All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed (7 page)

In fact, he sometimes shouted at me for causing him to run late.

It was around this time that I began to develop serious behavioural and psychological problems. Given that I had no control over my body, I began to control everything else by organising strict rituals which allowed me to exercise some control over my life.

At breakfast time, I would only eat from a certain bowl and use a certain spoon to eat. If breakfast was given to me in another bowl, I would refuse to eat it.

Of course, the bowl which I chose to eat from was old and battered. The spoon was equally battered—it was covered in sharp edges from where the garbage-disposal unit in the kitchen sink had swallowed the spoon so often that it was barely safe to use now. But I didn’t care. To me, the bowl and spoon were like a rattler to a baby—soothing and comforting.

I ate my breakfast from that bowl and spoon every single morning, right up until I was married and had my first child.

I would then move on to my next ritual. Each morning, I would flatten the Rice Krispies in just the right way as they floated in a bowl. I would never swallow a spoonful until I had it perfect. Even the milk had to be just the right temperature and volume or I wouldn’t go to school. And after every spoonful of cereal, I had to rotate the bowl a few degrees. I ate my breakfast in this exact way for more than 30 years.

My life quickly began to revolve around daily rituals. It was unnatural but it was a ten-year-old girl’s way of remaining sane.

Behavioural and psychological problems were not the only issues I faced. My body started to turn against me, and I stopped being able to hold down food.

After breakfast each morning, I would go to the toilet and puke up my breakfast. I never made myself sick. My stomach just turned every morning after breakfast had been served and everything would come flying back up again.

I inevitably started to lose weight which affected my periods. It was awful.

I was quite young when I got my first period—I was only about ten years of age. In the beginning, my periods were so heavy that they lasted two weeks out of every four.

I was only 12 years old when I had a womb scraping done in an effort to get to the root of the pains that troubled me.

After school, if I even went that is, I’d collapse with exhaustion on the sofa and sleep for the rest of the evening. I was so tired from the lack of sleep, lack of food, and stress.

At one stage, I was diagnosed as suffering from anorexia although I did eat. My stomach just turned as soon as it saw food. I didn’t want to be sick. I didn’t like the feeling—it just happened.

I had long since learned how to separate body and mind so I no longer had a rational thought process—I just did things as my subconscious dictated.

Fake pains and real pains—I stopped being able to tell them apart.

I was taken to hospital on countless occasions and underwent surgery for mysterious illnesses.

I induced cramps and severe pains in the hope that a doctor would be able to get rid of the physical pain in my guts, then maybe, while they were in there, they’d also be able to take away the dark, empty blackness that sometimes accompanied this pain.

Or at least give me some tablets that would make it all better. And that would be the end of these bad feelings— the pain I couldn’t explain.

On one occasion a surgeon operated on me because I had complained so much about the pain, but nothing of medical significance was found. I still complained of a pain afterwards though.

I can honestly say though that even if the doctors and nurses had asked me the right questions, I wouldn’t have told them anything. If a social worker had called to my house, I would have done everything I could to hide the truth. If they’d asked me if my father was sexually abusing me, I would have smiled sweetly and said, ‘No, nothing is happening.’

Da knew this. It would have killed me to have been taken from my home. I’d have lost more than I would have chosen to lose. What little control I had would also have been removed.

I never linked all the illnesses—both real and perceived— to the abuse until I was an adult.

The depression, the fake pains, vomiting and the inexplicable pains were all completely separate as far as I was concerned. I was one hurt little girl yet I still helped prevent Da’s dirty little secret from getting out. I thought I was doing a great job ’cause no one ever asked any questions.

The rest of the family looked upon Da as an honest and good man because they didn’t know the truth. No one knew what he was doing. Our family was a success. I didn’t want to be the one to put my hand up in the air and cause our family express train to come screeching to a halt.

*

It was during a family holiday to France that I began to understand exactly what lengths my father would go to in order to gratify himself. That summer, he brought a trailer tent and took us on holiday to France.

The trip was memorable for two reasons. The first was the ferry crossing which caused me to get seasick. The second reason why I remember that holiday is that it was the first time that Da found it difficult to conceal his sexual interest in me.

My family spent the holiday travelling from campsite to campsite. We made friends with lots of other families, of all different nationalities. I met other girls of all ages, who Da also befriended.

I don’t know if he abused any of them but I suspect that he did.

I can recall watching him scan the campsite for little girls whom he could encourage me to talk to.

He would get as close to these children as he could. He might suggest that we go to the swimming pool or play together.

He would put blankets over them, offering to help make them ‘cosy’ when they emerged from the water.

Prior to this holiday, Da had always used me for his own sexual gratification. He considered my body to be a tool which he used to pleasure himself. He never really looked at me or my body but all that changed during our holiday to France.

Throughout the holiday, Da found it difficult to conceal his sexual interest in me. In fact, he hardly took his eyes off me. Everywhere I went his eyes followed, looking me up and down before coming to rest around my chest area.

I found this terrifying and revolting. And with reason; what if he went further than he had before and got me pregnant? He also began talking to me in a way that made my skin crawl. He constantly made remarks about how I was changing physically.

‘Oh, look how your little buds are growing,’ he said whilst leering at me.

One day he went further and touched my breasts in public as if I was enjoying his attention.

To stop him, I decided to wear as many clothes as possible that covered my body. I started wearing a 70s-style long red cardigan, and refused to take it off. This became a huge bone of contention between me and my mother.

She couldn’t understand why I refused to wear the new clothes that she bought me to wear on the holiday—halter-necks, shorts and skirts.

