Daddy's Little Earner (3 page)

‘Stop snivelling,’ he would bark, ‘or you’ll get another
lot and this time it will be the stick!’

Him shouting would just make me want to cry more.
I wanted to run over to him and tell him I was sorry for
whatever I had done and that I still loved him. I wanted
to ask him to hold me and cuddle me, but I knew better
than to do that because such weakness would only aggravate
him. So instead I would desperately fight to swallow
my sobs and stop the tears from flowing.

I remember witnessing him beating up Terry really
badly one day, punching him with his fists. I watched
Terry sliding down the wall, the wallpaper behind him
smeared with his blood. I couldn’t intervene because I
would have received the same treatment for daring to go
against him, so I just had to watch and wait for it to be
over. If you tried to ask why he was angry or to argue
with him you would merely make the ordeal last longer
and give him an excuse to become more vicious.

Mum was useless at protecting us because by this stage
she was utterly terrified of him as well. He wasn’t the
kind of man that many people found the courage to resist.
Gradually he undermined Mum’s confidence, telling her
she was ugly and useless. He used to beat her about as
well, kicking her in the mouth once and knocking out
some of her teeth so she had to get false ones. She still has
a prominent scar on her chin from that attack.

Things must have been volatile between her and Dad right from the moment they met but it was when she fell
pregnant with Glen that she says it all started to go badly
wrong. Dad was drinking a lot by then and when she
was a few months pregnant they passed a Chinaman in
the street on their way home from the pub. Maybe it
started as a joke and then got out of hand, but Dad
accused her of having an affair with him and then
became convinced that Glen really was the Chinaman’s
baby. The whole idea was patently ridiculous since Mum
had never set eyes on the man either before or after that
chance passing in the street but Dad seemed to have convinced
himself until he became so incensed by her imagined
treachery that he threw Mum down the stairs with
Glen inside her, sending her into premature labour. She
had to have an emergency caesarean and, as they prepared
her for the operation, the doctors discovered that
she was suffering from anaemia and malnutrition. She
was kept in hospital for a while receiving treatment for
all her ailments.

Dad’s theory about Glen having been fathered by a
Chinaman was shown to be ridiculous once Glen was
born because he looked more like Dad than any of us, but
that didn’t stop him from continuing with his delusion.
He started claiming that he couldn’t go out to work for
fear that he would find Mum in bed with another man
when he got back. I don’t believe this for a moment, but
he repeated it time and time again over the years to get sympathy, and I’m sure his cronies in the pub took him at
his word. Poor old Terry, with a wife he couldn’t trust.

When Mum was rushed into hospital for the caesarean,
Terry Junior, Chris and I were placed with a foster
family. I suppose Dad didn’t think he could cope with us
on his own or maybe Mum had told social services that
he couldn’t and that we needed to be protected from
him. By that time I think the authorities were becoming
aware of his violence. We must have been considered to
be at risk.

One of the few memories I have of that period is of
coming downstairs the first morning that I was in the foster
home.

‘Good morning,’ one of the family said when they saw
me appearing in the doorway and I froze, my face turning
the colour of beetroot, totally unable to find the words
to reply. The greeting must have taken me by surprise
because people didn’t exchange those sorts of simple
pleasantries in our house; they just grunted and shouted
at one another if they needed to communicate. From then
on the foster family all called me ‘dummy’. They may
only have said it a few times, and they might just have
been gently teasing me, but I was still mortified enough
for the word to be burned indelibly into my memory. I
knew it was my own fault for not speaking up as soon as I
was spoken to, and it convinced me that I was inferior to
the other children there, a worthless creature who had no right to be in their home at all but wasn’t wanted by anyone
else, least of all her parents.

When Mum had recovered from her operation we
were allowed to go home again. The doctors said it could
be dangerous for her to have another pregnancy and
prescribed her with the contraceptive Pill. Once there was
no danger of her falling pregnant again, Dad decided
the time was ripe to put her on the game. He’d talked
about it before, apparently, never seeing anything wrong
with the idea. In fact it was a bit of a mystery to him why
all women didn’t do it.

‘Every woman’s sitting on a goldmine,’ he would say.
‘Pity I haven’t had four girls because then I could run a
proper little brothel and I’d never have to work again.’

It might seem ironic that he beat Mum up because he
suspected she’d been unfaithful to him yet he was prepared
for her to be a prostitute, sleeping with any man
who could pay the going rate – but that would be entirely
consistent with his warped kind of logic.

‘If you’re going to do it, you should get paid for it
instead of giving it away for free,’ he’d always say.

M
um had never really taken him seriously in the
early days of their relationship when he talked
about her going on the game, assuming he was just joking.
Who would imagine that any man would want to
do that to the woman he loved? Why would he want to
share her with any old Tom, Dick or Harry? But Dad
wasn’t like most men, and as the years passed Mum
came to realize that. The comments that had started out
sounding like a rather tasteless kind of banter between
lovers grew to seem more real and threatening. And
once she was on the Pill, Mum soon realized that he had
become deadly serious with his plans and expected her
to start excavating the ‘goldmine’ she was ‘sitting on’ and
become the family breadwinner.

They probably already knew people who worked in
the business because of the kind of places where they went to drink; Dad socialized with prostitutes all the time
when I was a bit older. Selling your body simply didn’t
seem like a big deal to him; it was just another easy way to
make good money for very little effort – well, very little
effort by him.

