The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [36]
Les ended up spoilt, though, because even though they didn’t want to look after him, Mum and Richard let him have his own way all the time. If he wanted to have something of mine I had to let him, otherwise he would scream and they would intervene on his behalf and I lose whatever it was forever. He was even allowed to call Mum a ‘fat slag’ and Silly Git would just laugh and encourage him.
When Les was a baby and I was eleven, it was my job to get up to him if he cried in the night and I had to take him into bed with me to keep him quiet. I was so frightened of doing it wrong that on the nights when he slept through I would wake up in a dazed state and think I’d lost him because he wasn’t in the bed with me. I would be crawling around the floor on my hands and knees in the dark trying to find him before I woke up enough to remember he wasn’t there.
One afternoon Mum and I went round to visit my granddad and I was starting to tell him about how I’d been crawling around the floor in the middle of the night looking for Les.
‘Shut up!’ Mum hissed and I realized I’d spoken out of turn.
‘Why was she doing that then?’ Granddad asked, obviously puzzled.
‘Oh you know her,’ Mum brushed it aside, ‘she’s just a fucking div, isn’t she?’
I realized that she wouldn’t want her dad to know that she was making me do her job of caring for the baby. I learnt to keep quiet after that.
As he got older Les became so spoilt he was impossible to deal with, so it was Tom and Dan, the middle two, who ended up being my favourite brothers.
Silly Git didn’t like the idea of me working with children, though, because it wouldn’t be of any use to him. He wanted me working in the high street. If I was stacking shelves in one of the supermarkets, he reasoned, I would be getting discounts on food for the family. In the end he and Mum found me a job in a shoe shop, insisting that I hand over whatever money I earned for my board and lodging and only leaving me enough for my bus tickets to and from work and sandwiches for lunch. It was like living with playground bullies who nick the pocket money off little kids.
Although I would like to have stayed on at school for longer and got a few more qualifications, I actually enjoyed the job and didn’t mind doing it full time. Just like school, it meant I was out of the house and safely away from Richard for a few hours every day, although he was always waiting for me when I got home.
I was amazed by how well I got on with everyone in the shop. No one was ever nasty to me, quite the opposite. Although the manageress was sometimes quite strict with the other girls, she seemed to like me, taking me outside with her every time she wanted a cigarette break and leaving the others holding the fort. ‘Me and Jane are just going out for a fag,’ she would announce to the others, and we would sweep majestically away. None of the others seemed to hold it against me, though.
The manageress’s husband also took to me and used to ask me to go out shopping with him whenever he had to buy things for his wife and needed some female advice. There was even talk of me being given a branch of my own with a flat above it, although nothing came of it.
The fact that everyone except my own family seemed to like me was probably what kept me from completely giving up on life in those early years. Although Richard managed to frighten me into obeying his every command, he never managed to convince me that I was quite the vile worm that he told me I was. If I could just find a way to escape his clutches, I knew there was a nice world out there full of nice people I could have a laugh with. It was just that