Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence. Maria Landon
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keep you here at all,’ he replied. ‘You’re going in voluntarily.’
When he arrived at his destination the doctors tried hard to sedate him but he just kept saying he wanted to leave and ordering Mum to call him a taxi. She tried to put up a fight, tried to persuade him that it was for his own good that he got treatment, but ultimately there was nothing she could do once he’d made up his mind. Eventually she gave in and they got a taxi home, where their lives soon descended back to their previous level of violence and abuse, with Mum back working on the block every night of the week.
Mum tried to leave again, not long afterwards, and once more she went to a refuge for battered women. She stayed away longer this time and social services took Terry and me off to live with a foster family, some lovely people called the Watsons. They had a swimming pool in the garden of their Suffolk home where they carefully taught us how to swim. Dad had very different ideas on how these things should be done: one time he had slung us into the sea off the pier at Great Yarmouth, telling us that that would teach us how to swim. ‘Sink or swim!’ he laughed. As we survived the experience I suppose he must have been right, or maybe it was the current that washed us back up onto the beach along with all the other flotsam and jetsam, but I remember how terrifying it was floundering around in the waves, swallowing great mouthfuls of salty water every time I went under, compared to all the gentle help and encouragement the Watsons gave us.
They were such a sweet couple, trying everything possible to make us feel welcome and part of their family. We went blackberry picking and Mrs Watson made homemade pies and jams with us, but whatever we did and however nice they were to us I felt like an intruder. I knew I wasn’t their child and I felt I shouldn’t be there. It was never possible to really relax. I did wonder what made the Watsons’ own children so much better than us that they deserved a life like this. Why wasn’t I as special to my parents as their daughter was to them? My memory isn’t very clear on dates and ages but we must have been with them a while because they put us into the local school, which was very sweet, and the teacher there taught me how to write.
However wonderful life was with the Watsons, I still wanted to be back home with my dad because that was where I felt I belonged. I wasn’t good enough to deserve to live in a nice home like the Watsons’. I remember one particular afternoon, lying beside their swimming pool in glorious sunshine. Everything seemed so perfect. I had a beautiful new home and some new clothes they had bought for me. Mrs Watson brought us out cold drinks with ice cubes and fretted about me getting burned, rubbing sun cream onto my skin and making me feel so loved and cared for. But something wasn’t quite right and I still felt sad. I wished I was someone else, a feeling I would grow very used to over the coming years.
Mum came with her parents a few times to visit us at that foster home. Although I have no memory of her I do remember my granddad being there. Mrs Watson was very understanding apparently and let Mum bath us and read us bedtime stories.
We were only allowed to see Dad for one hour a week during that time under supervision at the social services office. One week he didn’t turn up and so they just took us back to the Watsons’ in Suffolk. The following day he turned up at the social services office roaring drunk and highly agitated, demanding to see us, insisting that it was his right. The social worker, a Mr Ashby, explained to him that as we now lived so far away visits had to be arranged to suit everyone. Dad refused to see reason and started to beat the poor man up, having first locked the office door so he couldn’t escape. The police eventually had to smash the door down and when they burst in they found Mr Ashby with three broken ribs, a broken nose, cuts and bruises. Dad was still on top of him, trying to gouge his eyes out when they finally dragged him off. That little outburst cost Dad a few months in prison but gave him something to boast about for years. He saw it as proof of how much he loved his kids, and how he wasn’t willing to let some pen pusher come between us.
At the time Mum was convinced we would only be in foster care temporarily and that once she had got her act together she would have us back and would bring us up as a single mum. She assumed the authorities would be able to protect us all from Dad now they knew just how dangerous he could be. But once he was out of prison again Dad tracked Mum down and started to pester her to come back to him. He was always able to find her because of the involvement of social services in our lives. She moved and changed jobs twice to try to get away from him and both times he found her by insisting on his right to see his kids. Her employers and landlords would become tired of the harassment he would give her wherever she went and would ask her to leave.
Whenever Dad found her, he would just completely wear her down and promise things would be different and tell her he was the only one who loved her. Mum left him three or four times but each time he succeeded in making her go back to him again. And each time he would have her back out on the street again within a week.
By that time Mum had been arrested several times for soliciting and had a suspended sentence hanging over her, but Dad still forced her back to work. She was terrified of being picked up again and being sent to prison, but he wouldn’t listen. One night she heard that the vice squad was doing a sweep of the area and she begged Dad to let her go home early since she had already earned plenty of money in the previous few hours. Dad wasn’t willing to even consider it, becoming angry that she dared to suggest when she should stop work. It was his decision and not hers, as far as he was concerned. As they stood on the pavement beside the busy road he lifted her skirt up and started shouting at the passing cars.
‘Come and get some of the best cunt in Norwich.’
Mum tells me that that was the final straw. At that moment she decided she was going to have to escape from him once and for all, whatever the cost, even if it meant abandoning her children to his mercies. She had run out of options. She had no choice any more.
Chapter Four
mum leaves
I have almost no memories of actually living with Mum although I was six when she finally left for good. I can’t summon up any mental pictures of what it was like having her in the house with us. I have a vague memory of a woman making jellies at a birthday party but can’t picture her face. There would be no children’s parties after she left so it must have been Mum who was there in the kitchen making jelly. She says it was.
Nearly everything I have described so far I learned from her many years later or from other people who were around at the time, or from reading my social services records. It was always hard for Terry and me to piece together exactly what happened around the time she disappeared because Mum and Dad had such different views on it.
I do remember her coming back one time after one of her absences, although I still can’t picture her face. To celebrate our reunion we all went to the pictures as a family, the four of us together. (I guess Chris and Glen were back at home in their room as usual.) I still can’t actually visualize her being there, but I remember the event because as we came out of the cinema I got lost. I must have run on ahead in my excitement and taken a wrong turning. I don’t think I was gone for that long, but when Dad found me he was really angry with me for inconveniencing him. When Mum finally left home he would tell me that I was the reason she had gone; that it was because I had got lost and been a nuisance to her that day after the cinema trip that she had decided she couldn’t take any more. He was very good at making out everything that went wrong in his life was someone else’s fault. I believed him because he was my dad so he must be right and because I already knew that I was a bad girl; he told me so all the time and had convinced me totally. So for years I believed it was all my fault that our mother had gone and that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with any of us.
I think each time Mum came back to Dad after one of her bids for freedom, she hoped that he would have been shocked into changing his ways, but each time he would start putting her down again, hitting her, nagging and bullying her to go back on the game again.
‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘there’s one of your punters. Why don’t you do just one more?’
If she didn’t respond to the cajoling then he would resort to violence. Nothing made him lose his temper more thoroughly than one of us refusing to do