All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed
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Authors: Audrey Delaney
Tags: #Child Abuse
About the Book
‘I could see what he was doing to the other girls because he had been doing it to me for as long as I could remember’
At just six years of age, Audrey Delaney’s childhood was cut tragically short when her father first abused her. Too young to know right from wrong, the only thing Audrey knew for sure was that her father’s actions left her feeling sordid and guilty.
When she saw him touching other girls, this innocent child felt that she was to blame. Then finally, after years of harbouring her father’s shocking secret, Audrey found the courage to bring him to account.
All My Fault is the inspiring and triumphant account of a scared and hurt little girl who managed to confront her demons and reclaim her life.
The true story of a sadistic father
and a little girl left destroyed
AUDREY DELANEY
Contents
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446406458
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group company
First published in Ireland by Maverick House Publishers in 2008
Copyright © Audrey Delaney 2008, 2011
Audrey Delaney has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780091938499
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With my warmest inner heart and spirit, and with the greatest love, I dedicate this book to my son Tyrone (my chipmunk) and to my daughter Robin (my angel). They are the reason I went as far as I could, to do the best for them. I get my strength from the love I feel for them and from them
.
This book is also dedicated to my stepdaughter Dee, who is my friend and family; for her encouragement and ability to be my rock many, many times. She shows and tells me how much she loves me every time we are together. She is a credit to herself and her own mother
.
Author’s Note
This book is a true story, and everything that is recounted in it happened. Some of the information contained in this book is taken from evidence given in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. For the sake of privacy, some names have been changed. These appear in italics.
On a personal note, I would like to say that I was compelled to write this story; it was a driven force in me that would not rest until I did it.
This book was written over hundreds of hours and several months, so it was not done lightly, but with passion and motivation to help accomplish the following:
• To help people open their eyes and see how this crime affects children through to adulthood, if they make it that far.
• To show it can be dealt with; without shame.
• To urge families involved in this type of situation to get support to help them deal with it.
• To help teach people to educate their children about what’s appropriate and what’s not amongst the ones they love and trust.
• To help educate people to recognise someone who is being abused, so they might ask the right questions.
• To make child abuse an issue of public debate.
• To give information to those working with abused children/adults on how it can disturb one’s mental health, so that healing can begin.
• To give comfort to all those who have ever been wronged. It was not you; it was the person who did it to you. It is their shame… and those who protect them.
Prologue
I was sitting in my little pink car one day with the radio blaring, allowing the music to drown out my thoughts, and pull me into a sweet state of nothingness. I didn’t want to think about anything, or feel anything. The music gradually faded and the news came on, slowly reaching into my consciousness.
I only half listened as the newsreader went through the top stories of the day. It was only when I heard the words ‘child abuse’ that I jolted upwards and froze. Every bone in my body tensed up and I felt my fists clenching involuntarily. The words had struck a chord with me. I tried to push them out of my mind and pretend I hadn’t heard them. But it was too late. A door had been opened somewhere in my mind—one that I had sealed shut a very long time ago.
I found myself short of breath, and I had a sense of falling into a black void. I sat in the car for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for the music to wash over me again, to wash away the bad memories. This time, though, it wasn’t working; the memories pushed against me, uninvited and unwanted.
I gradually allowed myself to absorb what these words meant. Child sex abuse. When I heard those words I felt like a thousand wasps were crawling all over me body and stinging me all at the one time. The words drilled a hole in my subconscious that caused toxic thoughts to leak out into the rest of my mind. I wanted to put my head under one of the tyres of my car and get someone to drive over it. I just wanted to be put out of my misery. I felt lower than I’d ever felt before.
At first, I denied any connection between me and those hateful words. This was not what happened to me.
My da didn’t do that. My da wouldn’t do that.
No, it was different. What my da did was completely different.
Sure, it wasn’t me da anyway. It was me. It was my fault. There was something dirty about me.
Chapter One
Da was, in many ways, a success story. He came from abject poverty, growing up in a tenement building in Gardiner Street, which runs through the heartland of Dublin’s north inner city.
He shared a two-bedroom house with his four siblings and his parents. The place was cold and damp and they often found themselves with barely enough food to feed the family. They shared the one loo with three other floors of tenement residents and had little or nothing to their name, or so I was told.
Gardiner Street had a bad reputation at the time. It was considered a rough street and Da was always very conscious of this growing up. He became so ashamed of having been reared there that he hardly ever admitted it to anyone. In fact, when I was growing up I was never allowed to tell anyone where he was from, even though Nanny and Granddad Delaney were still living there.
Da left school when he was 12 years old, but after he got married he went back to college and studied to become an accountant. He was a self-made man, someone who had struggled against social prejudices and poverty to become a success.
And he was successful—he ended up with a large house in Castleknock, an affluent suburb on the north side of Dublin, and he rapidly acquired the trappings of wealth; fancy cars and a boat on the Shannon. It was imprinted on our minds as kids how brilliant he was—he used to say that he had passed his exams in just two years when it had taken everyone else in his class three.
But it was only ever Da who told us how brilliant he was. I don’t remember anyone else ever saying it. He was always telling me and my brothers that he was the most intelligent person we would ever meet, and I believed him.
Although I loved Da, I began to see a side to him at a very young age that wasn’t nice. He never missed an opportunity to put people down. He was forever giving out about my Ma’s parents; Nanny for smoking, Granddad for being half deaf and us kids for yelling at him all the time in case he couldn’t hear us. His biggest gripe was the TV in Nanny and Granddad
O’Byrne’s
house.
‘It’s always blaring ’cause your Granddad is deaf. Anyone with manners would turn it off when there are guests,’ he’d moan.
Da considered himself a highly important guest when he visited anyone’s home. He thought everyone should be delighted to see him and go out of their way to accommodate him.
As time passed, the more Da mixed with educated, successful people, the more obnoxious he became. It wasn’t just his obnoxious behaviour that made me dislike him, though. It was his bedtime routine that I hated, and it goes back as far as I can remember.
*
Apparently, it’s not true that all babies are beautiful because when I was born everyone said I looked like a plucked chicken with loose folds of skin. I was born in the bedroom of our house in Ballsbridge although I nearly arrived in the bathroom as the door got stuck while Ma was in there, and it was only that the midwife broke the door down that Ma made it into the bedroom in time, or so the story goes.