I Did Tell, I Did (6 page)

The little girl in my story knew she wasn’t wanted and knew her mother never loved her. I wrote that she was confused about why her brother and sisters were loved and treated well when she wasn’t. I said she tried hard to please her mother but that her mother never seemed happy with anything she did. This made the little girl very sad and she felt very alone. Her mother referred to her as a mistake, but this little girl hoped that one day her mother would realise that she did love this child after all, and that hope kept her going. She would realise that there had been no mistake and then she would treat the little girl in the same way she treated her other children. And as in all make-believe, they lived happily ever after.

My teacher was very concerned about the content of the story and felt, I suppose, that only a child who had experienced great emotional pain could have written it. She was so concerned that she told me to ask my mother to come into school and discuss it with her.

Mum refused to come, saying she was far too busy.

The teacher must have been very worried indeed because the next day after school she turned up at our front door. I was sent to my room but I listened from the top of the stairs.

‘I’m concerned about a story Cassie wrote in class,’ my teacher said. ‘I wonder if you would have a look at it and tell me what you think.’

‘I haven’t got time for this,’ Mum said impatiently.

‘If you don’t mind, I think it’s important.’

After some persuasion, Mum agreed to read the story and when she finished I heard the sound of her throwing the book down on the table.

‘I wouldn’t worry about this. She’s got a vivid imagination. She’s always making things up. She’s a terrible liar. You wouldn’t believe the stories she comes out with at home.’

The teacher persisted in wondering if anything was wrong but Mum was adamant that I was perfectly happy and the only thing I suffered from was an overactive imagination that made me make up lies.

As soon as the teacher had gone, Mum ordered me downstairs and into the best room, a room that was usually kept for special occasions like Christmas.

But it wasn’t Christmas.

‘Do you feel like the child in this story?’ she asked, holding out my English book. ‘Is this how you really feel?’

At first I was afraid to confess that yes, I did feel like that, but then I was taken in by her play-acting and began to believe she was concerned. ‘Well, yes, I do feel like that,’ I said timidly. ‘I do feel different and not wanted at home.’ There was no reaction so I continued. ‘All I ever wanted is for you to love me, but when I told you about what happened with Uncle Bill you didn’t seem to care. You didn’t even believe me. I don’t understand why you didn’t do something. He hurt me and scared me, and it was horrible.’ My eyes welled up at the memory.

Suddenly, the woman in front of me erupted like a volcano. She grabbed my shoulders and shook me violently then
slapped my face over and over, all the time screaming at me. ‘You’re the most ungrateful child ever to have been born. How can you say you’re not loved? It was all lies about Bill. He would never hurt you and do those awful things. How could you write down all those dreadful things in that story and let your teacher see them?’

Mum glared down at me for a while, as if considering something. Suddenly she seemed to come to a decision: ‘You’ll have to go and live somewhere else. Yes, that’s it. Perhaps in a children’s home,’ she grimaced. ‘Then you would know what it’s like not to be loved!’

That was the threat Uncle Bill had made, that I would be sent away to an awful place where bad things would happen to me. Why was Mum saying this? She had asked me how I felt. Should I have lied and said I made it all up, that it was just a story?

In the middle of all of this drama, Dad came home from work and wanted to know what was going on.

‘Your little girl doesn’t love us any more and she wants to leave home,’ Mum told him, then began to cry with big, loud, choking sobs.

I tried to say that this wasn’t true but Mum cried even louder, drowning me out, so I ran up to my room and hid under the bedclothes. My only place of safety.

Later that evening no one seemed to know where Mum was. She had done one of her disappearing acts, so Dad and I went out looking for her. It was cold, dark and wet and we seemed to be searching for hours. As a last resort I called in at the fish and chip shop owned by a neighbour, Auntie Mary, who was a
friend of Mum’s. I asked if she had seen Mum but she claimed she hadn’t been by all day. While we were talking, I thought I caught a glimpse of Mum walking past the window that looked out from Auntie Mary’s house into the back of the shop. I was sure I saw her, but Mary denied it.

Eventually we went home, but Auntie Mary came in to talk to Dad later. I listened from my usual spot at the top of the stairs.

