Daddy's Little Earner (13 page)

Eventually I became so cold, uncomfortable and
scared it seemed like a better option to go home and face
Dad’s wrath than to stay where I was. If I couldn’t will
myself to die then I was going to have to get on with facing
the music. I hurried back through the dark, threatening
streets and was horrified when I turned the final
corner to see a police car parked outside our house. I don’t
know exactly how long I had been gone, but it had been
long enough for Dad to call the police and tell them I was
missing. There were social workers as well as police in the
house as I came in the front door and they were all listening
to Dad playing the part of the hard-done-by father
with the problem daughter, who had been abandoned by
his heartless wife. Of course he hadn’t thought to mention
the fact that it was him who had kicked me out of the
house in the first place, telling me not to come back without
the right butter. I realized then that I had created even more trouble by staying away, causing all these people
inconvenience and making them angry with me. I certainly
wasn’t going to speak up against Dad and risk
making everything worse, so I hung my head in silence
and probably gave the impression that I didn’t give a
damn about anything. If I had told them he had ordered
me not to come back he would have dismissed it as a joke
and made out that I was stupid for not realizing it, so
there was no point in saying anything to anyone.

In the course of looking for me the police had rung my
grandparents and asked for Mum’s telephone number to
see if she knew where I was. I suppose they thought I
might have gone looking for her. They had even been talking
about broadcasting my disappearance on the local
news. Everyone was really angry with me when they realized
I hadn’t been abducted and had stayed out voluntarily,
wasting their time, and I could hardly blame them since
they had no idea what our lives with Dad were really like.

‘Your poor dad,’ someone said, ‘trying to bring you up
on his own, and this is how you behave, causing him all
this worry.’

They all felt sorry for him, just like the old ladies who
fell under his spell in the pubs, and Dad milked it for all it
was worth. There was nothing I could say in my defence
without telling them that I was out on the streets at that
time of night because he had sent me, and I could never
have brought myself to betray him like that.

After the police left, I thought I would get a beating
from him for causing all that trouble, but not another
word was said. He just carried on as if nothing had happened.
Maybe he had genuinely been worried about me
but more likely he was worried about the trouble he’d get
into if something had happened to me. I expect he was
grateful that I didn’t tell the police why I had been out in
the dark, but he had told me often enough that if anyone
found out about the things he got up to he would be sent
to prison again, which was an even more terrifying
prospect than doing his bidding and facing the anger of
the police. We already knew that when he went to prison
we had no one else to turn to apart from the social services.
He was all the family we had left so there was never
any option but to go into care of some sort, which was like
a giant leap into the unknown each time it happened.
Dad was continually telling us the most terrible horror
stories about foster homes and children’s homes and how
we could be beaten up and raped if we went there, but
even without that to worry about I still would never have
betrayed him, just because he was my dad and I loved
him. In the great game of life Dad held all the cards.

D
ad always seemed to be battling against his depression.
He would say it was because Mum had broken
his heart by leaving, but he was already making suicide
attempts before she finally went. When he was drunk he
would often say he was going to kill himself, which
made Terry and me constantly frightened that he would
carry out his threats and we would come home from
school one day to find him lying dead on the floor. Over
the years, however, we heard him say it so frequently
that we began to take less notice, until one day when I
was nine he came into the house with a bottle of weedkiller
and announced that he was planning to kill himself
with it that afternoon. Apparently he’d read a story
in the
News of the World
about a bloke who had done
exactly that and now he planned to end his own life the same way. He flamboyantly opened the bottle and drank
it down in front of us. Neither of us had the nerve to try
and stop him. He said goodbye and went upstairs to die.

‘Don’t phone anybody,’ was his last instruction as he
left the room.

Terry and I sat staring at one another in shock. There
was part of me that was thinking, ‘Don’t do anything, just
let him go, your life would be so much easier without
him,’ but another part of me couldn’t do that. Whatever
he was like he was still our father and he was still the only
relative we really had left in the world who cared anything
for us at all. But did we have the nerve to disobey
his direct instruction not to call anyone? Dad was always
telling us never to talk to anyone about anything private
that happened in our family. He would warn that they
would think he couldn’t cope with bringing us up and
they would send us away to children’s homes. If that happened,
he said, we might never see him again. Sometimes
we had to go into children’s homes anyway because he
would get caught for something and sent to prison and I
would be desperate each time in case they refused to let
us go back to him. If he killed himself the authorities
would have no option but to farm us out to whoever they
chose and there would be no going back and no one left
who would give a damn what happened to us; we would
be orphans.

After a few moments of waiting our nerve broke, we decided we were going to have to risk disobeying his
orders and we rang the doctor. We explained breathlessly
what had happened and a few minutes later there was
someone knocking at the door. When we let him in the
doctor went straight upstairs to give Dad an injection and
the next thing we knew Dad was leaning out of the
bedroom window throwing up, his vomit cascading past
the front room window below. The doctor then came
back downstairs.

‘He’ll be all right now,’ he said as he left us on our own
again. The only sounds in the house once the front door
had slammed shut were the moans and retching noises
coming from the bedroom. Looking back, I wonder what
it was that Dad had drunk. If it really had been weedkiller,
surely it would have burned his throat as he drank
it and caused him to collapse on the spot in agony? Had
he substituted something else in the bottle? Was that why
the doctor didn’t have to get him to hospital? I’ve got no
way of finding out now.

That was the last we heard of the incident. The social
services department did not check that we were all right
or talk to us about what had happened. The good thing
was that Dad never got angry with us for disobeying him
and making that phone call, so I guess that was what he
had wanted us to do all along.

