CHAPTER ONE
Dad had his belt ready, yet again.

“Billy boy, this going to stop, one way or the other”

Four strokes that time, me bent over the arm of the settee so he could get a decent swing in. At least he left my trousers on while he hit me.

“Room. Now. Or you get another one”

I could hear the conversation downstairs as I pressed my tears into my pillow. Always the same words, the same clearly expressed viewpoint. No room for doubt, ever, neither in how Dad acted or in what passed for his thought processes. Up until then it had been quite a good day.

Our station had been closed a year ago, but it wasn’t that far to Shotton, and, if I timed it right, I could usually manage to slip onto the train. Slam-door carriages back then, none of this centrally controlled doors business. Look for the guard and duck down to the front carriage and I was usually good for Chester, Get talking to some other kid with their parents, and walk out with them when we got to town, and I was free for a little while. It was odd how few of the adults felt the need to ask me where my own guardians were, but on the few times they did enquire, I lied that my Nan was meeting me outside the station, It worked almost every time; the two occasions they took it forward meant Dad and his leather belt.

The Rows were my place, after a walk along the city’s walls and a gawp at the cathedral. It was a bit of a walk, but it never felt excessive. In the Sixties, we seemed to walk far more, in both senses, than we do nowadays, and thought nothing of it. A walk along the walls to see the clock, then work my way back down to the Rows, sticking to the first floor as much as I could. It made me feel so far above the common herd on Eastgate, even though it is only a glorified set of verandas crossed with balconies, but it was one of my early life’s greatest pleasures, along with the windows I passed, or rather what they held, and what they did hold were my dreams.

So many assumptions will have been triggered by that remark, and, broadly speaking, they will be wrong. I wasn’t looking at dresses or shoes, but at their settings. Some of the shops held clothing for adults, some for children, but a select few (and I knew them all) catered for the whole family, and two shops in particular usually had displays of family groups, dummies depicting the ideal. Mam. Dad. Son. Daughter. There were posters in some shops, and the families in them were equally balanced. Everybody was smiling, and nobody was even slightly black apart from the golliwogs on the adverts for jam and marmalade.

Everybody was smiling, nobody was being lashed with a belt, and girls were girls.

Sunshine over the Scouse Riviera when I was little, and doesn’t the sun always shine in our memories? We would stay in Uncle Abie’s caravan at Prestatyn for a fortnight in Summer, the Tommy Cook place being outside my father’s budget, or so he always said. The dunes were my favourite place there, my parents taking the traditional wooden-poled wind break and a picnic of pretty bland food, if I am honest, but that was how the Sixties were. I suspect the spiciest things anyone ate would have been Coronation Chicken and Branston pickle. Even horseradish was a stranger to me in my childhood.

When I was tiny, there were no swimming costumes, and little people ran everywhere in their nakedness. Nobody had palpitations of terror about paedophiles, for back then such things didn’t exist. I say ‘things’, because that is what they were, rather than ‘people’. We had the occasional warning about strange men with sweeties, or puppies to show, but that was it. Always faceless, never a living presence. Nobody ever defined why the sweets and puppies might be dangerous; they just were to be avoided.

Life for most people was a lot simpler than it is now, except for my case. On those Summer days I would run through the dunes and down the beach as naked as all the other toddlers, and that showed me how wrong my life was. I only made the mistake of asking the obvious question once, but at least that time it was Dad’s right hand rather than his belt. I had to wait a couple of years before that delight was to make its own presence properly felt.

Why did all the other girls have smoothness where I had a lump? A simple question, full of implications so deep they have to be excavated, slowly and painfully, years later. The pain, however, was there from the beginning.

As I grew, Chester became my dreaming space. For a few hours, I could stand and stare, lose myself in little private worlds where everything was right, all was exactly as it should have been from the beginning. I would take a little time to enter the cathedral, find a quiet place in the pews, and kneel, hands together palm to palm as Mrs Shanklin had shown us in school. Prayers work best when all the boxes are ticked, but I never had anything to cover my head, and the prayers themselves remained unanswered. Eventually, I would make my way back to the station to sneak onto a train back to Shotton, if I hadn’t already been gathered up by a nice policeman.

I suppose they thought they were being nice, but don’t imagine I was driven back home to face my father, because it never turned out like that. Chester nick would ring the local one at home, and Dad or Mam would have to get the train to collect me. Either or both would make a few points in the endless debate, usually about the Great Expense of the train tickets, bur always involving Being Shown Up, and the belt was always waiting, right up until my ninth birthday, when I simply didn’t go home. I didn’t want to reach double figures as a boy, because I now realised it wasn’t a club I really belonged in, so I spent longer than usual hovering outside the station until I noticed the staff looking a bit too closely at me. No chance.

I made my way back to the walls, ending up down by the Dee, where there were boats. I remembered a film, or perhaps a comic, where someone stowed away on a ship by hiding under a tarpaulin on a lifeboat, and there were a few larger craft pulled up on the bank, tonneau covers in place. I realised I simply couldn’t face the belt again, not on my birthday night, so I waited till the light started to fade, watched the passing strollers and then ducked under the edge of the tarp on one of the boats. There was an old rug between the seats, and a small sail, and as the adrenalin left my body, so did my consciousness. I didn’t wake until the cover was pulled off in the morning.

The police were bastards that day. It was clear that at least some of them remembered me, and those memories were far from fond. There was no seat in a waiting area, no angry father, no belt. Instead, I found myself in a cell.

“Why am I being locked up, sir?”

The huge sergeant looked at me, mouth twisting.

“Because you are being a right little shit, sonny Jim. Such a persistent little shit that your Dad has said he doesn’t want you back, and I can’t say I bloody blame him”

That wasn’t how the dream went, nor how reality usually unfolded.

“Haven’t they got to take me back?”

“I don’t really know, boy. To be honest, I don’t actually care. I have had more than enough of you, and your family is on the other side of the border so I OFFICIALLY don’t give sweet Fanny Adams for what they can or can’t do. Council will deal with you now. You had a home, boy, and you threw it away, so now you get a new one, and this one you won’t be running off from”

He paused, just for a second.

“And if you think the hidings your Dad has no doubt given you were bad, let me find you back here again, and you will discover how bad things can really get. You understand, Billy Boy?”

He was wrong, though. I didn’t go somewhere secure, for the Council had foster carers, paid per child they accommodated, as I discovered that same evening. I think the first ones were called Keegan. The first time they hit me was about three days into my stay with them.

“What are you sitting like that for, you bleeding fairy?”

“Like what, Mrs Keegan?”

“Legs crossed like that, boy! Like an utter pansy! And don’t answer back, child! Let that be a lesson to you”

Her backhander nearly took my head off, and I went out of my bedroom window only two days later. The huge sergeant kept his promise, and I was more than a little bruised when I was returned to the Keegans.