It’s hard to imagine how most men would have persuaded
their wives to actually go out the first time and do
it, but Dad had a way of making people do what he wanted
with a mixture of charm, violent bullying and manipulation.
Although he worshipped Mum, he constantly
strove to control her in every way possible. He dominated
and terrorized her almost as completely as he dominated
and terrorized his children. When he wanted something,
he would go on and on, like a terrier with a bone, never
stopping until he got his own way, and I imagine that’s
how it was back then. He probably flattered her, telling
her how gorgeous she was, then told her she was useless
and how much she needed him, then he would nag her
constantly that her family needed her to earn money, that
it wasn’t a lot to ask after all. I can imagine him doing it,
and although it might be hard for other people to understand
I know just how persuasive he could be when he
set his mind to something.

And so Mum agreed. She says she allowed him to kid
her that she was only going to have to do it once or twice,
that he was just asking her to do him a favour because he
was skint and this was the only way he could think of to make a bit of drinking money for them both quickly. The
first time, he took her up to the block in Norwich where
all the streetwalkers worked and explained to her what
to say to the drivers of the cars that crawled along the
kerbs and what to do once she was in the cars with them.
I know exactly how he would have done that because a
few years later he was making the same trip with me.

It wasn’t long before Mum realized how naïve she was
being. Easy money is as addictive as any drug, particularly
if you don’t have to do anything for it yourself. Once
the cash started rolling in he was hardly going to put a
stop to it; he probably wasn’t capable of it, any more than
he was capable of giving up his drinking or his gambling.
The more she earned for him the more he wanted and the
harder he made her work.

Dad took his role as a pimp very seriously, hanging
around the block all night at first, making sure Mum
stayed on her patch and took advantage of every single
potential client who drew up. He would never allow
her to go home until he felt she had extracted every
penny possible from the punters. Whenever she had an
unsavoury or threatening client and became frightened
she would plead with Dad to let her stop but he ignored
her, pretending he couldn’t hear her and pushing her
back to the edge of the street.

Mostly she would be getting into the men’s cars at
the kerb, driving off and transacting the business in the passenger seats, but sometimes she would bring the customers
back to our house. Dad didn’t mind how she did it
as long as she kept working. He would sit downstairs
watching the television while she was at work in their
bedroom above, next to where Terry and I were sleeping
and where Chris and Glen lay in silence. She would just
have walked in the front door with the customer and
gone straight up the stairs to do the business as if it was
the most normal thing in the world. Dad saw nothing
wrong with it at all.

She put up with it for two or three years, from soon after
Glen’s birth, all the while kidding herself that it would stop
one day. Many years later she told me that she used to get so
depressed she would sit downstairs all day reading books
and eating chips until it was time to go out to work. For part
of those years she had a day job at a shoe factory, so she must
have been utterly worn out. She was struggling for her own
survival and not able to take any notice of Terry or me and
she seemed to forget all about Chris and Glen locked in
their bedroom upstairs. Gradually, she brought them out of
their room less and less, even when Dad wasn’t there, until
eventually she managed to forget they existed for hours on
end. Maybe it felt as though she had too many things to cope
with and something had to be allowed to give or her brain
would have overloaded.

It’s obvious from reading the social services records at
the time how hard life must have been for Mum with four small kids and no money coming in apart from
whatever she could keep back from Dad. It wouldn’t
have occurred to Dad to help her look after us either. I
suppose there were a lot of men like that in those days. I
don’t think it would even have occurred to her to ask
him for help because looking after the kids was considered
to be women’s work. But most husbands would
have made sure they provided at least enough money for
the basic essentials their family needed. If a traditional
woman’s place was at home looking after the house and
the children, a traditional man’s place was as the breadwinner
for the family. Even when she was working
Mum never got to keep anything she earned; it all had to
be given to him to take down to the pub and the bookies.
She was often forced to go to the authorities for help
when there was no food in the house, but if he found out
about it Dad would take whatever money they had
handed out to her and would spend that on drink too.
Sometimes the social services would give her vouchers
and money for the electricity meter but then Dad would
sell the vouchers and break into the meter when he needed
more cash for the pub.

In the end Mum was left to rely on handouts from
kind neighbours and the big parcel of groceries her parents
brought round every Wednesday. It’s hard to understand
why my grandfather and grandmother couldn’t see
what was going on and do more to help us. I think they were at their wits’ end to know what to do. I’m sure they
can’t have realized how bad things were for Chris and
Glen, though; Mum must had cleaned them up a bit
when her parents were due.

Once he’d had a few drinks Dad’s obsession with
Mum would sink into pure cruelty. He would pace up
and down the front room for hours on end yelling at her
about how fat, ugly and useless she was, telling her that
no one would ever love her except him. If you tell someone
those sorts of things often enough they soon start to
believe them.

‘You’ve brought shame on the family,’ he would rant.
‘I should never have married you, you’re just council
house rubbish.’

They were living in a council house themselves at the
time, but because the rest of Dad’s family had done better
and all owned their own businesses and homes he
somehow thought that meant he was superior to her.
There was no point in her arguing with him unless she
wanted a beating so she just had to sit there and take
whatever he wanted to throw at her.

I think it must have been 1972 the first time Mum left
him, when I was about five years old. She always had
trouble getting all four of us out of the house at the same
time so she just took Glen and Chris with her to a local
refuge for battered wives. I can understand why she
thought they were in more danger from him than Terry and I were: they were so much smaller and he seemed
to have taken against them from birth.

The NSPCC and local social services got involved in
the case and after listening to what she had to say they
went to visit Dad. The report came back that he was on
the verge of having a nervous breakdown. I dare say
these days they would have come up with a more specific
diagnosis, such as ‘bipolar disorder’, but back then they
just talked about depression and nervous breakdowns.
They promised her they would have him admitted to the
local psychiatric hospital for a month. During that time
Mum was told she would be able to apply for a restraining
order stopping him from returning to the house
and she would get custody of all of us. For a few fleeting
moments she must have felt that she was finally getting
some protection from him, and that it was all going to
work out.