I Did Tell, I Did (13 page)

The houseboat was brown and a bit grimy. He pushed me up onto the deck then down some wooden steps into a room that
had a sort of bed in it. There was nothing else except a bed. I went cold. I suppose I had hoped that there would be very little room in a boat for him to be able to hurt me again, but there was plenty of space in there for him to do whatever he wanted. He sat on the bed and stood me in front of him.

‘Take your clothes off,’ he ordered, and I began to cry.

I had been trying to teach myself to switch off during his abuse. I don’t mean I switched off to what was happening to the extent that I didn’t make any memories; that would have been wonderful but I couldn’t manage that. Instead I taught myself to concentrate on something else, such as the sea. I would think about waves washing up on the seashore, the shushing sound as they pulled back along the sand, and their rhythmic, timeless movement. It didn’t stop the fear, but it made it bearable. I tried to shut myself off in my head, to put all the horrid nastiness into a box and keep it there with the lid firmly on. If I could learn to do it really well, I hoped I’d be able to cut off from what was happening to me. But when he made me take my clothes off, I felt so exposed that I couldn’t switch off, couldn’t pretend I was anywhere else but there. Present. In that moment. I was a small, helpless child.

‘Get them off!’ he ordered again, and I obeyed because there was nothing else I could do. Slowly I unbuttoned my school cardigan and shirt, pulled my vest over my head, then sat down on the edge of the bed to remove my socks and shoes. All the time Bill was staring at me, touching himself and making groaning noises in his throat.

‘Lovely,’ he leered. ‘You’re lovely and you’re all mine.’

I couldn’t bring myself to remove my panties, but Bill came over and ripped them off then pushed me back on the bed, forcing my legs apart.

‘Oh. I love you. You know that, don’t you? I’ve missed you and missed our games. I know you must have missed this too, haven’t you?’

Before I could answer, there was the sudden horrendous pain again. Pain like I had never felt before in my young life. He kept pushing and pushing himself inside me and I was trying to scream that it hurt but no sound came out of my mouth. The love toy had become an evil monster controlled by him, my godfather, the man they called Uncle Bill. How could he do this to me? Why? What had I done to deserve this?

I had stopped crying. I kept my eyes closed and tried to stop breathing altogether. I stopped being, stopped living. I was a thing, an object, not a person. On and on it went without respite, for longer than it ever had before.

When it was over, the man who professed to love me pushed me away so hard that I fell onto the floor. He was swearing and trying to get his trousers back on and he couldn’t do the buttons up for some reason.

‘Get up, get over here and button these up!’ he shouted.

I shook my head. I couldn’t touch his sweaty, smelly trousers. I couldn’t move. I was hurting and scared. Why should I do anything to help him when all he ever did was hurt me?

But when he ordered me again, my courage failed and I got up and did his bidding with shaking fingers. My whole body
shook after our ‘games’. It was as if my muscles went into a spasm of revulsion. My teeth were chattering, my legs felt like jelly and there were palpitations in my chest. Every part of my body was protesting at the way it had been treated.

In the car on the way home, I sat mute, huddled, with my arms round myself. Bill looked over and grinned. ‘We’ll have to go to the boat again really soon, Cassie. But remember this is our secret. You can’t tell anyone. You know what will happen if you do.’ He left the threat hanging in the air. ‘Besides, no one will believe you anyway.’

He didn’t have to remind me of that. I knew that already. I had told Mum and I hadn’t been believed.

Uncle Bill dropped me off outside our front door, patting my knee and smiling as though we’d just been out for a treat together, like the zoo or a funfair. ‘See you again soon, Cassie,’ he said. ‘Tell your mum I had to dash but that I’ll see her next time.’

I went into the house and straight up to the bathroom, where I locked the door behind me. No one shouted up to ask if I was OK or if I’d had a good time. I ran some water in the bath, took my clothes off then I climbed into the water and scrubbed and scrubbed myself until I bled. I wanted to erase any last trace of Bill’s smell from my skin, get rid of any lingering stickiness from the yucky stuff he left inside me.

