I Remember, Daddy (6 page)

When I was in the hospital, I spent a lot of time re-living my childhood. I’d often sit on the floor in the corner of my room, partially protected by the walls on either side of me, and talk in a high-pitched, child’s voice about the things I was afraid of. I was remembering just some of the unspeakable things my father had done to me from the time I was three years old, and some of the disgusting, appalling things he’d made me do to him, and my mind simply couldn’t cope. I felt contaminated by my childhood, dirty and repulsive; and, despite the medication I was taking, I became intent on killing myself, because I couldn’t bear the thought of having to live with the guilt and with the knowledge of what I thought I had done.

For years, I’d suppressed all the memories that were starting to return. So when I was a teenager and everything had seemed so inexplicably miserable, I hadn’t understood what was wrong with me and why I didn’t seem to fit the life I was living. Sometimes when I was young, sudden waves of rage would wash over me. I knew they were out of all proportion to whatever had just happened, but it was as though I couldn’t help myself and I’d be completely overcome by the need to lash out and hurt someone. It was a rage that had often frightened me and that had made me as wary and distrustful of myself as I always was of anyone I didn’t know well. Perhaps what had been one of the most difficult things of all, though, was the knowledge that I wasn’t the person I wanted to be, or even the person I felt I really was, somewhere deep down inside.

In hospital, as the memories started to re-surface – and with Dr Hendriks’s help – I began to understand what had caused all those years of unhappiness when I’d seemed constantly to have been fighting an invisible enemy. And, in some ways, remembering was almost worse than not knowing.

When my mother came to see me, I could tell she was trying to sound optimistic, as though she truly believed I’d get better and would be able to live a normal life again. She’d never known about most of the things I was remembering, and I didn’t tell her about them until some time later. So I suppose she couldn’t understand what had happened to make me so ill. On more than one occasion, I heard her say to one of the nurses, ‘Katie shouldn’t be in here with all these people with schizophrenia – and worse. She’s not like them. She’s not mentally ill.’

She was wrong, though. I was regularly regressing to childhood, re-living its nightmares over and over again, and I was hearing voices telling me that I was useless and dirty and that I might as well be dead. And the reality was that I was about as ‘mental’ as it was possible to be.

I’d never had much of an appetite, even as a child, and in hospital I almost stopped eating entirely and began to lose weight. Starving myself was just another form of the self-harming I’d been doing even before I went into the hospital, when I’d often cut my arms to try to release some of the pain that had built up inside me.

Whenever I was allowed out of the locked ward to go for a walk with a nurse, I’d keep my eyes fixed to the ground and, as soon as she looked the other way, I’d stoop quickly to pick up anything sharp I could see. Sometimes, I’d find a tiny shard of glass and sometimes I’d snatch up a nail that had been kicked into the gutter beside the pavement. I’d slip it into a pocket or up inside my sleeve and hide it in my room until I was alone and could take it out and cut myself. Then I’d watch the blood trickle down the soft skin on the inner surface of my arm towards my wrist, imagining that it was a red line of pain washing out of my body. And it worked, a bit, for a while.

I was always trying to think of ways to escape from the hospital. I’d spend hours standing beside the locked door to the outside world, murmuring to myself and trying to look nonchalant as I waited for someone to be let in or out of the ward so that I could make a dash for freedom. Surprisingly, I did manage to get out once or twice, although I can’t now remember how.

One day, someone found me wandering along the side of the road not far from the hospital, and on another occasion I made it all the way to a friend’s house. I don’t know how I got there, but I remember asking her over and over again to promise she wouldn’t tell anyone, because if they made me go back to the hospital, I knew I’d die. She did promise eventually, and then she phoned Tom when I was in the bathroom and he came to pick me up. I was furious with my friend and I was convinced that, like everyone else, she was part of a cruel conspiracy to keep me locked up when there was nothing wrong with me.

‘I’ll never speak to you again,’ I shouted at her. ‘I thought you were my friend. I thought I could trust you. I can’t believe you’ve done this to me.’