‘Your wife came to see me and she’s desperately upset. She says your ungrateful daughter has been spreading ugly rumours about being ill-treated and unloved, and now she doesn’t want to come home any more.’

I felt terrible. I had never
told
anyone how I felt. I’d only written about it in the story, and now I wished I’d never done that.

I rushed down the stairs and confronted Auntie Mary. ‘Please tell Mum I didn’t mean it. Tell her I love her and please tell her to come home.’

Mum let us sweat it out for a few more hours before she deigned to come back. As soon as I heard the door opening, I rushed down to apologise and tell her I hadn’t meant it.

‘Get away from me!’ she screamed. ‘Get away, you nasty child. You hurt me badly with all your lies and insinuations. I’m a good mother and you should be grateful to me. I do everything for you and this is how you repay me.’ At this she fell into her chair and began to cry.

My brother and sisters crowded round to comfort her. Dad said nothing, just left the room to go to his safe place, the shed
in the back garden. I cowered in the background, once more the outsider, the person no one loved or wanted.

After this episode things got much worse for me. Confident that she occupied the moral high ground, Mum decided that Uncle Bill could come back into our lives again. The day he came back, he was armed with flowers for Mum and presents for us children.

‘Can I take Cassie out for a ride, Kath?’ he asked, looking at me with the same funny expression he’d had when he hurt and scared me before. ‘We won’t be long. I’ve missed our trips out.’

I remember thinking that I hadn’t missed him at all. I wanted to scream, ‘No, you can’t take me out.’ But I didn’t. It wouldn’t have made any difference.

‘Yes, of course you can,’ my mother replied. ‘She’s not doing anything useful, so take as long as you like.’

I walked with him to the car, feet dragging, and climbed into the front seat feeling very nervous. We drove to a quiet side road and he stopped the car. This is OK, I thought, this is OK, nothing will happen here. But I was wrong.

Without saying a word, he reached over and put his hand up my skirt and into my panties then started rubbing his fingers up and down on my private parts and groaning.

I was terrified. What could I do? How could I stop him? There was no one around to hear me if I screamed. I couldn’t jump out of the car and run away because I didn’t know where we were.

‘Please don’t,’ I whispered. ‘Please stop.’

‘You don’t really want me to stop,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a new game we can play. Won’t that be fun?’

I looked at his face, the face I used to think of as friendly, and I knew that whatever it was, I wasn’t going to enjoy it.

‘The game is for you to find the love toy. I’ve hidden it in my trousers and you have to find it. Come on! Here’s what you do.’ He took my hand and pulled it to the front of his trousers and rubbed it up and down.

I was scared and wanted it to stop. This wasn’t a game I liked. My toys were fun. Games were something you were supposed to enjoy, not something nasty and horrible.

‘Come on, Cassie. You know how much I love you.’ He kissed my face, pushing my hand harder against him.

If that was what love meant, I didn’t want it. I’d always thought love was gentle and kind and that you didn’t hurt the person you loved, but Uncle Bill kept on hurting me.

Now he had unfastened his trousers and was pushing my hand inside where it felt all squelchy. He moved it up and down on his private part, his awfulness, and I felt it get bigger. I pulled my hand away and tried to hide it somewhere safe, like under my jumper, but he wouldn’t let me do that. He was groaning and squirming around, making me hold tightly onto this nasty part of his body. Then I felt yucky whitish stuff all over my fingers, making me want to retch. It was horrible and sticky and I supposed it must be wee. Why would he do that to me? I was scared to death and he just didn’t care.

He pulled a hankie from his pocket and cleaned himself up then he threw it onto my lap. ‘Wipe your hands off and we’ll go home,’ he said in a cold voice.

I was yearning to be at home, in the relative safety of my bedroom, so I wiped my hands and sat still and silent as he drove me back then dropped me off outside our house.

I ran straight upstairs to the bathroom and let the water gush over my trembling hands. I couldn’t make sense of it at all. I felt lonely and desperate. Was this how love was supposed to be? Was it meant to cause you pain and disgust till you felt sick to your stomach? There was no one I could ask. I felt too ashamed. My feelings were too intense, too heavy. I couldn’t find peace anywhere. I had told my mother what he had done and she hadn’t believed me, so now there was no one left who could help me.

