Dizzy, the Early Years

Born as the war was coming to a close, Dizzy is the middle of 3 daughters. Grandad, a proud Lancashire Lad, was away in The Signals, doing his part for the war effort & Nan, Motherwell Matriarch, was a stay at home mum. We joke that if the war had continued there would have been a much bigger family; Grandad returned from leave 3 times, leaving Nan with a ‘Bun in the Oven!’  

Like many veterans, he was reticent to talk about his experience; only choosing to tell us his job was to lay down the communication system before troops moved into an area. Nan didn’t have time to work! When she wasn’t cooking one in the oven and running a house single handed, she was next door, at my great grandparents, helping her parents! Both he and Nan came from large families. I had over 40 great-aunts and uncles, counting their spouses. I may not remember them all, but I do remember the feeling of family closeness and laughter, lots of laughter! On Nan’s side, it was like ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys' on turbo settings and on Granddad’s side, it was less raucous, but an amazing talent of being able to ‘spin a good yarn' with such a dry sense of humour!

Mum talks about her childhood with such warmth and affection, apart from resenting she always got the hand me downs, whilst her 2 sister's got everything new, “Middle Child Syndrome”! Sadly, mum grew up being told, by her teachers, that she was stupid and illiterate! Dyslexia didn’t exist back then! It made her disruptive in school and totally switched off to learning. Her favourite word, apparently, was, “Why?” Back in an era where children were seen and not heard, she and Granddad would regularly be at loggerheads. Mum always the loser, sometimes with a fat lip for her efforts! So it was hardly surprising when she married as soon as she could, in an effort to escape her strict upbringing.

Sadly, mum swapped her authoritative dad for a manipulative wife beater! Not to begin with of course, that controlling side took a short time to develop. In an age where wives stayed at home, mum would be out working full-time to pay his gambling debts. As an added bonus, she would be punished because there wasn’t a hot meal waiting for him, when he got in from work! They also had problems conceiving, another reason for a ‘quick slap'! But sadly, both their bodies were working against them. Mum’s bits produced too many chemicals that would destroy his little swimmers and he couldn’t produce enough little swimmers, and those he did produce needed a sat nav to find their destination! So, although I call him my ‘Sperm Donor’ he wasn’t! I will never know who was! I was conceived in a petri dish in Harley Street, London, at the cost of £2000 in 1970s prices. A secretive procedure back then, Artificial Insemination by a Donor, I am the result of a quick one of the wrist! All I do know is, as a controversial procedure, donors weren’t exactly queuing up, so it tended to be other medical professionals that donated their services. (Shame I didn’t inherit the clever gene!)  

As I’ve said, it was a secretive procedure and frowned upon as it was creating Frankenstein babies ... now I know why I’m so twisted!! They had to swear, on a bible, that my parentage would never be revealed, although by law I had to be registered with the ‘father unknown' label on my birth certificate ! Erm, hello ... do you not think that might raise suspicion?? And, as my exes would probably agree with, technically I was a Bastard, not a term discussed in polite society back then! So Mum was now baking her own bun and received 9 months of peace from his fists, not his verbal abuse though. He never let her forget it was HER failings that made them do what they did. That man, and I use that term in the biological sense only, was a master of manipulation.  Mum genuinely believed it was all her fault, she was stupid, she was inferior!  

Anyway, this has gotten far too serious, so let’s resume normal service! Mum couldn’t wait for her bump to show. Sadly, we think I’m made of plain, not self-raising flour; as mum was almost 8 months pregnant before it was evident! After almost a decade of trying to conceive, even her mummy tummy was letting her down! Her eldest sister, cooking baby number 7, and younger sister on baby number 2, were the size of buses ... so was mum, only hers was Corgi toy size! Finally, after many hours of labour (the number varies) I came into the world. I’m not saying I was ugly, but they had to slap the midwife! Simply put, I was over baked. I had layers of dead skin caked onto me! But mum thought I was beautiful, thank goodness at least someone did! Her friends would come to visit her in the hospital, sneak a peek and recoil, trying to hide their horror! Eventually, the dead skin came away, and I resembled human form! A thoughtful baby, apparently I always waited until Mum was pulling up the covers to sleep before opening my foghorn lungs! Unable to breast feed, mum would be sitting there bottle feeding me, being told what a failure she was, she couldn’t even feed her down child properly and that maybe it would be better if he just took me away to a better family! It’s a miracle she ever bonded with me!

Looking back through my rose tinted child glasses, they have much thinner lenses than the ones worn today, life seemed idyllic. It seemed to consist of school, where I was labelled a swot, playing out with my friends and Enid Blyton! Despite her fear of the written word, mum instilled a love of books into me. Apparently, when I was a baby I had cloth books for the pram and water proof books for the bath. She was determined I wasn’t going to grow up with her phobia. Unaware at the time, mum had rote learned a ladybird book, “Telling the Time” and would read it to me at bed time. She confidently sat there holding the book and turning the pages at all the right times, “At 7 o’clock we all rise, to stretch, and rub our sleepy eyes.” ...

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Sorry, had to stop for a minute there, my eyes have started leaking! Wow! Didn’t realise that was such a powerful memory, anyone know a good plumber?  

She was so clever, if I had a different book, she would ask me to read it to her, and I would mimic what I had learned from her. I was totally oblivious to her fear, but more importantly her sheer strength and determination. Not to be outdone, he drummed the times tables into me. He thought because I knew what 12 x 12 was at the age of 4, that he was the victor. But he wasn’t, I LOVED books, and 12 x 12 was just like a poem that you recite over and over again. It had no meaning, whereas I could pick up a newspaper and tell him that Star Trek WAS on, even though he’d said it wasn’t, to get me to bed early! He said I was lying, until I read the blurb in the TV listings! It’s probably the only time I remember getting a ‘good hiding’ from him. Looking back with adult eyes, to him, it was probably the equivalent of mum telling him HE was in the wrong, and I had to be put in my place!

