What Daddy Did (6 page)

The rooms I have already described had their horrors, but the bathroom in this first house was to become my most dreaded room. It wasn't even appealing to begin with – it had a high ceiling and an old-fashioned deep cast-iron bath with a Victorian toilet and cistern complete with pull chain. I was soon to get to know every crack on every wall in this room, every embossed swirl on the frosted glass door, as I was made to stand in there for hours on end, starving, shaking and freezing with cold.

Food was to become a big issue for me as a child. I was soon regularly deprived of it by Helen, as one of her means of exerting control over me. It will come as no surprise, then, that I have really strong memories of the times I was actually fed. In those early days I remember the food Helen gave me. Breakfast would be a bowl of cornflakes with a cup of tea and some toast. Lunch would be something like soup with a pudding, perhaps rice or jam. Tea, as we called it, could be anything from mince and tatties to cold meat and chips, to my dreaded and most hated meal of all – tripe and onions.

Helen didn't just stop giving me food all of a sudden. It happened gradually. She would make me miss out on a meal for being naughty (in her eyes), which eventually led to me not knowing when I would next be fed. In fact, this was a pattern with my stepmother, as the abuse she was leading up to began in the same fashion. To start with, I would be told off for things I did – such as playing with toys that belonged to her son, speaking when not spoken to, taking a biscuit before being offered – and many other things she would just decide were bad from one day to the next.

There was, however, one type of behaviour so abhorrent to Helen that she placed it above all of my other so-called transgressions – and that was wetting the bed. Memories come flooding back to me sometimes when I least expect them to, and often they are things I've buried. One striking recollection I have is the terrible telling-off I would get for not going to the toilet in the middle of the night.

I did have a problem with this while I was in the children's home, and I remember the way it was dealt with there. On a Saturday all of the children would be gathered in the main room. They would sit down in little seats which had been placed in rows before a large table. Behind this table sat two or three members of staff who would hand out pocket money and sweets (usually homemade tablet) to each child. We would traipse up, say 'thank you' and return to our seats clutching our little stash. However, the children who had been naughty, for one reason or another, would be singled out, their crimes would be revealed and they would forfeit either their pocket money or their sweets – or both, depending on the severity of the crime. Wetting the bed was one of these crimes, as I knew full well. I remember the sheer embarrassment of sitting there and having my name called out, and then going without the trip to the shops to spend my money or without the only sweet treat of the week.

As the years went by and I worked in children's homes as an adult, I encountered many youngsters who wet their beds, and I gained more insight into the problem. There are so many reasons why a child may suffer from this very common complaint, including lack of control over bladder function, sleep apnoea and stress. What I experienced in the children's home in the 1960s was due to ignorance rather than cruelty – but this can't be said of Helen's attitude and punishment.

When I first went to stay with her and my Daddy, she would just change the sheets and my pyjamas if I had an 'accident', then get me up to go to the toilet during the night. But I kept wetting the bed and this made Helen angrier and angrier. Any little bit of patience she had in her soon wore off. Eventually, I was the one who had to get up and take the sheets off my bed and trample them in the bath along with my pyjamas. I also had to wash down with disinfectant the red rubber mat that covered my mattress. When my stepmother was finally at the end of her tether – it was a short one – she made me lie on this rubber mat with no sheet, clad only in my pants, and sleep that way night after night. She would come in to check on me – it seemed as if she was willing it to happen – and then hiss in my face: 'Pee-the-bed, pee-the-bed – nasty little pee-the-bed, aren't you?' She liked nicknames and her preferred one for me then was 'pissy pants'.

By the time my older half-siblings arrived back from the children's home, I was just past my sixth birthday and still wetting the bed. Looking back, it's hardly surprising. I had been treated the Barnardo's way when the problem started, and that approach clearly hadn't been designed to resolve the issue, but now there wasn't even any pretence that I was going to be helped. It had been bad enough to face ridicule at home from Helen, but once I started school, she made me wear my wet, smelly knickers there all day. Children are often cruel to each other, and they will pick on anything different, so I became the focus of their taunts as they said I smelled, they said I smelled of piss, they said I was wearing dirty pants.

They were right.

When Helen was really angry with me, she would come into the bedroom first thing in the morning and drag me out of bed by my arms. 'Stand there!' she'd screech at me as I stood where she had put me. 'Stand there and don't you dare move!' She'd throw the thin covers right back so that she could inspect the bottom sheet and mattress. If I had wet them, she would shout and scream at the top of her voice, while hitting me repeatedly with her fists and arms. When this frenzy had passed to some extent, Helen would pull my pants off and rub my face in them, grinding me into the stinking material with utter hatred. Finally, as she prepared to leave the room, she would throw the knickers at me and say that I was to put them on. I'd have to go to school wearing them, with my face stinging and red, and the smell of pee hanging around me for the rest of the day. No-one else at home got treated like that – maybe no-one else wet the bed. I only saw her do anything similar to our dog, Snooky, a black-and-white mongrel collie cross. If Snooky ever had an accident in the house, his face would be rubbed in it and he would be kicked out into the back green with a yelp. My stepmother clearly thought I was as low as the dog.

