Anne's Song (4 page)

My mum was out at work during the day and my father was singing most evenings, so it was rare to see them together. If they were, she'd be busy doing things – cooking or cleaning or washing or getting the little ones ready for bed – while my dad would be watching TV. There was very little obvious interaction between the two of them. They dealt with the day-to-day demands of keeping a large family together, but there was precious little time left over, even if they'd been inclined, to sit around and chew the cud.

Certainly, if my distress was apparent to my father, he didn't show it. None of this seemed to be bothering him. Perhaps he just didn't care. Or perhaps he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. He appeared, in fact, to be in complete denial, a man with the ability, apparently, to blot out anything inconvenient from his mind. He made the bold statement, for example, about the paedophiles paraded on television.

He was reacting as any normal person would react except both he and I knew he wasn't normal. He couldn't have been to abuse me day after day, month after month, whenever the opportunity had presented itself. Because I knew what he'd done to me, I always felt a tension between us, but he seemed to be able to carry on a perfectly normal coexistence with my mother. I never heard them quarrelling or even bickering. Part of the reason for that, of course, was that she always deferred to him, bolstering his view that he was the head of the household. This suited my father, a man who liked to be in control.

Once we'd moved from Uncle Fred's, that attitude extended to our lives beyond our own front door. From the time we'd all moved to Blackpool, boyfriends had been off the agenda as far as he was concerned. He'd always claim that it wasn't us he didn't trust; it was the boys. If word got back to him – usually via one of my younger sisters – that I'd been seen talking to a boy, I wouldn't be allowed out for a week. He wouldn't scream and shout, but his face would be like thunder and then he'd denounce me in front of the rest of the familv.

'You're no better than a tart,' he'd say, and then he'd ostracise me.

That meant he would deliberately not address a single comment to me until he considered I'd learned my lesson. He could ignore me for anything up to three weeks. He just blanked me, so I did the same back to him. To be honest, I found it embarrassing. He was behaving to me almost as though I was his wife or his girlfriend and we'd had the equivalent of a lovers' tiff. But I was his daughter; and he was an adult. It was a strange, inappropriate way for him to behave. It wasn't natural. My younger sisters got the same treatment in time, but less frequently and less pronounced. I always felt I was the pioneer in anything to do with my father because I was his eldest daughter.

If he was talking to me, and we disagreed about something, he'd turn to whoever else was around. 'Oh, Anne won't agree with me,' he'd say, 'because she hates me.' This was pretty accurate, as it turned out. 'If I say something's white, Anne will sav it's black.'

He knew perfectly well the reason why, of course, but he could never admit it. What surprises me, looking back, is that no one else in the family picked up on our antagonistic relationship. You'd have thought my mother might have been curious about it, but she never said anything. My father was in charge and she wasn't about to question his behaviour. Later, as I moved into my teens, when things got too much for me, maybe once, possibly twice, a month, I'd go and stay with Aunt Teresa. I never told her what was happening at home and she never asked. I just needed to get away. I'm sure my mother didn't like me doing that. I could sense she was a bit hurt that I'd prefer to be with her younger sister but, typically, she never said anything.

If only I could turn back the clock, and have had the courage not to keep his dark secret to myself. My mum would have been shattered, although I wouldn't have properly understood that at the time because I didn't yet realise the full depravity of his actions, but just a chance remark about Dad stroking me down there would have put a stop to everything. Then I wouldn't have had this lifelong cloud following me around. However, a mixture of embarrassment and guilt somehow combined to hold me back.

I'd long ago made the decision to tell no one what my father had done to me when we were alone together. I still didn't properly understand the full ramifications of it but I was increasingly sure that it was a bad thing and a bad thing, moreover, of which I had been a part. By this stage, anyway, the school holidays were approaching so there'd be lots of people in the house and my dad would never be alone with me. After that, I'd be going to school every day.

I remember starting at that secondary school and feeling very vulnerable. I was put in a class where everyone else seemed to know each other. They were laughing and joking; I felt a complete outsider, the new kid with the Irish accent who didn't know a soul. Some of the girls would mimic the way I spoke, which I hated. Then Denise came across a girl called Jacqui who was also new to the school and, it turned out, was in the same class as me, so she approached this girl and told her about me. It was the best thing she could have done.

