Sadly, a happy childhood is not everyone’s experience. Neil McKay reads a new book by one who knows.

CHRISTINE Fieldhouse’s father was a drunk.

Much, much worse than that, he was a violent, cruel nasty drunk who seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in humiliating his wife and daughter.

This autobiography by Fieldhouse, a North-East based freelance journalist and mother, describes a childhood ruled by fear.

Fear of her father coming home from his nightly visits to the pub.

Would he go straight to bed and sleep it off? Or would he take out his drunken rage on Christine or her mum.

From the age of four the little girl would lie in bed petrified, waiting for the sound of the car engine and the key fumbling in the lock.

Once she came home delighted because she had achieved a 98% mark in her school spelling test.

Later that evening her father staggered in from the pub, burst into her room and drunkenly berated her because she had failed to achieve 100%.

On another occasion she woke to find her father pointing a shotgun at her head. It was 20 years before she could bring herself to tell her mother about the episode, when she looked him in the eye and told him, “Go on, shoot me, get it over with”.

Another time he held a knife to Christine’s mother’s throat.

The mental – and sometimes physical – torture made Christine feel useless despite being an outwardly self-assured, confident and successful wife, mother and journalist.

And it went on throughout her childhood, her teens and right through to university, where she went reluctantly, terrified to leave her mother at the mercy of a man whose behaviour was spiralling out of control.

You wonder why the pair stayed with such a monster, until you realise that they simply had no choice.

He spent all his money in the pub, and on smart clothes for himself, while wife and daughter were left to scrimp and scrape.

But this account is not, as Fieldhouse herself would describe it, part of the “misery book genre”. For she cleverly contrasts her miserable childhood with her life today, and does so with no shortage of humour .

Her mother eventually managed to leave the monster, move into a flat of her own, and gradually recover some of her esteem and self respect.

Fieldhouse married a good man and, after giving birth to her son, Jack, she experienced the overwhelming love and pride that comes with motherhood.

She began to wonder, what would make a grown man treat his own child so badly?

It is when she writes about Jack that the humour comes shining through.

Like all small boys, Jack is a natural mimic. And he lives next door to an elderly Yorkshireman. So when the four-year-old looks up at a dark and cloudy sky and solemnly announces: “Happen it will rain today,” you laugh aloud.

And when she takes him to her yoga class, hoping to show off her bright, well-behaved son, and he runs around like a little brat, before reverting to angelic mood when his dad arrives to pick him up, you smile sympathetically at her embarrassment.

Christine’s journey from a miserable childhood to happy wife and mother and fulfilled career woman is an inspiration to anybody who has suffered at the hands of a cruel parent or partner.

But while her childhood was some 30 years ago, it is a sobering (literally) thought that countless children will tonight lie in bed shaking with fear, wondering what mood their drunken parent will come home in, just as she did.

Why Do Monsters Come Out At Night? by Christine Fieldhouse is published by Hay House at £7.99.