Please Let It Stop (3 page)

I was scared of doctors but I was also aware I was alone with my GP for the first time. As she examined me, I suddenly blurted out something like, ‘I’m being sexually abused at home.’ Instead of making me feel comfortable and giving me the confidence to talk about it, she coldly asked, ‘Shall I send round a social worker?’ Hearing those words sounded so threatening I immediately said no, for fear of getting into or causing trouble. In those days the impression of the social worker was someone who took you away instead of helping you. After that episode and my childish attempt to tell my cousin, I kept the whole thing to myself. I couldn’t tell my father, who had absolutely no idea what was going on – in fact, it’s only recently that he has discovered what went on in that house.

John’s abuse went beyond the sexual. He was one of those people who was menacing, even when he wasn’t around. My mother became totally submissive to him. I won’t say she was besotted in a loving way. He controlled her and she spent her whole life pleasing him, so Vanessa and I had to do the same. Mum’s sole mission in life was how to keep John happy. He was not only her partner; he was also her main topic of conversation. She talked about him incessantly. When it wasn’t about John, it was about his dog. And that was it: she had no other interests. John would often mock me, taking something I’d said and repeating it back
to me as if I was stupid. Mum would then join in with him. His influence meant that she would put me down, often in front of people. I often remember hearing her say in front of visitors, ‘Jacqueline’s so plain and clumsy.’

As if the sexual and emotional abuse wasn’t enough, there was also the ‘work’. I don’t mean picking up our clothes off the floor or tidying our rooms, but seriously hard labour. After we did our homework, we weren’t allowed to watch TV or relax. We had to apply ourselves to one of four forms of work that John had decreed. One of these was housework, specifically cleaning. Often I would take on the worst room in the house, which was the kitchen. I don’t know how Mum did it but she managed to make it filthy so I had to scrub it. There was no rest for anybody. My mother’s chronic rheumatoid arthritis did not exempt her (although she had lighter jobs) and neither did Vanessa’s age (she was only five when John came to live in our house). With John there were no excuses. He liked to have us working in the garden where he made us dig a vegetable patch. We’d be out there until it got dark trying to make inroads into the stubborn clay. Our work took place every day of the week; at the weekend we worked from the moment we got up until we went to bed. It was relentless. It also ruined our beautiful house that Dad had left us. Over the years John destroyed the look of the house and garden by chopping down the lovely cherry and birch trees and knocking down walls, replacing them with ugly
outhouses and walls made of breeze blocks. He had no sense of style and seemed to do it for the sake of it. Our formerly beautiful house was now cold, untidy, unclean and generally neglected.

One of his favourite tasks for us was logging. Our garden led to a one-acre piece of woodland which my father had bought for my mother as an addition to the house. John would do the macho bits with the chainsaw and then it fell upon Vanessa and me to carry the logs to the living room. We had to carry them through the woods, across the lawn, up the steep hill, across the other lawn and inside. It was back-breaking work.

My other job was cleaning the swimming pool. The truth was they couldn’t afford to maintain it so it would fall into a state of complete neglect. Then John would decide to empty it and I’d have to get into the pool with a scrubbing brush – a small one. I would scrub and scrub until my fingers were red raw and he would stand there waving the hose over it so the mildew would run off. The mildew meant that the surface of the pool was slippery. One day I slipped, banged my head and ended up with concussion. There was no sympathy from anybody. John was very annoyed with me and frustrated that I couldn’t continue. My mother didn’t care that we were working so hard. She just seemed to turn a blind eye. During the school holidays John would return from work (which he did not enjoy) and ask us to give a detailed report on what we’d done during the day. There was no respite.

During the summer he would insist we all sunbathed naked while in the garden and even fixed a device on the gate so he could tell if anyone entered. The thought of him watching and leering at us is one that revolts me to this very day. It is very menacing when you know someone’s eyes are constantly on you. It is even more menacing when you know that he is going to sexually abuse you – but you don’t know exactly when. The result was that I constantly lived in fear of him coming into my room. He was constantly following me, coming into the bathroom when I was there and watching me in the shower. He would engage in some form of sexual activity with me, on average, once a week and, during that time, did everything except penetrate me fully with his penis. He frequently went close to penetrating me but then stopped. Perhaps it was the fear of making me pregnant?

