Читать книгу Slave Girl - Sarah Forsyth - Страница 9

Mum finally left Dad when I was 11.

I’d just started secondary school – St Leonard’s in Gateshead – when she took the three of us kids, packed us into the car and off we went. It was an escape for all of us; we were getting away from a violent, bad man. But only I knew how much we really were running away from.

Mum had an uncle who lived in Scotland. Troon is nearly 200 miles from Gateshead, tucked away on the Scotland’s west coast, just above Glasgow. Mum’s uncle was a good, kind man with a lovely house on the beach very close to the famous Royal Troon Golf Course. He had his own factory business and wasn’t short of a bob or two. He either owned or bred racehorses, I can’t quite remember which, and every weekend it seemed we’d be taken to the races to watch his horses run. Sometimes he’d give us money to bet on them.

I loved those horses. There was even a little foal which I helped to break in: it felt wonderful to be with such a beautiful, gentle creature. And I loved the walks we went for on the beach – me, Mum, my brother and sister, as well as Mum’s uncle and some of his kids. Most of them were around my age and for the first time I found I could talk with other children and just be … well, I suppose I was just able to be a child, without the awful burden of adult sexuality my dad had forced on me. It was the first time I can remember feeling happy.

We stayed in Troon for several months, but then Mum decided to give it another go with Dad and off we trooped back down to Gateshead. I dreaded going back but even I couldn’t have known how bad for all of us that decision would turn out to be.

Dad had opened new businesses while we’d been away: more ducking and diving, more bad debts and more broken promises, but he’d also taken up with another woman, someone he’d met in the local Chinese takeaway. I don’t think we even stayed one night with him.

Instead, we went to live with Mum’s mum, four miles across town. My Nana had always been a canny woman – sensible and sound, she had seen through Dad the very first moment she met him. And then, of course, she’d had to watch her daughter getting beaten and bruised by him: it’s no exaggeration to say that Nana hated Dad.

I suppose I can’t have been an easy child in those days: certainly, I never really felt happy or safe. Mum tells me that I was headstrong, wilful and difficult, and I can believe that. I don’t think I felt the same as my brother and sister – but then I wasn’t: Dad had turned me into someone very different from them.

We found somewhere else to live while Dad carried on with his new girlfriend, but there was tension and bitterness in the air and I don’t suppose I helped much. In the end Mum decided she couldn’t cope with me and I was sent to the last place on earth I should have been living: Dad’s flat.

It was bad enough being sent away from Mum and my brother and sister: once again I felt like an outsider, somehow marked out by the dirty little secret of what Dad was doing to me. But living under the same roof with him and his new family was a nightmare from the very beginning.

His girlfriend – my new step-mum – was a rough, hard woman with two little children under five years old. I loved those little bairns – but God, I felt sorry for them. My dad was even more violent with his new lady-love than he had been with Mum. And he wasn’t fussed about what they saw. Every week, without fail, he would beat up my step-mum. It didn’t matter what she had or hadn’t done, he’d knock her about something wicked. I once saw him with my own eyes put her head through a window; another time he stabbed her with a little fork in front of all of us.

The kids were terrified. They used to cling to me and cry. ‘Don’t let Daddy kill us tonight. Please, Sarah, please.’ And I’d hold them and try and soothe them, and keep them beside me till they fell asleep.

But I didn’t get to sleep those nights. Not as easily as that, anyway. Dad would beat my step-mum with his fists and then send her to bed. And then he’d come for me.

I was old enough by then to know that this wasn’t just ‘our little secret’ and in truth Dad had stopped even trying to pretend that the abuse was in any way normal or ‘loving’ – maybe leaving Mum had in some way freed him up from the fear of being found out. Maybe that’s why he didn’t seem to care whether my step-mum guessed or even knew. Maybe, too, the fact that I had been sent to live with him – put completely under his control – made him much bolder and more confident about satisfying his twisted desires any which way he chose. Oh, I was old enough to know alright, and believe me, I put up a fight the best way I could. But it didn’t make a scrap of difference.

