The Nipper: The heartbreaking true story of a little boy and his violent childhood in working-class Dundee

CHARLIE MITCHELL

The Nipper

The heartbreaking true story of a little boy and his

violent childhood in working-class Dundee

In loving memory of Shane,

the nicest and funniest person

I have ever had the pleasure to meet.

I’ll see you again one day.

Your big cuz, Milky Mitchell

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter One - First Day, No Way

Chapter Two - A Fairy Tale of Dundee

Chapter Three - Tug of War

Chapter Four - The Woman in the Bath

Chapter Five - The Monday Book

Chapter Six - The Three Amigos

Chapter Seven - The Laughter that Hurts

Chapter Eight - Twenty Pound Note

Chapter Nine - A Boy’s Best Friend

Chapter Ten - Pressure Cooker

Chapter Eleven - Inside an Igloo with a Drunk Bear

Chapter Twelve - The Swag Factory

Chapter Thirteen - The Best Blanket in Dundee

Chapter Fourteen - Air Vent

Chapter Fifteen - Bonnie and Me under the Stars

Chapter Sixteen - Home Sweet Home

Chapter Seventeen - Big Geoff and Wee Geoff

Chapter Eighteen - The Boy, the Dog and the Four Foot Woman

Chapter Nineteen - Scared to Laugh

Chapter Twenty - Water Fight

Chapter Twenty-One - Four Minutes Past Four

Chapter Twenty-Two - The Rogues

Chapter Twenty-Three - The Puppies

Chapter Twenty-Four - Red Light on the Stereo

Chapter Twenty-Five - Off the Leash

Chapter Twenty-Six - Heartache Following Me

Chapter Twenty-Seven - A Voice in the Wilderness, a Face in the Crowd

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgement

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

I am an optimist and believe that everyone deserves a second chance in life. But I also believe that some people, such as my father, are evil to the point of insanity and beyond help. I am sure when you read what happened to me as a child you will understand what I mean.

For years I have tried to work out the reason for his behaviour towards me and have never come up with an answer. I’ve put it down to a chemical imbalance in his brain. Like being born without that cut-off switch that tells you right from wrong. These kinds of people know what they are doing is wrong but don’t care. And they use alcohol or drugs as an excuse to hide the fact that they actually enjoy it.

If you drink or take drugs, you do turn into a different person. But it’s not an excuse. You make your own life choices. And if you turn into a monster when you fill your body with these things, then it’s your responsibility to stop taking them. Life is really hard sometimes and every choice you make determines your future, and everyone is capable of making the wrong choices at some point in their life. The main thing is that you learn from your mistakes. Because one day your freedom may be taken away, or even worse, your life.

This book will show you the devastating effects child torture can have on a kid. It will make you sad and make you laugh and sometimes will make you dislike me. I’m in no way proud of any of the stories in this book, and I just hope that people can understand why I was like the way I was. My main aim is to show young people who are thinking of choosing the life I did what the consequences are. And to show people that no matter how close you are to death and giving up, there is always a chance that you can turn your life around.

In life, every decision you make has an outcome, some good and some bad, and there are always two roads you can take. I always chose the wrong road, as my anger or need for attention would make the choice easy. But over the years I have realised that I was using my childhood as an excuse for everything I did. A large part was my father’s fault, but a lot of it was down to the roads I chose.

Drugs and drink were my choice, and the violence that followed was caused by my decision to take them, as they would trigger memories of my childhood. I just pray that after you read this book, you will forget about being a victim, and start thinking about what is good in your life – what you can achieve and how you are going to make the most of what you have.

My advice to people who read this book is to think seriously before you live the life that I did. Who cares if all your friends are on drugs, or fighting every night? They can’t help you when you stand in front of a judge, or are struggling to pay the bills when you’re older.

And no matter what you go through in life, don’t use it as an excuse to self-destruct. Ask someone for help. Because the longer you let things happen, the more you’ll accept it as normal life.

