Daddy's Little Earner (4 page)

Dad was taken off from the house in an ambulance
and two social workers stayed with Terry and me until
Mum arrived back home with Chris and Glen. Once they
could see we were all settled in, the social workers left and
a few minutes later Mum received a phone call from Dad
to say he had escaped from the ambulance on the way to
the hospital and had gone to his mother’s to steal some
of her sleeping tablets, which he was now swallowing.

‘I took my own tablets before leaving home,’ he told
her, and at that moment Mum spotted the empty pill bottle standing on the kitchen table. ‘I’ll be dead soon so
I’m ringing to say goodbye.’

He also, however, told her exactly where he was, so as
soon as she had put the phone down on him she called the
emergency services, who rushed to find him and take him
to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. When Mum
got there the doctors told her that if the ambulance had
been ten minutes later he would have been dead. He was
on a life-support machine for three days and went on to
develop pneumonia. There’s no doubt that Dad had a
genuine problem with depression, but it was always hard
to tell if he really wanted to go through with the suicide
attempts or if they were ‘cries for help’.

While Mum was visiting Dad in the hospital a senior
psychiatrist came to talk to her. He’d been listening to
Dad and had been appalled by everything he’d found out
about their life together.

‘You’re married to a very dangerous man,’ he warned
her. ‘Your husband is schizophrenic and in desperate
need of psychiatric help. Frankly, I’m amazed you’ve
managed to stay married to him for as long as you
have.’

He arranged for Dad to be moved to the psychiatric
hospital and Mum agreed to go in the ambulance with
him. She must have been feeling relieved that someone
else was recognizing her problem and finally helping
her and she must have been worried about Dad too. However badly he had been treating her, he was still the
love of her young life and the father of her children.

‘How long can they keep me here?’ Dad asked the
ambulance driver.

‘They can’t keep you here at all,’ he replied. ‘You’re
going in voluntarily.’

When he arrived at his destination the doctors tried
hard to sedate him but he just kept saying he wanted to
leave and ordering Mum to call him a taxi. She tried to
put up a fight, tried to persuade him that it was for his
own good that he got treatment, but ultimately there was
nothing she could do once he’d made up his mind. Eventually
she gave in and they got a taxi home, where their
lives soon descended back to their previous level of violence
and abuse, with Mum back working on the block
every night of the week.

Mum tried to leave again, not long afterwards, and
once more she went to a refuge for battered women. She
stayed away longer this time and social services took Terry
and me off to live with a foster family, some lovely people
called the Watsons. They had a swimming pool in the
garden of their Suffolk home where they carefully taught
us how to swim. Dad had very different ideas on how
these things should be done: one time he had slung us into
the sea off the pier at Great Yarmouth, telling us that that
would teach us how to swim. ‘Sink or swim!’ he laughed.
As we survived the experience I suppose he must have been right, or maybe it was the current that washed us
back up onto the beach along with all the other flotsam
and jetsam, but I remember how terrifying it was floundering
around in the waves, swallowing great mouthfuls
of salty water every time I went under, compared to all
the gentle help and encouragement the Watsons gave us.

They were such a sweet couple, trying everything possible
to make us feel welcome and part of their family. We
went blackberry picking and Mrs Watson made homemade
pies and jams with us, but whatever we did and
however nice they were to us I felt like an intruder. I
knew I wasn’t their child and I felt I shouldn’t be there.
It was never possible to really relax. I did wonder what
made the Watsons’ own children so much better than us
that they deserved a life like this. Why wasn’t I as special
to my parents as their daughter was to them? My memory
isn’t very clear on dates and ages but we must have
been with them a while because they put us into the local
school, which was very sweet, and the teacher there
taught me how to write.

However wonderful life was with the Watsons, I still
wanted to be back home with my dad because that was
where I felt I belonged. I wasn’t good enough to deserve
to live in a nice home like the Watsons’. I remember one
particular afternoon, lying beside their swimming pool in
glorious sunshine. Everything seemed so perfect. I had a
beautiful new home and some new clothes they had bought for me. Mrs Watson brought us out cold drinks
with ice cubes and fretted about me getting burned, rubbing
sun cream onto my skin and making me feel so
loved and cared for. But something wasn’t quite right and
I still felt sad. I wished I was someone else, a feeling I
would grow very used to over the coming years.

Mum came with her parents a few times to visit us at
that foster home. Although I have no memory of her I do
remember my granddad being there. Mrs Watson was
very understanding apparently and let Mum bath us and
read us bedtime stories.

We were only allowed to see Dad for one hour a week
during that time under supervision at the social services
office. One week he didn’t turn up and so they just took
us back to the Watsons’ in Suffolk. The following day he
turned up at the social services office roaring drunk and
highly agitated, demanding to see us, insisting that it was
his right. The social worker, a Mr Ashby, explained to
him that as we now lived so far away visits had to be
arranged to suit everyone. Dad refused to see reason and
started to beat the poor man up, having first locked the
office door so he couldn’t escape. The police eventually
had to smash the door down and when they burst in they
found Mr Ashby with three broken ribs, a broken nose,
cuts and bruises. Dad was still on top of him, trying to
gouge his eyes out when they finally dragged him off.
That little outburst cost Dad a few months in prison but gave him something to boast about for years. He saw it as
proof of how much he loved his kids, and how he wasn’t
willing to let some pen pusher come between us.

At the time Mum was convinced we would only be in
foster care temporarily and that once she had got her act
together she would have us back and would bring us up
as a single mum. She assumed the authorities would be
able to protect us all from Dad now they knew just how
dangerous he could be. But once he was out of prison
again Dad tracked Mum down and started to pester her
to come back to him. He was always able to find her
because of the involvement of social services in our lives.
She moved and changed jobs twice to try to get away
from him and both times he found her by insisting on his
right to see his kids. Her employers and landlords would
become tired of the harassment he would give her wherever
she went and would ask her to leave.

