Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence. Maria Landon
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us something else in common.
His broken heart was a terrible sight to behold, and I began to feel I had a responsibility to look after him. The worst times were always when he’d had a few drinks and the melodrama of his own self-invented life story would become heightened beyond anything any country and western songwriter would have dared to write. Time after time Terry and I would find him on the sitting room floor on his hands and knees, weeping and praying for ‘his Jane’ to come back to him, screaming hysterically at the gods in his abject misery.
He always became furious whenever Terry or I cried about anything, shouting at us to shut up, hitting us, seeing our tears as a sign of weakness, so I couldn’t understand how he could be so willing for other people to see him cry so openly. For him it seemed to be like a badge of honour, a way to show everyone how wicked Mum was to have broken his heart and how much pain he was in.
‘I can understand your mum leaving all the other children,’ Dad would say to Terry, ‘but not you because you were her favourite. How could she leave you? A mother is supposed to love her first-born child more than anyone.’
I would be able to see the pain in Terry’s face as the words sank in, and feel my own pain at hearing someone confirm out loud that Mum had loved Terry more than me, even though I knew it to be true. Terry rarely cried but the tears would swell in his eyes at those moments and I was upset with Dad for being so cruel and for continually rubbing salt into my brother’s emotional wounds.
However much I hated the way he behaved, Dad always managed to convince me of his undying love and favouritism towards me, as if to compensate me for the fact that my mother hadn’t loved me enough to stay. He would assure me that as long as I stood by him everything would be OK.
‘All mothers love their first sons and all daddies love their little girls,’ he would say, as if merely saying it was enough to prove it was true. He never backed it up with displays of affection or kindness but these few crumbs were enough to keep my loyalty and adoration intact.
All the same, he managed to inflict maximum damage on both of us in his outpourings of misery. Terry would be heartbroken to think that his mother had done that to him and I would feel crushed to think that I hadn’t been of importance to her, that only Terry would have mattered to her. Why would Mum have loved him more than me? I would wonder, deciding that it must be because I was such a bad person. Then I would decide not to care, telling myself that it didn’t matter what she had felt for me because I was Dad’s favourite and he was still there for us.
He had a particular skill at making other people feel so bad about themselves that they actually believed he was their hero, the only one who cared about them, the only one who was there for them when their lives fell to pieces. More often that not he would be responsible for reducing people to needy wrecks in the first place, then when he had them hooked and dependent on him he would remind them how useless they were, making them all the more grateful to him for being the one who looked after them. He did it with Mum and every other woman he ever went out with, and he did it to us children as well. I would go to him constantly, trying to climb onto his knee and telling him how much I loved him, but he would always push me away in disgust.
‘You’re too fat and ugly,’ he was always telling me. ‘No one will ever love you except me. Even your own mother left you.’
Looking back now I know I wasn’t fat, just a normal healthy child, and I don’t think I was ugly. But he convinced me of both at the time. Dad liked overweight women because they would be insecure about themselves and that would give him a chance to dominate and taunt them, calling them fat, useless whores.
Sometimes Dad would cuddle me, but it would only last a few seconds before he would shove me away again. I hated the feeling of rejection and eventually I stopped going to him. I still loved it when he told me I was his favourite, although it would make me feel sorry for Terry, but I didn’t believe I deserved such an honour.
We weren’t with Dad all the time because he quite often got taken off to prison for thieving or beating someone up. Whenever that happened Terry and I would be put back into foster homes and children’s homes for a few months, or however long the sentence was. We were taken to visit him in prison sometimes and it was always a terrifying experience. Even sitting in the waiting room amongst the other visitors was intimidating. Everyone appeared to be so angry and aggressive and there always seemed to be the sounds of shouting in the distance, as well as the banging of the big iron doors and the clanking keys on the wardens’ belts. It all added to the atmosphere of fear for small children who didn’t understand half of what was going on or what was being said around them.
Once we were taken through to where he was waiting for us it was distressing to see our dad, who was normally so smartly turned out, reduced to baggy prison clothes, looking so vulnerable. We were used to him being the powerful one, the one in control of everyone around him, and it was unnerving to see him being forced into a subservient position, being bossed around by the wardens. He would become very emotional when he talked to us on those visits, promising that everything would be different once he got home, that our lives would be wonderful and that he would get a job so he could buy us all the things we needed. It was as though he was playing some hard-done-by character from a country and western song – one man struggling bravely to bring his children up right in a hostile world. I always wanted to believe him, even when he kept on letting us down and breaking his promises, and I would always stick up for him in front of other people, even when I finally realized just how bad a father he really was.
As soon as he got out of jail, I would find a way to get back to Dad from wherever we were staying at the first possible opportunity. I felt I owed him my loyalty because, whatever he was like, at least he hadn’t walked out on us like Mum had. He had stuck by us and so we belonged to him, we were his and it felt right that we should be with him. ‘No one else will ever want you,’ he’d say. ‘Only me. You’re fat and useless but at least you’ve got me.’
He couldn’t stand the idea that Terry and I might be taken permanently into care because he didn’t think it was anyone else’s business how he brought us up, and because he didn’t like to lose the benefits that he got as a single dad. We were his devoted little followers, part of his entourage, and he resented any attempts to part him from us.
He did try for many years to get Chris and Glen back as well, even though he had never known what to do with them when they were babies and wouldn’t have been any better with them once they were older. He went round to the foster home where they spent their whole childhood a few times to try to see them, but thankfully for them he was never allowed access. I heard he even made a pass at their foster mother. I suspect she might have had a bit of a soft spot for him because virtually everyone did when he decided to turn on the charm. He was good at convincing people that his children were the most important things in his life; that he was a dutiful dad who had been wronged by a bad woman and a heartless state.
Although Terry and I didn’t get to speak to Chris and Glen again until we were all adults, we did see them a few times just after we were all split up when they were brought to visit the people who lived next door to us. I suppose their foster parents must have been friends of our neighbours. Our front doors were inches away from one another, only divided by a tiny fence, and we could see them coming and going, but we were still ordered by social services not to speak to them. I remember peering out the window, seeing how cute they looked in the nice new clothes their foster mother had bought for them, and just feeling sad. After a while someone must have realized how cruel they were being to all of us by allowing these visits because they suddenly stopped. I didn’t see Chris and Glen again after that until I was twenty years old.
Chapter Five
just the three of us
Dad did little more towards looking after Terry and me when he had sole charge of us than he had when Mum was there. We had to feed ourselves most of the time. I would make jam sandwiches if there was any bread in the house, or we’d dig up some spuds from the back garden and make chips. I suppose I’d seen Mum doing these things and I was a fast learner but it’s scary to think I was heating