Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence

Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence
Maria Landon

The shocking story of a young girl forced into prostitution by her own father, and her painful journey to escape her horrific childhood and build a new life for herself and her sons.Maria's dad was a pimp, living in a world of thieves and street-walkers. Her mother, tiring of turning tricks for her husband, walked out, leaving the children in his chaotic, violent and sometimes cruel care. By the age of nine, Maria's father was abusing her and getting a prostitute friend to dress her up in stockings and make-up. By the time she was fourteen he was selling her on the streets of the red light district in Norwich.Despite everything Maria still loved her swaggering and sometimes charming father and found it hard to sort out her own feelings. At fifteen she ran away to King's Cross with an older lover who turned out to be just another pimp. Furious at losing a nice little earner her father involved the police and both he and the other man were jailed for living off Maria's immoral earnings. Only then could Maria escape her traumatic childhood and follow her dream of becoming a mother.

Daddy’s Little Earner

Daddy’s

Little Earner

A heartbreaking true

story of a brave little girl’s

escape from violence

MARIA LANDON

with

Andrew Crofts

To GlenLove you and miss you always xx

‘Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.’

Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

introduction

‘Ria, you’re my favourite,’ Dad would tell me throughout my childhood. ‘All daddies love their little girls the best.’ I’d fill with pride at this announcement from my big, handsome, heroic father. I was his special one. My brother Terry might be Mum’s favourite but Dad loved me most and I’d have done anything to please him.

Mum says that right from the start he boasted to all and sundry that he was going to train me to be ‘the best little prostitute on the block’, but I only gradually got an inkling of what that meant. I probably didn’t want to know so I blocked it, even when he brought home his prostitute friends and dressed me up in their clothes. Even when he started breaking me in.

Years later, when my testimony put him in jail for living off my immoral earnings, he said: ‘You can cut me into a thousand pieces but I’ll always put myself back together again and I’ll be there for you, no matter what you do. I’m the only one who will ever truly love you.’

I think he genuinely did love me, to the extent that he was capable of love, and I stayed a daddy’s girl right into my teens. He was my dad, the only one I had, after all. And he had a lot of charm, he could talk the birds down from the trees. There are plenty of people, even now, who have a soft spot for him, despite knowing everything he’s done.

Without that charm, none of it would ever have happened. Mum wouldn’t have fallen head over heels for him, a lot of other people wouldn’t have got hurt, and I wouldn’t have found myself working the streets at the age of thirteen to keep him in booze.

Every little girl has the potential to be a pop star, a ballerina, a doctor, a barrister, a policewoman or a prostitute, but to make the right choices they need support and guidance from the people whose responsibility it is to care for them. With a dad like mine, I never stood a chance.

Daddy’s Little Earner

Chapter One

a glamorous couple

Terry and Jane, my mum and dad, were always described as a glamorous couple. Anyone who knew them when they were young in the early 1960s would agree on that, however much they might later disapprove of the way they both behaved. It was obvious to everyone that they absolutely adored one another; you might even say they were obsessed, and that it was their obsession with one another that led to so many of our problems.

If they were both the loves of one another’s lives, as they undoubtedly were, you would have thought that would have given us, their children, a secure start in life – but there were other darker elements of their relationship at work almost from the moment they met, which turned our family and our lives into a nightmare.

Everyone in the pubs that he frequented loved Dad. He was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a powerful presence about him. He was invariably immaculately dressed in a suit and tie and known for being good company wherever he was, never able to resist playing up to an adoring crowd of admirers.

Mum was only five feet four, but she had a perfect figure, slim but curvy, which she readily showed off with mini skirts, hot pants and tightly fitted tops, everything that was fashionable amongst the young in those days, even in Norwich, a good few miles away from ‘swinging London’. I don’t have any early memories of her but I’m told she was strikingly beautiful, with long jet-black hair, deep brown eyes and flawless skin.

