Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence. Maria Landon
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twenty of them, and they provided us with eggs but they were always escaping and causing problems with the neighbours. I hated those birds, especially the cockerel and the aggressive way it would fly at me, flapping and squawking when I was sent out to collect the eggs. Dad always said his dream was to have a smallholding out in the country where he could be completely self-sufficient but he never did anything about getting one. He never actually did anything about improving any of our lives, just taking refuge from it all in the pubs, hoping to win enough money on the horses to make all his problems go away.
If he hardly ever bothered to feed us, he didn’t give a second thought to clothing us; in fact he expected me to help him rather than the other way round. From the moment Mum left I was the one washing and ironing his shirts every day. I’d learnt how to do it by watching Nanny when we visited her bungalow. I had to become good at it because if I made the slightest crease in the wrong place he would give me a slap and shout at me for being stupid, like some eighteenth-century plantation owner overseeing his slaves. But at the same time he would boast to his friends about how wonderful his little girl was, doing all these things for her old man, as if it was evidence of how much I loved him. In a way it was. I felt proud when he talked about me to other people like that but confused that the things he said to my face were completely the opposite. I never knew where I really stood with him, which was one of the ways he kept control in all his relationships and friendships.
Terry and I didn’t have any opportunity to wash our own clothes and Dad wasn’t worried about how dirty or smelly they became, but he did take an uncomfortable amount of interest in our bath times. He always boasted about how at ease he was with nudity around the house and quite often he would make us have baths with him. The bathroom was off the kitchen, a tiny room containing a sink and a bath that had been crammed in under the slope of the staircase. He’d get in the bath first and then he would call us in when he’d had time for a bit of a soak. Once Terry had washed and got out Dad would tell me to stay and he would sit up on the end with his legs open, ordering me to turn round and look at his naked body while he played with himself.
‘I don’t want to,’ I would protest, staring hard at the taps at the other end, knowing something was wrong with what he was doing but not sure what it was. ‘Can’t I get out now?’ But he would make me stay there until he’d had enough and was ready to get out.
I had long blonde hair, which he was fanatical about, always insistent that I shouldn’t have it cut. Every week or two he would wash it for me in the bath and would always rinse it in freezing cold water, laughing as I gasped at the shock of the cold but becoming furious if I cried or made a fuss of any sort. He was like a sadistic little schoolboy sometimes. He had all sorts of mad theories about my hair, like deciding to rinse it in vinegar to give it a shine, and when it came to brushing the knots out he would turn what should have been a pleasant experience for both of us into the most horrifically painful ordeal possible, laughing gleefully all the way through it as I squeaked and squirmed under his brutal tugging.
He had a cruel, warped sense of humour, like a little boy with his practical jokes. When Mum was still with us, he used to pee in the vinegar bottle and watch joyfully as she sprinkled it on her chips. He often used milk bottles to relieve himself in when he was upstairs and couldn’t be bothered to come down to the toilet. He would shout for Terry or me to go up and fetch them from him and empty them. If he didn’t have a milk bottle handy he would just open the bedroom window and piss through that. He didn’t believe any of the rules of normal decent behaviour applied to him; he believed he could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.
Dad also seemed to get pleasure from inflicting any sort of pain on people weaker than himself. Sometimes Terry and I would be sitting with him watching television or playing a game quite peacefully and he would suddenly jump up and give one of us a Chinese burn, twisting our little arms as if he was wringing out a wet towel. If we cried out in surprise or pain he would start laughing or would shout at us to ‘shut up!’ like it was some sort of initiation ceremony designed to toughen us up and we had to be brave.
The unsettling thing was that we could never predict how he would react to anything; sometimes he supported us to an almost lunatic level. He loved his football and one year when Norwich City were in the FA Cup Final, he settled himself down in front of the telly to watch his home team, sending us out into the street to play. Terry got involved in some sort of an argument with another kid and came back indoors crying. Dad was annoyed at having his viewing disturbed but instead of giving Terry a hard time for being a pathetic crybaby, as he normally would have done, he stormed outside to deal with the problem himself. The other lad’s dad then also got involved and the two fathers ended up fighting so viciously the police had to be called to separate them. Dad was arrested and taken to the police station. He was angrier about missing the game than anything else. For years afterwards he would tell this story to anyone who would listen, using it as proof of how much he loved his children and how he would always stick up for them when they needed it. But he was unpredictable and Terry and I knew that he could just as easily have laid into him for being a wimp that day and sent him back out into the street to sort it out for himself.
If Terry and I ever started fighting with each other, as we did sometimes like any normal siblings, Dad would urge us to punch properly and not just pull hair or scratch. I remember one time I made Terry’s lip bleed with a punch and I felt terrible about it but Dad praised me and wouldn’t let Terry hit me back.
I knew never to disobey Dad or to put up an argument about anything. I might ask him to let me off doing something, but if he said no that was the end of it. The moment I heard his voice start to get angry I would always stop pleading because I would know it was hopeless and that if I kept going I was bound to end up being beaten.
Despite being meticulous about his own appearance, Dad didn’t care what we went out looking like. We could stink to high heaven and be clad in rags for all he cared. Once a week we would take our dirty washing up to his mother’s house, and she would do it all for us so we could pick it back up the following week. One set of clothes always had to last us the whole week, even our socks and underwear. We would take it back and forth between the houses in black bin liners. Terry and I would have to carry the sacks while Dad strode ahead as if he was nothing to do with us. We would try desperately to keep up and if I cried from the pain in my legs he would laugh at how weak I was or become angry with me for complaining. Even Nanny used to tick him off for the state my socks got into, telling him to buy me more clothes so they didn’t get so dirty, but he took no notice. No matter how bad they got she always managed to get them clean somehow. My most vivid memory of her is standing at the kitchen sink surrounded by piles of wet washing, scrubbing away like a demon.
It must have been obvious to everyone who saw us or smelled us that we were in a desperate state, and one day the headmistress of the school we were attending decided things had gone far enough and wrote to Dad saying that he needed to ‘clean Maria up’. Dad still couldn’t read or write so he made me read the letter out loud to him. The idea that anyone else had the right to tell him what to do with his children was impossible for him to grasp. He was absolutely furious that anyone would dare to interfere with the way he ran his family. He might be willing to take that sort of criticism from his own mother, particularly as he needed her to do the washing, but he certainly wasn’t going to accept it from someone outside the family setting themselves up as an authority figure.
‘You write down what I tell you,’ he fumed before starting to dictate a letter to me, which was full of four letter words and graphic insults. At one stage he sent me over the road to ask a neighbour how to spell the word ‘whore’. Although I didn’t know exactly what it meant, I somehow knew that this wasn’t a good thing to be calling my headmistress. I’d heard him use the word often enough when screaming abuse at women or venting his anger at our absent mother, so I knew it was rude.
The neighbour obviously thought it didn’t sound right that a child of my age should be asking him such a thing either and came back over with me. Maybe he thought I was trying to wind him up and wanted to check that Dad really had sent me.
‘Why does Maria want to know how to spell a word like that?’ he asked.
When Dad told him what he was doing the man tried to