Escaping

Daddy

A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl

MARIA LANDON

with Andrew Crofts

For the true heroes of this story,

Brendan and Thomas

xx

‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood’

Tom Robbins

Contents

Epigraph

Foreword

Chapter One - Childhood

Chapter Two - The Overdose

Chapter Three - A Ready-Made Family

Chapter Four - Rodney and Me

Chapter Five - Husband and Brothers

Chapter Six - Sticks and Stones – and Words Will Always Hurt Me

Chapter Seven - A New Baby

Chapter Eight - The Human Yo-Yo

Chapter Nine - An Escape Route

Chapter Ten - Breakdown

Chapter Eleven - Finding Marion

Chapter Twelve - The Inner Child

Chapter Thirteen - Chasing Happy Ever After

Chapter Fourteen - More to Me Than Frying Eggs

Chapter Fifteen - Terry’s Wedding

Chapter Sixteen - A Time to Die

Chapter Seventeen - Self Help

Chapter Eighteen - A Promise to Glen

Chapter Nineteen - Toni

Chapter Twenty - Positive Thinking

Chapter Twenty-one - Becoming a Teacher

Chapter Twenty-two - Thoughts on a Spanish Beach

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

‘Get that down you,’ Dad said, handing me a vodka and lime.

I took a big gulp and shuddered as it burned my throat. My hand shook as I applied eyeliner in thick black strokes. I was just thirteen years old and getting myself ready for a night working on the Block, the section of Ber Street in Norwich where men cruised in their cars looking for sex.

‘Hurry up!’ Dad growled. ‘The sooner you get started, the sooner it’ll be over.’

I took another big swig and the alcohol made me dizzy but didn’t relieve the sheer terror about what lay ahead. Every time I got into a strange man’s car I knew I could be robbed, beaten up, or worse. It never got any easier.

Dad gripped my elbow and led me out onto the street. I was teetering in my ridiculously high heels, stumbling with fear, trying to make my mind go blank. Just do it, just get through it, I was thinking. There’s no way out.

There were other girls working the same patch and they eyed me with suspicion and hostility as I arrived in their territory. None of them said anything while Dad was around because they all knew what he was like. I was by far the youngest one out there, but none of the customers were going to complain about that.

When the time came and a car pulled up, I couldn’t bring myself to actually walk forward and talk to the driver. My heart was beating so hard I thought I was going to faint. Dad stepped out of the shadows behind me and pushed me towards the road.

‘Get out there now,’ he hissed. ‘Go and earn your keep.’

I knew from experience that he wasn’t going to change his mind and let me go home now. I had no choice but to go through with it.

‘Do you want business?’ I asked the next driver through the open window, my voice not much more than a whisper.

He did. Terms were agreed and I got into the car under Dad’s watchful eye, then we drew away from the others into the darkness.

Working on the Block was a regular part of my life between the ages of thirteen and fifteen but never something I got used to. I always hated it but I didn’t think I deserved any better. It was my destiny to provide men with what they wanted and to be controlled by Dad. That’s all I was good for, as he had told me over and over again throughout my childhood.

So when I started trying to break away from Dad’s influence and form adult relationships with men, I didn’t have a clue how they should work. I thought I needed a man to protect me in the world, and in return I had to provide him with sex and do as he told me. Was that what other women did? Was that how the world worked? Wasn’t it?

‘No one else will ever love you, Ria,’ my dad would always tell me, ‘not the way I do. I’m the only one who will ever truly love you.’

I still believed those words long after I should have been grown-up enough to know better. Everyone wants to believe what their parents tell them, don’t they?

Even when I stopped having anything to do with Dad, the lessons he had taught me rang in my ears. There was an invisible chord still linking us no matter how hard I tried to pull away. What hope could I have of ever being happy? What would it take?

Chapter One Childhood

Right from the beginning Dad would say I was his favourite child, and that would make me very proud. He was big and handsome and always seemed heroic to me because he was so popular and flamboyant, always the centre of attention wherever he went. Everyone loved my tall, dark, handsome dad. He had a powerful presence, always immaculately turned out in a suit and tie and known for being good company, never able to resist playing up to an adoring crowd of admirers. He was so plausible he could tell people anything and get away with it. He cultivated an image for himself as a lovable local rogue and ‘a bit of a character’, but as well as being a charmer he was a bully and a show-off and he had an uncontrollable temper, which frequently spilled over into violence.

I always wanted to please him, to obey him, to win his approval and to avoid getting a beating. But the more I yearned for his approval the more he would withhold it, telling me how worthless and fat and ugly I was, and I continued to believe him even when I could clearly see the sort of man he truly was beneath the superficial bravado. My father was a pimp and a drunk and had been all his adult life.

His total possession of me started on the morning I was born, when I’m told that he paraded boastfully around the hospital, completely drunk, puffing on a cigar and joking that he was going to make me ‘the best little prostitute on the block’. Except he wasn’t joking; he was deadly serious.

‘Pity I haven’t got four girls,’ he would tell anyone who would listen, ‘because then I could run a proper little brothel and never work again.’

To him these weren’t such shocking announcements because that was the world he lived in, the world he sought to control in any way he could and the world I grew up in. He truly believed that all women were ‘sitting on a goldmine’ and that they were mad if they didn’t exploit it to their own advantage, and if possible to his advantage as well. He never held down a proper job in all the years I knew him, drinking away whatever money he could bully the women in his life into earning for him by selling their bodies on the streets, combined with whatever welfare payments he could blag.

Despite the fact he always swore that my mum was the love of his life, just as she would swear that he was the love of hers, he had even nagged and bullied her into selling her body to passing kerb-crawlers in order to provide him with drinking money. Such behaviour seemed normal to him because all the friends that he spent his days and nights with were the same: either alcoholics or hookers, or both. I was too young to be able to remember the years when Mum and Dad were together, but I can imagine how it was from what they and other people have told me, and from the way he went on to treat me and everyone else. Despite the fact that he worshipped Mum, he still undermined her confidence at every possible opportunity, one minute telling her how gorgeous she was and the next telling her she was ugly and useless. He would beat and kick her ruthlessly when she tried to stand up to him, determined to break her spirit and make her obedient. When she finally decided she had had enough and left us when I was six years old, he spent the rest of his life telling everyone how brokenhearted he was, and threatening to kill himself whenever he was drunk.

It was the same technique he used to manipulate and control everyone in his life. Dad had a way of making people do what he wanted with a mixture of charm, violent bullying and manipulation. He dominated and terrorised Mum in the same way as he would later dominate and terrorise us. The fact that she had borne him four children made no difference to the way he treated her or the things he expected her to do for him.

My brother Terry was the first to be born from their great teenage love affair and I came along a year later in 1966. It seems Dad was willing to tolerate our existence, although he still enjoyed hurting and frightening us whenever the mood took him, but by the time our brothers, Chris and Glen, came along in 1969 and 1970 he had lost all patience with the demands of small children. He was so violent towards the two babies Mum didn’t dare bring them out of their bedroom when he was around and, as she slipped into a pit of depression herself, they gradually became forgotten for longer and longer periods, remaining silent and fearful behind that closed bedroom door.

I was only little but I remember glancing at that door, hearing the whimpering noises behind it and smelling the awful, eye-watering smell of their unchanged nappies, a smell that permeated through the upper floor of the house. Mum only dared to bring them out to feed and change them when Dad had gone out somewhere, and they were pitiful creatures: very thin, with scratches and sores all over their skin, and huge staring eyes. I felt desperately sorry, and guilty that I was allowed to come downstairs and eat meals with the family while they weren’t–but what could I do about it? I was just too young to help them.

Dad managed to convince Mum that she would only have to turn tricks once or twice, that he was just asking her to do him a favour because he was skint and they both needed some drinking money, but it wasn’t long before she realised she was being naive and that the more she earned for him the harder he would make her work. Dad had realised that pimping was the easiest way imaginable for him to earn money. However much she might have loved him, there was a point beyond which even she wasn’t willing to put up with him any more.

Mum finally gave up hope of anything ever changing and had a nervous breakdown, walking away from all of us without even saying goodbye. I have only the dimmest of memories of a time when she was there with us and I have no picture of her leaving. All I can really remember is me and Dad and Terry on our own together and being told that she had gone. She left us all, including Chris and Glen, still festering in their locked bedroom. Dad couldn’t believe that he had lost the love of his life and his drinking grew steadily worse, increasing the lake of self-pity he chose to wallow in. I think he was genuinely shocked that she’d gone, but he was also upset at losing the money she had brought in.

As soon as she could, Mum alerted social services to the danger we were all in now that we were alone with Dad. When social workers came round they found Chris and Glen shut in their bedroom in a terrible state. They were two and three years old, staring straight ahead with deadened eyes. Chris was rocking rhythmically back and forth in his cot and Glen was so hungry he was actually eating the contents of his own soiled nappy. Dad told everyone who would listen that Mum was the villain of the piece for leaving her children in such a state and he was able to make out that he was the innocent victim of her cold heart just as much as we were. Chris and Glen were both put into a foster home while Terry and I were left with Dad, who was busy boasting how he was going to bring us up on his own, thus winning the sympathy of all his women friends in the pub.

