But the dogs were always there. Between them and the men – and the drugs they fed me day in, day out till I didn’t know which way was up and I’d reached that terrible place where I needed them as much as I hated them – there wasn’t a hope, really.
They knew that, of course. They’d worked hard to get me like that: to get me hooked on crack cocaine. That, and scaring me beyond belief by blowing a young girl’s brains out in front of my face.
I staggered through those days, weeks and months, each day the same: men and drugs, more drugs and more men. My life was ebbing away as slowly as the water in the dirty brown canal which oozed towards the North Sea. How many men paid their 150 guilders for a few minutes of rough and selfish relief? I couldn’t tell you: by the time I might have thought to keep count, I wouldn’t have been able to.
How many rocks of crack, how many lines of coke or joints of strong, calming marijuana did I consume? I couldn’t have tallied them up. Someone did, of course: nothing comes for free in Amsterdam, not in the Red Light District at any rate. And I paid the bill – the bill for the drugs that dulled my brain while I sold my body in the shabby neon-lit window by the canal – by selling myself again. A vicious cycle played out ten, fifteen times a day, seven days a week.
No, there wasn’t any escape from that hell. Not until that day when through the haze of my addiction and desperation I saw half a slim chance and somehow found the courage to snatch at it. Not until that day when my legs carried me away while my mind screamed with fear. Not until – for almost the first time in my life – someone came to my aid and stood beside me, not because they wanted something but out of common humanity.
That was the start of my journey out of hell: that first act of unselfish kindness. But if I’d known then how long the journey would be and how hard the road, would I have had the strength to start along it?
I honestly don’t know.
I was born on Monday, 26 January 1976, at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead.
‘Monday’s child is fair of face,’ runs the old rhyme and I’ve been lucky enough to inherit my looks from my mother. She was – and still is – a petite woman with a good head of dark curly hair and wide brown eyes that sparkle with gentleness and with love. She’s in her fifties now but looks so young that she could be taken for an elder sister.
My father’s looks, though, are a very different story. Like I say, I’ve been lucky.
I was the second child in the family. My big brother was 18 months older than me, and my little sister was seven years younger. We all lived together in a little house in the sort of terraced streets they use today to film TV dramas set around the time of the First World War.
Gateshead back in 1976 was a scruffy, down-at-heel sort of town, clinging to the south bank of the Tyne and rather overshadowed by its big brother, Newcastle, on the other side of the river. When I was a child I looked up the history of the town in a book. People have lived here since Roman times and Gateshead is thought to mean ‘Head of the (Roman) road’.
But the town’s subsequent history isn’t particularly inspiring: a few semi-famous soccer stars were born here as well as the odd Victorian industrialist, and a woman who went on to become a Hollywood porn actress. Two famous people definitely passed through, though, and then passed on their impressions. In the 18th century Dr Johnson described it as ‘a dirty little back lane out of Newcastle’. Nearly 200 years later, JB Priestley pronounced that ‘no true civilisation could have produced such a town’, adding, for good measure, that it appeared to have been designed ‘by an enemy of the human race’.
I’ve lived in and around Gateshead most of my life. Nothing much has changed since and probably never will.
My dad was a bit of a local entrepreneur. He used to own two freezer shops and a restaurant, but I also have memories of him being a sales rep, travelling all over the north-east. But I’ve no idea what he sold and as it turned out I wasn’t ever going to ask too many questions about him. Mum was a housewife most of the time, looking after us bairns, but sometimes she worked night shifts at a local factory. Dad used to gather up us kids and pack us into the car in the middle of the night to go and pick her up.
Financially, we were pretty well off. Unlike a lot of folk in the town, Dad always made sure that we owned our own homes, never rented. We lived in nice neighbourhoods, always had plenty of food and I never went short of toys or clothes. In Gateshead that pretty much made us middle-class.
As children we were all really close – and absolutely devoted to Mum. I was particularly close to her – partly, I suppose, because I was her first daughter and there’s always something special in the relationship between a mother and her first little girl. I loved being so close to Mum – and loved, too, that I got to play Big Sister to both my siblings, even though my brother was actually older than me.
On the outside, then, we must have looked like a wonderful little family. Three lively and cheerful children, a pretty and loving mum and a father who worked all hours to make sure that we wanted for nothing.
But behind the front door we weren’t playing nice happy families.
Behind the façade of a good middle-class father, Dad was a violent, bad man – especially when he’d been on the drink. He used to batter Mum with his fists, throw things at her, cut her even. Once he hurled a milk bottle at her – one of the old-fashioned glass ones that everyone in our street had delivered every morning: it cut her face so badly that she needed to go to the hospital to have stitches put in. Dad insisted on driving her there – even though he was blind drunk – and so us kids were packed inside the car in the middle of the night once again and taken along for the ride. We were terrified and screaming as the car weaved through the streets of Gateshead: Dad was too far gone even to hear us. When our noise finally penetrated his stupor his reaction was typical.
‘Bloody shut up, will you. Shut up or I’ll come back there and shut you up myself.’
We shut up. We’d seen enough of my Dad’s violence to know that he would be perfectly happy to stop the car in the middle of the street and carry out his threat.
As I grew up, I saw more and more what my dad was really like behind the mask of a successful local businessman. And the truth is that he was a bastard. The money that kept rolling in, for example, wasn’t always exactly ours. Dad constantly ripped people off and throughout my childhood men would turn up at the door – big men, frightening men oftentimes – looking for my dad and demanding money they said he owed them. Us kids were trained to fob them off: ‘Oh – me dad’s abroad at the minute. No, no idea when he’s due back. Me mam might know, but she’s just popped out.’ And off they’d go – sometimes grumbling, often threatening, into the night. Until the next time.
It wasn’t an easy way to grow up, and there were times as children – many times – when we were frightened to go to sleep in case someone came knocking at the door, determined to get inside and somehow collect the money they were owed. But it did have one positive effect: the three of us were very close to each other – united, I suppose, against a common enemy. And as we grew up, our bond with Mum became stronger than ever: she bore the brunt of most of Dad’s violence, and had to deal on a day-to-day basis with the results of his conning and cheating. Gateshead isn’t that big a town, and the gossipmongers didn’t hold their tongues: it must have been hell for her to step outside the front door, knowing what people were saying about ‘Those bloody Forsyths’ behind her back.
Yes, all in all, Dad was a bit of a chancer, always ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving, leaving Mum to clean up the mess after him.
And he could be utterly callous: