A Life More Ordinary

We stayed in Teignmouth for a while, in the Devon-based equivalent of the house from the Amityville Horror movie, after my parents had separated. I remember my Dad being involved in a relationship with a woman named Sharon. I think she was a bit younger than him and if I’d been in a different headspace as a young child from a broken home, I might have been able to appreciate what I’m sure were the many positive facets of her personality. However, I was hurting and I felt that she was trying to replace my mum. Older and wiser now, I’m sure that she wasn’t but through childish eyes that was what I saw and felt. And I behaved accordingly.

In fact, thinking about it, I’m not even sure that I thought she was trying to replace my mother. I was probably more worried about her taking my Dad away from me. Essentially losing one parent and only seeing them for a handful of days every year was tough enough, I felt abandoned and unbelievably lonely. I think that I must have clung to my Dad after their separation, despite his parenting ‘style’. Even a dysfunctional family set up can be comforting in its own way and the constant comings and goings were unsettling to say the least.

So, Sharon arrived on the scene and I was suddenly having to compete with someone else for my Dad’s attention. It wasn’t pretty. I was a little shit, rude and thoroughly unpleasant. I would interrupt every opportunity they tried to create to share any intimacy. At Kingsway, the kitchen was at the back of the house and accessed through the hallway. There was a window above the kitchen door and next to the door we had a tall fridge and various piles of domestic detritus. On one occasion, Dad and Sharon escaped to the kitchen, either in search of shenanigans or serenity. Perhaps both. Neither were attainable, thanks to the furious, small child scaling the Hotpoint equivalent of Mount Everest and pressing his tear-stained face up against the dusty windowpane. They did their best to ignore me, but I’m nothing if not persistent when the mood takes me and I earned myself an absolute shoeing that day. Maybe it was justified.

Shortly afterwards, Sharon broke things off with my Dad and he was only too happy to make sure that I knew it was entirely my fault. It was only when I got older that I understood more about what had happened and I still feel appropriately guilty about how that particular situation unfolded. Maybe that’s why I try to understand why my Dad did the things that he did, he was far from perfect and there was an inordinate amount of trauma behind his actions as there was behind my behaviour back then and the person I am today. Of course, there is no way of knowing how that relationship would have panned out, what it would or wouldn’t have led to. But was I ultimately responsible for the fact that it didn’t work out? Yes, I was. It must have been an awful situation. Yes, I was hurting and I was only a child…perhaps that’s why I try to take responsibility for my own actions as much as possible. It’s all about choices…and sometimes there are only bad choices but we still have to choose.

The saving grace was that he did find happiness further down the line and that happiness led to him becoming a different person. A better person, I think. A better parent in some ways, because the violent outbursts diminished and eventually stopped completely but there were still areas of our relationship that were fragmented and in many ways beyond repair. The damage, as they say, had already been done.

Things became even more difficult after the failure of that relationship. I suspect that I was subconsciously aware that through my actions I was at fault and was ultra-keen to make amends. I have no idea why or how my sisters and I ended up at the local tip, but we snuck in and began to poke around, completely oblivious to any potential dangers. This was the late seventies/early eighties after all…

After a few minutes, we hit the jackpot. Or at least we thought we had. Carrier bags full of discarded beer mats. I imagine the thought processes went something like this:

Beer mats…Dad likes beer…so he must like beer mats. That’s about it. Nothing more complicated than that. So, we set off for home, weighed down by our haul yet joyous with our potential peace offering. That joy lasted mere seconds upon our arrival, mud-caked shoes and grime-streaked clothes being greeted with an unexpected fury.

My world turned upside-down. Quite literally as I was grabbed by my right welly, flipped the wrong way up and dragged upstairs towards the bathroom. I was about to suggest that I was quite unaware as to why I had been the one to cop my father’s anger, but in hindsight and considering the previous paragraphs above, it’s probably quite obvious. Upwards I floated, my head banging on each stair until we reached the summit, his rage peaking in time with our movements, his voice rising all the time while he violently shook me by the leg on the landing. In one movement, my foot slipped out of my boot and my back hit the top step. Time stood still as I teetered on the brink, small fingers clutching at the threadbare carpet for what felt like an eternity before I began to slide backwards, tumbling towards the front door in a whirl of terror, oddly aware of the sound of myself screaming as if I was watching on from outside of my body.

I hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs with a thud, the world spinning, my heart pounding and hot tears running down my face. I could feel the carpet burns on my back and arms, my neck hurt and I felt sick. A sharp pain in my left ankle suggested that I had hit my leg against the banister on the way down. And then, a welcoming blackness swept in.

