Stuart Howarth

I Just Wanted to be Loved How one boy overcame a terrifying past

IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND ‘BRETT LOWE’

15 SEPTEMBER 1975–23 AUGUST 2008 AGED 32 YEARS

‘Many are called but few are chosen’

And

‘MICHAEL ALEXANDER JACK’ 14 NOVEMBER 1952–8 MAY 2008 AGED 55 YEARS

‘It only takes a moment to inspire’

GOD BLESS YOU BOTH

Table of Contents

Chapter One - Growing Up In Ashton-Under-Lyne

Chapter Two - Trying to Make A Life for Myself

Chapter Three - Falling Apart

Chapter Four - Being Inside

Chapter Five - Release from Strangeways

Chapter Six - Party at the Pub

Chapter Seven - Life on the Outside

Chapter Eight - Self-Medication

Chapter Nine - The First Steps

Chapter Ten - The Babysitter

Chapter Eleven - Meeting My Real Dad

Chapter Twelve - Burnt House Farm

Chapter Thirteen - Waiting to Die

Chapter Fourteen - Living with Geoff and Sue

Chapter Fifteen - Housecleaning the Soul

Chapter Sixteen - The Pity Party

Chapter Seventeen - Family Therapy

Chapter Eighteen - Strangeways in the Dock

Chapter Nineteen - Learning to Understand the Past

Chapter Twenty - Under Pressure

Chapter Twenty-one - Please, Daddy, No

Chapter Twenty-two - Pushed to the Limit

Chapter Twenty-three - Crying on Live TV

Chapter Twenty-four - Losing My Surrogate Dad

Chapter Twenty-five - Staying Clean

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘What fucking time do you call this?’ Dad snarled as I crept in the door. ‘You're fucking late.’

I glanced over his shoulder at the clock and could see that I wasn't late. It was seven o'clock exactly, the time he'd told me to get home. If I got back before then I'd be in trouble so I always timed it exactly to the minute. ‘I'm not. It's …’

The words dried up as he rose suddenly from his chair, his lip curling the way it always did when he was angry.

‘Sorry,’ I pleaded, as his fist caught the side of my head, knocking me into the wall. I crumpled to the floor. ‘No, Daddy. Please don't.’

He kicked me in the side and I curled in a ball with my hands cradling my head. It was no use, though. I was hauled up by the arm as he kicked and punched me ferociously then hurled me against the door before pulling me back up for more.

I was only seven. There was a loud buzzing noise in my head, the noise I always heard when I was terrified. He threw me round the room, laying into me wildly with his fists and feet, not caring how badly I got hurt.

When he'd finished beating me he shoved me towards the stairs. ‘Go and get yourself cleaned up, you filthy bastard. I'll be up to see you in a bit.’

My legs were trembling as I climbed the stairs. Why did I always make him angry? Why couldn't I get it right?

I washed my face then went through to my bedroom, every bit of me aching. I considered hiding inside the walk-in wardrobe but I knew it would make things much worse if he had to haul me out. Instead, I crawled under the covers and pulled them up to my chin. I buried my face in the pillow and that's when the sobs came.

I knew what would happen next. Even as I cried for Mum, my sobs muffled in the pillow, I was listening for him coming upstairs. Bile rose in my throat as I worried about what he would make me do this time. The waiting was horrible. I could already smell the rancid, stale-sweat smell of him and hear his panting breath. There was a bitter taste in my mouth and I hurt all over. There wasn't a single bit of me that didn't hurt.

I began to tremble with fear, and then I heard it: the loud creaking sound of that first step, and then the next. He was coming. There was nothing I could do.

Chapter One
GROWING UP IN ASHTON-UNDER-LYNE

I don't remember a time before Dad came to live with us although I was three when he moved in. He was a colourful, larger-than-life character who worked as a dustbin man in the smarter areas of Ashton-under-Lyne, and on his rounds he would pick up all sorts of cast-off items to bring home. We were proud to be the first family in the street to have a television, even though it only worked intermittently when you banged the sides, the first to have a washing machine, and the only ones to have a PVC sofa and ornaments and paintings on the walls.

