Daddy's Little Earner (27 page)

Doris was a great woman but a visit from her for half
an hour a week wasn’t really going to solve my problems
or change anything fundamental. For most of the time it
was just me and the baby in the flat. I didn’t have any days
or nights of my own; every hour was dedicated to looking
after Brendan and catering for his needs.

Doris knew I was struggling because she even brought
me some coal round to help keep the fire going, but I
didn’t want her to know exactly how hard I was finding
it to cope in case she decided Brendan would be better
off with someone else.

I wanted to do everything right but I didn’t know
how. I had never seen my mother cooking or keeping
the house clean and she wasn’t around enough to ask
now. I was having to learn everything from scratch. I’d
buy a bottle of bleach to clean the toilet but I would have
no idea how often I was meant to do it or how much
bleach I was meant to use. I was like an alien suddenly
landing in a domestic situation and having to work everything
out for myself.

I kept hearing how people who had been abused as
children ended up as abusers themselves. I felt no urge to
abuse Brendan in any way – I just wanted to look after
him and protect him – but I was terrified some force hidden
deep inside me would fight its way to the surface and turn me into a monster like my father. A hundred different
questions were going through my head. At what age
should I stop getting in the bath with him? When should
I stop walking about the house in front of him in my
underwear? I was terrified of getting it wrong, of being
like Dad. Sometimes I was even scared to cuddle him. I
had no idea where the boundaries should be.

The need for money preyed on my mind twenty-four
hours a day, but I didn’t want to get a full-time job because
I didn’t want to be away from Brendan and I couldn’t
afford childminders anyway. I hated the idea of stealing
and didn’t want to risk getting caught and giving them an
excuse to take Brendan into care. There had only ever been
one way that I had known to make easy money, so when
Brendan was six months old I summoned all the courage
I could find and went back out on the game to try to get
some quick cash to buy us a few of the things we needed.

I took Brendan round to Lisa’s new place and asked
her to look after him for a couple of hours, not telling her
what I was doing, not telling anyone, knowing that it was
a terrible decision even as I made it. I knew that if I was
seen by anyone from social services they would almost
certainly take Brendan away from me. It was a giant
backward step and I felt like the lowest of the low as I
climbed into those men’s cars.

I only did it twice and I knew as I was doing it that it
was all wrong, that I was going to have to find another way to survive. I felt so guilty about breaking the promise
I’d made to Brendan on his first night in the world that I
would give him a decent life. I knew from experience that
the money I was making from those punters wasn’t going
to last more than a couple of days and if I followed this
road I was going to be back on the street full time by the
end of the week. How long would it be before I was
arrested or beaten up by a punter, rolling home to my
baby with blackened eyes and broken teeth? I remembered
all the nights that Lucy had ended up on our
doorstep, battered and bruised. I knew her daughter was
now following in her footsteps but I had to break the cycle
if I wanted any chance of giving Brendan something better
than I’d had myself. I knew that I was failing but I
didn’t know what to do about it.

I used to take Brendan out in the pram for really long
walks during the day, pushing him for miles and miles,
to get us both out of the flat and to give myself some space
to think. Although I loved Brendan more than anything I
had ever loved before, a dark cloud of despair was gathering
around me. In my attempts to escape from it I had
started drinking heavily at home, sometimes getting
through a bottle of vodka a day as I plodded through my
solitary routines. In my blackest moments I wondered if
maybe the woman at Bramerton had been right after all
when she said I would be incapable of bringing up a baby
and that he was bound to have a miserable childhood.

What sort of life could he hope to have with a mother
who couldn’t do anything except drink all day and sell
her body to pay for it? I was terrified I would end up just
like Mum, separated from my children, or dead and
mutilated in some bushes somewhere. On her fleeting
visits Doris was talking about sending me to psychology
groups to try to help me come to terms with my past.
She introduced me to a woman who did a lot of fostering
who she thought might be able to help me by babysitting
for Brendan sometimes, giving me a bit of a chance to
make a life for myself.

When Brendan was around eight months old I met
a very successful businessman called David, who was
incredibly supportive and helpful. Although I had an
enormous crush on him, he was never interested in me in
any romantic or sexual way. He had just separated from
his wife and was definitely anti-women for a while.
David genuinely wanted to help me and offered me a job
answering his telephone whilst he was out working. I was
able to take Brendan with me. As well as answering the
phone and doing basic secretarial duties, I would do some
housework for him as well. David was really pleased with
me. He wasn’t able to pay me much money because I was
receiving benefits but with the little he was able to give
me I started taking driving lessons. It was a good feeling
to be doing something respectable. This was clean, decent
money that I had earned legitimately and honestly, which was why it felt so different, and I was determined to use it
in a respectful way.

One day as I was walking back home from David’s a
truckload of lads drew up beside me, whistling and cat
calling.

‘Do you want a lift home?’ one of them shouted out
the van window.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m all right. I’m walking the baby.’

‘Give us your phone number then,’ he said.

He was a big, stocky man in his late twenties and I
rather liked the look of him so I gave him my number but
when I didn’t hear anything from him during the following
days I thought no more about it. I had enough on my
mind without worrying about men.

Despite the job working for David, I couldn’t raise
any optimism about the future. I still felt a terrible weight
of depression and worry at the sort of life I was going to
be able to give Brendan, whatever choices I made. Added
to this, I heard that Dad was about to be released from
jail, after serving most of his four-year sentence, and I was
very apprehensive about what it would be like to see him
again. One day I reached rock bottom and made up my
mind to put a stop to the whole thing before it was too late
and Brendan’s life was ruined forever. I took him round
to the house of the foster mother Doris had put me in
touch with and asked her if she would look after him for
a couple of hours. I then walked back to the flat and took a major overdose. I felt like I had no choice. It wasn’t
difficult to do. I’d done it dozens of times before. I no
longer believed I was going to be able to support Brendan
and bring him up as I wanted, but I also knew I wouldn’t
be able to live without him. I wouldn’t have been able to
stand seeing him being brought up by someone else.
Maybe that was why Mum had to cut all her ties with
us once she had walked away, because otherwise the
pain would have been too intense. I knew there was no
way I would ever have been able to give Brendan up
while I was still alive, but I believed he would be better
off without me.

