Escaping the Darkness (13 page)

I heard a sigh of regret at the other end of the telephone. ‘Oh hi Sarah, I was just thinking about you and wondering if you were all right. Are you sure about this?’

‘I’m positive. You have helped me bring my memories out into the open and now all I want is to get on with being a mum and enjoying my life with Sam. I don’t have room in my life to waste time on my memories. I just want to try and be normal again.’

That was a laugh: I was never normal and I hadn’t been normal since the age of eleven. I could hear the silence on the other end of the line and wondered what Bess was thinking. Bess spoke casually to me, wishing me luck with
the future and hoping that I would be okay. I thanked her after she’d said that if I ever needed to speak to her as a friend, then all I had to do was phone and she would come and see me straight away without me having to go through all the usual lengthy channels of seeing my doctor and making a host of new appointments.

After I finished the conversation with Bess, I thought about what she had said but I wouldn’t see her again. Because I knew that, from now on, it was my battle and mine alone.

Chapter Fifteen

OVER THE NEXT seven years, I didn’t have much time to spare for reminiscing, because I submerged myself fully in my family and began working part-time a couple of evenings a week as a waitress in a local restaurant. On Saturday and Sunday evenings I went to work for four hours whilst Sam took care of the boys. I loved this little bit of independence and enjoyed bringing in the few extra pounds.

I worked at the restaurant for ten busy months before I decided it was time for a change, and I then started work in a nursing home for a couple of nights a week as an auxiliary nurse, looking after old people. I enjoyed this work as it brought me closer to the nursing dreams and the career I had wanted when I was a younger. I moved about a bit over the next few years, working in four homes in total. I ended my career as an auxiliary nurse in 1997,
after finding it difficult to return to nursing, having just seen my father die of cancer.

The memories I had made had been good ones. I especially enjoyed the last two years of my nursing career, when I had worked on a special unit with elderly people who had senile dementia. It was wonderful to hear and share their memories of things that had happened forty or fifty years ago: wartime dances, parties with the American air crews, the women having to wear socks, painting their legs with gravy browning because there were no stockings available. Yet I felt sad too, knowing that these poor people couldn’t remember what they ate for breakfast that day. They were all very special and I loved them all so dearly.

During this time when I was working, Sam had been made redundant and had been applying for lots of jobs. In the end we made a decision that he would go to university and study for his degree, which was a dream come true for him. He began his studies in 1992 and completed his course in 1996, gaining a BSc in Astronomy and Applied Physics. I was so proud of him and the fact that he had managed to study and still have time to play football or cricket whenever his sons demanded his attention.

I spent many nights listening to him telling me about black holes and the other galaxies in our universe. I enjoyed every minute but never really fully understood what he was saying to me. I do have to thank him though, for making me more aware of our beautiful night sky, a sky
that seems even more dramatic when viewed from a dark field when you’re camping in Cornwall.

It was during these busy years that I successfully managed to bury my past deep inside the bad memory box. It stayed there undisturbed for a long time, allowing me to be a mum, a part-time nurse and eventually, a full-time student, just as Sam had been. It was hard work shuffling all three activities but worth the effort. After Sam had finished his degree, I wanted to go and finish the education I had started, but that had been cut short all those years before. We had decided that once Sam completed his degree course, I would start. So in September 1996, with no real knowledge of what I wanted to do, I went to an open evening at the university.

I felt totally exhilarated by the people and the buzz of energy that seemed to have been set free in the air that surrounded me. I desperately wanted to learn, but I was so terrified I wouldn’t be good enough and that I’d be laughed at because I had no qualifications to my name. Instead I was greeted with warmth, sincerity and a welcoming understanding – after all, I was a mature student, and entry requirements were less stringent.

Before I knew it, I was signing a slip of paper offering me an unconditional place on a Year 0 Foundation Course (I studied history after), and being given details of where to go for enrolment. The only thing I had planned to do that night was enquire about a place, and now here I was with an offer. All the way home on the bus that night I was shaking with disbelief. What would Sam say?

When I got home and I told him he laughed. I remember looking at him in disbelief before he spoke, saying, ‘You’ll be fine Sarah, don’t worry.’

‘That’s okay for you to say,’ I joked with him. ‘You’ve been there and got the T-shirt.’

He came across the room and folded me into his arms like he always did when I needed reassurance. I was glad of the closeness. What had I done? He continued to reassure me, telling me I would be just fine. Sam used to say I was already very, very intelligent but that I just hadn’t been educated. He didn’t mean this in a derogatory way. He meant that I just hadn’t had the chance to get the qualifications at school that other people of my age had.

We spent the summer that year relaxing for a few weeks. For the first time ever, we had decided on a touring holiday, and drove all night, travelling to Cornwall’s most southerly point, where I fell completely in love with the stunning coastline on the Lizard Peninsula. The people were friendly and the couple that owned the campsite where we had booked, welcomed us with the kind of warmth you would expect only be given to very, very close friends.

We spent four nights camping in Cornwall and then moved on to Dorset and Cerne Abbas where we stayed for two nights. The Lizard Peninsula was like a dream – warm sunshine, beautiful scenery and the ocean. This was the first time I had seen the ocean and the Atlantic did not disappoint; it was quite literally mesmerising, especially when you viewed its vastness from high above on the cliff-top path that wound its way around the spectacular
coastline. Every day was hot and sunny, the nights cool and foggy. Each evening, as we lay in our beds, we heard the sound of foghorns – like a distressed dragon in a blackened sky – coming from the lighthouse close to the cliffs; a sound that haunted the earliest hours of each new day that was about to dawn.

