I Remember, Daddy (7 page)

After a while, my father told me to ‘run along’, and as I slid off Harvey Wynne’s knee, he handed me a shiny coin and I left the room clutching it so tightly that my fingernails dug painfully into my palm, leaving tiny red marks like half-moons. But, despite my delight at being given this token of my father’s apparent approval, I couldn’t help feeling that something really bad had just happened.

Shortly after that day, my father went on a holiday to Spain with some of his friends. They’d rented a villa for a couple of weeks, but he’d only been there for a few days when he got ill and he summoned my mother to fly out and look after him. My brother had been at boarding school since the age of five, but it was the school holidays, so my mother had to take us both with her.

I remember how excited I was at the thought of going on an aeroplane, although I don’t remember much about the days we spent at the villa in Spain, except that I had to run as fast as I could across the burning hot sand to the water’s edge when we went to the beach, and that we ate delicious, thick omelettes that tasted far better than anything I’d ever eaten at home. And I remember swimming one day in the pool at the villa with one of my father’s friends.

For some reason, we were the only two people at the pool that morning and he was supposed to be keeping an eye on me while I was in the water. I was wearing bright-orange-coloured water wings on my arms and splashing around happily just out of my depth when he swam towards me, pulled the bottom of my swimming costume to one side and put his penis inside me. It hurt and startled me, and when I screamed he quickly took it out again, stared at me coldly as he splashed me with water and then swam away.

Back at home, my father’s parties had become legendary, and sometimes, after I’d gone to bed at night, I’d creep out of my room again and crouch silently in my nightdress on the landing, so that I could look down through the balusters. I loved hearing the laughter and listening to the loud, cheerful chatter of my father’s jovial friends, which was often punctuated by shrieks from the confidently mini-skirted, flirting young women they’d brought with them. My father and his friends seemed to know a lot of young women, and it wasn’t until later that I realised they’d actually picked them up in casinos and bars because they were willing to have sex with almost anyone in exchange for as much of my father’s expensive champagne as they could drink.

After most of the parties, at least one of my father’s friends would be too drunk to go home, so he’d stay the night in a guestroom on the top floor of our house. And on those nights, from the time I was just four years old, my father would come into my bedroom when I was fast asleep, pull back the bedclothes and lift me out of my bed. Sometimes, I’d open my eyes as he was carrying me up the stairs, and sometimes I’d wake up to find myself already lying in a bed beside some man I didn’t know who was breathing alcohol into my face and touching me.

Whenever I saw any of my father’s friends during the day, they’d speak pleasantly to me and I’d answer them politely. At night, though, when I lay naked in bed beside them, they rarely said anything directly to me. They all stank of alcohol, and one of them – my father’s best friend, who was later accused of abusing his own stepdaughter – had feet which smelt so awful that just being in bed beside him made me retch.

But although I hated what was happening and it made me afraid to fall asleep at night, none of the men who abused me was actually unkind to me in any practical way that I could identify. So I simply assumed it was what everyone did – that it was just one of those things you had to accept when you were a little girl and no one was interested in what you wanted or what you thought. It was many years before I had any understanding of what was normal behaviour towards a child and what was totally unacceptable, perverted and cruel abuse. Until then, I was just happy when someone was kind to me.

It was no wonder I’d fallen apart after my own child was born. In my mind, being a child was associated with being constantly unhappy, bullied and frightened and, subconsciously, with sexual abuse. The prospect of becoming a parent had scared me before Sam was born, and the responsibility of knowing that I had to protect him against all the dangers I could name, as well as those I couldn’t, had proved overwhelming. And, gradually, while I was in hospital, I began to understand why.

A
s a child, not knowing what was ‘normal’ and what wasn’t meant that I trusted everyone and no one, and that I had no basis on which to judge people’s intentions. There was one occasion, when I was five, when I was playing outside in the street and a man stopped in his car and asked if he could take my photograph. Nowadays, no normal person would even consider making a request of that sort to a little girl playing on her own. But perhaps at that time people were more trusting, or simply more naïve. So I sat down on a step outside the house, as he asked me to do, and he took my photo and promised to send me a copy.

When I proudly told my mother what had happened, she was horrified. The colour drained out of her face and she bent down, put her hands on my shoulders and looked directly into my eyes as she said, ‘Oh Katie! Surely you know that you mustn’t, ever, talk to strangers. I can’t believe you let a strange man take a photo of you.’

‘But he wasn’t strange,’ I told her, wondering if perhaps my understanding of the word was different from my mother’s. Then, feeling pleased with myself for being able to clinch the argument so definitively, I added, ‘His feet didn’t smell.’

My mother just looked at me in bewilderment and shook her head. Unable to follow what to me seemed like a logical train of thought, she must have wondered if I was simple, at best.

Several days later, there was a knock on the front door and when my mother opened it, a man thrust what looked like a piece of paper towards her.

‘I took this photograph of your daughter a couple of weeks ago,’ he told her. ‘I hope that was okay. She was playing in the street outside and although she looked like a little ragamuffin, you could tell she’d been immaculately clean and tidy when she’d first gone out. I thought she was the most beautiful child I’d ever seen.’

