Parents can define us.

Or, if we have other family members who understand the effect of that influence and try to neutralise it

Or, if we manage to get a sense of what is, and what is not right, counteract it before it has an effect.

For the majority of children who live in what could be called socially acceptable circumstances rather than ‘normality’, on the whole they have a balanced childhood.

For those who have no counterbalance, and no one looking after them, though you would say it’s s parents job the protect their children, quite a few, and I would include myself in that group, are left in a quandary as to what to think, and question what is right and what is wrong.

Parents do not have to define us, not in ways that make it impossible to know what is socially acceptable, but the sad truth is, if you grow up in a bad environment where you see events that are not socially acceptable continuously, how are you to know whether it is bad or acceptable?

It is how bad behaviour is perpetuated, such as domestic violence.

Take for instance a house where domestic violence is the norm. What a child sees and hears in those formative years, say from 2 or 3 through to 8 to 10, it breeds disrespect for girls and later women, it can sometimes lead to the perpetuation of the same behaviour down through generations.

I say this as a general background and to provide a little context.

From the outset in our life at Bess Court there was an underlying series of events that no one knew about, and I for one didn’t understand the significance of.

My brother three years older probably had an inkling but I doubt if he knew anything other than it was not proper.

We had an uncle who we later discovered to be a pedophile, and much later I learned that he was sexually assaulting my brother.

When he threaten to tell my parents, as I had no doubt he would, our uncle moved his attention to me. I was five and had no idea what was happening let alone protest.

Perhaps after a year I may have said something, most likely to my brother and he in turn finally told my father, suddenly the atmosphere in the house turned ugly.

So. In a sense, I had learned a valuable lesson without understanding the underlying reasons. Sexual assault was not acceptable, particularly when it involved children.

But whatever the results that stopped that particular series of events, it sparked something else in my father, and suddenly he turned his hated towards my older brother and beat him, and my mother, frequently getting on the way, was beaten severely too. I just ran and hid under the bed, trying to escape this new onslaught

The violence only escalated, but at least the molestation had stopped.

Then, suddenly, my father had what I thought was a mental breakdown.

It may have been a buildup of pressure in the household over the sins of my uncle, an onset of malaria which he was still prone to since the end of the war, or finally the ptsd had finally caught up.

No one knew what ptsd was then, and I think it was sometimes called “shell shock” a hangover from the first world war.

Only much, much later did we learn the circumstances of his war service and the reasons for malaria and his anxiety, and the fact he had been living with these memories while trying to fit into a ‘normal life’.

No 5 or 8 year old should have to constantly live on fear of your father, and no wife should have to live with the fact that any moment she could become a punching bag.

This was our normality.

And thankfully we learned from it, not succumb to the inevitably of it.

But something else that came out of all this, from a period that may only have spanned no more than 3 years.

I began retreating into a world where everything was so much better, a world far removed from that grim reality.

And this imaginary world was fuelled by reading.