They used to call me Little John and Jacqui Friar Tuck. I was tall and skinny; she was small and a bit chubby. She had dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, just the same as me. She was an extrovert, but not in an overbearing way. We were a week apart in age. There was an immediate bond between us: she didn't know a soul in the school and nor did I; each of us was naturally a bit apprehensive. It was inevitable that we'd start going around together, but it was more than that: we clicked. To this day, she remains one of my closest friends. But I was never tempted to tell her my secret. By then, I was pretty sure what had happened was wrong so I was worried she might think that I was in some way to blame. I never told anybody because the older I got, the more ashamed I became.

Jacqui and I would talk, as girls do, about the facts of life, or our sketchy understanding of them, at least. There was a girl in our class who got pregnant at fourteen, a real scandal back then, and I remember discussing with Jacqui how babies were made. A lot of it was guesswork. We hadn't a clue about the sexual act. Certainly, we never discussed masturbation. We simply had no knowledge of it – ironic when I realised later that I'd been involved in exactly that without really being aware of it. I never, ever said a word to Jacqui about what my dad had been doing, but, over those weeks and months chatting to my new schoolfriend, there was a dawning realisation in my mind that his fondling of me was sexual. And totally wrong.

As that knowledge strengthened, I felt a mixture of horror that it had happened in the first place, shame that I had allowed it to happen (albeit innocently) and anger that my own father had done that to me. The more I understood the full implications of his actions, the more this swirl of emotions intensified. There was also the sad acknowledgement that the father I'd known when I was nine and we were all living in Dublin no longer existed. He'd been destroyed and it was his fault alone. Our relationship had gone beyond the point of no return.

Jacqui was always there for me. She knew what my dad was like, without ever being aware of the fact that he'd been sexually abusing me. I'd always be complaining about him. There'd be some sort of club activity alter school and I'd tell Jacqui I couldn't come to it because my father wouldn't let me. Or she'd ask me to go to the cinema and, nine times out of ten, he'd say that I couldn't.

I think now that he wanted to keep me as his little girl. He wouldn't allow me to wear tights to school, for instance. He insisted I continue to wear socks. We'd sometimes have parties at school in the evening, but I was never allowed to stay out later than nine o'clock, and, because I always had to leave early, Jacqui started getting friendlier with a girl called Joan. I didn't blame her, but that didn't stop me minding. I liked Joan, too, and a girl called Patsy, but Jacqui was my best friend.

It was Jacqui who gave me my first bra. My mother was of that generation too embarrassed to talk about how your body changed when you hit puberty. A lot of mothers back then were like that. A friend of mine thought she was bleeding to death when her periods started. No one had told her what to expect. We did have some sort of guidance at school about menstruation but, even so, I had no idea how to cope when it happened to me soon after I started secondary school. I asked my mother and she handed me an old stocking and a pad. I was meant to thread the stocking through the loops of the pad and then tie it round my waist. It took me years to get the hang of tampons, not least because I was too shy to ask for help.

Years later, when Jacqui was living in Wigan with her husband, she came to see us perform in a club there. She was pregnant with her first baby. My father announced her from the stage.

'Look at her,' he said, 'that's Anne's best friend. Before the mark of the cradle's off her backside, she's pregnant.'

Jacqui, quite rightly, was really upset. 'What do you mean?' she said. 'I've been married two years.'

My father's attitude to sex seemed to be that it was all right for him wherever and with whoever he chose, but it was something to be derided in young women.

When I think of my father now, part of me just feels dead, part of me still feels real anger. One of the saddest legacies of being sexually abused is the ball and chain of guilt you drag around after yourself for ever afterwards. There might be some satisfaction, I suppose, if 1 were somehow able to explain to him the effect of what he did to me, but, in the end, I suspect it would have offered scant comfort. Those things happened.

I refuse to feel bitterness, a wasted emotion that does no more than eat you up, and I can't write him off as a monster, even if some of his actions could only be described as monstrous, but neither can I lightly brush aside the way he exploited my innocence for his own perverted gratification. Sadly, some children suffer far worse sexual abuse than I ever knew, but there is no league table for this sort of thing. Once a man can see his own daughter as a sexual object, he crosses a line from beyond which there is no way back. And, anyway, the abuse isn't only physical, not for the victim, at least.

