The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland by Lily O'Brien Page B

smell was so strong that I turned around to ask him what it was that he was cooking, but he had gone red in the face from the smell and smoke and he was choking too.
    Then the smell got so bad that we all had to run out of the house and Ted ran out behind us, and he was chasing after us with the frying pan and he was shouting that we had to come back and eat our dinner. But the smell was so strong that even the outside of the house stunk, and thick brown smoke was still coming out of the sausage. ‘No’, I shouted, ‘it’s disgusting. What is it?’ ‘It’s a shit’, said Ted. ‘I done it’, he said; then he shouted that it went in one end and it came out of the other, so it must still be good for you to eat. Suddenly, he coughed again and he began to choke, so he stopped running and he slung the lot into the air and we all ran out of the gate screaming as he ran after us, shouting and laughing that we had to come back and eat our dinner. But I shouted, ‘Eat it yourself, we’re not hungry anymore’ and we just kept screaming and running as Ted fell to his knees choking.
    We all stayed out for the rest of the day and we sat amongst some tall grass in a field, hoping that Ted would not be able to find us and make us eat the shit. But after a while, it began to get dark so we decided to head back to the house; we all got up and Daisy, Simon and myself slowly walked home, still laughing about what had happened earlier in the day, and hoping that the smell would be gone by the time we got back. No one was around when we returned to the house, so we went straight inside and off to bed; the last thing we wanted was to see Ted when he got back and it worked and we were left alone for the rest of the night.
    However, the next morning, when the three of us kids got up and went downstairs, Ted was waiting for us in the living room and he told us that we couldn’t go outside until he did something. And then he made us stand in a straight line in front of him and he told us to hold out our hands as he took a big flat stick out of his trousers, and within a second he began to slap our hands with the stick. But before he could finish hitting us, dad walked in through the front door and he saw what he was doing. And without making a sound, he walked up behind Ted, leant over and gave him a huge slap around the head and told him to fuck off outside before he gave him a whipping around the head with his belt. Ted lifted his hands up to protect his head from dad and then he shouted at dad, telling him that we had no food and that he was hungry, then Ted ran like hell out of the house and as far away from dad as possible.
    But Ted was right, we had no food in the house and we were all starving with the hunger. Dad looked down at us and then he said that he was going to get some food for us. But once dad left the house, we never saw him again that day and he never came back for a week. Ted did eventually come back and he decided that he had to do something fast or we would all die from starvation, so he gathered us all up and he told us all to go out and to do our best to find something to eat. We all walked off in different directions, hoping to find food; and within a couple of hours Daisy, Simon and myself had managed to find some apples and potatoes in a field, so we gathered them up and we headed back home, feeling very happy with ourselves.
    As we walked towards the house, we could see that it was quiet and no one was around. But as we got closer, I could see a filthy pillowcase lying on the ground at the foot of the front door and it was moving. I slowly walked up to the pillowcase and I poked at it with a stick that I was playing with and the pillowcase stopped moving. I could see that the open end of the pillowcase had been tied up with string, so I undid the string and I looked inside; and just as I put my face into the pillowcase, out jumped two chickens and they fell to the ground. And as I stood back, they began to run