Soon Uncle Bill wanted us to play his games at every opportunity he had, whenever he could get me on his own—all in the name of ‘love’. I would beg Mum to tell him I couldn’t go out with him.

‘Please, Mum. Please. I don’t want to go. Don’t make me.’

‘You ungrateful girl!’ she’d snap. ‘Bill goes to a lot of trouble to give you a nice time. He loves you—goodness knows why—so you can just jolly well go out with him when he can find the time for you and count yourself lucky.’

Lucky. That was one thing I never felt as a child. Sometimes I thought I must be the unluckiest child in the whole wide world.

T
he in-between times, when I wasn’t with Uncle Bill or Mum, became the only bits that kept me going. My singing was an in-between time, as was school, but the most important in-between time was the time I spent with Claire.

Claire was a skitty, funny, happy girl who was just lovely to be around. I often went to her house at weekends and during the holidays and I used to love the way her parents were with her. They laughed together and hugged each other and it all seemed so natural and easy. Claire’s mum often invited me to stay overnight and I was able to truly relax then, knowing there were hours ahead of me in which no one would shout at me or pull my hair and hit me, and that there was no chance of Uncle Bill coming to take me out. Sometimes Mum banned me from staying over at Claire’s because she didn’t want me to enjoy myself, but most of the time she would let me because it got me out from under her feet.

The times I spent with Claire and her family allowed me to daydream. I wished I belonged there. I tried to pretend that they were my family, and that her mum and dad were mine too. I know her parents really cared about me because of the clothes they bought me and the trips they took me on as part of their family. Why couldn’t I become one of them?

Claire and I liked playing games of make-believe. Once we made up a play called
Princess Tallulah and the Emperor’s Treasure
and invited some of the other children in her street to act in it. I played Princess Tallulah, who was beautiful and kind, and I loved the feeling of being someone else, someone happy.

Sometimes we pretended we were grown-up ladies out for lunch with each other. We’d dress up smartly and go into the café in Littlewood’s department store, Claire with her pocket money and me with any pennies I’d managed to save from doing odd jobs for neighbours. We’d order one bowl of ‘Piping Hot Tomato Soup’ and a roll to share. Sometimes I poured a little bit of vinegar into the soup, just because I could. It didn’t improve the flavour, but Mum would never let me have vinegar at home because she said it soured the blood. So, on a Saturday in Littlewoods, I poured vinegar in my soup. It felt good to be able to do this without her watching and telling me off.

When we were nine, Claire and I joined the Girls’ Life Brigade, where we worked to earn badges for things like handicraft, housekeeping and reading books. The Brigade meetings were every Friday night and I started going to Claire’s after school on Friday then staying the night after the meeting. Her
mum would make us baked beans on toast and we would watch
Popeye
together on television. There was never any pressure to eat foods I didn’t like, such as green vegetables. We’d have a lovely girly time, giggling as we dropped off to sleep in the same room.

Sometimes I watched Claire and wondered if there was anyone like Uncle Bill who touched her and hurt her, but I couldn’t imagine that there was. She was too clean and happy, untouched by anything nasty in the world. Occasionally I thought about telling her what Uncle Bill did. I’d rehearse the words over and over in my head. Maybe I should just hint at it and see how she reacted?

But if my own mum didn’t believe me, why should anyone else? And the threat of being sent to a children’s home was always hanging over me. I didn’t know anyone who had been to one but everything I heard about them sounded grim. Our English teacher, Mrs Rutherford, once read us a story about a little girl who lived in a children’s home and it sounded like an awful place to be. The teachers were cruel and locked the girl in a cupboard. The children were kept short of food and were beaten if they were naughty. I didn’t want to go somewhere like that, so I couldn’t risk telling.

Besides, what if Claire thought it was my fault? What if she told her mum and they decided I couldn’t come to their house any more because I was tainted, or bad? I had been told so often at home that I was a bad person that there was part of me that believed whatever was happening was my own fault. I must deserve it when Bill put his hand inside my panties and rubbed
till it felt raw, or made me hold his love toy while he made strange grunting noises. I didn’t want to risk losing my make-believe family, who were so kind to me. That’s why I couldn’t tell Claire about these things that made me feel sick and terrified. I couldn’t tell anyone.