‘Poor old Terry. His wife’s up and left him and he’s doing his best to be a good dad to the little ones,’ they’d say, oblivious to the fact that he didn’t look after us at all. It fell to me to get meals for us, try to clean our clothes and get us to school on time, while Dad was out cavorting with his girlfriends or staying up all night drinking.

Once Mum had gone we never heard from her again for eight years. We didn’t hear from our grandparents or any of our other relatives either. Somehow Dad managed to intimidate them all into staying away, just as he intimidated Terry and me into obeying his every order with the beatings and the hours we spent locked in the windowless coal cellar if we displeased him. We never even received any birthday or Christmas cards from other family members. It seemed he was right when he told us the whole world had forgotten we existed and he was the only person we could rely on to care about us and look after us.

‘I’m the only person you can trust,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m the only person who will ever love you.’

With Mum gone he turned the full force of his pain, anger and misery onto us, while to the rest of the world he remained the jovial life and soul of the party, the hero whose feckless wife had deserted him and who was struggling to bring up the kids on his own. In the privacy of the house he did everything he could to make sure we were his devoted slaves, particularly me, playing endless mind games to make sure I would stay loyal and obedient and crushed.

‘You’re fat and ugly,’ he would tell me all the time, ‘no one will ever love you except me. Even your own mother left you.’

I was convinced it was all true. Sometimes he would cuddle me and then push me away for no reason. He would tell Terry that he had been Mum’s ‘favourite’, making it all the worse that she had deserted him, and making me feel all the worse for not being as good as my brother. He certainly didn’t bother about our clothes or any other aspects of our care. I got a letter home from the headmistress of my school, suggesting that it would be a good idea to ‘clean Maria up’ but Dad countered with such a string of expletives that the poor woman never dared to follow through with a face-to-face meeting.

I wished Dad wouldn’t treat Terry and me so badly, but I still adored him and was still desperate to please him in any way I could, following him around like a faithful little puppy. All his days were spent in the pubs and the bookies, with us waiting outside in the cold for him to stumble back out, while his nights were spent drinking and playing cards with his friends. Sometimes he would force us to join in till the early hours of the morning; other times we would be sent upstairs and threatened with dire consequences if we even came out to use the toilet. He would make us go shoplifting, mainly to steal whisky for him and his friends, and he even had us cashing stolen giros at one stage.

Dad couldn’t read so I always had to read things out for him. By the time I was eight or nine he had started making me read to him from his pornographic magazines while he masturbated. I didn’t understand what he was doing but I knew it felt wrong and weird. I had no choice, though, because if I refused I’d get beaten with a stick or with his slipper. Then he began to make me lie beside him so he could slide his fingers inside my pants, which I hated. He said he would teach me everything I needed to know, but if I ever told anyone about what he did I’d be sent away to live in a children’s home full of perverts who would torture and rape me. It sounded terrifying and I begged him not to make me go there.

His sexual demands didn’t stop at touching me.

‘Do you want a lollipop?’ he asked one evening when he got in from the pub.

‘Yes please, Daddy,’ I said, confused as he marched me upstairs and started masturbating in front of me.

‘Do you want a lollipop, then?’ he asked again.

‘Yes. Where are they?’

‘Come here,’ he said and as I leaned across he grabbed my head. ‘Suck this!’

I felt as though I was suffocating and I struggled to get away, which made him angry. Tears were streaming down my face and I was gagging and choking, certain he was going to kill me. I couldn’t breathe because his thing was so huge. It was a nightmare that never seemed to end.

Soon he was forcing me to take his penis in my mouth regularly and then he began trying to have penetrative sex with me, not caring how much he hurt or frightened or disgusted me, making it clear that there was no point struggling because it was going to happen anyway and I would just make it harder for myself by fighting. It hurt so much that I was convinced I was going to die. I thought I was being torn in half, but there was no point in struggling because he was too big and strong. He told me over and over that I must never tell anyone about the things we did together, terrifying me with stories of what would happen if I did.

‘If I go to prison you and Terry will be sent to a children’s home and everyone will hate you,’ he would warn. ‘You need to have your daddy here to protect you. This is our secret. No one will believe anything you say until you are ten anyway.’

I hated the things he did to me, but I still adored him and longed to please him so that he would stop hurting me and telling me how bad I was. I longed for the times when he was nice to me and told me I was his favourite. I’d do just about anything to win his praise. He was my dad and I loved him.

When I was twelve he took me up to the streets where the city’s hookers plied their trade to kerb-crawlers. This was his little kingdom where he set himself up as a pimp, the place where everyone knew who he was. I knew a lot of the girls already because they often came round our house after they had been beaten up or robbed, looking on Dad as a friend and someone who understood their world because he was a part of it. Some of them were really good to me and I considered them to be my friends too. He proudly showed me where he had put Mum to work and where he was going to make me follow in her footsteps, spending my evenings lurking in the shadows as a steady stream of punters slowed down in their cars, in search of business, taking a look at the goods on offer.

I liked it the first time Dad got his friend Lucy to dress me up in a tight skirt and stilettos. I felt glamorous, like a little girl playing make-believe, and I was happy when Dad admired my legs and said they were just like Mum’s. I didn’t let myself think about working on the streets though. I hated what Dad did to me in his bed and couldn’t bear to think about any other man doing it to me. My throat closed up in dread every time he talked about me becoming the best little prostitute on the Block.

But when I was thirteen, the day came when Dad decided I was ready to start fulfilling the destiny he had chosen for me. I felt an overwhelming sense of hopelessness as I got ready, knowing there was no way out of it so I might as well get it over with, just as he had told me a hundred times when he raped me. I obeyed him automatically, like a robot, still wanting to please him and win his love despite everything he had done to me. I had to drink a lot of vodka to build up my courage before the first time I went out on the street but I got through it somehow, trying to make my mind go blank as I spread my legs and let businessmen thrust away inside me.

Once I had serviced a few punters and earned him some money, Dad bought a bottle of whisky and took me back to Lucy’s house to celebrate. The mix of whisky and vodka was too much for my young stomach and I threw up all over Dad’s suit. I thought he would be angry but he wasn’t–he just thought the whole thing was funny and in a way I was glad that I had been able to make him happy. But I dreaded having to work on the Block again. No matter how many times I did it, I always felt terrified as the car pulled off with me inside, and I always felt as though I had been raped afterwards, even though I was clutching the punter’s money.

All the girls would use drink and drugs to help them get over their fears every time they went out on the street, or to drown out the memories afterwards. The irony was that once they had habits, they needed to go out to work more often in order to earn the money they needed to satisfy their cravings, creating vicious cycles that many never escaped from. I was no different to the rest and Dad was always happy to supply me with as much drink as it took to make me co-operative. He didn’t approve of drugs, but there were plenty of other people around who were happy to supply me with those when I asked. I started on cannabis but before long speed became my drug of choice and I took it whenever I could get my hands on some.

There were times when Dad would get caught by the police for thieving or fighting and sent to prison for a while. Terry and I would then go into children’s homes or foster homes and I was surprised to find that they weren’t as terrible as Dad had warned me they would be. But by that time he had messed with my head so much that I couldn’t settle anywhere. A lot of teachers and social workers told me that they thought I had the potential for a better life, but I always ended up back in trouble one way or another. As soon as he came out of prison Dad would order us to go back to him and I always wanted to go, hoping beyond hope that things would be different this time; that this time he would be kind to me, that he would stop doing those things to me.

But it was all a game to him. He convinced me that wherever I was taken I should run away and go back to him at the first opportunity. I never questioned this wisdom, even though I sometimes knew I was better off in the places the social workers sent me to. I desperately wanted us to be a happy little family, but he just wanted to have me in his power in the same way he had with Mum. Whatever efforts the authorities made to get me to safety he just had to snap his fingers and I would go running back to him. Sometimes I would try to explain to people what he was doing to me, but Dad always managed to get out of it, to turn everything round so it seemed as if I was the problem, not him.

Social workers were as confused as I was. One wrote about me: ‘Maria is in some ways functioning at a four-or five-year-old level and in others at a sixteen-year-old level, plus being an intelligent twelve-year-old. She is over-fond of her dad and wants him close to her, up to a certain point, and beyond that she starts complaining.’

At one of the homes, when I was fourteen, I asked if they would try to make contact with Mum for us. They managed to track her down and she actually came to see us. For a while it looked as though Terry and I might be able to live with her, but we were all too damaged. Within six weeks the relationship had broken down because Mum couldn’t cope with our disruptive behaviour and we were taken back into care.

I was fifteen and on the run from one of the care homes I’d been assigned to when I met a guy called Brian. He was a thirty-five-year-old biker and I fell in love with him because he was a kind and decent man. I had ‘property of Brian’ tattooed on my upper arm, just above a tattoo I already had of Dad’s name. We even bought a silver ring down the market and announced to the world that we were in love. Brian gave me the courage to break away a little from Dad, even though I was still working on the street to make the money I needed for the drink and drugs I was using.

