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

I have been stolen back and forwards five times before by Dad and Mum, but this time Dad’s stolen me for good. And this time I’ve let him steal me. I’ve chosen to live with him so I’m also to blame. But it’s Dad who’s won the tug of war – not me or Mum. Dad is an animal that Mum just can’t handle. With him, it’s like banging your head against a brick wall. No matter how hard you try, you can never win, and Mum has had the last bit of fight knocked out of her. She has her consolation prize: at least she’s got Tommy, her first born.

As for me, now that I’m with Dad full-time I keep trying to imagine what it would have been like if I had replied ‘Mum’ to the judge not ‘Dad’, and if I had managed to escape along with Tommy that time he wriggled free of Dad in town. It’s a hard thing to say but I’ve wished so many times that I had been the one to go with Mum, not Tommy.

I’m not yet four years old and I won’t see my mother and brother again for most of my childhood. Instead my consolation prize is to look forward to years and years of physical and mental torture from my dad.

And my prison sentence has only just begun. The minimum term of my sentence is the whole of my childhood – though it may last much longer and could even be for life.

Chapter Four The Woman in the Bath

After Dad takes me away from that horrible courtroom and now that he has complete custody over me, I know that I won’t see my mum again. I know this because Dad keeps telling me.

‘She’s washed her hands of yir for good this time, the fuckin’ bitch,’ he smirks and of course I believe him. How can I not believe him? How can I know that she’s crying for me every day? How am I to know that losing me is the worst thing that has ever happened to her and that she will spend the rest of my childhood years trying to get me back? I only find this out years later and by then the damage of our being torn apart has well and truly been done.

But for me, as a boy of less than four years old, out of sight means out of mind. Besides, Dad has told me that if Mum gets her hands on me again she’ll try to kill me. She must be worse than Dad, I tell myself. After all, how can I know otherwise? And very soon I simply stop thinking about her.

After Dad and Mum broke up when I was ten months old, Dad had a short stint at the single life before he met a woman named Mandy. She’s a really pretty woman from a big, well-known family in Dundee. By well known I mean that where we live in St Mary’s, Dundee, everyone seems to know everyone else, especially when people come from big families. Mandy has three kids from her previous unhappy marriage, one girl and two boys, Julie, Paul and Peter. We all live together when I’m young.

Paul, who’s the middle child and a year older than me, soon becomes my best friend, and our friendship continues for many years into adult life. And Julie and Peter will always be like a brother and sister to me.

By the time I’m five I’m already living in fear of what my dad will do to me. The first time he battered me was the night before what should have been my first day at school. I now look forward to the rare occasions when he leaves me with someone else when he goes off somewhere, and for a brief time I’m free from him, off the hook. Like the time he takes Mandy and her three kids to Blackpool and leaves me behind with one of the neighbours, so I can go and pick berries to make money over the holidays.

Although my memories of my mother are already growing hazy I remember how Dad used to beat her up and mentally torture her, so in a way I’m not surprised when he carries on doing this in his relationship with Mandy.

Night after night I’m forced to listen to the thuds and moans coming through the wall, until I fall asleep. I have a good idea what’s going on, but I put the pillow over my head and cover my ears with my hands to block the noise out. I realise when I’m older that Mandy could have had anyone back then, as she was really good looking, but she ended up choosing a crazy aggressive thug with no morals or remorse for anything he did.

It’s hard to explain how this could come about but I know people think that Dad has a really funny personality when they first meet him – and when he’s sober. And the women he dates are led into a false sense of security by his happy-go-lucky attitude. But when he manages to get his feet under the table – once these women have let him into their lives and he’s installed in their houses – he’ll take to drinking and turn into an animal.

Even when I’m very young I know that he’s using drink as an excuse to unleash the sadistic side of his nature that he can hide very well if it suits him, and that he enjoys inflicting pain – physical and mental, on people who are weaker than him.

There are many, many nights when I get dragged out of bed at three or four in the morning because Dad has beaten Mandy, and if he leaves, I have to leave as well.