I never imagined a place could captivate my heart in such a way as Cornwall did. Before I had seen Cornwall, there was only ever one place I loved and that was the Lake District – for me that was simply heaven. Once we left Cornwall, we travelled to Dorset where my eyes were opened further. We travelled along tree-tunnelled lanes on our journey into Cerne Abbas, where beautiful buildings greeted us. It was a sleepy village lost in unspoilt time. Afterwards we travelled to Cambridgeshire because we wanted to go to the Imperial War Museum and show the boys the planes that they all shared a love of – James was particularly fond of aircraft, and often dreamed of becoming a pilot.

Two days later we packed up our tents again, and travelled into the Cotswolds to show Andrew the car known as ‘Brum’ (regularly shown on BBC TV) at the Cotswold Motoring Museum in Bourton-on-the-Water. This museum was a fascinating place, and it was especially interesting to show the boys one of the first tiny caravans that people owned and used for holidays. The memories that we made on that holiday still make me smile because we all had such a wonderful time. If I close my eyes, I am instantly transported to those places we visited. I see the boys, each one of them, enjoying themselves so very much.

Finally we finished in Lincolnshire, staying close to where my mother used to live, before travelling home.

In September the boys returned to school and I started my first year at university. My father recovered from cancer and I felt the need to spend time with him. Why this was, I wasn’t really sure: after all he had also been responsible for some of the bad experiences I’d had as a young girl. Perhaps I thought that if I was alone with him, he might tell me why he had chosen to abuse me when I was a child. And not just any child either, but his own child, his precious daughter. I tried to spend as much time with my father as I could, and worked hard to fit this in with everything else I needed to do. I didn’t want the boys to feel left out or for Sam to feel neglected – not that he would ever complain. He was always so supportive of everything I did or wanted to do in my life.

There was only ever one time I can remember when Sam did not support me. It happened after we had walked up to Stickle Tarn in Langdale and then continued the walk across the fells. As we sat having lunch with the boys by the tarn (a small mountain lake), I said to him that I wanted to do ‘Jack’s Rake’, which was a path that led up the front of Pavey Ark – the huge, rocky outcrop of stone that stood firm above the tarn. As we sat there, you could see other walkers attempting to go up the diagonal gully, which was frightening in parts, especially in the exposed sections. He looked at this path and said, ‘Are you mad, have you forgotten you’re a mother?’

I laughed at him and said, ‘One day I’ll do it, but I’ll wait till all our sons are grown.’

Sam took me in his arms and kissed me, ‘We’ll see,’ he said. I still haven’t climbed that little rock. But I will one day!

Once we were home again, I visited Dad almost every day and felt guilty when I didn’t. I don’t know why I felt this guilt, but it weighed me down like one of the boulders that I felt used to when I was an innocent child, when I was the victim of two grown men’s abusive obsession.

Over the months that followed, I fought to keep a grip on the things that mattered to me. I tried to be a good mum, a caring wife, a hard-working student and a worker too, without losing control of any of these things or tiring myself out. I can’t remember where my strength came from but it was there. As the first few months of 1997 passed by, it was obvious that my father wasn’t recovering quite as quickly as he should be doing. He was in pain again and struggled to stay awake all day. The little bit of weight he’d gained began to disappear. He went to the hospital for his twelve-weekly check-up and was told by his consultant that his cancer was back.

This time the tumours were growing at an alarming rate and were now in his lungs. His condition was inoperable. As he struggled more and more over the next few months, I knew that his time was running out fast. I got behind with some of my work at university and fought hard to keep everything in perspective. I knew my father
was dying. He was admitted to hospital and he started deteriorating rapidly. He seemed to be in pain all the time. He came home two weeks later at the end of September. On the following bright, sunny Sunday he was picked up and taken to the hospice six miles away. It was beautiful weather for October. He lived out the last twelve days of his life there, five of which he spent in a coma.

During his last week of consciousness, my father became the man he had once been when I was a child. He looked at me in the same way a doting father would have looked at his only daughter. I saw him every day and shared cups of tea with him, and we talked about the things that mattered to us. The plants in the garden, his grandchildren and all the things we once did as a family. He never mentioned the time Mum left him, or the time he discovered someone else had abused me, or the way he abused me, or what had driven me to leave home when I was fifteen.

He never told me he regretted what he had done to me or begged me for his forgiveness. He just looked at me and acted as if he had been a wonderful father to me all my life. He wasn’t – he’d failed. Never once did I see the word sorry etched in his fading, watery, dying eyes. As he slipped into a state of unconsciousness, I sat at his bedside searching for answers, yet none came. I spoke to him often while he slept. I wished his cancer would leave him just for a moment so I could get the answers I desperately wanted. I felt the amount of courage I needed enter my body, giving me strength to ask him why, but he never
woke up and so my question remained unheard. I never knew what had made him do such immoral things to his own twelve-year-old daughter.

During one of those long nights at the hospice, I told my oldest sister, Caroline, that Mum’s friend Bill had abused me. I never told her any details, just that it had happened. Even though I’d had all those counselling sessions with Bess, I still felt to blame for those events that had overshadowed my life. Caroline held me: we cried. I wasn’t sure if at that time she was crying for me or for our dying father, too. I hoped, quite selfishly, that it was for me.

Now, sixteen years on, I know it was. My sister has always been there with her shoulder to cry on whenever I need it. We have become good friends and I miss her dreadfully when we’re apart. I think we make each other proud of the people we have become.

On the 25 October 1997 my father lost his battle for life and I was trapped in a world I didn’t understand. I started to grieve for a man who I shouldn’t have loved at all for the past twenty-three years. He didn’t deserve the love I had given him since that fateful day when I was twelve, when he should have known better than to abuse me. Yet at that time I still did love him, although why I did, I wasn’t sure.