A Life More Ordinary

I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts before moving on to the next part of my story. Walking through my early years has left me feeling bruised as I have uncovered more memories than I expected and reliving the times when I was on the receiving end of violence or worse has saddled me with a deep, cloying sadness that I am unable to shake off.

The thing about the physical violence is…after a while, it loses its shock. You can begin to see it coming, anticipate it. Recognise the signals. For me, it was always a reaction to something, so I learned to watch my father and to try to keep one step ahead of his anger. There were times when this worked and many others when it didn’t. Essentially, I was a child trying to learn adult strategies and implement them into my life. To this day, I still select where I sit in rooms with half an eye out for trouble on the horizon, giving myself both the best line of sight to anticipate any problems and the best chance of dealing with them.

Of course, I was by no means a saint and there were times when it could be argued that a ‘punishment’ of sorts was justified. Whether or not that punishment should have been physical is obviously up for debate and one particular occasion sticks in my mind to this day.

I must have been about seven years old, still attending Inverteign Junior School in Teignmouth, so we’d have still been living at Kingsway. I was no stranger to adult life; we were regularly exposed to bad language and sexual content, some of which, the swearing especially, was often a hot topic of conversation in the playground. During one of these conversations, it was suggested that if I wanted to make my father happy, which he obviously wasn’t during this time, I should share with him a particular phrase which he would find hilarious.

I was intrigued. Was this the much-sought-after magic solution that would lift me from those darkest of days? Could it ease my troubles and set me on the path to a ‘normal’ life?

Well, no, it couldn’t. Because unbeknownst to me, I was being totally and utterly set up and I bought it completely. As the school day came to an end, I merrily trotted through the gates and made the short walk home. As I reached the back door, I knocked and waited, butterflies in my stomach as I prepared to solve all of the problems in my tiny, pain-filled world. My Dad pulled open the door and looked at me.

‘Dad,’ says I. ‘I learned two new words at school today.’

‘Really?’ Came the reply. ‘What were they?’

I paused for maximum effect and braced myself to be showered with love and to be raised high upon his shoulders as some sort of saviour.

‘Fuck off!’ I proclaimed, proudly, and watched as his face turned slowly purple and the same fury that had led to the ‘cricket ball in the face’ and the ‘falling down the stairs’ incidents descended swiftly.

With my heart breaking, I made the seemingly wise yet ultimately futile decision to leg it. Down the steps, up the garden path that I had been well and truly led down, out of the gate and beyond. I would probably have been better served by taking my punishment there and then. Instead, he was left with time to stew on my misdemeanour. When I finally returned home after about three hours of freedom, I was dragged up the stairs, given a hiding and had my face shoved in a sink full of water while my father shoved half a bar of Palmolive in and out of my mouth. And the worst part of all of that? I still had no idea what I’d done wrong.

I know that it was ‘the way of things’ back then. But what exactly did it teach me?

I think it taught me that I couldn’t trust anyone. It taught me that soap doesn’t taste very nice, either when it’s being forced down your throat or when it’s on the way back up afterwards. It left me bewildered and confused. I was told this was a good thing, but it clearly wasn’t and in amongst the shouting and the hitting, there was no explanation. So I had to draw my own conclusions and more through luck than anything, I resolved to stay away from the phrase ‘fuck off’ for a considerable amount of time.

What was beyond my father at that time was the ability or perhaps the inclination to educate me. Would it have been more effective to sit me down and discuss what I had done and why I shouldn’t have done it? I don’t think that I was unreasonable as a child and I honestly believe that I would have responded far better to reason than I ever did to his more ‘traditional methods’.

On reflection, however, at least I knew where I stood with the violence. It was straightforward, even if I didn’t always understand why I was taking a pummelling. It was obviously because I’d done something wrong, I just had to work out what that was and not do it again.

The other stuff was far more confusing because it wasn’t so easy to anticipate and sometimes it came from nowhere. Or worse, it came out of love. Or what we thought was love back then and let’s be honest, it wasn’t like we were inundated with good role models in our family.

I think that I must have spent a large part of my childhood silently raging at the injustice of my world. I was always a thinker and, I suspect, always a worrier, but I worked out very early on that there was something very wrong about the way that I was being parented and that if I ever got the opportunity to be a father myself, I would never repeat those mistakes. Of course, I say that I was silently raging because there was no benefit to voicing my anger and my frustration, as it would only provoke the inevitable reaction. I wonder if that’s why I’m vociferous against perceived injustice these days, having been so quiet for so long; it’s quite the revelation when you finally learn to make a stand. And I can still remember the day that I made a stand against my father and strangely enough, I’m reasonably sure that it was around the time that I became a father myself. Twenty-six years ago.

We were visiting my Dad and Brenda at their house in Plymouth and he was trying to wind me up to get a reaction from me. I think we were watching something on television that I was interested in, but he wasn’t and he kept prodding and poking my leg. Small-time stuff, but it was really irritating. Eventually, I got to my feet and stood over him.

‘If you do that again, I’ll fucking lay you out!’ I said, having to check that it was my voice saying those words. I braced myself, suddenly seven years old again and waited for his response. He tried to make light of it, saying that he was just messing about, but the Universe shifted in that moment and I would never be made to feel the way I did when I was a child again. I had made my stand and that was enough. If only it were that easy to exorcise the ghosts of my childhood.

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.