All the neighbours used to come round to admire our newest possessions, do their laundry in our machine and drink beer and smoke in the sitting room, but there was an undercurrent of jealousy as well. There was definitely a feeling that we thought we were a bit above ourselves, which didn't go down well. I got bullied by some local boys, who used to play tricks on me like getting me to swallow a spoonful of margarine by pretending it was ice cream.

I had two big sisters: Christina, who was two years older than me, and Shirley, who was a year older than her. Poor old Shirl the Whirl, as I called her, was born with spina bifida that meant she was confined to a wheelchair, paralysed and without feeling from the waist down. She also had hydrocephalus, or fluid on the brain, and epilepsy and a hunchback, and she was always having to go into hospital for operations and coming back covered in bandages. There was nothing wrong with her mind, though. I loved Shirley because she was the one who looked out for me when she could and tried to make sure I was OK. Christina was tougher and more independent when we were little.

Mum had been married to a man called George Heywood whom she'd met when she was just sixteen, but he turned out to be a drinker and a womanizer. He couldn't handle the pressure of having a disabled child so he soon disappeared from the scene. It must have been really tough for Mum being on her own with no money and with kids to raise, so when David Howarth came along with his jet-black hair and moustache and his ready charm, she was easily swept off her feet.

‘David is your real dad,’ she whispered to me, ‘and George was the girls. But don't tell them or they'll be jealous that you're the only one whose real dad lives with us. Let's keep it to ourselves.’

None of the other kids in our street had their real dad living with them, although there might be stepdads or boyfriends in the house. I was chuffed to bits that I had my real dad and, what's more, he had a proper job and he brought home lots of presents for us. I used to be his favourite, and that made me feel very special. I hero-worshipped him and strove to do whatever I could to please him, although I was always a bit scared of him as well.

Dad had a smallholding, which we called ‘the Pen’, where he kept pigs, chickens, geese and ducks. His father lived in one of the sheds up there, amongst heaps of scrap from the dustbin rounds, an old rusting car we kids used to play in and litter strewn everywhere. It was up there that Dad started his campaign to ‘make a man of me’, as he put it. He'd make me collect the eggs from the hens, although their flapping wings terrified me, and he'd put ferrets down my trousers, where they scratched and wriggled. I was especially scared of the big black boar and the sows that snuffled around in the mud, but I was learning to keep this from Dad because if he sensed I was scared of something he would push me right into it as part of his campaign to toughen me up.

If I annoyed him I'd get a cuff round the ear or a pinch on my legs, but nothing prepared me for the day he laid into me on a beach in Wales when we were on holiday. I was only four years old but the event sticks vividly in my memory. I'd wandered off from the family, and when Dad caught up with me he punched me repeatedly, forcing my face down into the sand and screaming abuse at me. I couldn't breathe and struggled wildly in panic.

‘Do you want me to tell your mum that you have spoilt the fucking holiday?’ he hissed. ‘Do you?’

It wasn't the pain of his blows; it was the ferocity of the attack and the shock of the betrayal. I thought I was his much-loved son, but here he was saying, ‘Get up, you little cunt, and stop fucking crying.’ It was a devastating moment.

He warned me not to say anything to Mum – ‘Put a smile on yer fucking face’ – and when I obeyed, he knew he had me where he wanted me. From then on, he would get away with increasing levels of violence and brutality and I would lie to everyone about where all the bruises and welts came from. I told teachers at school I'd been messing around climbing trees or that I'd fallen downstairs. I don't think Mum ever asked. I had been a bad boy and I deserved it, I thought. I just had to do better in future.

