What Daddy Did (3 page)

I felt as if I had been thrown into the eye of a storm.

Although it was incredible to me that someone was offering to listen to my story for the first time in my life, I was also terrified. I had locked so much of the abuse away for so long that I knew there would be enormous problems if I opened up those memories again. I was engaged and had my three wonderful children around me. None of these people knew what I had suffered. Did I want them to know the full horror of it?

After a great deal of soul searching, I decided to give my story to the authorities. I gave evidence at Helen Ford's trial and I quietly rejoiced when she was sentenced to imprisonment when found guilty of 'procuring a minor'.

In the days after the trial, I was approached by many journalists who wanted to write about my story. While many of them seemed supportive and friendly, something didn't quite feel right. Finally, I realised what it was. After years spent in silence, years spent being controlled by others, I was uncomfortable at the thought of someone else – another stranger – taking my words and being able to make the ultimate decision as to how those words would be presented.

After the trial, I was living with my dear friend, Christine, and her husband at their home in North Berwick. During the trial, I had thought about the possibility of writing a book – I had even mentioned I might do so to my half-brother and his wife over lunch one day. I didn't know how I was going to go about it, but I just knew I had to tell all of my story, every last bit of it, and not just what was likely to be published in a newspaper.

One day, I was speaking on the phone to a woman who ran a charity for survivors of sexual abuse. This woman and her organisation had been very helpful, and she was someone who sometimes 'filtered' journalists' requests to speak to survivors. That morning, she was passing on details of someone who wanted to do an interview about my story. I was cautious and said this to her, briefly bringing up the point that I really wanted to speak to someone who was in the industry and knew how the media and publishing worked – not for an interview, but to see whether my idea of doing a book was feasible. She said that she knew just the person, a journalist whom she had worked with a lot and seemed to understand the issues rather than just be looking for the next headline.

A meeting was set up at Christine's house, but I was still very nervous as it is hard for me to trust people. I also tend to go on my gut feelings, however, so as soon as I met the writer, Linda, I knew she was a good person. She was clear and concise when answering the questions I posed, and she didn't patronise me. In fact, she spent as much time warning me of some of the hurdles I might face as she did talking about what I might get from going down the publishing route. I felt that we hit it off really quickly and she didn't see me as some sort of victim.

The conversation we had about our children was the final push I needed to know that we would make a good team. The way she spoke about her family made me trust her because I knew she was a good mother. That's how I gauge women. If they are good mothers, they are trustworthy. I told her that I needed to explain everything that had happened to me in my own life, both for my own sake and for that of my kids. From that moment, I believed in her because she also believed in me, and she's never let me down. We both found a new friend that day.

I knew what I had to do.

I had to tell my story in full, by myself. It was time for me to write my book.

To do that, I've had to face all of my demons. I've had to look at things from my past that I'd hoped at one time to just bury away. It's been so hard, so painful and truly testing, yet as I write this, I am sitting in my home overlooking the Firth of Forth, with my three children, all happy, content and safe with their worlds. I feel truly blessed.

When I first told my story I was concerned with the immediate criminal element of it – the abuses committed against me by my stepmother and her friends when I was a little girl. But there is so much more to my story than her, than just Helen Ford.

I was born in a basement tenement in Edinburgh's Easter Road on 5 June 1959. At the time, my father, Donald Chalmers Ford, was living with my biological mother, Breda Curran Robertson. Breda had two children from two previous relationships, and was a young Irish lass who had come over the sea from Tipperary with her slightly older brother in the early 1950s. Sometime between arriving in Britain and meeting my father, she had given birth to her first child, a daughter, out of wedlock. She then went on to marry a different man and give birth a few years later to a son. Where and how she met my father is one of the many enigmas in my story, as is the question of whether or not they were truly in love before they consummated their relationship and conceived me. The foursome lived together in this flat in Easter Road, where I was born, until I was around a year old. At that point, my mother split from my father, and also left him with three children under six, two of whom were not his biological offspring. Why she left and where she went is a matter for speculation. I haven't seen her since that day and will probably never see her again.

So, when I was born, I already had this older half-brother and half-sister waiting for me. I have no memories of them in the very early days, although I have seen photographs of the three of us sitting together before we were admitted to Haldane House, the Barnardo's home we finally lived in. My half-brother, Adrian, was two years older than me, and my half-sister, Frances, four years older. When my Dad met my mother, she was still married to Adrian's father. In fact, she never married my Dad, nor was she married to the father of my half-sister.

