Slave Girl (6 page)

I yearned for the life of a normal teenager. I longed to go out dancing and clubbing and generally throwing my cares to the wind – at least for a night. I didn’t necessarily want to go wild and get blind drunk – those days had long been cauterised out of me by the abortion – but I did want to feel alive and act my age. And therein lay the problem.

Chris may have been a real gentleman but he was also much older and more mature than me. Although there was only seven years between us it felt like he was going on 50. His idea of a good time was going up to his precious golf club and drinking in the bar. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t exactly teetotal. I could enjoy a drink as much as anyone but the golf club was a bit stuffy for me, and Chris’s insistence on spending so much time there, drinking with the other boring old men, began to rub me up the wrong way.

It didn’t help that wherever we went I seemed to get a lot of attention from other blokes. They made it obvious they fancied me and were pretty unsubtle about doing so right in front of Chris. I rather enjoyed the attention – it felt good to be appreciated, though I’d never have done anything about it. But Chris hated it, and as time wore on he became more and more possessive. I suppose that because I was so openly flirty he was worried I might run off with someone one night – and no matter how much I promised him that I never would, the anxiety grew inside him like a cancer. The more he complained, the more I became defiant and resentful. It felt like he was stifling me, squeezing the enjoyment out of my life. We argued and argued, settling into a pattern of flare-ups and dull silences. We both of us realised that the writing was on the wall.

It didn’t help that around this time the ghosts of my past turned up to haunt me again.

Out of the blue one evening there was a knock on the front door. When I opened it there were two women CID officers from Northumbria police. They said they knew I had been in several care homes in the area and they wanted to know if they could talk to me about my experiences.

People assume that I must have been pleased when the police turned up. After all that I had endured at that terrible care home someone was prepared to do something about it. And in a way, of course, I did feel like that. But when you’ve been sexually abused as a child – especially over such a long period – it’s never as easy as a simple feeling of relief: because it hurts to talk about what was done to me. For years I have tried to push those awful memories to the back of my mind and I have to steel myself mentally to dredge them up again.

And on top of that there’s the effect on me once I have started to spill out the river of poisonous memories. Like most abused children the pain of reliving what I endured was almost like a physical force: I felt sick and weary and scared all over again. The whole point of going through this hurt is that justice might be done – that someone might be forced to answer in a court for what they did to me. But I’d told Social Services about the abusers in that care home when I was 13, and other than agreeing not to send me back there, nothing had been done; certainly no one had been prosecuted.

That’s the thing about hope: when it’s raised and then dashed the pain is unique and terrible. And to do that to an abused child – to put her through the ordeal of re-living painful memories, to raise her expectations and then do nothing – well that’s nothing short of cruel.

So I can’t say I was happy that evening when the CID officers arrived on my doorstep, but one of the other children who’d been in the same home, who had also been targeted by the same men had given them my name, and she had said that I had been abused too. I was non-committal at first, but the police kept talking to me – quietly and patiently – and in the end I agreed to give a statement. I went to the police station and I told the officers all about the abuse: I told them about the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ game and the little room where the men would take us and rape us. And I told them which of the staff had hurt me.

And that was the last I heard about it. Days, weeks and then months went by without any contact from the detectives. All that difficult and painful process – then nothing. Once again it felt as though I’d had my hopes raised only for them to be dashed. And as yet more months passed by without any news I felt lower and lower and lower.

I couldn’t have known it then, but I was far from the only person feeling that way. And as things turned out it was only going to get worse.

S
chiphol airport seemed huge. It’s actually only the fifth biggest airport in Europe – and even lower in the wider international rankings – but because of the way it’s built you wouldn’t know it. Unlike other major airports its departure and arrivals terminals – three of them – are all housed in one massive building. Nearly 50 million passengers pass through Schiphol every year, constantly scurrying from one end of the terminal to another, in search of flights, food or the person meeting them. If you look down on it from above, it must seem like a vast ant hill, with constant and seemingly random motion.

It was September 1995, and there I was: little Sarah Forsyth from Gateshead in the midst of all these thousands of people from all over the world. I was in my best clothes, neatly made-up, excited and, as I walked through the concertina contraption that connected the plane to the arrivals hall, just a little nervous. For me, this day – a day like any other for all the thousands of other passengers, I supposed – was to be the first day of my new life.

It had all begun a few weeks earlier. Chris and I had finally parted. No bitterness, no hard words, just the realisation for both of us that we weren’t meant to be together and that the more we tried, the more we’d get on each other’s nerves. There was only one thing to do and, with little or no fuss, we did it.

I did feel, though, that in some indefinable way I’d failed. My first real grown-up relationship hadn’t worked out, and my lovely home – the place I’d dreamed of having all through the cold, lonely years in Care – was going to be sold to someone else. I felt terribly, terribly sad. Still, I knew I had to get on with it. I went to the building society and told them we were going to sell the house and that we’d pay off the mortgage as soon as the money came through. Then I went to see my mum.

I didn’t feel ready to look for another place of my own – and anyway I wasn’t sure how long it would take for the sale to go through. Until it did I couldn’t afford a new deposit, much less think about taking on a new mortgage all on my own. So, Mum’s it would have to be. I don’t think either of us was altogether thrilled about the arrangement. We’d not spent that much of my life together, and I knew she found me difficult and pig-headed.

She made me promise that this time I’d behave myself: no stopping out till all hours, no wild partying. I was happy enough to agree. I wasn’t much in the mood for men and I’d decided that it was time that I got my life sorted out once and for all. Still, I did rather resent the feeling that I was being treated like a naughty child, kept back after school for extra classes when all the other kids were allowed home. And at the same time, rightly or wrongly, I still partly blamed her for what Dad did to me. But when all’s said and done she was my mum and she had agreed to let me move in with her.

