Free Don’t Tell Mummy by Toni Maguire

moved them up and down. All the time I was doing it I could hear small animal whimpers escaping from my throat and mingling with his grunts. I shut my eyes tightly, hoping that if I couldn’t see then it would stop, but it didn’t.
    Suddenly my hand was released and my body thrown back across the seat. I felt one hand holding me firmly by pressing on my stomach while another pulled my dress up and yanked my knickers down. I felt shame as my smallbody was exposed to his eyes and I was pushed further down on the cold leather seat. He pulled me sideways, leaving my legs dangling helplessly over the edge. Legs that I tried in vain to close. I felt him force them further apart, knew he was gazing at the part of me that I thought private, felt a cushion slide under my bottom and then the pain as he pushed himself into me, not hard enough in those early days to tear or damage, but hard enough to hurt.
    I lay as limp and as mute as a rag doll, trying to focus on anything apart from what was happening, while the smell of the shed with its combination of damp, oil and petrol, mingled with my father’s male smell of tobacco and stale body odour, seemed to seep into the very pores of my skin.
    After what seemed like an eternity, he gave a groan and pulled out of me. I felt a warm, wet, sticky substance dripping onto my stomach. He threw a piece of sacking at me.
    ‘Clean yourself up with that.’
    Wordlessly, I did as he instructed.
    His next words were destined to become a regular refrain: ‘Don’t you be telling your mother, my girl. This is our secret. If you tell her, she won’t believe you. She won’t love you any longer.’
    I already knew that was true.
    The one secret I held back from my father was the secret I held back from myself. My mother did know. The one fear he had was that she would find out. So that was the day we started the game; the game was called ‘our secret’, a game that he and I were to play for seven more years.

Chapter Seven
    M y eighth birthday arrived, bringing with it an early autumn quickly followed by the chill of winter. A diet of dark-brown peat was constantly supplied to the stove, producing a red glow, but however much we fed it the warm pool of heat never seemed to spread more than a few feet. I would huddle as close to it as possible as my permanently damp coat, shoes and woollen tights steamed on the wooden clothes horse. Since I only had one of each they had to be ready for the following day.
    My mother’s voice would float up the still uncarpeted stairs to wake me in the darkness of every early morning, and a chill would nip the tip of my nose as it ventured outside the cocoon of blankets. Automatically my arm would stretch out to the wooden chair, which doubled up as table and wardrobe, as I fumbled for clothes, which I would draw in under the blankets. First my school knickers, followed by woollen tights, brought from the kitchen the night before, were wriggled into. Then, with chattering teeth, my unbuttoned pyjama top would be hastily pulled over my head to be replaced by a woollen vest. Only then would I swing my legs out of bed, leaving my warm nest behind and venturing into the cold of the unheated house. Hastily I would boil thekettle on the range, which would eventually, with some prodding from the poker and some small pieces of peat, come slowly to life.
    I would wash quickly at the kitchen sink while my breakfast egg was cooked, then scramble into the rest of my clothes. Breakfast would be consumed hurriedly, then, pulling on my still damp coat, I would pick up my satchel and leave for school.
    At the weekends, dressed in an old sweater, mittens and wellington boots, I would help my mother collect eggs, both from the deep litter outhouses and from the scattered hiding places of the free-range chickens. Hoping for brown eggs, she gave them cocoa every morning at eleven o’clock. Whether it increased the ratio of brown eggs to white we were never sure, but the chickens would