Joe Peters Read online

  I imagine that one of the reasons he liked going to work was because it took him away from the pressures of his private life. No man trying to please two women is likely to be having an easy time of it from either of them, however charming he might be. It was a situation totally of his own making, of course, but that wouldn’t have made it any easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis. The easygoing banter of his workmates must have seemed like a rest cure compared to what was going on in his personal life.

  Actually, nothing would ever have made Mum an easy person to deal with by then. If she had been angry with life after the loss of her fourth baby and the collapse of her first marriage, she was even angrier when she discovered she now had a husband who was blatantly sleeping with her best friend and making it obvious that he preferred her company. I don’t think Dad was making any secret of how he felt about Marie, which must have been hard for Mum to handle, but at the same time I doubt if Mum was making much of an effort to win him back with charm, knowing what her temper was like. It’s always hard to know exactly what goes on in other people’s relationships and I was certainly too young to understand anything of the emotional whirlwind swirling around me in those first five years of my life. All I knew was that Dad was my protector, whereas Mum was quite likely to give me a beating for no apparent reason if he wasn’t looking after me. Maybe my older brothers had undergone exactly the same levels of discipline when they were small, but Dad hadn’t been around to protect them. They weren’t really his problem. His main concern became keeping me safe from her anger and he did that by having me with him at every possible moment.

  Because we were always together and because he made no secret of how much he loved me, Mum began to view me as an extension of him. She saw me as part of the conspiracy against her, part of a team with Dad and Marie, part of her humiliation. Knowing that I was the most precious thing in the world to Dad, she would use me against him whenever she had an opportunity. On one occasion, when I was still a small baby, I’m told she dangled me by the leg from an upstairs window. My father had just stormed out of the house after a row and she shouted at him down in the street below: ‘Do you want the little bastard then?’

  My father panicked at the sight of me dangling fifteen feet above the hard pavement and ran back. Kicking the front door in he raced upstairs to rescue me, probably aware that she was more than capable of actually dropping me on my head at a moment like that. By the time he burst into the room she had pulled me back to safety, having achieved exactly the reaction she’d wanted. Apparently there was a big fight, in which she ended up with a thick lip and he got two black eyes. He says he’d never raised his hand to a woman before that day but she pushed him too far after risking my life like that. Dad left the house clutching me tightly and vowing to himself that he would never trust her alone with me again.

  Mum then called the police to tell them that Dad had abducted me and that she needed their help to get me back. She could be very plausible when talking to people in authority and with her bruised face she wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing them that she was the injured party, that she was a good and dutiful mother who had her child’s best interests at heart, while Dad was a violent philanderer who should never be trusted to look after a baby. By hitting her and grabbing me he had inadvertently played into her hands, making her look like the innocent victim of a brutal man. The police got involved and instructed him to give me back, which meant he had to come back too if he wasn’t going to risk leaving me alone with her. It must have been an agonizing choice for him and it must have made him resent Mum all the more for forcing him into a corner.

  As far as Mum was concerned, of course, her plan of using me to blackmail Dad into giving up Marie and staying with her had temporarily paid off. Not wanting to lose his son, knowing that I would need him there to protect me from her anger, he was forced to come home. She had gambled on him being more frightened of losing me than of losing Marie and the gamble had paid off, although not for long. He must have felt as though he was being torn in half, unable to give either of us up but constantly frightened of what Mum might do next. Even though he was back living in the house he was always nervous about leaving me alone in a room with her and he would take me everywhere with him, especially to work and also to Marie’s house when he could no longer resist the temptation to be with her.

  It wasn’t long before Mum realized that her plan wasn’t working and that his feelings for Marie were too strong for him to be able to stay away from her, as long as he felt that I was safe. It must have been galling for Mum to know that he preferred to be with Marie and she saw me as an accomplice in his behaviour, another enemy, even though I was far too young to understand what was going on between the grown-ups in my life.

  Despite the explosive nature of their relationship, or maybe because of it, Mum and Dad still managed to get it together enough during their periods of reconciliation for her to fall pregnant by him twice more, giving birth to a girl called Ellie, born eighteen months after me, and then a boy called Thomas, who was almost three years younger than me. I suppose there must have been some positive passion in their relationship as well as all that anger for them to continue creating a family in the midst of their battles.

  From the moment she was born, my sister Ellie was Mum’s favourite, her little angel, and she never seemed to want to hurt her in the way she did me. Thomas was treated badly, but she didn’t hate him with the same depth of loathing that she harboured for me. With a strange kind of warped logic, she blamed me for Dad’s misdemeanours but not the other two. Maybe it was because I was so clearly his favourite. Maybe it was because I looked so much like him.

  People who knew our family at that time tell me that Dad never became as obsessed about the other two as he was with me. Maybe he didn’t think they were in the same danger from Mum as I was. Maybe he could sense that my mother harboured a dislike for me that went far beyond anything rational. Perhaps he deliberately kept his other two children at arm’s length in the hope that she would bond with them better if she didn’t associate them with him and Marie. Or maybe he just liked having me around because I was that little bit older and adored him so completely. Once he had a boy to be his constant companion, perhaps he didn’t feel that he needed any more. I’ve got no idea what he was thinking or feeling during those early years of my life. I just know he was my hero, my pal and my protector.

