Wake Up, Mummy Read Free Page B

little in common. Paul was a couple of years older, a short, stocky, violent and vicious bully with an almost palpable air of aggression and a deeply rooted, immutable hatred and distrust of women. He clearly wasn’t the sort of young man Judith’s parents would have approved of – which may well have been part of his appeal for her.
    When she was just 16 years old, Judith became pregnant – whether as a deliberate act of defiance or as the result of a drunken accident, no one knows. If it was intended as a means of giving one more twist to the knifeshe’d embedded in her mother’s heart many years previously, it had the desired effect. As deeply religious people, her parents were mortified by the thought of what their priest (and neighbours) would say if it became known that their teenage daughter was about to become an unmarried mother. So, although they disliked Paul, they insisted the couple should marry.
    In fact, Judith’s father also had another reason for wishing his daughter to be married before her child was born: having been abandoned by his own mother as a small boy, his experiences had left him with the unshakeable opinion that children need two parents.
    Three months after the wedding, I was born – the daughter of a mentally ill, alcoholic, teenage mother who could barely take care of herself, and a violent, misogynistic, drunken and abusive father.
    I didn’t stand a chance.

2
Unfit parents
    MY MOTHER WAS a horrible teenager and a dangerously indifferent, self-absorbed parent. Perhaps her behaviour was due to having grown up feeling unloved – or, at least, less loved than her siblings. Or perhaps she’d absorbed some of her own mother’s guilt and felt as though she was somehow responsible for the death of the brother she never knew. Or maybe it was all entirely due to her mental illness and alcoholism. I’ll never know. But, despite all the terrible things that happened to me over the next few years, the consequences of which I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life, and despite all the misery my mother caused, I’ve always loved her. I think I’ve always known she couldn’t really help herself. So although I can’t actually forgive her for opening the door and pushing me into the lion’s den when I was six years old, I do know that, sober and in her right mind, she wouldn’t have wanted me to suffer in the way I did.
    My father, on the other hand, seems to have had no ‘medical’ excuse that I’m aware of for his cruel treatment of his mother, my mother and me. He may have had traumas in his own childhood. I know how that feels. But I know also that although some of the things that happen to you as a child may leave deep scars which never really heal, you still have a choice about how you behave towards other people. And he chose to treat his own daughter with cruel contempt.
    My father wasn’t present during my birth – I don’t think most men were, in those days. He arrived at the hospital when it was all over, glanced into my cot, hissed at my mother, ‘You can both fuck off,’ and left. He’d wanted a son, and he saw no reason to hide his disgust at being presented with a worthless daughter. He felt that he’d been forced into marriage by his wife’s parents, coerced into shouldering responsibilities he’d normally have avoided, and he was bitterly resentful.
    He returned to the hospital a couple of days later to take me and my mother home. Then he went to the registry office, where he registered only the first of the two names my mother had chosen for me. And that, he felt, was all he was required to do. While I was a baby, he totally avoided having any contact with me – he never held me, fed me or changed my nappy – and he never spoke to me other than with anger and dislike.
    My mother’s father worked in construction, doing contracts that took him all over the world, and after I was born he found jobs for himself and my father in the Middle East. So, when I