Joe Peters (18 page)

I still wasn’t an easy child for anyone to deal with. The words that came most easily to my lips were phrases like ‘fuck off’ and ‘you c***’, sayings that I had heard repeated over and over again throughout my life, literally having them beaten into me day and night. Swearing and snarling at anyone who tried to help me also allowed me to vent my own anger and frustration at the world.

One of the many reasons why I was so disruptive was because I was frustrated by my own inability to do most
of the schoolwork I was given. After a couple of years I no longer had Miss Meredith to guide me. Once I had mastered the basics and could talk and read and write, they assumed I could keep up on my own but I would sometimes find myself losing control as I struggled to make sense of what the teachers were saying and writing up on their blackboards.

At the age of eleven we all moved on to senior school, even though I had only received two years of education by then and was woefully ill-equipped to cope. Just when I thought I was getting a grip on something, the teachers would move on to something else. Everyone else in the class had got the hang of it before me and I would be far too self-conscious to ask them to stop and go over it again for me. After a while I would give up even trying and I would start messing around to cover up my own failures, flicking things around the room with my ruler or pulling stupid faces, no longer listening to anything the teacher was saying.

I wanted to win as many friends and be as popular as possible and the best way to do that was to make the other kids laugh at every opportunity. I was always easily led astray, just as I had been when Larry and Barry played tricks on me in the bedroom getting me to do things that would annoy Mum. Anything the other kids dared me to do, I would immediately do simply to please them and make them like me. If they told me to throw
something at the teacher’s back while he was working on the board I would do it, just to please them. This meant I was constantly getting into trouble and being punished. Compared to the punishments I received at home, however, there was nothing they could do to me at school that was too frightening. The worst thing they could threaten me with was telling Mum what I was getting up to, because then she would give me one of her batterings once she got me home.

Most of the people who had given me a hard time at my old school had gone to other secondary schools so I had an opportunity to make a new set of friends who didn’t have any preconceptions about me. Pete had come to the same school as me but he was in different classes because he was one of the clever ones whereas I was struggling to keep up at all. We remained good friends, though, and I grew to trust him enough to tell him a little about what went on in our house. I didn’t tell him about the sex, because that was too embarrassing, but when I described the violence he told me in no uncertain terms that I should report it to someone and get help. He said that there were helplines for kids to ring if they were being mistreated by their parents, and he told me the phone number of one of them, but I didn’t think it could possibly do any good to talk to people like that. Pete came from such a different world that he couldn’t imagine why I wouldn’t be able to just tell the authorities –
that was the sort of thing his parents would have known all about – but I was never going to be able to do it.

Even though I knew Pete didn’t really understand, I trusted him completely not to pass my secrets on. He had no trouble believing that I was telling the truth because he had experienced Mum in a hostile mood that time he came to our door. I don’t know how he would have reacted if I had told him everything; he probably would have forced me to talk to the authorities about it, or maybe he’d have told his parents.

Because I didn’t talk about it to anyone I assumed that most children had to put up with some sort of sexual interference in their family lives. I didn’t think the violence we endured at home was normal because I had seen that other children weren’t frightened of their parents, but I didn’t know what went on inside the privacy of their family bedrooms. I assumed lots of adults used the children in their families for sexual relief.

Sexual matters are confusing enough for any young boy as he starts to experience urges that would have been entirely alien to him just a year or two before, but for me it was even more of a puzzle. I was filled with a mixture of fear, guilt and my own growing desires. The only thing I was sure of was that I found girls attractive, not boys or men. But having been subjected to such a variety of extreme sexual acts by so many different people from an early age I had no idea where the barriers were
supposed to stand between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.

Once, when I was thirteen, I got over-enthusiastic and touched a girl at school inappropriately, without thinking for a second that I was doing anything wrong. She immediately went to a teacher and told on me and I got hauled in front of the headmaster. He explained to me that boys just mustn’t do those sorts of things, however much they might want to. I couldn’t understand what the big fuss was about, because it had only been a passing touch and I had come from a world where everyone took whatever they wanted, regardless of other people’s feelings.

I was horrified when I realized how seriously I had sinned in the eyes of the girl as well as the headmaster, and terrified when he told me that Mum had been called to the school as a result of my ‘disgusting’ behaviour.

As usual, when she arrived Mum was acting the role of the perfect, put-upon and slightly puzzled parent, unable to understand how her child could have let her down so badly. I sat beside her with my head down and eyes to the floor, not daring to speak, knowing that I was going to receive a terrible beating for this once she got me home – not because she would think anything much about the degree of the crime, but because she would be furious to have been called in and embarrassed in front of the headmaster.

‘I don’t know where he could have learned such behaviour,’ she said and I kept staring at the floor, bursting to blurt out everything that I knew and exactly how I had learned it, but knowing my life wouldn’t be worth living if I did. Even now that I was thirteen and no longer a small child, my mother’s secrets were still safe with me. Would anyone have believed such tales of horror anyway?

O
ne morning, during the year when I was thirteen, Pete came into school with some terrible news.

‘My mum and dad have decided to send me to a grammar school,’ he told me.

It seemed they had decided that our school wasn’t getting the best out of him or something, so he was moving on to try to fulfil his potential somewhere else. Maybe they still thought I was a bad influence and it was me they were trying to separate him from. I didn’t know what a grammar school was, but I did know that I probably wouldn’t be seeing Pete any more once he’d gone there. I assumed that he would almost certainly just disappear out of my life in the way that Wally had, however much he might protest to the contrary. The idea of losing my one good friend seemed unbearable and I broke down in front of him, crying like a baby –
something I don’t think I would have done in front of anyone except him or Wally.

‘I can’t manage without you,’ I sobbed.