  Soon after Thomas was born, Mum and Dad decided to try to patch everything up once and for all. Dad reluctantly parted from Marie and went back home to attempt to be a father to all six of us (including three step-kids), but he still made sure I was always under his watchful eye. Terrified of being hit I would cling tighter to him and the closer I stuck to him the more annoyed Mum became with me. Her hatred of me seemed to grow deeper every day. The attempt at reconciliation soon floundered and by the time I was four Dad and I were more or less living full time with Marie. Mum’s desperate attempts to hold onto her second marriage had failed and she was finally losing him. He was setting a divorce in motion and all she could do was rage against us to anyone who would listen. I dare say she got a fair bit of sympathy as she was the deserted party, but anyone who knew what she was like in the privacy of her own home would never have been surprised that Dad had chosen Marie over her.

  In his determination to keep me out of her grasp Dad went to the courts to say that Mum was an unfit mother to me and that I would be in danger if he left me with her. There were hearings and discussions with the welfare services and his sister Melissa has since told me that she began to believe that Dad was becoming overly protective and obsessive about me. No one in the outside world could know what Mum was really like towards me.

  Dad’s relationship with Mum had reached such a low point at one stage that he became convinced Thomas wasn’t his child. I don’t think he was right, but someone must have told him something about seeing Mum messing about with another man that had made him suspicious and once those suspicions took
a hold he didn’t seem to be able to shake them off. Maybe subconsciously he wanted Mum to have betrayed him so he wouldn’t feel so bad about his affair with Marie. Or maybe he thought Thomas would be safer from Mum’s campaign of revenge if it turned out that he had been fathered by another man.

  Marie must have been desperately in love with Dad to have put up with so much and to have continued to take him back even after he had got Mum pregnant twice more. When he went back to Marie for the final time Dad promised her he was going to divorce Mum on the grounds of her adultery, although I don’t know how he thought he was going to be able to prove it. Marie told me with great excitement that she and Dad were going to get married one day soon and we would be a happy family together. I was delighted about this and couldn’t wait until it was all sorted, but they must have been painful, turbulent times for all the adults involved.

  Marie then fell pregnant as well, adding yet another layer of anger and bitterness to the store that Mum was building up inside her head. This final insult tipped her over the edge and she actually went looking for Marie with physical revenge on her mind, like some bizarre sort of Wild West gunslinger. When she found her she beat her up badly, pouring all her anger and resentment into her punches. It would be impossible to overstate just how strong my mother was when she lost her temper; she was still slim at this stage but she was such a tall woman that no one was a match for her when she was angry. To us who were on the receiving end it was almost as though she was possessed by demons.

  The beating made Marie all the more nervous and anxious to stay out of her way and not to annoy Mum any more than she had to. Occasionally when I was with Marie I would slip up and call her ‘Mum’, because that is what she seemed like to me – far more maternal than the screaming, battering woman I had been born to. She would quickly correct me and tell me to call her ‘Auntie Marie’, terrified that if Mum found out what I was doing that she would go completely mad, seeing it as yet more evidence that Marie was trying to steal her child as well as her husband. Mum might not have wanted anything to do with me herself, but she certainly wouldn’t have wanted Marie to have the satisfaction of taking me away from her.

  While they waited for the divorce to grind its way through the system Marie changed her surname to Peters so that we would seem more like a family unit. She even took to wearing a wedding ring because in those days around our way there was still a stigma attached to single mothers in many people’s eyes.

  But the shadow of Mum and her wild, violent temper was always hanging over Dad and Marie, making them both nervous in different ways, always looking over their shoulders, expecting her to pounce at any moment shouting abuse and throwing punches. My younger siblings and I were a link that would always be there, never letting Dad escape completely from this unwise, youthful alliance.

  One day he received a call from Mum to tell him that Thomas, who was not yet two, had been taken into hospital covered in burns. By that stage Dad must have accepted that Thomas was his because he rushed straight to the hospital. Thomas had been admitted into an intensive care unit, with burns all the way down one side of his body from his head to his waist.

  ‘There was a pan of boiling water on the stove,’ Mum told him when he asked her what had happened. ‘He was sitting on the floor and Larry slipped and knocked the pan all over him.’

  I doubt if Dad believed her story, however convincingly she told it, but there was little he could do to prove she was lying until later, when my oldest half-brother Wally confessed that what had actually happened was that Thomas wouldn’t stop crying and so Mum had thrown him into a bath of scalding water in a fit of temper. Whatever the truth, Thomas was left badly scarred and needed endless skin grafts over the following years. Dad was angry enough when he heard Mum’s own version of the story, wanting to know why she wasn’t watching over such a small baby more carefully. When he found out Wally’s version of events he immediately brought Ellie to live with us at Marie’s, while Thomas stayed on in hospital, struggling for his little life. Dad might not have been as close to Thomas or Ellie as he was to me, but he still didn’t intend to leave them to the mercy of a woman who was capable of doing such things to a defenceless small child.

