Wake Up, Mummy (14 page)

My stepfather encouraged me to go to court and fight the mortgage company. So I went to the first court hearing and tried to explain to the judge how we’d come to be in the situation we were in. I told her how I’d signed away my legal right to live with my children in the home we’d worked so hard to own because my partner, under duress himself, had threatened me. I didn’t know any of the legal words the mortgage company’s lawyers used, and although I’d done research and learned as much as I could about the legal process involved, I didn’t really understand it.

Thankfully, though, the judge believed what I said in court that day. She ordered the repossession process to be halted and told me, ‘It is very important that you find a solicitor to represent you. You have what’s called an “undue influence case”, which means that it is not a foregone conclusion that the mortgage company will be able to repossess your house. Do you understand what I’m telling you? You
must
come to the next hearing with a solicitor.’

Although I’d been determined to fight the repossession order, I’d struggled to believe that I might have a chance
of succeeding. So just the fact that the judge had listened to me and taken what I said seriously seemed like a major triumph.

I found a really good solicitor, and for the next two years he came with me to dozens of court hearings. At each hearing, the judge denied the mortgage company’s request to start repossession proceedings, and the company’s lawyers became more frustrated and bemused by the fact that I refused to back down. At one point, my solicitor told the mortgage company he was considering telling my story to the newspapers. ‘They’ll love it,’ he said. ‘I can just see the headlines:
Mortgage company supports domestic abuse. Hardworking mother of four young children is evicted from her home after her partner threatens her with physical violence and forces her to sign away her legal rights
.’

While the court case ground on, my solicitor managed to get a few thousand pounds knocked off some of our other debts, on the grounds, as the judge had explained to me, of ‘undue influence’. But the mortgage company was proving more tenacious.

I didn’t understand why they were so resolutely refusing even to consider what seemed to be a reasonable request. I wasn’t asking them to cancel the mortgage and forgive the debt – all I was asking was that they reinstate it, so that I could start paying it myself. My solicitor was
shocked by the fact that they’d allowed Ken to extend the mortgage way beyond what the house was actually worth. But I didn’t really care about that. All I wanted was the opportunity to pay it so that the children and I could live in our house without the fear of being kicked out.

Finally, after a long and exhausting battle, which must have cost the mortgage company tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees, they agreed to reduce the amount of interest that had accrued and to allow me to pay an interest-only mortgage. I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to pay off the capital sum, but the important thing was that we could keep our home. I didn’t care what I had to do to earn the money: my children were going to have a decent home in a good neighbourhood, and that was all that really mattered.

For the children’s sake, I agreed to let Ken move back in to live with us, although I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he’d let us down. We’d nearly lost everything, simply because he’d refused to go to the police when he needed help. But I was desperate not to break up our family, and so I stood by him.

Ironically, it wasn’t until after I’d won the court case that I finally fell apart. I’d always refused to take antidepressants, because doing so would have meant I was accepting the fact that I suffered from depression, just like my mother had always done. Now, though, I realised that
I’d been angry with Ken for refusing to accept the fact that he needed help, and I was doing the same. It felt like admitting that I’d failed; but there are some battles you simply can’t fight all on your own, and I suppose the trick is to know which ones they are.

It took a while, but eventually the tablets the doctor gave me began to bring the world back into focus. They didn’t make me happy – I accepted long ago that nothing will ever do that – but they did enable me to manage, and that’s good enough.

MY BROTHER CHRIS
has always been my best friend; he’s the only person I can really relax with, because he shared my childhood and I know he loves me for who I really am. But although, as children, we’d often try to comfort each other and talk about the things that were happening to us, I haven’t said very much in this book about how our childhood experiences affected Chris, because I don’t feel that it’s right to attempt to tell his story for him.

As a teenager, he’d become so wild and angry that sometimes the rage that swirled around inside him like boiling liquid would burst out of him and he’d attack someone. He was always good to me, but he was full of anger and resentment towards our mother and he’d often launch himself at her, shouting that he’d kill her, and I’d have to drag him off – as much for his sake as for hers.
When he graduated from glue sniffing to becoming heavily involved in taking drugs, he seemed to lose control of his life completely, and it got to the point when it was clear that either he was going to kill someone or someone was going to kill him.

Even when he was a sometimes-violent teenager, I loved him, as I’d always done, but I didn’t know how to help him. It was the birth of my son that had been the trigger I needed to make me rethink what I was doing with my life. When Chris was young, though, there was nothing to prompt him to turn that corner – until something happened that brought him unexpectedly to a crossroads.

When he was 18, he lashed out in a rage at someone one day, injuring him quite badly, and he was sent to a detention centre. I was really afraid for him then, because I thought he’d just give up. He’d been brought up amongst criminals, drunks and drug addicts, and now that he was going to be incarcerated with more of the same type of people, I thought his fate had been sealed. Thankfully, though, it was a punishment that proved to be the making of him.

At the detention centre, he was taught a trade and he began to see in his head a different picture of the future he might be able to have. I went to visit him every two weeks, with my mother and my young son, and I could almost see the change in him from one visit to the next as
the effects of the drugs wore off and his confidence gradually improved.

Shortly after Chris was released from the detention centre, he met a girl and fell in love, and she encouraged him to change his life and went with him when he was offered a job on the other side of the country.