I’m not saying I thought mum was perfect back then, far from it! Mum was strict, NO meant NO and please & thank you came as standard, not an optional extra! We had a 1, 2, 3 rule ... if I didn’t do as I was told by the time she got to 3, my arse knew about it! And I’m not saying I wasn’t defiant either, I soon learned that I could get away with waiting until she got to, “Thhhhhhh,” so long as she didn’t get to the, “Reeeeeeee” part I was ok! And I also learned that if mum said no, a few tears to him, got me what I wanted. I didn’t know that by telling tales like that, mum was given a good hiding, once I was in bed! What a selfish, spoiled brat I was!

At the age of 7, the year of Grease, Olivia Neutron Bomb and John Travolting, we moved to Blackpool! I dreamt of sun, sand and an endless supply of rock! Who knew there were schools and even bad weather? Trust me, beaches soon get boring, you can sicken yourself on rock and Blackpool in the closed season is like the Antarctic! We went into partnership with Mum’s childhood friend and her husband. We ran a 9 bedroomed guest house, 109 Albert Road, aka Durham House. Life was far from the idyllic dream I had imagined!  The men worked a window cleaning round and Mum and her best friend seemed to be constantly in the kitchen cooking, or making beds! A far cry from the luxury bedrooms our guests had, we slept in the cellar! The only natural light came from the glass tiles in the roof, that was often punctuated with the feet of people walking by above, at street level.  

That’s also where I learned that kids could be so cruel. Poor mum saw this only child, spoiled brat being a prize bitch, she didn’t see the slaps, pinches and name calling that can be so devastating to a child’s confidence! The bullying was always at its peak during meal times, as all the grown-ups were busy looking after the guests. I developed, what today would be called a psychosomatic illness, basically I smelt the food cooking and I would throw up! Bring rushed off her feet, mum would make me sit on the back doorstep, throwing up into the outside drain. It sounds gross, but it was my haven, until bedtime! Obviously, being a kid, I saw mum as a graceful swan, cooking a million meals effortlessly, I didn’t see the frantic paddling her feet were doing below the water. The so called best friends were scamming the business and eventually it all went tits up! So he moved back to Coventry first, with the premise of getting a job and finding us a place to live. Mum and I moved in with a friend, so I could see the school year out in Blackpool. Bratty me could only see that I'd ‘lost' the nice parent and had to live in this hellhole with the strict one!  

I was totally unaware that, instead of getting everything ready for our return, he was living with Nan and Granddad, visiting prostitutes and gambling away the little money that was salvaged from the business. So my dream of returning to our privately owned 3 bed semi turned into the nightmare of a 4th floor council flat, no garden, no friends, yeah I was a selfish brat! That flat continued my awakening to how cruel life can be. That’s where I witnessed my mum slide down a wall after a swift punch, it's where I saw my mum finally snap and almost break his shoulder blade with a steak tenderiser and it's where I discovered I was a Bastard!  

Fearful of anything legal or official, mum had stuck to oath she had sworn 9 years ago. She had been mortified when instead of the, ‘Father Unknown’ that should have been on my birth certificate, he had registered my birth alone and naming himself as my legal father. I can still hear her pleas as she begged him ‘not to’ as he uttered the words, ‘I'm not your dad.’ He had an impeccable sense of timing too, it was the same night I discovered my dear great aunt had died! He failed to tell me the full facts, leaving me to assume mum had been unfaithful. I was at the age where sex had something to do with boys having pencils and girls had pencil sharpeners, so simply I thought mum had sharpened someone else’s pencil! Bless her, I bet she never thought she would be having ‘that’ conversation, whilst explaining the science behind it, whilst nursing a dislocated jaw!  

Expecting me to take his side, with his half truth, he was floored at my reaction! I remember feeling so angrily empowered and grown up, telling him, at the age of 8, that he couldn’t tell ME what to do, he wasn’t my Dad! I was then floored, literally at his response, my cheek stung for an age! Oh and by the way, this was Christmas Eve! I suppose my under reaction to Christmas today, has a lot to do with that time! I don’t remember much about that Christmas Day, other than a deathly silence and an atmosphere thicker than the Cabinet Room at No10, after the last election! I do remember Boxing Day though! Mum wasn't there when I woke up, and me and him went to visit my cousin! I thought nothing of it, when he and my cousins went to the pub. I thought it was exciting because Tina, my cousins wife, was teaching me to knit! Kids are so fickle! I was unaware that instead of the pub, they had in fact been at the flat, changing the locks! We returned home later to an empty flat and Mum STILL wasn't home the next day either! He told me she had phoned to say she wasn’t coming back! Like a prat, I believed him!  

I dreaded going back to school, because the first thing we would have to do was write our ‘news'. I remember staring at the blank page, trying to make up some magical story to compete with the other kids! I didn’t want my real news shared! I’m not sure what happened next, but I do remember a tear spreading out on my blank page and being quietly lead away to the Head Mistresses’ office. Waiting patiently in there was MUM!!!! In between my sobs, she explained how she had gone out Boxing Day morning to ask a friend, if mum and I could move in with her, until something better could be organised and on her return, the locks had been changed. Long  story short, the school would not let me leave before home time. I had to then ‘chose’ if I would cross the road to my aunts house and wait for him, or leave through the office and out to Mum, waiting in Grandad’s car! How thoughtful of the school to put such an immense responsibility on an 8 year old child! That day was a blur! I couldn’t wait to leave with mum! We were off on an adventure! Blow you Famous Five, The Terrific Two had their own stories to discover.