And yes, he was a violent man too, always ready with his fists and quite willing to hurt the very people he was supposed to love.
But all of that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by a long chalk. I suppose if it had just been the money and the violence and the constant sense of living on the edge of a volcano – ready to erupt and smother us kids with burning fire at any moment – I wouldn’t hate him the way I do. Because I do hate my dad; and I fear him to this very day. My dad wasn’t just a thief and a bully: he was a paedophile, too.
From when I was three years old my dad sexually abused me. He made me do things with him – disgusting things that gave him pleasure, I suppose, but hurt me terribly – for all of my childhood. Sometimes it would happen in bed – he’d come to my bed or even make me please him in the bed he shared with Mum. Other times it would be in the bath: Dad often volunteered to give me my nightly bath – ‘just to give your mum a break,’ he would say. Oh, he was such a thoughtful man, my dad.
I can’t remember exactly how or when it started – what three-year-old could? But I can remember clearly the terrible feeling of fear – a fear that pressed down on my chest and tummy, squeezing the breath out of me, making me feel dizzy and sick – when I knew Dad was about to start touching me again.
‘Our little secret’, he called it. Something that special little girls did with their daddy because they loved him. Even today I can barely bring myself to write that terrible sentence. What an awful, perverted thing to tell a child about love; what a horrible, selfish way to twist something so beautiful into something ugly and brutal.
How many nights did I lie in bed, hearing him climb the stairs and knowing that he was coming for me? How many times did I slide down under the bedclothes, pretending to myself that my bed was a castle with big strong walls to keep out evil, and trying to control the fear rising in me? How tightly did I close my eyes and lie still, pretending I was asleep, too terrified even to breathe? It never made any difference, of course: if Dad wanted me he wasn’t going to let me sleep. And so I would feel his weight press down on the side of the bed, hear his breathing and smell the booze and fags on his breath as he leaned over me. And then his hands would slide under the blanket, invading the safety of my imaginary castle, and I would feel big, rough adult fingers in places where a child should never feel them.
As I grew older, Dad increased the abuse to match – or so I presume he thought – my development. From him touching me it changed to me having to touch him; then from touching to rubbing and the inevitable messy result. And all the time, it was our little secret: something so special that no one else would ever understand, so best not to tell them.
When did I know it was wrong? When did it dawn on me that this wasn’t what daddies and their little girls did – not normal daddies and daughters, anyway? I suppose it was when he put it in my mouth. Certainly by the time he forced it into me I knew. Oh, I knew then, alright – knew that it was just another way that my darling Dad was happy to hurt me. And it wasn’t just fingers and his penis that he forced into me. He used to push knives or scissors inside too. Sometimes they cut me and I bled. But of course no one could see the scars because they were on the inside.
But the thing about scar tissue is that it grows and grows, surrounding the damage with a protective layer of calloused skin. And just as the scabs formed over my physical injuries, so I developed a way of dealing with the mental pain of the abuse.
From being a loving and carefree child, Big Sister to my siblings and close, oh so close, to my mum, I became troublesome and difficult to live with. I would throw wild and frightening tantrums, daring anyone to come near me and defying all attempts to calm me down. I screamed, I shouted and when those fires of anger died down I retreated into my own little world of silence and sulking.
Did Mum realise what caused these sudden and violent changes? I always thought she must have and once I found a letter Dad had started writing to her, saying how sorry he was for doing all that to me. But she says now she never knew and she was as terrified of him as I was. I can believe that – I saw the result of his brutality on her face too many times to doubt it.
But those scars my dad inflicted weren’t just physical ones like the bruises that covered her body. Nor were they just the dreadful mental wounds of growing up as an adult’s sex toy. The worst part of the abuse – and the thing I can never forgive him for – is the way it shattered our family. Forever.
All sexual abuse causes deep and long-lasting damage to a child, but there’s something uniquely terrible about being hurt by someone who is meant to look after and love you – and it has a viciously corrosive effect on every other relationship. I’ve met hundreds of women who were molested by their fathers and each tells the same story of ending up blaming their mothers for failing to protect them. I’ve told Mum I believe her when she says that she never knew that Dad was abusing me, and I’ve reassured her that really it’s all in the past and long gone. But, in truth, what Dad did drove us apart for most of my life.
And why did he pick on me? He never touched my little sister and although he beat my brother – sometimes quite badly – he didn’t sexually abuse him either. What was it about me that made him do it? I always wanted to know – and one day Dad told me … in his own charming way, of course.
‘You’re not my daughter,’ he shouted at me. ‘You’re someone else’s – a little bastard.’ From that day on it’s the reason he gave for sexually abusing me, for hitting me, kicking me, for everything he inflicted on me.
Was it true? I don’t know, and I don’t think I ever will. Mum swears blind that it’s nonsense, that all three of us were his kids. But even if it were true, it still wouldn’t be a reason to do that to a little girl. There’s no excuse ever in this world for sexually abusing a child – whether it’s your own or someone else’s. Sex is for adults, not children.
I’ve learned a lot about what being abused does to kids. Some of it has been learned the hard way, the rest I’ve found out for myself from books or talking to people who understand it. One of the things that often happens is that the mind tries to block out as much of the hurt as it can. Maybe that’s why I can only remember some of the things Dad did. Maybe it’s also why no one seemed to see what was going on.
Then again it all started happening in the 1980s. Child sexual abuse wasn’t talked about much back then – not until the Cleveland child abuse controversy all kicked off in Middlesbrough in 1987. Two doctors – paediatricians – caused a storm of protest across the country when they diagnosed sexual abuse in 131 children in just three months. The media went mad and politicians climbed all over the north-east. Newspapers and television talked about how kids had been ripped away from innocent parents and blamed social workers as well as the doctors. They even started to suggest that it wasn’t safe for parents to cuddle their children, or for men to give their sons and daughters the nightly bath. ‘The Social’ might come and take your kids away if they found out.
The doctors and the social workers said that was rubbish and there had been real evidence of abuse. But their voices didn’t really come across much: everyone just talked about innocent parents.
Cleveland is less than 40 miles south of Gateshead. I was just eleven when the whole thing kicked off and of course I didn’t know a thing about what was going on. But Dad had been abusing me for many years by then and I certainly did know what it felt like to be a small girl sexually assaulted by a big man. I could never work out why other people couldn’t see how much he was hurting me. I thought the teachers at my school must see something and would come to our house and tell Dad to stop it. But they never did. Maybe it was because of the row over Cleveland just a few miles away; maybe the teachers and social workers were scared that they’d get all the hostility and the hate mail that the doctors in Cleveland were getting. Whatever the reason, no one ever said anything and I had to go on being Dad’s little sex slave.
I was a quiet, lonely child at junior school. Mum tells