I didn’t go downstairs for tea and no one came up to ask why not. I just dried myself and went straight to bed. I prayed to God yet again to rescue me from my uncle and then I cried myself to sleep, muffling the sound of my sobs in the pillow. I
must have been the loneliest girl in the world at that point. No one was listening. No one cared.

After the first visit to the houseboat, things settled into a routine. Bill arranged with my mum that he would pick me up after school three nights a week, when I didn’t have choir practice or Girls’ Brigade. I was safe on Tuesdays and Fridays but not the rest of the week.

‘She needs a hand with all those books to carry,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got the car so I’m happy to do it.’

On the way home, he would pull off the road into the bluebell wood, telling me we had to play our secret game. This might be pushing his love toy inside me, or making me lick it or forcing my hands round it until the white stuff squirted out. We’d be late home, but Bill would always have some explanation for Mum—an errand he had to do, something he needed to pick up, or the car needing petrol. Not that she ever asked where we had been. It didn’t matter to her. She wouldn’t have noticed.

We went to the houseboat most weekends, and then there was more time for his sick games. He would tell me that the love toy became very angry if it wasn’t treated well. Treating it well, I had learned, meant touching and stroking it until it became hard then, the worst part of all, licking it until he said it was clean.

I never looked at it. Never looked at him. I did my best to find a safe place in my head where I could forget about the ugly purple piece of flesh in my hands or in my mouth or between my legs. I tried to forget about the grimacing, sweating face
looming over me and the fat lips covering my face and neck with their slobber.

After we began to go to the houseboat on Saturdays, Bill made Mum tell Claire’s mum that I couldn’t stay over on Friday nights any more because he wanted me up bright and early, ready for him to pick me up for a full day of abuse. I took this new blow without complaint. I had no power to affect anything about my life any more. I was utterly powerless. Some Saturdays he would bring a picnic with him, or he would stop and get some fish and chips at a nearby shop, but I could never eat. I was too scared and tense to eat, too sickened by what he did to me. We never stayed overnight but we could be there all day. Long horrible days that left me in a lot of pain.

Life was utterly unbearable. The in-between bits were very rare now. I was sleepwalking from one assault to the next. I hardly ever saw Claire, except at the Girls’ Life Brigade meeting when we were busy and didn’t have time to talk, then I would have to say goodbye to her at the bus stop and go straight home afterwards. At the age of thirteen she left the Brigade when schoolwork got too demanding, and I did the same. The hope seemed to have disappeared from my life altogether and I thought God had gone with it. My life was a sham. A painful, scary sham.

It was as though everything I’d ever had had been stolen from me. I was living a lie, pretending to everyone around me, lying about where I’d been because the truth was just too awful. I never cried any more. I just went through the motions of going to school, doing my work, then walking out the school
gates to where Uncle Bill’s black Austin was parked. It never occurred to me to make an excuse and say that I had to stay behind late or something. The caretaker locked the gates at 4.30 anyway, so it wouldn’t have worked.

If it was raining, my friends would say, ‘Aren’t you lucky having someone to give you a lift home?’ Not many of their parents had cars in those days. I’d just look at them and think how little they knew me. Bill would never get out of the car to greet me. He’d just wait till I got in, then he’d start the car and drive off to the woods.

When I look back, I don’t know how I survived. But I was just surviving, not living. I couldn’t share what was happening to me. I was twelve years old and I felt like the walking dead.

I became more and more introspective. While my friends liked Elvis Presley, I preferred sad ballads like Patsy Cline’s ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ and Carl Smith’s ‘Why? Why?’ I started reading romantic novels and poetry because they took me outside my own head to a make-believe place far away. Friends invited me to parties but I always refused, embarrassed because I didn’t have anything to wear, and didn’t know how to be around boys. What would I say to them? What would they expect of me?

