Escaping Daddy. Maria Landon
Читать онлайн книгу.
Chapter One Childhood
Right from the beginning Dad would say I was his favourite child, and that would make me very proud. He was big and handsome and always seemed heroic to me because he was so popular and flamboyant, always the centre of attention wherever he went. Everyone loved my tall, dark, handsome dad. He had a powerful presence, always immaculately turned out in a suit and tie and known for being good company, never able to resist playing up to an adoring crowd of admirers. He was so plausible he could tell people anything and get away with it. He cultivated an image for himself as a lovable local rogue and ‘a bit of a character’, but as well as being a charmer he was a bully and a show-off and he had an uncontrollable temper, which frequently spilled over into violence.
I always wanted to please him, to obey him, to win his approval and to avoid getting a beating. But the more I yearned for his approval the more he would withhold it, telling me how worthless and fat and ugly I was, and I continued to believe him even when I could clearly see the sort of man he truly was beneath the superficial bravado. My father was a pimp and a drunk and had been all his adult life.
His total possession of me started on the morning I was born, when I’m told that he paraded boastfully around the hospital, completely drunk, puffing on a cigar and joking that he was going to make me ‘the best little prostitute on the block’. Except he wasn’t joking; he was deadly serious.
‘Pity I haven’t got four girls,’ he would tell anyone who would listen, ‘because then I could run a proper little brothel and never work again.’
To him these weren’t such shocking announcements because that was the world he lived in, the world he sought to control in any way he could and the world I grew up in. He truly believed that all women were ‘sitting on a goldmine’ and that they were mad if they didn’t exploit it to their own advantage, and if possible to his advantage as well. He never held down a proper job in all the years I knew him, drinking away whatever money he could bully the women in his life into earning for him by selling their bodies on the streets, combined with whatever welfare payments he could blag.
Despite the fact he always swore that my mum was the love of his life, just as she would swear that he was the love of hers, he had even nagged and bullied her into selling her body to passing kerb-crawlers in order to provide him with drinking money. Such behaviour seemed normal to him because all the friends that he spent his days and nights with were the same: either alcoholics or hookers, or both. I was too young to be able to remember the years when Mum and Dad were together, but I can imagine how it was from what they and other people have told me, and from the way he went on to treat me and everyone else. Despite the fact that he worshipped Mum, he still undermined her confidence at every possible opportunity, one minute telling her how gorgeous she was and the next telling her she was ugly and useless. He would beat and kick her ruthlessly when she tried to stand up to him, determined to break her spirit and make her obedient. When she finally decided she had had enough and left us when I was six years old, he spent the rest of his life telling everyone how brokenhearted he was, and threatening to kill himself whenever he was drunk.
It was the same technique he used to manipulate and control everyone in his life. Dad had a way of making people do what he wanted with a mixture of charm, violent bullying and manipulation. He dominated and terrorised Mum in the same way as he would later dominate and terrorise us. The fact that she had borne him four children made no difference to the way he treated her or the things he expected her to do for him.
My brother Terry was the first to be born from their great teenage love affair and I came along a year later in 1966. It seems Dad was willing to tolerate our existence, although he still enjoyed hurting and frightening us whenever the mood took him, but by the time our brothers, Chris and Glen, came along in 1969 and 1970 he had lost all patience with the demands of small children. He was so violent towards the two babies Mum didn’t dare bring them out of their bedroom when he was around and, as she slipped into a pit of depression herself, they gradually became forgotten for longer and longer periods, remaining silent and fearful behind that closed bedroom door.
I was only little but I remember glancing at that door, hearing the whimpering noises behind it and smelling the awful, eye-watering smell of their unchanged nappies, a smell that permeated through the upper floor of the house. Mum only dared to bring them out to feed and change them when Dad had gone out somewhere, and they were pitiful creatures: very thin, with scratches and sores all over their skin, and huge staring eyes. I felt desperately sorry, and guilty that I was allowed to come downstairs and eat meals with the family while they weren’t–but what could I do about it? I was just too young to help them.
Dad managed to convince Mum that she would only have to turn tricks once or twice, that he was just asking her to do him a favour because he was skint and they both needed some drinking money, but it wasn’t long before she realised she was being naive and that the more she earned for him the harder he would make her work. Dad had realised that pimping was the easiest way imaginable for him to earn money. However much she might have loved him, there was a point beyond which even she wasn’t willing to put up with him any more.
Mum finally gave up hope of anything ever changing and had a nervous breakdown, walking away from all of us without even saying goodbye. I have only the dimmest of memories of a time when she was there with us and I have no picture of her leaving. All I can really remember is me and Dad and Terry on our own together and being told that she had gone. She left us all, including Chris and Glen, still festering in their locked bedroom. Dad couldn’t believe that he had lost the love of his life and his drinking grew steadily worse, increasing the lake of self-pity he chose to wallow in. I think he was genuinely shocked that she’d gone, but he was also upset at losing the money she had brought in.
As soon as she could, Mum alerted social services to the danger we were all in now that we were alone with Dad. When social workers came round they found Chris and Glen shut in their bedroom in a terrible state. They were two and three years old, staring 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. Dad told everyone who would listen that Mum was the villain of the piece for leaving her children in such a state and he was able to make out that he was the innocent victim of her cold heart just as much as we were. Chris and Glen were both put into a foster home while Terry and I were left with Dad, who was busy boasting how he was going to bring us up on his own, thus winning the sympathy of all his women friends in the pub.
‘Poor old Terry. His wife’s up and left him and he’s doing his best to be a good dad to the little ones,’ they’d say, oblivious to the fact that he didn’t look after us at all. It fell to me to get meals for us, try to clean our clothes and get us to school on time, while Dad was out cavorting with his girlfriends or staying up all night drinking.
Once Mum had gone we never heard from her again for eight years. We didn’t hear from our grandparents or any of our other relatives either. Somehow Dad managed to intimidate them all into staying away, just as he intimidated Terry and me into obeying his every order with the beatings and the hours we spent locked in the windowless coal cellar if we displeased him. We never even received any birthday or Christmas cards from other family members. It seemed he was right when he told us the whole world had forgotten we existed and he was the only person we could rely on to care about us and look after us.
‘I’m the only person you can trust,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m the only person who will ever love you.’
With Mum gone he turned the full force of his pain, anger and misery onto us, while to the rest of the world he remained the jovial life and soul of the party, the hero whose feckless wife had deserted him and who was struggling to bring up the kids on his own. In the privacy of the house he did everything he could to make sure we were his devoted slaves, particularly me, playing endless mind games to make sure I would stay loyal and obedient and crushed.
‘You’re fat and ugly,’ he would tell me all the time, ‘no one will ever love you except me. Even your own mother left you.’
I was convinced it was all true.