Memories are made of this

As I grew I began to realise we were different. Not because mum and my step-father were blind but because we lived in poverty. That on it's own would have been manageable as no-one down our way sparkled with coins.
Our next-door neighbour, who I shall call Matilda, produced kids like magic on a more or less annual basis until a bakers dozen was reached. Then she stopped. I wondered, as I lay in my lttle bed in the box room at the back of our terrace house whether the squeaking,jumping bed and moans in the dark would herald another arrival;but it didn't.

I wondered how she fitted in her produce in her three bedroomed home but she did. Then there was her husband, who I shall call Terry, who played a part in her swell. The washing machine seemed to spin into the night whilst her washing hung on the line, always proclaiming she was clean, which she was! There in the back yard, near her red painted back door, which was as busy as the bed upstairs, lay discarder roller skates, bike wheels,dolls prams and shot footballs and a concrete coal-bunker.

I would walk to school, saving our bus-fare money for chips but more often than not sweets from Polly Parrots mum's sweet shop which was close by the Secondary Modern School where they did their best to put some knowledge in our heads. I wondered, as we walked that straight mile whilst the A6 traffic thundered past on its own mission if my friend heard the screaming and yelling in our house. It isn't true what they say about sticks and stones breaking your bones but names never hurting you. I beleived for years that I was thick and useless with a teaspoon of brains to own in my head. He seemed to think he had some badge of bravery to own, as he shouted in his dark muggy world how he rued the day he had taken on another blind man's kids.

I didn't talk to her, as we walked to the school, past the pits still functioning then, how I diluted his drink with water. That was a fine art in itself knowing when to lift his bottle of poison and destruction from beside his chair; near to his brailled books and brogue shoes whilst his guide dog lay there in a quiet obedience. It was often better to tip his poison down the sink whilst he visited the outside toilet; releasing the cruddy stuff down the pan where no light shone.

"Hand's up in the class-room all of you on free school dinners please, bawled Miss Smith as she sat on her desk with her already tight skirt sliding further up to meet her knickers, thirteen she muttered. We who were notibly special put our hand's down whilst the boys still had their eye's fixed to her slender legs or breasts.

It was like we lived in another world where no-one could ever touch us but could still be disgusted by us all the same!
I wanted to cry out in our little town and proclaim this creature wasn't my dad but something from another very dark and dank land that none of us understood.

Grievances are like mantal cataracts; they hold you back. I don't want to be held back anymore. I don't think I ever looked for revenge. I don't think I have ever hated since a child when each morning I would awake and simply wish that he did'nt. Maybe, I thought, it would be like the war when someone would come and claim their lost loved one back and say he had gone through the wrong door.

Forgiveness was going to be my perfect antidote to my choices and how I lived my life so I didn't scream and shout like him; though for sometime I am ashamed to say I did. I could forgive him for taking my paper-round money but not for beating his guide dog with the leash intended to guide him;not ever!