Jeremy Spencer worked with Dad on Life with Grandpa as the artist. He lived in the small, detached room in the courtyard that was built for the maid. On our dates he would play a tape of saxophone music. The routine was by now familiar – undress, pray, kiss and then give him a hand job. Jeremy would try to masturbate me but it just ended up feeling raw and hurting. I would move position so that he would rub a different spot, but I never understood why he – and the other men – kept on rubbing and rubbing. If I said I did not enjoy it they would accuse me of being prudish or proud. I just pretended to have an orgasm to get them to stop.
Because we were supposed to ‘be loving and share’, my protests were seen as rebellion which was the spirit of the Devil. Eman Artist worked directly with Mo he was treated as special and had the pick of any woman or girl he wanted. He was a short man, overweight, wore glasses, and had already lost most of his hair even though he was only in his early thirties. I had just started to develop breasts and they were tender. Eman liked to come up behind me and feel me up, or wrap his arms around my chest and squeeze me tight. It felt like he was suffocating me.
‘You’re hurting me,’ I would say, as I pushed him away.
‘You’re just little Miss Queeny, aren’t you?’ he’d snap back. ‘So proud, Queeny,’ he would mock, emphasizing the word ‘Queeny’. I hated that name.
I managed to avoid him for a while, but then the dreaded evening came when he asked me to come to his room for a date. I could not bear the thought of being alone with him. In desperation, I went to my teacher, Sally, and said I could not do it.
‘He’s horrible, pushy and disgusting,’ I told her.
‘Sweetie, sometimes it can be difficult to share but God gives us the strength to do it. Why don’t we pray together?’
She laid her hand on my shoulder.
I listened dejectedly to her prayer, feeling betrayed and helpless. If she was not going to stop it then no one would. She handed me her tape recorder and suggested I play some music and do a dance for the loathsome man. She even escorted me to Eman Artist’s room. I hated her. I hated the fact that I was being forced to suck the dick of a perverted, fat man who persisted on pushing himself on me when he knew I hated it. The worst part was the way he gloated. He had power over me and there was nothing I could do about it.
He smirked as he exposed himself. ‘Suck me off,’ he ordered. Forcefully he pushed my face down on to his penis until I gagged. But although he puffed and groaned, nothing happened. So he asked me to dance for him, directing me to wiggle and rub my bottom in a suggestive way, as he tried to get it on himself. He failed to climax and his impotence made him agitated and more demanding. After what seemed like hours, I stumbled out of his room and cried myself to sleep on my own bed. The assault was over, but the nightmare continued to haunt me for years.
I never thought of telling Dad how I felt about the incident, especially after one evening when I walked in on him lying on the bed half-dressed with Armi. Upset and dreadfully embarrassed, I left the room quickly. The thought of my dad having a date with my best friend deeply disturbed me. He did it too, just like all of them. Of course he wouldn’t rescue me. We never talked about any of my sexual experiences, nor did he ask me. In fact, I rarely saw him. He was completely stripped of all his parental responsibilities – he was my father in name only. I spent most of my time with Michael and Patience, who acted as my foster parents.
But to Michael, I was more than a daughter. Like all the girls, I walked around in little panties during the day. After a game of badminton with him, he came up to me and flicked my panties playfully.
‘You’ve been a good girl recently. As a reward we should have a date,’ he said.
I gave a weak smile, but inside I was screaming, Why? What sort of a reward is that? Your penis down my throat is no reward for me. That was the last thing I wanted. I finally reached my boiling point. I was tired of anything do to with sex. I was fed up of what seemed to be a never-ending hell. I decided to risk it – I figured I had nothing to lose – and I went to Paul Peloquin. ‘I don’t want to have dates anymore. It’s not fun, I’m sick of it,’ I said.
His face turned bright red. ‘That is the spirit of rebellion speaking in you,’ he shouted. ‘Go to my room and wait there.’
My stomach churned. I was in trouble. When he entered the room an hour later, Paul told me he had a letter to read me, called ‘The Girl Who Wouldn’t’. It was a stern Letter of Correction from Mo to a woman who had refused to have lesbian sex with Keda, one of his leaders.
Afterwards, Paul applied what the letter said to me. ‘You know that’s your problem. So full of pride and self-righteousness, thinking you know better than everyone else. Do you think you know better than God?’ He fumed. ‘It’s the woman’s place to yield to the man and given them what they need. It’s not about you. You’d better be willing to sacrifice and show a little more love, damn it. You’re yielding to the Devil, you know? Rebellion is witchcraft.’
I had to write a Letter of Confession and repentance, but inside I hated Paul. I hated being forced to have sex, with no way to escape from it. I started to have violent thoughts about him and wished he would die. I felt I was going crazy with so many bottled up feelings that I couldn’t express. Sometimes I would go outside in the early evening just to be alone for a few moments and daydream. One evening after a game of badminton, as the sun was setting I heard haunting music from over the high wall. I lingered and as moths fluttered, attracted by the lamplight that illuminated the court, I listened to the words.
‘Flashback warm nights…suitcases of memories…time after time…’
I was mesmerized. All our songs had to be inspirational, about witnessing, Jesus, the Bible – the words of this song captivated me. They were poignant and filled my head with dreams of love and romance and pain.
‘You’re calling to me…I can’t hear what you’ve said…’
I wanted to cry with the pain that the song drew out of me.
‘If you’re lost you can look and you will find me…time after time…’
I felt as if all my dreams and hopes and aspirations for the future were in the words of the song – and a sense of loss, of being lost in a world I longed to find my way out of.
‘If you fall I will catch you…I’ll be waiting…time after time… ’
Night after night, I would wait outside in the dusk for that record to be played again. Whoever was playing it could have had no idea that, just the other side of the wall, I was listening and dreaming. Restricted behind four walls, with few changes of scene, us kids came up with ways to entertain ourselves and have fun. Armi and I taught ourselves to do the splits, cartwheels and backflips. We even put together a half-hour circus show with the boys that we proudly performed for the Home.
Through the good times and the bad, Armi and I were inseparable; she was my best friend and my closest confidante, so when I found out that she was leaving for Teen Training at the King’s House – Grandpa’s Home – I was devastated. It was the greatest privilege and honour to be invited to his house, and I wondered what I had done wrong that I had not been considered worthy enough to go too. I had no idea at that time that teen training at the King’s House would be no honour, but purgatory.
‘We’re going through some changes of personnel,’ Marianne told me, after summoning me to her room. ‘And it seems it would be best if you joined Serena. There won’t be anyone your age here.’ Michael and Patience and the boys were also leaving for another commune in Manila.
‘What about my dad?’ I asked.
‘He’s needed to write Life with Grandpa here,’ she said, not even trying to soften the blow when she saw my crumpled face.
I burst into tears. My dad and my