When I became a mother, these memories sometimes crept through. I could never imagine why anyone would do the things Helen had done to me. Even the fact that I wasn't related to her by blood didn't explain why she felt such hatred for me. How any adult could do those things to a child was beyond me. If my daughters or son ever wet the bed, I would run them a bath and, while they were in the big, soapy bubbles, I would get their sheets and pyjamas into the wash without a word to them. I'd remind myself to watch what they drank before bedtime and to lift them for the toilet before I went to bed.

This was certainly not Helen's way. I was a child, little more than a baby, when I was delivered into the care of Helen and my father. Of course, I didn't keep a diary, and I don't have a photographic memory, and so my awareness of when things happened can't be precise. However, I do know that there was a switch, very early on in my life at Easter Road, when Helen changed from being cold and distant to being hateful and violent. This was around the time when she started to berate me constantly for being 'really bad'. And that 'badness' was something Helen always thought could be beaten out of me.

One day, when I was about six, I had been really bad – as usual. I know that it was before my half-brother and half-sister came back from Barnardo's. I don't know why it had been decided that I was bad that day (I rarely did), but I had been told to spend the whole morning and afternoon in the bathroom, in my underwear, with my hands by my sides. I wasn't allowed to move an inch.

Not an inch.

As I write this, I can almost feel what it was like that day when I was hurt so much – not physically, but emotionally. It hurt more than anything Helen ever did to me because I loved my Daddy at this point. I looked up to him, he was my hero – and he was going to fail me.

'Wait till your father gets home,' Helen hissed in my ear.

'Wait till your father gets home,' she shouted into my face.

It was her mantra for hours and I did as I was told. I did wait. I did wait until my father got home. But even though I had no idea whatsoever of what I had done that was so 'bad', there was still a little part of me that thought, 'Well, when my Daddy does get home, he'll know that I'm a good girl, and he'll know that Helen is lying. He'll know this because he's my Daddy.'

I waited and waited.

I was almost numb with cold and stiff from the lack of moving around when I finally heard him coming in the front door. I listened to his footsteps walking up the lobby into the living room. I felt relief. My Daddy was home, and I hadn't had all hope kicked out of me yet. I thought that he would tell me to come through, have some tea, get my pyjamas on and go to bed. At first, I heard the muffled voices of him and Helen talking, then I heard him coming to the bathroom door.

When he came in, I almost shouted out, 'Daddy!' but he grabbed me by the wrist so quickly that I didn't have a chance. 'Why are you being so bad?' he asked me. 'Why are you being so bad, Donna?' He kept on asking me that question as he pulled me by the wrist through to the bedroom. 'Your Mummy is trying her best with you, but you have to be good,' he said. I tried to tell him that I was, I was good, but I was crying so much that I couldn't get the words out. My Daddy sat on the lower bunk bed, pulled me over his knee and then he hit me and hit me over and over again on the bottom. I kept saying, through the sobs, 'I will be good, Daddy, I am trying to be good,' but it was as if he couldn't hear me. Finally, he stopped and said that it had hurt him more than it had hurt me. He told me that I had to be good for my Mummy and that I was to stop giving her trouble, then told me to go to bed. He finished by saying that he didn't want to come home the next day and find out that I had been 'bad' again.

That became a pattern; it set the trend for many more occasions. Helen had now convinced my Dad that I was bad, and by the number of occasions he beat me, I could only assume he believed her. On many more occasions throughout my childhood I was to discover my father's wrath, always induced by Helen. I know that she was behind it because when she left he stopped beating me. If only she could have taken the memories away with her too.

THERE ARE SPECIFIC TIMES
I remember when my Dad would repeat this pattern – he would come home from work, talk to Helen then come to 'chastise' me.

That was the word he used.

During the very early days of my return home, I would sometimes find the courage to speak up and question why I was being smacked. Why did Helen say I was bad? Why did I get shouted at? Why did I have to go to bed? Why did I have to stand naked in the bathroom for hours? To begin with, I could ask these questions because sometimes my Dad would just give me a talking to on his return home from work. I was trying to make sense of Helen's rules and expectations of me. I was trying to work out what I'd done during the day that made Helen shout and yell to my Dad about how bad I'd been. I didn't realise that there was no real rhyme or reason to it. She was just evil.