Brian wanted to help me to escape from my fear of Dad and from the social workers who he thought were letting me down, so we hitchhiked down to London together. It was a dream that neither of us had thought through and we ran out of money almost immediately. Brian might have been older than me but he wasn’t capable of earning a wage and supporting us; he was a dreamer with a dope habit who liked playing his guitar. The only way we could support ourselves was for me to go back to work doing the one thing I knew how on the streets of King’s Cross. I was terrified and I didn’t want to do it, but the thought of going back to Norwich and letting Dad know I had failed was worse. I didn’t want him to see that he had been right, that I couldn’t manage without him.

The other prostitutes working in King’s Cross all looked older and harder and more vicious than any of the girls I had ever met in Norwich. These were people who everyone had given up on, junkies and schizophrenics and God alone knew what else. I’d never really known many black people before and I didn’t understand the way they or their pimps acted or talked to me. It was like occupying an alien landscape and everything seemed strange and dangerous, angry and aggressive. Most of the time I got myself high on speed or acid before I went out to work, just so that I could overcome my fears.

When the police eventually caught up with us they arrested Brian and Dad, accusing them both of living off my immoral earnings. Everyone knew Dad was a pimp but I was forced to stand in the witness box for an hour and half with him staring long and hard at me as I finally plucked up the courage to give evidence against him. Even then I still hated and loved him in equal proportions. I was relieved that people now believed me and that he was going to have to pay for what he had done to me over the years, but I also felt guilty that I was betraying him and ensuring he went back to prison again.

Everyone, including the judge, could see that Brian was my boyfriend and not a paedophile in the way Dad was, but he had still broken the law by sleeping with me while I was underage and so he had to serve six months in jail while Dad was given four years.

I don’t think anyone in social services thought that I would wait for Brian, but I did, putting all my energies into finding new ways to escape from the care homes they put me in. Eventually, once Brian was free and I was seventeen, they admitted defeat and let us live together in Brian’s council flat, which was the moment when I fell pregnant with his child.

I desperately wanted a child, having already suffered a miscarriage the previous year. Most of all I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted my baby to have the best possible start in life and never be made to feel the way I had felt throughout my childhood. As the date of the birth drew closer my intentions became more and more serious and I began to realise that Brian was never going to be able to be a good and responsible father. He might be a lovely, kind man, but he would never hold down a proper job and I could see that his drink and drug problems were getting worse not better. Dad would soon be out of prison and I was terrified of being forced back into his clutches simply because I had no alternative. I didn’t want him to be allowed anywhere near my baby when it arrived.

I had wanted so much to be independent and to show the world, and Dad, that I was an adult and could manage on my own, but I realised the relationship with Brian wasn’t going to work and I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of the social services. I needed help. I hated the idea of people seeing me as a failure again and I was terrified they would insist on taking the baby away from me, but they responded graciously to my plea and eventually put me into a little flat on my own. So many people in the social services over the years had told me that they thought I could do better with my life, but I had never believed them, always allowing Dad’s words to undermine my confidence and make me suspicious of anyone who told me I was better than I thought, that I could make something of my life if I wanted to.

My baby, Brendan, was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t sleep at all the first night after his birth, just lying there staring at him, promising him I would do everything I possibly could to give him a decent life and that I would make sure he didn’t have to endure the sort of upbringing I’d been given. I convinced myself that just because Mum had left us and Dad had abused me and put me on the streets didn’t necessarily mean I was doomed to repeat all their mistakes. I told myself that by having such a wonderful baby to look after I would be one of the damaged children who managed to escape from their past. I had imagined that Dad was the only problem, not realising there would be other people and emotions lying in wait to ambush me.

In the euphoria of the first few hours with my baby I thought my problems were behind me–but they weren’t. I was eighteen years old but inside the tense, feisty teenager I had become I was still a sad, desperate child. Despite the aggressive, cheeky face I showed to the outside world, I was feeling as lost and alone in the world as I had when my father first raped me and then laughed at my pain, terrified now that the shadows of my past would catch up with me again, dragging me back into his world of scams, populated as it always was by hookers, addicts and drunks.

Chapter Two The Overdose

When I was a little girl, if anyone had asked what I wanted to do with my life I would have told them, ‘I want to get married and have four children’. I guess that was because Mum and Dad had had four of us and I wanted to make up for all the mistakes they had made, do everything completely differently to the way they had. Perhaps I was hoping to get a childhood for myself through my own children. As I hadn’t been able to do all those great parent/child things when I was the child, at least I would be able to do them as a mum.

But the reality was that after Brendan’s birth I was lonely and broke, and insecure about my parenting skills. I didn’t even seem to be able to make enough money to keep my new baby warm and safe without having to resort to shoplifting. I can still remember the sick feeling of guilt I experienced when I was caught stealing some bedding from a department store in Norwich. I had Brendan with me at the time and when they took me up to the police station I dissolved into helpless sobbing and hysteria because I thought they were going to take him away from me.

I was never a good shoplifter, although I was a lot better than my brother Terry in the days when we were both small and Dad used to send us out every day to steal his whisky or some food for our supper. Whereas Dad seemed to see nothing wrong in stealing at all, as though it was just a fact of life that we had to get used to, I always felt guilty and tried to wriggle out of it. I stole an eyeliner pencil for myself once and felt so bad about it I took it back the next day. I was even more scared of being caught returning it than I had been when I originally slid it into my pocket.

The fact that I was having to turn to shoplifting again in order to provide for my baby made me feel like even more of a failure, as though I was fulfilling all Dad’s worst predictions about how my future would be without him. However much I hated the way things were going, however, I also couldn’t see any way I would ever be able to turn my life round and make everything decent. Once you have become part of that world of thieving and drinking and prostitution, especially when it is all you have ever known or had experience of, it is very hard to break out.

Although I was physically safe in my tiny flat, and was no longer being forced to climb into cars with strange men, inside I still felt like the same little girl whose father had decided on the day of her birth to turn her into a street walker. Even though I loved my baby, Brendan, more than anything or anyone I often found the pain of living too much to bear.

Apart from Brendan I had no family to turn to for comfort as the empty hours ticked by in that lonely little flat. Mum was living locally and I could telephone her whenever I wanted but she might as well have been at the other end of the country for all the help she was able to give me. I used to go to see her once a week for a few months after Brendan was born but her new partner had made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with her children from the past so I could only visit when he was out at work. When she saw me struggling to cope it must have brought back memories of how she had been at my age, when she was weighed down with kids that she hardly knew how to look after, and constantly bullied by the man who was supposed to be the love of her life. It’s easy to see why she might want to shut out anything that reminded her of those times, and that perhaps made her feel guilty for the way in which she had abandoned her children. Whatever the reasons, I knew I was on my own with my problems.

The people at social services did their best to help me in every way they could, which meant we wouldn’t starve and we had a roof over our heads, but I was desperate to do better than that for my precious child. I couldn’t bear the thought that I could do no more than keep him alive. But what could I ever do to earn money? Dad had completely convinced me that I was no use to anyone and had ensured that I had no education or skills apart from street walking. The only thing I knew about was working on the Block, but returning to that option seemed too terrible to contemplate. I knew that I was lucky to have survived for as long as I had selling casual sex to strangers in cars. I dreaded the thought of being forced to go back to taking such enormous risks, but Dad had told me a million times that that was all I was good for, and in the increasingly frequent number of moments of self doubt I believed he was right.

Most children are lucky enough to have wise and kind guides to help them find their paths through life, mentors who have their best interests at heart and want to see them be happy and want to help them to thrive and succeed at whatever they choose to do. But what happens if the people you are forced to rely on for guidance at the very beginning of your life are not wise or kind? What if they are quite the opposite and do everything they can to tempt and force you down the wrong paths in life, being more interested in themselves and the gratification of their own desires?

No one can spend their whole lives blaming their parents for everything that goes wrong in their lives; after a while it comes down to the choices you make for yourself as an adult and you have to take responsibility for them, but how good or bad those choices are will very largely be determined by the foundations that have been laid in the early years of your life. I might have been eighteen years old when I had Brendan, but I still felt as completely lost as I had been at eight when I was forced to lie down beside Dad with those magazines and at thirteen when I sat in the cars of strangers and they did whatever they wanted to me.

One night when I was drowning in unpaid bills and utterly desperate for money, I left Brendan with a babysitter and went out onto the streets in search of motorists looking for business. The despair I felt as I climbed into those strangers’ cars was the deepest and darkest I had ever experienced. I didn’t ever want to go back to being that desperate. I only did it a couple of times but afterwards I sank into the blackest of depressions and decided I would rather end it all and let someone more responsible than me take over bringing up Brendan.

Since I was twelve or thirteen I had been cutting my arms with knives and any other sharp implement I could get my hands on. I just wanted to hurt myself because I thought I was so worthless I didn’t deserve to be treated any better, to punish myself for being such a terrible person. I suppose it also gave me some kind of control over my body in ways that I didn’t have otherwise. When the blood flowed, I always felt a sense of release, however momentary.

