Читать книгу Beyond Fear - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 20

I have often felt envious of women younger than myself, simply because they were born, as I see it, into an easier age than I was. I envied the young girls of the sixties who did not have to struggle, and fail, as I did, with the inappropriate and sophisticated clothes of the fifties. I envied the choices which the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies gave to young women. Yet, as I watch what happens to girls and women nowadays, even the educated women who handle work, children, husbands and lovers with such flair and competence, I can see that the same sacrifices are demanded of girls as have always been demanded if they are to join the group called women. Boys too are still sent down a path which leads to a truncated, inadequate manhood, the man denying so much of himself that he becomes much less than he might have been.

Life in the second half of the twentieth century offered people in the developed world many more opportunities for satisfaction, enjoyment and progress, yet from 1946 there was a steady rise in the number of young people killing themselves. In recent years the suicide rate for young men has continued to rise while that for young women has levelled out.

The problem is that boys are still being educated for a society which no longer exists. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century created a society in which a young man who conformed to society’s rules had a place. He could secure an apprenticeship in an industry and rise steadily through the ranks. If better educated, he could join a bank, go into trade, or join a profession. Whichever, he had a job for life and the respect of the society that had created a place for him. The end of the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 ended the old certainties. My generation was the last which could safely assume that it would have a job for life. As the old certainties crumbled, many young people struggled to find a place in society. Young women could still find a place as a mother, but where was the place for a young man brought up to be a real man in the old tradition? Being a coalminer, or a steelworker, or a deep-sea fisherman was a real man’s job. Working in a call centre is not.

To maintain our meaning structure we need the people around us, not just friends and family but society generally, to confirm who we know ourselves to be. Lacking such confirmation, and lacking the self-confidence to confirm ourselves, we feel threatened with annihilation. If we believe that we cannot change ourselves or society, the threat of annihilation can become so great that we turn to the most desperate of defences. We destroy our body in order to survive as the person we know ourselves to be. Many young men have said to themselves, ‘If I can’t live as a man I’ll die as a man.’

Meanwhile women were now required to enter the competitive workplace but still exhibit the old necessary attributes of femininity and beauty. This was a daunting task, and to relieve their anxiety many young women took up smoking, a slow form of suicide. Educated young women, holding responsible positions and competing successfully with men, smoke for the same reasons that schoolgirls of limited education, ability and opportunity smoke. Smoking is a way of denying the fear of annihilation. These young women believe that to be allowed to exist they must be attractive; that to be attractive they must be slim; that smoking dulled their appetite and made them look sophisticated and in control. Unfortunately, nicotine is more addictive than heroin, and thus many women who have lost their youthful slimness find themselves trapped in an addiction which, even if it does not kill them, wrinkles and yellows their skin. In our society the old, if they are noticed at all, are not regarded as attractive.³²

Although the roles for men and women have changed, the methods of child-rearing have changed very little. Consequently, many girls and boys are still finding that the best way of surviving their childhoods is to become traditional women and men.

My garden borders on one side a row of large Victorian houses which have been turned into a hotel used by the council to house homeless families. My garden wall is topped by a trellis where jasmine and clematis grow riotously. A great profusion of growth developed on the hotel side of the trellis and, with this weight on one side, the strong autumn winds pushed the trellis away from the wall. I took my garden shears and a roll of plastic bags into the hotel garden and began cutting back the bundles of intertwining branches.

The garden was empty and all was quiet. Then there was the sound of a woman’s voice raised in anger. She was yelling, ‘Stay in or get out! Just close the bloody door.’

I could not hear anyone reply, but the woman screamed at this person, ‘I don’t care what you want. Get out.’

A door slammed. Round the corner of a hedge came a fair-haired boy of about six. Although the day was chilly he had no jacket on. He saw me and headed straight at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

I described what I was doing. He eyed my shears enviously. ‘Can I have a go?’

‘Wait till I’ve cut some more, then you can do some cutting while I put all this stuff in these bags.’

He waited impatiently while telling me about some fantastic garden where he cut things down, and then grabbed the shears as soon as I offered them. He clipped a few pieces and for one moment I thought he might prove to be actually helpful, but his interest soon waned. He tried out bigger and bigger branches and, even though his attempts were unsuccessful, kept boasting to me how great he was at cutting things down. ‘I’m the best at this,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I the best cutter you’ve ever seen?’

Ordinarily I would not have agreed, but, knowing that he needed some help in recovering from the onslaught his mother had made on him, I said that he was doing an excellent job.

A little girl of about four was watching us from a balcony. She was the daughter of a couple I had taken to be Kosovan refugees. She never attempted to speak English but her mother would struggle with a few phrases when she and I exchanged pleasantries over the wall. The little girl came down the steps from her flat and stood watching the boy, who had now lost all interest in my task and was wandering around the garden trying to cut down different kinds of unlikely branches. The little girl’s gaze inspired him to greater feats of strength, all unsuccessful, but which he passed off as brilliant.

As all women know, the duty of watching a male while he demonstrates his prowess in some masculine endeavour is a tedious one, and we soon find more interesting things to do. The little girl came over to see what I was doing. When I tore a fresh black bag off the roll and opened it, she reached out her hands, grasped the top of the bag, and held it up in exactly the position needed for me to put the greenery into it. It was precisely the kind of help I needed. Obviously she had done this many times before. Perhaps she had held the plastic bags open when her parents were hastily packing a few possessions as they tried to escape from what seemed like certain death.

The little girl helped me gather the last scraps of greenery and we both stood back to admire a job well done. By this time her mother had come out on to the balcony and was watching us. Now I come to the saddest part of the story. I was very sorry for the little boy, and I was sorry for the women who, one day, would bear the brunt of his anger against the mother who had so humiliated and threatened him, but now I tried to convey to the little girl’s mother how clever and wise her daughter was. I wanted her to agree with me, but she did not. She believed that it was wrong to accept praise, and praise for her child was to be negated just as she would negate praise for herself. Moreover, she had to teach her daughter womanly modesty. ‘No, no,’ she said, and with her hands she pushed away my words. Secretly she might have been proud of her daughter, but neither I nor her daughter were allowed to know this. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘it was nothing.’

Girls and boys are brought up differently, but the message each gets is the same. As you are you are not acceptable. You must become what your parents want you to be.

Girl babies are not all that different from boy babies. True, there are anatomical differences, and some researchers say that boy babies are more active than girl babies, although other researchers say that adults see in babies what they expect to see, but all babies come into the world as themselves, curious about the world, and wanting to act upon it, but for little girls it is not to be. Neither is it for little boys.

