Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence. Maria Landon
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every expletive copied out in my best neat handwriting. I was mortified because I knew that it wasn’t right. I’d always quite liked the headmistress and didn’t want to antagonize her, but I was more frightened of angering Dad by not doing as I was told than I was of any teacher.
The letter was delivered and I suppose it was read but nothing further was ever said to me on the matter from either end, and Dad made no more effort to clean me up for school. I guess the headmistress decided that it wasn’t a battle worth fighting and Dad put it down as yet another of his famous victories over petty bureaucracy and nosey parkers.
Social services used to give Dad an allowance to take us out and buy clothes but he would just spend it all on drink. When the authorities realized what he was up to they tried giving him vouchers instead but he worked out he could sell them to his friends down the pub for cash. He always had a dozen different schemes going to ensure he had a constant supply of spending money for the pub. Sometimes he put so much effort into trying to get something for nothing that it would have been easier to just have gone out and earned the money he needed, but that wasn’t the point for him. The point was to win the game, to get something over on the rest of the world, to show that he was cleverer than everyone else, particularly the people who tried to tell him what to do.
Although he didn’t care about Terry and me wearing the same clothes every day he would be very strict about the oddest things, like not chewing bubblegum or not swearing, and he insisted on us polishing our shoes each night. At that time everyone else at school was wearing plimsolls, partly because they were comfortable and partly because it had become a bit of a fashion statement. We used to beg him to let us do the same but he always insisted we wore some proper leather shoes that had been given to us by a kind neighbour. Because we desperately wanted to be like everyone else Terry and I would put our plimsolls in our bags and once we were round the corner from the house we would hurriedly change into them. He must have suspected something was going on because one day he decided to follow us. He caught us red handed and dragged us back home, furious that we were trying to ‘get the better of him’. I can’t remember what my punishment was, but he forced Terry to wear a great big brightly coloured orange and yellow patterned tie to school. He looked ridiculous and he was crying and sobbing and begging Dad not to make him do it because all the other boys would take the piss, but Dad made him wear it for days on end. Terry was far too scared of what his next punishment might be to be willing to risk disobeying Dad and taking the tie off as soon as he got round the corner. These sorts of intimidations were Dad’s way of keeping control of every little aspect of our lives. He loved to humiliate other people in order to demonstrate his own superiority and power over them.
My eyesight as a child was terrible and I went for years without being able to see the blackboard in class properly but not wanting to say anything for fear of drawing attention to myself. Eventually the school picked up on the problem and advised Dad to take me to an optician. He refused to do anything about it, saying I was just pretending not to be able to see in order to get attention. In a way I wasn’t too bothered by his reaction because National Health glasses for children were not exactly fashionable in those days and it would have been one more thing making me different to everyone else. I was already a target for some bullies at school and I didn’t want to give them yet another reason to pick on me. Eventually one of the children’s homes I went into got me glasses while Dad was away on one of his stints in prison and my schoolwork immediately improved, although my self-esteem sunk a few notches further down the scale.
Although I loved Dad, I realized very early on that our family life wasn’t normal because I had occasionally managed to glimpse into other people’s lives and knew they were all nicer than ours: there was that nice family the Watsons who fostered us once and then a couple called Ivan Bunn and his wife Ann, who lived a couple of doors up the road from us. They had two daughters called Frances and Denise and a little boy called Stephen, with whom I was very friendly. There was a piano in their house that they let me have a play on whenever Dad let me go round there, which wasn’t that often. Although he didn’t mind us playing out in the street if it got us out from under his feet, he was always nervous about us becoming too involved with other families. Maybe he was worried we would say too much about what went on behind our closed doors, or that we would realize that life with him wasn’t normal. Probably he just didn’t like the idea of losing any control over us, of allowing any other adult to have an input into our upbringing or to influence our thinking.
The Bunns must have known that things were tough for us because when I was seven or eight they even invited me on holiday with them to Hemsby, on the Norfolk coast, one summer. I don’t know how they got Dad to agree but I was glad they did because it was one of the happiest times of my young life. Ann bought me some pink cotton pyjamas with stripes on the bottom and polka dots on the top and I thought they were the prettiest, softest things I had ever seen. I got sunburnt playing outside during the day and she gently rubbed calamine lotion onto my skin in the evening to try to cool me down and prevent me from peeling. At that moment I felt so cared for and so normal, although all through the holiday I still felt like the odd one out in the group, like an observer merely there to see how a normal family worked. I believed that I didn’t deserve to be loved and cherished like the Bunn children were, although I wasn’t sure why not. I believed that everything horrible in my life was my own fault; that I was a bad person and didn’t deserve any better. I knew that was right because Dad was continually screaming it at me, although I didn’t know why or what I should do to become a better, more lovable person.
Many years later, when I was in my thirties, I bumped into Ann when she came into the B & Q store where I was working and we chatted about that holiday all those years ago.
‘I’ve never forgotten that time,’ I told her.
‘I’ve got some photographs at home somewhere, and some of you playing in our garden too,’ she said. ‘I’ll pop them in to you if you’d like to see them.’
I was so pleased I could have kissed her, but at the same time I felt a stab of pain to think that this woman, who was really no more than a neighbour, had thought it was worth keeping some photographs of me when my own family had never cared enough to do that. It had always hurt me that no one valued me enough to take any pictures of me and the fact that Ann Bunn had some made me realize all the more how little my own parents had cared for me. When she brought them in a few days later it was like looking at a stranger. I’d had no idea what I looked like when I was small. I was surprised to see that I was really quite cute, not fat, ugly and unlovable as Dad was always telling me I was.
There were always plenty of new opportunities coming along for Dad to mock and humiliate me. I loved music lessons at school and I enrolled to learn to play the violin. You had to be on a waiting list to be allowed your own instrument and it was a great privilege when you were eventually given one to learn with. When it was finally my turn to be allowed a violin and I was told that I could take it home for a week or two to practise I was thrilled. I felt so proud as I stood in the front room and started playing a few notes for Dad. I was eager for praise and encouragement but instead he just laughed and belittled me.
‘You’re pathetic,’ he sneered. ‘You’ll never be able to master that.’
And then he grew angry at the noise I was making.
‘Don’t ever bring that bloody thing home again!’
He never wanted me to do anything that would be outside his control, outside the little world where he was the undisputed king. I desperately wanted to go to Sunday school like my best friend at the time, because it would have been a chance to get out of the house and because I knew the children who attended used to be given milk and biscuits and would come back home with pictures they had painted, but Dad wasn’t going to allow that. He was the same about me joining the Brownies or the Guides or doing anything else that other little girls did. It was as if he thought that as a family we were too different and special to behave like everyone else, reinforcing in me the idea that I would never be able to fit in or be as good as everyone else.
There was a lovely church called St Catherine’s a few streets from where we lived, which was used by our school for their Christmas and Easter festivities. When I was eight they asked me if