Then, when I was about eleven, something happened: I stopped being able to walk.
It was so sudden: one day I was able to walk like anyone else, the next my legs just wouldn’t do anything. Mum took me to hospital straightaway: my temperature had started to soar and I was running a fever. As the doctors examined me I drifted in and out of a coma.
I stayed in the hospital for nearly four weeks. My weight dropped alarmingly – I lost a few stones in a very short time and looked like a skeleton: it took a lot of work by the nurses and doctors to get it back up again. And they had to teach me to walk again, just as if I was a baby. I had to practise on crutches, then with just one while my free hand grabbed on to whatever I could find.
It was a long slow process to recovery. And still no one put two and two together to work out what had caused the problem. Even when my dad came to see me and – from what Mum has told me since – I would visibly flinch the moment he walked in the room; even then not a single person put two and two together – much less got it to add up to four. Looking back, I want to shout at all the doctors and nurses: ‘Look – can’t you see? That little girl is being abused! It’s her dad that’s doing it. That’s why she can’t walk and has lost weight and doesn’t say anything to anyone.’ But that’s the thing about hindsight: you’ve got 20/20 vision.
And so they sent me home. Back to Mum and Dad; back to everything at home.
Did Dad stop for a while? I don’t know. It’s one of the bits my mind has blocked out. I do know he had his own lovely way of welcoming me home: as I staggered around, still unsteady on my feet and terrified I was going to fall, my wonderful Dad would kick out at my legs trying to knock me over. And just to make me feel really special he’d call me a little bastard. Again.
Mum finally left Dad when I was 11.
I’d just started secondary school – St Leonard’s in Gateshead – when she took the three of us kids, packed us into the car and off we went. It was an escape for all of us; we were getting away from a violent, bad man. But only I knew how much we really were running away from.
Mum had an uncle who lived in Scotland. Troon is nearly 200 miles from Gateshead, tucked away on the Scotland’s west coast, just above Glasgow. Mum’s uncle was a good, kind man with a lovely house on the beach very close to the famous Royal Troon Golf Course. He had his own factory business and wasn’t short of a bob or two. He either owned or bred racehorses, I can’t quite remember which, and every weekend it seemed we’d be taken to the races to watch his horses run. Sometimes he’d give us money to bet on them.
I loved those horses. There was even a little foal which I helped to break in: it felt wonderful to be with such a beautiful, gentle creature. And I loved the walks we went for on the beach – me, Mum, my brother and sister, as well as Mum’s uncle and some of his kids. Most of them were around my age and for the first time I found I could talk with other children and just be … well, I suppose I was just able to be a child, without the awful burden of adult sexuality my dad had forced on me. It was the first time I can remember feeling happy.
We stayed in Troon for several months, but then Mum decided to give it another go with Dad and off we trooped back down to Gateshead. I dreaded going back but even I couldn’t have known how bad for all of us that decision would turn out to be.
Dad had opened new businesses while we’d been away: more ducking and diving, more bad debts and more broken promises, but he’d also taken up with another woman, someone he’d met in the local Chinese takeaway. I don’t think we even stayed one night with him.
Instead, we went to live with Mum’s mum, four miles across town. My Nana had always been a canny woman – sensible and sound, she had seen through Dad the very first moment she met him. And then, of course, she’d had to watch her daughter getting beaten and bruised by him: it’s no exaggeration to say that Nana hated Dad.
I suppose I can’t have been an easy child in those days: certainly, I never really felt happy or safe. Mum tells me that I was headstrong, wilful and difficult, and I can believe that. I don’t think I felt the same as my brother and sister – but then I wasn’t: Dad had turned me into someone very different from them.
We found somewhere else to live while Dad carried on with his new girlfriend, but there was tension and bitterness in the air and I don’t suppose I helped much. In the end Mum decided she couldn’t cope with me and I was sent to the last place on earth I should have been living: Dad’s flat.
It was bad enough being sent away from Mum and my brother and sister: once again I felt like an outsider, somehow marked out by the dirty little secret of what Dad was doing to me. But living under the same roof with him and his new family was a nightmare from the very beginning.
His girlfriend – my new step-mum – was a rough, hard woman with two little children under five years old. I loved those little bairns – but God, I felt sorry for them. My dad was even more violent with his new lady-love than he had been with Mum. And he wasn’t fussed about what they saw. Every week, without fail, he would beat up my step-mum. It didn’t matter what she had or hadn’t done, he’d knock her about something wicked. I once saw him with my own eyes put her head through a window; another time he stabbed her with a little fork in front of all of us.
The kids were terrified. They used to cling to me and cry. ‘Don’t let Daddy kill us tonight. Please, Sarah, please.’ And I’d hold them and try and soothe them, and keep them beside me till they fell asleep.
But I didn’t get to sleep those nights. Not as easily as that, anyway. Dad would beat my step-mum with his fists and then send her to bed. And then he’d come for me.
I was old enough by then to know that this wasn’t just ‘our little secret’ and in truth Dad had stopped even trying to pretend that the abuse was in any way normal or ‘loving’ – maybe leaving Mum had in some way freed him up from the fear of being found out. Maybe that’s why he didn’t seem to care whether my step-mum guessed or even knew. Maybe, too, the fact that I had been sent to live with him – put completely under his control – made him much bolder and more confident about satisfying his twisted desires any which way he chose. Oh, I was old enough to know alright, and believe me, I put up a fight the best way I could. But it didn’t make a scrap of difference.
There’s no easy way to say this because there was no easy way for an 11-year-old girl to describe what Dad did. He raped me. On the sofa, in my bed, sometimes with the aid of a sharp knife he’d taken from the kitchen drawer, he forced himself into me, whether I struggled or not. That man raped me. And I was 11.
Some people ask why I never told anyone about what Dad did to me. But those people don’t know what it’s like to be a small child abused by a big powerful man. And that power isn’t just physical: Dad – like most abusers – used emotional and psychological threats to keep me quiet. He’d tell me that no one would believe me or that everyone would hate me or – worst of all – that I’d never see Mum, my brother and sister, or my step-mum’s kids again. On top of that, he threatened to do more than cut me with that kitchen knife: he would wave it in front of me and warn me that if I told a soul he would come and get me and I’d never be seen again.
Did I believe him? You bet I did.
So that was my life as I approached my teenage years: trapped