Please Let It Stop (2 page)

School was also problematic for me and I often faked illness to avoid going. Maybe it had something to do with my mother’s bizarre protectiveness that meant, on some level, like her, I could not cope in the outside world. I was also painfully shy which naturally put me on the periphery of things. It’s hardly surprising then that I was picked on by the other children who quickly saw me for the outsider that I was. I had very long hair pulled back tight into a ponytail that the other children used to pull. Mum never allowed me to wear my hair loose. I tried to draw it over my face because I was very conscious of my high forehead and my widow’s peak. I desperately begged my mother to let me have a fringe which she finally let me try when I was nine. We went to the hairdresser’s in Beckenham but the hairdresser told my mother that a fringe was impossible because of my hairline. I left without one. I also wore glasses, really ugly ones. To make matters worse, I had an eye patch over one lens to strengthen my weaker eye, which made me even more of a misfit. We used to play kiss-chase but nobody chased me.

School dinners were also a nightmare. I hate to admit it but I am very picky about my food. That’s not because of any body disorder or anything; I’m just really wary of what’s on my plate. One of the dinner ladies used to try and force-feed me vegetables which I then used to spit out. There was another one, a lovely lady called Dorothy, who tried to look after me. She was delightful and I felt very safe with her. Many years later fate would bring us back together when
I married her son, Tony. Today, despite being divorced from Tony, my relationship with Dorothy continues, as does my uneasy relationship with food. Friends often laugh at me when a waiter puts something in front of me, because apparently I tend to look at it very suspiciously, as though it might come alive or something. Now I tend to avoid overly fussy food and the restaurants that serve it.

What little respite I had from this lonely life came in the form of my cousins, Stephanie and Russell. Every Wednesday they would come to our house for dinner with my lovely Auntie Heather and Uncle Terry. That was the highlight of my week. While the grown-ups ate downstairs we’d be upstairs messing around like normal kids do. It was one of the only times I could really express myself and be the little girl I was supposed to be. Unfortunately, my aunt and uncle moved away when I was twelve, a move that was to coincide with the worst period in my life.

I don’t remember much about my father at this time, apart from him being, as he still is, a softly spoken man. He was always working really hard so we didn’t see much of him. He never raised a hand to me or Vanessa. I don’t recall many arguments between my parents but there was definitely a lot of tension. As with all marriages, the reasons are not always clear-cut but apparently they didn’t have much of a sex life, an inevitable result of not being able to communicate. Mum was often suspicious about Dad having affairs and I remember her checking his mileage on
more than one occasion. Another time I remember being bundled into the car as she tried to follow him.

Mum didn’t like doing things around the house and I’m quite sure that’s one of the reasons I am an absolute stickler for a clean and tidy home. Cleaning was not one of her priorities and if it were left up to her, the house would have been a tip. So she employed a cleaner called Bobby who, as it turned out, happened to be rather light-fingered. Bobby was one of those people who would steal things almost without knowing it. She wasn’t very secretive about it, either. One time she took one of Mum’s coats from the cupboard in the hallway, put it on and left. She came back wearing it the next day and continued to do so after that. Mum didn’t say anything about it and neither did she. Later on Mum and Bobby became close friends and set up an antiques stall together, selling all sorts of knick-knacks. She seemed to be one of the few people with whom Mum developed a friendship. Bobby had a son called John who had wanted to be a musician, but had never really made it and spent his time working in computers for a central London college. It wasn’t long before Bobby introduced John and his wife Sue to my parents. They all used to have dinner together and seemed to get on very well. For a time John became Dad’s best friend.

