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birth to a head”, and when it was the head’s birthday, the mother said, “Guess what I’ve got for your birthday?” and the head said, “I don’t care what it bleedin’ is, as long as it’s not another fucking hat!”’
    Dad thought this was hilarious, and so did Davie, but when he repeated it to Nanny she got very annoyed.
    ‘Fancy teaching that to a child!’ she exclaimed. ‘What sort of heathen has Donna moved in over there?’
    One evening Dad splashed out on a meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a treat for everybody. I remember us all gathered in the front room. It was dark outside. The glow from the coal fire and the flickering TV provided the only light in the room. The fried chicken was laid out on a low coffee table in front of the sofa, where Mummy and Dad sat side by side. Davie, Cheryl and I sat on the floor. Diane wasn’t there because she had gone to her boyfriend’s. Dad was talking and laughing, and Mummy’s adoring eyes never left his face. We were all smiling.
    Suddenly Dad reached for a piece of chicken and realised that somebody had eaten the last drumstick. His face clouded over and his small dark eyes narrowed as he yelled at us.
    ‘You greedy fuckers! Who the fuck has eaten all the chicken?’
    We froze and looked round at each other, taken aback by the anger in his voice.
    ‘Was it you?’ he asked each of us in turn, jabbing with his finger.
    I whispered ‘No’ when it was my turn, terrified of his aggressive tone of voice and the furious way he was staring atus. He looked as if he might murder the person who owned up, so no one did.
    Mummy offered to make him an egg sandwich but he shouted ‘Stuff your fucking egg sandwich up your arse,’ and swept the remains of the meal onto the snowflake-patterned carpet. ‘Greedy bastards!’
    We cowered in the face of his mood, scared of setting him off again, and slipped off to bed shortly afterwards leaving Mummy to try and appease him.
    A couple of days later Dad bought Davie and me a comic each and we settled onto the sofa happily flicking through them, glad to be in his good books. Then we heard Mummy and him rowing in the kitchen. Davie and I looked at each other nervously. We couldn’t hear what they were arguing about but there was the crashing sound of cups breaking and then a yelp from our dog, Eddie. Dad stormed back into the room, snatched the comics from us, and ripped them to shreds. Only a few minutes before he had ruffled the hair on our heads; now we both got a whack round the ear because we were ‘ungrateful fuckers’.
    I soon learned not to trust Dad’s moods. I knew that if I said or did anything he didn’t like, he could flip. Davie called him ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’–behind his back, of course–and that’s the way we all thought of him. He’d quite often be nice to me, playing at batting a balloon in the air or jiggling me on his knee, but the whole time I was bracing myself for a sudden change.
    Mummy had never been much of a cook–she was always too busy–but on the rare occasions when she did have boththe time and the inclination to cook anything other than something on toast, the food was delicious, almost as good as Nanny’s. She would make Diane’s favourite cheese and potato pie, or another crowd pleaser like toad in the hole with onion gravy, or shepherd’s pie. But these times were few and far between, and we mostly ate simple food like eggs, beans, Heinz spaghetti and tomato soup. Even this level of choice ground to a halt after Dad’s arrival. The cupboards were bare most of the time, except for the stuff she bought especially for him. Dad was the only person Mummy cooked for now, and she’d spend money she could ill afford making him his favourite steak and chips.
    On the nights we didn’t get any dinner, we’d either go without or Mummy would send us over to Nanny’s for a meal there. Nanny, Jenny and Freda made it clear they didn’t think much of Dad.
    ‘He’s a bad ’un,’ I