Life is never over till the fat lady sings. Unless, she falls out of a window and lands on you.

Life is never easy, but if you think about famine, war and all the other terrible things that are happening in the world, it puts it into perspective. Having to pay bills, or arguing over EastEnders or your team losing a football match is not the end of the world.

Treat people the way you want them to treat you. The better the person you become, the easier your life becomes. Well, that’s all I have to say at the moment, except…welcome to Dundee.

Prologue

Through a small gap in the curtains I can see the snow floating gently past the street lamp. Trying to focus my eyes, I yawn. It’s the middle of the night and I’ve been woken up by the sound of shouting and swearing from the living room. A few moments later the bedroom door opens.

‘Come on you – get up.’ He’s dragging me out of the bed by my arm and yanking me down the corridor and into the kitchen as he sways from side to side. The smell of cigarette smoke and beer and vodka turns my stomach, as I’m now in his arms, and only inches from his scarred face.

‘What is it, Dad? Is something wrong?’

‘Wrong? No nothing’s wrong. I’ve made yi a cup o’ tea. Yi like tea, don’t yi?’

He pushes me down on the chair and starts to boil the kettle. Why has he woken me up like this and why do I have to drink tea? I don’t even like tea. But I don’t dare say anything. Besides I’m shivering as it feels like it’s minus ten degrees. It’s one of the coldest nights on record in Dundee and I’m dressed only in my old paisley pyjamas that are already two sizes too small for me.

‘What’s the matter, son? Are yi cald?’

‘Yeah, it’s freezing,’ I reply as my teeth rattle together.

‘This’ll warm yi up then.’

He turns back to the stove, pours the boiling water from the kettle into a cup.

The next few seconds seem to happen in slow motion.

As he turns round again I think he’s going to hand me the cup but instead he reaches across to me and there’s something in his hand but it’s not a cup and a second later I feel an agonising, scalding sensation that starts in the middle of my cheek, spreads across my whole body and then seems to shoot into my heart.

Dad has pressed a burning teaspoon on my face and he’s holding it there long enough to get a result – he’s scored a goal and he grins because he can see that I’m in agony as I’ve started screaming out in pain.

‘Oh, is it too hot for yi, pal? Sorry, son, this’ll cool it doon.’

He looks straight into my eyes and then spits right into my face, his saliva mixing with the tears running down my cheeks.

Dad grins again and takes a swig of his vodka.

I’m just a nipper, and I’m frightened and I don’t understand. But I am still too young to realise what the effect of living with Dad is going to have on my life; too young to know that I will live the majority of my childhood as a virtual prisoner, and that my home in the Dundee tenements will be my torture den.

And it has only just begun…

Chapter One First Day, No Way

It’s 1980 and a freezing September morning in a run-down tenement block in St Fillans Road in St Mary’s, Dundee. The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall…Snow is driving horizontally against the misty bedroom window and the Abba record has been repeating all night in the living room.

The time on my Mickey Mouse clock says 7.30 and it’s my first day at school – I’m nearly five years old and I can’t wait to meet new friends and play snowball fights with the kids I’ll meet. I’m a cheerful kid by nature, and as soon as I get out of my prison I always feel happy and excited and free.

I’m trying not to make too much noise getting up, as I don’t want to wake Dad. He’s probably not long fallen asleep. My head is pounding and my eyes have not yet fully opened as the swelling from last night’s head blows is dropping down my face and into my eyes.

I’ve opened my creaky bedroom door to go to the toilet, trying not to step on any loose floorboards in case Dad wakes up. The house is freezing and I’m shivering in my brown and yellow Y-fronts, the wind blowing through every nook and cranny in the door and windows.

I close the door and to my relief make it to the toilet, passing a broken mirror on the left-hand wall; I can only see the top of my head, so I stand on the side of the bath and stretch over with one hand on the sink, and peer in. I have never seen before what I see this morning – the shape and colour of what used to be my face is like a Freddy Krueger Halloween mask.

