt as we looked at each other turned my legs to jelly and sent goose pimples up my arms.
Run
, my inner voice urged me again, but I was momentarily paralysed with a mind-numbing fear that I had no understanding of.
His mouth opened to reveal both a glistening red tongue and the jagged edges of his few remaining black teeth, and from it came a gurgling guttural sound like nothing I had heard before. I screamed one long loud scream of terror.
At that sound his eyes gazed into mine and the muscles of his arms strained against the worn fabric of his jacket as he clenched his two bricks. For a second I thought he was going to come closer, but instead he furiously propelled his body around and returned through the door he had come from, leaving behind a smell both musty and sour tainting the air. It was then that I regained the power to move and, stumbling in my haste to escape, I threw myself sobbing out of the door and into the deserted street.
Strong arms picked me up and a voice whispered in my ear, ‘Shush little lady,’ and a hand gently smoothed my hair.
‘The bogey man’s in there,’ I wailed.
‘You’re all right now,’ said the man from next door. ‘Nothing is going to happen to you now I’m here.’
My arms went around his neck, my head rested on his shoulder – he had saved me.
He started the car and drove us to the fish and chip shop. On the drive home I nursed the newspaper-covered packages, trying to warm my fingers, fingers that on that warm summer night were freezing cold.
I did not ask him why he had left me there. That question did not come to me until much later when I heard the tragic story of the man with no legs.
In the last year of the war he had turned eighteen and had received his call-up papers telling him to report for duty. Two months later he had returned home on a stretcher. A land mine had blown up; his legs were amputated in a field hospital where blood-stained doctors, working with little light and even less anaesthetic, had sawn off his legs. Not being able to face people who looked at him with pity and repugnance, he hid himself in the darkness of tumble-down houses. Nobody knew where his family was, and after the street where I had seen him was reduced to a pile of rubble by the demolition gangs no one saw him again.
I did not learn that until I entered my teens, and by then I knew who the real monster was. But for the rest of that summer when I was only eight the man next door remained my hero.