She cried as she tried to explain her reasons for doing what she’d done. ‘You’re not well, Katie,’ she told me. ‘And if you don’t go back to the hospital, you might never be well again. I have to do what I think is right. So either you let Tom take you back, or I’ll call the police and you can go back with them.’

I hated her for a while, but she was right. I was very ill, and the truth was that if I couldn’t cope in hospital, where the doctors and nurses were trying to help me, then I’d never be able to cope in the ‘normal world’ outside.

After a while, I was put on lithium, a powerful drug that’s used to treat psychosis; and as the medication began to have an effect, I was moved to the hospital’s mother and baby ward, where Sam was allowed to stay with me. For weeks, I don’t think I’d been consciously aware of anything other than my own fears and memories. So it felt good to be able to hold Sam and to think that perhaps, one day, I’d lead a normal life and be a proper mother to him.

At first, Sam stayed with me just for the occasional night, then for a weekend and then, for the last few weeks before I went home, he was with me all the time. I understood that everyone had to be absolutely certain I’d be able to manage and look after him on my own, and I went through the motions and did all the things I was supposed to do, although I didn’t really believe I’d ever be able to look after anyone or anything – including myself.

There were still some days when I relapsed into a world where nothing made sense except fear. And, on one of them, when Tom came to visit, he found me wandering in the hospital car park, half-naked, murmuring to myself and holding Sam tightly in my arms. I don’t remember how I’d got out of the locked ward, but I can still recall Tom’s obvious anxiety and the tears I could see in his eyes, and how miserable and guilty I felt at the thought that I’d made him sad.

Gradually, though, I began to get better and, after I’d been in hospital for six months, I was allowed to go home. In reality, however, ‘better’ is a relative term, because I still needed a lot of support – from Tom, his family and social services – and I wasn’t well enough to go back to work.

On Christmas Day, about three months after I’d come out of hospital, Tom suggested we should accept my father’s invitation to ‘pop in’ and have a drink with him and his girlfriend, Gillian. We’d had our house for just over a year by that time, but we were struggling financially and couldn’t pay the mortgage, and Tom was carrying all the stress and worry of it alone. So it seemed remarkable to me that, despite my illness and everything else he’d had to deal with over the last few months, he wanted to see my father so that he could ask his permission to marry me.

I desperately didn’t want to see my father. Tom knew that he’d been physically violent towards me when I was a child, but, as I hadn’t talked to anyone except my psychiatrist about the things I was remembering, it was difficult to think of a reason that might explain why I was so reluctant to visit him on that occasion. So we went to his house in the afternoon.

By the time we arrived, my father was in the jovial stage of drunkenness. It was the first time he’d seen his grandson and as he held Sam out at arm’s length and said something jokily critical about him, I looked at his face and felt suddenly ill.

‘I have to get out of here,’ I whispered to Tom. ‘I’m going to be sick. I’m sorry but I need to leave – right now.’

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Tom asked me. ‘You look terrible.’

I could see the nervous anxiety in his eyes and I knew he was afraid that I was breaking down again.

‘Please, let’s just go,’ I said, pushing Sam’s things into a bag and then reaching out to snatch my son from my father’s arms.

‘What? Leaving so soon?’ My father’s tone was mocking. ‘But you’ve only just got here. Oh well, why don’t you take some champagne for your mother? There are some steaks in the kitchen, too. Perhaps she’d like some of those.’

He waved his arm in a magnanimous, lord-of-the-manor sort of way as he spoke, and I felt a wave of disgusted resentment and a determination not to accept his pathetic handouts for my mother.

I shook my head and he shrugged and then suddenly bellowed at me, in a voice you might use to address someone who was partially deaf and feeble-minded, ‘You all better now? Not mental any more?’

Gillian gasped and I felt Tom’s body stiffen beside me. But my father just laughed.

‘You were on lithium I hear.’ He looked directly into my eyes for the first time since we’d arrived, and then he turned towards Gillian as he said, ‘When nothing else works for psychotics, they bring out the big guns. Then you know you’re dealing with a real nutcase.’

Gillian’s face was scarlet with embarrassment and distress. But my father just turned his head to look at me again and said slowly, ‘And who’s ever going to believe the word of someone like that?’