But from then on, no matter how hard I tried I always seemed to get things wrong and make Dad angry. The list of misdemeanours got longer all the time: I wasn't supposed to scratch my head, pick my nails, touch any of Dad's things, leave a mess anywhere, get dirt on my clothes or eat my crusts when Dad wanted them. Every infraction of the rules earned me a beating, and as well as using his hands he began to use a belt, a heavy brass crocodile, or any household objects that came to hand. Mum got a full-time job so she wasn't around to witness the violence, and I never dared to tell her about it. As I could hear when I lay in bed at night, she was experiencing it as well.

I couldn't tell Mum, and I was too scared to tell Christina or Shirley. What could they do? I just had to try harder not to make him cross in the first place.

‘You know you're a naughty boy, don't you?’ he'd whisper. ‘I'm doing this for your own good. If anyone finds out how naughty you are, you'll be sent away to a children's home.’

And then when I was about five he started to come up and visit me in my bed. He lay down beside me and stroked me, then held my hand against him and moved it back and forth, over and over, until I felt a hot liquid that I thought in my naivety was pee. After that he would force me to masturbate him or take his penis in my mouth almost every day. ‘You dirty little bastard!’ he'd cry as he came all over me. At least it was better than getting beaten, and usually he was nice to me for a while afterwards. Sometimes he'd run me a warm bath or make me something nice to eat.

Dad used to inspect my underwear regularly to see if it was clean, and when I got worms he'd be the one to apply the cream to my bottom, pushing into me roughly with his fingers. Before long he couldn't resist penetrating me anally. It felt as though I was being ripped apart and I screamed out loud. Even though he wasn't as rough as before, the pain was horrible and relentless. I stared at the pattern on the wallpaper, counting the repetitions, gritting my teeth and waiting for it to be over.

After being abused, I felt broken, sad and very lonely. I was permanently bruised, always bleeding from my rectum, constantly on edge when he was in the house, but no one seemed to notice. They all had their own problems. He used to take Christina and Shirley to bed with him every afternoon for a ‘nap’ when they got in from school, while I was sent out to play. One time I saw him lying on top of Shirley when I went to the toilet in the middle of the night, but I was too scared to say anything.

As I got older, the punishments got worse. I'd be locked naked down in the cold, damp cellar, fed my dinner out of the dogs' bowls or my head would be held under water until I thrashed around in panic, afraid he was going to kill me. And he could have done. He had a 12-bore shotgun that he used to control the rats up at the Pen and one day he made me sit down on his bed, loaded a cartridge into the gun and forced the barrel into my mouth.

‘I'm going to kill you now,’ he said.

I shook and sobbed in pure terror, my nose and eyes streaming as the barrel made me gag. I truly believed I was going to die that day. He could have taken my life, accidentally or deliberately, at any time. He had the power.

I was eight when he and Mum had a daughter, Clare. Maybe this would make him calm down, I thought. But we soon found out that Clare had Down's Syndrome and hydrocephalus and it wasn't long before Dad was hurting her as well. I saw him throw her down the stairs once when she was only six months old, and he used to threaten that he'd hold her fingers in the fire while I was away at school. I'd rush home panting with exertion every lunch hour just to peer in the window and check she was OK.

It didn't occur to me that we might get help if we told someone what was going on. It occurred to Christina, though. In 1979, when I was eleven, she told Mum that Dad had been having sex with her and Shirley. Mum threw him out and, when he wouldn't stay away from us, she called the police. At the ensuing trial, he was sentenced to two years in prison for molesting the girls.

No one thought to ask if anything similar had happened to me. After all, I was a boy and they all knew that I worshipped my dad. I was his only son, his special one.

Chapter Two
TRYING TO MAKE A LIFE FOR MYSELF

With Dad gone, I cast myself in the role of ‘man of the house’ and started worrying about how I could take care of Mum and my sisters. I nicked food from the local Presto store, sold some of the junk Dad had brought home at second-hand shops, and I even joined a church choir because they paid you £2 to turn up every Sunday. Our house began to fall apart around us so I decided to set fire to it to try and get the insurance money for Mum, but my plan backfired when the council decided to take Shirley into a special-needs home instead of rehousing her with us. We got a new council house but I really missed her when she wasn't there every day.