With the support of his girlfriend, who later became his wife, the move finally enabled Chris to reinvent himself as the person he wanted to be. Like me, he felt driven by the need to escape from his childhood and to be better than everyone else. So he worked really hard and started going to night school, and each time he looked over his shoulder, his past seemed just a little bit further away. Before long, his hard work had paid off and he did so well in his job that he ended up as a director of the company he worked for.

Although we rarely saw each other after he moved away, I’d always kept in touch with Chris, and one day a couple of years ago he phoned me to say that he and his wife and children were moving back to live not far from us. Shortly afterwards, Chris and I set up a company together and although for me it meant starting again from scratch, as I had, quite literally, nothing after I returned from Spain, working with Chris felt like being given another chance.

Over the next few months, we put in a lot of hours of hard graft and, in the early days particularly, by the time
the children had gone to bed at night, I’d often be too exhausted to walk up the stairs to my own bedroom. But it was worth it, because the company has gone from strength to strength and now employs several people, provides me with enough money to pay the mortgage on our house, and gives me the security I’ve craved all my life.

One of the reasons my brother and I work so well together is because we have common goals, born of our shared childhood experiences and fuelled by the same fear of being forced to return to having nothing. And I know that I can trust Chris.

We both still have difficulty trusting other people, so we employ members of our family, training them up and paying for them to go on courses and gain qualifications that will enable them to find other jobs and be successful should our own business ever fail. But we’re determined to succeed. We don’t ever again want to have to be afraid of being labelled ‘worthless’, and we want to show the uncle and aunt who were so good to us when we were children, who loved us and never judged us when we were teenagers, and who I used to wish were my parents, that they were right to have faith in us.

I haven’t yet managed to pay off all our debts, but the business is growing and looks set to do really well next year – despite the current financial situation. For once, I’ve got something to look forward to, because I have
complete faith in my brother and I know that, with him driving the company forward, we will succeed.

I’m 40 years old, and I’ve never talked to anyone about the abuse I suffered as a child. However much I try to rationalise it and to tell myself that children who are abused are not in any way to blame, I’m still ashamed about what happened to me. What Carl did to me damaged some part of me that will never recover. I know I’ll never lose my deep-rooted sense of worthlessness, or the fear that threatens to engulf me whenever I think about what might lie ahead as I approach each new crossroads in my life.

The people who think they know me would probably say I’m a strong person who stays calm in a crisis and that I can be relied upon to sort out everyone else’s problems. And it’s true that I have to be in control. I’ve known what it’s like to live with chaos, and I daren’t loosen my grip and let it seep back into my life. I don’t feel that I can trust anyone other than my brother and a few other members of my family, and I have no real friends, because I’m terrified that if someone starts to get close to me, they’ll discover I’m not the person they think I am.

Sometimes though, I’m able to rationalise the way I feel about myself by thinking that if I knew a child and discovered they were being abused, it wouldn’t change my opinion about them – other than to make my heart bleed
for them. So I know that I should pity the child I used to be and that I shouldn’t feel as though the events of my childhood have stigmatised me as an adult. But there are times when I can’t help it.

In many ways, reviewing my life while writing this book has made me feel stronger. I’m living with my demons and, mostly, keeping them under control. I have a successful business, a good relationship with my brother and, despite everything, also with my mother. My mother still drinks, but her love for her grandchildren and husband, and their love for her, have been the incentives she needed finally to rein in the demons that ruled – and ruined – her life and so many others for so long. I’m still with Ken, and we’re trying to rebuild our life together. But most importantly of all – and it’s the one thing I’m really proud of – I have wonderful relationships with my children.

Every day I have to battle against the voice in my head that tells me to give up my struggle to survive. ‘Why not commit suicide?’ it asks me. ‘What can you possibly have to live for?’ And sometimes I almost give in – until I remember the terrible intensity of the fear I felt each time my mother tried to kill herself. My life as a child was miserable, and my mother was at least partly to blame for failing to protect me against all the unspeakable things that happened to me. But I loved her, despite everything,
and my greatest fear when I was young was that one day she might succeed in taking her own life and leave me all alone in the world, without her.

My most cherished memory is of being a small child and lying curled up on my grandmother’s knee with my head resting on the side of her armchair as she stroked my hair and sang ‘Away in a Manger’. Whenever life gets too hard to bear, I think of that moment and wish I was back there again. I know, though, that I can’t go back and rewrite my own childhood; I can’t change all the terrible things that happened or erase the scars they left behind – both on my body and on my mind. But I know, too, that I have to do everything in my power to give each one of my children the childhood that every child deserves.

However difficult things become, I know that I can’t take my own life, because all those years ago, when my eldest son was a baby, I made a promise to him that, whatever happened, I would always be there for him when he needed me. It’s a promise I made again as each of my children was born, and it’s a promise I’m proud to say I’ve kept.

One day, my children won’t need me. But as long as they do, and as long as it’s in my power to do so, I’ll be here to protect them and to take care of them. Because that’s what mothers are supposed to do.

I NEVER KNEW
– or cared – where Carl had gone after he left our house almost 30 years ago. But while writing this book I heard he’d died. At first, I felt cheated. I suppose I’d hoped that one day he’d have to answer for what he did to me and for the indelible stain he left on my life. And then I remembered how my grandmother always used to say that God sees everything, and that it’s His anger we need to fear when the Day of Judgement comes.

I hope she was right.