  Mum, however, wasn’t about to allow him to walk off with her precious Ellie and she was constantly coming round to Marie’s house, banging furiously on the door, screaming abuse and demanding they give her children back, laying into Dad and Marie with her fists whenever she had a chance, bringing in the welfare workers and arguing her case for being allowed to keep her own children rather than handing them over to her husband’s ‘whore’. There was no way she was ever going to give in quietly and go away so in the end Dad was forced to compromise and allow Ellie to go back to her since she had never done her any harm. When Thomas was eventually released from hospital, Mum grabbed him and took him home and there was nothing Dad could do about it. But he wasn’t going to let me go. For a while it looked as if Mum might be going to settle for that and give up picking fights over me, but not for long.

  After the day Mum grabbed me from Aunt Melissa’s, dragged me home and burned my hand on the iron, Dad reported the incident to social services and they duly went to interview Mum. Yet again she managed to convince them that it was Dad who was the violent one, not her, and she was able to show them the bruises where he had punched her when they were struggling over me. She could be incredibly convincing when she wanted to be. It was as though she was two different people: the one who faced the outside world with a sweet smile, and then the monster who erupted once we were behind closed doors. She was brilliant at convincing anyone in authority, such as teachers and social workers, that she was a wonderful mother, struggling bravely on with bringing up her children alone. For them she would put on a wonderful act and anyone who knew her better was too frightened to contradict, allowing her to keep up her respectable façade in the eyes of the outside world.

  I didn’t have any problem about being with Dad all the time, and when I was little his employers were very understanding about having me around the garage, even when I caused trouble – like the time when I let the handbrake off in his Capri while I was locked inside to play. I can clearly remember the horrified look on Dad’s face as the car rolled steadily down towards the main road with him desperately trying to hold it back, calling out to me to pull up the locks so he could get in while I was laughing happily at all the attention, jumping up and down with excitement. I must only have been about three at the time, maybe just four.

  ‘Good boy,’ Dad kept shouting. ‘Open the door! Open the door!’

  It wasn’t till we were out in the road that I realized the danger and by that time it was too late and the car was travelling too fast for me to be able to get the door open in time. People scattered in every direction at the sound of Dad’s shouting and fortunately we managed to get right across the road without hitting any of the passing traffic or pedestrians, the car dragging Dad along with it. We eventually came to a halt against a wall with a hedge on top. The impact sent me flying and my head banged hard against the dashboard. Not wanting to leave me in order to run and get the key, and still unable to persuade me to unlock the door in my dazed state, Dad smashed the window and pulled up the lock himself. When he finally managed to pull me out he hugged me so tightly I could hardly breathe. He was crying from the shock of the whole thing and never even told me off. He probably let me get away with more than he should have, but I certainly wasn’t complaining about that.

  No one in the garage minded that Dad brought me to work – he had been there so long he was pretty much the boss – but it became harder for them to turn a blind eye when Mum started turning up and causing fights, trying to get me back from him, accusing him of kidnapping me, ranting on about his ‘whore’. I’m sure she didn’t actually want me, unless it was to get the benefit payments; she just didn’t want him and Marie to have something that she believed belonged to her. She had heard about the handbrake incident and tried to use
it to prove that Dad was being an irresponsible parent by taking me to work with him. She never missed a trick in their on-going war.

  More often than not she would be drunk when she decided to make these visits to the garage, and she would always be spoiling for a physical fight if she could provoke Dad into giving her one. Whenever he saw her lurching in through the doors Dad would shout to the other lads working there, telling them to take me into the office out of harm’s way and we would watch the two of them battling it out through the windows. I already knew that I didn’t like my own mother. I was scared of her and watching her in action through the grimy glass made me all the more certain I wanted to stay with Dad and Marie.

  ‘Come to Mummy,’ she would say, holding her arms out to me as if she expected me to run joyfully into them, but I wouldn’t be able to move, rigid with fear at the very sight of her. Even when I knew Dad was there to protect me I would still pee myself with fright when she started shouting at me. She always seemed to be shouting and screaming, attacking everyone and throwing spanners and other tools around. If she managed to get close enough she would scratch at Dad’s face and eyes as he struggled to restrain her.

  Dad wanted to avoid hitting her himself if he could help it, so he used to call his sister Melissa, who lived nearby, and get her to come and sort Mum out for him. Aunt Melissa loved my dad, just as everyone did, and would do anything to protect her little brother. She would come charging down the street and the two women would have the most colossal fights outside on the garage forecourt, pulling one another around by the hair, slapping and kicking with all their strength. Aunt Melissa would always win so after a while Mum started to run away as soon as she saw her coming, diving into a waiting car that one of her drinking buddies from the pub would have brought her over in, the driver revving away like a bank robber on the run. I think Mum enjoyed the drama of it as much as anything else.