Daddy's Little Earner (16 page)

Somehow Dad persuaded Kathy to go back to him
even when she knew all about what he had done to me,
which I found hard to understand. He then didn’t bother
to turn up to the next meeting with my social worker. It
was as though he was showing them he didn’t have to live
by their small-minded rules; that he wasn’t intimidated
by them and all their official powers. When he did finally
show up at his own convenience he vehemently denied all
the allegations I’d made.

‘Look how she lied about me sending her out to steal
whisky,’ he said. ‘She’s evil. I don’t want her back home
after this.’

He was playing some diabolical game of mental chess
with me and with the rest of the world. It was him who
had suggested I told them I had lied about him making me steal the whisky, and now he was using that false
confession to prove that I was a liar. There was nothing I
could say in my defence that wouldn’t make me sound
even worse.

Sometimes he seemed to be flaunting his lifestyle in
the faces of the people who tried to interrogate him, as if
he was trying to show them up for being petty and small
minded, painting himself as some grand, bohemian libertine,
unfettered by their petty rules and morals. He
admitted that because he rented two of our three bedrooms
out Terry and I often slept in his bed with him.

‘Sometimes I might put my leg over Terry in my
sleep,’ he told them, ‘thinking I’m with a woman.’

The social services, however, were obviously coming
to the conclusion that there was no smoke without fire
and even if I was still technically a virgin, it would only
be a matter of time before they caught him. Dad must
have realized they were closing in on him and his depression
returned. After they had talked to him Kathy rang
the social worker in charge of the case to tell her that Dad
had become suicidal and that he had now admitted to
sending us out to steal whisky for him. Maybe he thought
that if he admitted to one thing then they would be more
likely to believe him when he denied abusing me, or
maybe he had become too depressed to even care what
happened to him any more. It was a relief to know that
he was admitting it was him who was the liar and not me, but I was worried that if he got too depressed he might
try to kill himself again. I didn’t want to be the cause of
that. He was still the most important person in my life
and I loved him despite everything.

By then the police were involved and I realized it was
possible Dad was going to be sent to prison yet again
because of me. The staff at school and social workers kept
telling me I had nothing to worry about, nothing to blame
myself for, but I knew they were wrong. I walked around
with a huge cloud over my head, almost wishing I’d kept
my mouth shut, worrying over things constantly.

The reports that teachers and social workers did about
me during those years show they were almost as confused
about what was going on in my head as I was. At one
stage my housemistress at Wymondham wrote: ‘Maria is
in some ways functioning at a four-or five-year-old level
and in others at a sixteen-year-old level, plus being an
intelligent twelve year old.’ She then made the extraordinary
statement: ‘Maria is over-fond of her dad and wants
him close to her, up to a certain point, and beyond that she
starts complaining.’ Isn’t that how a little girl should feel
about her father? I loved my daddy; I just didn’t want
him doing those things to me. Was that so unreasonable?

There were all sorts of meetings to discuss whether
Terry and I should be allowed home for weekends at all.
At one stage my grandmother offered to have Terry at her
bungalow, but she didn’t offer to have me, confirming my early feelings that she’d never liked me. As far as she was
concerned I was the troublemaker in the family, telling lies
about her son, spreading false rumours, bringing dishonour
and scandal down on all of us. She would never have
been able to admit that he was capable of doing the things
that I had accused him of. To complicate matters even further
Dad was in the process of being evicted from his house
because the council had discovered he was subletting the
rooms that were meant to be for us. His angle for hanging
onto the house was to say that he had to have a home for his
children when we came back from school, but if we
weren’t allowed to see him that would undermine his
argument, particularly if he was renting out the rooms.

Then in another interview he suggested I was just trying
to get back at him by making up these stories because
he had bought Terry a £50 watch for his birthday but
hadn’t bought me anything. It was certainly true that he
had done that, but I was used to things like that. It always
hurt but it also made me more anxious to please him,
more anxious to make myself a better daughter so I
would deserve to be given presents too. It certainly didn’t
make me want to get him sent to prison.

‘And anyway,’ he said right at the end of the interview,
‘even if I had done these things, if she really loved her dad
why would she say such a thing?’

Social services actually had his words down in writing,
as if he was admitting that a child should not tell tales on her father if she loved him, no matter what he might
have done to her. It seemed to me to be practically a cast-
iron admission of guilt.

While all this was going on the authorities needed to
find us somewhere else to go during school holidays. Break
was a charity that had been started by a couple called Mr
and Mrs Davison to provide respite care for disabled children.
They had two houses, one called Magpie and one
called Rainbow. Magpie had become a general children’s
home and the council decided to send Terry and me there
during the holidays while we were attending Wymondham
College so that we didn’t have to go back to Dad.

I had some of my happiest times at Break, particularly
when a group of us used to go down to the nearby beach
where we would spend hours swimming during the summer
or just walking or sitting and talking in the winter.
We liked it better out of season when the holidaymakers
had all gone home and we had the sands to ourselves. I
used to go into the disabled house to help feed the children
who lived there. I loved doing that because disabled
people don’t judge you; they just accept you for who you
are. I never felt they were looking at me and wondering
what I was doing there or thinking that I didn’t belong or
looking down at me. I felt by helping them I was making
up a little for being such a crap person the rest of the time.

By the time Terry and I were at Break the Davisons
had opened a third house and the whole operation was starting to develop into the huge charity it is today. But
even though they were giving me the happiest times I had
ever experienced, whenever I spoke to Dad on the phone
he nagged me to run away and come back to him, and so
finally I did. It might be hard to understand, but I’d
missed him and I’d been so upset about betraying him
and worried that he might not forgive me that I was really
happy when he phoned and asked me to come home.