There is dried blood in the corner of both my eyes, and my neck has three long gashes down the back of my ear to my shoulder. My temples are swollen so badly that I can hardly see my ears. Then that creepy deep voice comes from the other side of the door.

‘Charlie! What are you doing in there?’

‘Nothing, Dad! I’m coming now! I’m brushing my teeth!’

‘Good lad, hurry up – I’m bursting for a piss.’

‘OK, Dad!’ I can hear him coughing his lungs up as he walks back up the hall towards the kitchen to release last night’s cigarettes into the sink.

Now I’m thinking, Why is he being nice? I thought he was annoyed with me after last night!…Maybe he didn’t mean to hit me. I open the door and he’s standing with his back to me in the hall, scratching his head with one hand and his arse with the other. He’s still a bit pissed from last night, I think.

‘First day of school today, son.’ He turns around slowly. ‘Get your clothes – oh, what the fuck has happened to you? Jesus Christ, your face, who the fuck did that?’

He looks angry, as if about to pop.

‘You, Dad! You told me to go to bed last night, and when I woke up you were punching me in the face for shouting and making a noise.’

I had obviously had a nightmare and must have been shouting in my sleep.

There’s a silence for about two minutes as he walks into the bathroom with his head in his hands. He sits on the edge of the bath and mutters something along the lines of, Please no again! Fuck no! Fucking hell! He turns to me with a confused look on his face.

‘Go back to bed, son, you don’t have to go to school, I’ll ring them and tell them you’re ill. Go on! Everything’s a’right, Charlie, close the door, son.’

I close the door and go back into my bedroom, totally confused at what has just happened. Did he batter me last night, or was it a dream? It’s absolutely freezing, so I’m just glad to get back into the warmth of my bed, avoiding the damp patch where I pissed it with fear the night before.

I lie down, pull the cover over myself and rest my head on the pillow, trying to work out what’s going on.

‘Ouch!’ I have to sit back up, as my head feels as if it’s in a vice when my temples hit the pillow.

I will never forget this pounding in my skull. It’s like having a heartbeat in my head, or in a cartoon when you watch someone hit their thumb with a hammer and it starts throbbing. I can’t sleep even though I am tired, so I climb back out of bed and walk over to the bedroom window to see if the snow is deep enough to build a snowman if I manage to get out later. It has gone off a bit and isn’t beating against the window any more, but it’s really deep, as it has been falling all night. I can see my downstairs neighbour with his mum and dad sliding him down the road with one hand each – on his way to school, I bet.

I really want to be out there and on my way with him, but no such luck. The state my face is in, I’m definitely not going out, as I look like I’ve just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

I hear Dad on the phone to school, telling them I have sickness and diarrhoea and that I’ll be in as soon as I’m better, then I hear the floorboards creak as he walks back towards my bedroom door. I quickly lie back on the bed and wait for him to come in, praying that he’s actually sorry and not coming back to finish me off.

You see, you never know with Dad. He can change in seconds. But although I’ve always known that he can be really scary after what he did to Mum and Mandy, this is the first time he’s done it to me, the first time he’s battered me. Even though I want to think I dreamt it, I know it really happened. I’m terrified that it will happen again and I’m now seeing Dad with new eyes. There’s always been something about him when he’s drunk that has frightened me, but he’s never taken it out on me like this before. Overnight my dad has become a scary monster and it’s something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.

The door opens, then he comes and sits next to me on the bed.

‘I’m really sorry, son, I can’t remember what happened.’ Then he puts his fingers on the side of my head and strokes it softly. ‘That will never happen again, son, I promise.’

‘It’s OK, Dad, I know you didn’t mean it.’

That isn’t what I’m thinking but he doesn’t have to know that.

‘Come on, son. I’ll make your breakfast – come through.’ He stands up and walks out of the bedroom.