Dad is a very sneaky man where women are involved. It’s like he plans the beatings at certain times of the night, when the world has gone to sleep. And he will mostly aim for areas that can be covered up with clothes the next day. You’d know when he’s really been pissed the night before because Mandy’s face will be in a hell of a mess. I look at her sometimes, sitting on the couch with black eyes or burst lips, while he’s whistling in the kitchen as if nothing has happened.

The bond that I have with Peter and Paul will never be broken. I may not see Paul for many years but I know he’s always there for me and we’re still like brothers when we meet up again. Mandy has always been there for me to talk to – but after she finally manages to get away from Dad I don’t really see her that much, as my face is probably a constant reminder of what she went through at his hands.

Dad did a lot of bad things to Mandy in her life, but there is one particular night that scares the life out of me, a memory that I’ll take to the grave. I’m staying in Mandy’s house, and Dad wakes all the kids up including me, and tells us to come downstairs and watch.

‘Everybody up, git up yi fuckers.’ He’s staggering around, pulling the bed covers off the beds. ‘GET UP!’

He turns and walks back out of the room, while the four of us jump out of bed and run downstairs, where I can hear Mandy crying and pleading.

‘No in front o’ the bairns, please.’

We find them in the bathroom, where he has filled the bath to the top, and has Mandy by the hair, pushing her head under the water. We all realise at once that he’s trying to drown her and he makes no secret of it either.

‘Look at yir mum drooned.’

We all jump on his back and try to get him off. He pushes us away, but his rage seems to have subsided, as if he’s achieved what he wanted – to scare the daylights out of Mandy, and us children too.

He leaves Mandy in the water, blue faced and bruised, and wanders off to the kitchen. I stand there in shock as I think she’s about to die right in front of me. She eventually climbs out of the bath, shaken and shivering and hugging herself, grabbing a damp towel and retreating to her bedroom, as far away from him as possible.

I feel dreadful and guilty and ashamed, as if I’ve somehow colluded in what my dad has done to Mandy – after all, I am the spawn of this devil. I can never understand why nobody comes to help her but maybe he’s got a spell over them like he has over me. He’s so clever at concealing the truth. Maybe Mandy loves Dad that much that she never tells anyone – or maybe she’s just like most women in Dundee and is used to being treated like a punch bag.

All in all Dad’s with Mandy for five years – between when I’m two and seven. He finally beats her up once too often and she never comes back.

I miss her, as she’s been like a mother to me. But I can’t imagine how her children must be feeling, and even years afterwards I feel embarrassed even saying hello to her daughter in the street. I do stay in touch with Paul, though. We’ll always be like brothers – and I still see him at school, as he’s in the year above me.

Dad’s beaten me many times between the ages of four and seven, but then Mandy’s always been around to absorb some of the worst of his punches while I’ve been on what you might call the reserve bench.

Dad thought he had got Mandy where he wanted her. That’s the kind of man he is: power mad, always wanting to be in control, and bullying people weaker than him. He’s a hard man who will take on anyone, but as he gets older he seems to direct his obvious hate and anger at people who can’t hit back.

And now that Mandy’s gone, that can only mean me.

Chapter Five The Monday Book

In the tenement block I live in with Dad in St Fillans Road there are six flats in each block and three blocks joined onto each other. Everybody knows everybody; people will come to the door asking to borrow some sugar or you will be sent upstairs to borrow milk or a fag until Monday when the giro comes swooping through the letterbox.

Dad is on the dole but works as a roofer-come-chimney sweep – obviously illegally, but he never gets caught as the social never come into our area. I don’t think they really give a monkey’s about poor areas, as they have nothing to gain from them. The only people that knock on the door are debt collectors, people in suits looking for Dad. I’m turning into the best liar in Scotland, as Dad will send me to the door to tell them stories about him being at the hospital, or at the dentist. Then I’ll come back into the living room, where Dad will be kneeling under the windowsill, looking out of a tiny gap in the curtains.

‘They believed me, Dad.’

‘Keep yir fucking voice doon, yi half-wit,’ he’ll whisper. Then he’ll start the questioning, once they’re out of sight.

