What Daddy Did (9 page)

This argument went on, as it always did, until finally I heard my Dad come out of the living room. I could tell by his footsteps that he was angry. He didn't come to the bathroom door as I'd expected, but went charging down the lobby and then stopped two-thirds of the way down. I could see his shape moving around. Then I heard him lifting the hatch to the cellar that ran below our flat, and joined up with a network of cellars that belonged to the various shops and restaurants on Easter Road, all separated by locked wooden doors. I heard him switch on the light he'd installed as he moved the wooden ladder into place that allowed people to go down there.

Then he came to the bathroom.

I bristled with fear as he yanked open the door. I looked up at him standing there in his Post Office trousers with a V-neck sweater over a white shirt and his tie loosened slightly. His eyes were massive brown pools behind NHS glasses. He was angry. I motioned to speak but he yelled at me not to say a word, and said that I was to get down in the cellar and wait for him.

I scurried down the corridor in my bare feet and vest and pants, almost numb from standing in the cold all day. As I passed the living room I caught sight of Helen standing behind the door, watching and listening. I'll never forget that sneer on her face.

I reached the hatch of the cellar and lowered myself onto the wooden ladder that wobbled as I climbed down it. I hated that cellar with its musty smell, cobwebs, dark shadows and cold, deathly feel. I just stood there again – awaiting my fate. I heard the footsteps of both my Dad and Helen walking about, and the muffled sounds of their resumed arguing. Then I heard him coming down the lobby. I watched as his shape occluded the hatch and he descended step by step, getting bigger as he got closer. I felt as if my heart was going to jump out of my chest. I was terrified.

I knew that I was going to get another beating but I just didn't want my Daddy to do it.

He finally got down to where I was, and I stared at the ground, stared at his feet. As I did, he removed the slipper from his right foot and stood with one slipper and one sock-covered foot. He grabbed me and sort of put me over his knee, although I wasn't lying down completely. He started whacking me. Over and over again I was thrashed – combined with what Helen had done to me earlier that day, it was a miracle that my skinny, beaten, malnourished body didn't just give in. All the time that he hit me, my Dad's breathing was laboured.

I tried to tell him to stop. I whimpered at him more than anything, but he just kept hitting and hitting me across the bottom and backs of my legs. He was really angry with me and told me I had to be good. He asked, 'Do you want your mother to leave us all?' My heart screamed out, 'Yes! Yes, I do! I want that woman who is not my mother, who will never be my mother and who says she hates me, to go away for ever. And I want you to look after me, Daddy, to protect me.' But my heart couldn't speak and, in a desperate fit of self-preservation, I said that I wanted her to stay.

The beating continued for a bit longer. My Dad then told me to get to bed and said he didn't want to come home the next day to find out that I'd caused more trouble for my 'Mummy'. I couldn't speak for crying, and I was hurting inside and out. I did what he said and climbed the ladder and went straight into my room. In bed, I did what I did most times after one of these episodes and curled up into a ball under the covers, hugging myself tightly while sobbing as silently as I could.

What surprises me now about this incident, looking back, is that my Dad seemed to think it was normal for his young daughter to be standing in the bathroom in her underwear. I can't understand why he didn't seek to question the bruises that covered the tops of my legs from the beating I'd had in the morning. I would so like to ask him about that now. How could he justify it? No child is ever naughty enough to warrant this kind of punishment, this cruelty. Where was the fatherly hug and the 'how was your day?' Where was the bedtime story, and who was this man who thought I was being treated appropriately? What was happening? How could it be getting even worse? Helen kept saying that I was truly bad. Maybe I was. I felt bad, as if I had done something very evil. I just didn't know what.

I had no Mummy and I was losing my Daddy.

HELEN'S PARTIES STARTED
a little while after Frances and Adrian came home from Barnardo's. My Dad was working many hours a day by then. I knew about the parties largely because they started during a summer holiday period from school, and continued at that time of year until Helen left. She may well have also hosted them during the day when we were all at school – and I suspect she did – but I can't know for certain. All I do know is that during the holidays there would be a party every other day.

Every day Helen had one of her parties was another day stolen from my childhood.

I was usually the only child in the house during these parties. The others would all be out, with my big half-sister in charge, either at the swing park, the play scheme or a holiday club at the Regent cinema on Abbeymount. I was allowed out to these places once or twice but certainly not as a rule. I'd be the only one left behind, as Helen would be punishing me for something.

I dreaded them all going out the door and it closing behind them – because I knew then what would be coming.

