What Daddy Did Read Online Free PDF Page B

angrier. Any little bit of patience she had in her soon wore off. Eventually, I was the one who had to get up and take the sheets off my bed and trample them in the bath along with my pyjamas. I also had to wash down with disinfectant the red rubber mat that covered my mattress. When my stepmother was finally at the end of her tether – it was a short one – she made me lie on this rubber mat with no sheet, clad only in my pants, and sleep that way night after night. She would come in to check on me – it seemed as if she was willing it to happen – and then hiss in my face: 'Pee-the-bed, pee-the-bed – nasty little pee-the-bed, aren't you?' She liked nicknames and her preferred one for me then was 'pissy pants'.
     
By the time my older half-siblings arrived back from the children's home, I was just past my sixth birthday and still wetting the bed. Looking back, it's hardly surprising. I had been treated the Barnardo's way when the problem started, and that approach clearly hadn't been designed to resolve the issue, but now there wasn't even any pretence that I was going to be helped. It had been bad enough to face ridicule at home from Helen, but once I started school, she made me wear my wet, smelly knickers there all day. Children are often cruel to each other, and they will pick on anything different, so I became the focus of their taunts as they said I smelled, they said I smelled of piss, they said I was wearing dirty pants.
     
They were right.
     
When Helen was really angry with me, she would come into the bedroom first thing in the morning and drag me out of bed by my arms. 'Stand there!' she'd screech at me as I stood where she had put me. 'Stand there and don't you dare move!' She'd throw the thin covers right back so that she could inspect the bottom sheet and mattress. If I had wet them, she would shout and scream at the top of her voice, while hitting me repeatedly with her fists and arms. When this frenzy had passed to some extent, Helen would pull my pants off and rub my face in them, grinding me into the stinking material with utter hatred. Finally, as she prepared to leave the room, she would throw the knickers at me and say that I was to put them on. I'd have to go to school wearing them, with my face stinging and red, and the smell of pee hanging around me for the rest of the day. No-one else at home got treated like that – maybe no-one else wet the bed. I only saw her do anything similar to our dog, Snooky, a black-and-white mongrel collie cross. If Snooky ever had an accident in the house, his face would be rubbed in it and he would be kicked out into the back green with a yelp. My stepmother clearly thought I was as low as the dog.
     
When I became a mother, these memories sometimes crept through. I could never imagine why anyone would do the things Helen had done to me. Even the fact that I wasn't related to her by blood didn't explain why she felt such hatred for me. How any adult could do those things to a child was beyond me. If my daughters or son ever wet the bed, I would run them a bath and, while they were in the big, soapy bubbles, I would get their sheets and pyjamas into the wash without a word to them. I'd remind myself to watch what they drank before bedtime and to lift them for the toilet before I went to bed.
     
This was certainly not Helen's way. I was a child, little more than a baby, when I was delivered into the care of Helen and my father. Of course, I didn't keep a diary, and I don't have a photographic memory, and so my awareness of when things happened can't be precise. However, I do know that there was a switch, very early on in my life at Easter Road, when Helen changed from being cold and distant to being hateful and violent. This was around the time when she started to berate me constantly for being 'really bad'. And that 'badness' was something Helen always thought could be beaten out of me.
     

     
One day, when I was about six, I had been really bad – as usual.