Читать книгу The One That Got Away - My Life Living with Fred and Rose West - Caroline Roberts - Страница 5

DEEP DOWN, WE all invest great hope in our families. We look to family and home to provide us with support, to help us grow, to give us love. We rely on the members of our family in a thousand ways. But what happens when a child doesn’t have all that to fall back on, when the child feels let down by those closest to him or her?

I spent much of my childhood fighting against members of my family. Told from a young age that I was just a little bitch, I grew up believing it and acted accordingly. My introduction to another family – the Wests – very nearly cost me my life. I escaped from them once, only to be recaptured again and to be subjected to the most terrifying ordeal of my life. I was lucky: I managed to escape a second time. Too many others didn’t.

My life went on, but the spectre of my horrendous experiences at 25 Cromwell Road continued to haunt me. Coupled with my unhappy early years, during which I also suffered sexual abuse at the hands of strangers, I started to believe that my life was jinxed – just when I had a run of good luck, everything would come crashing down around me.

I tried to push that dark period of my life into the background for more than twenty years. But in 1994 it came screaming back on to the front page of every newspaper in the land with the arrest of Fred and Rose West. I was forced to relive my nightmare once again – this time in a court of law – and in doing so I discovered how the Wests had destroyed the lives of some of their own children.

But some good can come from even the most traumatic circumstances. To my surprise and joy, confronting the past has given me the strength to really begin to understand myself for the first time. To accept responsibility for the hurt I’ve brought to others and stop blaming myself for the hurt I haven’t caused. To move on.

I was a lost girl for many, many years. Now I’ve found myself. This is how it happened.