Daddy's Little Earner (25 page)

‘Where are your books for homework then?’ he asked
after a while.

‘Oh, you know what they’re like,’ I said airily, ‘all
those bloody textbooks. My friend gets a lift in with her
parents so she’s taking mine in for me to save me carrying
them.’

‘You’re not one of those runaways from Bramerton,
are you?’ he joked at one stage.

‘Excuse me?’ I hoped I wasn’t blushing. ‘What’s
Bramerton?’

‘Haven’t you heard of it?’ He laughed. ‘That big children’s
home over the fields.’

‘What sort of people go there then?’ I asked and he
rabbited happily on for the rest of the journey. I guess
he thought I was much older than I was, and dismissed
the idea of me being a Bramerton girl as ridiculous. He
dropped me off in town without showing the slightest flicker of suspicion and then drove on to the police station
to start his next shift, probably feeling pleased with himself
for being such a chivalrous knight of the road. I later
heard that when he got there he looked at the log to see
what was going on and only then realized who I must be.
When I was eventually picked up and taken back, the
staff at Bramerton told me how furious he was.

‘God help you if you ever meet him again,’ they
laughed. ‘He was really mad.’

Even though I carried on running away from Bramerton
while Brian and Dad were both in jail, I always stayed
completely faithful to Brian, waiting for him to come out
so we could start our lives together properly. I used to get
drunk and high a lot in order to try to forget how lost and
lonely and confused I felt but I stayed off the game. A lot
of the boys at Bramerton tried to chat me up and I used
to play pool with them and everything, but I was never
tempted to stray; they were just mates. I was in love with
a grown-up man.

With Dad out of the way, Kathy really wanted to help
and agreed to have me to stay with her so that I could get
out of care for a bit and try to adapt to normal everyday
life. She is such a sweet woman and she gave me a nice
room of my own in her house on the condition that I
behaved and got in by a certain time every night. I wanted
to please her but I was back to socializing with a lot of
the working girls I had known when I was on the street and I would go to the same pub as them, the Brown Derby,
most nights, even running my own slate there. My
drinking was getting way out of control and one night I
drank fourteen pints of Snakebite (a mixture of cider and
lager) in the space of a few hours. There was one particular
hooker there called Sally, a great big scary-looking
woman who’d recently had her nose pierced. I was terrified
of her but I was never going to let her know that.

‘I’d like to do that,’ I said, tapping the side of my nose.

‘I’ll do it for you,’ she offered.

There was no backing down now. I had to let her
know I was as tough as her or I would never hear the end
of it.

‘Sure,’ I said bravely, like it was the most normal thing
in the world.

‘Come on then.’

We wove our way to the ladies’ toilet and she jabbed a
stud into my nose, pushing it straight through. It really,
really hurt but I wasn’t going to let on. My eyes were
streaming but I held in the cries, just as I used to when
Dad was beating me. He had trained me well for situations
like that. I kept the stud in and amazingly it never
even went septic.

In the end Kathy couldn’t take the worry of being
responsible for me. She would try to reason with me
every time I rolled in drunk and high in the early hours
of the morning, and I would feel really remorseful about letting her down again once I had sobered up. I would
apologize and promise to be good, but then I would get
bored or blue and I would be off again. I really wanted to
please her but it was as if I was on a direct course of self-
destruction. I knew it wasn’t fair to ask her to put up with
me any longer and I went back to Bramerton without
making any fuss, knowing that it was now only a few
more weeks before Brian would be out of prison and we
could be together.

By that stage most of the staff at Bramerton were used
to me and knew how to handle me. Sometimes after I had
been on the run for a while I would just give up and ring
them and ask someone to come and get me. Once, after
the pubs were closed, I was so drunk that I threw up all
over the car that came to fetch me. I must have stretched
their patience to the absolute limit but they had pretty
much given up trying to tell me what to do and what not
to do and they would laugh at me instead.