Tom took a step towards him, but I put my hand on his arm as I said, ‘Please, let’s just leave.’ Then I walked ahead of him out of the room.

My father had threatened me before, and I knew exactly what he was saying: whatever happened in the future and whatever I might say about him, I was now a once-certified mad woman – and he felt safe in the knowledge that no one would ever take my word against his.

I
hadn’t understood the flashes of images I was seeing before and after I was admitted to hospital. They seemed to be of dislocated scenes, which, although they didn’t make sense, always left me feeling deeply disturbed and distressed. And I think that if I hadn’t gradually learned to trust Dr Hendriks and been able to talk to him about what I was remembering, I might never have come out at the other end of the dark, terrifying tunnel I seemed to be in.

The trouble was, though, that once the floodgates had opened, there was no way of controlling the flow of memories that were being released.

Extraordinary as it seems now, despite what I was remembering about the things my father used to do to me, part of me continued to want him to love me. I simply couldn’t make any sense of why he’d hurt me and abused me and not loved me, and I thought it was my fault. I’d accepted for years that I was responsible for anything bad that happened to me or to the people I cared for, because that’s what my father had always told me. So it was difficult to override that ‘reality’ and replace it with the knowledge that I wasn’t to blame for what had been done to me when I was a child. And it was only two or three years ago when I finally realised that my father’s love was something I neither needed nor desired.

One of the first clear memories I had when I was in the hospital was of something that happened when I was three years old. It seemed random and didn’t make much sense to begin with, until I realised that it was just one piece of the jigsaw that I was starting to put together, with Dr Hendriks’s help.

The memory was of a time when I was very young and my father’s parents were staying with us. They were sitting in the kitchen one morning, drinking their early-morning cups of tea, when I appeared in the doorway in my nightdress and told them I had a really bad itch.

‘Well, that won’t do now, will it?’ my grandfather said, lifting me on to his lap and kissing the top of my head.

I loved my grandfather. He was always kind and patient with me, and he told the most wonderful stories, which was something my father must have inherited from him – together, sadly, with his alcoholism.

‘And where is this terrible itch?’ my grandfather asked, sliding me down his legs on to the floor and then pulling me up by the arms so that I was sitting on his knee again.

I laughed delightedly, and then pointed to my ‘front bottom’ as I said, ‘It’s down there.’

I started to lift my nightdress, but my grandmother reached out her hand to stop me, saying firmly, ‘There’s no need to show us, dear. I expect it’s just irritation caused by soap or washing powder. I’ll tell Mummy to make sure she’s rinsing your clothes properly and then I’m sure it’ll go away. Just don’t scratch it.’

Nothing more was ever said to me about it, even when, shortly afterwards, I developed a rash of boils on the same area of my body. At first, they were just small, itchy, red spots. But they quickly grew larger and more painful, until they were so bad I could hardly walk and the doctor had to come to the house to lance them. Even then, no one seemed to wonder why a three-year-old child had boils around her genitalia. These days, I imagine, questions would be asked. But, in the 1960s, I doubt whether anyone ever considered the possibility of sexual abuse within a family – and certainly not in a family like ours, with a father who was a high-earning, well-connected and well-respected businessman.

I used to wonder what my mother thought had caused those boils. But she was naïve, and as used to feeling responsible for bad things as I was to become, so she probably remained convinced that she’d caused them by not rinsing the washing powder out of my clothes properly.

In many of my childhood memories, my mother isn’t present. Even when she was at home, she’d usually be in the kitchen, two floors below the rooms where my brother and I spent most of our time as children, while we were looked after by whoever was our current nanny. We had a constantly changing stream of nannies – who were actually au pairs rather than qualified child carers, as that name would suggest. None of them lasted very long, because my father slept with all of them and when my mother found out, she got rid of them, one by one. However, a casual observer might not have noticed when one left and another took her place, as it was difficult to distinguish between all the young, blonde, pretty Scandinavian girls my father insisted on employing. There was one, though, that I remember clearly. She was different from all the others, being English and dark-haired, but everyone agreed that she adored me. Her name was Margaret Kennedy.

