Even as a child I had a lively imagination, it was one of the things that helped me survive my childhood, and by assigning nicknames to my family members aided me through that.

The Bear was always my Uncle Sam. He was a great bear of a man, thick and solid flesh wrapped around his broad frame, with a fine dusting of blonde body hair everywhere, while his chin was covered in a thick and equally blonde hair. His nature, though, was that of a Teddy Bear, warm and affectionate. He was my only relative I really cared about.

The Sheep were my mother and my two brothers, Abel and Isaac, because they always followed behind my father, unquestioningly believing everything he said or did. They were like three, woolly and brainless sheep endlessly following around after the ram, even though the ram was as blind as them.

The Goat was my sister Esther because endlessly, it seemed to me, she was clashing heads with my father. Like two goats fighting over turf, repeatedly charging horns at each other, she fraught with my father. They would almost have screaming arguments, fighting over every subject, neither of them giving an inch.

God was my father, ruling over his family like an Old Testament God, quick to anger and lay down the law, but slow to show compassion or love. He was as cold as the tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them and as unforgiving as Noah’s flood. I feared him as I feared the wrath of God himself.

The Quiet Black Lamb was a nickname I only gave in retrospect, as an adult, because I gave it to myself. I am the youngest of my parents’ children and quickly I learned to keep quiet, not to draw attention to myself and then no fault would be found in me. I was the Black Lamb because I held a secret that would have caused me to receive the wrath of my father but I was only a lamb and not a sheep because I never acted on that secret, while I lived at home. At fourteen I had realised what that secret was called.

My father was a Church of England vicar, deeply conservative and Evangelical, he ruled his suburban parish like he ruled his family, with a force of thunder; yet his parishioners loved him. They filled his church every Sunday, they hung off his every word, they lionised him as a prophet of God and he drank up every moment of it.

Heaven help anyone who didn’t offer him the respect he felt was his by right. At Secondary School, my History teacher, Mr. Bradshaw, walked out of an assembly my father was giving because he said only the Christian Church told the truth. My father was so angry at this that he demanded Mr. Bradshaw was sacked. After a long wrangle my father accepted an apology, though he was never invited to do another assembly.

I’m the youngest of my family, though the births of my siblings seemed to run as orderly as my father’s beliefs. Abel was born first, two years later Isaac was born, after another two years Esther came along, then another two years later was my birth, Malachi (We are all have Old Testament names, though I certainly got the worst choice). Then my mother was ill, what with I don’t know and no one ever told me, but after that she had no more children.

Abel and Isaac certainly were sheep, agreeing with everything my father said, but they weren’t silent. They were always voicing their views, direct copies of my father’s, and backing up what my father said. They were also younger and thinner versions of him. Not so Esther. She was just as vocal as them but her views were opposite to my father’s. She argued with him over everything. They clashed over the clothes she had to wear, the style of her hair (she always wanted it short), what she could watch on television, where she could go. Their arguments could easily turn into screaming matches, but they always ended the same way, my father banishing her to her room.

Sam is my father’s younger brother, which was one of the few things they had in common, for he certainly didn’t share my father’s religion. Sam was far more laidback and casual, he’d welcome anyone who treated him the same. For as long as I can remember he treated me as an equal. Also, my parents used him as a cheap babysitter. When they were away, with my father’s preaching that was often, they left the four of us in the care of Sam. When Abel was fourteen my parents decided he was old enough to be left at home, in charge of his siblings, though I was considered still too young and was still left with Sam, which pleased me because I had Sam almost to myself.

My father disapproved of Sam, but behind his back, because he shared his home with a woman and they weren’t married. I knew better. Kath shared Sam’s house but they were only friends, they had their own bedrooms. I did meet Sam’s lover, but only when it was just me staying with him. Sam’s friend Robert would also stay for the weekend, and he would share Sam’s bed. He was a slightly younger and smaller version of Sam, with dark hair instead of blonde, but shared the same laidback attitude. Kath joked that she was only Sam’s “fag hag” (But that was back in the eighties, I had no internet, how could I find out what she meant).

One weekend, when I was twelve, I was again left with Sam but Robert wasn’t there. When I asked where he was, Sam just replied:

“We’re not friends anymore.”

I knew not to ask any more but I still felt sad because Sam was so obviously unhappy. I wanted him to be happy, he was one of the few members of my family I wished that for. If my father was unhappy all I wished was to stay away from him.

My family life changed forever when I was sixteen. Esther had left school nearly two years earlier, my father believed higher education was “wasted” on girls, and she had spent her time working in the office of a haulage firm. Unknown to anybody in our family, she began to date one of the managers there, a thirty-two year old divorced man called Stephen Vasey. We all knew about him, though, when Esther came home on a Friday evening and announced that she was engaged to Stephen Vasey. My father exploded with anger. Not only was Vasey unknown to him, he wasn’t a Christian and was nearly fourteen years older than Esther.

Again Esther and my father fought, this time their argument took on a more serious and almost desperate tone. Esther was more than just pushing at pushing at my father’s rules, pushing his envelope, she was far more serious. It felt as if she was arguing for her life. Was she that much in love with this Stephen Vasey? He seemed so much older than her. Then my mother ended their argument with one phrase.

