Daddy's Little Earner

‘Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the
long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that
would never have bound you, but for the formation of the
first link on one memorable day.’

Charles Dickens –
Great Expectations

‘R
ia, you’re my favourite,’ Dad would tell me throughout
my childhood. ‘All daddies love their little
girls the best.’ I’d fill with pride at this announcement
from my big, handsome, heroic father. I was his special
one. My brother Terry might be Mum’s favourite but Dad
loved me most and I’d have done anything to please him.

Mum says that right from the start he boasted to all
and sundry that he was going to train me to be ‘the best
little prostitute on the block’, but I only gradually got an
inkling of what that meant. I probably didn’t want to
know so I blocked it, even when he brought home his
prostitute friends and dressed me up in their clothes.
Even when he started breaking me in.

Years later, when my testimony put him in jail for
living off my immoral earnings, he said: ‘You can cut me
into a thousand pieces but I’ll always put myself back together again and I’ll be there for you, no matter what
you do. I’m the only one who will ever truly love you.’

I think he genuinely did love me, to the extent that he
was capable of love, and I stayed a daddy’s girl right into
my teens. He was my dad, the only one I had, after all.
And he had a lot of charm, he could talk the birds down
from the trees. There are plenty of people, even now, who
have a soft spot for him, despite knowing everything
he’s done.

Without that charm, none of it would ever have happened.
Mum wouldn’t have fallen head over heels for
him, a lot of other people wouldn’t have got hurt, and
I wouldn’t have found myself working the streets at the
age of thirteen to keep him in booze.

Every little girl has the potential to be a pop star, a
ballerina, a doctor, a barrister, a policewoman or a prostitute,
but to make the right choices they need support and
guidance from the people whose responsibility it is to care
for them. With a dad like mine, I never stood a chance.

T
erry and Jane, my mum and dad, were always described
as a glamorous couple. Anyone who knew
them when they were young in the early 1960s would agree
on that, however much they might later disapprove of the
way they both behaved. It was obvious to everyone that they
absolutely adored one another; you might even say they
were obsessed, and that it was their obsession with one
another that led to so many of our problems.

If they were both the loves of one another’s lives, as
they undoubtedly were, you would have thought that
would have given us, their children, a secure start in life –
but there were other darker elements of their relationship
at work almost from the moment they met, which turned
our family and our lives into a nightmare.

Everyone in the pubs that he frequented loved Dad. He
was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a powerful presence about him. He was invariably immaculately
dressed in a suit and tie and known for being good company
wherever he was, never able to resist playing up to
an adoring crowd of admirers.

Mum was only five feet four, but she had a perfect figure,
slim but curvy, which she readily showed off with
mini skirts, hot pants and tightly fitted tops, everything
that was fashionable amongst the young in those days,
even in Norwich, a good few miles away from ‘swinging
London’. I don’t have any early memories of her but I’m
told she was strikingly beautiful, with long jet-black hair,
deep brown eyes and flawless skin.

Dad was the black sheep of his family, or so the legend
was whispered, the one with a dubious past who never
did the right things but who prided himself on doing the
wrong things with style. He always claimed that he was
conceived when his mother had a fling with another man
during the war, while his father (his mother’s husband,
that is) was away from home doing the honourable thing
and fighting for king and country. If that was true it
would certainly go some of the way towards explaining
why Dad was so different to the rest of his family, and
why we were always treated as though we were outsiders
in some way that was never actually put into words.
Having a different father to his siblings meant there was
always a gap between them and him. His life seemed to
travel on totally different tracks to theirs, partly from his own choice and partly because of the way he was and the
things he believed. Maybe the fact that he had a different
father was also the reason why Dad was his mother’s
favourite, the one she would always stick up for no matter
what he did.

Her husband, who was a farmer, got into a lot of debt
when he came back from the war and, unable to see a way
out, he shot himself in the shed at the bottom of their garden.
Dad said he was the one who found the body when
he was still just a small boy. No one else ever verified that
story for me so I have no way of knowing if it was true,
but I certainly believed it at the time. Maybe it was true.
Whatever happened, I certainly didn’t have a grandfather
on that side and Nanny lived alone in her bungalow
a few miles away from us.

Rumour also had it in the family that my dad and my
grandmother slept in the same bed until he was fourteen.
That seems very believable, given how close they were
and how she tried to protect him from everyone, including
me. It might also have explained why he was as
relaxed as he was about everything to do with sex and
nudity.

My aunts and uncles all grew up to be very different
to Dad, quite middle class in their values and successful
in their lives. They’ve bought their own homes and run
their own businesses and none of them would have
wanted to have anything to do with the sort of people that Dad liked to hang out with, the thieves, alcoholics
and prostitutes who trooped in and out of our home at all
hours of the day and night, and drank with him in the
pubs of Norwich.

Dad didn’t learn to read and write until long after I
could – and I know he spent some time in an approved
school as a boy, although no one ever told me what for.
There was a story about him throwing a bus driver off
the bus when he was still quite young and I believe the
chap later died of a heart attack, although I don’t know
any more details. I doubt anyone could have been sure the
two events were directly linked but it sounds like the
sort of thing Dad might have done. As well as being a
charmer he was also a bully and a show-off and he had an
uncontrollable temper, which he frequently vented with
violence.

