I don’t mind what age I was the first time they let me up the stairs by my own self. Five, maybe, or six. Old enough that I could do a lock of wee things about the place. Sweeping up the floors or dunging out the ashes from the fireplaces. Mummy Noreen telt me what to do. Says she, when the Daddies is around, you don’t look at them, just you get on with your work. Just you pretend you aren’t there, and they’ll not bother with you. Unless they do bother with you, then you be polite and don’t give them any cheek.

So that’s what I did. I just bate on with what I had to do, and if Daddy George or Daddy Ivan came in, I just put my head down and said nothing. And that wasn’t hard to do, either. I was wild afeart of them. They weren’t slow about giving beatings, them boys. Many’s a time Mummy Noreen or Mummy Joy would have a black eye or a sore back from a kicking.

Daddy Tam was the worst of them. He was a cribb’d auld skitter, so he was. He’d slap you soon as look at you. And them big hands of his. If he hit you, you knew you were hit.

I mind the first time he hit me. I’d finished sweeping up the ashes around the hearth in the living room. It was the wintertime because it would’ve foundered you in the house, but I remember the sun was out, and it was shining between the bare branches of the trees outside, and through the windows. Mummy Joy had just cleaned them, and you’d hardly know the glass was there she’d cleaned them that well. And I was there in the room all by myself and the sun was shining in and it felt warm on my arms, so here, didn’t I start dancing? I don’t know what notion I took, but I started twirling around like I don’t know what. Just spinning around and tittering away.

Then something slammed into my head, bang, and I didn’t know what it was. I thought the roof had fallen on me. Then here’s me on the floor, didn’t know what way up I was, and Daddy Tam’s standing over me.

Says he, What do you think you’re at?

I was that afeart I couldn’t answer him. I just stared up at him. Then he kicked me in the backside, awful hard, I’d never felt the like of it. I’d been hurt before, I’d had the odd wee bump or scrape, but no one had ever hurt me before. Not like that.