Helen Martins - Fighting Woman.

Part two of three.



“ You’ve seen him, then? Well, saw him…. He took the secret with him as far as I’m concerned. The secret of what happened to him. I’m not sure if something happened to him or he happened to something. He changed in a flash, not even overnight, no, just like a light coming on. Or going off might be more apt, I suppose, if you prefer the metaphorical. I’m not interested in what he might have told you about it all. That’s no concern of mine because, whatever he went through, I can only tell you about me, about how his actions, behaviours, whatever you want to call it, affected me. I can’t read minds, not his at least, so his side of things don’t concern me. Well lets just start off by saying we wouldn’t be having this little chat if he hadn’t started ignoring me, would we? We’d been married for seven years. I was thirty four, he was thirty six. We lived in… well, you know all this, don’t you? Just before the day it started, May the 16th for all the significance that offers, we’d been away for a week. We didn’t have a happy marriage, I suppose, but it was okay most of the time. We didn’t argue often but that was probably more down to him than me. He used to say I goaded him. He always said that. Ever since the wedding. Well if I did it was to get some life in him. Not that I think I did goad him, to be fair to myself. More the other way around, now I come to think about it. His silence and his supposed deference were as loud as I could ever be. Anyway, that’s all that needs to be said about us. We’d had a nice week away, away at my aunt’s on the Isle of Sheppey and we’d only really had one argument that stood out, and even that I’m not sure I remember what it was about. Three days after we got back he’d been to work as usual and we were in the middle of dinner and I asked him if he’d cleared his shed out. Well he didn’t answer because he was staring out of the window like he’d seen an ghost or something. I asked him again, and again, and it carried on like that for ten minutes, because I thought no way are you getting away with this. I was furious. How dare he, when all he ever had to do was get in after work and eat his dinner, and watch the TV and go to bed in clean pyjamas and clean sheets. And who made all that possible? And he treats me like that? No. No he doesn’t. That’s what I thought. Seven bloody years and he finally grows a spine, only when it comes to using it he goes the same way he always has and attacks with his silence. I tried everything. I stood in his way, and he’d walk around me. I sat on his knee when he was watching tv, and he stared at my nose for two hours before standing up and letting me fall to the floor when he went to the loo. After a couple of days I got so angry that I ripped up the only photographs of his mother he had. She died when he was thirteen, you know. Nothing. Not a thing. He sat there like he was on a desert bloody island. What sort of a man would do that? His poor mother. By the third day I’d ran out of options, you see, so I punched him. Well, tried to but he ducked out of the way like a coward and I caught him on the side of the head. I tried a good few times after that as well, in the ribs, the stomach, the face, but he was always wriggling and twisting as if I was some big docker instead of a petite woman. ,Anyway, after that I rang my brothers and they came round to try to talk some sense into him. He completely ignored them as well. My brothers are policemen and they don’t take kindly to being ignored, especially by him. They’ve always said he was no good for me. Well Neville, the youngest, he slapped him a few times around the face, then hit him in the stomach with his fist. He didn’t like that, I reckon, but he didn’t say a word, just kept drying the dishes. Well that set George off, and him and Neville worked him pretty good for a few minutes until I stopped them. Well, he was my husband. I thought he’d wake up the next day and it would be back to how it was but no, he carried on as if nothing had happened the night before. That’s when I decided to leave him. There and then. I had a bath, got ready, got the girl and went. That was the best thing I did, leaving that man. Well, the second best. The best was when I kicked him as hard as I could in his you-know-what’s before walking to the taxi. I think Anne was upset to be leaving the house but what do children understand? Well, we went to stay with my aunt on Sheppey until I got back on my feet, and within a couple of weeks I’d met Ciaran. That was a drama, just on its own. We were coming back on the train from Victoria and the only seats were opposite these tinkers. I know people call them pikeys or gypsies but they’ll always be tinkers to me. I remember I was telling Anne to stop her fussing when the two women who were sat with this man, Ciaran, although I didn’t know that then, started laughing at me and saying things that I couldn’t understand, but you know when someone is laughing at you, no matter what the language. Well I’ve always had my mother’s temper, and it starts off in the soles of my feet like hot pins and needles and goes whoosh up my spine, and that’s when my mouth can turn sharp. I had words with the biggest woman and she got up, this is in front of the whole carriage, and she got up and stood there with her big ham arms crossed and she called me a word that I’ve never allowed to cross my lips but it begins with a ‘c’ and before I know what I’ve done I’ve punched her right in her fat face. Oh she dropped down like a sack of potatoes, fell across the table and slid onto the floor and I thought that’s me, they’ll all turn on me now. Well not if I can help it, so I leant over and grabbed the other woman’s fringe and pulled her face onto the edge of the table hard. Her nose broke, I heard that, and she just slumped over towards the window. I thought about the man and looked over, really expecting to feel a punch of my own at any minute, but he was just leaning back, arms crossed with a bottle in his hand, and a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. He was a sight. Not handsome as such, not like Sean Connery. He had a rough, used face but what was underneath shone through like a searchlight. I was stood there, heart thumping, legs shaking from the suddenness of it all and he shone through and wrapped around me without moving once. He motioned me to sit back down and he came and sat with us, bringing his bottle of spirits with him. He asked my name, and gave me the bottle and that was us for the next half an hour, drinking