There’s no easy way to say this because there was no easy way for an 11-year-old girl to describe what Dad did. He raped me. On the sofa, in my bed, sometimes with the aid of a sharp knife he’d taken from the kitchen drawer, he forced himself into me, whether I struggled or not. That man raped me. And I was 11.

Some people ask why I never told anyone about what Dad did to me. But those people don’t know what it’s like to be a small child abused by a big powerful man. And that power isn’t just physical: Dad – like most abusers – used emotional and psychological threats to keep me quiet. He’d tell me that no one would believe me or that everyone would hate me or – worst of all – that I’d never see Mum, my brother and sister, or my step-mum’s kids again. On top of that, he threatened to do more than cut me with that kitchen knife: he would wave it in front of me and warn me that if I told a soul he would come and get me and I’d never be seen again.

Did I believe him? You bet I did.

So that was my life as I approached my teenage years: trapped in a little flat above a backstreet Gateshead restaurant with an abusive dad, a downtrodden step-mum and her two terrified kids. For a bed I had a grubby mattress; baths were in a big black bin in front of the gas fire.

They say that schooldays are meant to be the happiest of your life. I wouldn’t know since I rarely went to school. Most days I stayed home looking after my two stepbrothers. Dad would either be out working or drunk in a pub somewhere. I used to dread him coming home – and not just because of what he would do to me.

Every so often the school would ring up and ask where I was. They either left messages for Dad to call them or – occasionally – managed to phone while he was in. I knew that would lead to trouble: Dad would storm off, generally the worse for drink, and go into school. He’d make a nuisance of himself, tell lies, do anything until they stopped asking where I was. And then he’d come back and take it out on me.

I can’t say I ever liked my step-mum. She was rough and coarse. But when I look back it could have been living with my dad that made her that way. He was enough to turn a saint into a devil, my dad.

And in the end I suppose she did me a favour. One night after he’d used her as a punch bag, he sent her upstairs and once again he started on me. But this time – I still don’t know why – she didn’t stay in bed: she sneaked down and sat on the stairs, and heard what was going on. The next morning she confronted me and told me she knew what Dad was doing to me. Like I say, I hated her, but that morning it was such a relief to hear someone else saying they knew my terrible secret. Unfortunately, that was the last bit of good fortune I was going to have for a long time.

These days when someone tells the Social Services about a child being sexually abused at home, it’s the person accused of doing the abuse who has to move out while investigations are made. In 1988 it wasn’t like that.

I was taken into Care and stuck in a big old children’s home outside Gateshead, not far from where the Angel of the North sculpture is now. There were around 20 kids in the home, all of different ages, and all from pretty rough backgrounds. There was an unspoken sense of being in something difficult together – a sort of half-formed camaraderie, I suppose – but we were all cautious about giving much away about our lives: all of us had learned – or been taught – not to talk about what we’d experienced, and were quite confident that even if we did no one would do anything much about it.

I was in the home for four months while they assessed me. No one ever really talked to me about what was going on with my dad. I was just stuck there while some kind of enquiries were made and I was expected to put up with it. I suppose the idea was to keep me safe, to get me out of Dad’s clutches. But if so, it didn’t work. Dad used to hang around outside the children’s home: he was trying to intimidate me, I think – and he certainly succeeded.

I was only 12 but I’d been smoking for a while by the time I was taken into Care. Where I come from we call cigarettes ‘tabs’ and most kids I knew were hooked by the time they went to secondary school. Smoking was against the rules in the children’s home but we all used to sneak outside for a quick puff on a tab and hope we wouldn’t get caught. Mostly we didn’t – except that my dad seemed to be there almost every time I sparked up a ciggie. He would stand and stare at me till I had to go back inside.

Of course he wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t allowed to telephone me either, but that didn’t stop him: he used to get his friends to make the calls and then when I picked up the phone he would come on the line. He just wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe he couldn’t.

At the end of the four months, I was sent to a smaller family group home. There were three other children, all around my age, being looked after by really caring people. But after the children’s home it felt claustrophobic and oppressive: I couldn’t settle and started running away. In the end the social workers gave in and I was sent back to the children’s home.

