Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence. Maria Landon
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within reach he grabbed me and threw me across his long legs. As he raised the slipper in the air I let out an almighty scream, which made him laugh.
‘I haven’t even touched you yet!’
I couldn’t stop the crying and it made him angrier still so he doubled the number of hits to teach me a lesson, to teach me to be brave and strong, to teach me to obey his orders the moment they were issued. His lessons worked because I soon learnt to stifle my screams and take my punishments in silence. I always concentrated hard on counting each stroke to try to distract my mind from the pain and to keep myself from crying and angering him more.
Once he had finished he would throw me to the floor and I would scrabble to pull up my knickers, the tears silently streaking my cheeks, a wave of relief sweeping through me at the thought that it was over and that I had survived an ordeal that I had thought a few minutes earlier was going to kill me. Why had I made such a fuss? I would ask myself. It wasn’t so bad. I was still alive even if my bottom did hurt. Maybe Dad was right and I was making a fuss about nothing. I would then crawl into a chair and try to sit down, but it would hurt too much and I would have to lean on my side. My punishment was over, but however hard I tried I wouldn’t always be able to stop the tears. I would try to sniff them back up before he saw them.
‘Stop snivelling,’ he would bark, ‘or you’ll get another lot and this time it will be the stick!’
Him shouting would just make me want to cry more. I wanted to run over to him and tell him I was sorry for whatever I had done and that I still loved him. I wanted to ask him to hold me and cuddle me, but I knew better than to do that because such weakness would only aggravate him. So instead I would desperately fight to swallow my sobs and stop the tears from flowing.
I remember witnessing him beating up Terry really badly one day, punching him with his fists. I watched Terry sliding down the wall, the wallpaper behind him smeared with his blood. I couldn’t intervene because I would have received the same treatment for daring to go against him, so I just had to watch and wait for it to be over. If you tried to ask why he was angry or to argue with him you would merely make the ordeal last longer and give him an excuse to become more vicious.
Mum was useless at protecting us because by this stage she was utterly terrified of him as well. He wasn’t the kind of man that many people found the courage to resist. Gradually he undermined Mum’s confidence, telling her she was ugly and useless. He used to beat her about as well, kicking her in the mouth once and knocking out some of her teeth so she had to get false ones. She still has a prominent scar on her chin from that attack.
Things must have been volatile between her and Dad right from the moment they met but it was when she fell pregnant with Glen that she says it all started to go badly wrong. Dad was drinking a lot by then and when she was a few months pregnant they passed a Chinaman in the street on their way home from the pub. Maybe it started as a joke and then got out of hand, but Dad accused her of having an affair with him and then became convinced that Glen really was the Chinaman’s baby. The whole idea was patently ridiculous since Mum had never set eyes on the man either before or after that chance passing in the street but Dad seemed to have convinced himself until he became so incensed by her imagined treachery that he threw Mum down the stairs with Glen inside her, sending her into premature labour. She had to have an emergency caesarean and, as they prepared her for the operation, the doctors discovered that she was suffering from anaemia and malnutrition. She was kept in hospital for a while receiving treatment for all her ailments.
Dad’s theory about Glen having been fathered by a Chinaman was shown to be ridiculous once Glen was born because he looked more like Dad than any of us, but that didn’t stop him from continuing with his delusion. He started claiming that he couldn’t go out to work for fear that he would find Mum in bed with another man when he got back. I don’t believe this for a moment, but he repeated it time and time again over the years to get sympathy, and I’m sure his cronies in the pub took him at his word. Poor old Terry, with a wife he couldn’t trust.
When Mum was rushed into hospital for the caesarean, Terry Junior, Chris and I were placed with a foster family. I suppose Dad didn’t think he could cope with us on his own or maybe Mum had told social services that he couldn’t and that we needed to be protected from him. By that time I think the authorities were becoming aware of his violence. We must have been considered to be at risk.
One of the few memories I have of that period is of coming downstairs the first morning that I was in the foster home.
‘Good morning,’ one of the family said when they saw me appearing in the doorway and I froze, my face turning the colour of beetroot, totally unable to find the words to reply. The greeting must have taken me by surprise because people didn’t exchange those sorts of simple pleasantries in our house; they just grunted and shouted at one another if they needed to communicate. From then on the foster family all called me ‘dummy’. They may only have said it a few times, and they might just have been gently teasing me, but I was still mortified enough for the word to be burned indelibly into my memory. I knew it was my own fault for not speaking up as soon as I was spoken to, and it convinced me that I was inferior to the other children there, a worthless creature who had no right to be in their home at all but wasn’t wanted by anyone else, least of all her parents.
When Mum had recovered from her operation we were allowed to go home again. The doctors said it could be dangerous for her to have another pregnancy and prescribed her with the contraceptive Pill. Once there was no danger of her falling pregnant again, Dad decided the time was ripe to put her on the game. He’d talked about it before, apparently, never seeing anything wrong with the idea. In fact it was a bit of a mystery to him why all women didn’t do it.
‘Every woman’s sitting on a goldmine,’ he would say. ‘Pity I haven’t had four girls because then I could run a proper little brothel and I’d never have to work again.’
It might seem ironic that he beat Mum up because he suspected she’d been unfaithful to him yet he was prepared for her to be a prostitute, sleeping with any man who could pay the going rate – but that would be entirely consistent with his warped kind of logic.
‘If you’re going to do it, you should get paid for it instead of giving it away for free,’ he’d always say.
Chapter Three
putting mum on the game
Mum had never really taken him seriously in the early days of their relationship when he talked about her going on the game, assuming he was just joking. Who would imagine that any man would want to do that to the woman he loved? Why would he want to share her with any old Tom, Dick or Harry? But Dad wasn’t like most men, and as the years passed Mum came to realize that. The comments that had started out sounding like a rather tasteless kind of banter between lovers grew to seem more real and threatening. And once she was on the Pill, Mum soon realized that he had become deadly serious with his plans and expected her to start excavating the ‘goldmine’ she was ‘sitting on’ and become the family breadwinner.
They probably already knew people who worked in the business because of the kind of places where they went to drink; Dad socialized with prostitutes all the time when I was a bit older. Selling your body simply didn’t seem like a big deal to him; it was just another easy way to make good money for very little effort – well, very little effort by him.
It’s hard to imagine how most men would have persuaded their wives to actually go out the first time and do it, but Dad had a way of making people do what he wanted with a mixture of charm, violent bullying and manipulation. Although he worshipped Mum, he constantly strove to control her in every way possible. He dominated and terrorized her almost as completely as he dominated and terrorized his children. When he wanted something, he would go on and on, like a terrier with a bone, never stopping until he got his own way, and I imagine that’s how it was back then. He probably flattered her, telling her how gorgeous she was, then told her she was useless and how much she needed him, then he would nag her constantly that her family needed her to earn money, that it wasn’t a lot to ask after all. I can imagine him doing it, and although