Ellen and Rosie were working in the local hospital and both had boyfriends, so I watched them dressing up in the big full skirts of the period, giggling as they checked their makeup and pulled on stilettos. Tom left school at fifteen and joined the Marine cadets and I liked to help him clean the brass buttons and white belts of his uniform. He was the only one I felt
remotely close to. I loved him and I think he cared about me as well, but we never had a conversation about what was really going on in the house and I couldn’t ever have told him about my misery. Anne was still the baby of the family, but I began to worry that Uncle Bill might turn his attentions to her one day. I thought about warning someone, telling them to keep an eye on him—but how could I, without telling what he was doing to me? So I said nothing.

I hadn’t had any sex education at school but I knew what Bill was doing was wrong. My friends had talked about kissing boys and ‘playing around’ but I didn’t know what ‘playing around’ meant. I thought it must be fun and what was happening to me was anything but fun. One day Wendy told us that her mum and dad were having a baby and she exclaimed that she hadn’t realised they had sex. Maureen laughed and began to describe graphically what happens when a baby is created. It was only then I realised that what Uncle Bill was doing to me was grown-up sex, the kind that makes babies. Up till then I’d been unsure and confused.

One day we were lying on the bed in the houseboat after he had raped me, when he said something that shattered me: ‘If you told anyone about us now, they’d think you must have been enjoying it all this time. They’d think you agreed, that you wanted to be my girlfriend. Have you ever thought about that?’

The thought that anyone could believe I enjoyed his attentions had never occurred to me. Of course it hadn’t.

‘They’ll think you must have loved it. That you made advances to me and flirted with me. You’re the guilty one and
I’m innocent. They’d probably send you away to a home, a place where you could play these games all the time.’

I thought about what he said and decided it was probably true. I’d been playing games with Bill since the age of seven and I was now a teenager. He first forced himself inside me when I was eleven. If I hadn’t wanted to do it, everyone would assume I’d just have stopped. They wouldn’t understand how he drained the will to resist from me, drained the will to live. He persuaded me that everyone would believe I’d been in love with him and it was all my own fault.
Was
it my own fault?

Now I felt guilty as well as dirty. That is, when I felt anything at all.

W
hen I was about fourteen, my Nana C, Mum’s mum, came to stay with us. She had been very poorly and Mum was the only family she had so, reluctantly, Mum agreed she could move in. We didn’t have a spare bedroom upstairs but a bed was put into the back room of the ground floor of the house and she was installed in there with all her bits and pieces.

I was pleased when she came as I was very fond of her and she was kind to me whenever Mum wasn’t around. Mum told me that it was my responsibility to look after Nana. This gave her an excuse to exclude me from family outings to the fair or to the beach, but I didn’t mind because I was much happier staying at home with Nana.

We had secrets between us, secrets that I was happy to keep. Good secrets. For example, my mother thought Nana was bedridden. In order to be allowed to move in, she’d had to pretend she couldn’t walk and I was the only one who was in on the secret that she actually could, albeit slowly. When the
family went out for the day, I’d watch out of the window as they drove out of sight over the bridge at the end of our road, then I’d give Nana the all clear.

‘Have they gone yet?’ she would ask. ‘Have they gone over the bridge?’

When she was sure they were out of the way, she would get out of bed and hobble through to join me in the kitchen. On these occasions we would sit together and she would tell me stories about the war. Not scary stories, but nice ones about the sing-songs she and her neighbours had in the air-raid shelters. She told me about her husband, my Mum’s dad, who went missing during the First World War and how much in love they had been. And she made me laugh with tales of her escapades when she was young. Once when she was helping at the local hospital, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was visiting. Nana was running late and was still on her hands and knees drying the floor as the royal visitors approached. Not wanting to get caught, she crawled under a table and had to stay there until they had gone. She fell about laughing as she described peering out at their shoes as they chatted away unawares.

When we were alone together we would make jam tarts and eat them all before anyone returned, so as not to give the game away. We would sit out in the garden and play with my dog. Sometimes we would just sit together and say nothing. But we were always sure to get Nana back in bed before anyone returned, and they never guessed our secret.

These were good times, in-between times that helped me to get through all the rest. It never occurred to me to tell Nana
about Uncle Bill, though. What if he was right and she thought it was all my own fault? I couldn’t bear her to think badly of me. It was too awful to contemplate.