How did you celebrate your 21st birthday?

Hahaha! Doesn’t take long to relate that one. Because, I didn’t! I was pregnant with Briney Brines, and I had Kevin as a baby already. I couldn’t be taken out with Jack, because I looked so awful like that, being pregnant and everything. “I can’t be seen with you,” he said.

He did come home with a big box. I thought “oh no… he brought me a present”. He wasn’t a man for presents. When I opened it up, I found a pressure cooker. I’d heard about people blowing them up and getting stew all over the kitchen walls. So I was petrified of the darn things!

His little words that went with the box of tricks was “well, you can’t cook anything anyway, so maybe you can cook me a decent meal with this”. That’s what my 21st present was. It was horrible! It went through my mind to hit him on the head with it.

I still didn’t realise what was happening until years and years later. I was listening to the TV, and they started having all these talks about domestic violence. I suddenly started to realise that I had suffered domestic violence for years.

Back then, we thought it was just the normal thing. There were other women around the town were treated exactly the same. So sadly, you just thought it was par for the course.

Leaving your partner was impossible in those days. People used to say “well why did you have all those children?” We knew nothing about contraception back then. I asked for help from the priests in the confessional. I mentioned contraception to them and they just told me to go and offer it up to Our Lady. Of course, that didn’t work very well!

Frighteningly, I also asked the doctors up at the Women’s Hospital. I asked about having my tubes tied, so I would stop having babies. But they just said “oh no, we don’t do those kinds of things here.” And then I heard the doctor speaking to some other members of staff, saying “that women has got good childbearing hips, she could have a child every year”. And I thought oh god no!

I’m laughing about it now, because it was so ridiculous. But I was so desperate. Absolutely desperate. There’s a lot of things that I didn’t want to do. There was no way to get out; if he hadn’t have gone, I would have probably stayed. I would have still been getting bullied.

I’ll tell you another deep secret. I should have had six children. He forced me to have an abortion. I had to go down to the hospital, and his mother helped pay for that. Looking back on it now, I think that’s when he was planning to leave me and go off with Lorna. He was furious at the thought of another pregnancy.

I laughed because when I told the children, and good old Margie Megs - she’s so beautiful - said “well I wouldn’t be baby Margaret Megs then!” I didn’t know whether to tell them or not. But I felt lucky, because nobody growled at me. It’s pretty bad, when you think about it.

That’s why I feel very cross with these horrible people who are against abortion. I always think, these people don’t know the situation. Try being in my shoes and look at the horrible times I went through. It was often the only way out! In this case though, the worst part was that the decision was taken away from me. It still comes back every now and again. And I wonder what it would have been. You can’t help thinking about it. What an awful experience.

I’m lucky that it didn’t affect me like it affected other people. It could have caused me anxiety, or depression. I’m very fortunate with my happy go lucky nature, that I was able to conquer a lot of these things. My true nature was there all the time, it just wasn’t given a chance to emerge. I was stronger than I thought I was, but he squashed it all down.

I only once got close to having a breakdown. I was going to Doctor Marsden then. Back then, I was a bit of a mouse. I didn’t like talking and opening up, saying how I really felt. I’m still a bit like that because I don’t want to drag people down, why should I burden them?

She sat me down one time, and had a good talk with me when it was really bad. She wrote it all down. I was so upset when she retired from her practice, all her papers disappeared. One day, after Jack had left me, she turned to me and said “how’s that bastard of a husband of yours?” I feel like those records would be very valuable in understanding what was happening.

My friend Eunice knew, she helped me in a lot of ways. Same as my other friend Hazel - she used to take the kids on trips away and give them a little holiday. To me, he was such a nasty man.

Honestly, he’s gone, and I’m not a bit sad about that. It was 16 years before he left, 16 years of putting up with that. It was amazing when he left, because it made me the woman that I am today. I went on to bigger and better things.

Fancy the story about the 21st birthday to get to this point! Nothing happy about remembering it. I never had a birthday party, I was always pregnant! I certainly made up for it later in life, thankfully. I’m happy to talk about this, as it shows you what life was like back then. Not always a happy place, but you can always come through the tunnel and get out the other end.