It was October 1960 when my mother left. Disappeared. I have had to get a lot of my own story from various files collected from different sources over the years. From one of those files I know that:

On 6th October 1960, Ford
[my father]
reported to us
[the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children]
that he had returned from England where he had been working to find Mrs Robertson
[my mother]
had been drinking, and having undesirable people in his home, and the children and house neglected. They quarrelled, and Mrs Robertson cleared out with another married woman and two men, and although we have endeavoured to trace her our efforts have been unsuccessful.

The bald facts are that my mother upped and left and we were alone with my father. I had known only one Dad, but my older half-sister had known three men to take that role by this point, and my half-brother two. It must have been very confusing for the three of us already, and here we now were without a mummy either.

My father continued to look after us with the help of a young local girl while he went out to work. Sometimes this young girl would take us to, and drop us off at, nursery. An entry in my files from back then states:

Miss Robertson (from Pilrig Nursery) has great admiration for the father whom she has watched running home in between shifts, doing without breakfast sometimes to take the children to nursery, and who seems devoted to the children. The girl who sometimes brings them did not appeal to Miss Robertson who thought her unsuitable and rather unstable. On one occasion the girl brought the children to the nursery at 7.30am and left them in the charge of the cleaners until opening at 8.30am.

This extract chills me to the bone as the young girl in question is Helen Gourlay, the woman who was to become my stepmother. This arrangement of her helping out lasted for a while, then my Dad decided he could no longer cope and we were taken into care. For the next four years, the three of us stayed in a Barnardo's home near Alloa in Scotland. At that time, it wasn't only orphans or children whose parents would never want anything to do with them who were put into homes. Barnardo's also 'helped out' in situations where families needed a bit of time to get themselves together before reclaiming their children, before the final, desired act of 'restoration' as they called it.

I can only guess that my father couldn't do what he needed to do. When Breda left, he presumably thought that he would be able to work and also care for three young children. He probably did try but it wasn't enough, and there must have come a point where he had to admit defeat and send us away. Of course, I can question why he did this, why he didn't even decide to keep me, his only biological child, but – like everything else – I won't get any answers. How much the 'young girl' in the picture, Helen Gourlay, had a hand in our departure, I can't say.

But given what she was to reveal of herself in the years to come, I can guess . . .

IN DECEMBER 1961 MY FATHER
married this girl and in November 1962 they had a son, Gordon, who was another half-brother for me. There really is so much that I'm not aware of and will probably never find out. However, what I do know now is far more than I knew back in 2001, before I made the decision to go ahead and give that statement to the police which would be what they needed to finally press charges against Helen Gourlay Ford. Much of that knowledge came from just remembering and by looking over old documents, then putting all of the pieces together. My own life is a jigsaw to me, and I've had to approach putting it all together with very little 'inside' information.

My earliest memories are not of Breda, my biological mother – in fact, I have absolutely no memories of her at all, which is hardly surprising since she left my father when I was just a baby. No, my earliest memories are of my time in that Barnardo's children's home, of being one of many kids in the same position – parentless. I remember very clearly the amount of queuing which went on in that place, for everything from meals to baths to pocket money. I remember being hugged. I remember having fun. I remember laughing. I remember playing in big rambling gardens, but, most of all, I remember my Dad visiting me with piles of comics in his arms each time. I can still see the picture in my mind's eye of waiting in a great big sitting room for him to arrive, and feeling so excited that, today, I was one of the lucky ones who had a visitor – and not only that, not just any old visitor, this was my very own Dad!

Don Ford was quite a small man, around 5 foot 7 inches I would guess. He had, at that time, the blackest hair which was Brylcreemed and combed just so in a very particular way. He always wore a white shirt and a dark suit, and, like many men of his generation, his shoes were polished so that you could see your face in them. He told me when I was older that this was because he had been in the army. He said that a good soldier always paid particular attention to his shoes, and also said I should 'never forget to look behind', referring to making sure I polished the back of my shoes as well as the front.

There is very little else I remember about those visits from him to me in Barnardo's. I don't recall him hugging me or saying anything like 'I love you'. In fact, he never ever said those words to me at any point of his life. To tell the truth, he said very little about anything that actually mattered in all the years he was my Daddy. But, at that point, he was there on visit days and that was all that mattered.