‘What did they want? What did you say? Then what did they say?’

I’m six years old by this time and I never really pay attention to what they’re saying. I am more concerned about keeping them from pushing past me.

Between the age of five and seven, I learn how to keep on the good side of Dad. I will tell lies for him, keep lookout for men in suits when I’m out playing, and run to the shops for anything he needs. But I never know when he’s going to give me a beating and they’re getting worse. The first one he ever gave me – that meant I missed my first day at school – was just a taste of things to come. But today he takes it to a whole new level.

Dad has asked me to go and pick up his family allowance. He gives me the book for me to take to the post office and I then have to hand it over to the woman who’ll tear a page out and give me his money. On this particular morning I am waiting in the queue among all the old biddies and single mums, right behind an old man in his sixties who has obviously lost control of his bowels, and must have eaten sprouts this morning. The air is toxic around me, and my height isn’t helping at all. He smells like my neighbour’s dog after it rains.

‘Next please!’

Great, my turn. Thank God that windbag has gone – the air is so rife from his farts I can hardly see. I pull the book out of my pocket and hand it to the woman behind the counter.

‘There yi go, misses.’

She is peering at me over her National Health glasses, with a plaster in the middle holding them together.

‘Thank you son!’

She’s now looking closely at the cover of the book.

‘What’s up with your dad’s book?…All this black stuff on it, did he drop it?’

‘No he left it in his pocket when he was sweeping chimneys.’

The place instantly goes silent. Well, how am I to know he isn’t supposed to be working and claiming dole at the same time?

The woman behind the counter starts laughing. ‘You’re lucky I know your dad. You should be more careful who you say that to.’

Then all the people in the queue start laughing as I skip out of the door thinking I’m some kind of comedian. But I soon realise that Dad has a completely different sense of humour to me. I get back to the house white-knuckled from holding the money extra tight so I don’t drop it, then go into the kitchen and hand it to Dad.

‘There you go, Dad – sixty-nine pounds and thirty-eight pee.’

‘What took yi so long? Yi’ve been fucking ages!’

‘There was a massive queue, Dad, and some old woman was paying loads o’ bills.’

‘I’ll go mi fucking self next time.’

Don’t ask me to explain it, because I don’t have a clue why my mouth opens and blurts out this next sentence. Maybe it’s in case someone else tells him what went on, and then I wouldn’t get a chance to explain myself.

‘The woman asked in the post office why your book was black, and I told her it was soot from when you were sweeping chimneys, but she laughed!’

‘Yi stupid little bastard!’ I see his face change into a piercing, threatening stare as he puts his cup down on the kitchen worktop. I’ve never seen anyone’s pupils go so big and black, I can see myself in them as he takes a step towards me, grinding his fanglike teeth.

‘Come ’ere, yi little fucker.’

I walk backwards up the hall towards the living room with my hands up. ‘Sorry Dad, sorry Dad, sorry Dad. Please I’m sorry.’

‘Yi’re sorry, are yi?’ he says, walking towards me. Then boot! He kicks me right in the bollocks. I fall to the floor. Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! all over me, then he drags me up by the hair and throws me face-first into the wall. I fall onto the settee backwards screaming.

‘Please stop, Dad, I’m sorry.’ The egg on my forehead from the force of my face hitting the wall is now visible when I look up. ‘Dad, I’ll never do it again, I’m sorry, please, please, please – I’m sorry.’

I am now on my back with blood pouring down my face and into my eyes.

‘If yi say I’m sorry once more I’ll smother yi, yi little snivelling cunt. Shut it or I’ll stop yi breathing.’

So I don’t say another word. I just lie there like a dog on its back, with arms and legs in the air, sniffing and trying not to look at the massive egg-shaped bump on my forehead or say anything else that might start him off again.

‘Get up, idiot. NOW! Get up!’

‘Please Dad I’m sorry—’

‘What did I tell you about saying yir sorry?’ Smack! Smack! Bang! Bang! He just explodes again after pacing up and down the carpet, thinking about what it might mean for him to get caught by the social, I guess.

