I Just Wanted to Be Loved: A boy eager to please. The man who destroyed his childhood. The love that overcame it.. Stuart Howarth
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just sent back into society without any doctor's appointments or psychiatrists to advise me or help me stay sane and grounded. I'd been thoroughly assessed before the murder trial, but after that there was no more help. If anything I was more damaged after prison than when I went in.
I had a probation officer, who by bizarre coincidence had been the magistrate who gave my stepdad permission to adopt me when I was five years old. We both remembered her asking me at the time if I liked my new daddy, and I said, ‘I don't like it when he hits me and hurts me.’ All the adults in the room thought I was joking. No one took me seriously, and the adoption was approved. I always felt weird about seeing her because of that, but in fact our once-weekly meetings were just a formality. I'd turn up at her office and say ‘Hi’; she'd ask how I was and I'd say ‘Fine’. She would ask me how I was coping and if I had any problems but I didn't feel I could tell her the truth: ‘Yes, I'm having flashbacks and nightmares and I'm not coping at all.’
Dad peeing into my mouth.
Dad forcing me to eat pig swill.
Dad ramming my face into my dinner and saying, ‘You're a naughty little bastard, aren't you?’
I was terrified they might decide to lock me up in a mental institution if they knew what was really going on in my head. Mental illness runs in my real dad's family. I was scared that I'd end up in a psychiatric ward somewhere, pumped full of pills and rocking back and forwards all day. Given my record of killing a man, I might never get out again.
I occasionally saw Neil Fox, the counsellor I'd had sessions with in prison, but it was difficult to arrange appointments because he was always so busy. I never blamed him for this in any way; he had his own life to get on with. What I really needed was a regular therapist on the outside with whom I could discuss all the pressure I felt under, the fears and the depressions that were weighing me down. I needed someone to say, ‘What your stepfather did to you was wrong,’ and to help me find a way through all the conflicting emotions that were chewing me up inside.
The one thing that no one understood was that I missed my stepdad. I loved that guy so much as a child and, while I didn't like him hurting me, I never really understood that what he was doing to me was wrong. When I visited his house that night in August 2000, I was still yearning for him to love me back. Once he was dead, it was like a massive chasm that could never be filled. I ached for a man's love, a guiding figure in my life, someone who would give me a push when I needed it, or offer a shoulder to cry on. I missed him – and it was my fault he was dead.
I knew I needed help but I didn't know how to get it. I didn't think I could just go to my GP and say, ‘I can't cope.’ That would have felt as though I was a real failure, and I wasn't sure what he could do anyway. No, I decided; I would just have to find a way through this on my own, with Tracey by my side.
It wasn't only the after-effects of having killed someone, and the experiences I'd had in jail. Lots of other things were preying on my mind as well. There were two court cases pending that would drag all sorts of memories to the surface again. One was the trial of an old friend of my stepdad's who used to babysit for us when we were kids. While I was in prison, Christina had gone to the police to complain about him and he had been arrested and charged with several counts of rape and buggery. Christina and I were both due to testify against him.
The other case looming on the horizon was the one against the prison service for all the abuses that had taken place while I was inside. There were the ridiculous number of strip searches, often carried out without so much as a nod to the rules that you should be allowed to protect your dignity by keeping an item of clothing on. There were the unbelievably cruel comments made by one guard in particular, who never missed a chance to taunt me, saying, for example, that I'd probably enjoyed it when my dad was raping me. There was also the fact that they often prevented me from getting to my therapy sessions on time and sometimes made me miss them altogether: ‘We run the jail, Howarth, not you.’ And then there was the fact that I was put in cells near the sex offenders' wing, which drove me completely mental given my background.
Originally I'd been suing the Home Office and the United Kingdom Detention Service but that proved too complicated so we'd switched just to focus on Strangeways. The case was moving slowly and I'd no idea when I'd have to go to court, but until it was over I couldn't leave my prison sentence behind me. Every day there seemed to be some new information required by my solicitors or a guard's statement landing on the door mat, which I would have to read and check carefully. It took me right back into the prison, reliving every minute. As I pored over the paperwork, I could still smell the stale stench of the cells and hear the clamour of echoing voices in the stairwells.
My mum was doing her best to welcome me back home, but there were times when she could be very insensitive to what I'd been through. A couple of days after I got back I found out that Clare, who lived in the pub with us, was sleeping with a picture of my stepfather (who was her real dad) by her bed. Clare had severe learning difficulties, so I didn't blame her. I knew she had been to his funeral while I was in jail and I was annoyed that she was being fed this view that he was a normal, straight-up guy. She couldn't remember the time he deliberately dropped her down the stairs when she was six months old; she didn't know that he used to threaten to kill her when we were all out at school. She was still just a toddler when her dad went to jail for abusing her big sisters, so she never saw at first hand what he was really like. The fact that she was now sleeping with a picture of him destroyed me and I had words with Mum about it.
‘She's got a right to know her own father,’ Mum argued back.
‘Well, she's got a right to know what a sick, evil bastard he was in that case,’ I yelled. ‘I'm not having her turning him into a saint. That's not right.’
But Mum insisted I wasn't to say anything that would disillusion Clare about her biological father, and in my precarious state that didn't go down too well. I was still annoyed with Mum about her testimony in my court case. She had argued that I should be locked up in a mental institution, and if that had happened I would never have got out. It's just as well the judge hadn't listened to her.
I was also upset about my own children, Matthew and Rebecca, who were now aged twelve and nine respectively. A couple of days after I got out of prison I'd driven over to see them, only to find out that their mother, my ex-wife Angela, had moved house. My first paranoid thought was that she had fled with the children so I wouldn't be able to find them. However, I called my mum at the pub and she gave me the address that Angela had left with her, and I drove over to the new place, feeling like a bag of nerves. I was sweating and my heart was pounding so hard it was like having a rock band in my chest.
When Angela opened the front door I had tears in my eyes and she seemed shocked to see me like that.
‘How are you?’ she asked gently.
‘I'm OK,’ I sniffed, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘How are the kids?’
‘They're fine. Just fine. I took Matthew to see a counsellor a couple of times because he was so upset about you being in jail. I had to tell them the truth about what happened because other kids at school knew and it would have come out anyway.’
‘Yeah, of course.’ I'd guessed they probably knew. ‘But they're OK now? Do you think I could see them? Would that be all right with you?’
‘Sure, I'll just get them.’ She turned and shouted: ‘Matt! Becky! Can you come here a minute.’
Matthew appeared first and I was stunned to see how much he'd grown in just fourteen months. He was a couple of inches taller and looked more mature altogether. Then a waft of blonde hair came down the hall and my daughter said ‘Hiya!’, her face so like my own that it was like looking in a mirror. I had a massive ache in my chest.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘We're all right,’ Matthew answered on behalf of them both.
‘How's school?’
‘It's all right.’
I was desperate to take them in my arms and hug them but they were so pure and