Every society, every family, has very clear ideas about what is masculine and what is feminine. There is considerable overlap in these ideas throughout the world, even though practices vary. Orthodox Jews and Muslims regard women’s hair as something dangerous which can snare and incite a man to sexual fervour, the expression of which he is not responsible for, while in most Christian countries virtuous women no longer have to keep their hair covered. (My mother was one of the last generation of women who felt it a necessary modesty to wear a hat. She and I battled over whether I should wear one. I prevailed, but only after considerable humiliation whereby I was told that it was impossible for me to be properly dressed because my head was so big that no hat would fit me.) However, the idea that women have to keep themselves covered and/or secluded because their sexuality is a danger to men is common to all cultures. Even in countries where women are allowed to leave their homes unescorted by a man, it is the custom that if a man who is attacking and raping women has not been caught by the police, it is the women who are instructed to stay at home, not the men.

The fear of women’s sexuality is based not simply on the belief that the woman may passively, simply by her presence, arouse a man to passion, but on the belief that she may use her sexuality in an aggressive, assertive way. A feminine woman is not assertive. Little girls are taught this with great efficiency; they are taught and shown that assertive, aggressive women are not loved or even liked. Nowadays a woman can appear to be strong and assertive, but there is still an expectation that she will not go too far.

Going too far means being so strong, assertive and clever that the woman robs men of their rightful status. When, in 2000, the A-level results in the UK showed girls doing much better than boys, these girls were not allowed to enjoy their success publicly. The media told them a) that the A-level examinations were getting easier, b) that girls did easy subjects like languages while boys did the hard subjects of mathematics and physics, and c) that girls were causing the boys to do badly because their success humiliated the boys. David Blunkett, then the Secretary of State for Education, agreed with this last point. Blunkett showed himself to be a man of tradition. In discussions about corporal punishment he would say that he had slapped his sons when they were children, and he knew that they had suffered no harm.

Being assertive means standing up for oneself, and standing up for oneself is usually a response to a situation which leads one to be angry. If a woman feels that she cannot afford to be seen to be angry, she may try to give up feeling angry.

However, giving up anger is as sensible as giving up breathing, and just as easily done. Women may give up the social expression of anger, and they may even deny its existence to such an extent that they never consciously feel angry, but the unexpressed anger is there, and it takes its toll. The preponderance of depressed women has more to do with what they do with their anger than what their hormones do to them. Many men prefer to explain a woman’s depression in terms of hormones rather than anger, for the second explanation involves a recognition that women have a right to anger, just as a man has. Of course, there are many women who feel, and express, a powerful anger, but, as they cannot direct this anger at its true source, the conditions of their lives, they express it against the only objects available to them, their children. Many of us come to adulthood bearing on our soul, if not our body, the scars of the blows our mother’s anger dealt us, and many of us, unable to retaliate when we were children, take out our anger with our mother on our own children. Thus do the sins of the mother get visited on the children.

In dealing with her children in this way, a mother treats them simply as objects, something with which she can express her passion, like the door she slams or the plate she hurls at the wall. One way in which children can survive these painful, frightening, unjust events is to turn themselves into objects. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’, we might have chanted defiantly to ourselves in order to summon the courage to survive, encasing ourselves in a metal box, on the outside of which the wicked witch’s blows and curses rained without effect.

Girls are not as efficient as boys in turning themselves into objects so as to protect themselves from a parent’s anger. Since boys are encouraged from their earliest days to take part in rough-and-tumble games, while girls are discouraged from climbing, jumping and fighting, boys have more experience in how to develop techniques for avoiding or minimizing physical pain. Some years ago many Australian girls became weary of being expected to sit on the beach admiring the boys’ prowess on their surfboards and instead acquired their own boards and learned to surf. Similarly in the UK many girls got weary of having to cheer the boys’ football teams and instead got their own football kit and formed their own teams. However, research shows that, while girls on the whole are keen on sport in junior school, once they enter secondary school their interest wanes. They believe that girls who play sport are not seen to be feminine. This view reflects that of society. Women’s sport receives only a fraction of the government finance and sponsorship deals that men’s sport receives, while the media show scant interest in reporting it.

Since an essential part of femininity is being sensitive to what another person says and does, girls remain vulnerable to their mother’s angry abuse and insults, while a boy who is learning how to be a traditional man is learning to devalue such sensitivity. At around five or six a boy usually develops a peculiar functional deafness which renders him incapable of hearing his mother’s voice except for certain phrases, ranging from ‘Do you want an ice cream?’, through ‘How much money do you need?’ to ‘Here’s my keys. You drive.’ Many boys who receive a great deal of physical punishment learn to take great pride in the amount of punishment they can take without showing any pain or fear. Many boys not only make their closest relationships with machines, but they come to think of themselves as a machine - hard, logical, efficient, powerful, unaffected by emotional confusion and doubt.

The processes by which a girl learns to be feminine and a boy masculine require that each gives up vital parts of his or her self. Boys must give up those parts of themselves which might be labelled feminine, and girls those parts of themselves which might be labelled masculine. Having been forced to relinquish parts of ourselves which we valued (we begin our lives by valuing every part of us, and we no more want to give up part of our potentiality than we want to give up an arm or a leg), we envy those people who have what we have lost. Thus men envy women, and women envy men not their penises, those curious appendages which always make women laugh, but the power and freedom which men have. Many men, however, long for what they see as the security and gentleness of a woman’s life, but are afraid to claim this as their own, clinging instead to women and hoping to share their good fortune. The woman may similarly be clinging to a man in the hope of sharing his power and freedom. On such misunderstandings are so many marriages made.

These are the ordinary patterns of life for most boys and girls, but for some children the extraordinary occurs.

On the whole, life for a child in the developed world is the best it has ever been in human history. Children are no longer required to work at a very early age, schooling is relatively humane, and most children are reasonably well fed, clothed and housed, and are not routinely beaten. However, the history of childhood is one of misery and tragedy. Adults have always regarded children as possessions which they could use and abuse.³³ This abuse was both physical and sexual. Physical abuse was seen as essential for the education of the child, while the sexual abuse was hidden by a conspiracy of silence.

When Freud embarked upon the unusual method of actually listening to his patients, he found that many of them recounted stories of sexual abuse in their childhood. He developed his theory that sexual abuse lay at the root of much neurosis, but later he revised his ideas and said that the prime cause of neurosis was the young child’s sexual fantasies directed at its parents. So attached did Freud become to this theory that he not only ignored actual sexual abuse but also the physical abuse his patients suffered in childhood.³⁴ When Jeffrey Masson, who had access to the Freud archives, wrote about Freud’s change of theory and described the reasons for this change as politic, not scientific,³⁵ all hell broke loose in the psychoanalytic community. Jeffrey Masson and all his works became anathema for all Freudian disciples. But what better way was there to protect abusive adults than to say that anyone who told of being abused in childhood was merely reporting childish fantasies?