After I wrote my first book,
The Step Child
, there were many features and interviews in the national press and magazines. A Scottish newspaper printed a photograph I had never seen before. That photograph chilled me to the bone. It showed my older halfbrother and half-sister with Helen's two boys at the Regent cinema in the late 1960s. It is a publicity shot, where the manager of the cinema is being presented with something by someone else. I've no idea who the two men are, or what this presentation is about, but Helen's youngest boy is sitting on the knee of one of the men, with my older half-sister standing directly behind him, smiling. On the left of the picture is my older half-brother; he, too, is smiling. There are many other children in the picture and they are all happy. They were all there, my half-siblings, but I am not. I know I'm not because I would have remembered such an event. So where was I? It must have been a school holiday, I guess, so that means I would be where I always was. I'd be at home in my usual place, either in the bathroom or my dark boxroom awaiting my fate while Helen entertained her friends. I was part of that entertainment.

Since Helen's trial I have questioned the motives behind her gruesome abuse of me. I have had to try and make sense of what actually happened to me. I wonder if you will understand when I say that, even at her trial, I was still accepting the abuse. I didn't look beyond the fact that I had been abused. I didn't look for her motives or those of her so-called friends. I suppose in some ways I was still conditioned; I was still fearful of her. Standing in the High Court in Edinburgh that day in October 2003, I was still that frightened little girl inside. When I looked at her, as I was instructed to by Lord Hardie to identify her, she had the power to instil an incredible fear in me, even though I was 45 years old.

I was perplexed by the charges laid against her: 'procuring a minor'. I stood in that court back then and really, honestly, didn't understand what had gone on in my childhood. I knew it was wrong – that's why I was there, to get some justice at last – but I had no idea of the whole picture. What has come to light since that day is that I was not the only one she abused; it is not my place to say who that other person was, but there definitely was another person who, like me, was a child at the time. I know this because I have heard their story too. I do not know for sure if there were other children who suffered the same fate as we did, but I do have my suspicions. I can recall an instance at one of those parties when I heard a young girl cry out in pain in the room next to me. I don't know who the girl was or what was being done to her, but I could guess because I recognised the painful, pitiful sobs that were the same as mine.

Helen's parties were really nothing more than a sordid, sick bunch of paedophiles gathering together to exploit a child, a child held captive and provided by Helen to be used and abused by these warped, twisted people. That's what I understand now.

I love parties in my life today because we have healthy, happy family get-togethers where we enjoy each other's company. We listen to music, eat food and laugh and joke. Any children who are at these parties are respected and protected, an integral part of happy celebrations. It is a far, far cry from the parties I knew as a child where I would be fearful of every sound, where I was far from respected and protected. In complete contrast to a day being stolen, our parties today are days to be treasured, and the memories of them are happy and wholesome. I wonder if Helen Ford can say the same?

WHEN I ORIGINALLY DECIDED
to tell my story, I didn't know what I wanted from it. This far down the line, however, I can see the huge benefit I have gained from just being able to get everything out. Before I did this, I wanted to bottle everything up. I really didn't think anyone would believe me if I told them; furthermore, it was just too painful to think about.

During the court case against Helen, she and her 'friends' appeared to be the only guilty ones, but when I look at my father's role in my upbringing I see that he, too, is accountable. I also see that I was badly let down by all the organisations involved in my childhood, from the social workers who visited every four to six weeks – some of whom recognised something was wrong but did nothing – to the schools I attended where teachers saw a steady decline in my behaviour and witnessed my bruises, yet did nothing.

It seems incredible to me now, as an adult, that I was actually taken to be assessed by doctors after I was caught stealing at school. The files I have report that I was stealing food at home and from children's bags and pockets at school. That was perfectly true – I took food from any source I could. I'd pick halfeaten sweets from the pavements, and eat bread thrown out for the birds. I'd even steal food from bins. I was starving. I needed to eat. I'd go to school hungry having had no breakfast and possibly no tea or half rations the previous night. I was stopped from having school dinners by Helen and made to come home at lunchtime each day so that she could maintain control. It was hardly surprising that I stole food.

As I pointed out at Helen's trial, the only child who feels the need to do that is a hungry child. It was a cry for help, not naughtiness. So, at one stage, I was referred to a child psychologist because my stepmother said she was at the end of her tether with my behaviour.

I have since questioned why Helen said there was a problem with my behaviour. She was treating me so badly, so cruelly, that it seems unbelievable that she would be the one to actually draw attention to how I was behaving. I think that, by this stage, she was so confident of two things that she simply didn't think she would be caught. Her first line of defence would have been the impression she gave everyone of being the perfect wife and mother. She was the young woman who had taken on all these kids who weren't her own or even, in the case of my two halfsiblings, her husband's. Even when she had two little ones of her own she kept everything together. The second thing was that she was fully aware of what an arch manipulator she was. She was skilled at getting people to think what she wanted, and she probably would have assumed she could talk her way out of anything. I also think she was probably covering her own back – if she could get me labelled as a problem child, then anything I might say about her wouldn't stick.