Читать книгу Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence - Maria Landon - Страница 6

Chapter One

a glamorous couple

Terry and Jane, my mum and dad, were always described as a glamorous couple. Anyone who knew them when they were young in the early 1960s would agree on that, however much they might later disapprove of the way they both behaved. It was obvious to everyone that they absolutely adored one another; you might even say they were obsessed, and that it was their obsession with one another that led to so many of our problems.

If they were both the loves of one another’s lives, as they undoubtedly were, you would have thought that would have given us, their children, a secure start in life – but there were other darker elements of their relationship at work almost from the moment they met, which turned our family and our lives into a nightmare.

Everyone in the pubs that he frequented loved Dad. He was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a powerful presence about him. He was invariably immaculately dressed in a suit and tie and known for being good company wherever he was, never able to resist playing up to an adoring crowd of admirers.

Mum was only five feet four, but she had a perfect figure, slim but curvy, which she readily showed off with mini skirts, hot pants and tightly fitted tops, everything that was fashionable amongst the young in those days, even in Norwich, a good few miles away from ‘swinging London’. I don’t have any early memories of her but I’m told she was strikingly beautiful, with long jet-black hair, deep brown eyes and flawless skin.

Dad was the black sheep of his family, or so the legend was whispered, the one with a dubious past who never did the right things but who prided himself on doing the wrong things with style. He always claimed that he was conceived when his mother had a fling with another man during the war, while his father (his mother’s husband, that is) was away from home doing the honourable thing and fighting for king and country. If that was true it would certainly go some of the way towards explaining why Dad was so different to the rest of his family, and why we were always treated as though we were outsiders in some way that was never actually put into words. Having a different father to his siblings meant there was always a gap between them and him. His life seemed to travel on totally different tracks to theirs, partly from his own choice and partly because of the way he was and the things he believed. Maybe the fact that he had a different father was also the reason why Dad was his mother’s favourite, the one she would always stick up for no matter what he did.

Her husband, who was a farmer, got into a lot of debt when he came back from the war and, unable to see a way out, he shot himself in the shed at the bottom of their garden. Dad said he was the one who found the body when he was still just a small boy. No one else ever verified that story for me so I have no way of knowing if it was true, but I certainly believed it at the time. Maybe it was true. Whatever happened, I certainly didn’t have a grandfather on that side and Nanny lived alone in her bungalow a few miles away from us.

Rumour also had it in the family that my dad and my grandmother slept in the same bed until he was fourteen. That seems very believable, given how close they were and how she tried to protect him from everyone, including me. It might also have explained why he was as relaxed as he was about everything to do with sex and nudity.

My aunts and uncles all grew up to be very different to Dad, quite middle class in their values and successful in their lives. They’ve bought their own homes and run their own businesses and none of them would have wanted to have anything to do with the sort of people that Dad liked to hang out with, the thieves, alcoholics and prostitutes who trooped in and out of our home at all hours of the day and night, and drank with him in the pubs of Norwich.

Dad didn’t learn to read and write until long after I could – and I know he spent some time in an approved school as a boy, although no one ever told me what for. There was a story about him throwing a bus driver off the bus when he was still quite young and I believe the chap later died of a heart attack, although I don’t know any more details. I doubt anyone could have been sure the two events were directly linked but it sounds like the sort of thing Dad might have done. As well as being a charmer he was also a bully and a show-off and he had an uncontrollable temper, which he frequently vented with violence.

Although Mum’s family lived in a council house and hadn’t done as well as some of Dad’s relatives, she had been a bit spoiled by her father. Like Dad, she was always a problem to her parents in her early teens, running away from home, being wild and causing them no end of worry. Mind you, she can’t have been that wild because on the night she met Dad, when she was still fifteen, she had gone out to the pictures on a date with another lad and when he tried to put his hand up her skirt in the dark she was mortified and slapped it away. Apparently affronted by such forward behaviour she immediately ran out of the cinema and set out to walk home alone, having successfully protected her honour. Just up the road she bumped into Dad, whom she had never met before. He was only a couple of years older than her but was already very skilled at laying on the charm and flattery. He was tall and well-dressed, a proper ladies’ man, and her head was turned. He must have worked some magic because he didn’t meet with any of the resistance the poor guy in the cinema had encountered and they ended up having sex together that very first night. That was how the great love affair, which was to destroy so many lives, began.

When Dad first brought Mum home, my grandmother was overjoyed and immediately encouraged them to get married and start having children, but of course they had to wait until Mum was old enough. Dad had been in a fair bit of trouble when he was younger, always drinking and mixing with the wrong crowd, and Nanny was probably relieved to think she could get him off her hands, hoping he would settle down now that he had met the right woman.

Mum’s parents were not as pleased by this great love match as Dad’s mum was. In fact they went to court to try to stop her from seeing him. As she was only fifteen I suppose they thought they had a chance of saving her from him before it was too late. They must have been able to see through his charm and bravado immediately and they despised him, believing he was no good and would end up hurting their daughter. As it turned out they were completely justified in their fears. They had probably hoped she would meet some steady guy with a regular job who would be able to calm her down, and anyone meeting Dad would have known instantly that he was not going to be the man for that job.

The more her parents told her not to see him, of course, the more determined she became. By disapproving of her choice her parents had turned the affair into something illicit, adding to its glamour and excitement, making Dad seem like a forbidden fruit. From the first moment they spoke up against him they didn’t stand a chance of keeping two such wilful, self-destructive kids apart.

Mum was nineteen when she fell pregnant for the first time, and they got married a week or two after my brother Terry Junior was born in 1965. Dad’s mum was thrilled; I think she paid for the marriage licence and everything. Mum’s parents must have realized they had lost the battle by that stage and were going to have to make the best of a bad job. Perhaps they hoped that having a baby would make Terry and Jane settle down a bit and take their responsibilities seriously.

I was born a year later, in 1966, followed three years after that by Christian and then by Glen in 1970. Right from the word go I was a proper little daddy’s girl. I adored him, while Terry was more of a favourite for Mum.

‘The moment you were born you were his,’ Mum once told me, and I knew it was true. He loved my brother Terry too, but once I was born Terry became Mum’s and I was his. The night of my birth I’m told he paraded around the hospital, completely drunk and smoking a cigar, much to the annoyance of the sister in charge.

‘Right from the start,’ Mum said, ‘from when you were born, he used to joke that he was going to make you the best little prostitute on the block.’