Читать книгу Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence - Maria Landon - Страница 12

I have almost no memories of actually living with Mum although I was six when she finally left for good. I can’t summon up any mental pictures of what it was like having her in the house with us. I have a vague memory of a woman making jellies at a birthday party but can’t picture her face. There would be no children’s parties after she left so it must have been Mum who was there in the kitchen making jelly. She says it was.

Nearly everything I have described so far I learned from her many years later or from other people who were around at the time, or from reading my social services records. It was always hard for Terry and me to piece together exactly what happened around the time she disappeared because Mum and Dad had such different views on it.

I do remember her coming back one time after one of her absences, although I still can’t picture her face. To celebrate our reunion we all went to the pictures as a family, the four of us together. (I guess Chris and Glen were back at home in their room as usual.) I still can’t actually visualize her being there, but I remember the event because as we came out of the cinema I got lost. I must have run on ahead in my excitement and taken a wrong turning. I don’t think I was gone for that long, but when Dad found me he was really angry with me for inconveniencing him. When Mum finally left home he would tell me that I was the reason she had gone; that it was because I had got lost and been a nuisance to her that day after the cinema trip that she had decided she couldn’t take any more. He was very good at making out everything that went wrong in his life was someone else’s fault. I believed him because he was my dad so he must be right and because I already knew that I was a bad girl; he told me so all the time and had convinced me totally. So for years I believed it was all my fault that our mother had gone and that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with any of us.

I think each time Mum came back to Dad after one of her bids for freedom, she hoped that he would have been shocked into changing his ways, but each time he would start putting her down again, hitting her, nagging and bullying her to go back on the game again.

‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘there’s one of your punters. Why don’t you do just one more?’

If she didn’t respond to the cajoling then he would resort to violence. Nothing made him lose his temper more thoroughly than one of us refusing to do as we were told. Mum must have realized that as long as she was with him nothing was ever going to change, she was always going to have to do whatever he decided for her, that she would always be selling herself just to keep him in drinking and betting money. So she made up her mind to disappear once and for all.

One day in 1973 Mum sneaked home from the shoe factory in her lunch hour, when she knew Dad would be safely settled in the pub, and packed her case. Terry and I were probably sitting outside whichever pub Dad was drinking in. It didn’t matter because she wasn’t planning to take any of us with her this time. I suppose she knew that if she had children in tow Dad would be able to trace her through social services and make her go back to him. She wanted to vanish off the face of the earth. The psychiatrist’s warnings about being married to ‘a very dangerous man’ must have been ringing in her ears as she hurried from the house for the last time with her few possessions hastily packed, slamming the door behind her. Chris and Glen would have been able to hear her movements from behind their bedroom door but by that stage they must have been so weak from hunger that they wouldn’t have had the strength to cry out to her. There would have been no point anyway.

At first she went to a male friend and asked him to put her up. Initially he promised to care for her until she sorted herself out, but it wasn’t long before she realized he was going to want to pimp for her just like Dad and she knew her only chance was to leave Norwich for ever and start afresh somewhere else, somewhere where no one knew about her past. When you’re known to be a prostitute and all the people you socialize with belong to the same world, it’s almost impossible to change anything as long as you stay in the same town; you have to make a clean break. Carrying the suitcase that contained all the possessions she had left in the world she walked out to the ring road on the edge of town and hitched a lift with a lorry driver.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.

‘Blakeney,’ he replied.

‘That’ll do,’ she said and that was where she ended up. She was only about thirty miles up the Norfolk coast from us but as far as we were concerned back at home she might as well have been on the other side of the world.

She got herself a job in a hotel as a chambermaid and found a bed-sitting room. She contacted social services back in Norwich to tell them she’d gone and to ask them to take us into care, telling them yet again what her fears were for us. Her greatest fear, she said, was for me because of the number of times Dad had told her, and anyone else who would listen, that he was going to ‘break me in’ and put me on the game as soon as I was old enough. She knew him well enough to be sure that he wasn’t bluffing. If he had been willing to put his own wife, the love of his life, on the game, why wouldn’t he do the same to his daughter? She told them how dangerous she knew Dad was, feeling certain that they would take us away from him and put us into safe homes.

When the social workers arrived at the house that day, Dad was out with Terry and me but they must have broken in because they found Chris and Glen, who were two and three years old by then, abandoned in their locked bedroom as usual. Neither of them reacted to the strangers who suddenly appeared beside them. They just stared straight ahead with deadened eyes. Chris was rocking rhythmically back and forth in his cot and Glen was so hungry he was actually eating the contents of his own soiled nappy.

It was that scene, discovered by social workers, that sealed Mum’s reputation as a terrible mother, giving Dad the opportunity to make out he was some sort of local hero by default. Even though the state those babies had got into was as much his fault as hers, he somehow managed to make himself seem like another victim of her neglect and cruelty rather than the cause of most of her problems. Mum says she was having a breakdown during her final years with us and I imagine that must have been what happened. There’s no other explanation why a mother could neglect her own children to that extent.