Some of my most desperate moments were when Mum left the house. My grandparents lived half an hour away and Mum would often go and look after them since my grandfather had had several strokes. If Grandad had a turn in the middle of the night, Mum would take Vanessa and leave me alone in the house with John. I knew what would happen. She would also take Vanessa with her when she went shopping. I would beg and plead with her to take me with them but she would just say, ‘No you stay here and keep John happy. He likes you.’ I think she knew what was happening but whether she used it to gain favour with
John, I don’t know. He was a verbally violent person and they were constantly rowing. I don’t think he hit her but on one occasion I saw him with his hands tightly around her throat leaning her across the staircase.

Mum hated it if John was not pleased. He used to have sulky moods that went on for days that I thought were weird for anyone, let alone an adult. He would go into his den and stay there and Mum would get very restless over this. Because he was nine years younger, she was always scared he would leave so she would constantly do things to make him happy. ‘Make him a cup of tea and take it up to him,’ she’d say. ‘He likes you.’ Those words make me shudder. He didn’t like me. He didn’t care about me. If he had, he would never have done what he did. All he cared about were his own perverse desires.

He never threatened us directly but his manner and the way my mother insisted that we had to pander to his every need made him a very scary figure indeed. To his own friends he was very popular, a good laugh and one of the boys but nobody ever knew what happened inside our house. The design of the house was somewhat unusual in that when you entered the front door, there was a large hallway with bedrooms and a bathroom leading off it. You would go downstairs from there to the lounge and kitchen. There was another staircase on the same level as the front door leading upstairs which you accessed through a wrought-iron gate. At the top of the stairs was my and
Vanessa’s bedroom. When John came to live with Mum he bought a padlock and chain, and each night he chained the gate shut so we couldn’t come out. I remember that at weekends we were sometimes not allowed out until 1pm. I’m not sure but I think Mum also chained it up sometimes.

I actually tried to run away from home twice. The first time I went to St Marks Church in Biggin Hill (where my mother’s funeral was held in 2003) and hid there, crying, for hours. I then walked to the house of a school friend called Claire Firmin; Mum was called later that day by Claire’s parents, and she came and picked me up. I didn’t tell anyone why I’d done it. Another time I was about fifteen. At that point I had been moved to what used to be the study. John had been in there and put earth in my bed and my drawers, among my underwear and T-shirts. Apparently our dog, Kelly, had knocked John’s cactus off the window ledge in his and Mum’s bedroom. There were about ten plants in all that he had brought back from their holidays in Spain. When he found the fallen plants, he was very annoyed because I hadn’t cleaned it up but his reaction was clearly not that of a normal person. I was very upset when I saw all the dirt in my things and just thought, ‘My god, I have to get out of here.’ I climbed out of my bedroom window, navigated the slippery eaves below, jumped to the ground and walked from Biggin Hill to my father’s apartment in Croydon. It was a long walk in the middle of the night and I suppose I was lucky to be picked up on the way by police – who found me
in Addington – and not by some weirdo. I told them I was going to my dad’s so they took me there. Dad was packing to go on a skiing holiday in the next few hours. I couldn’t tell him the truth although I wanted to and he just assumed it was because Mum was overprotective and strict. He drove me back and I climbed back up through the window and wrote about it in my diary. What I didn’t know was that John read my diary. One day I came home and he’d nailed the windows shut.

Eventually, the serious sexual abuse stopped. One day I came downstairs on a Saturday afternoon. Mum had gone out shopping with Vanessa and I had been upstairs, physically shaking, thinking about what was going to happen. I never spoke to John even when he abused me which makes what I did that Saturday quite extraordinary. He was standing in the bar when I came downstairs. I said, ‘This has got to stop.’ Then I blurted out, ‘It’s not fair to Mum.’