After Dad got out of prison, he went to live with his sister Doris in Wales. I didn't want him to come and live with us again but I wanted my male role model back – someone I could look up to, who would protect me and teach me how to be a man – so I decided to go down and visit him there. He looked just the same as before and he was being perfectly nice to me, but one night from my bedroom I overheard a conversation between him and Auntie Doris in which she said, ‘I thought he knew he wasn't your lad?’

Straight away I hurried down to confront him about this, but he denied it. ‘Of course I'm yer dad,’ he said. ‘Don't be daft.’

I was confused, and left the next day without feeling I'd got the answers I wanted from him. And then he met a new woman who had three kids of her own. They had another son together, and Dad and I lost touch. He didn't make any effort to keep up with me, and I felt excluded by his new ‘family’. I also felt pushed out at home with Mum because when I was fifteen she got a new boyfriend called Trevor who usurped my ‘man of the house’ role.

I left school at sixteen and did a few different jobs before training as a steeplejack. I went out with a couple of girls but I was really messed up and hated the way other boys talked about girls as slags and whores or bought pornographic magazines. It felt wrong and dirty to me. I had this dream of having an intimate, loving relationship with a girl but no idea how I could achieve such a thing. The only person I was close to was Shirley, who I visited whenever I could.

At the age of eighteen I met a girl called Angela, a gentle girl with lovely long, dark hair. I pushed all memories of my childhood to the back of my mind and did my best to form a good relationship with her. When she announced she was pregnant, I said straight away that I would marry her and I vowed that I would look after her and our little boy, Matthew, who was born in 1989.

I loved him to pieces, but inside I was full of self-hatred and drinking heavily every night to drown out all the childhood memories and flashbacks that ran through my head like an illegal porn film, frame by frame. I looked at my son's little body as he lay in the bath and I was terrified that someone would abuse him one day. Questions would haunt me until I wasn't even sure if it was all right for me to be in the bathroom with him. Was even that wrong? Dad used to abuse me in the bathroom sometimes. I hadn't had a role model for fatherhood that I wanted to copy but I didn't know how else to be.

The following year, my world fell apart when Shirley died. She was left unsupervised in a bath, had an epileptic fit and drowned. All the feelings I'd been trying to repress exploded out of me in a torrent. I felt angry with the staff at the home, with God, the universe and everyone who had ever crossed me.

All my coping mechanisms broke down and the childhood memories came flooding out like torrents of water raging through a ruptured dam. I got into fights, drank even more than before and started arguing fiercely with Angela as well. In the midst of all this she announced she was pregnant again, but I felt no joy at the news – only increased stress.

I was a workaholic, choosing jobs that took me away from home a lot, and I started to doubt our whole relationship. How could Angela possibly love me? I was a disgusting, bad person. The pressure built inside me until one day I came home and told her I didn't want to be married to her any more. She was desperately upset, in an advanced state of pregnancy, and she just couldn't understand what was going on and why I was cracking up. I'd told her bits and pieces about my childhood but nothing like the whole story.

Our daughter Rebecca was born while we were living apart, and six months later I reached rock bottom and tried to throw myself under a train. I spent three days in hospital, where a psychiatrist suggested that I should get counselling, but nothing was ever done about it.

With my next girlfriend Lorraine I was even more messed up. I tried to kill myself twice while I was with her, the first time by attaching a pipe to my car exhaust and trailing it back through a window as I sat in the garage, the second by slashing my wrists when we were up in Edinburgh for Hogmanay. She tried her best to get through to me, to reassure me that she loved me and wanted to help, but by this stage I had discovered cocaine, and it fuelled the rage I was feeling.