The beating goes on for around four hours. Dad covers my mouth to stop me screaming while smashing his head into my face and kneeing me in the groin. I can’t even catch a breath as his hand is covering my mouth and nose. When I try to roll off the couch to get his hand away from my mouth, we both fall onto the floor, where he keeps smashing my head with a shoe, while clumps of my hair that he has been yanking out of my head are all over my face, and are now itching the hell out of my nose. My head feels like it’s going to explode and my body is aching from the constant knee shots he is firing into it.

Suddenly he stops and gets up, walks out of the living room and into the kitchen, then comes back with a bottle of vodka and two litres of Coke. I feel like jumping through the window but we’re three floors up and if it doesn’t smash I know it will be ten times worse if I never get out.

‘Get oot my fucking sight.’

I don’t know whether I should move or if he is going to smash me on the way past so I just lie there, not moving from the position he left me, against the couch on the floor with my legs under the table.

‘If I have to tell yi again, fucking bed now.’

So I jump up and chance it. He stands up as I try to run past and gives me one more boot in the back, sending me head first into the edge of the open door. That white flash I see when my skull smashes against the door will send a shiver down my spine for the rest of my life – and as an adult I still have the little indentation on my forehead from that cracked skull.

I drag myself off the floor, stagger into my room and close the door, just making it as I fall down face first onto the bed.

Blood is now pumping out of my head and covering the bed cover. It’s about 9 p.m. and all I can hear is the lid from the vodka bottle being twisted back on, as I take the pillowcase off the pillow to press against my open wounds. I can hear the TV volume go down – he turned it up full blast earlier to drown out my screams. How nobody has come to the door this night I’ll never know; I could have been murdered and people would have just sat at home with the telly turned up, so they didn’t have to get involved. Bunch of cowards.

I stay up until about 5 a.m. waiting for round two, but it never comes. The pain is not the worst thing about tonight though; it’s waiting for the bedroom door to open that really gets to me. My eyes will start to close, and then I hear movement, or he’ll start singing along to music on the radio or one of his records at the top of his lungs.

Dad loves singing – especially if they’re sentimental songs and he’s drunk, and often when I hear them I’m crouched somewhere in the flat in pain and not daring to move. He’s got old albums from the Sixties like the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, Tamla Motown, the Supremes and Stevie Wonder; and cassettes from the Seventies – he’s always playing the Carpenters and Commodores and Abba; and then there’s new, modern 1980s stuff like Alison Moyet and Lionel Richie. These records are the soundtrack of my childhood years of battering and abuse.

I’m completely exhausted but for eight hours that night I watch the door handle, listening to the odd can blowing down the street, cats fighting out the back green, police cars and ambulances going past but none stopping. I think that maybe someone may have called them to come and get him, but I am never that lucky.

The next day Dad says nothing to me in the morning. I am off school again but this time he’s going to need a really good excuse as I’ll be needing at least two weeks to recover because of the mess I’m in. But he’s thought of something; I never find out what it is, but it works. He’s a brilliant liar, you see, and has everyone under some kind of spell for years to come. As a six year old I’m desperate to tell someone, but I can’t forget him telling me that if I ever tell anyone what’s going on, he’ll either kill me or my mum would get me – and she’s fifty times worse, according to him.

Dad has told me that my mum tried to smother me just after I was born and that’s why he had to keep stealing me off her. I’m finding it harder and harder to remember my mum so I’m starting to believe him – and I’ve had no contact with her or my brother Tommy since the day in the courtroom when I went off with Dad. He’s also told me that she might kill me if she gets her hands on me again, and I sort of believe this too.

At least I think I do. He can make me think yes is no, up is down, black is white. I sometimes don’t know what to believe. But I will end up believing what he wants me to believe just so that I can get some sleep.

Chapter Six The Three Amigos

I go to school with my toes hanging out of the front of my trainers, wearing hand-me-downs that Dad has got from jumble sales or charity shops. I wear the same trousers for three or four years so the bottoms end up halfway up my shins. Most people are like that and I don’t feel like I stick out. In any case I don’t really care what other people think. When you’re getting what I’m getting at home that’s the last thing on your mind.