I was nervous about the reception I might get but he didn’t
seem to hold it against me that I had told Kathy about
what he was doing to me, or that he might end up in prison
for it. He just seemed to accept it as being part of life. I was so
relieved that he still wanted to see me and felt so guilty about
betraying him that I would do whatever he asked. I didn’t
want to accept the help that was being offered by everyone
else. My opinion of myself was so low that even when people
showed a genuine concern for my welfare I dismissed them
as interfering busybodies who were ‘just doing their jobs’ –
an attitude I had learnt directly from Dad.

Even at Break Terry and I were made to feel different
because all the other children went to the local secondary
school while we were sent off back to Wymondham College
at the end of each weekend and every holiday, which
meant we didn’t really fit in at either place.

I must have been giving off a lot of contradictory signals
to everyone because my social workers’ reports at the
time paint a very odd picture.

‘Maria went home on 23rd December,’ one wrote.
‘Terry Snr phoned asking if Maria could stay for the week-end.
Spoke to Maria also, she’d like to stay with Dad.
Phoned Mrs Davison, she agrees with Maria staying with
Dad until Sunday. They’ve all been staying at Kathy’s
house, which means the likelihood of Terry and Maria
indulging in any sort of sexual activity is that much less.
Whether they did in the past is debatable and it’s a risk
that has to be taken since Maria will never be content anywhere
unless she can see her father.’

I saw it as him raping me; they saw it as the pair of us
‘indulging in sexual activity’. It seemed like they thought
I had as much to do with instigating it as he did. By constantly
running back to him I was making it look like I
was asking for it, I suppose, but that wasn’t how I saw it. I
might have been guilty of some poor judgements when it
came to putting myself in dangerous situations with him,
but he was an adult who should have known better and I
was a child in need of protection. I wonder if the social
worker involved would have been happy to send her own
daughter home for the weekend with Dad, however
much the girl might have wanted to go?

All my life Dad had drummed it into me that wherever
the authorities took me I should take the first opportunity
to run away and go back to him. I never really
questioned that wisdom, even though I sometimes knew
I was better off in the places they sent me to. He was my dad, it seemed right that I should want to be back with
him, it was just the way things were. At one stage they
said he could only visit me under supervision, but he
wouldn’t have that. He threw a tantrum and said that if
he couldn’t see me on his own he didn’t want to see me at
all. I guess he knew he could brainwash me better when
he had me to himself. Another adult in the room at the
same time would have been able to see through his
manipulations, would have cramped his style.

I think that in a funny way I broke his heart by betraying
him to Kathy and the social services because he truly
believed I was his property, to do with as he pleased. It
was as if he was disappointed and puzzled to think that I
mightn’t be going to become a successful prostitute and a
credit to his teaching, able to support him for the rest of
his life. Maybe he felt the same way as respectable parents
feel when their children decide not to become doctors or
lawyers after family hopes have been raised. Not that he
allowed this setback to interrupt his plans for long.

I
kept running back to Dad and letting him hide me
from the authorities for days or weeks on end, not
realizing that I was playing straight into his hands. He
continued interfering with me and finally succeeded
in achieving full penetration over the course of time. I
couldn’t pinpoint an exact occasion when I lost my virginity
fully because it hurt so much every time. It was
while I was with him on one of these escapes from
school, when I was thirteen, that he must have decided
the time was right for me to start earning him money,
now that he had succeeded in breaking me in himself –
and he knew just how he wanted to get me started.

He had a friend called Peter, a big, fat, smelly Irish
drinking companion who spent a lot of his time working
away from home, probably on the oil rigs in the North
Sea. Peter always had plenty of cash in his pocket and no one to spend it on except himself, which made him a
tempting target for Dad. When he and Dad were together
they would always drink heavily and I dare say Peter
was buying most of the rounds. One night, I had run
away from school and had gone to find Dad as usual. He
welcomed me back and took me out drinking with him
and Peter. At that time he liked to buy me vodka and
limes and none of the pubs we went to ever said anything,
even though they must have known how young I was. I
was used to getting drunk with Dad’s friends; I’d been
doing it since I was eight or nine, when I used to drink
whisky and orange and play cards till all hours of the
morning in our front room, so I had no reason to be particularly
suspicious of their motives that day any more
than any other.

At the end of the evening they wended their way back
to Peter’s flat with me in tow, picking up a Chinese takeaway
on the way. It was a horrible, dirty, dingy flat, the
sort of place you might expect to find a wino living, but I
was too drunk and hungry to care much about my surroundings.
Just being with my dad was enough to make
me happy. I settled onto the settee and opened up the
Chinese.

However many vodkas I had put down that night I
was still sober enough to put up a fight when Peter started
making a clumsy and unwelcome pass at me. Men had
made unwelcome passes at me before and I was confident I could keep him at bay, especially with Dad there to protect
me. I’d seen Dad beat up enough people to be sure
that dealing with a fat, drunk Peter wouldn’t give him
any trouble. I hoped Peter would take the hint and give
up before Dad lost his temper and beat him to a jelly.

The next thing I knew I was grabbed, thrown off the
settee amidst flying Chinese food cartons and pinned
down on the floor. My head suddenly cleared with the
shock and I realized Dad was holding my arms back to
allow Peter to screw me. My father wasn’t going to fight
to protect me because he had sold me. I struggled and
shouted at them both to get off me.

‘Shut up!’ Dad screamed, apparently furious that I
was showing him up like this by making such a fuss.