My mother was mollified – she still has the photograph to this day – and she was vastly relieved to discover that the man I’d told her about wasn’t the devil she’d thought he must be. Which was ironic really, because she hadn’t any idea that it wasn’t ‘strange men’ on the street I needed to be wary and afraid of; it was my own father and the men she regularly talked to and laughed with and entertained in her own house.

My father’s abuse continued almost every night for more than four years, until being miserable seemed normal and I was becoming increasingly confused about what was right and what was wrong. And then, in the middle of one night when I was seven years old and he was out with his friends, my mother came into my bedroom, woke me up and told me to get dressed.

I pulled the bedcovers over my head and turned away from her. But she knelt down on the floor beside my bed and pushed at my shoulder until I eventually rolled over with a sigh. When I looked at her, I saw that her eyes were red and full of tears and I knew something very serious was wrong.

‘Get up, Katie,’ she whispered, tugging at my arm. ‘We’ve got to go. Get dressed, quickly. Here, I’ll help you.’

She picked up a sweater from the chair beside my bed and as she fumbled to pull it over my head, she raised her arms and the sleeves of her blouse slipped back to reveal skin that was almost completely covered in black and yellow marks.

‘We must go before your father gets home,’ she said, in a voice full of fear and urgency. Then she turned and started pulling clothes out of my drawers and stuffing them into an already over-full suitcase, glancing over her shoulder towards the bedroom door every few seconds as though she expected my father to walk through it at any minute.

She was more frightened than I’d ever seen her before, and my heart began to beat so fast I thought it might suddenly wear itself out and stop, because I knew she was right to be afraid. It was my own constant fear that one day my father might punch or kick her so hard that he’d kill her without meaning to, and I knew that if he came home and found her in the process of leaving him, he’d be so angry that this could be the night when my worst nightmare came true.

It was term time, so my brother was at boarding school, which meant that it was just me and my mother who crept, hand in hand, down the stairs that night and fled from the house without a backward glance. My mother had taken nothing with her except the few clothes she’d flung hastily into a suitcase and then dragged down the stone steps on to the pavement, and I don’t think I really believed we were leaving for good.

We spent the rest of that night at the house of one of my mother’s friends, and the next day we drove in almost unbroken silence to her parents’ house, where she was going to leave me while she went to London to look for work.

I still couldn’t believe we’d escaped from my father – or that anyone could escape from him – and for weeks I kept expecting him to appear suddenly in front of me and tell me that he was taking me home. But the truth probably was that he was pleased to be rid of us; he was always telling us how ‘fucking useless and pathetic’ we were and how we were too stupid to follow even the simplest of instructions. Despite our glaringly irrefutable inadequacies, however, he must have been beside himself with rage when he discovered that my mother had dared to take the initiative and leave him. He certainly wasn’t heartbroken, though, because, just a few days after we’d gone, he moved his girlfriend, Sally, into the house.

For my father, who loved sex, parties and drinking above all else, Sally was the ideal partner. She wasn’t a good housekeeper like my mother, though. My mother had always been house-proud and conscientious about making sure that everything was spotlessly clean, which was how my father always insisted it should be. So, when I visited him some time later, I was shocked at how untidy the house had become. There was mess everywhere. Almost every flat surface in the living room was covered in dirty glasses and plates with the congealed remains of food stuck to them; and there were more stacked up in the sink in the kitchen. Clearly, Sally’s other skills outweighed her obvious lack of interest in housekeeping.

My father went through a wild phase while he was with Sally. Although he’d never really seemed to care what people thought about him – despite the fact that, paradoxically, other people’s opinions of him were exactly what drove his long-held need to be someone – he’d always managed to keep up a front of respectability. But, when he was with Sally, he started taking cocaine and drinking even more heavily than he’d done before, and sex became the focus of his life.

Meanwhile, I lived with my grandparents, while my mother rented a flat in London. She didn’t really settle there, though. It was a long way from where she’d grown up, and from her friends and family, and marriage to my father had left her too cowed and lacking in confidence to be able to strike out on her own and make a success of a completely new life.

I wasn’t happy either. I was a very odd little girl and people generally didn’t like me. I didn’t understand why and, unfortunately, no one explained to me what it was that I did wrong – even when the father of a little girl at school came to my grandparents’ house one day and angrily told my grandfather that I was not to play with or even talk to his daughter ever again.

I longed to have friends, but there were so many confusions and conflicts in my mind, and my behaviour was so strange, that I made people wary and uncomfortable around me. And the more unhappy and isolated I became, the more I did things that highlighted the difference between me and all the other children at school.

From the age of seven, I’d sometimes take money from my grandmother’s purse and buy cigarettes from a cigarette machine. I don’t know why I did it – needless to say, none of the other children at school smoked. Perhaps it was a way of expressing the sense of freedom I felt when my father was no longer controlling my every move, because I knew that of all the many things my father hated, he hated people smoking almost worst of all. Or perhaps it was a case of ‘might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’: if I was going to be stuck with a reputation for being ‘odd’, I might as well be as odd as it was possible for me to be.