A number of members of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s were very critical of psychoanalysis, saying that Freud had not understood women and consequently belittled them. Some women now felt strong enough to speak publicly about their experiences of sexual abuse in childhood, and a number of books were published in which the writers revealed their experiences and described the long-term effects of these experiences.³⁶ However, it was not until the late 1980s that the seriousness of sexual abuse began to be recognized by the mental health professions. Many mental health professionals were reluctant to change their theories about mental illness because to do so meant changing significant parts of their meaning structure, and this required courage. Other mental health professionals who were highly critical of the psychiatric system quickly saw how important it was to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. Lucy Johnstone, in her excellent book Users and Abusers of Psychiatry, wrote:

Surveys indicate that about one in eight women are victims of sexual abuse in childhood, with the figure rising to as much as 50 per cent in women who use psychiatric services. Among the recognised long-term consequences are eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, anxiety and depression, as well as more general difficulties with relationships, self-esteem and sexuality. Women with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder often report a history of child sexual abuse as well.³⁷

Therapists had to find a new way of working with clients who had been sexually abused. Some therapists in the USA developed the practice of advising a client who had been sexually abused by a parent to confront the offending parent. Therapists can argue the pros and cons of this method and never come to a conclusion, but the immediate effect of this method was that the client’s family was thrown into turmoil. Jack’s story, which I shall recount later on, tells of a family who accepted the truth of one such revelation. Other families did not, and ferocious battles in and out of the law courts followed. In the USA, where every problem in life is turned into a medical condition, False Memory Syndrome was discovered. Whole forests of trees were sacrificed as arguments raged between those who said that all accusations of sexual abuse were completely true and those who said that all accusations of sexual abuse were completely false. Quiet voices of reason were lost in the clamour.

Eventually the dust settled and quiet voices of reason can now be heard saying that stories of sexual abuse in childhood may come from three sources:

1 Where the person has always clearly remembered the events of sexual abuse.

2 Where the person repressed memories of sexual abuse in childhood but certain events in later life triggered recall of these memories.

3 Where the person had not been sexually abused by the parent but in other ways had been hurt by the parent, thus leading them to harbour a deep hatred and a need for revenge on the parent.

With sources two and three it is safe to assume that the person has suffered such a threat to their sense of being a person that a desperate defence, that of massive repression or a passion for revenge, is seen as necessary. When the person clearly remembers the abuse it can be that as a child they found the abuse extremely threatening and shameful. As an adult the person still feels besmirched, guilty and worthless. Or it may be that the person as a child did not find the actions of the abusive adult personally threatening. The child may merely have been intrigued with what went on, in the way that children can be intrigued by strange or bizarre scenes which an adult might find unpleasant, even revolting. As an adult I do not want to see any living thing killed, but as a child I would not miss seeing my father dispatch a chicken with an axe and proceed to pluck and eviscerate it. Or it may be that, for the child, the abuse brings comfort and pleasure, as the story of Jack will show, but this reaction can have the unhappy outcome that the child identifies with the abuser and goes on to become an abuser himself. Often the damage that is done to a child comes not from the actual abuse but from the behaviour of adults when they discover the abuse. The child may discover that adults see him as damaged or dirty, or as being responsible for the abuse. I was not sexually abused as a child, but, when I was fourteen, a man inveigled me into witnessing him exposing himself. I was amazed and somewhat disconcerted, because in our prudish household penises were certainly not on view, but not for a moment did I consider telling my mother about this event. I knew full well that she would blame me for what had happened. I should not have been on my bicycle, on that road, coming straight home from a swim on a hot Saturday afternoon. If I were not such a bad child this event would not have happened.

These three possible sources of the accounts of sexual abuse seem straightforward, but the stumbling block is a clear and agreed definition of sexual abuse. Some of the fathers accused of sexual abuse by their daughters insisted that they were lying and defined sexual abuse as sexual penetration. They would have agreed with Bill Clinton’s assertion that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. However, all women know that there is more to sex than penetration. For a girl, a father’s lewd comments about her developing bosom or her sexual potential, or the father’s refusal to recognize the boundaries a girl creates to maintain her privacy, can seem to the girl as threatening and dangerous as a full sexual onslaught. A girl can clearly distinguish the warm, loving, sexual gaze of a man who accepts her as the person she is from the hard, sexual, threatening gaze of a man who sees her as an available sexual object. To women the first gaze is delightful; the second terrifying.

It was this second kind of gaze on the part of the father of a fourteen-year-old girl which made me certain that there was something seriously amiss in the family of this girl, who had been brought halfway across Britain to be a research patient in the psychiatric unit where I was working. This happened thirty years ago, in the early 1970s, when psychiatrists were completely convinced that there were such things as mental illnesses, and that these illnesses had a physical cause. My psychiatrist colleagues were researching what was called the biological basis of mood change, and this young girl, Karen, was deemed to be a suitable patient for a physiological study.

At that early stage in my career I was prepared to accept the psychiatric theories of mania and depression, and so I took part in the research by being a proper psychologist who administered tests. Karen seemed to exhibit only one mood, that of terrified shyness, but she submitted patiently to my demands and to those of the psychiatrists who were measuring certain physiological changes.

Karen’s degree of shyness suggested that she was frightened to do anything in case she made a mistake and displeased someone. This came out clearly in my tests, during which, if she made a response at all, it was guarded and extremely limited to the point of seeming childish, far below the level of intellect and maturity she had shown before she became ill. However, as the weeks went by, she gradually relaxed, though she remained shy, and this relaxation was reflected in her test responses, which became more able, various and creative.

There were a number of young patients in the unit, and I took it upon myself to try to make their time with us more interesting. The unit, an old house set in large grounds, was reasonably pleasant and comfortable, infinitely better than the traditional asylum where Karen had first been incarcerated, but there was little for patients to do except sit in the dayroom or carry out a few very simple tasks in occupational therapy. I helped to bring the young patients together so they could get to know one another, and occasionally we went for walks or into town to shop and to go to the cinema.

When I worked in Sydney as an educational psychologist, the only office I had was my car. I worked in schools and often visited a child’s family at home. This I found invaluable, because it allowed me to discover aspects of the child’s life which the family either kept secret or simply did not think to mention to me. Accordingly, though I had met Karen’s parents when they came to visit her, I wanted to see the family home.

Karen’s parents made me welcome. Her mother was quiet and undemonstrative, not given to hugging or kissing her daughter. Her father was much more lively and demonstrative. I felt that the parents had secrets, but it was not until one particular visit, when I was getting into the father’s van while he stood holding the door, that I had a clue as to what these secrets might be. I glanced up and saw him looking at me. He did not look away. He wanted me to see him looking at me with a searing sexual gaze that was both a threat and an invitation. Now I knew that the family secrets were, in part at least, sexual.

My psychiatrist colleagues did not think that my concerns about the family were in any way significant. Months passed. Karen started at a school close to the unit. She studied successfully and fitted into the school routine. Her physiological tests showed nothing of significance and so, eventually, she went home.

Karen and I kept in touch by cards and letters. Thirty years went by. Every Christmas she sent me a card and a letter with a summary of her year’s events. She left school, got a job, met and married a fine man. She continued working and had children who did well academically. We met socially sometimes when I was in her part of the UK, but it was not until after her father died that she phoned me and asked whether she could talk to me. Over the years she had suffered periods of depression, but she and her husband had learned to recognize the danger signs and deal with it effectively. Now, however, what was happening was different.