I left Lorraine just as I had left all the women I'd gone out with up to that point, because I was scared that if I didn't then she would leave me and I knew I couldn't bear that. I'd never told anyone about my dad and everything he had done to me. I was too ashamed, as if it was my fault in some way, and I just couldn't face all the trauma it would bring to the surface if I talked about it. Then in February 2000 I found a woman who seemed as though she would make all the difference: someone who I thought could fix me and make me able to live with myself again.

Chapter Three
FALLING APART

I met Tracey when I called in at the sunbed shop in Ashton-under-Lyne where she worked. I've always been insecure about my appearance, with my big, squashed nose and sticky-out ears, but I feel a bit better when I've got a tan, as if it will stop people noticing all the rest. Straight away I was attracted to this petite brunette with a perfect slim figure and lovely big eyes. She had a presence about her, very ladylike and with a quiet confidence. You can tell, looking at Tracey, that she's a good person.

I didn't think there was any chance that a woman like her would ever be interested in a scrote like me. I'd never had much confidence when it came to women, but I'd always had the ability to make people laugh so I started joking around with the girls in the salon. I'd developed a joker persona at school because I reasoned that if I could make the other kids laugh then there was less chance that they would want to hurt me. I had a red patch on my nose where it had been broken in a fight some years earlier and I asked Tracey how I could tan the rest of my face to match.

‘Why don't you put one of these over it?’ she suggested, and handed me a ‘winky’ – a little stick-on patch that's used to cover your eyes in the tanning booth.

Once I was inside, I called back, ‘My winky's not big enough. Have you got anything bigger?’ and all the girls cracked up laughing.

After that day, I couldn't get Tracey out of my mind. I started driving past the salon in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, or making extra appointments just to see her. My tan was coming along well because of it. The relationship I'd been in for the last few months had broken down irretrievably and I felt very lonely. Was there any chance that Tracey was free? Surely a gorgeous girl like her would have a boyfriend already?

One day at the salon, Tracey's friend Nicky mentioned that they were all going to a nightclub called Smokie's at the weekend and she hinted that it might be a good idea if I came along because, according to her, Tracey was quite keen on me. At first I thought they might be messing me around, but I decided to make sure I was there just in case.

It wasn't all plain sailing when I walked in. I spotted the girls as I made my way over to the crowded bar area, said ‘Hello, how are you?’ then we all sat down on some sofas. I sat by Tracey's friend first, scared of humiliating myself by making an obvious move too soon, so she got the impression it was her friend I liked. She then had a dance with a friend of mine, during which I was squirming with jealousy. Finally, Tracey came back and I said, ‘Are you talking to me now?’ and she grinned.

We went off to one side of the club to sit on our own and just talked for the rest of the evening. She told me she was in a relationship that wasn't working out. I lit a cigarette at one point and she grabbed it and stubbed it out, saying it was a filthy habit. I thought ‘Stroppy cow!’, but I liked it. She obviously had a bit of spirit to her. By the end of the evening we'd agreed to meet again somewhere not as noisy and I said I would phone her at the shop.

Thursday, 2 March 2000 was our first proper date. I was nervous as hell and it took me ages to get ready because I wanted to make the right impression. I kept trying on different shirts and walking backwards and forwards in front of the mirror, talking to myself. If Tracey could have seen me I'm sure she would have called me an ‘old tart’.

We drove over to Bradford and spent the day just walking round, holding hands and talking. She was obviously a very caring person so when she noticed the slash marks on my arms, I told her the truth – that I'd cut my arms with a razor while I was up in Edinburgh for Hogmanay when everything got too much for me. That led to me telling her about being abused as a child, and my sister Shirley dying, and all the bad stuff that had happened in my life. It just poured out. Tracey listened in a sympathetic, non-judgemental way, asking a few questions and saying all the right things, which is not easy because I can be very touchy if someone is insensitive or clumsy.

