“I heard him coming up the stairs. He was a big man and his feet sounded like thunder on the stairs. He opened my bedroom door and stood there with the leather belt in his hand. He seemed to fill the room. I was sitting on the bed holding the comic I’d been reading, and he said: ‘This is for what you said to your mother.’ Trish, I was a little boy, for God’s sake. What could I possibly have said to my mother to warrant this?”
“Keep it coming,” Trish said.
“And my father said: ‘This is going to hurt me a lot more
than it’s going to hurt you’. And I
remember thinking how stupid that was. How could it hurt him more than it was
going to hurt me? I understand now what he was saying, of course, but I didn’t
then.”
“What did he do?”
“He pulled my pants down, and I remember him looking
disgusted because they were wet. He turned me over on the bed and gave me the
biggest beating I’d ever had. It was several days before I could sit down
properly.”
“So for something you said on a Tuesday morning, you had to
wait until the Friday evening to get punished.”
“Yes.”
“I see. Where was your mother while this was going on?”
“She was downstairs.”
“She didn’t try to intervene?”
“Not that I recall. I do recall hearing her crying.”
“Apart from the leather belt, did your father ever punish
you in any other way?”
“Only once. He punched me in the face when I was about
nineteen.”
“What was that for?”
“I think it had something to do with me telling my parents I
was going to marry Liz.”
“Didn’t they approve of her?”
“Yes, they liked her. But she was Roman Catholic.”
“What were you?”
“Church of England. I think what my father objected to was
Liz saying she wouldn’t marry me unless I became a Catholic.”
“Is your father still alive?”
“No, he died a few years ago.”
“And when you think of him, what goes through your mind?”
“I don’t think of
him,” I said. “Well not very often. And when I do, I don’t harbour particularly
good thoughts about him.”
“Well, I think we’ve discovered what’s behind your feeling
of impending doom. Liz punished you for Harriett by not letting you see her and
the children for four months, and now you feel you’re about to be punished
because you’re planning to look for another partner while she’s still alive.
And the actions of your father all those years ago had a hand in it as well.
And now we’ve exposed this, I think you’ll find your feeling of impending doom
becomes a thing of the past.”
Extract from my book WILL YOU TELL HER, OR SHALL I? A true
story. My story. The story of how I lived with the ten-year terminal illness of
my wife. Also available on Amazon Kindle. www.amazon.com
Twitter: Maximillian19
FB: facebook.com/Booksthepublishersmissedcom
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