Despite Dad’s behaviour I felt safe there. It was the first extended period of time since I was three that I hadn’t been abused. I formed tentative friendships with the other children – though these were always tempered by our mutual determination to appear tough and never to drop our guard. Maybe that’s why I can’t recall the name of a single boy or girl living there.

The staff were kind to us kids: they talked to us calmly – even the times we threw tantrums, slammed doors and generally behaved appallingly. We even went on holidays to Scarborough and once over to France. But my rebellious streak seemed determined to stop me settling down: I smoked openly and defiantly now, challenging the staff to try and confiscate my precious fags. And I would run away every so often, hiding out, waiting and hoping that someone would come looking for me, would care enough to find me and bring me back.

In the end I suppose they decided they’d had enough of this. At the age of 13 I was sent to a much more secure children’s home, miles out in the countryside. What happened there made me question the very idea of this ‘care’ I was supposed to be living in. I’d love to name and shame this place, but there are legal reasons why I’m not allowed to do so. I can, though, describe it – even though doing so brings back horrific nightmares.

It was big, draughty old building in the middle of what seemed like a huge swathe of fields and about a mile away from the nearest village. The furniture was bare, stark and basic: as soon as I walked through the doors I knew this wasn’t going to be a comfortable place to live.

There were about 25 children in the home – both boys and girls – all of us teenagers. There was a sullen, resentful air in the place: no one smiled or welcomed me as I was shown to the little box-room where I was to sleep. It felt like being sent to prison – or at least what I assumed prison must be like.

They took security seriously: as well as the care home staff and teachers there were night watchmen who patrolled the ground with big Doberman dogs. And it was one of the night watchmen who gave me my introduction to the place on the very first night I arrived.

I was in bed and asleep, worn out by the stress of being uprooted once again. I woke up to see a torch light coming towards me through the dark: the man holding it turned slightly and shone it straight in my eyes. I felt a hand grab and drag me from the bed; I knew then what was coming.

What I didn’t know then was that I would be kept in this home for nine long months. Imprisoned in this cold, black hole of a place – a dark, brooding Colditz where kids like me were taken, dumped and forgotten.

I wasn’t only one being sexually abused, of course: there wasn’t anything that special about me. But the fact that some other girl or boy was being touched and groped and hurt didn’t make it any better.

I don’t know if it’s my mind playing tricks on me, but I can’t remember a single night there when I wasn’t molested. I had grown used to the feeling of an erect penis being thrust at me – or in me – and knew what I had to do to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. That’s one of the terrible things about long-term abuse: it makes the child almost complicit in the sex. Not because he or she wants it – God, no – nor that he or she enjoys it; just because being complicit, learning how to please the abuser, ensures that the whole horrific, painful experience finishes quickly.

The home was also a school. The kids in it were deemed to be such a security risk that there was no way we could be allowed to go to a normal school outside the heavily guarded grounds. Instead, teachers came in to give us lessons in the basics of education – reading, writing, maths – with whatever other stuff they reckoned they could ram into our skulls. It was a thankless task, of course: we were all too sullen and resentful to learn anything much. The only thing that kept us in check was the fear of punishment – act up too much and we knew we would be in for a good hiding, or worse.

And so we sat there in those grim and unforgiving classes. And if we didn’t throw too many wobblies, we didn’t exactly get much of an education either. To this day I can’t spell properly and as for arithmetic (much less anything more advanced) – well, let’s just say I’m not what you might call university material. I did learn something there though: I learned about psychology – one dirty little corner of psychology, anyway.

The sexual side of the abuse we endured was one thing, but I began to see that behind it was a sort of separate psychological motive. As an adult and a survivor I know now that child sexual abuse is often not about the sex itself but about control or dominance, or some other sick mind game. Back then, I couldn’t have expressed it like this – but I did start to understand that it wasn’t enough just for my abusers to get their sexual gratification: they had to hurt me mentally and physically as well.