By the end of the day, I had made up my mind that Tracey was the woman I wanted to be with and, amazingly, it seemed as though she wanted to be with me as well. We just ‘clicked’ in a way that felt very natural and real.

I went back to my mum's place above the pub she ran – the Hawthorn Inn, in Oldham – and waited to hear from Tracey.

It wasn't straightforward for her because she had two sons, aged sixteen and seventeen, and although the house they lived in was hers, her boyfriend said he couldn't afford to move out till he got paid at the end of the month. For a whole week I didn't hear anything from her and I thought she must have changed her mind. I was a nervous wreck waiting for the phone to ring, but knowing that I had to let her sort things out in her own way. Finally, she called and said she had had a terrible time with her now ex-boyfriend, who loved her dearly. Any break-ups are hard but when you leave one person for another feelings are especially raw. I told Tracey to come back and stay at Mum's pub for the time being, and she agreed.

We got very close, very quickly, spending lots of time together and talking constantly, filling each other in about all the details of our lives. I'd often had sexual problems in the past due to the abuse I'd suffered, but things were fine with Tracey because she was always so affectionate and caring. It was true love-making rather than just sex, and she'd hold me afterwards in a way that made me feel very secure. I had never experienced such a powerful emotion for another person before and I was completely swept off my feet.

At the end of March, her ex finally vacated the house and we moved in there, together with her sons Jamie and Lee. My relationship with them went well from the start. They hadn't liked Tracey's ex but said that I reminded them of Jimmy, their real dad, and that was a good thing. I told them there was no way I wanted to take their dad's place but that we could be mates, and that was what they wanted as well. I took the four of us on a holiday to Malia in Crete and we had a wonderful time messing around on jet-skis, sunbathing and generally bonding with each other. Back home I took the boys out clubbing a couple of times and they were impressed that I could walk straight in without queuing because I was friendly with all the doormen round our way. Basically they were nice lads, and I was happy to have them around.

There was never any doubt in my mind that Tracey was the woman for me. This was it. I'd thought for some time that if I could find a woman who really loved me to the core then it would solve all my problems, and it seemed as though Tracey was the one. When I was a child, my sister Christina used to tell me fairy tales about princes and princesses and I had this idea that when you met the right girl and fell in love you would settle down, have a couple of kids, move into a ‘palace’, buy a nice car, make a bit of money and live happily ever after. I was being hugely over-optimistic, though. One good relationship wasn't going to compensate for all the bad things that had happened in my life. No matter how loving Tracey was, it didn't stop my insecurities, and sometimes I tried to lift my mood with alcohol and street drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. She knew I took drugs from time to time but she had no idea how much.

She was also aware that I often had horrific nightmares that made me twitch and cry in my sleep, and sometimes I spoke in a strange high-pitched voice, like a little boy, like little Stuart saying, ‘Please, Daddy, no.’ She learned to recognize the times when I suddenly became deadly quiet and still as meaning that something had just caused me to have a flashback to some horrible incident from my past.

Meanwhile, I was driving myself crazy with the intensity of my feelings for Tracey. I couldn't get close enough no matter how tightly I held her. Touch wasn't enough – I really wanted our souls to entwine and for her to hold me and never let me go. I couldn't bear to think of her with anyone else; I wanted her to be mine and only mine, so I found it hard living with her in the same house where she'd lived with her ex-husband Jimmy, the boys' father, and with the boyfriend she'd been seeing when I met her as well.

I began to get stupidly insecure and would test her, saying she didn't really love me, just to see how she'd react. Sometimes I'd manufacture a silly tiff about nothing and I'd pack my bags and threaten to leave, wanting her to stop me to prove that she really did care and wasn't going to end up hurting me. I was petrified and so afraid of trusting anyone. All I knew was that if you trusted you got hurt. When Dad moved in with us when I was three years old, I thought I was his ‘special one’ and I gave him my heart on a plate. Even after he started beating and abusing me, I was devoted to him and yearned desperately for him to love me back. As an adult I still yearned to be loved but I put so many barriers and tests in the way that they alienated most people and stopped us getting close.