Although Mum’s family lived in a council house and
hadn’t done as well as some of Dad’s relatives, she had
been a bit spoiled by her father. Like Dad, she was always
a problem to her parents in her early teens, running away
from home, being wild and causing them no end of worry.
Mind you, she can’t have been that wild because on the
night she met Dad, when she was still fifteen, she had
gone out to the pictures on a date with another lad and
when he tried to put his hand up her skirt in the dark she
was mortified and slapped it away. Apparently affronted
by such forward behaviour she immediately ran out of the cinema and set out to walk home alone, having
successfully protected her honour. Just up the road she
bumped into Dad, whom she had never met before. He
was only a couple of years older than her but was already
very skilled at laying on the charm and flattery. He was
tall and well-dressed, a proper ladies’ man, and her head
was turned. He must have worked some magic because
he didn’t meet with any of the resistance the poor guy in
the cinema had encountered and they ended up having
sex together that very first night. That was how the great
love affair, which was to destroy so many lives, began.

When Dad first brought Mum home, my grandmother
was overjoyed and immediately encouraged
them to get married and start having children, but of
course they had to wait until Mum was old enough. Dad
had been in a fair bit of trouble when he was younger,
always drinking and mixing with the wrong crowd, and
Nanny was probably relieved to think she could get him
off her hands, hoping he would settle down now that
he had met the right woman.

Mum’s parents were not as pleased by this great love
match as Dad’s mum was. In fact they went to court to try
to stop her from seeing him. As she was only fifteen I suppose
they thought they had a chance of saving her from
him before it was too late. They must have been able to
see through his charm and bravado immediately and they
despised him, believing he was no good and would end up hurting their daughter. As it turned out they were
completely justified in their fears. They had probably
hoped she would meet some steady guy with a regular job
who would be able to calm her down, and anyone meeting
Dad would have known instantly that he was not
going to be the man for that job.

The more her parents told her not to see him, of
course, the more determined she became. By disapproving
of her choice her parents had turned the affair into
something illicit, adding to its glamour and excitement,
making Dad seem like a forbidden fruit. From the first
moment they spoke up against him they didn’t stand a
chance of keeping two such wilful, self-destructive kids
apart.

Mum was nineteen when she fell pregnant for the first
time, and they got married a week or two after my brother
Terry Junior was born in 1965. Dad’s mum was
thrilled; I think she paid for the marriage licence and
everything. Mum’s parents must have realized they had
lost the battle by that stage and were going to have to
make the best of a bad job. Perhaps they hoped that having
a baby would make Terry and Jane settle down a bit
and take their responsibilities seriously.

I was born a year later, in 1966, followed three years
after that by Christian and then by Glen in 1970. Right
from the word go I was a proper little daddy’s girl. I adored
him, while Terry was more of a favourite for Mum.

‘The moment you were born you were his,’ Mum once
told me, and I knew it was true. He loved my brother
Terry too, but once I was born Terry became Mum’s and
I was his. The night of my birth I’m told he paraded
around the hospital, completely drunk and smoking a
cigar, much to the annoyance of the sister in charge.

‘Right from the start,’ Mum said, ‘from when you
were born, he used to joke that he was going to make you
the best little prostitute on the block.’

B
eneath the glamorous act that Mum and Dad put
on for the world when they were out around the
pubs, things must have been pretty grim for them.
While Terry was a baby they lived in a bed-sitting room,
and it was only after I was born that they were given
their own council house. If Dad had a job in those days
it would have been painting and decorating, but I never
knew him to do much work when he was a grown man
and I can’t imagine he was any different in his early
twenties. He always says he worked in the early days
when he and Mum were together, but she would say he
didn’t do much.

As a some-time decorator, Dad was able to do the
house up a bit himself, but he only bothered with the
parts that he saw and wanted to show off to the people he
brought home at night. Their bedroom was beautiful and so was the sitting room, but the kitchen and outside toilet
were horrible and our rooms were all bare boards and
disgusting old wallpapers left by previous occupants; we
had no curtains or furniture or light bulbs. We were given
a couple of blankets each and there was no heating. I
used to get myself dressed under the blankets in the
morning, unable to face stepping out into the freezing
room until I had on as many layers as possible.

Mum was very glamorous in those days, good at making
the most of herself with make-up and clothes, and she
owned an array of wigs to change her look when she
wanted to. She used to sing around the pubs and clubs she
and Dad frequented and she was keen to do more with
her talent, maybe even going professional. She had a terrific,
soulful voice and got a chance to appear on
Opportunity
Knocks
, which was like the
X-Factor
of the time, but
Dad wouldn’t let her do it. I guess he was frightened he
would lose control of her if she became successful, that he
would be out of his depth amongst the sort of people she
would meet and that she would leave him behind. Perhaps
he was frightened she might meet someone else,
someone who would treat her decently. It’s quite likely
that the audition would have come to nothing, but then
again it could have been her chance to get out of her life
with him, make some money and get some independence,
and he wasn’t about to let her do that. Everyone,
even people who seem to have drawn all the short straws in life, gets a few chances to make something of their
lives. If enough of those chances are missed, the options
begin to shrink.