Karen remembered remarkably little of her childhood, and she did not speculate about the significance of what she did remember. She had not linked one memory of her father forcing her to eat baked beans with the fact that her choice of diet was extremely limited and not based on any theory of nutrition. There was a wide range of ordinary foods she could not bring herself to eat, just as she could not possibly eat baked beans.

Karen had a similar problem with sex. She loved her husband and she wanted to respond fully to him, but, while she could approach him with passion, at the critical moment she would pull back, frightened and not knowing why she was afraid. It seemed that from early childhood she had been operating under four internalized injunctions: Don’t remember, don’t ask questions, be afraid, know that you can never be good enough.

Karen had remained close to her parents and, when her father became seriously ill, she shared her mother’s anxiety. However, very shortly after her father died her mother spoke of him being a wonderful man who had devoted himself to his family. Karen suddenly felt very angry. This was not like her. She did not get angry with people. Whenever something went wrong she always blamed herself. She should have tried harder, been a better person. However, now not only was she angry, she was not blaming herself for getting angry.

Karen had always found it difficult to talk about herself, so when she came to see me after her father’s death she spoke haltingly, sidling up to something rather than confronting it head on. Thus we sidled up to the question of what her father had or had not done when she was a child and a teenager. I knew that this could not be a conversation between client and therapist because I was part of Karen’s past, just as her father had been. Our conversation had to be like that of two family members who were trying to remember and understand the past. So I told Karen what I remembered of my visit to her family, and how her father had looked at me. She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘That’s what he did to all my girlfriends. I didn’t like to invite them home.’

I did not feel it was necessary for Karen to dig in her memory for particular events and lay them out like the contents of a trunk that had stood unopened for many years. If she had had no one to talk to she and I might have done that, but she and her husband did talk to one another. They knew each other very well.

How very different Karen’s life would have been had the first doctor who saw her said to himself, ‘I wonder what’s going on in this child’s home that makes her so frightened she can hardly move?’ Nowadays most doctors would ask themselves this question, and most child psychiatrists would know that to understand why a child behaves as he does he must be looked at in the context of the family. Many, though not all, child psychiatrists and clinical psychologists know the truth of the advice I was given back in 1961. It was: ‘The presenting problem is never the real problem.’ Family therapists are no doubt well aware that the real problem has something to do with the family member who refuses to attend discussions with the therapist.

Karen’s main interest seemed to be to fill in the gaps in her family story. Until she knew the full story she would feel incomplete and thus inadequate. I gave her some of my papers from all those years ago, and she spoke to several family members whom she felt could bear the burden of uncovering family secrets. She would not speak about these matters to her mother because she did not feel that her mother, now old, could bear to be forced to remember the past.

Karen’s principal problem, as I saw it, was that her propensity to blame herself for every disaster turned the natural sadness she felt into depression. Otherwise she managed her life very well. Had she been having greater and more diverse difficulties I would have recommended that she read Carolyn Ainscough and Kay Toon’s book Breaking Free: Help for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse?³⁸ and perhaps join a self-help group of adult survivors. This kind of group has enabled many men and women to confront the demons from their past and defeat them. Alas, such groups are sparse, and few are a regular part of mental healthcare.

For all the people who have suffered sexual abuse in childhood to receive appropriate help, governments would have to recognize and deal with the incidence of abuse not just in families but in certain institutions. A great deal of fuss is made about strangers who prey upon children. When the News of the World printed the photographs of a number of convicted paedophiles now living in the community, there were noisy demonstrations and the homes of suspected paedophiles were attacked. What was ignored in all this was that the majority of children who suffer abuse do so at the hands of a parent or someone they know and trust. It is far worse to be abused by someone you know and trust than by a stranger. Recovery from abuse by a stranger can be relatively straightforward, though not easy, by seeing it as a chance event for which you are not responsible and do not deserve, and the offender as being completely in the wrong and meriting punishment. However, when the offender is someone in whom you have placed your trust, someone whom you love and you hope loves you, recovery is not simple. We all long for a parent who loves us and looks after us, and when our parent falls far short of the mark the longing we have for the parent they might have been can tie us to the parent who harms us. Our longing for the perfect parent can prevent us from seeing the parent who harms us as a mere human-sized human being. Instead we see this parent as looming over us, wielding massive parental power which we dare not ignore or disobey.

Powerful though a parent may seem to be, how much more powerful is a man who has access to God’s power. The Catholic Church demands from its clergy and its flock obedience and silence. Any institution which operates on principles of obedience and silence creates the conditions for the abuse of power. Catholic children were, and sometimes still are, fiercely and brutally beaten. When I was a child in Australia the Christian Brothers’ schools for boys were notorious for the priests’ brutality against the pupils. Martin McGuinness, now Minister for Education in Northern Ireland, and Conor McPherson, the brilliant young Irish playwright, have spoken of the beatings they received at Catholic schools. In recent years some Catholics have broken the order of silence and have spoken, not just of physical abuse, but of sexual abuse at the hands of priests. What started as a trickle of accounts of sexual abuse by the clergy turned into a torrent in the USA, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia and Ireland. These accounts showed how the clergy used their priestly power to coerce and silence their victims. An eleven-year-old girl told how a priest would follow an act of abuse by saying: ‘This is our secret and you mustn’t tell anybody. You are very special Sarah, very special indeed. Secrets can never be broken. However, if you do tell anyone, then God will know what you have done. Because I am a priest, God will inform me of your deed, and as a consequence you will need to be punished. I want you to remember, Sarah, if God tells me you have been naughty, I will kill you. Do you understand? I will kill you.’³⁹

The Catholic Church was extremely slow to acknowledge that harm had been done by priests to those in their care. Following legal action by some victims, the Church has made some modest remunerations, and some dioceses have created the post of child protection officer, but the ethos of the institution has not changed. How can it when a cardinal, in the process of inauguration, ‘takes a vow of secrecy to the Pope which states: “I promise to keep secret anything confided in me in confidence that if revealed will cause scandal or harm to the Roman Catholic Church.”’⁴⁰

When Monsignor James Joyce was child protection officer for the Catholic diocese of Portsmouth from 1994 to 1999, he met victims of abuse and their families. He wrote, ‘Most were in shock, stunned not only by what had happened and its effect on them, but also by the silence and denial by the Church. Many victims of abuse had their lives destroyed. They found relationships with their families and friends distorted, their sexuality confused and their whole being affected. They couldn’t understand why it had happened to them. ’⁴¹

Monsignor Joyce found that the system whereby child protection officers were priests or deacons who, as the Church requires, had made a vow of obedience to their bishop rendered them powerless. A priest or deacon cannot tell a bishop what to do. He wrote, ‘The climate in the Church is still one of denying abuse and minimising its effect, because to accept it is to open up issues about power. Parishes and dioceses can still be run on the whim of a priest or a bishop, and there is no appeal or grievance procedure in the law of the Church.’⁴²