She had been looking at Esther for a long moment before she said:

“You’re pregnant.”

Esther fell silent at this, though my father certainly didn’t. This sent him into a frightening rage. He now screamed at her, spit leaping from his mouth, calling her a whore and immortal and far worse, his angry words spat out at her silence. The fight had gone out of her and she wilted under his onslaught.

The rest of the evening was spent in a tense and nervous silence. Esther was banished to her bedroom, but this time without any fight, while my father prowled the house in a dark and smouldering temper, rest of us purposely avoided him, obviously not wanting to anger him anymore. As soon as I could excuse myself and slip away to bed I did.

The next morning everything deteriorated even more, it might not have seemed possible. As always, we gathered together as a family for breakfast, but that morning Esther didn’t come down to breakfast. My father, his anger still boiling away, demanded that she was brought down. So Isaac was dispatched to her bedroom. He came back, a few moments later, his face white and his lower lip trembling. He simply said:

“I can’t wake her. I think she’s dead.”

My father stood up and shouted:

“What do you mean?” But Isaac just stumbled into the nearest chair, his head in his hands.

That day our house was swamped with chaos. First ambulance men and then police officers entered, all full of questions but no one could help Esther. She had taken an overdose the night before, leaving only behind a short note. I hid away from it all. All the strangers in our house, my mother’s constant and almost silent sobbing, and my father prowling around like some caged animal with a temper that made him snap at everyone.

Days later I was to piece together the full details of what had happened. Esther was pregnant and by Stephen Vasey, but my father had stopped any chance she had of running away with him. He’d called Stephen Vasey and made threats towards him, causing Vasey to disappear into the night. When Esther had tried to contact him she was only confronted by silence. In her despair, she’d gone into the bathroom and taken every pill she could find in the old medicine cabinet there (Years later I’d find out that this included my mother’s antidepressants and sleeping tablets).

Esther’s funeral came as a relief. The week up to it had been fraught with tension and emotional landmines. My father was in a more then normally sharp and easy roused temper, snapping and barking at everyone around him, my mother was either crying quietly or else withdrawn from all around her, while my brothers argued between themselves, in hushed and whispered tones. Once I overheard their argument and found it was about Esther, they were arguing over which was her greatest sin, pregnancy or suicide. I continued to hide away from them all.

The service itself was quiet and sparsely attended, only family and my Uncle Sam, there was no sign of Stephen Vasey or any of Esther’s friends. It all took place at the local crematorium, not at my father’s church. The service itself consisted of three hymns (all very Evangelical in tone), two bible readings and no eulogy. I occupied the second pew, with Uncle Sam and my brothers, while my parents occupied the front one. My mother had stopped crying, she seemed to have finally cried herself out, though my father’s temper hadn’t eased but at least it had grown quiet for the day.

The service ended with Esther’s coffin silently gilding behind a red velvet curtain as we sang that last hymn, with it came another sense of relief. But that relief had gone by the end of the hymn. We were to adjourn to a local cafe for the “Funeral Tea” and I was dreading that. Dreading the small talk I didn’t know how to make, dreading my father’s temper, dreading my fate because I was next.

As we filed out of the church I found myself at the back of the procession, Sam walking next to me.

“How are you?” Sam asked, his hand gently resting on the small of my back. This was the first time I’d seen him since Esther’s death. I turned to him, to face that big and friendly face, but his face was creased and worn down with sadness. I knew he meant his question.

“I feel terrible,” I replied. “I don’t know...”

“I know,” he told me.

“I’m afraid,” I said, finally voicing the fears that had almost been consuming me for days now.

“Of what?”

“That I’ll be next. That my father’s anger will kill me, like it killed Esther. His anger made her kill herself. I don’t want that to happen to me...” The whole fear rushed out of me. It probably sounded stupid at best, it was the only way I could describe it, but Sam just nodded as he listened.

“Why do you think you’ll make him angry?”

“Because I’m different, like you,” I said, again the only way I could voice my feelings. “Like you were with Robert.”

“You mean gay,” he replied, his voice dropping low in tone even though we had lagged behind the others there.

“Yes.”

“Have you had a boyfriend yet?”

“No.”

“Then we had better save you before then,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

“You could move in with me. Come to live with me today.”

“Could I?” My nerves jumped into my throat, this was my lifeline but I was afraid of snapping at it too greedily.

“If you did your father would never speak to me again,” Sam said, glancing at the back of my father’s head, yards ahead of us now, for a moment, as if thinking it over. “After today, I could easily live with that. We’ll tell your father I’m giving you a lift to this bloody funeral tea, but we’ll go to your house and get the things you want. Then back to my house. Simple.” He looked down at me and smiled for a moment.

“Thank you,” I said, pouring an ocean for gratitude and relief into those words.

Sam’s hand slipped from my back and gave my own hand a quick and very reassuring squeeze.

That’s what we did. I moved into Sam’s home while everyone else made small talk at the funeral tea. It was easily done because there were few things I wanted to keep from my father’s house. Sam’s prediction was correct, my father didn’t speak to either of us, made no attempt to contact me, until his death, two months ago. At first I’d felt relief to have escaped him, but over the years a sense of regret crept in, being so completely cut off from them.