I started seriously trying to kill myself when I was about fourteen. The first time, I saved up paracetamol tablets by telling different people in the care home I was in that I had a headache or period pains and then swallowed them all one night but I was found and rushed to A & E to have my stomach pumped. I tried again not long afterwards but the same thing happened.

Whenever I was actually putting the tablets in my mouth I always intended to kill myself, but sometimes I would change my mind a few moments later. A kind of survival instinct cut in, making me panic and tell someone what I had done. They then raised the alarm and I was left with all the shame and embarrassment of having had my stomach pumped out and being given a load of lectures. With each failed attempt my self-esteem would shrink further.

Now, at the age of eighteen, I decided I had to make sure I died this time. I loved Brendan so much it hurt and I was terrified he was going to end up being damaged by whatever choices I made in life. Just looking at his perfect, innocent little face as I changed or fed him made me cry. But I had become increasingly certain I was the worst mother possible for him. He was helpless and trusted me completely but I believed that I had to let him go in order to give him a better chance in life than I had been given by my parents. I just wanted all the pain and shame to end and there only seemed to be one way to make that happen.

If I killed myself, Brendan would have a better life than I could ever give him and I would be released from my misery. I didn’t think I deserved to live. I believed I was worthless, because that was what I had always been told by Dad and virtually everyone else I came across, and I now felt that I was so useless as a mother that even Brendan would be better off without me. On the evidence of what had happened so far, I didn’t believe I was going to be capable of looking after him properly.

I didn’t want to kill myself with him in the flat since I had no idea how long it would be before anyone found my body. My first priority was to ensure that he was somewhere safe before I did the terrible deed and ended the horrible charade of my short life forever.

I always tried to hide from everyone the fact that I wasn’t coping but Doris, my social worker, had been able to see how much stress I was under beneath my seemingly cheerful, argumentative exterior. Doris had introduced me to a nice woman who worked as a foster mother and she had been doing a bit of babysitting for me, giving me a chance to get out and have a break now and then. As the darkness of my despair threatened to engulf me once and for all I took Brendan round to her house and asked if I could leave him with her for a while. She agreed immediately without asking any questions. She was a kind woman and I knew he would be in safe hands for as long as he was with her. I think perhaps I hoped that she would adopt him once I was gone, because she had already formed a bond with him.

It was agonising to say goodbye to the baby I loved more than anything in the world, to walk away from him feeling as if my insides were being physically torn from my body, but at the same time I was in a hurry now that I had made up my mind to get the whole thing over, eager to move on to a better place, or at least to be at peace, and to finally put an end to the pain. If Brendan was going to be better off being brought up by someone else I didn’t want to have to be around to watch it happening; I wouldn’t have been able to bear that. It was better that I acted quickly and decisively to end my life for everyone’s sake. He would be free to get on with his life and I would be free of the pain.

I took him from his pram on the pretext of checking he was dry and comfortable, and held him for as long as I could bear, drinking in the scent of his skin as I kissed him for the last time and passed him across to the kind foster mother who had no idea of the turmoil churning around inside my mind. I was always good at hiding what I was feeling, giving people the impression that I was on top of everything, that I didn’t have a care in the world.

After handing him into her care I left the house without looking back because I couldn’t bear to see his trusting little face watching me go, and I walked straight back to my flat. I didn’t want to think about anything else now that the final decision had been taken. It was a relief to be able to work on autopilot. The pain in my heart was so agonising I was frantic to numb it as quickly as possible.

I had been saving up paracetamol for weeks, knowing that this moment would come, that I would eventually have to admit defeat and give up Brendan and my life. Stockpiling tablets whenever the opportunity presented itself had been a habit of mine for many years. Knowing that I had them there was like knowing that there was an emergency exit available to me if life became intolerable. Having a potential way out sometimes made life seem a little more bearable during the years when I was with Dad or locked up in one children’s home or another.

That morning, the moment I was alone behind my own front door I swallowed the tablets in greedy mouthfuls, washing them down with swigs of cheap wine. Then I sat down and waited for them to take effect, relieved to have finally made the decision to give up the struggle and to go on to somewhere peaceful. I was in a confused and emotional state already and once the tablets started working their way into my system reality became even more blurred, the world around me drifting into a sort of comfortable haze, a bit like a waking dream. The pain was fading just as I had hoped and life began to float away from me.

I could hear the phone ringing but I couldn’t make any logical decision as to whether to answer it or not. In the end my hand just picked it up, like a robot, wanting to stop it from making such an irritating noise, and I put it to my ear. The deep voice on the other end was unfamiliar and I had to struggle to take in the words, forcing my brain to try to make sense of them and my mouth to respond in the way that the caller might expect. It sounded like a kind voice, someone who was trying to make a connection with me. It was probably only a few seconds but it seemed like an age before I realised it was a man called Rodney I had met a few days before, who had asked for my number. There must have been something comfortable and reassuring about him that had struck a chord because I had given him the number without hesitating, which I would never normally do with a stranger.

Who knows why he chose that moment to make a call? Maybe there was some higher force directing his actions, someone or something that wanted to stop me from doing what I was doing, or maybe it was just a lucky break.

I forced my brain to focus on what he was saying. It sounded as though he was asking me out. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I couldn’t accept the invitation because I would be dead in a few hours’ time. I don’t know if the words that were coming out of my mouth were even making sense by that stage as I strained to make normal conversation.

The call from Rodney gave me a cause to hope, a tiny straw to cling to. It sounded to my desperate ears as if he was my knight in shining armour. When you are as near to the edge of the precipice as I was, the smallest thing can tip you either way. Just hearing from another human being, knowing that someone out there thought it was worth picking up a phone to call me, that this man was actually wanting to get to know me, made things feel different. By the time I finished the conversation and hung up, my life no longer seemed to be the same terrible black hole of despair it had been just a few minutes earlier. I had even managed to make a date to meet him, but meanwhile the drugs I had put into my system were well into the process of closing my life down.

Now that things weren’t as painful and bleak as they had seemed before his call I no longer wanted to die but my head felt so heavy I wanted more than anything else to lie down and go to sleep. This stranger on the phone had thrown me a lifeline and I grabbed it, battling to stay awake, knowing that once I gave in to sleep that would be the end, that by the time anyone found me I would be long dead. I had to keep going, but the drugs had penetrated deep into my blood by then, relentlessly doing their work of shutting everything down. I had just enough brain cells functioning to know that I couldn’t do this on my own, I had to get help.

I didn’t have the strength left for more than one phone call by then. Not able to think of anyone else to turn to as I struggled to stay awake, I forced myself to concentrate for a few more seconds and dialled my mum’s number. If my brain had been functioning logically I would have tried to think of someone else. This was the woman who had disappeared for most of my childhood and although we were back in contact again, there was no maternal bond between us. But in those moments, as my life was slipping away, I wanted my mum to be the one who was there for me. No way would I ever have wanted to rely on her for support or advice if I had had a choice–but I didn’t. She was my only chance.

As soon as she answered I somehow managed to make her understand what I had done despite the fact that I could hardly get the words out. She made it clear to me that she was pissed off to have me messing up her day but a few minutes after hanging up the phone and lying back on the verge of surrendering to sleep, I heard the distant wail of an ambulance siren responding to her call. I was drifting in and out of consciousness by the time it arrived at my door and fell silent, replaced by the sounds of running feet and banging doors. At that moment I gave in to the tablets, knowing I was no longer alone as I slipped into unconsciousness, only vaguely aware of feeling myself being lifted onto a stretcher.

In hospital, after I had my stomach pumped, a psychiatrist came to talk to me, and then within a day they were releasing me back to my old life and all the problems that came with it. I was terrified that now they would take Brendan into care but to my surprise, Doris gave such a glowing report on my mothering skills that they didn’t even mention it. They said they weren’t surprised I felt suicidal after everything I had been through in my life and that they would look around for more ways to support me.

I’d been given another chance. Now it was up to me to try and make it work.

Chapter Three A Ready-Made Family

When Rodney first spotted me from the window of his van as I pushed Brendan’s pram along the pavement, there was no way either of us could tell anything about the other. He must have seen an eighteen-year-old girl that he fancied and guessed from the fact that I was pushing a baby around that I was a mum, but he wouldn’t have been able to even begin to imagine what the first eighteen years of my life had been like and that beneath the aggressive, cheeky exterior that I showed to the world there lurked a damaged little girl who lacked all self-esteem and any hope for being able to build herself a better future.

Likewise, I just saw a bloke in a van who had asked for my telephone number. I’d seen enough men through the windows of cars since I was twelve to know that they were seldom planning anything pleasant. He didn’t look like anything special. I couldn’t tell then if he was a knight in shining armour sent to save me from my past, or yet another useless man who was only after one thing and would either let me down or treat me badly. To be honest I wouldn’t have given it that much consideration at the time, my thoughts being dominated by my own inner demons and my worries about how I was going to feed and look after my baby.

