Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence. Maria Landon
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his mind to something.
And so Mum agreed. She says she allowed him to kid her that she was only going to have to do it once or twice, that he was just asking her to do him a favour because he was skint and this was the only way he could think of to make a bit of drinking money for them both quickly. The first time, he took her up to the block in Norwich where all the streetwalkers worked and explained to her what to say to the drivers of the cars that crawled along the kerbs and what to do once she was in the cars with them. I know exactly how he would have done that because a few years later he was making the same trip with me.
It wasn’t long before Mum realized how naïve she was being. Easy money is as addictive as any drug, particularly if you don’t have to do anything for it yourself. Once the cash started rolling in he was hardly going to put a stop to it; he probably wasn’t capable of it, any more than he was capable of giving up his drinking or his gambling. The more she earned for him the more he wanted and the harder he made her work.
Dad took his role as a pimp very seriously, hanging around the block all night at first, making sure Mum stayed on her patch and took advantage of every single potential client who drew up. He would never allow her to go home until he felt she had extracted every penny possible from the punters. Whenever she had an unsavoury or threatening client and became frightened she would plead with Dad to let her stop but he ignored her, pretending he couldn’t hear her and pushing her back to the edge of the street.
Mostly she would be getting into the men’s cars at the kerb, driving off and transacting the business in the passenger seats, but sometimes she would bring the customers back to our house. Dad didn’t mind how she did it as long as she kept working. He would sit downstairs watching the television while she was at work in their bedroom above, next to where Terry and I were sleeping and where Chris and Glen lay in silence. She would just have walked in the front door with the customer and gone straight up the stairs to do the business as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Dad saw nothing wrong with it at all.
She put up with it for two or three years, from soon after Glen’s birth, all the while kidding herself that it would stop one day. Many years later she told me that she used to get so depressed she would sit downstairs all day reading books and eating chips until it was time to go out to work. For part of those years she had a day job at a shoe factory, so she must have been utterly worn out. She was struggling for her own survival and not able to take any notice of Terry or me and she seemed to forget all about Chris and Glen locked in their bedroom upstairs. Gradually, she brought them out of their room less and less, even when Dad wasn’t there, until eventually she managed to forget they existed for hours on end. Maybe it felt as though she had too many things to cope with and something had to be allowed to give or her brain would have overloaded.
It’s obvious from reading the social services records at the time how hard life must have been for Mum with four small kids and no money coming in apart from whatever she could keep back from Dad. It wouldn’t have occurred to Dad to help her look after us either. I suppose there were a lot of men like that in those days. I don’t think it would even have occurred to her to ask him for help because looking after the kids was considered to be women’s work. But most husbands would have made sure they provided at least enough money for the basic essentials their family needed. If a traditional woman’s place was at home looking after the house and the children, a traditional man’s place was as the breadwinner for the family. Even when she was working Mum never got to keep anything she earned; it all had to be given to him to take down to the pub and the bookies. She was often forced to go to the authorities for help when there was no food in the house, but if he found out about it Dad would take whatever money they had handed out to her and would spend that on drink too. Sometimes the social services would give her vouchers and money for the electricity meter but then Dad would sell the vouchers and break into the meter when he needed more cash for the pub.
In the end Mum was left to rely on handouts from kind neighbours and the big parcel of groceries her parents brought round every Wednesday. It’s hard to understand why my grandfather and grandmother couldn’t see what was going on and do more to help us. I think they were at their wits’ end to know what to do. I’m sure they can’t have realized how bad things were for Chris and Glen, though; Mum must had cleaned them up a bit when her parents were due.
Once he’d had a few drinks Dad’s obsession with Mum would sink into pure cruelty. He would pace up and down the front room for hours on end yelling at her about how fat, ugly and useless she was, telling her that no one would ever love her except him. If you tell someone those sorts of things often enough they soon start to believe them.
‘You’ve brought shame on the family,’ he would rant. ‘I should never have married you, you’re just council house rubbish.’
They were living in a council house themselves at the time, but because the rest of Dad’s family had done better and all owned their own businesses and homes he somehow thought that meant he was superior to her. There was no point in her arguing with him unless she wanted a beating so she just had to sit there and take whatever he wanted to throw at her.
I think it must have been 1972 the first time Mum left him, when I was about five years old. She always had trouble getting all four of us out of the house at the same time so she just took Glen and Chris with her to a local refuge for battered wives. I can understand why she thought they were in more danger from him than Terry and I were: they were so much smaller and he seemed to have taken against them from birth.
The NSPCC and local social services got involved in the case and after listening to what she had to say they went to visit Dad. The report came back that he was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. I dare say these days they would have come up with a more specific diagnosis, such as ‘bipolar disorder’, but back then they just talked about depression and nervous breakdowns. They promised her they would have him admitted to the local psychiatric hospital for a month. During that time Mum was told she would be able to apply for a restraining order stopping him from returning to the house and she would get custody of all of us. For a few fleeting moments she must have felt that she was finally getting some protection from him, and that it was all going to work out.
Dad was taken off from the house in an ambulance and two social workers stayed with Terry and me until Mum arrived back home with Chris and Glen. Once they could see we were all settled in, the social workers left and a few minutes later Mum received a phone call from Dad to say he had escaped from the ambulance on the way to the hospital and had gone to his mother’s to steal some of her sleeping tablets, which he was now swallowing.
‘I took my own tablets before leaving home,’ he told her, and at that moment Mum spotted the empty pill bottle standing on the kitchen table. ‘I’ll be dead soon so I’m ringing to say goodbye.’
He also, however, told her exactly where he was, so as soon as she had put the phone down on him she called the emergency services, who rushed to find him and take him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. When Mum got there the doctors told her that if the ambulance had been ten minutes later he would have been dead. He was on a life-support machine for three days and went on to develop pneumonia. There’s no doubt that Dad had a genuine problem with depression, but it was always hard to tell if he really wanted to go through with the suicide attempts or if they were ‘cries for help’.
While Mum was visiting Dad in the hospital a senior psychiatrist came to talk to her. He’d been listening to Dad and had been appalled by everything he’d found out about their life together.
‘You’re married to a very dangerous man,’ he warned her. ‘Your husband is schizophrenic and in desperate need of psychiatric help. Frankly, I’m amazed you’ve managed to stay married to him for as long as you have.’
He arranged for Dad to be moved to the psychiatric hospital and Mum agreed to go in the ambulance with him. She must have been feeling relieved that someone else was recognizing her problem and finally helping her and she must have been worried about Dad too. However badly he had been treating her, he was still the love of her young life and the father of her children.
‘How long can they keep me here?’ Dad asked the