I Did Tell, I Did (17 page)

We went to the houseboat that afternoon. And the abuse continued.

During that summer of 1964, Mum hired a friend of hers, a man called Phil, to paint our kitchen. I think he was out of work and she was helping him out. Anne and my parents were going away for the day and Mum suggested that he make a start while they were out, adding that I would be at home to bring him cups of tea when he wanted them.

I didn’t particularly like Phil but had no reason to fear him. After everyone left, I began to clear the breakfast dishes and put them in the sink. Suddenly he came up behind me and grabbed me around the waist.

I went rigid, I was so shocked, then I managed to spin round and push him away.

He laughed and made a joke about it, then carried on with his painting.

I tried to dismiss the incident but my past experiences came into my head and I began to feel nervous. After clearing the dishes, I walked into the hallway to go up to my room and keep out of his way. But I never got that far.

Again Phil grabbed me, lunging and trying to kiss my face. I screamed at him to stop.

‘Come on, it’s fun. You know it is,’ he laughed, thrusting his hand up my skirt and tugging at my panties.

Not again. Why was this happening to me? Why me?

‘Get away from me! Stop it!’ I yelled, and I struggled with all of my strength. He pushed his hot, now sweaty body against me and I began to cry, feeling his penis hardening against my stomach.

His face was distorted as he rubbed his body up and down against me, arousing himself. And then came the words that made the whole ugly episode even more despicable. ‘I’m allowed to do anything to you. He said I could. You know you like it, so stop playing games and let’s get on with it. He said you would pretend to dislike this but I know different and I can do what I want.’

I couldn’t believe my ears. Could it be true? Had Bill really given permission for this man to abuse his own biological daughter? How sick was that?

‘Get away!’ I screamed. ‘Get away from me! I hate you! Stop this!’ I pushed and pushed at him, praying with all my heart that he would stop. Then my prayers were answered. Someone
knocked on the front door. Phil jumped, I pushed past him and ran to the door and flung it open then stepped out onto the doorstep.

It was the milkman, come for his money. I was never so happy to see anyone in my whole life. The milkman realised that something wasn’t quite right.

‘Are you OK, love?’ he asked, looking at my ruffled clothes and flushed face.

I started to say, ‘No, I’m not.’ At that point, Phil walked out past us and said everything was fine, he was just leaving. He hurried off down the street.

After the milkman had gone I shut the door and locked it, still shaking, still shocked. Nothing had happened really. Certainly nothing as nasty as all the other abuse I had suffered. But even though Phil hadn’t actually been able to rape me, I still felt terrified. Was I not safe from other men? Was this what all men wanted from me?

I had finished with boyfriends in the past because sex was the only thing on their minds. Alistair had said he respected me and wanted to wait, and that was one of the reasons I trusted him and liked being with him. Suddenly I felt a strong need to see him. I washed myself thoroughly, dressed and locked up the house and went over to his place.

As soon as Alistair looked at me, he knew there was something very wrong. I didn’t mean to tell him but I couldn’t help it. I was still shaking with a mixture of fear and indignation. I told him about how Phil had tried to assault me. I told him everything. Except that I didn’t tell him Bill had said it would be OK. How could I tell him that? How could I tell him that my
father had given Phil permission to sexually abuse me, abuse me in the way he himself had been doing for virtually all of my life?

Before I could argue, Alistair put me in a taxi and the two of us headed back to my house, where he wanted me to tell Mum everything. To say I was terrified was an understatement. I’d told her once before about Bill, and look how that had turned out!

But Mum approved of Alistair. He was from a very wealthy family, a family that was respected in the community. An upperclass family. So he was OK in my mother’s book. This time I seemed to have got it right. Alistair was also charming and good-looking and he knew how to handle Mum.

When the family came home, we asked to talk to my parents in private. Mum insisted that Dad take my younger sister out to buy sweets at the shop down the road and we went into the best room.

It wasn’t easy telling her, because Phil was a friend of hers, but tell her I did. With the exception of the missing bits.

