'Once, When I was Little': Finding Brian

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When writing ‘Just Once, When I was little’ it felt, at times, that I was writing a novel. The memories of my childhood had become so distorted over time that I was unsure of many things and I found that, even when writing about events, the reality of it would suddenly change. For most of my teenage years and adult life I had fought to stop my brain looking back into the darkness of my childhood. But it was a futile fight that I was never going to even come close to winning; and the terrible memories would always get their way and would creep unbidden into my mind. When I first started to write my biography some ten years ago the only memories I could access were dark and disturbing; void of any love or happiness. Yet I knew there had been some happiness and love somewhere during those terrible years and, as I wrote, I kept remembering times when I laughed. Then the ‘yo-yoing’ started. Each time I started to remember feeling loved and the people that loved me I saw the face of my father screaming at me; when I remembered the places I played with my siblings my mind would take me to a place my father raped me, or beat me, or both. As the years of my childhood were written down, and I had reached about 400, thousand words, I knew I was writing it wrong and deleted every word. I had decided to write as I had remembered it; trying to express the emotions of love and hate, happiness and sadness in the same chapter simply sent my brain yo-yoing leaving me utterly confused and the confusion I felt was evident in my writing. So I made a conscious decision to try and stay true to the confusion I felt as a child and ignore the urge to write my about childhood and teenage years from my perceptive of it as an adult. I wanted to show the loneliness and the terror I felt during that time. Moving home every few months had left me confused about where and when events occurred and I found that, by trying to stay true to facts, I lost touch with the child that I had been. I didn’t want simply to write about the events of my childhood, I wanted to write about the feelings of a child living with abuse and the impact it was having during my formative years.
This is the first of three books and will put you in the mind of the child that I was, it will take you through to my utterly confused early teenage years when my life turned to almost daily violence as I tried to make sense of who I was. I have attempted to show in my writing that there was hope that things would change, and did. However, as a child, I held no hope; in fact I don’t think I even knew the concept of it during those early years of my life. But there was hope and there were people in my childhood that, though I didn’t realise it at the time, offered it. Uncle John at the Cinderella Home in Morecambe Bay; my ‘angel’, a young woman that hugged me until I stopped crying when I left the children’s home I had been sent to following my father’s arrest, aunts and uncles and even a dog called Prince. They had all entered my life at critical times and had shown a very lonely and frightened young boy that life was not all cruelty and privation and that not all people wanted to hurt him. But it would be many years of emotional turmoil before I could remember them and finally recognise the good that they did.

I wrote ‘Just Once, When I was little’ to help those people studying, teaching or working with people that have suffered similar trauma; but the main aim of my writing of it was to help people that have lived, or living with, abuse and help them realise that things can and will get better and discover, or rediscover, the ability to trust and love again and find that its ok to be happy.

Brian Mynott