Media stories of abusive priests have been matched by stories about workers in care homes for children who physically and sexually abused the children in their care, and by stories of international paedophile rings whose members entrap, abuse and even murder children for their own amusement and for the creation of pornography which is now a multibillion-dollar industry. Some care home assistants and some paedophiles have been charged, and some of these have been convicted for their crimes. Terrible though all these stories are, however, they do not arouse the kind of public passion that forces governments to take some major action to deal with the perpetrators, protect children and compensate those who have suffered. Nick Davies, whose investigations into care home abuse and the activities of paedophiles have won awards, noted that ‘The political reality is that the Home Office continues to steer police resources into dealing with reported crime. In its major 1996 inquiry, Childhood Matters, the NSPCC concluded: “The legal system, designed to provide justice and redress for the victims of abuse, is failing to do so consistently.”’⁴³

Nick Davies wrote about the work of Rob Jones, who, as a young detective sergeant, moved to Avon and Somerset’s Child Protection Team, where he developed a way of working which resulted in the successful prosecution of many of the members of a paedophile ring who preyed on teenage boys. In 2000, wrote Nick Davies, ‘Rob Jones devised his own package of proactive child protection to safeguard children from abuse, particularly in the world of sport. He called it Child Safe. His chief constable supported him. It was the only such scheme in the country and he set out to spread it to other forces and recruited footballing stars, including Gary Lineker and Kevin Keegan, to help him. Some forces have adopted it. Others are not so keen. They say it’s women’s work.’⁴⁴

‘Women’s work’ is something such men belittle and scorn because what men call women’s work involves caring for others. Caring for others calls for the tender emotions which many men in the course of their upbringing are forced to learn to deny. For the majority of women feelings of affection, kindness, sympathy and tenderness are linked to sexual feelings, but when men deny these feelings and their link to sexual feelings, sex becomes an activity no different from driving a fast car or winning a game of golf. Sexual feeling becomes no more than the sensation of excitement and power that can confirm the man’s sense of existing as a person. To get this feeling he acts upon someone’s body, or on his own, and uses it as an object, in the same way he uses a car or a golf club. Just what a man does with a sexual object is often bizarre - it is men, rarely women, who develop fetishes and perversions - and often inhuman - it is men, extremely rarely women, who commit rape.

If this attitude towards sex is the result of what is an ordinary upbringing for a boy, what happens to a boy who experiences not just the usual indoctrination about maleness but also the experience of being treated as a sexual object?

Jack and his wife Joy agreed to my recording his story, in the hope that it might be of use to other people in a similar predicament. All that Jack asked was that I should not give the name of the orphanage he lived in as a child. ‘Things are different now,’ he said, ‘or at least I hope they are.’

We had met twelve years previously when their son Mark had been in trouble at school. He was a very bright lad, but he stayed away from school a lot, and when he was there he would not work. His headmaster wanted to expel him, but before this could be done the Education Department needed a psychologist’s advice. Mark and his parents came to see me, and eventually Mark went to a boarding school. His parents came a few more times to discuss their marriage. It had become clear that much of Mark’s difficult behaviour stemmed from the strain in their relationship.

Joy found it hard to criticize Jack because she knew he was a devoted, caring father. She wanted to make their relationship better and wanted to talk to me about it. Jack was not so keen, but he came back with her for several meetings. After a while they stopped coming, saying that things were better, and I lost touch with them. Over the years I often wondered what had happened to Mark. I was relieved, as we sat down in my office, when Joy said, ‘Mark said that we ought to get in touch with you.’ She went on, ‘It’s very good of you to see us, and at such short notice too.’ She told me that Mark was married with two children and had his own business. Alice, their eldest, was married, their second daughter, Jenny, was working in Edinburgh, Ray was a research scientist, and Louise, the youngest, was at university.

Joy paused and looked at Jack. He looked dreadfully upset. He said, ‘I’ve been very stupid. It’s about the children… when they were young… what I did to them. I… interfered… with them… not all of them. I didn’t think -’

His voice broke. Joy, gently, took over, and went on talking, taking responsibility for telling me what had happened. She spoke very simply and directly, explaining carefully and laying no blame, trying to be fair to everyone concerned. She described how their eldest daughter, Alice, had three children and lived a hundred miles away. Joy had noticed how infrequently Alice visited them, and how when they visited Alice the atmosphere was very strained. She knew that Alice and her husband were having difficulties and that Alice was consulting a counsellor about this. One day Alice phoned to say that she would be calling to see them. She made a special point of arranging to arrive at a time when Jack would be home from work. When she came she asked both of them to sit down so that she could tell them something very important. Joy thought Alice was going to tell them she had left her husband, and was puzzled when Alice said that she was going to leave the problem with them.

Then she told Joy, and reminded her father, how when she was twelve her father had interfered with her sexually. He had asked her to undress for him and he had fondled her breasts. She had been very frightened by this. Over the years she had tried to forget what had happened to her. She had begun to wonder whether it had really happened, especially when at college she had confided in a friend, only to be told that Freud had said that girls often had these kinds of fantasies about their fathers. She was sure that this was not a fantasy. When her marriage ran into difficulties she went to a counsellor, and her counsellor had helped her see how what her father had done to her had undermined her trust in men and so had affected her relationship with her husband.

She had asked Mark whether anything had happened to him. Mark had said that it had, and that it had gone on for a long time. She wrote to Jenny about it, but not to Louise. Alice had always been very close to her little sister, and she was sure that nothing had happened to Louise. Her counsellor had advised her that the problem was not hers but her parents’, and that the only way she could rid herself of its effects was to return it to her parents. This she was doing, and, having done so, she left.

Joy did not attempt to describe the pain and confusion Alice left behind. Coming to see me was her way of trying to sort out her confusion. As to most introverts, it was important to her to see things clearly, no matter how painful they might be. She had always been like that. I found in the notes I had made twelve years earlier that I had written of Joy: ‘She would puzzle over the problems our discussions raised, remember them to the next session, and try to find a solution.’ I had noted, ‘She said that she had a constant, nagging anxiety and a sense of imminent disaster from some unknown quarter.’ I had also noted Jack’s ‘reluctance to enquire deeply into personal matters’.

Joy said she could not understand how it was that she had never noticed anything. Alice and Jack were always getting angry with one another, but Alice had always been an angry child, ever since she was little. Joy had spoken to Mark, and he had told her how Jack had engaged him in sexual acts for quite some while, stopping only when he thought there was a danger that she would find out. Jack defended himself. ‘It was just mutual masturbation, nothing else. Just like boys playing together.’

Joy said, ‘What about Ray? He told me there were times with him too.’

Jack shook his head. ‘I can’t remember.’

Joy said to me, ‘This is what’s so terrible, he can’t remember. If he doesn’t remember what he did, what other things has he forgotten? Will he do it again? Can we trust him? You can see why Mark and Alice worry he might with our grandchildren.’

Jack found it hard to speak. ‘I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. I know Mark and Alice don’t trust me. But I wouldn’t, not with my grandchildren.’

Joy pressed him, reminding him of what he had done to Mark.