Rodney was a short, stockily built man, and not bad looking. You wouldn’t say he was exactly handsome but he had a way about him that was attractive to people. My previous experiences of men hadn’t only been with callous abusers like my father and the many punters and kerb-crawlers that he steered me towards over the years. There had been kind men too, like Brian, but in the end even the good ones turned out to be a bit hopeless at managing their lives, and were completely unable to offer me any of the guidance or support I needed as I stumbled to find a way to give my child a decent start in life. These men were as lost as I was, more so in most cases. Nearly everyone I knew had been led into using drink or drugs unwisely as they searched for ways to escape from the grim reality of their lives and themselves. Their addictions usually hastened the collapse of everything else in their lives, blighting their relationships, draining them of money and often making them unemployable. There was no way of telling if this man who had shouted out to me from his van was going to be any different or whether he would just add another level of pain to my life.

After I got out of hospital following the overdose I met Rodney for our first date in a pub in Norwich. He told me he came from a big gypsy family, who were all very close-knit, and that he came as part of a complete package, with a ready-made family of three children. There was Shiralee (more commonly known as ‘Fred’), who was eight, Roddo, five, and Billy, who was two. To complete the family unit Fred also had a Jack Russell terrier called Midge, who had been with her since she was a baby and seldom if ever left her side. I told him about Brendan and about the fact that I had no contact with his father any more. We’d been chatting like this for a while when who should walk in but my Dad, now released from jail.

I introduced them and they got on like a house on fire, Rodney doing his best to make a good impression with the father of the girl he was interested in. It was only when we got back from the pub that night that I plucked up my courage and confided in Rodney about everything that Dad had done to me as a child, how he had raped me constantly and then started selling me when I was just thirteen. Even for someone as accepting and worldly as Rodney my childhood stories were a terrible shock. I told him about the first time Dad sold me, before he took me up to Ber Street, and how he had actually helped to hold me down.

‘He had a friend called Peter,’ I explained. ‘A big, fat, smelly Irishman who was always working away from home and always had plenty of cash in his pockets when he came back.’

I could see that Rodney was becoming tense, as if trying to control his anger so as not to frighten me, forcing himself to listen to something that he knew was going to be horrific.

‘They took me out drinking with them one night. At the end of the evening we went back to Peter’s flat, picking up a Chinese on the way. It was a horrible, filthy place but I didn’t care because I was happy to be with Dad. We were sitting on the settee, eating the Chinese when Peter started making a pass.’

I could still remember the whole night with horrible clarity, even though I had been very drunk. I remembered how I felt all excited to be treated like a grown-up when they took me out, like one of them. Peter’s flat was a horrible, filthy place, where you’d expect to find winos living, but I didn’t care because I was happy to be with Dad.

When Peter reached over to grab me I tried to get his hands off without making a fuss, thinking that Dad would punch him if he wasn’t careful and wanting to avoid the evening turning into a brawl. The next thing I knew I was thrown on the floor amongst the scattered Chinese food cartons and Dad was pinning me down by the arms while his friend did what he wanted to me. I was struggling and shouting and Dad was telling me to ‘shut up and relax’ because it was going to happen either way. I knew at that moment he had sold me and I remember staring at the overturned cartons on the carpet around me while it was going on and thinking that was all I was worth to my own father.

As I told Rodney the story I noticed that he was clenching and unclenching his fists, his lips tight and his eyes narrowed. Part of me was ashamed to let him know such terrible things about me, but the other part was relieved to have someone who cared and who was willing to listen.

‘You mustn’t see him any more, Ria. That man doesn’t deserve the name “dad” after what he’s done to you. I can’t believe I was chatting away to him earlier. I’d have taken him outside if I’d known.’

He made me promise that I would stop seeing Dad and I was happy to agree. Even on our first date I realised that Rodney was different, that he was a man who seemed to know what he wanted from life and how he was going to get it, and I liked that. It felt like this might be the start of something important.

From the beginning Rodney was eager to start a relationship and it seemed to me as though he was the answer to all my dreams. I had always said I wanted to get married and have four children and now it looked as though my prayers had been answered in the most dramatic way.

Rodney immediately took charge of my life, moving into the flat with Brendan and me. I asked why we couldn’t move to his but he explained that he lived in a caravan, and that there wouldn’t be room for all of us. He was proud of his travellers’ roots and was often disparaging of those of us who had been born and brought up in houses, calling us ‘Gorjers’. But he seemed more keen to get into my flat, and any other house that I might be able to arrange for us as a family, than he was to live in a caravan or on the road. But that was all fine with me.

The next step was for me to meet his kids, and that all went perfectly. He saw them every weekend and during the school holidays, and so they would come round to stay in my flat at those times. Almost overnight I had gone from being suicidal, alone and frightened to being at the centre of a social whirlwind. Not only did I now have a man in my life, I also had four children, just as I had always imagined I would–plus a dog. Ever since I could remember I had wanted to be part of a proper family. I had no real idea what that would consist of; I just knew that I had never had one in the past.

At eighteen I probably seemed more like a friend or a big sister to Rodney’s kids than a new mum, and all three of them accepted me immediately. I’ve heard lots of horror stories about the difficulties new wives have with their stepchildren, but I never had anything but friendliness and support from any of them. They also accepted Brendan as their new little brother without seeming to give the matter a moment’s thought, happy to share their family with both of us. It was wonderful to watch Brendan’s little face lighting up when they played with him and made him feel loved. They must have been so secure in the love of their dad and mum that they didn’t feel remotely threatened or resentful about Brendan and me suddenly turning up in the middle of their lives.

My flat only had two bedrooms but we would all squash in somehow when the kids were there. Brendan had a cot and sometimes Billy would sleep in that and they would all swap and change around as the mood took them, usually ending up in the double bed, so that Rodney and I had to have the couch in the living room or a mattress on the floor. It didn’t bother us; it was all about mucking in together as a family. I liked the times I had on my own with Brendan, but both of us always looked forward to the weekends and the other kids arriving, bringing a rush of excitement and distraction in through the door with them.

Brendan became just as keen to be around them as they were on him and he would cry inconsolably when Rodney dropped his new brothers and sister back to their mother at the end of each weekend because he would want to go with them. The others felt the same way, not liking it when they were separated.

The main reason why childhood had been such hell for me and my brothers was because both our parents always put their own feelings before everything else, never thinking of the effect their actions were having on us. Mum left Dad because she couldn’t bear to have him forcing her onto the game all the time and, it seemed, without thinking what he would do to us once she was gone, and he used us as punch bags and ultimately turned me into a source of income in order to make his own life more comfortable. I was determined not to be like them. I wanted to always put my children first.

If there was one thing that made the idea of being with Rodney irresistible it was those children. With them around the house I could recreate the life that my brothers and I had never been allowed to enjoy because we had been split in half, with Terry and me staying with Dad and being kept apart from Chris and Glen once they were fostered out. We never had the chance to be one big noisy, chaotic, happy family. Even when we had all lived together in one house with Mum and Dad I had never had a chance to get to know Chris and Glen because they were locked upstairs in their bedroom.

My little council flat, which had seemed so deadly quiet and cold when it was just me and a sleeping Brendan, now buzzed with family life. I soon realised that Rodney was a brilliant father in many ways, totally supportive and ‘there’ for his kids. It was a startling contrast for me when I thought back to all the hours that Dad had spent inside pubs while Terry Junior and I either sat outside or waited at home, with no idea when we would see him again or what mood he would be in. Now that I was watching a good father at work it made me feel all the sadder for the things that I had missed out on.

Another great benefit to being with Rodney was that he had money, and he was generous with it. The ways in which he earned a living were probably similar to the ways his ancestors had been doing it for centuries. When I met him he was buying and selling cars and trucks without bothering much about official details such as registration papers. He always had a wallet full of cash in his pocket, although most of the time I had no idea where it had all come from, and as far as I could make out he never bothered with any paperwork. He had never learned to read or write, which was like my father, who didn’t learn until he went to prison as a grown man. The difference was that whereas being illiterate embarrassed Dad, it didn’t bother Rodney in the least. When we first met he said he’d teach me to drive and I could teach him to read and write in exchange, but although I did learn to drive he never got around to reading. He went to adult education lessons once to try to learn, but he didn’t have the patience to persevere, especially as he was able to manage perfectly well without it.

It was an attractive, carefree attitude to life which appealed to someone of my age, much as I used to be impressed by Dad’s swagger when I was a small child gazing with awe as he got a friend to drive him in a Jaguar to pick up his dole money, or he would ostentatiously light a cigar with a ten-pound note after a win on the horses. Rodney had the same lack of interest in convention or authority, but without my father’s tendency to show off and boast about it. It was just the way he was. I would never know what car I would be driving from one week to the next. I could come home of an evening and find he’d sold the car I’d been planning to go shopping in.

‘So?’ he’d say when I complained, unable to see what the problem was. ‘Take the truck.’