I have no recollection of what happened after the incident. I’m guessing that there wasn’t much left to discuss. I’ll make an assumption that my father felt a mixture of regret and relief, although I’m not convinced that either emotion would have been voiced. I would probably have received a drunken apology at some point along with a poorly reasoned attempt at justification. Love most definitely did not live at 178 Kingsway.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom in Teignmouth but incidents such as the one above were commonplace. It’s fair to say that light-hearted moments were certainly few and far between. There was one mealtime, however, that went down as legendary in our family history. There was a disagreement between myself and at least one of my sisters and for once, it was allowed to play out without physical intervention in the form of a fist or the flat of a hand. I think my Dad may also have encouraged the dispute along its path. Suffice to say that it reached a certain point and I reacted in a particularly irritated and vociferous manner, launching into a verbal tirade as I bravely decided that I would leave the table before everyone had finished (which absolutely was not allowed and will bring me to another, small tale shortly) and storm off in the general direction of the rest of the house.

After exiting swiftly, with no plan other than to put as much distance between myself and the rest of the family, I thought of one other thing to say, so pushed open the kitchen door. At this point, my Dad picked up one of the used tea bags from the table, whirled around and threw it in my direction just as I opened my mouth to speak. I kid you not, the teabag flew straight into my open mouth, splitting instantly and spilling tea leaves all over my tongue and lips, only serving to enrage me further but causing everyone else to dissolve into one huge, hysterical mess. Eventually, and by that I mean some days later, I managed to see the funny side of it.

My father was a stickler for rules, especially around the dinner table. Correct use of cutlery was one, noisy eating was not allowed either. The main one, however, was nobody was allowed to leave the table until everyone had finished, which was a constant source of frustration for us all. The flip side, however, was that it offered us siblings the chance to irritate each other, which I think made it all the more entertaining for my father. There was one occasion when some of us were desperate to leave the table to watch something on tv, I can’t recall what exactly. Rachael had different ideas and decided to cut every baked bean on her plate in half and eat those halves one at a time, very slowly. My Dad found it ‘hilarious’ and played along, telling her to take her time, which she did, of course. These were the days before video recording or DVDs, so you generally had one chance to watch something and that was it. We missed whatever televisual extravaganza we’d been pining for and Rachael made whatever point it was that she wanted to make.

Behaviour like that was fine all the time that Dad thought it was funny, but more often than not dinner would be a stressful affair. There were times when he would throw plates full of food at the wall and we’d be made to clean up the mess and if he was in a particularly bad mood, we’d have to eat the food even if it was covered in hair or dirt or bits of porcelain. We’d often be sat in silence trying not to make even the slightest sound, even to the point of trying to make sure that our knives and forks made no noise when cutting food on the plate. The rules were inconsistent as were his reactions and it made navigating home life unpredictable and at times, terrifying.

The fluctuating moods of my father and the instability at home were nigh on impossible to understand as children and I’ve no doubt that the destabilisation of the family unit and the lack of parental guidance have a lot to answer for when it comes to the trials and tribulations that we have been through over the years. When Dad was at home we were constantly walking on eggshells and we never received any positive recognition. When he wasn’t there, we felt very much as though we had been left to fend for ourselves. Carole, as the oldest sibling, took much of this on herself but at the age of 12, maybe 13, had little experience in dealing with suddenly being thrust into the role of matriarch while also attempting to make sense of puberty. The result was not good.

I look back on my days at Kingsway with such sadness. Those formative years of ours are so important when we move from our first stumbling, tentative steps to learn all about the world and the people around us, those people that we hope will be the touchstone for our developing personalities to lean on and learn from and then stand shoulder to shoulder with us to face whatever difficulties the Universe has in store for us until such a time comes that fate intervenes. The love of your parents should be the first thing you experience, the first certainty that you can call on when you are afraid. Unconditional love. That’s not to say that our actions and our choices don’t impact that love or challenge it, in the worst cases even slowly eroding it to a greater or lesser extent. But you can love somebody without necessarily liking the person they are at certain times. It was expected of us, the children. We were expected to love our parents regardless of their actions. So why was it not reciprocated? Why did their love come with unspoken caveats that we were supposed to be aware of in not-so-blissful ignorance?

I have moments where I want to believe that it was perhaps because they never experienced unconditional love either. I’m pretty damn sure that my father didn’t. When I’m feeling…calm and reasonable, I can make myself ok with that as an explanation. But…I didn’t experience unconditional love as a child, yet I can clearly remember having been on the receiving end of parental frustration and punishment and understanding completely that this was not how things should be. I didn’t parent the way that either of my parents did, which in many ways blows that initial reasoning out of the water.

I’m not saying that there should be an absence of consequences for our actions, we all have to learn how to get along in the world and even as adults we can struggle with this at times. But consequences within a family environment should be administered with love, surely? Teach with kindness, learn to understand together the rights and wrongs of social interactions. Love completely. Parental love isn’t something to be earned. If you make the decision to bring life into this world, you have a responsibility for that life from day one. You don’t stop being a parent when your child reaches the age of eighteen because to be perfectly frank, your child doesn’t stop needing you then. They don’t stop looking at you for guidance, for understanding, for kindness. For love.

And that’s a big part of what I think my parents never understood. I may have moved out of Kingsway a long time ago, but for years there was a ghost of my own trapped in that house. Sometimes a ghost isn’t a spirit but a memory and those tortured reminisces of my childhood were just as much a prisoner in that house as the actual ghost was who haunted it. It took an awfully long time to set it free.

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.