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

Dad took his role as a pimp very seriously, hanging around the block all night at first, making sure Mum stayed on her patch and took advantage of every single potential client who drew up. He would never allow her to go home until he felt she had extracted every penny possible from the punters. Whenever she had an unsavoury or threatening client and became frightened she would plead with Dad to let her stop but he ignored her, pretending he couldn’t hear her and pushing her back to the edge of the street.

Mostly she would be getting into the men’s cars at the kerb, driving off and transacting the business in the passenger seats, but sometimes she would bring the customers back to our house. Dad didn’t mind how she did it as long as she kept working. He would sit downstairs watching the television while she was at work in their bedroom above, next to where Terry and I were sleeping and where Chris and Glen lay in silence. She would just have walked in the front door with the customer and gone straight up the stairs to do the business as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Dad saw nothing wrong with it at all.

She put up with it for two or three years, from soon after Glen’s birth, all the while kidding herself that it would stop one day. Many years later she told me that she used to get so depressed she would sit downstairs all day reading books and eating chips until it was time to go out to work. For part of those years she had a day job at a shoe factory, so she must have been utterly worn out. She was struggling for her own survival and not able to take any notice of Terry or me and she seemed to forget all about Chris and Glen locked in their bedroom upstairs. Gradually, she brought them out of their room less and less, even when Dad wasn’t there, until eventually she managed to forget they existed for hours on end. Maybe it felt as though she had too many things to cope with and something had to be allowed to give or her brain would have overloaded.

It’s obvious from reading the social services records at the time how hard life must have been for Mum with four small kids and no money coming in apart from whatever she could keep back from Dad. It wouldn’t have occurred to Dad to help her look after us either. I suppose there were a lot of men like that in those days. I don’t think it would even have occurred to her to ask him for help because looking after the kids was considered to be women’s work. But most husbands would have made sure they provided at least enough money for the basic essentials their family needed. If a traditional woman’s place was at home looking after the house and the children, a traditional man’s place was as the breadwinner for the family. Even when she was working Mum never got to keep anything she earned; it all had to be given to him to take down to the pub and the bookies. She was often forced to go to the authorities for help when there was no food in the house, but if he found out about it Dad would take whatever money they had handed out to her and would spend that on drink too. Sometimes the social services would give her vouchers and money for the electricity meter but then Dad would sell the vouchers and break into the meter when he needed more cash for the pub.

In the end Mum was left to rely on handouts from kind neighbours and the big parcel of groceries her parents brought round every Wednesday. It’s hard to understand why my grandfather and grandmother couldn’t see what was going on and do more to help us. I think they were at their wits’ end to know what to do. I’m sure they can’t have realized how bad things were for Chris and Glen, though; Mum must had cleaned them up a bit when her parents were due.

Once he’d had a few drinks Dad’s obsession with Mum would sink into pure cruelty. He would pace up and down the front room for hours on end yelling at her about how fat, ugly and useless she was, telling her that no one would ever love her except him. If you tell someone those sorts of things often enough they soon start to believe them.

‘You’ve brought shame on the family,’ he would rant. ‘I should never have married you, you’re just council house rubbish.’

They were living in a council house themselves at the time, but because the rest of Dad’s family had done better and all owned their own businesses and homes he somehow thought that meant he was superior to her. There was no point in her arguing with him unless she wanted a beating so she just had to sit there and take whatever he wanted to throw at her.

I think it must have been 1972 the first time Mum left him, when I was about five years old. She always had trouble getting all four of us out of the house at the same time so she just took Glen and Chris with her to a local refuge for battered wives. I can understand why she thought they were in more danger from him than Terry and I were: they were so much smaller and he seemed to have taken against them from birth.

The NSPCC and local social services got involved in the case and after listening to what she had to say they went to visit Dad. The report came back that he was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. I dare say these days they would have come up with a more specific diagnosis, such as ‘bipolar disorder’, but back then they just talked about depression and nervous breakdowns. They promised her they would have him admitted to the local psychiatric hospital for a month. During that time Mum was told she would be able to apply for a restraining order stopping him from returning to the house and she would get custody of all of us. For a few fleeting moments she must have felt that she was finally getting some protection from him, and that it was all going to work out.

Dad was taken off from the house in an ambulance and two social workers stayed with Terry and me until Mum arrived back home with Chris and Glen. Once they could see we were all settled in, the social workers left and a few minutes later Mum received a phone call from Dad to say he had escaped from the ambulance on the way to the hospital and had gone to his mother’s to steal some of her sleeping tablets, which he was now swallowing.

‘I took my own tablets before leaving home,’ he told her, and at that moment Mum spotted the empty pill bottle standing on the kitchen table. ‘I’ll be dead soon so I’m ringing to say goodbye.’

He also, however, told her exactly where he was, so as soon as she had put the phone down on him she called the emergency services, who rushed to find him and take him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. When Mum got there the doctors told her that if the ambulance had been ten minutes later he would have been dead. He was on a life-support machine for three days and went on to develop pneumonia. There’s no doubt that Dad had a genuine problem with depression, but it was always hard to tell if he really wanted to go through with the suicide attempts or if they were ‘cries for help’.

While Mum was visiting Dad in the hospital a senior psychiatrist came to talk to her. He’d been listening to Dad and had been appalled by everything he’d found out about their life together.

‘You’re married to a very dangerous man,’ he warned her. ‘Your husband is schizophrenic and in desperate need of psychiatric help. Frankly, I’m amazed you’ve managed to stay married to him for as long as you have.’