As far as I was concerned, wearing these clothes was tantamount to inviting trouble. The red cardigan covered up everything. While I couldn’t stop him from molesting me, I could stop him looking at me.

I thought that if I could make my body invisible then maybe Da might leave me alone for a while and let me enjoy my holiday. But I should have known that would never happen.

That holiday also stands out because it was the first time that Da took risks to abuse me.

At the time, I thought I would be relatively safe because we were all crowded into a two-room trailer tent. Ma and Da slept on one side and we slept on a double mattress on the other side. But one night, Da got undressed and came over to our side of the tent and climbed into bed beside me. He was talking away, asking me and my brothers what we thought of the holiday so far and if we were having fun, when all of a sudden I felt his hand tugging at my knickers underneath the blankets. He started rubbing my vagina and prised my legs apart so he could push his fingers inside me. All the while he chatted away to my brothers as if nothing was happening.

I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to think. I just lay there, trying to concentrate on what my brothers were saying. Five minutes previously I had been like any other child, happily discussing the day with my brothers. Now I just lay there like a zombie trying to project my mind to a different place.

This happened a few times on the holiday, with my brothers lying inches away. They were oblivious to what was happening. It was humiliating for me. I felt so used, like an inanimate object that my da made use of when it suited him.

But it also made me angry. I hated it and when he molested me in such circumstances, it proved to me that I was being used. This was a turning point.

We did lots of touristy things on that holiday. We visited the Louvre Gallery; we ate croissants for breakfast and tasted frogs’ legs and snails but I can’t remember how any of these smelled, tasted or felt. What I do remember, and will never forget, is how it felt to have Da climb under the covers beside me at night, rubbing his body parts all over me and soiling all the good memories of the day in the process.

There were other family holidays that I did enjoy, however, simply because Da wasn’t there. We went to Butlins on holidays for a week every year, but Da usually stayed at home for most of this week. I loved going to Butlins, not only for the obvious reasons, such as having fun with my friends, but because it was a break from being abused. I could be a real little girl in Butlins, concerned only with sweets, the fair ground and playing the day away.

We had pretty much a free reign there. At home I was always so tired and sleepy during the day; at Butlins the energy flowed through me.

I always made new friends, and was teased mercilessly because if I hung around with people from Cork I came home with a Cork accent, if they were Northerners I came home with a twang as if I had lived in Belfast all my life. But what got to Da was when I would hang around with a crowd from Dublin’s inner city. He knew I was playing with them when I came back because my accent would go downhill, in his opinion.

I had a Dublin accent anyway but he hated it. At one point he became so ashamed of me that he sent me to elocution lessons. He didn’t realise that the accents were not something I did deliberately. It was something I got teased with for years but I was not pretending. My voice just took over and copied what it heard. I pretty much speak the same now as I did when I was four, so I’m not sure the elocution lessons made much of an impact on me.

I was particularly deflated at the end of those holidays. For me it was not just that the fun was over, it also meant back to reality; back to the nightmare of being sexually abused by Da.

Chapter Five

Not unexpectedly, I was asked to repeat sixth class because I had missed so many days at school. The request, which was justifiable, caught me by surprise and reinforced the belief that existed in my own mind that there was something wrong with me; that I was dirty and deserving of what Da did to me. I was a failure in school, and it was official as far as the other girls were concerned. This reinforced my negative feelings about myself.

I did as I was asked and repeated the year but it proved to be a futile exercise. I didn’t learn much and I was miserable and lonely. Even when other girls in the class tried to reach out to me, I pulled even further away. I was old enough now to know that I had to keep these girls away from my house at any cost.

This was hard when they were always calling for me and I would have given anything to have friends. When they stopped calling to play, I became even more withdrawn from everyone and everything.

The pain inside me just never seemed to go away. While I thought that I shouldn’t have been feeling so lonely and insecure, I did not understand why I felt the way I did. I knew the world was meant to be a happy place and fathers were supposed to be faithful and loyal to their children. But my world was different; I lived in a dark dysfunctional world where life wasn’t that simple.

Inside I felt dead; I existed in an upside-down world where I was humiliated on a nightly basis by the man who was supposed to protect me. Yet I suffered to protect him because he was my father.

I was a 12-year-old girl who got what she deserved because there was no other explanation to explain my predicament.

By this time, I had become more physically and mentally ill. Even if I’d looked for help, I felt that no one would have believed me.

I was a confused child, who believe it or not, thought I deserved what Da did to me and I was the bad one.

When I think of that little girl, I wish I could sit and talk to her and comfort her. I wish I could make her see that her father was not worth having; that he was an animal and an abuser.

Such wishes are nothing more than fanciful notions to me now. At the time though, I convinced myself that there was something horrible about me that made him do this to me; if I am to be honest I believed he wasn’t at fault.

In time, my life became so bad that I couldn’t cope anymore. I decided that I had to stop the pain somehow and permanently. The doctors had tried everything to cure me medically and nothing had worked so I saw only one other option—that was to take my own life. This was not the momentous decision that you might think. Children don’t understand the finality of death. I certainly didn’t. I believed suicide was something that people made a fuss about, but I didn’t understand why. It wasn’t something that I thought through or even wanted. It was, I suppose, a cry for help albeit a serious one.

If I remember what happened correctly, I decided to take my own life on the spur of the moment while I was feeling low one day.

The memory of this event has faded with time but I can remember searching my house for tablets and medicines when everyone was out, gathering up every single tablet I could find. I am sure that I was in the depths of depression though I didn’t know what depression was. I did, however, know that I didn’t want to feel so low anymore. Swallowing enough tablets to kill myself was one way to escape; that was my reckoning.