My mother stayed in London for almost a year, and then one day she came to collect me from my grandparents’ house. I think they were vastly relieved to see me go, and I was certainly happy to be returning with my mother to the city where I’d been born, even though the prospect of seeing my father again filled me with dread.

For the first few weeks, my mother and I stayed with a friend of hers called Tilly, who had a flat on the first floor of a house similar to – and not far away from – the one we’d lived in with my father. One night while we were there, I was woken up by the sound of someone shouting in the street below my bedroom window. Still half asleep, I’d turned on to my back to listen when suddenly my eyes snapped open and I was fully awake. It felt as though ice-cold water was flooding through every vein in my body, because I recognised the voice that was shouting in the street outside: it was my father.

With my heart thumping, I slid out of bed, crept to the window and then just stood there, trying to pluck up the courage to look out on to the street. Eventually, I took a deep breath and lifted the edge of the heavy velvet curtain. I could see my father standing on the pavement outside the house, waving his arms in the air like someone conducting an invisible orchestra and shouting words I couldn’t make out. I dropped the curtain quickly, as though I’d been burned, and crawled back under the blankets on my bed, where I lay, crying soundlessly, until I fell asleep.

The next morning, it was Tilly who opened her bedroom curtains first and saw the photographs my father had rammed down on to every single one of the spikes on the black-painted iron railings that ran across the front of the house. My mother cried when she saw the torn, scarred photographs of her wedding to my father and, although it seemed totally inexplicable to me, it was obvious that she still loved him, on some level at least, and that she was deeply hurt by what he’d done. She was distraught, too, when she found out that his girlfriend Sally had given away her wedding dress and had been wearing the clothes she’d had to leave behind in her wardrobe the night we fled from our home.

Clearly, my father was intent on making my mother suffer for having left him.

My mother no longer had any money of her own and, despite the divorce settlement ordered by the courts, my father gave her nothing. He had an almost psychopathic hatred of anyone who crossed him and he had always had absolutely no interest in ‘doing the right thing’. All that ever concerned him was what he wanted – and he wanted money almost more than anything else. So he simply ignored the court order, assuming – rightly, as it turned out – that my mother wouldn’t have the mental energy to fight him and that if she ever did, he had enough powerful and influential friends in high places to find some way of discrediting any claim she might make.

My father had been hiding money for some time and he’d bought several properties, most of them in the names of trusted friends. So he allowed my mother and me to move into a flat in a house he owned, for which, incongruously, my mother paid him rent. It was a horrible flat – just two rooms plus a tiny kitchen and an even tinier bathroom in a rundown house in one of the worst areas of town. I had never seen anything like it before, and in fact I didn’t have any idea that places like that even existed.

My father was in the process of having the rest of the house divided up into dismal little bedsits, and for the first few weeks after we moved in, we were its only occupants. The whole building was grimly bleak. It was noisy during the day when the workmen were there and eerie at night while all the bedsits were empty. But, once our new neighbours started moving in – all of them drunks, drug addicts and prostitutes whose rents were being paid by social services – it was worse than anything I could ever have imagined.

Our flat was on the top floor, and it was divided from the landing at the top of the staircase by a glass partition, which meant that our hallway – and the doors leading off it to the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room – was clearly visible to anyone and everyone coming and going to the bedsits.

I think my father derived some sort of satisfaction from knowing that my mother was living in such a miserable place – and I know that he was completely indifferent to what happened to me. Perhaps he felt that living surrounded by down-and-outs and criminals was suitable punishment for her for having thought she could just walk away from him. And perhaps he liked the irony of the fact that my mother had come from a respectable, comfortably well-off family whereas he had been poor as a child, and now she was living in squalid poverty while he remained in the family home, dined at the best restaurants and drank champagne with some of the town’s most prominent movers and shakers.

Every corner of the flat was pervaded by a sour, musty smell, which no amount of scrubbing and cleaning could ever get rid of. There was no washing machine, no cooker and no furniture apart from the narrow single bed I slept in and the sofa in the living room, which at night became my mother’s bed. The bathroom was minute; it was too small for a bath, and there was just a grimy, leaking shower with no curtain rail, and therefore no curtain, a cracked basin and a stained toilet with a white plastic seat that jerked precariously to one side when you sat on it. There was no floor covering in the bathroom; in fact, there were no curtains or floor coverings anywhere in the flat, except for two large Persian rugs my mother had somehow managed to take from what was now my father’s house and which looked bizarrely out of place on the stained, splintered fl oorboards in the living room/bedroom.

My mother’s mother bought us a cooker, but we still had no washing machine, so we washed our clothes in the basin in the bathroom and hung them to dry on a rack in the shower.

My mother found a job in an upmarket clothes shop, where she earned just enough to pay the rent and bills, and I accepted things as they were, without ever thinking that there might be an alternative way for us to live. I realise now that my mother must have been depressed, and still completely under my father’s thumb. Why else would someone who wasn’t receiving the money from her ex-husband that the courts had ordered him to pay actually pay him money for rent on a horrible, disgusting flat like the one we were living in – or, in fact, for any flat at all?