Don’t Tell Mummy by Toni Maguire Read Free Book Online

carrots were the only survivors of the vegetable patch.
    Holidays, now that I was twelve months older, brought more household jobs such as using a strainer to remove frogs from water buckets, collecting kindling for the stove and searching for eggs. Unwilling to use the coops provided, the free-range chickens hid their nests in far corners, some in our yard, others tucked away under bushes in the adjoining fields. The deep litter barn housed the majority of them, and every day baskets would be filled ready for the grocer’s twice-weekly visits, when he bought our eggs and provided us with groceries.
    Each morning I was sent to the local farmer to collect milk that came in metal cans; those were the days before people worried about pasteurization. Each day the farmer’s wife would invite me into her warm kitchen and give me milky tea and warm soda bread before I headed home.
    During the days I was too busy to worry about the changing atmosphere in our home. The apprehension I’d felt a year ago had become a reality. My mother’s happiness was controlled by her husband’s moods. Without public transport, with no control over money and not even a public phone within walking distance, the happy woman who once sat laughing in Kent teashops seemed a distant memory. Only Judy and a very tattered Jumbo remained as reminders of those days.
    Once dusk fell I would sit reading my books in the orange light of the Tilly lamps, while my mother waited for my father to come home. I would sit quietly, hoping that quietness made me invisible.
    Some evenings before I went to bed his car could be heard as it drove into our gravel yard. Then she would leap up, placing the kettle on the stove, putting his previously prepared dinner on a plate and a smile of welcome on her face. Butterflies would knot my stomach as I wondered which father would appear at the door. Would it be the cheerful jovial one flourishing a box of chocolates for my mother and chucking me under the chin? Or the scowling man I’d first seen in the lane and who had appeared more and more frequently after that?
    The former could change into the latter at any imaginary slight. My mere presence, I knew, annoyed him. I could feel his gaze on me as I kept my eyes glued to my book, feeling the silent tension build up.
    ‘Can you not help your mother more?’ was a question he would put to me repeatedly.
    ‘What are you reading now?’ was another.
    My mother, still in love with the handsome man who had met us at the docks, was oblivious to my plight. If I put any questions to her in the daytime, as to why my father was often so angry with me, she just told me to try and please him more.
    On the nights when the car had not returned before I went to bed my mother’s brightness would fade and I would be awoken in the middle of the night by raised voices. The arguing would continue until his drunken shouts finally subdued her. The mornings following these nights would be strained as my mother silently went about the house and Imade any excuse to leave it. Those nights were frequently followed by the return of the jovial father the next day, bringing sweets home for me and asking how his ‘wee girl’ was. He would hand flowers or chocolates to my mother, kissing her on the cheek, bringing her momentary happiness.
    I came to dread weekends. Every Friday my mother would wait for her husband, who seldom appeared, and I would be awakened by their rows, indistinguishable words of anger invading my room, fear binding me to my bed as I burrowed under the blankets, trying to escape the ugly sounds.
    Every Saturday morning, lying in bed with a self-inflicted headache, he would command my mother to send me into his room with cups of tea. Tight lipped, she would obey, restricting me to staying near the house. Visits to the farmhouse to collect the milk were now monitored; no more cups of milky tea and warm buttered bread with the friendly farmer’s wife.
    I seemed to be a magnet for his