Jack said, ‘It started when Mark asked me about sex. I never thought much about it. Just two males together. At the orphanage, everyone did it.’

Jack went on to tell me about his life in the orphanage. After his father died his mother felt that she could not cope with him, so, at just eight years old, he was sent to a home for boys. There, he said, every new boy suffered ‘virtual rape from the older boys and from the masters. Everybody was involved in it. You learned not to complain because there was no one you could complain to. When you got older you did it to the younger boys. It went on in all the boys’ homes. When I got older I was sent to other homes we were shifted around a lot and I met up with boys from other homes and they did it.’

Jack said that he had never thought about his time in the orphanage at all. ‘I can’t remember much about that time. I don’t remember anything before I was eight. I know my mother used to have lodgers. One of them used to take me out to the woods. I can remember he used to buy me ice cream. Perhaps something happened then. I don’t remember.’ He spoke of the terrible guilt he felt now. Before, ‘I didn’t think about it. I thought the children would have forgotten it.’

Joy said, ‘When Alice was a child I told her not to let anyone do anything to her that she didn’t want and to tell me, even if it was someone close, like an uncle. Alice reminded me of this. She said, “I couldn’t tell you, Mummy, because there was someone, and you were always telling us what a good father we had.’”

Joy told me how, over the past ten years, Jack had suffered several sudden, violent illnesses, sometimes necessitating him being admitted to hospital. The doctors had explained these in terms of a virus, but now she wondered whether the illnesses were connected with all this. Now these things were being discussed, the illnesses had stopped.

Some weeks later, when we were arranging the next appointment, she said that in the three weeks between this meeting and the last she had thought she might go mad. All the structures she had built to form the world she lived in had now been revealed as fictions which bore little relation to reality, and she was no longer sure of what reality was. In those weeks she had felt that she had to hold all her thoughts very carefully in her mind, otherwise everything would fall apart. Jack threatened every part of her being. She was trying to hold it all together by continuing to be the good, patient, understanding, calm, unaggressive person she had always been, and by maintaining her faith that there was something beyond this life which would offer reparation for her suffering. However, Jack threatened even this. He would shrug his shoulders and say flatly, ‘This is all there is and when you’re gone, you’re gone.’

When we met three weeks later, Jack agreed that he needed people. ‘I don’t like being on my own,’ he said. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. ‘What’s happened has happened,’ he said, ‘and I can’t change it. I’m sorry it happened, but I can’t do anything about it. If Joy could accept that we could get on with thinking about the future. That’s what’s important, not the past.’

Joy could not do that. She needed to think about what had happened, to reinterpret much of what she remembered of the past years, and to understand, no matter how painful that process of understanding was. ‘Jack just accepts things without thinking about them,’ she said. ‘He just takes what someone says or what he reads in the paper without working something out for himself.’

The way Joy would sit quietly, thinking, worried Jack very much. He felt that she had withdrawn from him and that he was in danger. He could not put this feeling into words. Instead he thought about leaving himself. He said, ‘Would it be best if I left? She’d be better on her own, without me.’

I said, ‘We can’t work out what’s best to do until we understand what happened and why it happened.’

So Jack reluctantly agreed to talk some more about his past. He described how he had been conscripted into the air force and posted to the Far East where, in the absence of women, many of the men found sexual relief with one another. ‘That’s all it was, just relief,’ he explained.

I asked whether he considered himself to be a homosexual - that is, having loving relationships with men as the most important relationships of his life.

‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live with a man. I like women.’

His last sexual experience with another man had been when he came out of the air force and was living in Wales. He had later moved to the Midlands, where he had met Joy. None of these sexual encounters had been with children.

Joy said, ‘Jack’s always seen sex as something very surface. When the children were little and he was working very hard, I wouldn’t see him until late and we’d no sooner get in the bedroom than he’d want to. I couldn’t get him to understand I wasn’t like that. I needed time to be with him.’ It was no good if Joy offered simply to oblige him. He wanted every sexual encounter to be passionate and grand, in which he possessed Joy totally. Instant, total gratification.

We went on to talk about their children. Jack was very proud of them. All of them, except Mark, had excelled academically, and Mark was now being successful in his own business. ‘I couldn’t ever believe I could have such bright kids,’ said Jack. ‘Right from the beginning they seemed older than me.’

What did he mean, they’d always seemed older than him?

Gradually we put together an answer to this question. When the children were tiny he did not see them very much as he was working so hard, but once they started at school he became aware of how bright they were and how much they knew. He could not discipline them, but only, in Joy’s words, ‘quarrel with them’. He felt inferior to them, and frightened of them. There was only one area of experience where he felt his knowledge was superior to theirs - sex - and so he thought he could teach them about this. All the time he could not see anything wrong in doing this. Of course, sometimes we teach children something because we feel that it is important that they know it, and other times we teach them something so we can demonstrate our superiority over them. Sometimes we need to demonstrate our superiority because we envy them.

Joy had brought along letters from her daughters Jenny and Alice. Jenny was angry with Alice for speaking about the subject to Joy, causing Joy hurt. Jenny said she had spent years trying to forget ‘the experience’ and did not want to discuss the matter now. Jenny’s letter implied that something very unpleasant had happened. Jack said he could remember very little, but he insisted that whatever had happened was nothing more than when he was ‘fooling around with her’, playing the childish games Jenny had always enjoyed. He admitted he had touched her breasts. ‘I didn’t expose myself or ask her to touch me,’ he said. ‘It was her body I wanted to see.’ He was distraught with remorse. ‘I didn’t realize how much I had hurt her. I wouldn’t want to hurt her ever. I wish I could tell her how sorry I am and ask her to forgive me.’

Jenny had always been extremely good as a child. Alice had been argumentative, and she and Jack had often clashed, but Jenny never argued with him. Jack was puzzled as to how Jenny could be so upset now about what had happened; as a teenager she had always been very friendly to him. She had won a scholarship to a boarding school of great repute, and he had often driven her to and from the school, several hundreds of miles away. Moreover, at home she would often go from bathroom to bedroom quite scantily clad. Why would she do this? I guessed that Jenny throughout her teens was trying to prove to herself that these painful events of her childhood had never happened or, if they had, that they had no untoward significance.

As Jenny was coming for Christmas I suggested that Jack write her a letter, saying what he had just told me he wanted to say to her. We spent some time discussing this proposed letter. Jack was worried that if he did what I suggested giving Jenny the letter soon after she arrived home this might spoil Christmas, and the family’s ritual celebrations of Christmas were very important to Jenny (and to Jack). ‘She likes everything to be exactly the same every year,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it to her just before she leaves.’

‘That won’t give her time to discuss it with us if she wants to,’ said Joy. She went on, ‘We have to show the children that we are able to bear all this, because if we can’t bear it, then they’ll find it hard to bear what they have to bear.’