My father may have invaded my body, but he also invaded my mind. I'm now in my late fifties, and yet, to this day, no recollection of my childhood can ever be carefree, and that includes the years before the abuse began. It has a contaminating effect that seeps into every corner of your mind, every facet of your life. It doesn't go away, and the slate can never be wiped clean.

In 1964, when I was thirteen, my parents bought their first house. When we moved to Waterloo Road from Uncle Fred's, I didn't like it. It was bigger than his place, but it was a bit run-down, and dark and dingy, too. In time, however, Mum and Dad paid for somebody to knock down a wall to combine a couple of rooms downstairs and repaint and decorate the whole place.

The house was terraced. There was a long hall with a staircase leading up to the bedrooms. Immediately on the left as you came through the front door, there was a front room, kept for best. I remember the first time that Jacqui came to the house, she and I were allowed to eat in that room on our own. My dad had set up a table for us. At the end of the hall, there was another family room and a kitchen with a yard off it where there was an outside toilet that had been converted into a coal shed.

Immediately in front of you as you came up the stairs, there was a box room at the back of the house where my two brothers slept. Then there was a combined bathroom and toilet on the left-hand side at the top of the stairwell. A left turn up three or four steps would take you to three bedrooms. In the first, there were two sets of bunk beds: Maureen was on the top of one and I was on the bottom; Denise was on the top of the other with no one beneath her. Linda and Bernie were in the front bedroom. And my dad was in the second small box room.

I never thought about why my parents didn't sleep in the same bedroom; maybe they didn't want any more babies. My mother slept on a couch downstairs. I know she had to get up very early each morning to light the fire, to make our breakfast and to get us off to school before she herself went to work: perhaps she felt she'd disturb fewer people by sleeping on the ground floor.

Our next-door neighbours were called the Flecks, Ena and Neil. She had three children, Alan, Linda and Suzanne Gallagher, from her first marriage; Suzanne was my sister Linda's best friend. Then there were Mark and Joanna by Neil.

Mrs Fleck was a Scot, a lovely woman with a very distinctive, quirky sense of humour. She might ask one of us to go to the local shop for her and get her a cabbage 'as big as your head'. She was a real joker. I remember telling her once that there was a cigarette butt stuck to the sole of her shoe. 'Oh, I know,' she said. 'That's where I keep them.' Later on, we'd get back from a gig at one or two in the morning and she'd make bacon butties for all of us. You couldn't have wished for a nicer neighbour. She was fabulous. I'm still in touch with her to this day.

Because our house wasn't centrally heated, there were always wet knickers hanging all over the fireplace to dry while everyone would fight for a central position in front of the fire. And because the toilet was in the bathroom and because there were so many females in the house, my brothers used to have to nip next door to Mrs Fleck's, if they needed to use the loo. Or, if she wasn't at home, they'd have to go up the road to the public toilets on the corner.

Being part of a large family was fun but I loved going to school or to stay with my lovely Aunt Teresa. I got on well with my brothers and sisters and my mum, too, but I was always cautious around my father. Since I'd started school, no opportunities had presented themselves for him to molest me again, but that didn't mean I wasn't wary in his presence. Who knew when he might strike again? As it happens, I didn't have to wait long to find out.

One night, I woke up with another of my fierce headaches and went into my dad's room. I was groggy from sleep, my head was pounding, I think I was a bit disorientated. I just headed for the nearest parent, without thinking. I wanted something to ease the pain. Dad went off, returned with some headache pills and then said, 'Get in beside me.'

I wasn't at all sure. 'No,' I said, 'I don't want to. I'll go back to my own bed.'

But he was insistent. 'You've got a bad headache,' he reasoned, 'you'll keep the others awake. Much better if you sleep here.'

He had a huge amount of natural authority and I wasn't about to cause a noisy scene with everyone else in the house sound asleep. So, reluctantly, I did as he told me. It was a single bed. He was by the wall; I was on the outer edge. I lay on my back for ages before eventually falling asleep. The next thing I knew, it was early morning and the sun was streaming through the curtains. My dad was still asleep.