The mental bit seemed to revolve around a game they made us play in the evenings: they called it ‘The Yellow Brick Road’. One of the men would produce a bit of paper with a road drawn on it. From this main road smaller paths branched off. He would explain that the game started on the main road, which was safe, but that after we set off we would have to choose which of the little paths to go down. Some of these paths led to good things; others to bad ones. But we weren’t allowed to know which was which. We just had to choose blindly and hope.

To this day I can’t quite work out how it was supposed to work or what possible gratification it could give anyone. All I know is that more often than not I seemed to choose the bad path and I’d be dragged off and locked in a room upstairs. Before too long one of the men would unlock the door, come in and pin me – often by my throat – against the wall. I can see their faces now – the men who took it in turns to come into that locked and lonely room. I can feel the coarseness of their clothes pressing up against me, the weight of their hands on top of my head, pushing me down and into the required pose to bring them satisfaction. And I can hear them, too, screaming at me, calling me ‘a little shit’, and trying to make me cry. Did they succeed? I like to tell myself that they never did, that I never gave in and cried, but I know I must have sometimes.

This so-called ‘care’ home might have been in the middle of nowhere but that didn’t stop me from trying to run away. More than once I climbed out of my first-floor bedroom window and jumped – how far down it seemed! – to the ground below. Then I would run as fast as my legs would carry me across the fields in the direction of the little village, hoping I’d make it and hoping I’d find someone who would help me get back to Gateshead. Once I badly sprained my ankle in the jump from the window. I knew as soon as I landed on the ground that I wouldn’t get far that night but I tried nonetheless.

They always caught me, of course. I was only 13 and hadn’t a clue where I was. They were big and strong, and knew the grounds like the back of their hands. And they had those dogs. I can’t describe how those dogs made me feel. Terrified, of course, but there was just something completely horrible in knowing that they would track me down and in waiting to feel them grab hold of me.

And after I was caught they had an extra punishment for me – and for the others like me – ‘runaways’ and those who couldn’t be trusted to stay put and endure the misery they heaped on us. They took our shoes away and made us go barefoot at all times. Barefoot or not I was determined to get away, even though I knew they would always catch me. It was as if the act of trying to escape was an essential defence mechanism which enabled me to survive there.

And then, one night, a miracle happened. I climbed out the window, dropped to the ground without hurting myself and sprinted away across the fields. I expected to hear the chase and feel the dogs come for me at any moment, but there was nothing – just me and the night air and the silence. I ran and ran and ran. I know I fell down and tripped into ditches – though I can’t remember doing so – because by the time I got to a bus stop I was covered in black mud from the fields. That night bus seemed to take forever to arrive but I finally climbed on board and paid the five pence fare to Gateshead. It was the best five pence I’ve ever spent in my life.

One of my brother’s friends had a flat in town. In the dead of night I found my way there and banged on the door until he opened it. I was dirty and ragged, and must have looked completely wild. But, having come so far – having finally escaped from my prison – I was determined that he would let me in and give me sanctuary. And he did. I told him everything that night: I poured out my heart and must have convinced him how badly I needed a safe place to stay because he agreed to let me live there for as long as I needed. The flat was tiny, with only one bedroom. By night I slept on the couch in the living room, by day I sat in the kitchen smoking endless cigarettes and drinking innumerable cups of tea.

In retrospect, it was a very odd arrangement – and one that looks suspicious: a young man harbouring a teenage runaway – but it wasn’t that way at all. My brother’s friend was a good and kind person, someone who could see that I simply needed some space to recover a little strength. I lived in his flat for three months, hiding out and terrified someone would turn up at the door to cart me back off to that terrible care home. Somehow, though, they never did.

But I couldn’t stay there forever. Someone would be bound to notice there was a young teenager living in the flat with a man several years older than she was, a school-age girl who never went to school. So before anyone could report me I got in touch with the Social Services – hoping against hope they would listen to me and not take me back to the house in the fields with the men who raped or beat me every night.

I must have said something right: the social worker listened and promised me I wouldn’t ever have to go back. And I didn’t. Instead, I was taken to a boarding school in the Lake District.

