Cry Salty Tears by Dinah O'Dowd

Author:Dinah O'Dowd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446455678
Publisher: Random House

Chapter Twelve

You Just Couldn’t Best Him

AS THE KIDS grew up, we all became his slaves. He’d get home and sit in front of the telly, keeping up a constant series of demands. ‘Where’s my tea? Fetch me this, fetch me that. Here, boy, put the kettle on …’ In the main he would attack me verbally or physically when the children weren’t around, or at least out of the room. But they knew when something was up.

I’d be sitting there recovering from one of his rants and they’d ask, ‘What’s the matter, Mam?’ I’d say that nothing was wrong, but whoever it was would say, ‘Mam, I can tell. Has he been having a go at you?’

I’d say, ‘Well, he started to row but everything is fine now.’

Georgie would say repeatedly, ‘I don’t know why you don’t leave him.’ But having come so far with him – and the line ‘You’ve made your bed …’ nagging at the back of my head – I couldn’t. I read cases in the paper where the children of separated parents went off the rails and thought, ‘I don’t ever want to put my kids through that.’

There was one particular afternoon when another shred of respect for him was torn from me. Luckily his brother was visiting. Kevin had been naughty, climbing a tree he shouldn’t have in the garden, yet rather than just tell him off, Gerald totally overreacted. I don’t know whether he was embarrassed that his kids seemed out of control in front of his brother, but he grabbed little Kevin, dragged him upstairs and took his belt to him. I was screaming for him to stop and eventually his brother wrestled the belt from him and his rage subsided. But to me he looked like a wild animal, somebody I couldn’t trust to be close to my kids.

This was an unusual event. Gerald would give the boys a clout if they were naughty, but he never overstepped the mark. It seemed he reserved his particularly vicious beatings just for me, and maybe I absorbed that violence so he wouldn’t inflict it on our children.

They say in a relationship there’s a giver and a taker. Well I took very little. I wouldn’t ask for money from him even when he was running his business; I’d rather go out and scrub floors and earn it myself. I wouldn’t beg after he told me several times, ‘You can’t have any more money. You’ve got your family allowance and your job. Don’t be greedy.’

He could give it to the betting shop but not to me.

Although I was growing to despise him, I still couldn’t overcome my fear. In those days there’d be tallymen all over our area selling things from door to door, and one time I bought some sheets from one of them on tick, paying from the back door, where, as it turned out, our new washing machine was on view. When the tallyman appeared the following week for the next payment, Gerald was in.

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