by Hyacinth Bouquet

Created on: August 20, 2009

I grew up in severe Domestic Violence in the early 60's when race riots in England were the talk of politics and Enoch Powell made his famous 'Rivers of Blood' speech (1968). My mother is a petite red haired, Irish Catholic from Ennis, County Clare and my father is a tall, chocolate colored Yoruba Nigerian. They met and came together in turbulent times. My parents faced disgust and social isolation to be together. The story goes that my alcoholic Irish grandmother died falling off a Peat Bog Cart and breaking her neck when she heard the news that I, a mixed race child, had been born to her daughter. My brother was born soon after.

I don't know when the violence began or when it had seeped so deep into my consciousness that it became the air I breathed, but I have clear memories of my mother, carrying my brother, with a swollen lip and black eye. I have vivid memories of hiding underneath the kitchen table with my little brother wanting to protect him so bad it hurt. Running out in to the street, with bare feet in pajamas, my mother always silently crying with a misshapen face, memories of blood covering my hands...... there was the time my dad threw the TV out of the window from the top floor of our three storey house because I had said I was glad the 'News' was over and DR WHO was coming on, my mother tried to stop him from lunging at me and he broke her arm over his kneethe sickening 'snap' followed by the scream of pain..or the time he held her head between his knees as he stood over her and repeatedly pounded her head with the leg of the bed that had broken off, a solid wooden leg with the circumference of a fist, or the time he beat my brother so badly in the bathtub as he tried to climb out because the water was too hot, of my mother pleading and crying with my brother to please open his swollen shut eyes and she would buy him some ice-cream, of trips to the hospital with my aunt Florida, me, my brother and my mother, broken, weeping, exhausted from the effort of escape. By the time I was six it was normal to always be ready to run to rescue or escape, bodies with a constant flow of adrenalin, fuelled by uncertainty and fear.

My children ask me why I don't really like roller coasters or Ferris wheels, Why would I use such a ride to get the rush others get only when they are riding? I have that rush in my veins, in my bones, in my brain, all the time, my body believes that 'the rush' is the normal state for it to be in, even now. Therapists

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