Wake Up, Mummy Read Online Free PDF

embellished – the sorrier people felt for her and the more drinks they bought her.
    The woman who lived in the house next door had come out into her garden when all the noise started, and she was standing, openly watching, with one hand restingon the fence and the fingers of the other holding a cigarette to her lips.
    My father turned towards her. ‘We’ve got some toys for your kids,’ he said, reaching into the open bag my mother had dumped beside the front door and pulling out a teddy bear and a red-painted steam engine, my brother’s pride and joy. ‘Anna and Chris don’t want them any more.’
    As he walked towards her, I began dragging toys out of the bag and trying to stuff them into my pockets and under my coat, although I was sure the woman wouldn’t take them, because it was obvious that what my father said wasn’t true. But when I looked up again, the neighbour was smirking as she reached eagerly across the fence to snatch the things my father was holding out to her.
    My uncle clenched his fists and took a step towards my father, as if he was going to hit him. I felt a sudden thrill of satisfaction at the thought that someone was finally going to stand up to my father in our defence, but my grandfather laid a hand on my uncle’s arm and said gruffly, ‘Leave it. Let’s just get them out of here.’ So, instead, my uncle took the small suitcase my mother was holding and threw it into the boot of my grandfather’s car, along with a couple of carrier bags of hastily collected clothes. Then my brother and I clambered on to the back seat and we drove away, my mother still cursing my father as she leaned dangerously out of the open window besideher, and my father shouting and gesticulating furiously from the pavement outside our house.
    Leaving our home and our father was a horrible, traumatic experience for many reasons, and it left me and my brother – at the ages of just four and two and a half – without a single familiar or loved possession. What I didn’t know on that day, though, was that it was to be the beginning of the two happiest years of my life.
    I’D KNOWN FROM a very early age that my father actively disliked me, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, there was nothing I would ever be able to do – no instance of good behaviour or amazing achievement – that would make him change his mind. My mother’s attitude towards me, however, was more one of indifference: I was a nuisance and an inconvenience to her and, most of the time, she was happy simply to ignore me, as long as I didn’t get in her way. And she never let me forget that the reason my father treated her so badly was because I was a girl, rather than the son he’d wanted. I knew I was a disappointment to them both, and at the age of four I was already convinced that I was as worthless as they so often told me I was.
    Therefore, particularly in contrast to the first four years of my life, living with my grandparents was an unimaginable revelation as I slowly discovered what it felt like tobe loved and what a difference that feeling can make to a child’s life. In their large, comfortable house in a quiet road in an affluent area of town, Chris and I became completely different children. We idolised our grandparents and loved our aunts and uncles, and they in turn made us feel special and important.
    From being a timid, uncared-for and anxious child, I became a well-dressed, well-spoken little girl who made friends quickly when I started at the local school. For the first time in my life, I felt I fitted in somewhere. I’d never before experienced consistency and stability, and I loved being part of a respectable family and living within a community, rather than at the edge, always watching and feeling excluded. And I loved not having to be afraid and wary all the time. It was as though my grandparents had built an invisible protective bubble around me, enclosing within it all the things I wanted to be part of and