As I waited for the tablets to take effect the phone
rang. I don’t know why I bothered to pick it up at a
moment like that, but I did. It was Rodney, the man in
the truck, calling to ask me out. I didn’t have the nerve to
tell him that I’d overdosed, but just hearing his voice
through the fog of vodka and tablets gave me a ray of
hope and I started to regret what I’d done. The moment
he hung up I rang Mum and told her. She made it plain
that she was annoyed and disgusted with me but she did
at least call an ambulance and the next thing I knew I was
back in hospital having my stomach pumped yet again,
the doctors ramming the familiar thick rubber pipe down
my throat. As I came back to consciousness and the world
swam into focus around me I felt a surge of panic. Would
they take Brendan away from me now? I couldn’t imagine they would allow a little baby to live alone with
a mother who was likely to try to kill herself.

But Doris’s glowing praises of my mothering skills
must have helped. To my surprise the social services were
really understanding. They seemed to think it was perfectly
understandable that I should be suicidal given my past
and all the problems I had. They didn’t think it had anything
to do with the way I was caring for my baby and they
started looking around for more ways they could help me.

I began dating Rodney just before my nineteenth
birthday and, believe it or not, on our first date we met
Dad in a pub. When I told him that this was my dad,
Rodney was all Flash Harry, trying to make a good
impression, and they got on like a house on fire. It was
only later that I told him about what Dad had done to me,
and the way he’d made me go on the game, and Rodney
was horrified, telling me I shouldn’t have anything to
do with him ever again.

From early on in the relationship, Rodney kept insisting
that he and I and Brendan should start a life together
so he soon moved into my two-bedroom flat with me.
I couldn’t believe that anybody actually wanted me. Brian
was still coming round now and then but his drinking was
getting worse and worse and I could see that he was never
going to be any help to Brendan, so I didn’t protest when
Rodney sent him away, claiming Brendan and I were
his now.

I really wanted to continue working for David, because
the job had given me a bit of self-esteem, but Rodney just
wouldn’t hear of me working for another man, so finally,
after some huge arguments, I had to give in.

Rodney already had three kids from a previous relationship,
who came to us at weekends, and I loved the
feeling of having a ready-made family – although looking
back now I don’t know how we all fitted into that flat.
It was chaotic and noisy and crowded but it was glorious
for me having four kids to look after, plus their Jack Russell
as well. There would be no more nights alone in the
flat and no more temptations to go out onto the streets to
earn money. There was something about Rodney that
made me feel safe and I was more than happy to let him
take over my life and make my decisions for me.

My most desperate wish was to get social services out
of Brendan’s life. It was greater than any dreams or hopes
I might have had for myself and I knew that we wouldn’t
need social services any more if I stayed with Rodney.
I had no idea what new adventures I was letting myself
in for but I started to feel optimistic about the future for
probably the first time in my life.

W
hen I was in my early thirties, after I had been
through years of counselling, Dad came round to
see me one day. He had grey hair now and was scruffily
dressed in an old red sweater instead of his immaculate
suits and ties of old. He seemed to be in a confiding mood,
wanting to try to explain why he did the things that
he did.

‘It was all because your mother had left me,’ he said.
‘If she’d never left I’d never have touched you.’

His next excuse was that he was always drunk when
he abused me, but I knew that wasn’t strictly true. While
he was in this soul-searching mood he did tell me that he
had been regularly raped as a child and he had never told
anybody. That may or may not be true, but even if it was,
that wasn’t any reason to inflict the same fate on me.
Telling me the story about himself made him cry.

Dad,’ I said firmly, ‘I am not going to be your counsellor.’

I tried to understand why he had done everything he’d
done to me, but I didn’t think there was anything he
could tell me that would make any of it right. Even then
he was still angry that I had ever told anyone what went
on in private between us. As far as he was concerned I was
his property and shouldn’t have said anything.

‘So,’ he said, recovering from his tears. ‘If I gave you a
thousand pounds now and took you to bed with me and
fucked you, that’s got nothing to do with anybody apart
from us, has it?’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, or that he
thought it was all right to say it.

‘Just get out of my house,’ I told him.

I knew this conversation was going to be as close as I
was ever going to get to an apology from him; that’s as
far as he could go.

Peter, the man who raped me while Dad held me
down, fell into a river while drunk and drowned. I can’t
claim I felt any sympathy.

Brian fell from his balcony while drunk and ended up
with brain damage. I later saw him selling the
Big Issue
in
the centre of Norwich. I went over to buy a copy but he
obviously had no idea who I was any more.

So many people that I knew have fallen victim to
drink and drugs. It takes a lot of courage, luck and hard
work to escape from the sort of life I was born into.

In 2006, when I heard about the murder of the
five young girls who were working as prostitutes in
Ipswich, my heart went out to them. By deciding to
walk the streets and have sex with strangers for money
they were knowingly putting their lives at risk, but
young girls very seldom actually choose to sell themselves
in dangerous situations. None of them was born
to be a streetwalker. In every case something or someone
had happened to them in their childhood to make
them think so little of themselves, to make them believe
themselves to be so worthless that they were only good
for one thing. Such girls have already been turned into
victims and are easy prey for any bullies and sadists
who choose to go after them, and from time to time for
murderers as well.