Читать книгу Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence - Maria Landon - Страница 4

‘Ria, you’re my favourite,’ Dad would tell me throughout my childhood. ‘All daddies love their little girls the best.’ I’d fill with pride at this announcement from my big, handsome, heroic father. I was his special one. My brother Terry might be Mum’s favourite but Dad loved me most and I’d have done anything to please him.

Mum says that right from the start he boasted to all and sundry that he was going to train me to be ‘the best little prostitute on the block’, but I only gradually got an inkling of what that meant. I probably didn’t want to know so I blocked it, even when he brought home his prostitute friends and dressed me up in their clothes. Even when he started breaking me in.

Years later, when my testimony put him in jail for living off my immoral earnings, he said: ‘You can cut me into a thousand pieces but I’ll always put myself back together again and I’ll be there for you, no matter what you do. I’m the only one who will ever truly love you.’

I think he genuinely did love me, to the extent that he was capable of love, and I stayed a daddy’s girl right into my teens. He was my dad, the only one I had, after all. And he had a lot of charm, he could talk the birds down from the trees. There are plenty of people, even now, who have a soft spot for him, despite knowing everything he’s done.

Without that charm, none of it would ever have happened. Mum wouldn’t have fallen head over heels for him, a lot of other people wouldn’t have got hurt, and I wouldn’t have found myself working the streets at the age of thirteen to keep him in booze.

Every little girl has the potential to be a pop star, a ballerina, a doctor, a barrister, a policewoman or a prostitute, but to make the right choices they need support and guidance from the people whose responsibility it is to care for them. With a dad like mine, I never stood a chance.