One day, just after Sam was born, I found a photograph of myself, aged about three, wearing a pretty pink dress and standing barefoot in a garden I didn’t recognise. I asked my mother where it had been taken and whose garden it was.

‘It was at Margaret Kennedy’s house,’ she told me. She took the photo from my hands and smiled. ‘She loved you so much. She and your father used to take you there sometimes, so that she could show you off to her family and friends.’

I suddenly felt as though I was going to be sick. I closed my eyes and kept swallowing the saliva that was flooding into my mouth until eventually the feeling passed and I reached out and took the photograph from my mother’s hand. I examined the photo for a moment and then looked at my mother. Even for someone who’d been too brainwashed and under my father’s thumb to think about it at the time, I was certain that she must have realised how ridiculous what she’d just said had sounded and be wondering why my father had gone with Margaret on those visits to her home. But apparently not, because she was still smiling wistfully at some fond memory of my childhood the photograph had falsely evoked.

Suddenly, an image flashed into my mind: I was lying on a bed and Margaret was holding my arms above my head, pressing them against the mattress until they hurt. Then, as quickly as it had come, the picture evaporated and was gone, leaving me feeling as though someone had punched me in the stomach and dreading the prospect of remembering whatever had happened next.

The photograph I’d looked at with my mother that day represented just one of the causes of the many hours I spent crying and rocking myself backwards and forwards in the corner of my room at the hospital. Because the memory it had begun to unlock was of what really happened when my father and Margaret Kennedy were together.

Although my father had simply slept with all my other nannies, he’d had a more serious affair with Margaret. And she didn’t take me to her house to ‘show me off’ to other people, as she always claimed; she took me there so that my father could sexually abuse me while she held me down on the bed.

As all our other nannies had done, Margaret had a room on the top floor of our house, which she stayed in during the week, and she and my father often used to take me there, too. I didn’t have even the slightest understanding of what my father was doing to me at the time; all I knew was that I hated it. But I didn’t cry, partly because what he did to me when Margaret was there wasn’t as bad as being thrashed with his belt. It did hurt, though, and it made me feel miserable, because it was like being punished for something and because it sometimes seemed as though my father didn’t even really know I was there at all.

Once I started to remember, and the images I could see in my mind developed from fragments into full memories, it was too late to decide that I didn’t want to know. Sometimes, I’d remember something and have an almost triumphant sense of ‘I knew it!,’ because part of me had always known there must be a reason why I felt so unhappy and so ‘unclean’. Most of the time, though, I wished I wasn’t remembering, because being forced to relive my childhood seemed far worse than not knowing what had happened to me. But I had to remember. I had to face the demons that were scrambling my brain and making me so ill, because only by doing so could I take the first step on the long, exhausting and often incredibly difficult journey towards recovery.

I was just three years old the first time my father had full intercourse with me. He came into my room one night when I was asleep and climbed into bed beside me. Not long after that, I started lining up all my dolls next to my pillow every night, in the hope that when my father came silently into my room, he wouldn’t be able to tell which little head was mine. When that failed, I began sleeping in a corner of my wardrobe with a sheet draped over my head – which was one of the first images that had haunted my nightmares after Sam was born. But, again, my father wasn’t fooled, and almost every night the wardrobe door would slowly creak open and he’d reach in to lift me out and carry me back to my bed before lying down beside me.

Sometimes, he’d put a pillow over my face while he abused me and, just once, he called me ‘Mother’. Mostly, though, he seemed to be in a trance. He wasn’t nice to me while he was doing it, but he wasn’t horrible, and I think that, for as long as he was breathing loud, rasping breaths and making peculiar grunting sounds, he was completely unaware of who I was.

My father didn’t really do anything other than work, drink and sleep. Every Saturday, he’d go out to meet friends for lunch. Then he’d come home, drunk, in the afternoon and say casually to my mother, ‘I’m going upstairs to have a nap. I’ll take Katie with me,’ or – the sentence I dreaded more than anything else – ‘Katie might as well come with me while I have a bath.’

