sharks, mostly. Because our names are the same, I’ll sometimes get investigated by companies trying to get back the cash he owes them.
On birthdays, I used to get a £3.99 Airfix model kit from somewhere like the Ragmarket, Birmingham’s version of the Barras. There’d be half of it missing, or the cardboard box it came in would be so wet and soggy that you wouldn’t have wiped your arse with it.
Christmas was terrible. When we were older, Mum always used to work in a nursing home, doing as much double-time as she could. Sometimes she didn’t even come home on Christmas Day. I used to dread Christmas. And then the bailiffs would show up. We’d be evicted. Dad’s van would be loaded up, and we’d be off to the nearest refuge or round to the social services, pleading homelessness.
As a teenager, I used to be ashamed of some of the places we lived – the ones that were riddled with damp, the ones that had been left like pigsties by other families. And every time he got violent, any ornament, any present we’d bought for Mum, would be smashed, simply because it belonged to her.
For our schooling, we were never in one place long enough to develop any kind of attention span. Dad was hardly the kind of man to insist on you doing your homework. Only poofs did homework. The same way only poofs went into catering. No, he was much more interested in trying to turn us into a country music version of the Osmonds. Diane, Ronnie and Yvonne, my younger sister, all sing and play musical instruments. They didn’t have any choice about that. Dad was obsessed. But I never went along with his plan. That’s not to say I wasn’t just as scared of him as they were. My tactic was to keep my head down and my nose clean. When I was asked to lug his bloody gear about the place, I just got on with the job. It’s funny, really, that people think of me as so forceful and combative, because that’s the precise opposite of how I was as a kid. I wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.
His favourite punishment was the belt. You’d get whacked for something as innocent as drinking his Coke. I would get completely fucked over for that sort of thing. It wasn’t so much the Coke he was bothered about, more that he wouldn’t have a mixer for his precious Bacardi.
Yvonne was born in Birmingham. Next stop was Daventry, where we had quite a nice council house. Then we were off again, to Margate, where, for a time, we lived in a caravan. That was horrendous. We didn’t even have enough money for the gas bottle to keep the place warm.
Then it was back up to Scotland again, followed by another stint in Birmingham, and then on to Stratford-upon-Avon. But Dad couldn’t settle. Off he’d go: to France, or to America. He never sent money home. It was up to Mum to earn our keep. When he came back from abroad, we moved to Banbury, where he was going to run a newsagent’s shop. We lived above the shop, and the guy who owned it was lovely. But Dad was on the fiddle. The owner found out, and we were out on our ears again.
So it was back up to Glasgow. But I was a teenager now, and I decided not to go. The council gave Diane and me a flat, and we stayed put. I was doing a catering course at college, funded by the local Round Table, but, in any case, I don’t think Dad wanted either of us around.
I had crossed a line when I was fifteen. I was going out with a girl called Stephanie, and one night I came back late.
‘Get your stuff out of my house, and go and live with her,’ he said.
‘I’m sixteen next week,’ I said. ‘I can go where I like.’
I’d already been given a big radio for the upcoming birthday, and he threw it at me from the top of the stairs.
‘I can’t believe you’ve done that,’ I said. ‘You know damn well that Mum bought it for me.’
I knew she’d got it on hire purchase, which was costing her £8 a month, and I couldn’t bear it.
‘I’d rather you did that to me than to something that hasn’t even been paid for,’ I said.
He came storming down the stairs. At first, I stood my ground. Then I saw the look in his eyes and I bolted. For the first time, I felt that he really might kill me. I saw something in his eyes that day – a kind of madness.
Once Diane and I were out of the way, he turned his madness to whomever else was there. Ronnie was his pal, mostly, so it was Yvonne’s turn to take the treatment, and Mum was still getting knocked about. She was working in my Uncle Ronnie’s shop in Port Glasgow, and she’d come in with bruised lips and black eyes.
My uncle would say, ‘Oh, Helen, you can’t serve the customers looking like that!’
And she’d say, ‘Well, it was your brother that did this to me.’
But no one intervened. Domestic violence was still seen as a private matter then.
Next, the four of them ended up in Bridgwater, in Somerset. It was there that he committed the final crime and left our lives – almost for good. It’s a time I cannot think about without feeling the blood pulsing in my temples, though I wasn’t even there when it happened.
Dad had had a couple of drinks, but this attack was planned – not some dumb, drunken rage. He came home from work, and Mum was in bed with a mug of hot milk. He poured it all over her, leaving bad scalding to her chest. Then he dragged her downstairs, and the beating started. By the time the ambulance arrived, her eyes were completely closed, her face swollen and pulped. First, she was taken to a hospital, then to a refuge. Dad, of course, disappeared at the first sound of a police siren.
That was when the social services and all the other authorities got fully involved, and a restraining order was taken out on him. He wasn’t allowed anywhere near the house, but when Mum went home, she found everything that she had built up smashed into tiny pieces. He hadn’t left even a light bulb intact. Worst of all, Dad had left a note on the mantelpiece. It read, ‘One night, when you are least expecting it, I’ll come back and finish you off.’
Dad went off to Spain, and I didn’t see him for many years. Then, towards the end of 1997, when I was running a restaurant and already well-known, I got a call from Ronnie. Dad was in Margate. He’d had an argument with Anne, his second wife, and he’d upped and left. I called him on the number Ronnie had given me. I don’t know why. He sounded very low.
‘I’m here to see my doctor,’ he said. ‘Can I see you?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll come down.’
It had been a difficult year. My wife, Tana, and I were expecting our first baby. And I was involved in all sorts of legal trouble over my restaurant. Still, I drove down there. There was something in me that couldn’t refuse his request. I got out of my car and I saw this old, frail, white-haired man with bruises on his face, and marks on his knuckles. I felt stunned. This was the man I’d been scared of for so long, brought so low, so pathetic and feeble.
‘What’s happened to you?’ I said.
‘Oh, Anne and I separated, and I had an argument with one of her sons.’
‘Look at the state of you. Where are you living?’
He pointed at the car park, and there was his Ford Transit van. Inside there were all his possessions and an inflatable camp bed in the back, with awful net curtains in the windows.
We had breakfast, and we went for a walk on the pier, and it was so sad. So I went to the bank and I got out £1,000, and I gave it to him for the deposit on a flat. I thought that at least I could do the right thing by him, and that’s what he did. He got a little one-bedroom basement flat.
On Christmas Eve, he telephoned. Anne was coming over, and they were going to try and fix their problems. That was the last time I ever spoke to him.
After hearing that he and Anne had made up, I booked him a table at my restaurant for the twenty-first of January 1998. Most of my staff didn’t even know I had a father. I’d reinvented myself, I suppose. I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve never tried to pretend anything else. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be like him. And any time I came even close to that, I would put the fear of God into myself.
It was