‘Why did you do that then?’ they would ask every
time I did something stupid. ‘When are you going to be
going on the run again then?’

They were endlessly patient because I was always letting
them down. I would take whatever punishment they
doled out for a few weeks – such as extra chores or withdrawn
privileges. I’d earn their trust back and then throw
it all away again on a stupid whim. Maybe they just
thought I was a lost cause.

M
y sixteenth birthday came and went, Brian was
released from jail and there was no stopping
me. Nothing was going to keep me apart from him for
long. I would run away to see him at every opportunity,
just as I had previously run away to see Dad. The staff
at Bramerton decided to let me visit him at weekends,
willing to accept that we were in a proper relationship
now that I had passed sixteen and become legal. We
were really in love.

As soon as I discovered I’d fallen pregnant I knew
exactly when it had happened. The first time Brian had
come to visit me at Bramerton after he was released we
had gone for a walk together. He’d been inside for all
those months so it wasn’t surprising that we were both
keen to make love. We didn’t bother with precautions
because I really wanted to get pregnant with Brian as the father, so I was delighted when I found out the plan had
worked first time. It wasn’t long, however, before other
people started to undermine my joy and make me wonder
if I had done the wrong thing.

‘The best thing you can do for that child,’ one of
the less sympathetic staff at Bramerton told me, cruelly
puncturing my bubble, ‘is to have an abortion. You’ll
always be an unfit mother and that baby’s life will be
a nightmare.’

I’d had it fixed in my mind for over a year that I wanted
a baby, something all of my own, someone to care for
and nurture and be responsible for. And Brian was keen
too, not having managed to have a child in his previous
relationships. I thought that if I had a baby it would give
me a focus in life but now this woman was putting doubts
into my head. I had thought that perhaps a baby would
save me from the temptation to fall back into prostitution
when I was next desperate for money. It seemed like my
best chance of leading a decent independent life, but
maybe she was right and it would be unfair for someone
as worthless as me to bring a child into the world. It didn’t
take much to re-ignite all my insecurities about myself.

Another reason I had wanted to fall pregnant was
because I’d read somewhere that girls who have been
abused when they are very young can sometimes be so
physically damaged inside that they are never able to
conceive and I wanted to reassure myself that that wasn’t the case for me. But now the seeds of doubt had been
sown all my old feelings of inferiority came bubbling
back to the surface. What, I asked myself, made me think
that someone as bad as me deserved to have a baby? I
decided the woman must be right, that it would be the
kindest thing if I had an abortion rather than condemn
my child to a childhood as miserable as mine.

I went to see Mrs Mcquarrie and the matron and told
them that I had decided to get rid of the baby. They listened
to what I was saying but Mrs Mcquarrie seemed to
be really off with me, which was a shock as I had expected
her to be supportive of my decision and her opinion
meant a lot to me.

My social worker, who thought I should have an abortion,
escorted me to the doctor to get him to make the
necessary referral.

‘Can you tell me why you want this abortion?’ the doctor
asked me, pointedly not looking at the social worker
as he talked.

‘Because everyone has told me that I can’t have a child
because I’m useless and because of my lifestyle,’ I said
matter-of-factly.

‘But what do you really want?’ he asked.

I burst into tears. ‘I want this baby.’

‘Well,’ he said, sitting back in his chair, ‘there’s no way
I’m going to recommend that you have an abortion when
it’s not what you want.’

It was like he had lifted a huge weight off my heart. I
was delighted that someone was actually listening to what
I wanted rather than telling me what they thought I
should do. From that moment on there was no chance I
was going to get rid of that baby. I left the surgery unable
to wipe the broad grin off my face, ignoring my social
worker’s mutterings and grumblings. Once we got back
to Bramerton I went straight in to see Mrs Mcquarrie.

‘I’m not having an abortion now,’ I said.

‘Well, I should bloody well think not,’ she replied.

‘Is that why you’ve been off with me?’

‘Yes. You’re a perfectly healthy young woman who got
pregnant on purpose, so why would you then decide to
get rid of it?’