I actually enjoyed that side of his character, the unpredictability and the spontaneity. Once he’d bought a truck or a car he would immediately be stripping it down and changing the engine over, which was a skill he had taught himself over the years of dealing with scrap vehicles in places like his dad’s yard. I guess he must have been tinkering with engines since he was tiny and understood instinctively how they worked. I once had to phone him from a petrol station where I’d stopped for fuel because I couldn’t remember whether the van I was driving had a petrol or a diesel engine now.

Like his dad he was always working, always thinking, always doing deals, always looking for an angle. It was nice to have a man like that looking after me, having never been able to rely on my idle father for anything, never even knowing if there would be food on the table at the end of a day.

Money went out as easily through Rodney’s hands as it came in, which sometimes made me nervous. And he was never one for paying the bills that I thought were important, like our rent or the poll tax. If I challenged him he would shrug and claim it was the ‘traveller’ in him, firmly keeping his wallet in his pocket and leaving me to find the money somewhere else if I was so keen to pay it. He might have thousands of pounds on him some days but if I asked him for some rent he would always say no. I didn’t like that. Ever since having Brendan I had always wanted everything straight and above board, all my bills paid. After my childhood I didn’t ever want to be dealing with bailiffs or debt collectors or social workers again if I could help it. I wanted things to be secure and legal. Since Brendan was born, I had this deep-seated fear of social services saying I was an unfit mother and coming to take him away from me and I didn’t want to give them any excuses to do so.

Even with all this new family life buzzing around me Brendan was still the centre of my life and I was determined not to do anything to risk losing him or to mess up his chances in life. If I ever did get into debt it would worry me incredibly until I had managed to pay it off. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to think that I had failed in my attempt to be independent and to be a good mother. I had done enough failing in my life.

Most of all I wanted to prove to Dad that I could manage without him. Ever since I was a small child he had told me how useless I was and how I would never be able to manage without him. That had been how he had managed to force me to keep silent when he was abusing me himself, and how he could get me to go out to sell myself on the streets over and over again despite the fact that I hated it and was terrified every time. I never wanted to give him any chance to say that I had messed up my life once I’d left him so it made me nervous whenever Rodney took risks with my home and security. The worst thing would be to have to go back to Dad and ask for shelter, mainly because I didn’t want to have him anywhere near Brendan. I had to keep Brendan safe and protected at all costs, which meant I had to do everything possible to keep a roof over my head.

Rodney might not have liked wasting his money on annoyances like rent and poll tax, but when it came to spending on life’s pleasures he was never mean–far from it. After so many years of scrimping and scraping and having to sell my body or steal just to survive, it was like having a ten-ton weight lifted from my shoulders. For the first time in my life I was able to walk around a supermarket and just put whatever I wanted into the trolley, knowing that Rodney would happily pay the bill when we got to the till. For so many years I had felt like an outsider in this world, like some Victorian street urchin with my nose pressed up against a shop window, watching other people leading lives of what seemed to me to be unimaginable luxury but which was in fact just normal. Suddenly I could behave like all these normal people. It was a heady experience. I’d always been more used to buying one or two items at a time down the corner shop, existing from one makeshift meal to the next, always wondering if I had enough change in my pocket to manage till the next day. When you have been brought up in a house where there was never any money and where you only went into supermarkets in order to nick drink for your father, it felt like a dream come true; a shopping experience amongst the packed supermarket aisles that would be a chore for most people was like a day out in a theme park for me.

In one jump I had gone straight from being a suicidal teenage single mum, struggling to survive from day to day, to being a full-time stepmother and wife from the first day that Rodney moved into my life. In many ways, when I was busy and distracted, it felt like it was the most natural thing in the world, as if none of the pain and anger and resentment in my past had ever existed. Whenever Rodney was in charge there was always too much going on for me to have time for introspection and self-doubt, too much work to be done, too many people talking at once, too many surprises. There was no time to think about Dad or to remember the terrible times he had put me through, the memories that still haunted my nightmares. I thought that was a good thing. I thought that with Rodney’s help I really was going to be able to put everything behind me and be happy. There were moments when I actually felt like I might be a worthwhile person after all.

One of the first things I had learned about the new man in my life was that he was from a big gypsy family. I guess I had a fair number of preconceived ideas about gypsies, probably most of them emanating from Dad, although God knows no one in our family was in any position to look down on anyone else. I had always been told they were dirty and dishonest and aggressive and so I have to admit I felt nervous at the prospect of meeting Rodney’s extended family. I guess I never expected people to like me or love me because that had always been my experience. My own mother had left me, my father spent his whole time telling me how worthless and unlovable I was and his mother, my grandmother, never made any secret of how much she disliked having me around. I had no reason to think that Rodney’s parents would be any more welcoming but I needn’t have worried. They were great, accepting Brendan and me without a moment’s hesitation.

As soon as Rodney and I became a couple, Brendan and I were considered part of their family. They never asked me any questions about where I came from or who my family were; they were totally accepting and non-judgemental. It felt as though I could start my life again with a clean slate. I didn’t need to worry that they were talking about me behind my back or feeling sorry for me or disapproving of me because they were never like that. They weren’t interested in anything that I might have done or that might have been done to me in the past, only in how I was now, just living in the present, dealing with the day-to-day business of making a living and looking after the baby. It was a wonderful feeling to be with people who weren’t trying to bully or manipulate or humiliate me, who didn’t want anything from me.

Rodney’s parents lived in a caravan, which they had parked on a patch of land they owned out in the countryside, about eight miles outside Norwich. When Rodney first took me out there I was gob-smacked by how beautiful the location was. The caravan was immaculate, cleaner than any home I had ever been into, and full of bone china cups and sparkling cut-glass vases. In fact, it hardly looked lived in at all, more like a show home to be admired rather than actually used. The family spent most of their time in a shed that they had built on the site and which they had hooked up to a generator for electricity and heat. They used the shed as their office, their kitchen and a family meeting place. There were always a group of men sitting around talking about business and drinking tea, often with children running around at their feet.

I was amazed by how hygienic everything was as I watched Rodney’s mum and the other women use different bowls for everything; the one designated for washing dishes was never used for anything else. I guess it comes from living on the road and not always having the luxury of permanent running water.

I had a look round Rodney’s own caravan, which was parked on the site, but we never lived there, as my flat was a lot more comfortable. When I was feeling insecure (as I often was) I wondered whether my flat was as much of an attraction to him as I was, but in those early days and weeks I tried to push away my worries. My dreams had come true. I had a wonderful man, with a big family who accepted me as one of them, and four children to take care of. Relationships with new partners are always strange adventures. You set out hopefully, knowing nothing about the person you have just met, and gradually travel further and deeper into the complex jungles of emotions caused by whatever has happened in their pasts, and in yours.

Rodney’s dad, Dick Drake, ran the main part of his business from the land around his caravan, stripping down old cars and trucks, repairing them if he could or dealing in the scrap metal that he was able to salvage. He was always working, always making a living wherever he could, always keeping his eye out for an opportunity to make a profitable deal. He owned another scrapyard further away from Norwich in Buxton, where I worked with Rodney all through our first winter together. Their plan was to clear the land because they were trying to get planning permission for houses so they could sell it on to a developer at a profit. There were hundreds of rusty old lorries and cars piled up there that needed to be dismantled, carted off and sold.

Despite the fact that it was hard work, especially on cold days, it seemed a romantic lifestyle to me, nothing like I had imagined it would be from all the things I had heard being said about gypsies in the pubs by people who didn’t actually know any. Everyone who knew Dick loved him because he was the genuine article, a tiny, wiry little man, only weighing seven or eight stone, with a trilby hat permanently set at a jaunty angle on his head, always laughing, always friendly.

I soon learned that all the gypsy families stick together and are totally loyal to one another. I guess it happens with any people who have been as persecuted down the ages as they have. Having come from parents who could never be relied on for anything by anyone, not even to protect us or be there for us, it was a revelation. Such ferocious loyalty has its downside too, of course, and can often lead to disagreements breaking out when family members clash with the outside world and others wade in to support them, particularly when there is drink involved. There were a lot of fights going on, especially when we went out to the pubs. I had seen fights before when I was a child, and I had seen a lot of violence at home with Dad, but I had never seen anything like the level of violence the gypsies were capable of when they felt they were being threatened or disrespected. Even the women fought like men, never hesitating to get stuck into the thick of it, landing punches and doling out vigorous kickings to anyone who got in their way. I witnessed a lot of pubs being wrecked during those years as every stick of furniture was smashed up and turned into a weapon.

Rodney himself was never a man to go looking for trouble, but he was never one to back down if it came along either. If an argument was nothing to do with us he might walk away, but more often there would be a reason why he would be at the centre of it. I took my role as his partner very seriously and would stand by him in public whatever happened, even if it meant landing a few good punches myself. I had some experience of fighting because Dad would actually encourage Terry and me to fight when we were little, urging us on to punch each other properly and not just pull hair and scratch. I remember one time I made Terry’s lip bleed with a punch and I felt terrible about it but Dad praised me and wouldn’t let Terry hit me back.