I go through into the living room and sit on the couch next to the window, looking around the room. When I think back to it, I can’t imagine how he coped with a hangover looking at that crazy interior car crash of the early Eighties. That’s probably why he ended up as an alcoholic: he couldn’t handle walking into the front room sober, as the décor would have made him vomit.

We live on the middle floor of a grey, unloved three-storey tenement, up pee-stained steps to the front door. There’s a mouldy, dingy smell from the rotten carpet in the bathroom, the cluttered kitchen is further up, then three bedrooms and the living room at the end of a long corridor which I call the ‘Hall of Imminent Death’. It has cold, creaky floorboards and feels like a dungeon, very dark and grey. The dirty carpet and peeling wallpaper in the living room are flower-patterned but, bizarrely, totally different in colour: the wallpaper’s green and orange while the carpet is yellow and brown.

The living room has a two-bar electric fire with the grid broken off the front and the atmosphere’s always smoky from Dad’s cigarettes and butt-filled ashtrays. He makes new fags out of the butts with Red Rizla cigarette papers when he runs out of his ciggies. The TV in the corner is always on – if the money in the meter on the back of it hasn’t run out.

The L-shaped couch I’m sitting on takes up a fair share of the room. We got it from MFI. It has great big chunky square arms and is covered in some kind of potato sack material with a diagonal plum-coloured stripe, though it’s mainly faded to grey. This couch is where I spend most of my childhood getting battered.

The windows are black inside and out from never being cleaned, but it doesn’t really matter as there’s not much to see out of them – just the main road and a couple of semi-detached houses opposite.

Dad hoovers now and again but it’s rarely clean or tidy and there are always rings on the table from coffee cups. Even when Mandy stays, he does most of the cooking. We mainly eat chips, fish fingers and beans on toast, which is my favourite. (‘We had toast and beans, how posh are we?’)

I don’t have a bedtime. He doesn’t care what time I get to bed. Most nights when he’s drunk I want to go to bed but daren’t ask.

He’ll be sitting there dozing off with the telly on and then it will turn into that high-pitched whistle, or sometimes I’ll sit with him not daring to move, watching the Test Card with the girl holding the stuffed clown for hour after hour. We stick a quid in the meter and when that runs out he’ll just sit there swearing like a trooper for hours, but as always I don’t dare move.

However drunk he is, he never spills his drink. His head may be touching the floor but the hooligan soup – his vodka – will be intact.

Even if he’s hammered he’ll be on his best behaviour if I have friends over, but if they go to the toilet he’ll give me that snide look once they’re out of the room and will start swearing nastily. He’s able to control it though, and that’s why I know it isn’t just the drink that makes him do all the things he does to me.

Dad comes through from the kitchen with my toast and beans and a glass of water. There’s a fuzzy half-screen cartoon on the telly.

‘Here you are, son. I’ll be back shortly, I’m just nipping to the shops for milk.’

That means vodka – I’m not that daft.

‘See yi in a minute, Dad.’

The door closes and I start the difficult task of eating toast with lips like Mick Jagger’s. My jaw’s aching as well but nothing is going to stop me wolfing it down, as you can be sure that food is never spilling out of the cupboards in our house. You have to eat while you can, as you never know when it will be there again. It takes a few days for the swelling to go down and bruising to turn yellow and descend towards my cheeks, but I don’t care as I just want it to go, so I can get out into the snow and start school. Anything to get me out of this hellhole. I’m sure it’s colder in here than outside. The joys of living in a council flat.

My dad Jock is a big stout bloke in his early thirties, with dark curly hair and a squashed nose from getting it broken seven times. He’s always had a beard and moustache; sometimes it’s just stubble, but he’s never clean-shaven. His front teeth are like fangs, as he has broken his jaw three or four times and had it wired up with these strange-looking disc things that look like shirt buttons. He has a scar on his left cheek where one of his mates smashed a pint glass in it during a punch-up in the local pub (the Pheasant, I think it was called). He has big hands with great thick fingernails and massive footballer’s legs, and there’s a huge scar on his thigh where he had to have pins put in because someone ran him over after he had tried to run Mum over when she was seven months pregnant.