Life soon began to get very complicated. I’m not sure exactly when I became aware that Mum was having an affair
with John but I must have been about twelve years old. Mum would pick me and Vanessa up from school in Hayes. On the way home, we would stop at John’s place. He lived at Biggin Hill, in a bungalow on the main road with a back garden that had a very fierce slope. The garden itself was treacherous: from a concrete terrace there was a sheer drop of about ten feet. Beneath that, there was a mixture of broken bricks, glass, other rubble and stinging nettles. It was here that Mum would leave us, locked out of the house, while she and John got on with their affair for a few hours. With a front garden that led straight to the main road and a back garden in which two little girls could easily have come to serious harm, there was now absolutely no thought for our safety – a complete contrast to the way in which she used to watch over us. Mum was pleasing herself and that was all that mattered. We never went into the house and it was clear that we weren’t allowed to. I was confused and lonely. Although my sister Vanessa was with me, our seven-year age gap meant that I very quickly got bored with her. After all, there are only so many mudpies you can make. I remember being so cold sometimes but I didn’t complain.

While many teenage girls tend to appear rather older for their age, I was the opposite: I looked much younger and because I’d been kept away from the world and hadn’t interacted with other children, my social development was not what it should have been. While the other girls were figuring out how to talk to boys and doing the usual
teenage experiments with black nail polish and violent blue eyeshadow, I was living in a vacuum, away from it all. So I really don’t understand how I figured out that Mum was having an affair with John, but I did.

One day my father came home from work and saw Mum and John having sex in our swimming pool. Apparently, he went back to work without saying anything. Most men faced with the realisation that their wife is making love to their best friend could be expected to react rather more visibly and even violently – but that didn’t happen, perhaps because Dad realised it may have given him an opportunity to end the marriage.

What did happen after the swimming-pool episode is that Dad seemed to accept it; and from then on the four of them continued to meet up – except now Mum slept with John and Dad slept with John’s wife, Sue. It was like some horrendous, cheap suburban fantasy. My father has since explained: ‘I was in a loveless marriage but I didn’t want to leave you girls. I was suddenly offered the opportunity to sleep with John’s wife who was very young and attractive. I realised my wife had no intention of stopping the affair with John so it seemed to me to be the best of all options. I just went along with the situation.’

John would go into my parents’ bedroom with Mum and Sue would sleep with Dad in the spare bedroom. As for me, well, I just got on with things as best I could. My upbringing had ensured that I was both introverted and
conditioned not to question things. Vanessa was too young to know what was going on so we just went to our room and played as if nothing was happening. It was just the way things were.

The swapping continued for quite some time but, not surprisingly, it didn’t work out happily ever after. For Dad and Sue it was always going to be a compromise situation. Sue was young and the relationship fizzled out. Not long after Dad started an affair with his father’s secretary, Denise. This wasn’t to last either. Dad was now deeply unhappy and it was inevitable that my parents would split up. He was very upset at having to leave us and conversations with him in recent years have revealed that he carried a lot of guilt with him. Much later, when he discovered that he had left us in the same house as a man who was to violate us in the worst possible way, it tore him apart.

I was absolutely devastated by the split. My schooling was affected and I had to stay down a year, putting me behind the others of my age which really hurt because I knew I wasn’t stupid. In fact, it was around this time I began to take a huge interest in word puzzles of all kinds; not just completing them but making them up as well. I was so good at devising puzzles that my dad offered me the princely sum of 50p a puzzle to design them for the crossword magazines he was now producing which had titles like
Letter Fit
and
Easy Crosswords
. My father’s move into publishing came as a progression from the book and magazine shops that he ran
with his brother Ralph; creating magazines seemed a natural extension to selling them. I took my responsibility very seriously and particularly excelled at ‘Find a Word’, where you have to make a number of words out of one word or subject. I still love crosswords and puzzles, and feel obliged to issue the warning that I am a highly competitive, demonic Scrabble player.

The puzzles were a way of extricating myself, at least mentally, from the pain and confusion at home. I even worked on them during lessons because I wanted to earn money and be independent; it was a big incentive. It was also around this time that I finally found some friends at school. There was Michelle Yarrow, Beverley Dalton and Karen Carter. At the time I was probably closest to Karen, who always struck me as very grown-up so I looked up to her, and we both drooled over Donny Osmond and David Cassidy! Karen and the other girls seemed a lot older and self-aware. I had absolutely no dress sense at all and was still an ugly duckling: freckly, pasty and very skinny. Like many young girls I was a late developer, a fact that was not overlooked by my mother’s new partner.