Alistair was so angry, he said he wanted to kill this man.

My mother realised she should probably be playing the concerned parent at this point so she stood up and came over to me. ‘No one,’ she said sternly, ‘no one will hurt my daughter and not pay for it.’

I was stunned. This was a new one! Where did that come from?

‘I just want to forget all about it and pretend it never happened,’ I said, scared of what else might come out. ‘As long
as he doesn’t come to the house or come near me again, I’ll be fine.’

But no. This woman who suddenly cared for her daughter picked up the phone to call the police. I was absolutely stunned!

Was this the same woman who had called me names when I’d confided in her about the darkest, most horrific secret of my young life?

The same woman I had witnessed kissing my abuser and telling him that she hadn’t believed a word I’d said?

What I didn’t know at the time was that Mum had been having an affair with Phil but straight after leaving our house earlier that day he had phoned her to call a halt to it. So she was already angry with him. I had given her the opportunity to hurt him in a very serious way. How dare he spurn her? He would pay dearly for that.

Despite my attempts to prevent it going any further, the police arrived. They were very kind. A policewoman with bright red hair asked to speak to me in another room. She started by telling me that if a man did anything to a girl or a young woman that they didn’t want, then it was an offence. She went on to say that if I had been younger then it would have been an even more serious offence. I began to cry. She comforted me and said that I was to take my time, I could tell her anything and she would endeavour to put the offender behind bars.

She thought my tears were about the afternoon’s events. Little did she know.

My tears were for the girl who hadn’t known any of that, who hadn’t dared to tell anyone what a man was doing to her.

I explained what had happened with Phil and she wrote everything down. I was then examined in the best room of the house. All the time the policewoman comforted and reassured me that she would make sure justice was done. She said she would also talk to the milkman who had saved me that day so he could be a witness.

She was so kind that I wanted to spill everything out. Wanted to tell her that actually this was nothing compared to the abuse I’d been suffering over the last eighteen years.
He
hadn’t actually touched me intimately.
He
hadn’t raped me. I wanted to tell. But I couldn’t do it. And then my chance was gone.

The next few weeks felt like a dream, as if I was living someone else’s life. The house was the same. The family were the same. The dog was the same. But Mum wasn’t. She wasn’t the same. Gone were the jibes. Gone were the unkind remarks and the ridicule. She was actually kind to me. She talked to me as if she cared about me. She spoke quietly to me, which was unheard of in our house.

I tried to like it. I tried to believe in it and enjoy it. Wasn’t this what I had always wanted? I tried to believe this was how it would be from now on. But I couldn’t. I was a master at pretending so I could always spot it in other people. I knew this wouldn’t last. I knew it wasn’t real.

I didn’t have long to wait. Phil was taken to court the following week. It was a horrible experience for me. I was cross-examined by his defence barrister, who insinuated that I had asked for it. He made it sound as though I had flirted with this
man and enjoyed the attention and the kissing. I was horrified. I tried to defend myself but was stopped. I didn’t understand the way courts work. Why should I have? This was my first encounter.

The court heard from the milkman, my mother and my boyfriend. When Alistair spoke, the court fell silent. After all, he was good with an audience and had practised what he was going to say, as if it was a script in a play. It was all true, but he put it across very well.

After two days, the judge found Phil guilty of attempted sexual assault and actual assault. It was then disclosed that he had been cautioned for several sexual assaults before, mostly with young girls.

As we left the courts I will never forget the look on his wife’s face. She obviously didn’t believe my story and thought her husband was innocent. I felt awful, particularly when I noticed she was pregnant. The court only gave Phil a two-year suspended sentence in view of his wife’s pregnancy. I heard on the grapevine a few years later that his teenage daughter had given birth to twins and that he was the father. He really was a thoroughly nasty individual.

It took a long time for me to recover from the court case and the feelings of guilt about Phil’s wife and family. Uncle Bill stayed away throughout this time, possibly afraid that he would be implicated. After all, he had given his permission for the assault to take place, hadn’t he? He had told Phil that it was OK to sexually abuse me, his own daughter. So he had to stay away, didn’t he?