He’s a Jekyll and Hyde character, my dad. One minute he’s happy, asking me if I want to go camping, then in a flash he’s snapping about dishes not being done, or my bed not being made. Literally before he has taken a breath. It’s very confusing for me as a kid, as I have to adjust my thinking to cope with two different people, even though I only live with one. I don’t understand why he changes so quickly and there’s no one to help me deal with it. I’m on my own with him and I’m always scared of him.

Everyone who knows him says he’s one of the funniest blokes they’ve ever met, but a lot of them don’t know how mean and scary he really is behind closed doors. I, on the other hand, am a little short arse with fair mousy brown hair, and freckles on my cheeks and nose. Three foot nothing, built like the gable end of a pound note, with a home-made haircut that Worzel Gummidge’s idiot child would complain about and dressed in naff clothes that Dad buys me in jumble sales and bargain stores. Eighties tat.

Today I’m wearing a maroon jumper with patches on the elbows, Farah’s Stay-Press trousers with itchy wool, shoes that are at least one size too big from British Home Stores. Most of the time I wear hand-me-downs from Dad’s friends’ kids or from my Aunt Molly’s kids or from Barnardo’s, the charity shop in Reform Street. He gets a grant from the social to buy clothes – he sells it on sometimes for drink but will always make sure I have clothes for the start of the year – like today was going to be. He never takes me out shopping – he just gets the clothes on his own, which is why they’re always too big or too small. He mostly gets them bigger and says I’ll grow into them. It doesn’t matter to him that my shoes look like hand-me-downs from Coco the Clown.

I’ve also got some other footwear – some sand shoes like plimsoles and a pair of monkey boots, shaped like a meat pastie in front, with stitching like an Eskimo had got his hands on them.

People I know go snowdropping – that’s nicking off other people’s washing lines – but they leave clothes on our washing line. I remember one of Dad’s mates saying, ‘Jock, if your house was burgled they’d probably leave you a fiver and their shoes.’

It isn’t just us that are skint though: everyone’s in the same boat. They joke about it bitterly in the pub. Dad sometimes takes me in there with him.

‘What will the nipper have?’ one of his drinking pals will say.

‘Charlie will have what I have,’ he replies, but then gives a broad wink.

I sip a Coca Cola while he drinks his vodka and I listen to them all trading hard luck stories and generally having a moan. One of Dad’s friends says that when he has a bath he’s so poor he has to wash the dishes in there with him to save on water, with all the bacon and eggs floating around in his lukewarm bathwater.

The men in the pub drink their pints and moan and groan about the English and the state of the world. The English they call bloody animals, the police are bastards, the vatman’s a pig, the taxman’s a cunt – as if any of them have ever paid tax or VAT in their lives. All Dad’s friends spend all day in the pub and most of that time is spent talking about the English, but I don’t think they’ve ever even met an Englishman. They seem to have it in for the English, though, mainly because of a woman called Maggie Thatcher.

Dad blames everything on Maggie Thatcher. I used to think she was the old witch at number 47, the one with the moustache who stabs every ball that goes in her garden. But now I know who she really is. She’s a burglar from another rough area, who comes out at night and steals everyone’s worldly belongings.

Chapter Two A Fairy Tale of Dundee

Before I say what happens next, I need to tell you how all this began. I still don’t understand most of what went on when I was two years old, but I’ve managed to piece together what happened from my mum and from other people who knew how it was.

The story began around 1972 in Dundee on the east coast of Scotland, when a sixteen-year-old girl called Sarah (my mum) – who had just left school – met a twenty-one-year-old lad called Jock (my dad) from St Mary’s in Dundee. Mum was beautiful with blue eyes, a pale freckled face and long blonde hair which she wore in a fringe. She came from a decent family and was the middle of six children – with four brothers and one sister.