No one talked openly about anything in those days, including domestic violence and sexual abuse, and my mother was probably even less worldly wise than most people of her background and upbringing. So she never had even the slightest suspicion about what my father was really doing to me – and I’m not sure what she’d have done if she had. I’d like to think she’d have taken some sort of action to put an end to it. But my father had already broken whatever spirit she used to have and she’d long ago given up arguing with him about anything, because she’d learned that all that would happen was that he’d beat her up and then do whatever it was he’d been planning to do in the first place.

So, when my father took me upstairs with him, she’d just feel pleased that at least he was taking some interest in me. Then she’d go down to the kitchen and start preparing food for the evening’s party.

In the bedroom, my father would tell me to take off my clothes and get into the bed, and then he’d make me tickle him or show me the special way he liked to be massaged. After a while, he’d take hold of my hand, place it on his penis and say, ‘Now look what you’ve done! It’s your fault that’s happened, so you’re going to have to get rid of it.’ Then he’d half-lie on top of me, crushing me with his weight and hurting me as he heaved and grunted. And I’d feel bad, because I knew that I was to blame, even though I didn’t understand what he was doing or why.

Afterwards, he’d fall into a deep, alcohol-fuelled sleep, and I’d lie beside him, watching the saliva dribbling from his open mouth and the sides of his nostrils vibrating in time with the rumbling of his snores. When he woke up, he’d give me a pound note – later, a shiny new one-pound coin – which was a small fortune to me at the time.

Far worse than being taken into my father’s bed, though, was having to have a bath with him. I was frightened of my father, and I’d learned at a very young age that it was best to do whatever he told me to do, promptly and without fuss. So when he pushed my head under the water and held it there, I tried not to panic or to think about the pain in my chest as the air drained out of my lungs, because I knew that the quicker I did what he’d taught me to do, the sooner I’d be able to breathe again.

I didn’t know there was anything wrong with what my father was doing to me or with what he was making me do to him, any more than I’d have thought it might be ‘wrong’ of him to teach me to recite fables in French. I just accepted it; in fact, I didn’t really even think about it. If I had, though, I imagine I’d have assumed that all fathers did the same things to their daughters; that all daughters were to blame for what was done to them, as my father always told me I was; and that all little girls hated it as much as I did. I didn’t have friends home to tea, and I rarely went to anyone else’s house to play. So I didn’t know that other fathers didn’t punch their wives and abuse their children, or that not every little girl had an empty space inside her that was slowly filling up with hurt, fear and self-hatred.

My father drank in bars and pubs at lunchtime almost every day, including weekends. He’d often arrive home late on Friday afternoons with at least one friend, and they’d have a few drinks together before going out again in the evening. One Friday afternoon when I was four years old, I went into the kitchen and found my father leaning against the black iron range cooker drinking a glass of whisky and talking to his friend Harvey Wynne.

Harvey Wynne had extraordinarily bushy eyebrows and a long, narrow chin, which made him look far more serious than he actually was. He was always nice to me, and as I walked into the kitchen, he greeted me cheerily.

‘Well, hello there, Miss Katie,’ he said in a jokey, cartoon sort of voice. ‘That’s a very pretty dress you’re wearing today.’

He smiled broadly at me, and then picked up a crystal whisky glass from the kitchen table and raised it to his lips.

‘It’s a new dress,’ I told him proudly. ‘My mummy bought it for me when she went shopping today.’

‘Well, it suits you very well,’ Harvey Wynne said, sitting down abruptly and heavily in one of the oak-wood chairs beside the kitchen table. He turned to look at my father, who smiled and nodded, and then he patted his knee as he said, ‘Why don’t you come and sit here, with your Uncle Harvey.’

I was always afraid of doing anything that might make my father angry with me, and I glanced up at him quickly to see if he approved, and again he nodded his head. So I climbed on to Harvey Wynne’s knee in my lovely new dress, and he let me dip my finger in his whisky and laughed when I wrinkled my nose with disgust at the taste. Then he put his hand underneath the skirt of my pretty dress, pushed it down into my pants and touched me with his fingers, while my father looked on, sipping his drink and smiling a small, cold smile that warned me not to struggle and cry out, as I wanted to do.