and laughing, even when his then wife - that was the one I punched - came to and sat scowling with her sister, the other one. Not a word from either of them, though, and he never once looked at them for the rest of the journey. They knew what had just happened, you see, while I was blissfully unaware and feeling tipsy and wild and more excited than I had in years. This was living. This was life. They were getting off the train at Gillingham and I got off with them. Well, with him. Anne went to her aunt’s and from what I know she’s done well for herself. She was better off there, to be honest, because for once in my life I decided to concentrate on myself, not catering to the needs of others. That may sound callous to you but I think that people can get so wrapped up in looking out for others that they never get the most out of life, and that’s a very, very sad thing…. And not for me, not after seven long years of first him and then his child. Well, she never took after me, either in spirit or looks. So back to Gillingham. We went in the first pub we saw, with the other two trailing us, and even though I had never been a drinker the magic of the evening kept me lively through every drink he handed me. He told me he was a prize bare-knuckle fighter, and that the woman I’d laid out with a punch, his then wife, was known herself and that they’d fought after each other many a time. He said that when I’d connected with her jaw he’d felt a rush of love, and that rush had deepened when I’d tabled the sister. He had me in a whirl with his words and what with the drink and the way things had turned out I was easily led to bed with him. He had a caravan on a site a taxi ride away and even though his wife and her sister came with us, those three knew that once she been knocked out she was wanted no more. He couldn’t see her out in the dark, though, plus her sister was on holiday with them so they slept in the seated area of the van and of course must have heard us in bed, because he was a man who threw himself into everything, not just fighting and drinking, if you know what I mean. We must have kept them awake for sure because they didn’t look too sleepy when they jumped me when I went to find the toilet. Jesus no. In fact they looked wide awake and angry. Lillian, the wife, hit me in the face with an ornamental tea pot… see this scar, here, over my eyebrow? And they both kicked me when I went down, all over my back because I curled up like this. There’s a reason for doing that, kicking someone in the small of the back when they’re curled up. It hurts like hell, gets the kidneys, and eventually the person on the ground uncurls and you get to go at their front for a bit, maybe their face. How do I know that? Because I beat them both again. Beat them bloody and Ciaran went on to teach me bare-knuckle, with all its art and darkness. That night showed him that I had the spirit and the meanness for it, although god only knows where I’d hidden it for all those years, me who’d never swat a fly before… As they were kicking me, I found a bit of broken tea pot and dragged it over the back of Lillian’s calf. It opened up pretty deep, because even in the light of a couple of lamps you could see it bulge out. Well she yelled and fell into Maureen and they both went over and barefoot though I was I kicked and stamped on them until Ciaran, who’d been watching all along from the bedroom door, the bugger, pulled me off and threw them out into the rain. He didn’t speak a word, even though every van’s window and door had a face to it, and the two bitches were screeching and sobbing and cursing. He came back in and lifted me up and took me to the bed, where he fetched a bowl of water and sponged off my blood from my face and chest, and theirs from my feet. Half my toes were broken, and both ankles came up like marrows by the morning but we stayed in his caravan becoming man and wife for eleven days and when he finally brought me out and told whoever was around that I was his wife now, and the hardest bitch of a wife I was that he’d ever lain eyes on, that’s the golden moment that I experienced true bliss for the first time. For the only time, really, because when you think about it if a moment of true bliss is equalled, it loses its sparkle. I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy the next eighteen years, though, because I did. Once Ciaran started to train me, and once I’d bloodied a few more of the van women, I was reborn. Everyone called me Hel’, and it suited me to a point. I’ve had twenty six proper fights and only lost two and that was against men. Aside from that I’ve fought with twenty more women who either slighted me or flirted with my man. I’ve been in hospital five times, and put others in there ten or more. I’ve fought in barns, fields, scrap yards and once in a Lord’s flat in Mayfair. I’ve drank like a navvy, and the more battered and ugly I became the more he loved me… How many women can say that, eh? I’m a gypsy queen, and they all know my name, and whether I’m here or there, or on the earth or under it I’ll always be more than I was when I was saddled to that bloody idiot and his weakness and his silences…. I’ve been in prison three times, that’s a total of six years and three months, none of it with parole. The second sentence started with a fight and ended with two. The woman who ran the wing knew who I was and on the afternoon association hour of the first day we got ourselves locked up in an empty cell. She stabbed me with a bic pen sharpened to a point, right here in the shoulder when I was on top of her and punching like mad. I got it and stuck it through her left cheek then stabbed her in the nose. We both got stitched up and put in segregation because we wouldn’t say what happened. There was no more trouble on the wing until my last day when two of her friends tried to push my head into a pan of boiling soup in the dinner queue. Well it was my last day so I didn’t want any trouble so I just wriggled away from them and they ended up in the seg. I played nice all day until I saw the bitch going into the sluice on her own and I went in after her and knocked her into next week. I forced some detergent down her throat for good measure, but she never grassed… she didn’t dare. Of course Ciaran was there to meet me the next morning, in a horse and trap and a big bottle of champagne. Oh you should have seen people stare, we were a sight. And he’ll be outside this place when I get out next week, with that twinkle in his eye and that searchlight grin, wrapping me up and making everything worthwhile….