Slave Girl. Sarah Forsyth

why on earth it took such reserves of confidence. I wasn’t ugly – I had a nice slim figure, curly brown hair and I knew men found me attractive. But I wasn’t really interested in sex: it hadn’t done me much good in my life and I didn’t want to get hurt again.

      And anyway, I didn’t think of myself as attractive. I felt small and powerless; plain and uninteresting. Why – apart from the chance to have his way with me – would a bloke want to go out with me? And so it was a slow and cautious process of dipping my toe back in the water. I was still living with Mum at the time and so it was perhaps inevitable that I met someone else through her.

      Chris – once again I’ve not used his real name here – was another of Mum’s boyfriend’s mates. The two of them were members of the same golf club and he came across as a real gentleman. He was seven years older than me and much more settled. I told him about the way my life had been – what Dad did, the abuse in Care, even the abortion – and he listened without ever judging me. We started seeing each other regularly and were soon very much a couple. We went everywhere and did everything together, and before too many months had passed we had agreed to live together as well.

      I’d learned one good thing from my dad: he always insisted that renting was a mug’s game – ‘get on the property ladder, own your own home’ was something he hammered into us kids from an early age. So when Chris and I started looking for a place to live I knew that we were going to buy, not pay out money to a landlord.

      We found a nice little house in Birtley, a pleasant area on the outskirts of Gateshead itself and close to Chris’ beloved golf club. It was clean and neat and modern. It had just the one bedroom but I knew I could make a lovely home for us. We were both working – Chris had a good job and I was doing really well as a nursery nurse – so there was no problem in getting a mortgage. The day I moved our possessions in through the front door I felt that I was finally a real grownup woman. I was 18 at this point and it seemed as though at last I was going to find real happiness.

      I loved that little house. Once the door closed it was just Chris and me (unless Mum or my brother and sister came over to visit). I began to decorate, giving full rein to the passion for art that I’d discovered at Riverside. The walls were soon treated to the fashionable styles of the day – rag-rolling, sponging, colour washing – and at weekends I worked to make the tiny garden as neat and trim as a shiny new pin.

      Chris and I settled into our new life together really quickly. I suppose we were a married couple in all but name. We did everything together and enjoyed taking holidays in the sun – Rhodes was a real favourite – it all added to my sense of security and happiness.

      I suppose I should have known it wouldn’t last. There’s a pattern to my life and it’s hard and cold and unfair. Whenever something seems to go right, whenever I appear to be in control and I’m not having to face up to yet more turmoil, that’s when something is absolutely guaranteed to turn up and smack me in the face. And sometimes it’s my fault – at least in part.

      I yearned for the life of a normal teenager. I longed to go out dancing and clubbing and generally throwing my cares to the wind – at least for a night. I didn’t necessarily want to go wild and get blind drunk – those days had long been cauterised out of me by the abortion – but I did want to feel alive and act my age. And therein lay the problem.

      Chris may have been a real gentleman but he was also much older and more mature than me. Although there was only seven years between us it felt like he was going on 50. His idea of a good time was going up to his precious golf club and drinking in the bar. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t exactly teetotal. I could enjoy a drink as much as anyone but the golf club was a bit stuffy for me, and Chris’s insistence on spending so much time there, drinking with the other boring old men, began to rub me up the wrong way.

      It didn’t help that wherever we went I seemed to get a lot of attention from other blokes. They made it obvious they fancied me and were pretty unsubtle about doing so right in front of Chris. I rather enjoyed the attention – it felt good to be appreciated, though I’d never have done anything about it. But Chris hated it, and as time wore on he became more and more possessive. I suppose that because I was so openly flirty he was worried I might run off with someone one night – and no matter how much I promised him that I never would, the anxiety grew inside him like a cancer. The more he complained, the more I became defiant and resentful. It felt like he was stifling me, squeezing the enjoyment out of my life. We argued and argued, settling into a pattern of flare-ups and dull silences. We both of us realised that the writing was on the wall.

      It didn’t help that around this time the ghosts of my past turned up to haunt me again.

      Out of the blue one evening there was a knock on the front door. When I opened it there were two women CID officers from Northumbria police. They said they knew I had been in several care homes in the area and they wanted to know if they could talk to me about my experiences.

      People assume that I must have been pleased when the police turned up. After all that I had endured at that terrible care home someone was prepared to do something about it. And in a way, of course, I did feel like that. But when you’ve been sexually abused as a child – especially over such a long period – it’s never as easy as a simple feeling of relief: because it hurts to talk about what was done to me. For years I have tried to push those awful memories to the back of my mind and I have to steel myself mentally to dredge them up again.

      And on top of that there’s the effect on me once I have started to spill out the river of poisonous memories. Like most abused children the pain of reliving what I endured was almost like a physical force: I felt sick and weary and scared all over again. The whole point of going through this hurt is that justice might be done – that someone might be forced to answer in a court for what they did to me. But I’d told Social Services about the abusers in that care home when I was 13, and other than agreeing not to send me back there, nothing had been done; certainly no one had been prosecuted.

      That’s the thing about hope: when it’s raised and then dashed the pain is unique and terrible. And to do that to an abused child – to put her through the ordeal of re-living painful memories, to raise her expectations and then do nothing – well that’s nothing short of cruel.

      So I can’t say I was happy that evening when the CID officers arrived on my doorstep, but one of the other children who’d been in the same home, who had also been targeted by the same men had given them my name, and she had said that I had been abused too. I was non-committal at first, but the police kept talking to me – quietly and patiently – and in the end I agreed to give a statement. I went to the police station and I told the officers all about the abuse: I told them about the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ game and the little room where the men would take us and rape us. And I told them which of the staff had hurt me.

      And that was the last I heard about it. Days, weeks and then months went by without any contact from the detectives. All that difficult and painful process – then nothing. Once again it felt as though I’d had my hopes raised only for them to be dashed. And as yet more months passed by without any news I felt lower and lower and lower.

      I couldn’t have known it then, but I was far from the only person feeling that way. And as things turned out it was only going to get worse.