John’s presence in the house completely changed things. We were all terrified of him. He had a fiery temper and would explode at the slightest provocation. When he came back from work we would all listen to how hard he threw his keys on the table so we could determine what mood
he was in. Whenever Mum’s friends or family unexpectedly visited, he would usually pour himself a whisky and disappear to his ‘den’ in a huge sulk. He sulked like no adult I’ve ever met – or child, for that matter. Dad would come over every Thursday night to see Vanessa and me, and we would sit and try to make conversation. It was very strained and John would again go off to his room. He was a heavy drinker and, under his influence, Mum also began to drink very heavily. She may have loved John, or thought she did, but it was not a healthy relationship. She was as much in fear of him as we were and he knocked all the confidence out of her. I was sorry for her and wanted so much for her to be happy.

John wasn’t someone who engaged with people and that included me and Vanessa – he did, however, come up to the room we shared to kiss us goodnight. I didn’t like him and didn’t feel any affection for him so I just never reacted. Then one night when he came in, he put his tongue in my mouth; to be honest, I didn’t understand what it meant. After he did it, he went straight out again. Now, having read about paedophiles, I believe it was the start of his ‘grooming’ of me. John knew exactly what he was doing. He could see that I was cut off both from my mother and the rest of the world. My mother was totally in awe of him so the field was clear for him to do as he wished.

The abuse built up over a period of time. He would make me feel special and boost my obviously fragile confidence by
saying nice things to me. These were things I hadn’t experienced before and didn’t know if I was supposed to experience. I know that John was very affectionate to Vanessa but he didn’t pay her as much attention as he did me. In fact, she only recalls him touching her on one occasion but he did take nude pictures of her. Looking back, I think that even though she was younger, John kept away from Vanessa because she was far more feisty than me which made her too much of a risk. Like any paedophile who studies his subject, John surmised that I wasn’t going to tell a soul. I wanted to tell someone but I was also scared, not just of John, but my mother as well. My cousin, Russell, was one of the few people I tried to talk to about what was happening to me. Once when I was twelve, they were visiting and I told him, ‘John gets fresh with me.’ My mother overheard me and told me to stop telling lies.

I can’t remember when things went from touching and kissing to more sinister abuse but one event really stands out. When I was thirteen my father paid for all of us – Mum, John, Vanessa and me – to go on a cruise to the Caribbean. He didn’t have to do this but maybe it was his guilt. The list of destinations looked fabulous: Martinique, St Vincent and Barbados were all on the itinerary. I was so excited.

On the cruise ship one day, on the way to lunch, I started feeling ill so it was decided that I should go and rest. Halfway through the meal John left Mum and Vanessa
and came to my cabin. I can’t picture the specifics of that day but he undressed me and led me into the shower. He’d just let me come out when my mother turned up at the cabin door. John had locked it but Mum looked through the keyhole and saw him there with me. She banged loudly on the door. He unlocked it and, still pulling up his trousers, walked straight past her and out the door, saying nothing at all. Seeing me naked and dripping wet, my mother just walked up to me and slapped me across the face. She never confronted John but she did ignore me totally for the rest of the holiday.

After that incident I believe she knew exactly what was going on. The more I thought about it, the more I felt rejected by her and responsible for what was happening to me. I knew what John was doing wasn’t right or normal and kept asking myself what I had done wrong. I was also living in a time when children did not discuss issues like abuse with other people. It was not commonly mentioned in the media as it is today and children were not warned to watch out for people who might be possible abusers. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it didn’t exist. Even professionals were not very adept at handling it, as evidenced by my encounter with a female GP. I had gone to see her for my self-inflicted constipation. Over the years I had developed this habit of holding my bowels so that I didn’t go to the toilet, at one point for two weeks. I was in a huge amount of pain. Psychologists would probably see it as a desperate
child’s attempt at gaining some foothold and control in the world and I suspect there is a great deal of truth in that.