The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [21]
Although I didn’t mind looking after my little brothers, I was too young to be left in charge of them and it was inevitable that something terrible would happen. I was trying to get the three big ones ready for school one morning and changing Les’s nappy at the same time. I was making them toast under the grill, doing up their shoes, finding their clothes as they got dressed in front of the fire and getting myself ready, and I took my eye off little Les for just a second. He was one year old at the time, but big for his age. He had weighed a stone when he was born and had kept growing after that. Impatient to get his morning drink, he must have reached up and tugged the flex of the kettle while I was looking the other way, and he pulled the whole thing down on top of him. The boiling water made his skin bubble and blister, and the screaming was terrible. He was in hospital for three months and the scars on his arms never went, although his face healed eventually.
I was never allowed to forget that it was me who did that to him, scarring him for life.
‘Who burnt you, Les?’ Silly Git would ask him every so often.
‘Janey done it,’ he would reply dutifully. ‘Janey burnt me.’
I was twelve at the time.
Chapter Three
My favourite person was always my granddad, Mum’s dad. He wasn’t that old and everyone seemed to like him. He was dark-haired and skinned, like an Italian. I guess I got my colouring from him. When he was young he used to dress like a Teddy boy, with the DA haircut. He worked as a driver for someone very senior in business and had two huge American cars, an orange one and a white one, and two Yorkshire terriers. I thought of them as a little married couple, especially as the boy had what looked like a little beard. I used to love tying ribbons in their hair and dressing them up in dark glasses and anything else I could persuade them to wear, just as I had with my brothers when they were small. The dogs never complained; they were happy to have any sort of attention.
Knowing how much I liked dogs, Granddad brought us a black Labrador. The man he worked for had some connection with the royal family and this dog was from the same family as the Queen’s gun dogs. He was a lovely animal, but Silly Git found a black hair on his dinner plate one day and he had to go. He took him out into the country somewhere and tied him to a tree. Someone helpful brought him back, so he had to do it again.
This wasn’t the first dog we’d had, or the first to disappear. There had been a mongrel in the house when I was small. He used to knock on the door when he wanted to be let in and would go down the shops with me whenever I was sent on errands. But when I came home from school one day I was told he’d been run over and killed. Maybe he had. I never found out.
Granddad used to take me shopping at Tesco with him in his flash cars so we could pose. Everyone would stop and watch as we cruised past, him with his sunglasses on and me feeling like a princess, snuggled up beside him because there were no gear sticks or handbrakes in the way. Inside the shop he would do things that would make me laugh, like taking his false teeth out and putting them on the conveyor belt when we got to the tills, or climbing up one of the stepladders they used for filling the top shelves and singing a song to the assembled shoppers below. I would be cringing with embarrassment but loving it at the same time. If I asked to go shopping with Granddad, Richard and Mum would instruct me to tell him I needed a new coat or new plimsolls. I hated having to ask, but I think he knew I had to. He nearly always got me what I asked for, if he could.
At one stage he used to live next door to us with his youngest son, my uncle John, who was only four years older than me and more like a brother than an uncle. Granddad