There was never any telling when his violence would explode. I remember an argument with a lodger who had eaten Dad’s chocolate biscuits by mistake. He beat the poor guy to a pulp in front of us, splattering the sitting room in his blood as he punched and kicked and threw him around, getting all his stuff and hurling it out into the street.

In some ways it was good to release some of the anger that I had pent up inside me after all the years when I had been unable to fight back against Dad because I was too little, too powerless. That’s why I sometimes let myself be drawn in to fights, particularly when it was to defend another member of Rodney’s family.

He was a real believer in families sticking together and although he continued to insist I had no contact with Dad, he worked hard at trying to repair my relationship with Mum. She had broken up with her partner now, so she was able to come out with us without fear of angering him. If it was Mothers’ Day or Christmas, Rodney would be the one telling me to ring Mum up and invite her out for dinner. It was as though he wanted to build a relationship with her to make up for the fact that he didn’t get on that well with his own mother. I was happy for him to do that because I wanted to have her in my life and was pleased that she always agreed to whatever we suggested. I wanted my children to know their grandmother. After Mum left home I hadn’t seen or heard from my maternal grandparents again for eight years. I remembered all too acutely what it felt like to have no relations who would send me a card on my birthday or a present at Christmas, and I was determined to do everything I could to give my children as big an extended family as possible.

My father’s mother was the only grandparent who had been around in my childhood and she had never even pretended that she liked me. Dad had been the centre of her world and when I finally told the police about what he had done to me she never forgave me. When he was taken to court and convicted for living off my immoral earnings she was waiting outside to scream abuse at me as I came out in front of the whole world, calling me a whore and a liar. She knew everything about Dad and his lifestyle, so she knew that I was telling the truth, but she couldn’t forgive me for sticking up for myself and for denouncing Dad in public. I suppose she thought I had betrayed her family in some way.

I wanted Brendan to have nicer memories of his grandmother than that. I could never understand why Mum’s parents had wanted nothing more to do with us once Mum had left. Why had they not even sent us cards at Christmas or on our birthdays? Why had they acted as though we didn’t exist? What could I possibly have done to offend them so terribly by the time I was six years old that they would want nothing more to do with me? Their disappearance had served to reinforce the idea in my head that Dad must be right, that I must be worthless and unlovable and that he was the only one who was ever going to care for me. I never wanted Brendan to think such thoughts about himself for even a second.

I have to admit that Mum could be good company on these family outings, if I could forget about all the resentment I had stored up inside me about what had happened in the past. When we were all together as a family and everything was buzzing it was often possible to ignore the little voices in the back of my head that were goading me on to ask her why she treated us the way she did. While part of me longed for us to all get on like one big happy family, another part always wanted to punish her in some way for her crimes against her children. The logical part of my brain would tell me that there was no point thinking like that. Rodney was right; what was past was past and there was no point dwelling on it. But those voices were always there, even if I managed to drown them out with noise and distraction for most of the time.

I’m not saying Mum’s life was easy, but then whose life is? Once I was a mother myself I couldn’t understand how she could bear to let eight years drift by without even trying to do something to help her own children. When you have children of your own running around it focuses your mind on what happened to you when you were their age and makes you see things afresh. There was no way I would let Brendan anywhere near a monster like my father, not even with me there to protect him, so how could she have left us completely alone with him like that?

I didn’t ask her, though. Not then, at least.

Chapter Four Rodney and Me

Rodney was a brilliant family man. His commitment to his children was total and from the first moment we got together he included Brendan in that. Whenever the kids were with us he would be coming up with ideas for things to do with them, like driving off into the countryside, all of us piled into the cab of one of his trucks together, and having a picnic. Or we would go for a barbecue on the beach. He would always include Mum in these outings as well, arranging to pick up her and my young half-brother Adam who had been born in 1981, when I was fifteen.

Rodney might have been a bit stricter with discipline sometimes than I thought was absolutely necessary, but the kids all appeared to forgive him the odd smack and had grown used to being shouted at when they didn’t obey him immediately. He insisted on instant obedience from all of us, but I was more than used to that. I had spent endless hours locked in the coal shed at home when I was small for some petty or imagined misdemeanour: sitting shivering in the dark, terrified by every sound but too frightened to call out to be released because it would result in a terrible beating, and desperate to win back Dad’s approval. I knew all about the tyrannical ways in which some fathers chose to rule over their families. Although Rodney’s kids were always respectful of him, and cautious about upsetting him, I could see they weren’t actually frightened of him in the way Terry and I had been of our father. They could have a laugh and a joke with him in a way I could never have dreamed of with mine.

There are always people in any extended family or group of friends who are keen to stir up trouble for a newcomer to their social circle, as much for their own entertainment as anything I guess, and malicious voices were quick to tell me that Rodney’s ex-wife Sue and I were bound to end up clashing. They told me, with mock concern for my welfare, that Rodney was still in love with her and that Sue was certain to resent me having anything to do with her children. I didn’t like having this threat hanging over my head and I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Rodney about any of it, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Plucking up all my courage I went round to her house to see her, wanting to set the record straight, to clear the air and make sure she didn’t think she could take any liberties with me just because I was young. If there was one thing I had learned during my years of going in and out of care homes, it was that you had to stick up for yourself from the first moment you arrived in a new environment if you didn’t want to end up being walked all over. In the past it had led to me getting a bit of a reputation for being hard in some of the institutions I had been in, when inside I had been no more than a scared, confused and insecure child.

The moment Sue opened her front door to me with a beaming smile on her beautiful face I knew we were going to get on. She invited me in as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had been looking forward to getting to know me ever since she first heard I was on the scene. The moment I voiced my worries she assured me there was no way she would ever consider going back to Rodney, however much he might want it, and it was easy to believe her.

‘To be honest,’ she told me, ‘I’m really glad that he’s found someone else. Now perhaps he’ll leave me alone and stop pestering me to go back to him.’

She introduced me to her new boyfriend, Kevin, who was only sixteen–a good few years younger than her. He was a gorgeous-looking lad and I could immediately see why she wouldn’t be bothered about losing Rodney to me. At the time a lot of other people believed that Sue and Kevin’s relationship couldn’t last because of the age gap, but they were obviously totally in love.

The gossips and mischief-makers were just as wrong about Sue and me clashing because we never had so much as a cross word about the kids or anything else. From that day onwards we became best friends and got on so well that sometimes she and I would actually go together to the kids’ parent/teacher meetings at the school. It made other people laugh to see us side by side but we didn’t care and, more importantly, neither did the kids. I guess she must have been about the same age I was when she first met Rodney, so she understood very well a lot of how I felt and what I was going through as the years went on. Maybe she felt sorry for me because she knew what lay in store and because she had managed to escape to a relationship that was so much better.

During that first winter when Rodney and I were together, I went to work with him at the scrapyard. That was the way with all the wives in his family and I was always ready to do what he asked, even on the days when we were working in snow and ice and I thought my fingers were going to fall off every time I had to grip some freezing cold piece of metal and lug it onto a van. Rodney was a hard task-masker, expecting everyone else to work as hard as he did himself. He got the kids working for him too as soon as they were old enough and strong enough to lift things around. If he got home late from a job he would immediately send them out to load or unload the lorry for him. He would not tolerate any arguing or complaining. It was tough for them but it seemed acceptable because he worked so hard himself. It wasn’t like Dad putting me to work on the streets and then disappearing into the nearest pub with his mates, only popping out occasionally to make sure that I was pulling in the punters and not hanging back in the shadows. Rodney managed to make it seem as though we were all working in the same family business, pulling together towards a common goal.

Sometimes during the week, when the other kids were at school or back with Sue, I would take Brendan with me when we went to work, and he and I would play together in the cab of the lorry while Rodney laboured outside. Rodney liked to have us around for company and to keep an eye on me. He always liked to be surrounded by friends or family wherever he was. Sometimes, when there was a lot for me to do at the job site, I would leave Brendan with a babysitter if I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on him while I was working. Although I loved him to bits it was still nice to have the occasional respite from continuous baby talk.

In the summer months most of Rodney’s jobs were to do with gardening, especially laying out patios and driveways; he was a skilful craftsman whenever he got the chance to show it, always doing a good job for his customers. My jobs would usually be to drive the van or mix the cement, or do any odd chore he asked of me. Sometimes we would be clearing away scrap, like the old vehicles in Dick’s yard, and my first job would be to get the wheels off. I grew strong from the physical labour of it and I liked how that felt. I felt as though he needed me, as though I had a role in his life, and it seemed like useful, honourable labour, not like the furtive, grubby work that Dad made me do with the men he made me sell my services to.

A couple of times a year Rodney and I would go to the horse market, held in the cattle market in Norwich, where all the old boys like Dick would be sitting around drinking and singing in the same way their ancestors must have been doing for centuries. It seemed very different to the sordid, claustrophobic little world of hookers, drunks and ne’er-do-wells that my dad used to live in. Dad liked nothing better than to be thought of as ‘a bit of a character’, always showing off and trying to attract a crowd in whatever pub he was in, but Dick didn’t have to try that hard because everyone was automatically enchanted by him. After the sale had finished everyone would gather in the pub, The Norfolk Dumpling, and have a singalong and a good old drink. Quite often one of the little Shetland ponies would be brought into the pub to share in the fun. The children loved it.