It was nice that his abuse had ceased for the time being. But it didn’t take long for Mum to get over her fake concern for me and revert to her normal behaviour. She couldn’t manage to be nice to me for long.

A
t the time of the court case, Alistair and I had just got engaged. Mum was delighted at the thought of me marrying into the ‘upper classes’ and whenever my fiancé was around she became the loving mother who wanted nothing but the best for her daughter. Life had been looking up. But after the case everything seemed to have changed—both in her behaviour and in his.

One day, when I arrived at Alistair’s place to spend the weekend, I noticed that my usual bed in the spare room hadn’t been made up. When I asked where I was to sleep, my charming fiancé said, ‘In with me.’

‘But I thought we were waiting until we got married,’ I protested. ‘I thought we had agreed about that.’

‘We’re getting married, so what’s the harm?’ he said with a smile. ‘There are no other beds made up, love, so you have no choice.’

Suddenly I saw him as just the same as Uncle Bill and Phil. All they seemed to want me for was sex. To play their games,
to satisfy their needs. I was upset but more angry than anything. He knew what the court case had done to me; he knew how I felt about sex. He didn’t know the reason, because I didn’t tell him—I didn’t tell anyone except Mum—but he knew all the same.

I couldn’t get home that night as Alistair didn’t have a car and we weren’t on a bus route, plus it was too far to walk. But I did have a choice. I had gone into the bathroom and was worried that since he had changed his attitude about waiting for marriage, he might try and force me to have sex with him that night. I began to get washed and ready for bed but I didn’t want to go out onto the landing in my nightie just in case he leapt on me. I couldn’t decide what to do and I felt too nervous to talk to Alistair about it, so in the end I just slept in the bath, using towels as a pillow and covers.

The next day, after a brief conversation, I broke off my engagement. I was disappointed in Alistair because I had thought he was different. I thought he was interested in me and not just in having sex with me, but it seems that wasn’t the case. He pointed out that it was
1964
and most girls slept with their fiancés—but I wasn’t most girls. I was me, not a sexual plaything.

When I went home and told Mum, she was incandescent with rage, all her plans for moving into the upper classes through my marriage smashed to smithereens. She didn’t speak to me for a long time after that. But that was nothing new.

Over the next few months I dated several boyfriends but it seemed they all wanted only one thing from me and I began to
believe that this was all I was worth. They sometimes became very angry when I wouldn’t do as they wanted but I held my ground. I began to wonder if I had ‘sexual plaything’ tattooed on my forehead because that’s certainly how it seemed. I liked some of them but they never stayed around when they realised there wasn’t going to be any sex.

Then I had some wonderful news. Claire, my best friend from primary school, was to be married and I was to be chief bridesmaid. We hadn’t seen each other very much throughout our teens and, what with college and singing, the rest of my life had been filled with Bill or family chores. Claire had taken a job in a shop when she left school at fifteen and had met her future husband when she was seventeen. We had met up a few times, and we were both bridesmaids when my sister Ellen got married, but since then we hadn’t seen each other very much. I was over the moon when she asked me to be her chief bridesmaid, something that we had talked about as children. Planning the wedding meant I was back with my second family, feeling safe and loved.

The ceremony was lovely. I wore a glorious yellow organza and silk gown and felt like a princess as we drove round the town in the best man’s open-topped car. It was an unbelievably happy day, and although it was my best friend’s wedding day and not mine I didn’t think she could possibly be as happy as I was.

Mum was working in a café nearby and after the wedding reception I popped in to see her, still dressed in my yellow bridesmaid’s dress. Mum was friendly with the landlady of the
pub next door, who was called Dottie, and her son Edward happened to be in the café when I walked in so we chatted for a while.

‘Edward thinks you’re really attractive,’ Mum said to me later. ‘You should pop in and see him at the pub some time.’