Free My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story by Helen Edwards, Jenny Lee Smith

get out of the way of their fights, as so often when I was little, I was knocked to the floor. They never seemed to realize I was there. I tried to make myself as small as I could, curling up into a ball in the corner and protecting my head. They moved about so much, I used to call it the dance of anger. It was a macabre ballet of the furies.
    I’m sure my grandma and the others knew. But it was that old custom – what goes on behind the front door, or in a marriage, or what a parent does to a child . . . you can’t interfere. So they knew, but they did nothing.
    When my mother wasn’t there I saw my father in a different light. Dad drove a huge brick wagon in those days. The bricks were loaded by hand onto the lorry, and after a lengthy journey, he then had to unload them by hand again at the other end. Sometimes he took me on long-distance trips with him. I rode all day on top of the engine cowling in between the seats in the cab. I liked the warm hum of the engine beneath my tummy as I lay across it, holding my head up to watch the road through the windscreen. Dad used to steer one-handed as he went round a corner, reaching out to put his free arm over my back to stop me from sliding off down to the floor.
    Once we arrived at the building site, Dad would share his lunch with me – usually jam sandwiches packed in an old Oxo tin. He called it bait. The sandwiches were always dry and stiff from being made the night before, but they tasted good to me. We washed the crusts down with a plastic cup of hot tea from his Thermos flask. Dad used the big cup and he gave me the little one. I can still taste that tea – hot and sweet, with the tang of plastic. It seemed to me the best tea in the world.
    After our lunch, I watched Dad unload the wagon four or five bricks at a time. It seemed to take for ever. As he worked, he laughed and joked with the men on the site, and sometimes they came over to help him. Occasionally one of them would come and give me a couple of toffees, softened by the warmth of their pocket. Half-melted, it would take all of my concentration to extricate them from their wax papers. But they were worth it.
    On the long journey home, the rhythmic heartbeat of the Leyland engine and the flapping of the windscreen wipers to and fro, to and fro would soothe me off to sleep, wrapped in the old tartan rug that my dad kept in the cab of the wagon, with its delicious aroma of petrol and engine oil.
    As we neared home in the dark of the evening, my dad would stop the empty wagon outside a certain confectionery shop. It was always open. I woke up, excited to go inside this magical grotto with him. He would buy me a tube of Smarties, or some Fry’s Chocolate Cream chocolate, which we ate together on the last leg of the journey. Finally we would arrive home and the wagon seemed to heave a sigh of relief as my dad picked me up and carried me inside on his shoulder.
    I have always remembered those trips in the big wagon, the togetherness of me and my dad, and his deep voice singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ to me as my eyelids drooped and I dozed off into a peaceful sleep. I think having me on the truck with him, sharing that time with me, was the closest he was capable of being.
    Even my mother had her lighter moments. At Christmas time every year she made a lot of ginger wine, which she loved. My big treat was when she filled the miniature ginger essence bottle with some ginger wine for me. This was a great excitement, like having something forbidden, but with permission. It was delicious.
    The Christmas Eve when I was five, I raced into the kitchen from the bathroom, wearing my new pyjamas, their Christmas present to me, to have my coveted bottle of ginger wine. I found it on the dresser, unscrewed the top and drank it all down. What I didn’t know was that my father had been varnishing something in his garage, had poured the leftover varnish into an empty bottle, just the right size, and left it where he