It wasn’t just my address that changed around this time. A month or so before Chris and I split up, I’d been offered a job working with old people in a nursing home and I’d agreed to take it. Looking back, I’m not entirely clear why I did so. I loved looking after children, and though the old people were lovely and the place I worked was pleasant enough, somehow I’d managed to move away from the career I really enjoyed. Taking care of the needs of little kids was one thing; cleaning up after incontinent old men and women was quite another. Yes, they too had needs and were often deeply grateful for everything I did, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that they’d had their lives – they’d had children and families and yet they were now being looked after by a stranger who was paid to be there.

Perhaps it was all part of the muddle and sadness of the break-up and selling the house. More likely, I was still traumatised by the abortion. Maybe I thought that the grass was greener, or that I needed a change of scenery. Certainly living with Chris had become increasingly claustrophobic. But whatever the reason, switching jobs didn’t seem to do the trick. I still felt sad and a bit of a failure, and I longed to be back working with children.

All in all, after a few weeks of staying at Mum’s the feeling of claustrophobia was getting worse, not better. I felt trapped and useless and miserable. Gateshead seemed small and limiting; my career stalled and unfulfilling. And then I saw the advert.

It was in one of the daily papers Mum had delivered to the house. To this day I can’t recall which paper it was: it was definitely a tabloid and the advert was in a little box of its own in the classified section, which made it stand out from all the other words around it. And when I saw it I thought I’d found the answer to my prayers. The words in the little box said: ‘Nursery nurse wanted to work in crèche abroad. Accommodation available.’ I read the words once but I couldn’t quite take them in. It seemed too good to be true: a job doing what I loved and in a place far away from Gateshead and all its horrible memories.

It was so perfect that I was afraid I must have imagined it. I was terrified that if I looked away the little box, the words inside and all the promise they held out would disappear. But somehow I calmly sat down on the living-room couch, closed my eyes, took a deep breath and then opened them again, willing the advert to still be there. It was, and for the next hour I read it over and over again. Then I snatched up the paper and took it through to the kitchen to show Mum.

To my intense annoyance, she wasn’t impressed. She couldn’t seem to see all the wonderful possibilities that I saw magically opening up for me … if only I grasped this fantastic opportunity. She could, though, see all the downsides – and proceeded to tell me about them in great detail. I was still only 19. I’d been through years of abuse, I’d lived in Care, I’d had two failed relationships and an abortion. I was only just beginning to find my feet again – oh, and had she mentioned that I was still only 19? Just a bairn, really.

And what did I know about the company behind this? What sort of people advertised for a nursery nurse in the classified section of a tabloid rag? And
abroad
? What on earth did I know about working abroad? I didn’t speak a word of any foreign language. No, there was something not right about this – not right for me, at any rate. Forget it, Sarah. Focus on getting your life sorted out here.

But I was having none of it. This was the golden opportunity that was going to change my life. It was the piece of good fortune I was surely due, and I was going to grab it with both hands. We argued, Mum and I, up hill and down dale. We argued all that day and well into the night. My little sister took Mum’s side; even my brother weighed in with his view that it all sounded decidedly ‘dodgy’. And the more they warned me, the more I dug my heels in, and the more I was determined to pursue this wonderful opportunity with every breath in my body.

There was a phone number to call printed at the bottom of the advert. I flounced out of the argument and picked up the telephone. As I dialled the numbers, I knew – I just
knew
– that from this moment on my luck was going to change.

The voice that answered was pleasant enough. He said his name was John Reece and yes, he was looking for a trained and qualified nursery nurse to work in a crèche with which he was associated. Did I have proper qualifications, because he wasn’t going to bother interviewing anyone without them? It seemed like another good sign. I proudly told him about my NNEB from Gateshead College and he seemed duly impressed. He asked what experience I had and so I went into detail about the places I’d worked and the children I’d looked after. He seemed pleased with my answers.

Next he asked how old I was and if I had a passport. I’d need one, he said, because, as the advert had stated, the crèche wasn’t in Britain but in Amsterdam. I liked the sound of that immediately and told him so. I also explained that I was 19 but I had travelled abroad before and had a valid passport. As the conversation went on I realised with a little thrill of excitement that not only was I being interviewed for this job, but that I seemed to be impressing John. He said that everything I told him sounded very promising. After about half an hour he asked me a few personal questions: what did I look like, was I neat and tidy, what sort of clothes did I usually wear, did I like to go out on a night and did I consider myself an extrovert or an introvert? He said he needed to know all this information because it was a great responsibility finding a nursery nurse to look after other people’s children and that he wanted to make sure I would be suitable.

He asked me to supply references from my current and previous employers and finished off by saying that he’d have his assistant call me back in a few days to let me know if I had got the position. As I put the phone down I felt confident that I’d done well and that I might well have landed my dream job. I fairly skipped back into the living room to tell Mum all about it. She gave me a look that very plainly told me she thought I was being an idiot.

True to his word, John Reece got his assistant to call me. She phoned one evening after I got back from the nursing home. She said my references had arrived and were impressive, and that she had some good news – I’d got the job. I was elated, I’d done it! I was going to start a new life in an incredibly exciting city, doing a job I loved. I felt like I was going to explode with happiness.

And John’s assistant seemed really friendly: from the moment I picked up the phone she and I just seemed to hit it off. She said she was a trained nursery nurse herself and told me all about the crèche. My contract to work there would be for an initial six months, but might be extended after that if I proved a success. She told me the salary I’d be paid – not terribly generous, but she explained that I’d be given free accommodation: my own room in a city centre flat used by other people John had previously hired. What’s more, she would meet me at the airport personally, take me there and settle me in before I had to start work the next day. Everything she said made me more and more excited.