Escaping Daddy. Maria Landon
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to make contact with Mum for us. They managed to track her down and she actually came to see us. For a while it looked as though Terry and I might be able to live with her, but we were all too damaged. Within six weeks the relationship had broken down because Mum couldn’t cope with our disruptive behaviour and we were taken back into care.
I was fifteen and on the run from one of the care homes I’d been assigned to when I met a guy called Brian. He was a thirty-five-year-old biker and I fell in love with him because he was a kind and decent man. I had ‘property of Brian’ tattooed on my upper arm, just above a tattoo I already had of Dad’s name. We even bought a silver ring down the market and announced to the world that we were in love. Brian gave me the courage to break away a little from Dad, even though I was still working on the street to make the money I needed for the drink and drugs I was using.
Brian wanted to help me to escape from my fear of Dad and from the social workers who he thought were letting me down, so we hitchhiked down to London together. It was a dream that neither of us had thought through and we ran out of money almost immediately. Brian might have been older than me but he wasn’t capable of earning a wage and supporting us; he was a dreamer with a dope habit who liked playing his guitar. The only way we could support ourselves was for me to go back to work doing the one thing I knew how on the streets of King’s Cross. I was terrified and I didn’t want to do it, but the thought of going back to Norwich and letting Dad know I had failed was worse. I didn’t want him to see that he had been right, that I couldn’t manage without him.
The other prostitutes working in King’s Cross all looked older and harder and more vicious than any of the girls I had ever met in Norwich. These were people who everyone had given up on, junkies and schizophrenics and God alone knew what else. I’d never really known many black people before and I didn’t understand the way they or their pimps acted or talked to me. It was like occupying an alien landscape and everything seemed strange and dangerous, angry and aggressive. Most of the time I got myself high on speed or acid before I went out to work, just so that I could overcome my fears.
When the police eventually caught up with us they arrested Brian and Dad, accusing them both of living off my immoral earnings. Everyone knew Dad was a pimp but I was forced to stand in the witness box for an hour and half with him staring long and hard at me as I finally plucked up the courage to give evidence against him. Even then I still hated and loved him in equal proportions. I was relieved that people now believed me and that he was going to have to pay for what he had done to me over the years, but I also felt guilty that I was betraying him and ensuring he went back to prison again.
Everyone, including the judge, could see that Brian was my boyfriend and not a paedophile in the way Dad was, but he had still broken the law by sleeping with me while I was underage and so he had to serve six months in jail while Dad was given four years.
I don’t think anyone in social services thought that I would wait for Brian, but I did, putting all my energies into finding new ways to escape from the care homes they put me in. Eventually, once Brian was free and I was seventeen, they admitted defeat and let us live together in Brian’s council flat, which was the moment when I fell pregnant with his child.
I desperately wanted a child, having already suffered a miscarriage the previous year. Most of all I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted my baby to have the best possible start in life and never be made to feel the way I had felt throughout my childhood. As the date of the birth drew closer my intentions became more and more serious and I began to realise that Brian was never going to be able to be a good and responsible father. He might be a lovely, kind man, but he would never hold down a proper job and I could see that his drink and drug problems were getting worse not better. Dad would soon be out of prison and I was terrified of being forced back into his clutches simply because I had no alternative. I didn’t want him to be allowed anywhere near my baby when it arrived.
I had wanted so much to be independent and to show the world, and Dad, that I was an adult and could manage on my own, but I realised the relationship with Brian wasn’t going to work and I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of the social services. I needed help. I hated the idea of people seeing me as a failure again and I was terrified they would insist on taking the baby away from me, but they responded graciously to my plea and eventually put me into a little flat on my own. So many people in the social services over the years had told me that they thought I could do better with my life, but I had never believed them, always allowing Dad’s words to undermine my confidence and make me suspicious of anyone who told me I was better than I thought, that I could make something of my life if I wanted to.
My baby, Brendan, was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t sleep at all the first night after his birth, just lying there staring at him, promising him I would do everything I possibly could to give him a decent life and that I would make sure he didn’t have to endure the sort of upbringing I’d been given. I convinced myself that just because Mum had left us and Dad had abused me and put me on the streets didn’t necessarily mean I was doomed to repeat all their mistakes. I told myself that by having such a wonderful baby to look after I would be one of the damaged children who managed to escape from their past. I had imagined that Dad was the only problem, not realising there would be other people and emotions lying in wait to ambush me.
In the euphoria of the first few hours with my baby I thought my problems were behind me–but they weren’t. I was eighteen years old but inside the tense, feisty teenager I had become I was still a sad, desperate child. Despite the aggressive, cheeky face I showed to the outside world, I was feeling as lost and alone in the world as I had when my father first raped me and then laughed at my pain, terrified now that the shadows of my past would catch up with me again, dragging me back into his world of scams, populated as it always was by hookers, addicts and drunks.
When I was a little girl, if anyone had asked what I wanted to do with my life I would have told them, ‘I want to get married and have four children’. I guess that was because Mum and Dad had had four of us and I wanted to make up for all the mistakes they had made, do everything completely differently to the way they had. Perhaps I was hoping to get a childhood for myself through my own children. As I hadn’t been able to do all those great parent/child things when I was the child, at least I would be able to do them as a mum.
But the reality was that after Brendan’s birth I was lonely and broke, and insecure about my parenting skills. I didn’t even seem to be able to make enough money to keep my new baby warm and safe without having to resort to shoplifting. I can still remember the sick feeling of guilt I experienced when I was caught stealing some bedding from a department store in Norwich. I had Brendan with me at the time and when they took me up to the police station I dissolved into helpless sobbing and hysteria because I thought they were going to take him away from me.
I was never a good shoplifter, although I was a lot better than my brother Terry in the days when we were both small and Dad used to send us out every day to steal his whisky or some food for our supper. Whereas Dad seemed to see nothing wrong in stealing at all, as though it was just a fact of life that we had to get used to, I always felt guilty and tried to wriggle out of it. I stole an eyeliner pencil for myself once and felt so bad about it I took it back the next day. I was even more scared of being caught returning it than I had been when I originally slid it into my pocket.
The fact that I was having to turn to shoplifting again in order to provide for my baby made me feel like even more of a failure, as though I was fulfilling all Dad’s worst predictions about how my future would be without him. However much I hated the way things were going, however, I also couldn’t see any way I would ever be able to turn my life round and make everything decent. Once you have become part of that world of thieving and drinking and prostitution, especially when it is all you have ever known or had experience of, it is very hard to break out.
Although I was physically safe in my tiny flat, and was no longer being forced to climb into cars with strange men, inside I still felt like the same little girl whose father had decided on the day of