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

have to come home and start all over again. It’s all your fault!’
    I wasn’t sure if she was talking to my father or to me. She seemed to blame us both.
    ‘It’s your fault I have to work to earn this house.’ She looked at me, then she looked at him. ‘Where would you live if it weren’t for me? I work my fingers to the bone for you. No thanks I get for it.’
    ‘Oh shut up, woman!’ barked my father. ‘Do you think I wanted to come here? It was your bloody idea.’
    ‘Well, you didn’t come up with a better one.’
    ‘Pit-yacker. Pit-yacker,’ he taunted.
    ‘Up yours,’ she snarled. ‘When I married you, I didn’t think I’d end up being put into service.’
    So it went on, day after day. We dwelt once again in the shrine of my mother’s martyrdom. Worse still, my father didn’t want to live here either. The man who needed to be in sole control felt forced to move from one house belonging to his wife’s family to another secured entirely by his wife. Only this time, as the ultimate blow, it was by dint of her work, rather than his. He was now a tipper-truck driver on the pit heaps at Wallsend. No house came with that job. Tommy was a man fuelled by pride in his superiority as the master of the house, and this was an open wound that ate away at him day by day. He had to reinforce his position in this family somehow, and there was only one way he knew how to do that.
    If I closed a door too noisily, he would shout, ‘Get back here. You did that just to annoy me, didn’t you?’
    I always said nothing. I had already learned it was safer that way.
    ‘You will open and close that door silently – not a sound – twenty times. I shall count, mind.’ He sat down to look at the paper.
    ‘Yes, Daddy.’ I started my penance. Twenty times I opened and closed the door, trying my hardest not to make a sound. If I did, he would make me start all over again.
    After a meal, he would point at me. ‘You – dishes, now.’
    So at six years old I washed the dishes after every family meal. If he wasn’t happy with the way I did them, I would have to start all over again . . . and maybe again. I had to jump to every command. Total obedience. I knew that to argue or protest would lead to something worse.
    Every time my father ordered me to do something, my mother chimed in with her sarcasm. ‘Let’s bow and scrape to the master! He has to be the big man, bossing a little girl around.’
    There were no other children at Murton and I had to get used to playing on my own. I became a ‘country kid’, and I soon got to know every burrow hole in Murton village. I knew the feral cats in the farmer’s barn and played with their kittens. I counted the newts in the village pond and investigated their markings. I found a weasel colony and watched them foraging for food. I revelled in the freedom of endless sunny summer days as I wandered alone through fields of wheat between meadows of sweet buttercups and cowslips. I made friends with the hedgerow animals and enjoyed many a conversation with the farmer’s cows.
    My new school was more than a mile away across the fields, at Monkseaton. I dawdled on the way home, spinning out the time before I would have to enter the house again and its aura of menace. Halfway I stopped to pick handfuls of the juiciest green grass before climbing a stile. As I strolled through the field, grazing cattle put up their curious heads to look at me. I offered them the new grass and a few of them snatched it, their velvet lips brushing my skin. Gradually they became used to me feeding them by hand with such tasty morsels from the other side of the fence.
    Before long the cows came to meet me at the same time every afternoon. This loving herd of raven-black cattle nodded their heads when I arrived and followed me back to the farm. ‘What’s it like to live in this big field, with all your brothers and sisters?’ I would ask. They listened, their wise eyes focused on me. ‘Where are your