Sometimes Don went to the pub with her brother to plead with friendly insistence on her return home.

In order to avoid her staggering through the apartment later, screaming. (“Hey Mother, the walls at home are a bit moldy, and we don’t have any money to pay for electricity, but we could sit in the damp kitchen and eat bread and margarine.”)

Like in some shitty Dickens Christmas movie, the two of them would stand at the bar where their mother was sitting with men who always had something sticking out somewhere and who laughed too loudly. After a while it would become too embarrassing even for the drunks and she would follow her children. At home there were beatings.

One night Don’s mother tried to use an ax (where did she get a fucking ax?) to break down the bedroom door behind which the children had locked themselves. Don and her brother rappelled down from the window using sheets and spent the night at a playground. Don consoled her simpering, whining brother and calculated how much longer she had to be a child. Clearly too long. She wondered what alternatives there were. Now. The opportunities for a small child who hadn’t finished school to make a living on the free market were limited. All the ideas that quickly popped up—working on a ship (as what, for god’s sake?), making child porn, entering the drug trade—were unappealing. The world Don knew consisted of Rochdale, the idiotic family, school, and her friends. She couldn’t imagine anything else.

Childhood, with all the diseases it can entail, is probably the most horrid period of life. A child’s perception of the seemingly infinite duration of life multiplied the sense of unease. To feel like an independent person but not to be one, dependent on the moods and temper of legal guardians who themselves didn’t know any better. Don had no idea that there were childhoods where young people sat in the back of cars on long summer days, looking out the window as their parents navigated toward a holiday spot. Childhoods where if they fell, someone put a bandage on their wound and sat next to their bed and patted their head. Children’s misfortune wasn’t a result of being able to compare their situation to other children’s but rather the result of their inability to know what they needed in order to create a feeling of well-being.