My feelings and fears after that incident were even
more mixed up and confusing. Now I felt I had to work harder to make Dad happy so he wouldn’t attempt to kill
himself again. I had to try to help him to mend his broken
heart, but at the same time I hated the way he treated
us. I was exhausted from always being afraid and always
feeling guilty.

The social workers who did come to see us from time
to time continued trying to ask us questions, probably
well aware that there was more going on in the family
than I was letting on, and eventually when I was about
ten I found the courage to emerge from my silence and
confessed that Dad regularly sent us out stealing whisky
and that I didn’t want to do it any more. It has all become
a bit of a haze in my memory but when they found that
out they took us away from him and put us into a children’s
home called The Durdans, which as usual didn’t
seem to be nearly as bad as the pictures Dad had been conjuring
up for us. In fact in many ways it was quite nice.
The staff did their best to be kind to us and we were sent
each day to a little school nearby which I absolutely loved.
They bought us new clothes and gave us clean socks and
underwear every day so we didn’t have to wear the same
filthy rags all the time, and the food was a lot better than
anything we would ever get at home. But despite all these
things, I still wanted to be back eating egg and chips with
Dad, the one person who I believed loved me.

Dad had taken up with a new girlfriend called Kathy,
who he brought in to visit us at The Durdans. I never worried when he had new girlfriends because I was confident
I was so special to him nothing would ever change
his feelings towards me. I knew he was the only one who
loved me and that he would never abandon me unless he
was forced to because he had told me so, many times. I
understood that he needed a woman in his life and I
couldn’t fill that space; and nor did I want to. On top of
that I wanted a new mum and I knew Terry needed one
too.

Kathy was a lovely woman, dark and pretty, with
kind, smiley eyes. She was a genuine sweetheart with two
children of her own, both slightly older than us, and she
said what she wanted was for us all to be living together as
one big happy family. Dad had worked his magic on her
and she was as much in love with him as everyone else
seemed to be, and he was promising that as soon as he and
Kathy were sorted out he would be getting Chris and
Glen home too. He was still such a hero to me. As far as I
was concerned it wasn’t his fault he drank so much, it was
Mum’s, so the sooner he was able to meet someone else
and forget about her the better.

The moment I met Kathy I really wanted to be a part
of their family unit. I resolved to be a good little girl so she
would never have a reason to leave us because of my
behaviour the way that Mum had. I also knew that if
Kathy was in the house Dad would be less likely to interfere
with me, trying to put his thing inside me all the time, and I would be able to go back to just being his
daughter. I yearned for that.

I’d had my long hair cut off a few days before that visit
to The Durdans and Dad walked straight past at first
without recognizing me, which really hurt my feelings.
When he spotted me and realized what I’d done he was
furious because he said he had always loved my hair. It
was as if I had wilfully damaged one of his personal possessions
by allowing them to cut it. Once he got over that
we started chatting quite normally, although Dad always
seemed to be on his guard when there were other people
with us.

‘Do you want to come home?’ he asked in a moment
when the staff had gone out of the room to make a cup
of tea.

‘Yeah.’ I nodded enthusiastically.

‘Well, tell them you lied about me sending you out to
steal the whisky,’ he said.

So as usual, despite the fact that lying made me feel
sick with apprehension and guilt, I did exactly what he
told me. I confessed to the staff that I had made up the
story about the shoplifting. Even though I had already
been in the home for months by that stage, they seemed
to think that that changed everything and they let Terry
and me go home with Dad and Kathy there and then. I
couldn’t believe my luck as we walked out through the
doors with all our possessions packed up. I was actually going to be part of a proper home and both Kathy and
Dad wanted me to be there. I loved him more than ever.
We were going to be a normal family at last.

One huge advantage of having Kathy around the
house was that Dad had to leave me alone sexually. It
wasn’t all sweetness and harmony though. Sometimes she
would stand up to his bullying ways, which meant they
were often rowing and separating and whenever that
happened he would go back to mentally, physically and
sexually abusing me again. He always had to have someone
weaker than himself to pick on when his mood grew
black, and he always had to have someone to relieve his
sexual frustrations for him. I came to look on Kathy as my
saviour and hated it whenever they fell out, frightened
she would leave him for good one day and I would be at
his mercy again full time.

Although we were a bit like one big family, Kathy
was wise enough not to give up her house even at the
times when their relationship was going well. It wasn’t
far from ours so we were always back and forth between
the two but it meant that Dad could never completely
dominate her because she had somewhere to escape to,
something that Mum never had once she’d married him.
Kathy adored Dad so much she actually did want to marry
him and do the whole thing properly but Dad held
back from that final commitment for some reason. Maybe
he thought that gave him at least some power over her, or maybe he really did think Mum had been the only wife
for him. Either way it was a mistake from his point of
view and it was Kathy’s saving.

Dad was still thieving and fighting and soon he was taken
back into prison again. Kathy wasn’t able to have us to
stay at her place, with her own kids to look after, so the
authorities put us with a foster family called the Leggetts.
They already had six boys living with them and told me
excitedly that they were looking forward to having a girl at
last. When I got there I was thrilled to find they had even
prepared me a pink girl’s bedroom, but I soon realized there
was going to be a price to pay for being a different gender.
The boys expected me to do far more than my share of the
chores, just because I was a girl. I was soon feeling that I was
being really picked on, just as I had in the foster home
where they called me ‘dummy’. I felt they were sniggering
and laughing at me behind my back all the time, although
looking back now I’m not sure if they were. One day I was
clearing the table after a meal and I wiped a plate into the
bin using my hand instead of a knife or fork. The other
children laughed at me and called me names. To them it
was probably good-natured teasing, but to me it was more
evidence that I was inferior to everyone I came across.