Slave Girl (5 page)

The case lasted four days. To prevent me having to face Dad across the courtroom I gave evidence via a video link, from a little room off to the side. Of course this completely shattered my fantasies of standing in the witness box and pointing an accusing finger at the man who had ruined my childhood, but I’m glad I did it that way. Dad denied everything – of course he did – and it would have been terrible to answer all the questions his barrister wanted to ask me with my abuser sitting just a few feet away, his eyes glaring at me. Even so, it was a real ordeal. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s easy to give evidence about being abused: it’s an incredibly painful, gut-wrenching experience.

Because of the video link I never saw the inside of the court until the last day. It was smaller and less formal than I’d thought it would be. I’d imagined something much more imposing and Victorian. I sat at the back and managed to get a good look at the jury as the verdict was read out by the judge. I was astonished to see that quite a few of them were crying openly – it had never occurred to me that a stranger could care about me enough to cry like that. And then they found my dad guilty.

The judge was Sir Angus Stroyan. He’d been a top QC before being promoted to the Bench and would later go on to be the top judge for the whole of Newcastle. He looked at Dad and told him that this was one of the worst cases he’d ever heard, and he sentenced him to eight years in prison.

Some people might think that doesn’t sound very much – one year inside for every year that he’d abused me and made my life hell. But compared to what most men get for molesting their kids it was a big sentence. Often – too often – courts impose less than four years in jail: four years is a magic number because anything less and the man doesn’t get considered for the sex offender programmes inside prison. Those programmes are the best way of getting through to paedophiles: they strip away the layers of self-deceit and self-justification with which these men surround themselves and force them to confront the reality of what sexual abuse did to their victim.

And what of Dad’s victim? What was I feeling, as they led him away – flanked by two prisoner officers – to face years of degradation and danger inside the prison system? (Even I knew that paedophiles – ‘nonces’ in jail slang – are the lowest of the low inside, and are often viciously attacked by their fellow inmates.) What was I feeling? Guilty, of course. Paedophiles survive during the time they are abusing by making their child victims take responsibility; by making them feel they are the ones to blame for the abuse. Dad was no different: he had made me complicit in a vile, dirty little secret – and now I was responsible – on my 16th birthday – for sending him to a place from which he might not emerge alive. Oh, yes, I took that responsibility on my shoulders; I welcomed the blame and the guilt inside me like an old friend. It was all my fault – of course it was: it always had been so.

And I felt like that right up until the moment when, as the prison officers got him and began to take him away, he turned and spat out his birthday message to me: ‘You little bastard – I’ll kill you.’ I was in a daze as he was led away: the guilt and the self-blame had evaporated, so you’d think I would feel relief or satisfaction, or as if a great burden had been lifted off me. But I didn’t: I believed Dad when he said he would kill me.

It took three years inside before Dad finally admitted what he’d done to me. And somewhere along the way he also got religion and claimed to be a changed man. It took a long time for my fear of him to subside. Even when Dad found God and understood what he’d done to me I still didn’t feel safe from him. As long as I could remember I’d pleaded with him not to hurt me and he had carried right on and abused me. Even when someone had stopped him they’d punished me by locking me up in Care. So how much faith was I ever going to have in either my father or the system itself?

But for the moment I had to get on with my life. I was 16, out of Care and free, for the foreseeable future, of Dad. It was time to make up for lost years and missed education. I went to college.

Gateshead College had been in existence (in one form or another) since the First World War. In 1955, Prince Philip cut the ribbon on the new, purpose-built campus premises on Durham Road. By the time I arrived it had grown into a busy and exciting place with four major departments and more than 200 staff. I was accepted to study for the National Nursery Examination Board (NNEB) exams. The NNEB diploma is the key to getting a job working with children – and I knew that was what I wanted to do. So every day I got on the bus from near Mum’s flat to spend all day studying at the college.

And I loved it. I loved the subject, the theory, the practical work that went with it: I loved everything about it. But was I happy? Now that’s a whole other question.

