Like Father

Nicholas Day-Lewis

Description

John Madden is born into a poor working class family. He has an abusive father, who acts like a puppeteer, an expert in mind control, while his mother is timid and subservient. At school he is mocked and bullied. but later, as an apprentice mechanic at TAFE, John meets Helen with whom he falls in love and marries. The question is: Will John turn out to be like his father? And if he does how will Helen react? And will she be able to escape from the marriage if she finds it necessary, for to leave is the hardest thing anyone ever has to do?

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 27 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669831471
• Langue: English

Extrait

LIKE FATHER
 
 
 
 
 
 
Nicholas Day-Lewis
 
Copyright © 2022 by Nicholas Day-Lewis.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022915618
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-3149-5

Softcover
978-1-6698-3148-8

eBook
978-1-6698-3147-1

 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Rev. date: 08/29/2022
 
 
 
Xlibris
AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)
www.Xlibris.com.au
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Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
AUTHOR’S NOTE
 
 
 
 
We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.
—Sigmund Freud
CHAPTER 1
1961–1979
My earliest memory was the sound of crying. That and shouting. I was possibly around three years old at the time, though it’s hard to know since that same sound kept haunting me in later years. My mother, as she cuddled me, would often have red eyes, tear-stained cheeks, and bruises. I didn’t understand at first, though it wasn’t long before I understood that my father was the cause of her hurts. I began to recognise his bellows of rage, and when I was too small to move around unaided and therefore to hide, I began to realise that all I could do was shut my eyes and pretend to be asleep. It seemed to deflect my father’s anger. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was simply withdrawing into myself, my only method of hiding myself away.
I should tell you a little bit about the Maddens. I guess you would call us a working class family. My father, John Madden Senior, is a tram driver, and my mother, Flo, is a housewife. My father runs the family with a rod of iron, taking no nonsense from either his wife or his two children, me and my elder sister, Barbara. In fact, Dad is a bit of a tyrant, a domestic abuser I think it’s called these days, and Mum was often the recipient of a slap or a punch. So was I, but somehow Barb always managed to avoid the worst of his angry outbursts. My sister is three years older than me. She was canny enough to see a threat before it arrived, and she always did exactly as she was told, and, unlike me, she never answered back. She managed to escape the confines of home as soon as she was twenty-one and could stick it up to Dad. In fact, she went one better and married one of the first guys she’d ever gone out with, an easy-talking character called Paul, who promptly easy-talked Barb into bed only the second time they’d met and got her pregnant, the silly girl. But more about that later; I don’t want to get too far ahead of the story.
Anyway, my early days weren’t always so grim. There were happy times as well, times when there was laughter in the house and an atmosphere of well-being. I remember my sister’s tenth birthday for my father came home with a huge doll’s house for her. Barbara was his favourite. As I said, she was always polite and did his every bidding, never questioning his authority. Little did I realise at the time that this was her way of deflecting his anger onto someone else, usually my mother but sometimes me. And I learnt never to cry in his presence, even after a beating, because tears were responded to with further violence. I was particularly prone to bed-wetting, and Dad’s reaction just made matters worse, so I began suffering from nightmares. ‘Your little runt has pissed himself again!’ he would shout out to Mum.
I remember one occasion, horrific in its intensity. I must have been about six at the time. My father came home one evening in a particularly belligerent mood. He was unsteady on his feet, and his speech was slurred. The three of us were in the lounge room, and my father started picking an argument with me for some misdemeanour that I’ve long forgotten. Mum immediately took my side and told him to lay off me. He bellowed at her, accusing her of pampering me, and then, after more swearing, he grabbed her and threw her onto the couch. He started ripping her clothes off. ‘No! Stop!’ she shouted a couple of times. ‘Not in front of the children.’ But he didn’t stop, and Barbara took my hand and dragged me out of the room. I now think that my father used to rape Mum a lot, perhaps every time he came home drunk. But at the time, I had no idea what was going on. To me, it was just something else to be avoided.
I developed the ability to scan for the warning signs. I even became attuned to Dad’s inner state: subtle changes in his facial expression, voice, and body language, so I could begin to decipher signals of anger or intoxication. And when I saw such signals, I would go and hide. I found many hidey-holes in the house, my favourite being the laundry cupboard. I could just fit in there when I was small. I would continue to sit in there, quivering with fear, until it seemed safe to emerge. Sometimes, I’d be hiding for an hour at a time. And when I emerged into a now silent household, my father, if he was still there, wouldn’t have noticed I’d gone missing.
A lot changed when I was old enough to go to school. Barbara had been at the primary for three years before I went, so she walked me there every morning and back in the afternoon and guided me through the early weeks of this strange new life. It was at school that I first discovered that the Madden household was much poorer than most others. There was little money for books or proper uniforms, and certainly none for outings and school excursions. I was teased unmercifully by the other children when I came to school, usually dressed in very second-hand-looking and ill-fitting clothing. And if I ever lost anything, or more likely had it stolen, there was yet another excuse for my father to administer a thrashing.
Sometimes, I wonder how I survived. Looking back on my primary school years, I think there were two things that helped me to endure: my sister and my teachers. I had a series of wonderful teachers, mostly women, and mostly people who understood poverty and how it affected children. Whenever they could be, they were supportive and made sure my disadvantage did not hinder my progress through the school. As a result, though I wasn’t a brilliant student, I did manage to hold my own. Nevertheless, it was with a sense of shame that I walked to school every morning, often hungry, and always fearful of the day ahead. I particularly remember Miss Snow. I thought she was pretty old, but I later found out she was still in her early twenties. She was my form teacher in year two, and she always started the day with arithmetic, and not just the ordinary kind, but mental arithmetic. She’d read out a series of numbers, which she would make us add up in our heads, sums that occasionally included a bit of multiplying, dividing, or subtracting. I had a hidden aptitude for numbers, and I adored Miss Snow, probably as a result. And I retained my love of maths throughout my school years.
I struggled with the other subjects; though with Barbara’s help, I had learnt to read at an early age. So in the early years, until other subjects were introduced, I managed to keep up. The time came, however, when my sister had to move on to high school, and at the same time, everything got a little harder. Without Barbara to protect me, the school bullies took their chances. My schoolwork suffered as I spent increasing amounts of time trying to escape their attention. I cannot even remember half of the indignities I was subjected to. They have blurred together in my memory, but many were the times I returned home in tears, vowing never to go to school anymore. Mum would do her best to jolly me along and persuade me to keep trying. She was a saint, I often think now, judging by everything she had to put up with from Dad, and having a snivelling little urchin for a son wouldn’t have helped.
One thing I do remember well occurred when I was in year four. It was the turn of our class to go on a school camp that summer, but, as usual, my parents couldn’t afford the fees, so I had to stay behind. Even though there were no classes, I was still required to attend school, me and one other boy whose parents must have suffered from the same problem. Unfortunately, Trevor was one of the nastier bullies, and as we were left alone together in the otherwise empty classroom, he could have been particularly unpleasant. However, we had been set some maths to do, and Trevor was something of a dunce for anything to do with numbers, so he actually asked me to help him. I was only too glad to show off my knowledge, especially if it could improve relations with someone who always seemed to look down