Thursday, November 15, 2018

Memories from the flat in East Malvern - Fractured Moments from Childhood

Some of you may or may not know that I ran away from an abusive home at the age of 16. As I have been getting older, especially over the past years since I have been with my wonderful partner (and guitarist) Lukas and seeing his loving family dynamic, I am realizing just how devastatingly traumatizing my childhood has been in parts and trying to come to terms with it by talking about it with him, writing music and now trying to put it into words. When the mood takes me, I will post some snippets of raw, flowing written memories of parts of my life back then. Please be kind with me. I am not writer in this sense and I am not doing this to get sympathy. I just feel like it's time to deal with a lot of this stuff and I know there are a few of you out there who also suffered some kind of childhood abuse…and probably so many that I didn't know about. You're not alone and guess what? We survived it!…and somehow still surviving. Hugs x

MEMORIES from the flat in EAST MALVERN

Metal gates with barbed wire and padlocks. That's what you would see if you looked up the long concrete backyard behind the flat, behind the shop we lived when I was 12 - 16 years old. Along the right side on the long concrete path that was cracked and crumbling were old sheds storing my fathers electronic equipment and bulk goods that he bought with get-rich-quick dreams that never amounted to anything. I have memories of a small patch of grass but a panel van was parked over it. I don't even think it was driveable and anyway all the concrete space was filled with cars or stuff. There wasn't much space left for anything else.

There were 4 of us plus 2 small children living in that two bedroom flat near the end of my time there and god how much I hated the tiny space I was expected to grow up in without any privacy. I remember filthy stains that years of living like this had produced in the carpet that had once been white or cream…and cheap, worn out furniture that was supposed to hold us upright after working sometimes 18 hours a day in one of Dad's several businesses where the work never seemed to be done.

We had an outside laundry room halfway between the flat and the back gate where the washing machine was kept. I would often sing while filling or emptying the machine, using those precious moments in a way to comfort myself and to bring relief from the life I was living. It was the one place I remember being able to express myself creatively without the fear of being ridiculed and I would sing over the old rickety machine, using it's rocking and shaking booms as a kind of drum to create melodies to sing over.


Over all of our windows were bars. He told us it was to keep criminals out but years later I understand the real reason they were there. He had also pinned a sign to the back door of the flat facing onto the concrete path that read: "This property is guarded by shotgun 3 days per week, you guess which 3"…a perfect example of my fathers paranoia, violence and humour summed up in one line.

But underneath my fathers humour was a darkness just waiting to strike out at anyone who dared to undermine his authority or didn't follow the rules, doing things as perfectly as his neurosis demanded of us. I remember writing lists. Lists, lists, lists….sometimes 50 or more things to do daily. Lists that needed to be completed and shown to him to be checked off. Lists that if weren't completed on time meant you were beaten and screamed at. If you failed to complete a list to a satisfactory level then according to him you were a piece of s**t, scum that didn't deserve to live, an embarrassment and no longer part of the family. This might last a few hours or a few days until you were back in his good books again and at some point it all became a blur to me, this life, this apparent living and I learned to breathe and tread quietly. Sometime around my 14th birthday I began to shut my mouth, keep my head down and started to plan my great escape.