Dad was the black sheep of his family, or so the legend was whispered, the one with a dubious past who never did the right things but who prided himself on doing the wrong things with style. He always claimed that he was conceived when his mother had a fling with another man during the war, while his father (his mother’s husband, that is) was away from home doing the honourable thing and fighting for king and country. If that was true it would certainly go some of the way towards explaining why Dad was so different to the rest of his family, and why we were always treated as though we were outsiders in some way that was never actually put into words. Having a different father to his siblings meant there was always a gap between them and him. His life seemed to travel on totally different tracks to theirs, partly from his own choice and partly because of the way he was and the things he believed. Maybe the fact that he had a different father was also the reason why Dad was his mother’s favourite, the one she would always stick up for no matter what he did.

Her husband, who was a farmer, got into a lot of debt when he came back from the war and, unable to see a way out, he shot himself in the shed at the bottom of their garden. Dad said he was the one who found the body when he was still just a small boy. No one else ever verified that story for me so I have no way of knowing if it was true, but I certainly believed it at the time. Maybe it was true. Whatever happened, I certainly didn’t have a grandfather on that side and Nanny lived alone in her bungalow a few miles away from us.

Rumour also had it in the family that my dad and my grandmother slept in the same bed until he was fourteen. That seems very believable, given how close they were and how she tried to protect him from everyone, including me. It might also have explained why he was as relaxed as he was about everything to do with sex and nudity.

My aunts and uncles all grew up to be very different to Dad, quite middle class in their values and successful in their lives. They’ve bought their own homes and run their own businesses and none of them would have wanted to have anything to do with the sort of people that Dad liked to hang out with, the thieves, alcoholics and prostitutes who trooped in and out of our home at all hours of the day and night, and drank with him in the pubs of Norwich.

Dad didn’t learn to read and write until long after I could – and I know he spent some time in an approved school as a boy, although no one ever told me what for. There was a story about him throwing a bus driver off the bus when he was still quite young and I believe the chap later died of a heart attack, although I don’t know any more details. I doubt anyone could have been sure the two events were directly linked but it sounds like the sort of thing Dad might have done. As well as being a charmer he was also a bully and a show-off and he had an uncontrollable temper, which he frequently vented with violence.

Although Mum’s family lived in a council house and hadn’t done as well as some of Dad’s relatives, she had been a bit spoiled by her father. Like Dad, she was always a problem to her parents in her early teens, running away from home, being wild and causing them no end of worry. Mind you, she can’t have been that wild because on the night she met Dad, when she was still fifteen, she had gone out to the pictures on a date with another lad and when he tried to put his hand up her skirt in the dark she was mortified and slapped it away. Apparently affronted by such forward behaviour she immediately ran out of the cinema and set out to walk home alone, having successfully protected her honour. Just up the road she bumped into Dad, whom she had never met before. He was only a couple of years older than her but was already very skilled at laying on the charm and flattery. He was tall and well-dressed, a proper ladies’ man, and her head was turned. He must have worked some magic because he didn’t meet with any of the resistance the poor guy in the cinema had encountered and they ended up having sex together that very first night. That was how the great love affair, which was to destroy so many lives, began.

When Dad first brought Mum home, my grandmother was overjoyed and immediately encouraged them to get married and start having children, but of course they had to wait until Mum was old enough. Dad had been in a fair bit of trouble when he was younger, always drinking and mixing with the wrong crowd, and Nanny was probably relieved to think she could get him off her hands, hoping he would settle down now that he had met the right woman.

Mum’s parents were not as pleased by this great love match as Dad’s mum was. In fact they went to court to try to stop her from seeing him. As she was only fifteen I suppose they thought they had a chance of saving her from him before it was too late. They must have been able to see through his charm and bravado immediately and they despised him, believing he was no good and would end up hurting their daughter. As it turned out they were completely justified in their fears. They had probably hoped she would meet some steady guy with a regular job who would be able to calm her down, and anyone meeting Dad would have known instantly that he was not going to be the man for that job.

The more her parents told her not to see him, of course, the more determined she became. By disapproving of her choice her parents had turned the affair into something illicit, adding to its glamour and excitement, making Dad seem like a forbidden fruit. From the first moment they spoke up against him they didn’t stand a chance of keeping two such wilful, self-destructive kids apart.