As I pulled the bedclothes back, my hand brushed across my nightdress – and a wet, sticky patch. Then I felt something resting against my stomach. It was my father's penis. I recoiled in horror. Without thinking, I moved it away, got out of bed and ran to the bathroom where I scrubbed and scrubbed myself in an attempt to feel clean again. I was in a daze, and yet I felt I had no one to confide in. I knew I could never tell another living soul the unbelievably disgusting truth: my own father had masturbated over me, his own daughter, while I lay sleeping.

It was such a shock, truly the worst thing he'd ever done to me. I felt dirty, degraded, debased – and totally betrayed. Stupidly, I'd trusted him when I wasn't feeling well, and this was the contempt with which he'd treated me. I'd gone to my father for help. Here was his response. If there had been any last small hope of repairing our fractured relationship, that single filthy act had put a stop to it once and for all.

I never willingly went anywhere near the man again. If we were ever alone in the same room, Fd position myself as far away from him as possible. From that day forward, I wouldn't sit next to him on the sofa if we were all watching television. I couldn't bear the thought of him even touching me. Not that you'd ever have guessed what he'd done to me from his demeanour or behaviour. There wasn't even a tacit acknowledgement of the disgusting things he'd done.

And still I wasn't entirely safe from my father's dark desires. 1 remember the night, not too long after, when Dad arrived home drunk after performing in a local club. I heard him climb the stairs and walk unsteadily to the bedroom I shared with Denise and Maureen. He came over to where I was lying and put his hand under my bedclothes, fumbling to fondle me between my legs.

Immediately, I sat bolt upright.

'Stop it!' I hissed under my breath. 'I don't like it.'

He simply laughed, the smell of alcohol on his breath hot and rank on my face.

'Don't! Get away!' I was almost shouting now. I pushed him as hard as I could. It wasn't difficult because he was so wobbly on his feet. I was grinding my teeth in fury. Again, he just laughed at me and stumbled out of the room – but it must have made some sort of impression: he never, ever tried to touch me between my legs again.

Even allowing for all of this, my life wasn't one of relentless domestic gloom and abuse. Christmas, for example, was always a magical time. We'd get up and go to Mass and then there'd be a marathon session of opening all our presents which would last for hours. Mum would cook a late breakfast and she'd be in charge of Christmas dinner, although my dad would help her. That would start around four o'clock.

When we'd finished the traditional meal of turkey with all the trimmings, we'd tuck into my mother's homemade Christmas pudding, the best I've ever tasted, before or since. We'd stay at the table for anything up to four hours, eating and laughing and drinking and singing a mixture of carols and seasonal songs. Our favourite was 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas' which we sang in five-part harmony. Friends and family would come round later on and we'd play games.

Good times weren't confined to Christmas, and I remember when we'd sit in front of the big coal fire at weekends during winter and have a good laugh watching a movie on TV on a Saturday night. We were all particularly keen on westerns, for some reason. My dad used to give us money to go out and buy sweets first at the corner shop. However, I never loved that house or those days like I loved the time in Raheny in Dublin. Little wonder. My life had changed by then. Now, I was a wary girl on the cusp of becoming a young woman who didn't feel comfortable sitting next to her own father on the family sola.

When it came to the first stirrings of our semi-professional career, the landscape was much brighter. In Blackpool alone, there must have been at least twenty working men's clubs that offered entertainment every night, so there was no shortage of opportunities for my parents to find singing engagements, both separately and together.

Denise had quickly become keen on putting on little 'concerts' in the garage of the house on Waterloo Road. She'd rope all of us in and my friend, Jacqui, too. Then Mum and Dad as well as various friends and neighbours would have to pay sixpence each to come and see a performance. We'd sing songs from
The Sound of Musk,
Denise having taught us the harmonies. None of us ever had any lessons, but all of us had a good ear, all of us could sing in tune. It's an ability, I suppose, we must have inherited naturally from the gene pool.

I had been raised in a musical family and been singing, just for the fun of it, for as long as I could remember. Apart from those little shows Denise put on in our garage, I'd never performed professionally, though. All that began to change when Tommy was thirteen and I was twelve. Our parents took us both to the British Legion Club in Blackpool one evening when they had a booking there, and at one stage during their act, they introduced us to the audience and we sang a couple of songs along with them.

