Daddy's Little Earner (24 page)

The whole London experience was making me a
nervous wreck. I felt almost as insecure and threatened
inside the squat as I did out on the streets. A Scottish couple
lived on the floor above us, both of them heavy
drinkers who would row in voices filled with bitterness
and aggression whenever they were drunk. It sounded as
though they had a long history of grievances, which the
drink released over and over again. During one of their
endless fights the man finally lost his grip on reality and
stabbed his partner in the stomach on the stairs just outside
our room. There was blood everywhere and I was
terrified that sooner or later Brian and I were going to
end up murdered in our beds.

We decided it was time to admit we’d made a mistake
and to leave London before anything worse happened.
We got back onto the road out of the city and headed up
to Northampton to stay with another friend of Brian’s
called Kevin.

K
evin lived on his own, apart from a black Labrador
called Fish, in a little cottage a couple of miles
from the Santa Pod raceway, which is a famous drag-
racing venue. Tina, one of the prostitutes who had been
in the flat the first night I met Brian, came up too and we
would all go to the drag racing together, mixing and
drinking with people who had travelled from all over
the country to spend their weekends up there in tents. It
was exciting to be part of their community amongst the
good-natured motor enthusiasts, hanging out in the ear-
shattering roar of the cars and the fog of exhaust fumes.
I was hugely relieved to have got away from the aggression
and danger of the streets in King’s Cross to a place
of relative safety. Here we could relax and breathe again
and be more ourselves.

We had only been away from Norwich for six weeks but it was long enough for my picture to have been
published in the local papers with a story explaining that
I had disappeared and asking the public for any information
they might have about my whereabouts. The information
they had put out about me wasn’t exactly
flattering. They said I was ‘about 5 ft 6 in tall, has short
auburn hair, a slightly spotty complexion and sometimes
wears glasses. She is quite stocky and looks older than 15.’
The description fulfilled all my worst fears about myself.
Dad’s words rang in my ears: ‘You’re fat and ugly and
no one but me will ever love you.’ But Brian did love
me, of that I was sure, and that was the best feeling I had
ever experienced.

Although we frequently had no money at all during
those weeks, we weren’t completely reliant on my earnings
because Brian had his benefits; they just weren’t
nearly enough to support us and our various drug and
alcohol habits. Once a fortnight during the time we were
in London, Brian had hitchhiked back to Norwich to
sign on the dole and get his money, which meant I was on
my own for two or three days while he waited for the
money to come through. I never liked it when he was
away, feeling vulnerable and lost, but I knew he had to
go. He did the same from Northampton, but this time the
police were waiting for him at the dole office and he was
arrested when he got there. They grabbed him and
demanded to know where he had hidden me.

Tina phoned from Norwich to tell me what had happened
and I knew the game was up. I was really upset
that just when I was beginning to feel settled it all went
wrong again. Realizing I needed a friend, Tina travelled
back to Northampton to fetch me and Dick-the-Shit.
I wanted to come back to Norwich myself in order to
explain to the authorities that Brian was completely innocent,
that far from abducting me he had actually been
helping me to escape from Dad, who was the real villain
of the story. Tina was still living at the flat in Norwich so
once we got back to the city she took over looking after
Dick and I surrendered myself to the social services.

The social workers knew pretty much everything
there was to know about me by then. They knew about
me being on the game, and they all knew that Dad
had abused me, even though they hadn’t yet got round
to pressing charges against him. Now they had Brian
in their clutches they finally seemed to think they had
enough to go on and both he and Dad were charged with
living off my immoral earnings. My world came crashing
round my ears; this was the last thing I’d ever wanted
to happen.

It tore me in two when I had to go into court to give
evidence against Dad. I stood in the witness box for about
an hour and a half with him staring long and hard at me,
and there were so many emotions flooding through me. I
hated him and loved him at the same time; I was pleased that people now believed me and that he was finally going
to pay for what he had done to me over the years but I also
felt guilty that I was betraying him and ensuring that he
went back to prison yet again.

To make me feel a thousand times worse my grandmother
was waiting for me outside the courtroom,
screaming abuse at me, telling me what a liar and a bitch
I was for saying these things about her precious son Terry,
not caring who heard her ranting or what they thought
of us.

‘How can you do this to my son?’ she yelled. ‘To your
own father? He would never do those things to you! Why
are you telling all these lies?’

The court disagreed with her. They didn’t think I was
a liar. They believed every word of it. Dad was found
guilty and was sentenced to four years. The judge made a
point of saying it was the maximum sentence he could
give for the offence as he knew the whole story and wanted
to reflect the public revulsion at how Dad had behaved
towards me over the years. The fact that he was my father
and that I was underage made Dad’s crimes all the more
repellent and unacceptable to everyone who heard about
them, including other prisoners he was likely to meet
once he was inside. Child abusers don’t get treated well
in places like prison.

I heard later that he was taken to one of the special
units where they put nonces and rapists and other sex offenders for their own protection. I used to hear sometimes
of the things the other inmates do to sex offenders,
like giving them humiliating haircuts or uniforms that
don’t fit with trousers halfway up their ankles. They
would put bits of glass in their food and chuck slops down
onto their landing so they would get covered in it. I have
to admit there was a part of me that liked the idea that
other people were taking revenge on my behalf, sticking
up for me, confirming that what Dad had done to me was
wrong, just as I had always believed it was. Such humiliation
would be even worse for someone who was as vain
and pleased with himself as Dad was. He liked to be
admired by those around him, not despised.

