Nobody's Child by Father Michael Seed

Nobody's Child by Father Michael Seed

Author:Father Michael Seed [Michael Seed and Noel Botham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781857828580
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter Eighteen

Between them, Nanny and my headmaster saved both my life and my sanity through the next few harrowing years of my youth.

Mr Bleasdale became like a second father to me, and a kinder, more helpful and supportive father than the one that fate had already handed me. He was tall and thin and had a small moustache and a permanent hangdog expression, and ages before smoking was considered a social disease he chain-smoked long thin cigars.

Had it been left to the teachers, I might, in time, have struggled through this bad period. They were all kind and gentle with me, and Mr Bleasdale told me I should come to school only when I wanted to. It was the other children who were the problem. They continued to be as ruthless and pitiless as only children can be. They knew every gruesome detail of my mother’s suicide, which had been splashed across not just the Bolton Evening News but the Sunday national newspapers too.

I was mocked, taunted and verbally abused almost from the moment I set out on my journey to school in the morning to when I trudged my unhappy way home in the afternoon.

If I did go to school, I almost always refused to go into the playground at break times or at midday. If I did venture outside, this was the signal for the start of a barrage of insults and vicious questions. Some of the children would even mime being a grotesquely broken corpse. I was spat at and kicked as all the while they vied with one another to see who could regale me with the goriest details of my mother’s death. They claimed my mother was mad and a witch.

‘Your mother’s scattered in bits,’ they would yell. ‘We’ve seen her blood splattered on the front of trains.’

‘Why don’t you kill yourself too?’ they would chant, and when I didn’t answer they would push and punch me.

It became so bad that I couldn’t leave the house outside of school hours without being beaten and bullied.

I wanted to scream back that I would love to kill myself. It was what I wanted more than anything else. But each time I came close to doing it something held me back. I don’t know if it was just cowardice or whether I didn’t want to leave Nanny for the unknown. But I couldn’t go through with it.

I would stand on the railway bridge from which Mammy had jumped and wait for the trains to see if there really was blood on the front of any of them, imagining her beautiful body being dismembered by the wheels.

On several occasions, I climbed on to the top of the guard wall and looked down, waiting for a train to come so that I could hurl myself down in front of it.

I felt abandoned, forsaken. There was no future for me. I simply wanted to die. But I couldn’t. Each time I would promise myself that I was going to jump and as the train approached I would close my eyes and tell myself, ‘Now.



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