At first I didn’t settle. I suppose I’d got used to the little flat and being back in Gateshead again. This boarding school, Riverside, was even more out in the country than the terrible care home. But gradually I came to love it and be happy for the first time in I don’t know how long. In some ways it reminded me of my mum’s uncle’s place in Scotland: it was peaceful like that and the air felt fresh and clean. Above all, though, I felt safe. I felt that at last none of the terrible things that had happened to me could ever come back and drag me down again.

I started doing school work again – maths, English, a bit of science – just like a normal teenager. I listened to music, read magazines, gossiped with my friends … And I thought to myself, ‘At last – something is going right.’

And I discovered that I had a talent: art. As a child I’d always liked drawing and I could spend hours and hours lost in the world that I created with just a sheet of paper and some pencils or crayons. But as Dad’s abuse worsened, the images had grown darker and more menacing. Mum tells me that I used to draw pictures of a little girl trapped in a cave or a castle with a figure that looked like a witch outside. She thinks now that she was that witch and that I was trying to make her see that she should help the little girl – but all that happened was that the teachers at school threw the drawings away.

At Riverside, I rediscovered the joys of art – and the teachers encouraged me. One year, as Christmas approached, they held a competition for the best-designed Christmas card. I worked and worked on my drawing – a snowy landscape with a cheerful-looking house and white smoke puffing out of the chimney, and above it – of course – Santa Claus with his reindeer and his sleigh piled high with toys.

It sounds terribly corny and absurdly childish for someone who had been through all I’d endured. But it was done with love and ambition, and I was as proud as can be when I won our little competition. I, worthless little Sarah Forsyth – abused child and teenage tearaway – had done something right for once, and someone else had noticed! I couldn’t wait to tell Mum.

But the teachers at Riverside had another idea – and it was so much better. They arranged to have a number of copies of the card printed – properly, professionally printed – so that I could send them out like a normal person. I couldn’t believe it when they told me: I thought I was going to burst with happiness.

God, how proud Mum was of me, too. She was absolutely full of real joy – the first, I’m sure, that I had given her for many, many years. She treasured that little Christmas card and showed it to everybody she could for a long time afterwards. Isn’t it funny how much little things can mean?

My brother would come and visit me at Riverside every few weeks. He had found out about what Dad had done to me and my God, he was furious. He told me he’d been round to see Dad to confront him. In response our dear father beat him up.

Even though I was away from him, somehow my brother and I became closer than before. I’ll always remember the clothes he brought me – T-shirts and jeans – and the cigarettes he used to smuggle in to the home for me in pairs of trainers. And we’d go out on to the surrounding hills for long, lovely walks. I loved my brother: he was my rock and my lifeline.

I stayed at Riverside for three years: happy years, by and large, and a much-needed respite from the misery of my childhood. I was 13 when they sent me there, and the years seemed to fly by. Somehow, without noticing it, I was about to turn 16. I had been in care for almost five years. Other than occasional visits from my brother and Mum I’d not really had to deal with my family. But although packing me off to the peace and tranquillity of the Lakes had probably saved my life, it suddenly dawned on me that this wasn’t going to last much longer.

At that time the care system generally spat kids back out once they turned 16. It had rescued them from violence, neglect or sexual abuse and then, pretty much without warning, it turned its back on them. I’ve seen reports since then which show that most of the young girls (and many of the boys) working the streets in cities across Britain have been in care. Typically, they have turned to prostitution as a means of survival once the care system has finished with them. And at 16 they’re easy prey for the pimps and pushers who ensnare them with drugs and live off the money they make by renting their bodies.

I suppose I was lucky in that I had somewhere to go once I had to leave Riverside: Mum had fixed for me to live with her again. I’d also begun to think about what I would do with my life once I left Care. My mind had drifted back to the times when I looked after my step-mum’s two kids and I realised that I actually enjoyed working with bairns. What’s more, I was good at it. Maybe, I thought to myself, I can go to college and get a qualification that will allow me to earn a living doing something worthwhile and which I like doing. But then my world fell apart. Again.