Denise and the rest of us used to pester our parents to take us with them when they went off to sing in the clubs. That's how it all started really. We'd be taken, just one at a time, to whichever club it was and Mum and Dad would allow us to sing one song for the audience. I remember I liked doing 'Moon River' which I'd sung at a talent contest Aunt Teresa had taken me to not long after I joined the rest of the family in Blackpool. I hadn't known it was a talent contest. She just told me to get up and sing so I did, and I won. I loved performing – we all did, I think – and I can't ever remember being nervous. In fact, I liked the feeling that singing in public gave me, but I wasn't really conscious of the audience or of their applause at the end. I was in my own little bubble.

I enjoyed the working men's clubs. There wasn't anything like them in Ireland and they seemed so full of life. They were always noisy and smoky, but I never minded that; it just added to the atmosphere. It was a treat if our parents said we could go with them. They'd buy us soft drinks and crisps and we were allowed to play bingo. It all seemed so exciting.

In time, they'd sometimes take Denise and Maureen as well. We loved it and so did the audience who always responded enthusiastically. As a result, our appearances with our parents became more and more frequent and it wasn't long before we'd evolved into a family act: my mother and father, two brothers and us five girls – even little Bernie. We became known as the Singing Nolans.

We'd sing songs like 'Beg, Steal or Borrow' that had been made famous by The New Seekers and that we'd heard on the radio, as well as songs from musicals. I'd sing the melody, Denise would do the high harmony and Maureen the low one.

We'd do three forty-minute spots in the evening accompanied by our organist Roly Haworth, with Tommy on drums. In the intervals everyone would play bingo or there'd be a raffle. When we finished our third spot around 10.30, we'd get taken home either in my dad's car or by taxi. We might do as many as four nights a week, singing in one club or another. We didn't get paid at this stage, although we always got pocket money if we asked to buy comics or sweets. If we weren't performing but Mum and Dad were, Tommy and I were considered old enough to look after ourselves and the little ones at home.

We never rehearsed and there were no routines to learn first thing in the morning, which we'd read was how The Osmonds were put through their paces by their father. It was only later that the hours became ridiculous and we'd miss school because we were so tired. At this early stage, though, it was all innocent fun, even if I do remember resenting sometimes having to go to sing with my parents when I'd have preferred to be out with my friends.

Our popularity grew. News of us spread quickly, and as it travelled further, so did we. People would come and visit Blackpool on holiday or for the nightlife and they'd come and see us perform. When they returned to their homes, we'd start getting bookings in other towns and cities. There's nothing more effective than word of mouth. Gradually, we were travelling to south Wales, to Scotland, the Midlands.

We were all still at school, but that didn't stop us. We'd often travel for two or three hours to a gig, do our three sets and then have to turn round and come home again, often not getting to bed until three or four in the morning. Then there'd be school just a few hours later.

I distinctly remember Mum coming into our bedroom. She'd shove each of us awake. 'Come on,' she'd say, 'it's time to get up for school.'

We'd moan and groan that we were too tired. She'd go downstairs to see to the food and stoke the fire, then we'd be disturbed from our slumbers again.

'Come on,' she'd shout up the stairs. 'You're going to be late! You're going to be late!' Throughout all of this, of course, my father was dead to the world, asleep in his bed in the box room. If they ever discussed the fact we were burning the candle at both ends, I certainly never heard it. Our household didn't operate like that. We weren't a family for sitting around debating what we did. We just got on and did it. I can't recall a single occasion when I eavesdropped on my parents discussing what was best for us children. Dad would say that something was going to happen. Mum would try and make sure whatever it was did indeed happen. And that was that.

Rising from our warm beds was tough enough in summers but winters were worse. The house had no central heating in those days. Mum, poor thing, would have been out of
her
bed an hour before anyone else to set the coal fire in the lounge where we'd eventually gather, half asleep, to eat breakfast, assuming, of course, that we'd managed to drag ourselves from our beds in the first place. Some days, we'd get to school late; some days, we didn't show up at all. And as for homework . . . I rarely did mine because there wasn't time and anyway I was too tired. I can clearly remember trying to scribble as much as possible in my exercise books on the bus to school.