I don’t remember coming home that day to find Mum gone. Because she’d disappeared before, I probably assumed it was like the other times and she’d be back eventually. It was only gradually, over time, that I realized she wasn’t coming back this time and that Terry, Dad and I were on our own now. I was six years old, nearly seven, and I had to become the woman of the house. A cold knot of panic formed in my chest when I thought about it.

The social workers took both Chris and Glen into care but, for some reason that no one has ever been able to explain to me, they decided it would be all right to leave Terry and me at home with Dad. Perhaps at that stage they thought Mum was the bigger problem; after all she was the one who was on the game, a lifestyle that carried so much stigma and suggested she couldn’t possible be a decent parent, and she was the one who had deserted us. Perhaps they thought that with such a shameless woman gone from his life Dad might be able to do a better job for us. Who knows what he told them at the time to make himself look good and her look bad. Dad could convince anyone of almost anything when he put the full weight of his charm into it.

When Mum heard from her parents that Terry and I had been left with Dad she boarded the first train back to Norwich and went to see social services, to plead with them to do something. It must have been a nerve-racking trip for her, constantly looking over her shoulder for fear of being seen by someone who would tell Dad she was back in town. Both of the social workers she had dealt with in the past had been moved to other areas and she had to explain her whole story all over again to someone new. She pleaded and begged, telling them again about Dad’s drinking problems, his violence, his involvement in prostitution and his promise that he intended to put me on the game as soon as possible. They refused to take her warnings seriously. Maybe they hear stories like that all the time and thought Mum was exaggerating to get back at her estranged husband.

‘All your children are subject to care orders,’ they tried to reassure her, ‘which will stay in force until they are eighteen.’ This was supposed to mean that social services took responsibility for us and made decisions about such things as where we lived and what schools we went to. No doubt they promised to keep an eye on us and to remove us if they thought we were in any danger, but I doubt if that would have put Mum’s mind at rest. She knew how clever Dad was at manipulating people and making them believe whatever he wanted them to believe.

Although I have all my social services reports from the time, it is hard to work out from the things they have written why they made some of the decisions they did. I always felt hopeful in the following years whenever I knew that a social worker was due to call on us, because I thought each time they were bound to realize that something was wrong and would try to help us. But the main social worker who was allotted to us in the early years was so terrified of Dad she refused to come to the house unless she had a police escort or one of her bosses with her. Her visits were very infrequent and were over as quickly as everyone could manage. Her fears were not unreasonable, of course, since Dad had already served six months in jail for beating up that other social worker. But if they knew he was capable of that level of violence, did they not guess he was capable of being violent to us? What made them think it would be all right to give us straight back to him as soon as he finished his sentence?

Even if they had come visiting more often and asked us more probing questions it probably wouldn’t have done them any good. I would never have spoken up to anyone in front of Dad, or even talked honestly about him if he weren’t there. It would be years before I found the courage to do that. Sometimes I would sit silently staring at the social workers who did make it into the house, trying to talk to them with my mind, trying to send them messages, hoping they would be able to hear my telepathic cries for help, but of course they didn’t. I have vivid memories of being asked questions like, ‘Are you getting enough to eat?’ and my stomach was rumbling but I didn’t dare to say we hadn’t had any food at all that day and only a few chips the day before. They took my silence as meaning that I had nothing I wanted to complain about. I would try to drop hints and clues but they never picked them up; maybe I was being too subtle or maybe they just didn’t want to hear. It was bound to be easier for them if they could feel reassured that we were OK.

I was as terrified of Dad as anybody else, but I still adored him and wanted to be living with him. I just wanted them to make him be nice to us and to tell him to stop doing some of the things he was doing, such as beating us. I hated Mum for deserting us because I could see how devastated my brother and father both were and I despised her for abandoning them when they loved her so much. Hating her brought me even closer to Dad, giving us something else in common.

His broken heart was a terrible sight to behold, and I began to feel I had a responsibility to look after him. The worst times were always when he’d had a few drinks and the melodrama of his own self-invented life story would become heightened beyond anything any country and western songwriter would have dared to write. Time after time Terry and I would find him on the sitting room floor on his hands and knees, weeping and praying for ‘his Jane’ to come back to him, screaming hysterically at the gods in his abject misery.

He always became furious whenever Terry or I cried about anything, shouting at us to shut up, hitting us, seeing our tears as a sign of weakness, so I couldn’t understand how he could be so willing for other people to see him cry so openly. For him it seemed to be like a badge of honour, a way to show everyone how wicked Mum was to have broken his heart and how much pain he was in.

‘I can understand your mum leaving all the other children,’ Dad would say to Terry, ‘but not you because you were her favourite. How could she leave you? A mother is supposed to love her first-born child more than anyone.’

I would be able to see the pain in Terry’s face as the words sank in, and feel my own pain at hearing someone confirm out loud that Mum had loved Terry more than me, even though I knew it to be true. Terry rarely cried but the tears would swell in his eyes at those moments and I was upset with Dad for being so cruel and for continually rubbing salt into my brother’s emotional wounds.