At the same time I feared for him and his tendency to
depression. Even in my moments of vindication part of
me still felt guilty and worried about what I had done to
him. I knew that a lot of men ended up driven to suicide
when they found themselves in positions like his and Dad
had shown many times that he was capable of such acts of
self-destruction when he was low.

Having to give evidence in court against Brian, the
man I loved and who had proved in so many ways that he
loved me, was even harder. They tried to convict him for
abducting me, but I stuck up for him so vehemently they
couldn’t make that charge stick. Being an inherently honest
man, however, he couldn’t deny that he’d had sex with
me or that he had shared the money I earned in London in order to eat, so he was given six months for having sex
with a minor and for living off my immoral earnings.

It all came as a bit of a shock to Brian, who hadn’t really
thought he was doing anything wrong. I suspect he had
grown so used to treating me like I was the same age as
him and the rest of his friends that he had pretty much
forgotten I was officially still a child during our time
together. He even talked about suing the police for
wrongful arrest before the gravity of his situation was
explained to him clearly by his lawyers.

It was obvious that the courts had to be seen to do
something about what had happened, but any attempt by
the prosecution to make Brian sound like a paedophile
rang very hollow. He was indisputably my boyfriend and
even though I was underage I had been sleeping with
men for money for over two years by then, so I was hardly
your average innocent little schoolgirl. What he had
done was more of a technical misdemeanour than a great
moral crime. The length of his sentence compared to the
one handed down to Dad showed that the judge did not
view their crimes in the same light, but that he couldn’t
turn a blind eye completely to what Brian had done. The
judge made it clear that I had consented to the sex with
Brian, which I had never done with Dad, and the newspaper
coverage of the case reflected that sympathetically.
However, I still felt guilty about the catastrophic effect I’d
had on his life, and I missed him terribly.

Like Dad, when he went into prison Brian was
offered the sort of protection that paedophiles and sex
offenders can have, but he categorically refused to accept
it. He wanted to be treated like every other prisoner
because he wasn’t ashamed of anything he had done.
Everyone in the prison would have known the story by
the time he got there, and would have known about Dad.
Like me they would have seen Brian more as a hero for
trying to get me away from Dad than as the villain of the
story. No one gave him any trouble and he settled into
prison life as philosophically as he settled into everything
else. Brian was such a sweet-natured man he never once
blamed me for his predicament, just shrugged and got
on with serving his time, looking forward to our future
together once he was out and once I was old enough to
live with him openly.

In the meantime the authorities had to think what to
do with me and I was sent back to Bramerton. I was
heartbroken that they had taken Brian away because he
had such a calming influence on me and at that age a six-
month sentence seemed like a lifetime, but at least now I
believed I could envisage a future for myself, a future
with him. I’m sure the authorities thought our great love
affair would peter out while we were apart, that there
would be no chance someone with my past record would
wait six months for any man, but they were wrong. For
the first time in my life I had someone who cared about me, someone who was willing to put his neck on the
block and go to prison for me and I wasn’t about to throw
that away.

As the months passed and they saw that we were still
writing to one another all the time and that I wasn’t going
off with any other men, the staff at Bramerton began to
realize that we weren’t going to be so easily separated and
they allowed me to go to visit him in prison. It wasn’t
depressing or frightening, like visiting Dad had been
all those years before when Terry and I were kids. It was
lovely to see him, even though we had to have a social
worker sitting with us all through the visit. He was still
his same easygoing self, just accepting the way things
were without bitterness and saying nice things to me,
making me feel special.

The prison governor and Mrs Mcquarrie at Bramerton
used to talk to one another on the phone and between
them they came to the conclusion that Brian actually
might be quite good for me. He was the opposite of Dad
in every way, always advising me not to run away from
Bramerton and not to go on the game, assuring me we
were going to get married and be all right as soon as he
had served his time and I was old enough. They started
to find ways of letting us talk to one another on the phone.
The governor would arrange to get Brian into his office
and would ring Mrs Mcquarrie who would then call me
into her office and hand me the phone.

Despite Brian’s calming words, however, it wasn’t long
before I was escaping again. The habit was just too deeply
ingrained in me to stop. Most of the time I didn’t even
know why I did it, any more than I knew why I smoked
cigarettes, took drugs or drank. Maybe it was the challenge
each time because Bramerton wasn’t that easy to get out
of. There was only one lane in and out so I couldn’t use that
if I wanted to run away as it would be the first place they
would go looking, so I always had to start out across the
fields, hiding behind the hedges and trees, which was
bloody hard work. I would start out quite fast, pumped
up with adrenaline, but I soon got tired and wished I had
never bothered. It reminded me of the horrors of cross-
country running, which Wymondham College used to
make us do and which used to nearly kill me.

On one of these escapes I finally staggered out onto the
main road at a point I thought would be safe at about nine
at night. Having picked off the various bits of hedge and
kicked the worst of the mud from my boots I stuck my
thumb out for a lift into Norwich. It wasn’t long before a
car drew up and the smart-looking man at the wheel said
he would take me. I climbed in gratefully.

‘What are you doing out at this time of night?’ he
asked as we drove off.

‘I’ve just been round my friend’s house to do my
homework,’ I told him. ‘I’ve missed my last bus home and
my dad’s going to kill me if I’m late.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we’ll soon get you there nice
and safe. You don’t have to worry about anything. I’m
a policeman.’

I don’t know if blood actually can run cold, but it certainly
felt like mine did at that moment. I was sure I was
about to be driven straight back to Bramerton. Trying not
to show my shock I kept the pretence going, hoping I
might be able to bluff my way through. He was very
friendly and tried asking me a few questions, which I lied
my way out of quite easily.