Besides, I love school. I try to have as much fun as I can when I’m at school. I walk through the school gates thinking ‘joy’ and enter into a different, safer world where the nightmare of the previous night’s beating can seem like a lifetime ago – something that happened on another planet and not even to me but to my twin brother – and unfortunately that affects my performance at school because everything that goes on within the school gates is sheer light relief as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing they could possibly do or say that would have been able to control me, or would put fear into me in comparison with what happens at home.

I’ve got a picture of myself in a little white shirt and striped red school tie – not my normal clothes I wear for school but they look good in the photo. I’ve just started school and I’m grinning from ear to ear. I’ve got this Edward Scissorhands pudding-bowl haircut – my hair’s light brown and matted – and my face is a little red. That’s partly because of freckles and partly because it’s still swollen from a beating Dad gave me a couple of nights before. I’ve got styes in both eyes and a cold sore on my mouth, and if you look closely you’ll see my eyes aren’t as happy as my grin would make you think.

When I’m at school and free of my jailer I put up a front to protect myself, so no one knows what’s happening at home. I clown it up and it’s like that Miracles song Dad sometimes plays and sings along to, ‘Tears of a Clown’. The only good thing I’ve got from Dad is that he can be very funny, and so can I. Dad loves playing tricks. He’ll brick up someone’s front door, or get his next-door neighbour’s washing, put brown sauce on it and put it back on their washing line, and I do similar things at school – when I manage to get there – like moving people’s chairs away before they sit down. Or when we’re in the canteen eating school dinner, I’ll unscrew the top of the salt cellar and leave it loose on top, so when someone sprinkles salt on their chips, it all falls out.

Dad’s been taking me to the pub from the age of five. If I go off to the toilet, by the time I’ve come back there’ll be a group of men surrounding him and he’s entertaining them all, telling them stories and laughing, the centre of attention. But he’s lousy at listening to other people. He’ll make a joke out of everything they say, even if it’s a serious conversation.

Having Dad’s sense of humour helps me right through my school years. Even in my first years at school, I get by with quips and practical jokes. Besides, just getting out of the house and away from Dad makes school a holiday. School’s a breeze for me – it’s a lark. I’m aided and abetted in this by my best friend Calum, who makes my time at school – when I do go to school, that is – about the only thing that makes life worth living for me.

Calum Patterson! A kid in exactly the same boat as me but it’s his mum who’s bringing him up alone and using Calum as a punch bag. We never really speak about our home life, but we just know even at a young age what each of us is going through. Calum is a short-arse like me. He’s a right Scottish-looking child, with a ginger bowl-cut hairdo and freckles, and even though he’s just a kid he has a boxer’s nose and bags under his eyes like me. Like me he wears Staypress trousers, and British Home Stores jumper and shirt from the social grant that all people on the dole receive. His tie is always wrapped around his head. When Karate Kid comes out Calum thinks that’s him, running past people screaming high-pitched noises like hiiiyyaa.

We both walk around school with ripped trousers and scuffed shoes from climbing up the drainpipe onto the school roof. If anyone kicks a ball up there, we’re the monkeys that will go and get it – well, we’re the only two daft and fearless enough for the job. Calum is a lot like me. The way that he always cracks jokes or makes up names for people by using their most noticeable features.

For instance, we call ginger Garry Copper Crutch; fat Paul is Rollo; Alec with the glasses is Specky Ecky; and Peter Humphrey is Bogey, after Humphrey Bogart. Compared with what we both go through at home, our lives in school are fantastic, brilliant – a world away from the torture dens we have to go back to at 3.30 p.m. It is somewhere we can be ourselves, without the pressure of watching every word we say in case we’re mauled.

One day Calum and I are walking along the corridor between classes when we see a girl from the year above us arguing with a boy about how good looking she is. I only catch the end of the conversation. ‘I’m nicer looking than your lass, she’s a pure minger.’