Tracey did her best to reassure me. ‘But why do you love me?’ I'd ask over and over. I thought maybe she liked me because I bought her lots of meals and flowers and treated her like a lady, but she said no, it wasn't that. It was the fact that I let her see the vulnerability beneath the extrovert veneer of a successful businessman and joker. The story of my childhood moved her deeply and made her want to care for me. She claimed it was the real Stuart she fell for, not the public mask.

Still I had problems trusting. Roughly three months after we'd moved in together, things came to a head and we agreed that I would move back to my Mum's pub until we could sell her house and buy somewhere new together – somewhere without history, that was just ours; somewhere she hadn't lived with another man.

Without her there to cuddle up to every night, I started hooking up with the lads and going out drinking and drugging with them. It wasn't long before Tracey began to complain bitterly that I either disappeared at weekends or was too hung over to do much with her, so to make things up I took her away for the weekend. On 20 August 2000 we ended up in Wales, in the village where my stepfather was now living, and briefly met my Aunt Doris and her husband Stewart.

Later that night, tortured by all the memories, and convinced that I would never be able to form a good relationship until I got answers to some of my questions about the past, I drove back to visit my stepdad to try and talk to him about everything. But once I got inside his house, I became a frightened little boy again rather than a thirty-two-year-old man. Dozens of little things triggered horrific childhood memories: his dogs' bowls sitting on the step, which made me remember all the times he'd forced me to eat from them; his feet soaking in a bowl, which brought back their vile, rotten smell and all the times he made me scratch the dead skin off them; the way he sat in his chair with that twisted smile on his face. There was a hammer beside him in just the place he would have kept whatever weapon he was about to beat me with.

He started shouting at me and I began to sob convulsively, crouching down on the sofa in a submissive, child's posture. He ranted and raved, denying everything, utterly furious with me, and when he stood up I felt sure he was standing to attack me.

‘Please, Daddy, no!’ I screamed. I lunged across and grabbed the hammer and brought it down on his head in a moment of blind terror. It was a gut reaction, a pure survival instinct. It was and still is like a terrible nightmare that never happened.

Even as I ran out of the house and down the hill to my car, I was terrified he would be running after me and about to grab me and beat me to a pulp. I fled like a naughty child as if my life depended on it, my veins flooded with adrenalin, my teeth chattering and my entire body twitching with shock. There was a buzzing in my ears and I felt hot all over. I've never been so scared in my life. I thought that any minute he was going to catch me and beat me to a pulp. I didn't realize that he was dead.

Chapter Four
BEING INSIDE

The next morning I was arrested and taken into police custody. It was only then I found out that David Howarth hadn't been my real dad; George Heywood, Mum's first husband, was my biological father. Although I'd had my suspicions after overhearing the conversation in Wales, it was still a very strange surprise.

I told the police about all the abuse I'd suffered as a child and they interrogated me in detail about it. There were hours and hours spent going over and over events until I thought my head was going to explode.

I was in a state of extreme fear and confusion as I was marched to the cells and strip-searched. Right from the start prison was a huge shock, a dog-eat-dog world where both inmates and guards seemed out to get me. My nerves were jangling; every sound of a clanging door or a shout from another inmate left me petrified and shaking. I'd killed a man. My life was over. I made up my mind to kill myself as soon as I got the chance – but they put me on suicide watch so there was nothing I could do.

At this stage I'd only been with Tracey for five months. Most women would have run a mile, and with my set of life problems and issues I was sure that's what Tracey would do too. When at last she was allowed in to visit me, my first words were: ‘Just leave me now. It's over.’

Looking me straight in the eye, she said: ‘I'll never leave you, Stuart. I love you.’