I’ve often looked back to that time and asked myself what went wrong. Generally I come up with a one-word answer: Steve. Steve isn’t his real name. Since he was largely the innocent party in what happened I don’t think it’s fair to identify him. I haven’t seen him for more than 15 years – who knows, he might be happily married by now, with a good job, a family and a decent life. I certainly hope so.

Despite my success at college, my personal life was something of a mess. I was 16 and thought I knew everything the world had to throw at me. As a result, I was wild and out of control more nights than I care to remember. I’d grown up too fast and too hard. I’d been used to the attentions of older men – whether welcome or not – and if I felt ill at ease with myself well, that could usually be solved by a few nights out on the town with whoever was interested in buying the drinks.

My poor mum despaired. I’d only just been returned to her after what seemed like a lifetime’s separation – first, through the abuse and then from being in Care. And now here was her precious little girl, the daughter to whom she had been so close, staying out till all hours of the night in the company of God knows who. Did she argue with me? You bet she did. Did I listen? Of course not.

And so it was deeply ironic that it was through Mum that I met Steve.

Steve was older than me – 10 years older, in fact. He was an engineer working in a local small business and I met him through Mum’s boyfriend. I’m not proud to admit that the reason I started seeing him was purely mercenary. He had a car, and to a frustrated, rebellious teenager sharing a small flat with her mum and sister (my brother had left home by this point) he represented hope and something I could otherwise only have dreamed of: freedom.

I didn’t love Steve; that much is certain. And he didn’t love me. We got along well, had a good laugh and, like I say, he had a car. But we didn’t love each other.

And then I discovered I was pregnant.

I didn’t tell Steve, even though I knew he was the father. I may not have loved him but I’d definitely been faithful to him. By then I was 17 years old, coming up to my exams and with the possibility of a normal life ahead of me for the first time since I was a toddler – and I was pregnant. My head was spinning; I was in a complete whirl. Who could I talk to? Where could I go? What should I do?

I plucked up courage from somewhere and talked to Mum. It wasn’t an easy conversation and we were both torn in two. I loved the idea of children and knew I would be good with them – but I was so young and my life had been so messed up. Could I actually cope with becoming a mother?

Now, when I look back at the young girl I was then, facing such an enormous, life-changing decision, it’s sometimes as if I am watching a completely different person. That teenager isn’t me: it’s someone else and I have no control – no responsibility – for the choices she makes. Mum did her best to advise me, but she was as lost in this mess as me. Neither of us knew what to do for the best, so we sort of drifted into a decision. And that decision was to terminate the life growing inside of me.

Mum found a private clinic that would do the operation. A week later she and I drove to Leeds together. I don’t know why she chose Leeds, but that’s where we went. We drove in silence, sitting miserably in Mum’s car as the miles slowly slipped by until we came to the clinic that would give me an abortion. It cost £500: we had to pay upfront. I know the people who ran this place weren’t bad people; I know they weren’t intentionally unkind. But it was an awful, hopeless place, a place where you went when you were desperate; a place that, by the time you left, you’d never be the same again.

I was 16 weeks pregnant and I really didn’t want to get rid of my baby. I wanted to keep it and hold it and love it. Deep down I knew that. But I put on that gown and I walked from the ward to the theatre and lay down on the trolley while they put me to sleep. The nurses told me that when I woke up I would feel like I wanted to wee, but they said that was just a feeling – I wouldn’t be able to wee; I would just feel like I needed to. They were right, of course: it was their job and they knew how it worked. I did feel like I wanted to wee, but I also felt so much more.

I don’t know if I was supposed to ask and I’m pretty certain no one was supposed to tell me, but I know that if I hadn’t had that abortion I would have a daughter. And today she would be 17 – the same age I was when I went to that clinic with my mum.