When they came back to see me on New Year’s Eve they agreed that they had had a good Christmas. Jenny, Louise and Ray had come home, and there had been a family celebration. Jack had written the letter to Jenny, saying how sorry he was and asking for her forgiveness. He had put the letter on her bedside table on Boxing Day morning. Later Joy had looked in and seen that the letter had disappeared. Jenny did not mention it for the rest of her stay. ‘Her manner didn’t change at all,’ said Jack. ‘She was just like she’s always been, all the time she was with us. Perhaps she’ll write to me when she gets back home.’

Mark and Alice, spending Christmas with their own families, had phoned over the holiday. ‘They didn’t want to talk to me,’ said Jack. ‘This is my punishment.’

Joy told me how she and Ray had talked together about the sexual approaches Jack had made to his son, which Jack did not remember. They had not included Jack in this conversation because they both wanted to spare his feelings. Now, in her gentle, precise way, she told me what Ray had told her. Jack sat with his head down.

Ray described three events. The first was a simple enquiry from Jack as to whether Ray got erections. Ray had not sensed there was anything wrong with this until Jack, leaving Ray’s bedroom, had said, ‘Don’t tell your mother.’ The next time Ray and Jack were playing, just fooling around, Jack put his hand down Ray’s trousers and touched his penis. Ray pulled himself away. The third occasion was no more than a look which Ray, undressed, found hard to distinguish from the close looks which parents give to children when inspecting for unwashed faces and adolescent pimples.

Jack still could not remember these events. ‘Jack doesn’t bother to sort things out,’ said Joy. ‘Something happens and he just covers it up with something else. It’s like our attic. When we moved to that house he just piled things up there, just a higgledy-piggledy mess. That attic always reminded me of Jack’s mind. I hated to go up there. But now I’ve got everything in it sorted out. We put up some shelves and changed the glass in the window to let in more light.’ She smiled. ‘Now we’re getting his mind sorted out getting things clear and in order.’

The reason that the attic, like all the cupboards and shelves in their house, was crammed full of things was because Jack couldn’t bear to throw things away.

‘We weren’t allowed any possessions at the orphanage. If you had something you had to carry it with you to keep it or it disappeared. When I went into the orphanage it was just after Christmas and I had all my Christmas presents. They soon disappeared. I had a billiard table and cue. The cue was the first to go. One of the masters took it and used it as a cane. He often belted me with it. I soon learned how you had to get things. You were always on the lookout for something you could exchange for something else. But it always had to be something you could carry with you. It wasn’t until you were a work boy that you had a locker, just a small one, about eighteen inches square, and you were allowed to buy a lock to put on it. But even then someone would break the lock and take your things.’

Jack talked about the beatings and indiscriminate cruelty in the orphanage. The matron, he said, wore a large ring, and as she walked past a boy she would slap him across the head, often cutting his face with the ring. Even today Jack cannot bear to have his head touched.

‘We would get belted for anything and nothing,’ he said. ‘Every fortnight we had boot inspection. We had to stand holding our boots upside down. The chap who mended our boots would allow us to lose just one stud from the sole. For every other stud missing you’d get a belting. We’d do anything to get studs for our boots. If you found one you treasured it like gold. Sometimes you’d manage to get hold of a new one and then you’d have to scratch it for ages to make it worn like the other ones. If he thought you’d put a new one in, well, you’d had it.’

The boys were beaten and whipped for all kinds of offences and often for nothing at all. ‘I wet the bed every night from the time I went into the orphanage until the time I left. There was a group of us that did this, and we were always punished, every time. We’d be beaten, or wrapped up tight in the wet sheets and made to stand out in the cold. All the other boys knew what you’d done. We always had to wash our own sheets. The staff never did anything to help us.’ There was no one to whom the boys could turn for help. ‘No one would have believed us,’ he said, ‘and my mother, even if she had believed me, which she wouldn’t, wouldn’t have done anything anyway.’

As Jack described at length the cruelties that had been perpetrated on these helpless boys, he smiled and occasionally laughed. I asked him why he did so and he said, ‘Well, it’s a long time ago, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

I asked him whether he had beaten his own children. ‘Nothing like the way I was beaten,’ he said. ‘Only when they needed it.’ ‘I’d stop him,’ said Joy. ‘I can’t bear violence. It’s so ugly.’ ‘Alice was the main one,’ said Jack. ‘She used to wind me up. I wouldn’t belt her just slap her around the face.’

Several times in this conversation Jack remarked with some awe how he was remembering things he had never thought of before, ‘not just general things, but specific things. I can remember just what happened and what I felt.’ He went on, ‘You know, when I remember being with someone then, I remember it as being pleasant. It was warm. You were accepted, even though it was only for a night. The masters, well, they lived two lives. If one of them said to you “Come to my room at seven o’clock tonight” you knew what it was for. You weren’t going to get belted. They were really nice to you then. They gave you sweets and cakes, things you hardly ever got. Then next morning if you stepped out of line they’d belt you. If a master chose you, well, it was like being taken out of the pond. We were just like fish in a pond. If one master chose you, then the other masters didn’t. They each had their own group of boys. Your master might keep you for a long time, or he might get sick of you and then you’d get thrown back in the pond.’

Jack stressed that the good part was that ‘you were always paired off with someone. There wasn’t much group sex. Sometimes the boys in the dormitory would have, for want of a better word, a wanking party to see who could come first, and there was one master, a slimy creep, who used to get several boys in his room and make them do it while he watched, but most times, even with the boys in the dorm, even if it was only once, it was just the two of you. It made you feel special.’

Jack was very special for over a year. One master, known as the Major, singled him out. In his room Jack learned more than sex. The Major played records and introduced Jack to classical music. Music became Jack’s great love. The Major would also take Jack on excursions out of the school. ‘He would take me to Salvation Army meetings. Sometimes they would have concerts, really good music. And they always made a big fuss of me. They’d stuff me full of cakes and buns and give me a big bag of food to take back for my friends. I was really happy there. It was great, getting out and meeting people.’

Then, suddenly, the Major left. ‘The staff were moved around the different homes a lot,’ he said, ‘but we usually had a few weeks’ warning. With the Major, he just left in twenty-four hours. I was thrown back in the pond and I was just another boy there for, well, over a year.’

I asked Jack whether the other boys were envious when one boy was singled out by a master. ‘No, they just took it for granted. Everyone did it. If you woke in the morning and saw a boy’s bed empty you knew he was with so-and-so. And the boys who went with masters, they brought back sweets and things, for the other boys. If they didn’t hand them out they had them taken off them.’ Jack had felt envious of anyone who had something that he did not have.

Despite their continual financial difficulties, Jack and Joy had always found the money to give their children the things they needed to pursue their interests. If one was interested in music, then musical instruments were bought. If another was interested in tennis, then tennis rackets and tennis lessons were bought. Jack was proud of his children’s achievements and of his hard-won ability to give them what they needed, but underneath that there must have lurked a small boy’s envy of the other kids’ possessions.