Whenever Dad found her, he would just completely
wear her down and promise things would be different
and tell her he was the only one who loved her. Mum
left him three or four times but each time he succeeded
in making her go back to him again. And each time he
would have her back out on the street again within a
week.

By that time Mum had been arrested several times for
soliciting and had a suspended sentence hanging over her,
but Dad still forced her back to work. She was terrified of being picked up again and being sent to prison, but he
wouldn’t listen. One night she heard that the vice squad
was doing a sweep of the area and she begged Dad to let
her go home early since she had already earned plenty of
money in the previous few hours. Dad wasn’t willing to
even consider it, becoming angry that she dared to suggest
when she should stop work. It was his decision and
not hers, as far as he was concerned. As they stood on the
pavement beside the busy road he lifted her skirt up and
started shouting at the passing cars.

‘Come and get some of the best cunt in Norwich.’

Mum tells me that that was the final straw. At that
moment she decided she was going to have to escape from
him once and for all, whatever the cost, even if it meant
abandoning her children to his mercies. She had run out
of options. She had no choice any more.

I
have almost no memories of actually living with
Mum although I was six when she finally left for
good. I can’t summon up any mental pictures of what it
was like having her in the house with us. I have a vague
memory of a woman making jellies at a birthday party
but can’t picture her face. There would be no children’s
parties after she left so it must have been Mum who was
there in the kitchen making jelly. She says it was.

Nearly everything I have described so far I learned from
her many years later or from other people who were around
at the time, or from reading my social services records. It
was always hard for Terry and me to piece together exactly
what happened around the time she disappeared because
Mum and Dad had such different views on it.

I do remember her coming back one time after one
of her absences, although I still can’t picture her face. To celebrate our reunion we all went to the pictures as a
family, the four of us together. (I guess Chris and Glen
were back at home in their room as usual.) I still can’t
actually visualize her being there, but I remember the
event because as we came out of the cinema I got lost. I
must have run on ahead in my excitement and taken a
wrong turning. I don’t think I was gone for that long, but
when Dad found me he was really angry with me for
inconveniencing him. When Mum finally left home he
would tell me that I was the reason she had gone; that it
was because I had got lost and been a nuisance to her that
day after the cinema trip that she had decided she could
n’t take any more. He was very good at making out
everything that went wrong in his life was someone else’s
fault. I believed him because he was my dad so he must
be right and because I already knew that I was a bad girl;
he told me so all the time and had convinced me totally.
So for years I believed it was all my fault that our mother
had gone and that she no longer wanted to have anything
to do with any of us.

I think each time Mum came back to Dad after one of
her bids for freedom, she hoped that he would have been
shocked into changing his ways, but each time he would
start putting her down again, hitting her, nagging and
bullying her to go back on the game again.

‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘there’s one of your punters. Why
don’t you do just one more?’

If she didn’t respond to the cajoling then he would
resort to violence. Nothing made him lose his temper
more thoroughly than one of us refusing to do as we were
told. Mum must have realized that as long as she was with
him nothing was ever going to change, she was always
going to have to do whatever he decided for her, that she
would always be selling herself just to keep him in drinking
and betting money. So she made up her mind to disappear
once and for all.

One day in 1973 Mum sneaked home from the shoe
factory in her lunch hour, when she knew Dad would be
safely settled in the pub, and packed her case. Terry and I
were probably sitting outside whichever pub Dad was
drinking in. It didn’t matter because she wasn’t planning
to take any of us with her this time. I suppose she knew
that if she had children in tow Dad would be able to trace
her through social services and make her go back to him.
She wanted to vanish off the face of the earth. The psychiatrist’s
warnings about being married to ‘a very dangerous
man’ must have been ringing in her ears as she
hurried from the house for the last time with her few possessions
hastily packed, slamming the door behind her.
Chris and Glen would have been able to hear her movements
from behind their bedroom door but by that stage
they must have been so weak from hunger that they
wouldn’t have had the strength to cry out to her. There
would have been no point anyway.

At first she went to a male friend and asked him to put
her up. Initially he promised to care for her until she sorted
herself out, but it wasn’t long before she realized he was
going to want to pimp for her just like Dad and she knew
her only chance was to leave Norwich for ever and start
afresh somewhere else, somewhere where no one knew
about her past. When you’re known to be a prostitute and
all the people you socialize with belong to the same world,
it’s almost impossible to change anything as long as you
stay in the same town; you have to make a clean break.
Carrying the suitcase that contained all the possessions she
had left in the world she walked out to the ring road on
the edge of town and hitched a lift with a lorry driver.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.

‘Blakeney,’ he replied.

‘That’ll do,’ she said and that was where she ended up.
She was only about thirty miles up the Norfolk coast
from us but as far as we were concerned back at home she
might as well have been on the other side of the world.

She got herself a job in a hotel as a chambermaid and
found a bed-sitting room. She contacted social services
back in Norwich to tell them she’d gone and to ask them
to take us into care, telling them yet again what her fears
were for us. Her greatest fear, she said, was for me because
of the number of times Dad had told her, and anyone else
who would listen, that he was going to ‘break me in’ and
put me on the game as soon as I was old enough. She knew him well enough to be sure that he wasn’t bluffing. If he
had been willing to put his own wife, the love of his life,
on the game, why wouldn’t he do the same to his daughter?
She told them how dangerous she knew Dad was,
feeling certain that they would take us away from him and
put us into safe homes.