‘Yeah you can, we’ll stay in touch,’ he promised, trying to soften the blow, trying to sound casual about the whole thing, as though it was no big deal.

‘No, you won’t,’ I said. ‘You say you will, but you won’t, not once you have new friends.’

‘I will,’ he protested, but I could see that he was no more convinced of the truth of that than I was.

I didn’t blame him for moving on. I just knew he wouldn’t keep in touch and I didn’t want to be left hanging around waiting for him to get in contact, as I had for so long with Wally. That had been such a huge let-down that I still couldn’t think about it without feeling deeply hurt. I didn’t want to be the one who was chasing after Pete and constantly finding he was too busy with his new friends or with his homework or his important exams to be able to spend time with me. I knew only too well how painful it was to hold out hope for something and then to be disappointed yet again. I preferred to face the truth at the beginning, make a clean break and cope with it as best I could. I had to accept that I was going to lose Pete, my only real friend, and that was the end of it.

It was a Monday morning when he broke the news and his words kept going round and round in my head as I sat in my early lessons. I was in a state of shock, even
less able to concentrate on anything the teachers were saying than usual. Pete was the only good thing in my life and I couldn’t see any point in continuing to go to school without him there. I didn’t need him to protect me from the bullies any more, but I knew that I wasn’t gaining anything from the classes because I was falling so far behind, so if I couldn’t hang out with Pete between classes it all seemed like a big waste of time. As long as I was still in school I had to go home every night to the nightmare of my family life, but if I left school I just might be able to walk away from my whole life: Mum, Amani, Larry, Barry and the vile Uncle Douglas. It was as though a light bulb had suddenly gone on in my head as I began to think practically about running away from school and home and my entire past.

I’d thought about running away before, of course, a million times – especially when I had been lying in the cellar at home or in one of the little bedrooms at Douglas’s house. But I had never been able to think of a concrete plan of how to do it or where to go. I’d never actually thought I would get away with it and I knew that when I was inevitably brought back by the police I would be bound to have to face terrible consequences, so I had never found the nerve to go through with it. Having Pete’s friendship during school weekdays had been just enough to keep me from having a go. But now that restraint was being lifted, and I was getting older. I
was a teenager, so was it really such an unreasonable idea to start my adult life a bit early?

I felt a rising beat of excitement in my heart as the idea blossomed into a definite plan. When I was a small child I’d known I would be caught quickly and taken straight back to Mum, who would have beaten me to a pulp for daring to do such a thing, but I wouldn’t be so conspicuous on the streets now that I was older, and I would be able to look after myself better. At least I could talk now, and being friends with Pete had taught me a lot about being more confident in the world. I reasoned that if I could just keep myself hidden and out of everyone’s way for a few years I would be old enough to stay away from home legally. I would be free to live my own life, away from all the people who wanted to hurt me and keep me as their slave. How could life on the run be any worse than life at home and at Uncle Douglas’s, even if I was forced to live rough for a while? If I could survive for three years in a cellar, surely I could survive anywhere?

Once the idea had taken root it suddenly seemed like the obvious way out of everything that made my life a misery. I decided to act immediately. I didn’t want to endure another night of humiliation, pain and abuse at home if I didn’t have to; in fact, the idea of going home ever again suddenly seemed intolerable compared with the temptation of the big wide outside world. I knew
that I would have an hour at dinnertime when no one would notice I had gone; that would be my chance to get away.

‘I’ve got to go home,’ I told Pete when we met as usual after the last morning lesson. ‘I don’t feel well.’

‘Who’s coming to get you?’ he asked. ‘The bitch?’

He’d always referred to Mum in that way, ever since she’d told him to ‘fuck off out of it’ at our front door.

‘Yeah,’ I lied. ‘Will you tell the teachers for me?’

‘Sure,’ he shrugged. Maybe he could tell I was acting strangely but if he could, he probably put it down as my reaction to his news.

I went into the dinner room and collected together as much food as I could carry without drawing attention to myself, stuffing it into my pockets while no one was looking. I then strolled as casually as I could manage from the dinner room to the cloakroom and went through everyone’s pockets and bags looking for cash. I also scooped up any items of clothing that I thought would be useful once I had discarded my school uniform. I felt guilty about stealing from the other kids but I had gone into survival mode and I knew I wouldn’t last long on the run without any money, and I couldn’t walk about in my school uniform or I would be hauled over and asked some questions.

When I was ready, I strolled out of the school gates as calmly as my thumping heart would let me, and just kept
walking without looking back. I kept on going for hours, putting as many miles as possible between me and my past, marching away from the built-up areas and out into the countryside to a beautiful area well known to holidaymakers during the summer. Campers, tourists and hikers all came to this part of the world in summer but I was pretty sure there was no chance of me bumping into anyone I knew since it was only March.

I’d studied some survival books in the library when I had first learned to read, fantasizing about surviving in the wild somewhere on my own, living on my wits, and I imagined I had learned enough to be able to get away with it. My plan was to build a camp in the woods somewhere and live like Tarzan did in the movies – maybe even making friends with the animals as he did. Animals would be a lot more reliable than people had ever turned out to be. Any hardships I might face in the wild were going to be nothing compared to what I had survived at home, I was sure of that. The further I got from home, the more optimistic I felt that I was going to get away with it, that all my pain and suffering were finally over. I was a free man now and I could put my childhood behind me as I got on with the rest of my life.

By seven o’clock that evening I felt I had walked far enough to be safe from anyone who might by now be searching for me and I began to look around for somewhere to sleep for my first night. I was passing an
isolated group of big detached houses when I came across about a dozen kids playing together after their tea. It was nice to see some friendly faces, people who knew nothing about me or my past, and I stopped to talk to them. They were very posh, their voices much more like Pete’s than like mine. Their houses looked like mansions to me.