‘It was because of what the others said.’

‘Well, bugger them.’ She grinned. ‘We’re having a
baby, so let’s get on with it.’

Once the staff realized that I was going to become a
mother they weren’t sure what to do with me next. By
that stage I was refusing point blank to go into school so I
spent more and more time with Mrs Mcquarrie or with
the staff and I happily set about knitting cardigans, bonnets
and booties.

Over the years that I had been at Bramerton I had
eventually formed good relationships with a number of
staff members, even though it didn’t start out that way.
The people I got on best with were the domestic staff and I spent most of my time in the kitchens with them.
The housekeeper, Renee, and the chef were both great to
me and I learnt more from them than I had ever learnt
from the teacher in the school. I would never talk to
Renee about any of my emotional or mental problems,
which was a relief: her mission in life was to do with practical
things, like cooking and baking and making sure
everyone was warm and clean and well fed. A lot of the
boys, many of whom were pretty hard cases and not long
away from prison, found the same with the gardener,
who used to take them outside to work with him in the
vegetable patch. In the last year or so of my time there the
domestic staff actually became like my surrogate family.

If I wasn’t going to go to the school any more they said
I had to go out and get a job, which seemed like a completely
foreign concept to me. I’d never really known anyone
who had a normal job, and whenever people asked
me what I wanted to do when I grew up all I could ever
think to say was, ‘I want to get married and have four
children.’ Now that they were insisting that I came up
with an alternative career plan I shrugged and said,
‘Work in a shop?’ I couldn’t think of anything else.

‘But you’re an intelligent girl,’ they protested. ‘Don’t
you want to do more than that with your life? You could
go to college, get some qualifications and have a career.’

I didn’t really think I was good enough for anything
else, because that was what Dad had always drummed into me, but as they were now insisting I come up with
something I admitted I had enjoyed working with the
disabled children in Break. Clutching at this straw, they
arranged for me to go to work in a local home for the
disabled, a position that allowed me to live in a sort of
supervised flat on my own. I could still see Brian when I
wanted to, so I felt quite pleased with myself. Maybe my
life wasn’t going to be quite such a complete failure as I
had been anticipating.

One morning a few weeks later I woke up with terrible
pains and bleeding. The doctor was called and said I
must stay in bed and they should call an ambulance if the
bleeding got any heavier. By lunchtime it was getting
much worse and an ambulance was summoned. I was
petrified. Mrs Mcquarrie dashed over to be with me and
she seemed almost as frightened and worried as I was and
insisted on coming with me herself. She held my hand on
the way to the hospital, which meant a lot to me. She was
still there as they wheeled me off into the operating theatre
and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was
her concerned face looking down at me.

‘Have I lost my baby?’ I asked, and the answer was
written all over her face.

‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I’m so sorry.’

I was devastated and wept for days and weeks on end.
To be given something you want so much, something as
wonderful as a pregnancy, and then have it snatched away again without warning, just felt unbearable. Brian
was really cut up as well, but at least I knew now that I
could get pregnant and I was clear in my mind that I
wanted a baby of my own. I was determined to try again
at the first opportunity.

B
y the age of seventeen I was still an uncomfortable
mixture of maturity and immaturity. Social services
felt they had done all they could for me and there wasn’t
much point in keeping me in care till I was eighteen, or a
ward of court till I was twenty-one, just for the sake of
it. As they knew I was going to be constantly running
away from any institution they tried to put me in, they
decided to let me go officially to see if that would work
and if I would be capable of taking responsibility for my
own life. The same judge who had sentenced Brian to
six months lifted the care order on me, and the ward of
court order, and sent me off to live with him. Less than a
year earlier they had been telling me to stay away from
him because he was dangerous, and now they were
wishing us well and telling us to live happily ever after. I
guess it was good that they were prepared to be flexible and to see that my needs were changing, but actually I
was no more equipped for dealing with the real world
than poor old Brian was.