Mum was nineteen when she fell pregnant for the first time, and they got married a week or two after my brother Terry Junior was born in 1965. Dad’s mum was thrilled; I think she paid for the marriage licence and everything. Mum’s parents must have realized they had lost the battle by that stage and were going to have to make the best of a bad job. Perhaps they hoped that having a baby would make Terry and Jane settle down a bit and take their responsibilities seriously.

I was born a year later, in 1966, followed three years after that by Christian and then by Glen in 1970. Right from the word go I was a proper little daddy’s girl. I adored him, while Terry was more of a favourite for Mum.

‘The moment you were born you were his,’ Mum once told me, and I knew it was true. He loved my brother Terry too, but once I was born Terry became Mum’s and I was his. The night of my birth I’m told he paraded around the hospital, completely drunk and smoking a cigar, much to the annoyance of the sister in charge.

‘Right from the start,’ Mum said, ‘from when you were born, he used to joke that he was going to make you the best little prostitute on the block.’

Chapter Two

early home life

Beneath the glamorous act that Mum and Dad put on for the world when they were out around the pubs, things must have been pretty grim for them. While Terry was a baby they lived in a bed-sitting room, and it was only after I was born that they were given their own council house. If Dad had a job in those days it would have been painting and decorating, but I never knew him to do much work when he was a grown man and I can’t imagine he was any different in his early twenties. He always says he worked in the early days when he and Mum were together, but she would say he didn’t do much.

As a some-time decorator, Dad was able to do the house up a bit himself, but he only bothered with the parts that he saw and wanted to show off to the people he brought home at night. Their bedroom was beautiful and so was the sitting room, but the kitchen and outside toilet were horrible and our rooms were all bare boards and disgusting old wallpapers left by previous occupants; we had no curtains or furniture or light bulbs. We were given a couple of blankets each and there was no heating. I used to get myself dressed under the blankets in the morning, unable to face stepping out into the freezing room until I had on as many layers as possible.

Mum was very glamorous in those days, good at making the most of herself with make-up and clothes, and she owned an array of wigs to change her look when she wanted to. She used to sing around the pubs and clubs she and Dad frequented and she was keen to do more with her talent, maybe even going professional. She had a terrific, soulful voice and got a chance to appear on OpportunityKnocks, which was like the X-Factor of the time, but Dad wouldn’t let her do it. I guess he was frightened he would lose control of her if she became successful, that he would be out of his depth amongst the sort of people she would meet and that she would leave him behind. Perhaps he was frightened she might meet someone else, someone who would treat her decently. It’s quite likely that the audition would have come to nothing, but then again it could have been her chance to get out of her life with him, make some money and get some independence, and he wasn’t about to let her do that. Everyone, even people who seem to have drawn all the short straws in life, gets a few chances to make something of their lives. If enough of those chances are missed, the options begin to shrink.

Not that the two of them weren’t enjoying themselves for a lot of the time in the early days of their marriage, despite their money problems and Dad’s violent temper. They both liked going out drinking together and Terry and I would be left at home or would have to sit outside the pubs with Cokes and crisps and wait for them to roll back out. Sometimes we would be sitting there for hours on end before they finally emerged, weaving around and slurring their words. I’m told that when I was about three they came out of The Lamb in Norwich and found I’d gone from wherever they had told me to sit. Suddenly frantic for their lost child, they got the police involved and they found me at the bus station with a woman who was about to board a bus with me. I wonder sometimes what would have happened to me if the police had got there a few minutes later. Could my life with this stranger have been any worse than it was soon to become anyway? I’ll never know.

They were already developing a habit of spending every penny they had on drink. I’m pretty sure Dad wasn’t working at that time because Mum’s parents used to come round to our house every week with groceries and Mum had been in trouble with the law for breaking into the electric meters and things like that; so money must always have been pretty tight.

Apart from regularly announcing that he was going to make me a prostitute as soon as he could, Dad made plenty of other declarations that showed how little he took his role as my father seriously. Mum told me that when I was three he asked her to go down to the bookies to put a bet on for him. She didn’t leap up immediately and he grew impatient. Dad liked to get instant obedience from all of us. Grabbing hold of me he pulled my dress up and yanked my knickers down.

‘If you don’t hurry up,’ he shouted at her, ‘I’m going to have her by the time you get back.’