Mum and I drove back to Gateshead the day after the abortion. We didn’t say a lot on the way home. I knew, without her ever telling me, that she was as devastated as I was. I stayed on at college and I passed my exams. I still went out – though I was generally quieter and less wild when I did. I stopped seeing Steve, though. I asked Mum to tell him about me being pregnant but we decided that instead of saying I’d had an abortion we’d say I’d miscarried. It seemed a kinder way to let him down: why should he go through the torment that washed through me from the moment I woke up till the moment I fell asleep? Either way, though, there was no future for Steve and me.

Once I’d got my NNEB qualification I could look for work as a nursery nurse. It didn’t seem hard to find and soon I was taken in by a primary school just down the road in Gateshead, helping with the four- and five-year-old children who were starting in its reception class.

From the very first day I loved it. I loved the job, the work, the school and – above all – the bairns. I’d just got rid of a child and there I was, surrounded by them. They were so young and so innocent, and so many of them needed so much love and attention that some of the pain that gnawed away inside me began to ease off. It felt good – and it was wonderfully easy – to lose myself in the needs of others. Wiping a nose here, tying a shoelace there; above all, holding their little bodies when they had hurt themselves and were sobbing their hearts out – this was how I could see my life going. I had a mission, a purpose for my existence, and at last I was fulfilling it.

The months flew by so quickly and I started feeling confident enough in myself to agree to dates with boys once again. I suppose most 18-year-olds reading this will wonder why on earth it took such reserves of confidence. I wasn’t ugly – I had a nice slim figure, curly brown hair and I knew men found me attractive. But I wasn’t really interested in sex: it hadn’t done me much good in my life and I didn’t want to get hurt again.

And anyway, I didn’t think of myself as attractive. I felt small and powerless; plain and uninteresting. Why – apart from the chance to have his way with me – would a bloke want to go out with
me
? And so it was a slow and cautious process of dipping my toe back in the water. I was still living with Mum at the time and so it was perhaps inevitable that I met someone else through her.

Chris – once again I’ve not used his real name here – was another of Mum’s boyfriend’s mates. The two of them were members of the same golf club and he came across as a real gentleman. He was seven years older than me and much more settled. I told him about the way my life had been – what Dad did, the abuse in Care, even the abortion – and he listened without ever judging me. We started seeing each other regularly and were soon very much a couple. We went everywhere and did everything together, and before too many months had passed we had agreed to live together as well.

I’d learned one good thing from my dad: he always insisted that renting was a mug’s game – ‘get on the property ladder, own your own home’ was something he hammered into us kids from an early age. So when Chris and I started looking for a place to live I knew that we were going to buy, not pay out money to a landlord.

We found a nice little house in Birtley, a pleasant area on the outskirts of Gateshead itself and close to Chris’ beloved golf club. It was clean and neat and modern. It had just the one bedroom but I knew I could make a lovely home for us. We were both working – Chris had a good job and I was doing really well as a nursery nurse – so there was no problem in getting a mortgage. The day I moved our possessions in through the front door I felt that I was finally a real
grownup
woman. I was 18 at this point and it seemed as though at last I was going to find real happiness.

I loved that little house. Once the door closed it was just Chris and me (unless Mum or my brother and sister came over to visit). I began to decorate, giving full rein to the passion for art that I’d discovered at Riverside. The walls were soon treated to the fashionable styles of the day –
rag-rolling
, sponging, colour washing – and at weekends I worked to make the tiny garden as neat and trim as a shiny new pin.

Chris and I settled into our new life together really quickly. I suppose we were a married couple in all but name. We did everything together and enjoyed taking holidays in the sun – Rhodes was a real favourite – it all added to my sense of security and happiness.

I suppose I should have known it wouldn’t last. There’s a pattern to my life and it’s hard and cold and unfair. Whenever something seems to go right, whenever I appear to be in control and I’m not having to face up to yet more turmoil, that’s when something is absolutely guaranteed to turn up and smack me in the face. And sometimes it’s my fault – at least in part.