Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence. Maria Landon
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ever going to change, she was always going to have to do whatever he decided for her, that she would always be selling herself just to keep him in drinking and betting money. So she made up her mind to disappear once and for all.
One day in 1973 Mum sneaked home from the shoe factory in her lunch hour, when she knew Dad would be safely settled in the pub, and packed her case. Terry and I were probably sitting outside whichever pub Dad was drinking in. It didn’t matter because she wasn’t planning to take any of us with her this time. I suppose she knew that if she had children in tow Dad would be able to trace her through social services and make her go back to him. She wanted to vanish off the face of the earth. The psychiatrist’s warnings about being married to ‘a very dangerous man’ must have been ringing in her ears as she hurried from the house for the last time with her few possessions hastily packed, slamming the door behind her. Chris and Glen would have been able to hear her movements from behind their bedroom door but by that stage they must have been so weak from hunger that they wouldn’t have had the strength to cry out to her. There would have been no point anyway.
At first she went to a male friend and asked him to put her up. Initially he promised to care for her until she sorted herself out, but it wasn’t long before she realized he was going to want to pimp for her just like Dad and she knew her only chance was to leave Norwich for ever and start afresh somewhere else, somewhere where no one knew about her past. When you’re known to be a prostitute and all the people you socialize with belong to the same world, it’s almost impossible to change anything as long as you stay in the same town; you have to make a clean break. Carrying the suitcase that contained all the possessions she had left in the world she walked out to the ring road on the edge of town and hitched a lift with a lorry driver.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.
‘Blakeney,’ he replied.
‘That’ll do,’ she said and that was where she ended up. She was only about thirty miles up the Norfolk coast from us but as far as we were concerned back at home she might as well have been on the other side of the world.
She got herself a job in a hotel as a chambermaid and found a bed-sitting room. She contacted social services back in Norwich to tell them she’d gone and to ask them to take us into care, telling them yet again what her fears were for us. Her greatest fear, she said, was for me because of the number of times Dad had told her, and anyone else who would listen, that he was going to ‘break me in’ and put me on the game as soon as I was old enough. She knew him well enough to be sure that he wasn’t bluffing. If he had been willing to put his own wife, the love of his life, on the game, why wouldn’t he do the same to his daughter? She told them how dangerous she knew Dad was, feeling certain that they would take us away from him and put us into safe homes.
When the social workers arrived at the house that day, Dad was out with Terry and me but they must have broken in because they found Chris and Glen, who were two and three years old by then, abandoned in their locked bedroom as usual. Neither of them reacted to the strangers who suddenly appeared beside them. They just stared straight ahead with deadened eyes. Chris was rocking rhythmically back and forth in his cot and Glen was so hungry he was actually eating the contents of his own soiled nappy.
It was that scene, discovered by social workers, that sealed Mum’s reputation as a terrible mother, giving Dad the opportunity to make out he was some sort of local hero by default. Even though the state those babies had got into was as much his fault as hers, he somehow managed to make himself seem like another victim of her neglect and cruelty rather than the cause of most of her problems. Mum says she was having a breakdown during her final years with us and I imagine that must have been what happened. There’s no other explanation why a mother could neglect her own children to that extent.
I don’t remember coming home that day to find Mum gone. Because she’d disappeared before, I probably assumed it was like the other times and she’d be back eventually. It was only gradually, over time, that I realized she wasn’t coming back this time and that Terry, Dad and I were on our own now. I was six years old, nearly seven, and I had to become the woman of the house. A cold knot of panic formed in my chest when I thought about it.
The social workers took both Chris and Glen into care but, for some reason that no one has ever been able to explain to me, they decided it would be all right to leave Terry and me at home with Dad. Perhaps at that stage they thought Mum was the bigger problem; after all she was the one who was on the game, a lifestyle that carried so much stigma and suggested she couldn’t possible be a decent parent, and she was the one who had deserted us. Perhaps they thought that with such a shameless woman gone from his life Dad might be able to do a better job for us. Who knows what he told them at the time to make himself look good and her look bad. Dad could convince anyone of almost anything when he put the full weight of his charm into it.
When Mum heard from her parents that Terry and I had been left with Dad she boarded the first train back to Norwich and went to see social services, to plead with them to do something. It must have been a nerve-racking trip for her, constantly looking over her shoulder for fear of being seen by someone who would tell Dad she was back in town. Both of the social workers she had dealt with in the past had been moved to other areas and she had to explain her whole story all over again to someone new. She pleaded and begged, telling them again about Dad’s drinking problems, his violence, his involvement in prostitution and his promise that he intended to put me on the game as soon as possible. They refused to take her warnings seriously. Maybe they hear stories like that all the time and thought Mum was exaggerating to get back at her estranged husband.
‘All your children are subject to care orders,’ they tried to reassure her, ‘which will stay in force until they are eighteen.’ This was supposed to mean that social services took responsibility for us and made decisions about such things as where we lived and what schools we went to. No doubt they promised to keep an eye on us and to remove us if they thought we were in any danger, but I doubt if that would have put Mum’s mind at rest. She knew how clever Dad was at manipulating people and making them believe whatever he wanted them to believe.
Although I have all my social services reports from the time, it is hard to work out from the things they have written why they made some of the decisions they did. I always felt hopeful in the following years whenever I knew that a social worker was due to call on us, because I thought each time they were bound to realize that something was wrong and would try to help us. But the main social worker who was allotted to us in the early years was so terrified of Dad she refused to come to the house unless she had a police escort or one of her bosses with her. Her visits were very infrequent and were over as quickly as everyone could manage. Her fears were not unreasonable, of course, since Dad had already served six months in jail for beating up that other social worker. But if they knew he was capable of that level of violence, did they not guess he was capable of being violent to us? What made them think it would be all right to give us straight back to him as soon as he finished his sentence?
Even if they had come visiting more often and asked us more probing questions it probably wouldn’t have done them any good. I would never have spoken up to anyone in front of Dad, or even talked honestly about him if he weren’t there. It would be years before I found the courage to do that. Sometimes I would sit silently staring at the social workers who did make it into the house, trying to talk to them with my mind, trying to send them messages, hoping they would be able to hear my telepathic cries for help, but of course they didn’t. I have vivid memories of being asked questions like, ‘Are you getting enough to eat?’ and my stomach was rumbling but I didn’t dare to say we hadn’t had any food at all that day and only a few chips the day before. They took my silence as meaning that I had nothing I wanted to complain about. I would try to drop hints and clues but they never picked them up; maybe I was being too subtle or maybe they just didn’t want to hear. It was bound to be easier for them if they could feel reassured that we were OK.
I was as terrified of Dad as anybody else, but I still adored him and wanted to be living with him. I just wanted them to make him be nice to us and to tell him to stop doing some of the things he was doing, such as beating us. I hated Mum for deserting us because I could see how devastated my brother and father both were and I despised her