A couple of days later, as I sat in my prison cell, a letter was tossed inside. I recognized Tracey's writing and when I picked it up I felt something hard inside. I ripped open the top of the envelope and a white-gold wedding ring fell out and spun across the floor. As I bent down to pick it up, my heart ached. A note from Tracey said simply: ‘I'll never leave you and I will always love you.’ It was the most powerful gesture of love that I'd ever experienced in my life. Who was this amazing woman and what on earth did she see in me?

Over the next seven months while I was on remand awaiting trial, Tracey visited me every single day, bringing me the few items of clothing I was allowed and some CDs to try and relax me. But the regime in prison was a living nightmare. I was in a permanent state of terror at the unpredictable nature of the other prisoners and the cruelty of some of the guards. It culminated one night when I was told I was being moved to a cell just by the sex offenders unit and I totally lost the plot. I had hidden two safety razors in my cell and I used them to slash at my arms until blood was spraying round the room and gushing down my legs.

They stopped me before I managed to kill myself but after that I was transferred to Manchester's Strangeways prison, where things went from bad to worse. There were some sadistic guards in there who used strip search as a form of punishment, and after I complained about it my treatment got even worse. My food bowl disappeared, I was moved to increasingly dilapidated cells, there was verbal abuse and all kinds of insidious harassment. I began to keep a diary of events and that seemed to wind them up even more.

At my trial in March 2001 I was sentenced to two years in prison for taking the life of the man I had always known as ‘Dad’. The judge said he believed I'd had diminished responsibility at the time and told me that the case was one of the most graphic and depraved instances of child abuse he had ever come across, and that my stepdad was a sick and twisted man. Taking into account the time I had already served, I would be released in September, six months hence. But how would I get through those six months without losing the plot completely?

Tracey was the only thing that kept me going, but it was tough for her too. After I was sentenced the visiting was substantially reduced and she was only allowed to come once a week. It got even harder when I was placed on the category A side of Strangeways. Category A is for hardened criminals or those assumed to be a risk to the public or national security. Category A prisoners aren't allowed to leave the wing so any visitors have to come to them. When she visited me there, Tracey had to walk right into the heart of the prison past all the other prisoners, who would whistle, catcall and jeer as she went by.

We sat for an hour facing each other across a table with a guard hovering nearby, only allowed to kiss briefly at the beginning and end of each visit. I desperately needed to hug her for comfort but this was never allowed. Yet Tracey turned up faithfully every single visiting time, trying to lift my spirits as best she could.

After a visit when she knew I was in a bad way, she would drive back late at night and park on the road outside Strangeways where I could see her from my cell window, then she would get out of the car and wave to me, shouting that she loved me. It brought me a lot of comfort on the lonely nights. We'd talk daily whenever I wasn't banged up in my cell and got a chance to reach the phone, and we would write letters to each other as well; sometimes I wrote as many as three times a day.

Tracey's whole life revolved round prison visits: organizing her shifts at work to fit around them, rushing through Manchester city-centre traffic to get there on time, never once letting me down. In many ways, it was as if she served that sentence with me.

I had some counselling in prison with a decent guy called Neil Fox, but in a way it made things worse by bringing the trauma to the surface. Psychiatrists diagnosed me as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because I never knew when some seemingly insignificant trigger would bring back the sights, sounds, smells and sheer misery of my younger days, as vividly as if they were happening all over again. It was as though I was right back in the bedroom at home with him towering over me, shouting abuse.

I clung to the hope that I would be able to turn my life around once I got out. I'm a physically strong guy, used to working hard and bright enough to get good jobs. But in my head, I kept hearing my stepfather's voice saying, ‘You're bad, you're naughty and you're no good. That's why no one loves you.’

I did my best to blank out the flashbacks and to trust the good people around me, especially Tracey, but that childhood conditioning runs deep. I was suicidal throughout the whole thirteen months I served in prison. At times I thought that maybe it was true: that I was a bad person and no one would ever truly love me. There were many days when it seemed there was no way out of the nightmare except death.

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