However much I hated the way he behaved, Dad always managed to convince me of his undying love and favouritism towards me, as if to compensate me for the fact that my mother hadn’t loved me enough to stay. He would assure me that as long as I stood by him everything would be OK.

‘All mothers love their first sons and all daddies love their little girls,’ he would say, as if merely saying it was enough to prove it was true. He never backed it up with displays of affection or kindness but these few crumbs were enough to keep my loyalty and adoration intact.

All the same, he managed to inflict maximum damage on both of us in his outpourings of misery. Terry would be heartbroken to think that his mother had done that to him and I would feel crushed to think that I hadn’t been of importance to her, that only Terry would have mattered to her. Why would Mum have loved him more than me? I would wonder, deciding that it must be because I was such a bad person. Then I would decide not to care, telling myself that it didn’t matter what she had felt for me because I was Dad’s favourite and he was still there for us.

He had a particular skill at making other people feel so bad about themselves that they actually believed he was their hero, the only one who cared about them, the only one who was there for them when their lives fell to pieces. More often that not he would be responsible for reducing people to needy wrecks in the first place, then when he had them hooked and dependent on him he would remind them how useless they were, making them all the more grateful to him for being the one who looked after them. He did it with Mum and every other woman he ever went out with, and he did it to us children as well. I would go to him constantly, trying to climb onto his knee and telling him how much I loved him, but he would always push me away in disgust.

‘You’re too fat and ugly,’ he was always telling me. ‘No one will ever love you except me. Even your own mother left you.’

Looking back now I know I wasn’t fat, just a normal healthy child, and I don’t think I was ugly. But he convinced me of both at the time. Dad liked overweight women because they would be insecure about themselves and that would give him a chance to dominate and taunt them, calling them fat, useless whores.

Sometimes Dad would cuddle me, but it would only last a few seconds before he would shove me away again. I hated the feeling of rejection and eventually I stopped going to him. I still loved it when he told me I was his favourite, although it would make me feel sorry for Terry, but I didn’t believe I deserved such an honour.

We weren’t with Dad all the time because he quite often got taken off to prison for thieving or beating someone up. Whenever that happened Terry and I would be put back into foster homes and children’s homes for a few months, or however long the sentence was. We were taken to visit him in prison sometimes and it was always a terrifying experience. Even sitting in the waiting room amongst the other visitors was intimidating. Everyone appeared to be so angry and aggressive and there always seemed to be the sounds of shouting in the distance, as well as the banging of the big iron doors and the clanking keys on the wardens’ belts. It all added to the atmosphere of fear for small children who didn’t understand half of what was going on or what was being said around them.

Once we were taken through to where he was waiting for us it was distressing to see our dad, who was normally so smartly turned out, reduced to baggy prison clothes, looking so vulnerable. We were used to him being the powerful one, the one in control of everyone around him, and it was unnerving to see him being forced into a subservient position, being bossed around by the wardens. He would become very emotional when he talked to us on those visits, promising that everything would be different once he got home, that our lives would be wonderful and that he would get a job so he could buy us all the things we needed. It was as though he was playing some hard-done-by character from a country and western song – one man struggling bravely to bring his children up right in a hostile world. I always wanted to believe him, even when he kept on letting us down and breaking his promises, and I would always stick up for him in front of other people, even when I finally realized just how bad a father he really was.

As soon as he got out of jail, I would find a way to get back to Dad from wherever we were staying at the first possible opportunity. I felt I owed him my loyalty because, whatever he was like, at least he hadn’t walked out on us like Mum had. He had stuck by us and so we belonged to him, we were his and it felt right that we should be with him. ‘No one else will ever want you,’ he’d say. ‘Only me. You’re fat and useless but at least you’ve got me.’

He couldn’t stand the idea that Terry and I might be taken permanently into care because he didn’t think it was anyone else’s business how he brought us up, and because he didn’t like to lose the benefits that he got as a single dad. We were his devoted little followers, part of his entourage, and he resented any attempts to part him from us.

He did try for many years to get Chris and Glen back as well, even though he had never known what to do with them when they were babies and wouldn’t have been any better with them once they were older. He went round to the foster home where they spent their whole childhood a few times to try to see them, but thankfully for them he was never allowed access. I heard he even made a pass at their foster mother. I suspect she might have had a bit of a soft spot for him because virtually everyone did when he decided to turn on the charm. He was good at convincing people that his children were the most important things in his life; that he was a dutiful dad who had been wronged by a bad woman and a heartless state.

Although Terry and I didn’t get to speak to Chris and Glen again until we were all adults, we did see them a few times just after we were all split up when they were brought to visit the people who lived next door to us. I suppose their foster parents must have been friends of our neighbours. Our front doors were inches away from one another, only divided by a tiny fence, and we could see them coming and going, but we were still ordered by social services not to speak to them. I remember peering out the window, seeing how cute they looked in the nice new clothes their foster mother had bought for them, and just feeling sad. After a while someone must have realized how cruel they were being to all of us by allowing these visits because they suddenly stopped. I didn’t see Chris and Glen again after that until I was twenty years old.