The conversation turned to television, and Joy remarked that Jack could not stand any programme that revealed emotions. When I enquired, ‘What emotions?’ it became clear that Jack could not tolerate watching the expression of realistically tender feelings. He enjoyed the violence of westerns and war films (‘Well, it’s only on the screen, isn’t it?’) but the expression of real, tender, personal feelings, with all the concomitant yearning and pain, was something he could not bear to witness.

Joy had suggested that Jack might like to come to see me on his own, and I was surprised when he agreed to do this. He spoke again of his sexual experiences at the orphanage. He described how he had been there only a few hours when a boy came to him and said he was wanted. He was taken down to the basement where the boiler was, and there he found a group of the older boys.

‘They grabbed me, spread me on the table, and each of them raped me. If I struggled they hit me. They were big boys, fully developed, big enough for it [anal rape] to be very painful.’

A day or so later he was taken again, this time by just two boys. ‘It wasn’t as bad as the first time. I got used to it.’ With most of the masters ‘it was just down with the trousers and, bang, in. All you got out of it was a sore bottom.’

He told me how one master would beat boys on the bottom with a cane until their flesh was red and sore. Then he would smooth cream over the boy’s buttocks very gently. Then, ‘bang, in. It was pain, pleasure, pain. Funny thing, I really like smoothing cream on. I like smoothing cream over Joy’s back.’ He added, ‘I was a skinny little kid, and I always was the passive partner, but after, when I got older, I did it to the younger kids. I wonder now what happened to them.’

Jack spoke fondly of the Major. He said, ‘The Major had a great influence on me. With him, well, sometimes we just sat in front of the fire and made toast - you know, bread on toasting forks - and listened to music. Other times, well, he wasn’t in a hurry. There’d be mutual masturbation, and after, well. I know I was the passive partner, but I’d got something out of it.’ He described how the Major would dress up in a woman’s suspender belt and stockings and would dress Jack as a schoolgirl. He said, ‘I got something out of it being loved and wanted, if only for one thing.’

Jack spoke of ‘men’s sex and women’s sex’. Men’s sex, as he wanted it, was chiefly arousal and excitement, not orgasm. ‘I don’t put much importance on that,’ he said. If, when they were making love, Joy had an orgasm first, Jack would lose interest immediately. Making love to Joy was very important to him, but so was masturbation. He also valued his collection of pornography. Reading pornography was, he said, very stimulating. He found it immensely pleasurable to spend an afternoon in his bedroom, where he would dress up, as the Major had done, in suspender belt and stockings and read what he called ‘my books’, his collection of pornography.

Joy accepted these activities, although she refused to watch his blue films and hated to look at his pornography. This was part of his life which was separate from her, and, as she explained to me later, when she first discovered what Jack did she did not know any other men and supposed that all men were like that. She now knew that they were not. Mark’s abhorrence of Jack’s collection of books made that quite clear, but she thought that she should accept this quirk of Jack’s character because she loved him. ‘I’m very good at loving,’ she said.

Jack defended his activities to me. ‘Why should I stop doing it? I’m not hurting anyone.’

When, as children, we suffer some severe trauma and discover that the world is not at all as we believed it to be, we struggle to master our experience - that is, to create a meaning for it which can fit without much difficulty into our meaning structure. However, our experience of life is so limited that we do not have many alternative meanings from which to choose our interpretation. We experiment with elements of the traumatic experience itself, perhaps believing that there is some hidden meaning which we can discover if we keep repeating in some form the experience itself. Jack was a child and therefore could respond only with the eroticism of a child. As the psychoanalyst Ferenczi said, ‘The erotic life of the child remains at the level of foreplay, or knows satisfaction only in the sense of “satiety” but not the feeling of annihilation that accompanies orgasm.’⁴⁵ Jack’s experience of the erotic remained that of a child. Moreover, as a child he had dealt with his fear of the Major by identifying with him. Anna Freud called this process ‘identification with aggressor’, but the old saying ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ would do just as well.

Joy spent a week helping Alice when one of her children was ill. It had been a painful, difficult time for both women. They knew that they should talk, but neither wanted to distress the other. Risking Alice’s pain and anger, Joy told her about the discussions she and Jack had had with me and how she now understood him much better. She said to me, ‘Isn’t it strange, you can live with a man for thirty-five years and not know him.’

Joy talked to Alice about Alice’s childhood when, as the eldest, Alice had to endure the birth of five siblings. One of these babies had lived only four days, and Jack had ordered Joy, ‘You’re not to cry.’ Forbidden to talk about her grief, for talking brought on tears, Joy withdrew into a depression. She struggled on with performing her duties as wife and mother but, as she told me, ‘I can’t remember Alice then. She was the schoolgirl in the family. It’s no wonder she was argumentative and demanding.’

Alice, as she told her mother later, did not want her to talk about those times. ‘I thought you were going to criticize me and tell me what a great trouble I was to you.’ Joy was not placing the blame on Alice. She was reviewing what she herself had done and was feeling the pain that loving parents feel when they realize that what they have done to their children, often with the best of intentions, has hurt and harmed them.

Alice told Joy of her encounters with Jack when she was just blossoming into womanhood. ‘He said that he wanted to undress me. This made me feel that I was supposed to respond, like the ball was in my court. I had to put up a barrier, but at the same time I felt that because I had refused him he rejected me. I still feel he’s rejecting me.’ Joy hastened to reassure her that Jack had not rejected her and that he loved her very much. Alice said, ‘I wish he’d write and tell me that.’

Jack felt very discomfited at the prospect of writing another letter, but his face lit up with happiness as he told me how, when he had phoned Joy recently, Alice had answered the phone, and instead of immediately calling Joy had asked him how he was. He was delighted too that, as Jenny was leaving after Christmas, she had invited them to visit her.

His face was again alight with pleasure as Joy told me about her visit to Mark and his family, and about Mark’s little daughter. Jack longed to see his granddaughter, but, as he told me with great sadness, ‘Mark won’t talk to me.’ A few weeks later Jack told me that he had written a second letter, this time to Alice. Mark, too, had phoned and taken the time to talk to him.

Jack’s story shows how the sexual abuse of children can be handed down from generation to generation, like the family jewels. It seems likely, from Jack’s memory of the trip to the woods and the ice cream, and the fact that he retrieved this memory and wondered about its significance, that he had had some sexual encounter when he was small. However, the events of his early life (he said he remembered almost nothing of his first eight years) and many of the events of his childhood he hid in the deepest recesses of his memory. When he said that he did not expect his children to remember what he had done to them, he was speaking truthfully, for he did not remember what had been done to him.

This forgetting was not just because he was the kind of person for whom repression is the most favoured form of defence. In those situations where he had been the victim of sexual and physical abuse he was completely helpless. There was no one to whom he could turn for help, and he was a small child in a world of powerful and dangerous adults. He did not want to remember what had been done to him, because with those memories would come that feeling of terrible helplessness and abandonment.

Jack’s story shows, too, how a child, needing a personal relationship in the way he needs food, will, in the way that a starving man will eat anything, accept affection in whatever form it is offered. Children should never be put in a position where they have to accept love at any price but, alas, many of them are.