MY WIFE LEFT ME WITH OUR SEVEN CHILDREN FOR THE NEIGHBOUR AND CAME BACK TEN YEARS LATER WITH A BIKE AND A TABLET FOR THE YOUNGEST. MY TWELVE-YEAR-OLD HANDED HER A PHONE WITH FOUR WORDS ON THE SCREEN.
I came home early on a Thursday in June 2015 and found my wife upstairs with the man who lived four doors up.
He wasn't just the neighbour. He was the man I'd known since we were eleven.
And she stood in our bedroom and put her hands on her hips and said: well, what did you expect? You never gave me the life I'm owed. He does.
And then she said something about a holiday they'd been on in April — which I'd thought was her sister's.
I said: we've got seven. The baby's two.
She packed that night. Said I'd manage. Said she needed to make her own life and the children would be in the way of it.
And then the pair of them went.
I'm not going to do the first eighteen months. Seven children crying for their mother at night is a sound, and I had it for about a year.
I took a second job in August and a third in January — a cleaning contract from four in the morning — and I did those three for about four years.
I never met anybody. Women hear seven and that's generally the end of the conversation.
They've turned out well. That isn't me being proud. It's a fact, and about nine other people would tell you the same.
And I want to put one thing down about those ten years, because the version where a man does three jobs and is heroic about it is not what it was.
I wasn't good at it for about the first two years.
I wasn't unkind to them. But I wasn't in that house — and when I was in it I was asleep in a chair, and my eldest did most of what I should have been doing, and she was fifteen and then sixteen.
She did the uniforms. She did the forms. She did the parents' evenings for the little ones twice, because I couldn't get off the cleaning contract.
Yesterday was my youngest's twelfth. We had it in the back garden — four of her mates from school, all of mine, my sister, the neighbours. About twenty-five people.
And at about half four, somebody knocked.
She was on the step smiling. He was behind her.
And she came past me into my own hall without looking at me.
My daughter was in the kitchen getting another bit of cake.
She was two when that woman went. She's seen about four photographs.
And her mother got down to her level and said:
Sweetheart. We can be together now. Look what we've brought you. I went away to build something better so you could have all this.
And he wheeled a bike into my hallway.
And she got a tablet out of a bag and held it out — and it was the exact one. The one my daughter had been on about since February, that I'd priced up twice and put back.
What happened just seconds later left everyone in the room completely speechless… (Continue to Part 2 →)