Dick battled for years to get permission to build on the site of the Buxton scrapyard, even taking his case to the Court of Human Rights, claiming that he was being discriminated against because he was a gypsy. His perseverance paid off and he was eventually successful, but the deal didn’t finally go through till after his death in 1989. Now they’ve built bungalows on the site and named it Drake’s Loke in his honour. It was a shame he didn’t live to see the fruits of his labours.

Dick’s funeral was an amazing event, with travellers and relatives arriving in lorries from every corner of the country to pay their respects, partying long into the night to celebrate the life of a man who everyone seemed to have loved. No one could find a bad word to say about him, living or dead. According to the traditions of gypsy law, Dick’s caravan should have been burned after he died but it never happened for some reason and Rodney’s younger brother moved in and took over running the yard. Phoebe moved into a house in Buxton and Rodney and I got on with our own lives and our own family.

Anyone meeting me during those years would have assumed I was a full-blooded gypsy wife. I jangled with the gold jewellery and sovereign rings that Rodney would give me. I would be tanned from working in the outdoors and I hardly ever bothered to wear shoes when we were out and about, enjoying the freedom of bare feet, feeling like I was being a bit of a rebel. Rodney didn’t allow me to do anything that might attract other men, like wearing make-up or skirts, but that didn’t bother me too much as I had no sense of personal identity at that stage anyway. I only really existed as his woman and the kids’ mother. I also liked the fact that it was very different to my days with Dad, when he used to make me get all dressed up in his prostitute friends’ clothes and heels, and paint my face when I was as young as twelve. He would take me to parties like that to show me off, flirting with me as though I was his girlfriend, paying me compliments, pleased to see other men eyeing up the goods that he was soon going to be selling, or helping himself to as soon as we got home. Because Dad spent so much time telling me how fat, ugly and unlovable I was, I partly enjoyed it when he seemed pleased with the way I looked, but at the same time I already knew it was wrong and spooky for him to be paying me that sort of attention.

With Rodney it was completely the opposite and I liked that protectiveness to start with. I felt pleased that he loved me enough to be jealous of other men, instead of being happy to sell me to anyone with the price of a few drinks in their pocket, as Dad had been. Despite my low self-esteem I had always been good at putting on a brave face to the outside world and was always happy to chat to other people. Although I was pleased that Rodney was protecting me, I began to get confused when he was angry with me for talking to other men in normal social situations like pubs or shops. If I even put on a bit of lipstick when we went out together he would immediately accuse me of having an affair and would turn it into a big argument.

‘I saw the way you were looking at him,’ he would shout once he got me back home. ‘You were leading him on, flirting with him.’

‘I was just talking to him,’ I would protest, completely unable to understand what was going wrong between us and why he didn’t trust me.

As time went by it started to make me mad because I had never given him the slightest reason to think that I would ever be unfaithful to him. I hated people who messed around like that because I had seen how unhappy Mum and Dad had made each other. Although it was intimidating sometimes, his possessiveness did in a way make me feel secure, but this self-confidence that I was beginning to build was badly shaken one day when I discovered that Rodney had slept with the babysitter, Tina.

Tina and I were friends and used to take turns babysitting for one another. I first felt uneasy about her relationship with Rodney one evening when we went round to collect Brendan, and Rodney commented on some semi-naked photos of her that were stuck on her fridge door. They had quite an intimate giggle about them and a few days later Rodney picked a fight with me and stormed out, saying he was going to stay at his caravan.

Walking past Tina’s house a bit later I spotted his truck outside, which was odd because I’d talked to her earlier and she’d told me she was going out for the evening.

I let myself into the house as I normally would when I was picking up Brendan, and there were Rodney and the children sitting round the table having a meal. The kids were all in a state of undress, having had a bath, so it was obvious they were planning on staying over. Rodney and Tina made no secret of the fact that they were having a fling and I felt doubly betrayed, by my man and by my friend.

This was exactly the sort of pain that I had been hoping Rodney would protect me from and it brought back a million memories of my time with Dad, reminding me of all the reasons why I hated the way he and his friends behaved so casually about sex. We had an incredible row and from then on I kept Brendan with me nearly all the time rather than hiring another babysitter and putting temptation in Rodney’s way. There was never any question that I would take him back–I needed him too much–but once someone has betrayed you, however, you can never feel quite the same about them again. Trust in a relationship, I believe, has to be an absolute; you either have it or you don’t; there are no degrees in between.

In my heart I knew he had been unfaithful to me at other times too and I realised that since I didn’t have the courage to leave him I’d have to put up with it and try to ignore it. He didn’t even seem terribly concerned about hiding it from me after that. Perhaps he felt it was his right as a man. It certainly wasn’t a subject he was prepared to discuss with me. All the confidence that had been building inside me, when I thought I had found a knight in shining armour to protect me, was draining away, leaving me feeling vulnerable and worthless all over again.

Despite whatever he might be up to himself when the opportunity arose, Rodney wanted to have me somewhere where he could keep an eye on me every hour of every day, and he would become more and more possessive if he thought I was even passing the time of day with any other men. Although I was still mistaking his behaviour for a kind of love it was making life difficult, making me feel stifled and restricted, as though I had no more freedom than I’d had when I was in Dad’s power.

One day I had been out shopping for hours and when I came back I discovered that my period had started and I’d forgotten to buy any tampons. Rodney was home by then, outside in the garden with a couple of mates.

‘I’m just nipping up the shop,’ I told him as I headed back to the car, not wanting to go into any more detail in front of the other men.

‘No, you’re not,’ he replied. ‘You’ve been out all day.’

‘You can’t tell me I can’t go up the shop,’ I said. ‘I need to go.’

‘You’re seeing somebody,’ he shouted. ‘You’re not going out again. What could you need when you’ve already been out shopping all day?’

‘I need some fucking Tampax,’ I screamed at the top of my voice, no longer caring about being discreet, wanting to embarrass him in front of his mates to make him realise he was being stupid.

But he still wasn’t having it and told one of his mates to go down the shop and buy them for me, which made the whole thing even more embarrassing for all of us.

‘Get back in that house!’ he ordered me.

There were days when I didn’t feel like going to work with Rodney, just wanting to stay at home and look after Brendan rather than sitting around in the cab of the van in some unknown part of town, but he was always adamant.

‘You’re not staying here on your own,’ he said. ‘What are you planning to do anyway?’

‘I could take Brendan out in the pushchair for a walk,’ I said, fed up with being bossed about all the time, needing some space away from Rodney and his mates. ‘It’ll be nice for him to get some fresh air.’

‘No, you’re bloody not! I’m taking the pushchair with me,’ Rodney said, snatching it up before I could get to it. ‘So if you don’t come with me you’ll be staying in all day.’

That made me cross. I might have liked Rodney’s possessiveness at the beginning, but this was stupid and felt more like bullying than love, more the way I remembered Dad behaving, bringing a thousand ugly memories to the surface. I started to shout back at him, genuinely angry, not for a moment expecting what was to come next. Rodney was used to total obedience from all of us. He was only willing to put up with my back-chat for so long before his temper snapped. I pushed it too far this time and suddenly he punched me in the face with all his strength in order to put a definite end to the conversation. I didn’t see the blow coming and for a moment I was too shocked to even register the pain as I hurtled backwards off my feet.

In that split second everything changed and I became a victim once more. Everything good that he had done for me was shattered with that one blow. There was nowhere I could be safe, not even my home, and no one I could feel safe with. I lay there feeling betrayed and destroyed, cowering in case he tried to hit me again, too shocked to respond in any way.

Leaving me lying there he stormed out of the flat to work, carrying the pushchair with him, no doubt feeling that he had succeeded in making his point.

I don’t know why I was so shocked because I had yet to meet a man who didn’t end up wanting to hit me, but I remember feeling suddenly trapped and scared as I lay there waiting for the pain to subside and trying to clear my thoughts. All the things that had become good about my life were due to Rodney being there, but this punch immediately made them worthless. The moment I knew that he was capable of hitting me so violently, using all his strength, I should have walked away from the relationship, but if I did that I would have lost the whole family that I had just found. I would have taken Brendan with me, but I wouldn’t have had any claim on Fred, Roddo and Billy. I would have been deserting them just as surely as Mum had deserted us.

There was also a part of me that believed I deserved to be hit. All my life Dad had been telling me how worthless and unlovable I was and how he would be the only one who would ever love me and a large part of me believed him. The way I had been treated by the dozens of clients I had serviced for him on the streets of Norwich had reinforced everything he ever told me about myself. From the first time that Dad sold me to that mate of his, holding me down to be raped on the floor amidst the scattered remains of a cheap Chinese takeaway, I had believed that I didn’t deserve anything better. If I was so worthless my own father was willing to do that, why should I be surprised that Rodney would hit me when I was giving him so much grief?

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