Maybe I was cleverer than I thought I was because, in retrospect, I think I chose my words very carefully. I didn’t want to inflame him or start a discussion. I wanted the conversation to end without confrontation and felt that appearing to care about someone else would help. I left the room, feeling worthless as I always did, and went back to my room in fear. From that day onwards he would watch me but he never touched me again. The worst was over but I was still not free. I started setting traps outside my
bedroom door so I’d hear him coming up. He came in to look at me when I slept and still watched me in the shower. It was torture in the real sense of the word as I didn’t actually know it would never happen again.

I would often fantasise about walking up to John, holding a gun to his head and shooting him. If I’m stressed, I still have these recurring dreams about him. And even though this may sound ridiculous, I don’t think I could ever go out with anybody called John – the name haunts me.

CHAPTER TWO

If you’ve ever wondered why more sexually abused children don’t speak out, I can tell you it’s just not that simple. This is something that happens to you in your own house where you are supposed to be safe. You feel frightened, confused and, a lot of the time, you just feel very, very ashamed. I often wondered what I had done wrong, which I now know is a common feeling among abused children. The feeling of shame is one of the reasons you don’t want to tell anybody. At the same time there may be people who suspect something is happening to you but they are too scared or don’t know how to discuss it. So everybody stays quiet. It’s like a silent contract.

On the rare occasions I did attempt to speak out I wasn’t believed or taken seriously. Later on when I got married, I told my husband Tony about John. Although I didn’t go into detail it was obvious what I meant, but all he could say was, ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’ Responses like that
constantly invalidated my feelings and made me very reti-cent about discussing my past life. I didn’t talk to my sister about what had happened until we were adults and I didn’t seek professional help until after my mother died in 2003. Up until then I dealt with it by stepping outside of myself so that I was seeing it from the outside, somewhat distanced from the reality. In later years, when recounting it all, I would think of that young girl as a separate person sitting next to me. That was my own way of surviving.

I am fortunate in that I am extremely self-motivated. If faced with any problems, I always have an overwhelming desire to help myself. Rather than wait to be rescued, I will immediately start to look for solutions, believing that I can overcome anything thrown at me. I also go out of my way to avoid people who treat me like a victim. Of course, I am vulnerable occasionally. Like everyone else, there are times when I need the comfort and support of my friends and family and when I am really hurting it can take time to get through it. But there comes a time when I want to pick myself up and look at what I have rather than focus on what I haven’t. I don’t want to hear about the bad things in life all the time. I am a very caring person and have lots of time for my loved ones, and am there for them when they are suffering, but I find it difficult to relate to people who spend their whole life as victims, blaming everyone else for life’s misfortunes. I believe we are all responsible for our
own destinies: whatever befalls us, it is our own choice to become a victim or even to turn into the bully that perhaps once bullied you at school. In my case I didn’t become either and for that I am immensely grateful.

Realising that my mum had probably played a part in allowing my abuser to keep doing what he did made it worse. Admittedly, she was powerless to do anything as she was completely controlled by him. But at the same time I think she used me as a bargaining chip since her biggest fear was that of John leaving. It was almost like she was saying to him, ‘You won’t want to ever leave, because look what you have here.’

Not long after my confrontation with John he did actually leave my mother for another woman and went back to live at his mother’s house, which was within walking distance. Life was suddenly more peaceful and relaxed, but it wasn’t to last. John had a cat called Eric which he took back with him but the cat kept coming back to our house. After about a year John’s affair with the other woman ended and one day when he came back to pick up Eric it all started again with Mum. By now Vanessa was nine, and both of us knew this was bad news. Mum was relieved and happy. The inescapable truth is that she would have put up with anything because she could not bear being lonely. Mum’s sister, Auntie Heather, pleaded with her not to take him back and my mum responded by saying, ‘I know he’s a bastard, but I can’t bear being on my own.’ Although John had returned, I was no longer
subjected to him sexually abusing me; but since I had no idea it was over, the threat was still very much there. He would still watch me as he’d always done, his eyes incessantly following me. And there was still our punishing schedule of ‘labour’ to be done around the house.