I Remember, Daddy: The harrowing true story of a daughter haunted by memories too terrible to forget. Katie Matthews

– there were two nurses. The smaller one of the two was on tiptoes, looking out through the window, while the other one stood at right-angles to her, glancing back down the corridor in my direction.

      As soon as the second nurse saw me standing nervously in the doorway of the day room, she scurried towards me.

      ‘Go back, Katie,’ she said, looking directly into my face and nodding a couple of times, as if to encourage me to do what she was asking. ‘Go back in the day room. Please. It’s just for a moment.’

      There was an urgency in her voice that made the muscles of my stomach contract, and I stepped quickly back into the room. The nurse closed the door behind me and I stood for a moment, my whole body shaking violently, and tried to breathe. Then I turned to look through the little window in the door. But all I could see were the neat brown curls at the back of the nurse’s head. So, instead of looking, I listened, one ear pressed against the wired glass.

      I could hear the subdued murmur of a woman’s voice, which was interrupted periodically by a man saying something loud and angry. For a few seconds, everything was quiet, and then a different man spoke in a slow, authoritative voice. The first man shouted, a door slammed and then there was silence.

      My heart was racing and, as I took a step away from the day-room door, I could see the damp imprint of my hand where it had been pressed against the glass of the window. At that moment, the nurse turned and smiled at me and then she opened the door.

      ‘Well done, love,’ she said. ‘You can pop out now.’

      ‘Who was it?’ I whispered. ‘Who was the man who was shouting?’ But I already knew the answer.

      ‘It was your father,’ the nurse said. She smiled a quick, apologetic smile.

      Usually, the staff avoided any kind of physical contact with the patients, except when they had to restrain someone who had become violent and was threatening to hurt themselves or someone else. For some reason, though, the nurse touched my arm lightly as she added, ‘My word! Now there’s a man who knows what he wants and intends to get it.’

      I pressed my hands against my stomach, trying to stop the sick feeling rising up into my throat, and then I asked, in a barely audible voice, ‘And what did he want?’

      ‘Oh, he wanted to see you. In fact, he demanded to see you. Apparently, he’s on the hospital board.’ Her laugh was scornful.

      My father told me the same thing himself some years later, which is when I found out that it wasn’t true. He wasn’t on the board of hospital directors, as he claimed to the nurses that day, although I’ve no doubt he knew people who were. But twisting the truth – and telling outright lies – to get what he wanted was something he often did, and he must have been furious when his self-assured, bullying arrogance hadn’t had its usual effect and he’d been thwarted in his attempt to see me.

      The other man’s voice I’d heard during the fracas with my father turned out to have been that of Dr Hendriks.

      ‘How dare you try to prevent me from visiting my daughter,’ my father had bellowed at him. ‘I demand to see her immediately.’

      ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, and I must ask you to leave – now,’ Dr Hendriks had answered. He always spoke in calm, measured tones, which I found reassuring, but they must have driven my father into a frenzy of fury – particularly in view of the fact that Dr Hendriks was someone my father would have referred to as ‘a bloody foreigner’.

      I couldn’t begin to imagine how enraged my father must have been at being refused access to me, not to mention at being spoken to as if he was ‘just anybody’. He’d have heard on the grapevine that I was remembering things about my childhood, and he must have been anxious to find out what I was saying. I expect he wasn’t too worried, though, because, after all, who was going to believe the word of a crazy woman who’d been committed to a psychiatric hospital against that of a successful businessman, friend to the rich and famous, and well-known pillar of society? My breakdown must have seemed like a godsend to him.

      After my father had stomped out of the hospital in a rage that day, a nurse handed me the huge, stupid bouquet of flowers he’d left for me. I rammed them into the bin, heads first, snapping their stems and scattering their petals on the floor around me.

      I’d always been frightened of my father. Just thinking about him made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach start to churn painfully. But, for a moment, that fear had been replaced by hatred, and I felt a deep, childish satisfaction at the thought that, for once, he hadn’t got his own way. I was grateful to the nurses and to Dr Hendriks for standing up to him in a way I’d never seen anyone do before, and for making me feel, briefly, safer.