He arranged for Dad to be moved to the psychiatric hospital and Mum agreed to go in the ambulance with him. She must have been feeling relieved that someone else was recognizing her problem and finally helping her and she must have been worried about Dad too. However badly he had been treating her, he was still the love of her young life and the father of her children.

‘How long can they keep me here?’ Dad asked the ambulance driver.

‘They can’t keep you here at all,’ he replied. ‘You’re going in voluntarily.’

When he arrived at his destination the doctors tried hard to sedate him but he just kept saying he wanted to leave and ordering Mum to call him a taxi. She tried to put up a fight, tried to persuade him that it was for his own good that he got treatment, but ultimately there was nothing she could do once he’d made up his mind. Eventually she gave in and they got a taxi home, where their lives soon descended back to their previous level of violence and abuse, with Mum back working on the block every night of the week.

Mum tried to leave again, not long afterwards, and once more she went to a refuge for battered women. She stayed away longer this time and social services took Terry and me off to live with a foster family, some lovely people called the Watsons. They had a swimming pool in the garden of their Suffolk home where they carefully taught us how to swim. Dad had very different ideas on how these things should be done: one time he had slung us into the sea off the pier at Great Yarmouth, telling us that that would teach us how to swim. ‘Sink or swim!’ he laughed. As we survived the experience I suppose he must have been right, or maybe it was the current that washed us back up onto the beach along with all the other flotsam and jetsam, but I remember how terrifying it was floundering around in the waves, swallowing great mouthfuls of salty water every time I went under, compared to all the gentle help and encouragement the Watsons gave us.

They were such a sweet couple, trying everything possible to make us feel welcome and part of their family. We went blackberry picking and Mrs Watson made homemade pies and jams with us, but whatever we did and however nice they were to us I felt like an intruder. I knew I wasn’t their child and I felt I shouldn’t be there. It was never possible to really relax. I did wonder what made the Watsons’ own children so much better than us that they deserved a life like this. Why wasn’t I as special to my parents as their daughter was to them? My memory isn’t very clear on dates and ages but we must have been with them a while because they put us into the local school, which was very sweet, and the teacher there taught me how to write.

However wonderful life was with the Watsons, I still wanted to be back home with my dad because that was where I felt I belonged. I wasn’t good enough to deserve to live in a nice home like the Watsons’. I remember one particular afternoon, lying beside their swimming pool in glorious sunshine. Everything seemed so perfect. I had a beautiful new home and some new clothes they had bought for me. Mrs Watson brought us out cold drinks with ice cubes and fretted about me getting burned, rubbing sun cream onto my skin and making me feel so loved and cared for. But something wasn’t quite right and I still felt sad. I wished I was someone else, a feeling I would grow very used to over the coming years.

Mum came with her parents a few times to visit us at that foster home. Although I have no memory of her I do remember my granddad being there. Mrs Watson was very understanding apparently and let Mum bath us and read us bedtime stories.

We were only allowed to see Dad for one hour a week during that time under supervision at the social services office. One week he didn’t turn up and so they just took us back to the Watsons’ in Suffolk. The following day he turned up at the social services office roaring drunk and highly agitated, demanding to see us, insisting that it was his right. The social worker, a Mr Ashby, explained to him that as we now lived so far away visits had to be arranged to suit everyone. Dad refused to see reason and started to beat the poor man up, having first locked the office door so he couldn’t escape. The police eventually had to smash the door down and when they burst in they found Mr Ashby with three broken ribs, a broken nose, cuts and bruises. Dad was still on top of him, trying to gouge his eyes out when they finally dragged him off. That little outburst cost Dad a few months in prison but gave him something to boast about for years. He saw it as proof of how much he loved his kids, and how he wasn’t willing to let some pen pusher come between us.

At the time Mum was convinced we would only be in foster care temporarily and that once she had got her act together she would have us back and would bring us up as a single mum. She assumed the authorities would be able to protect us all from Dad now they knew just how dangerous he could be. But once he was out of prison again Dad tracked Mum down and started to pester her to come back to him. He was always able to find her because of the involvement of social services in our lives. She moved and changed jobs twice to try to get away from him and both times he found her by insisting on his right to see his kids. Her employers and landlords would become tired of the harassment he would give her wherever she went and would ask her to leave.

Whenever Dad found her, he would just completely wear her down and promise things would be different and tell her he was the only one who loved her. Mum left him three or four times but each time he succeeded in making her go back to him again. And each time he would have her back out on the street again within a week.

By that time Mum had been arrested several times for soliciting and had a suspended sentence hanging over her, but Dad still forced her back to work. She was terrified of being picked up again and being sent to prison, but he wouldn’t listen. One night she heard that the vice squad was doing a sweep of the area and she begged Dad to let her go home early since she had already earned plenty of money in the previous few hours. Dad wasn’t willing to even consider it, becoming angry that she dared to suggest when she should stop work. It was his decision and not hers, as far as he was concerned. As they stood on the pavement beside the busy road he lifted her skirt up and started shouting at the passing cars.

‘Come and get some of the best cunt in Norwich.’

Mum tells me that that was the final straw. At that moment she decided she was going to have to escape from him once and for all, whatever the cost, even if it meant abandoning her children to his mercies. She had run out of options. She had no choice any more.

Chapter Four

mum leaves

I have almost no memories of actually living with Mum although I was six when she finally left for good. I can’t summon up any mental pictures of what it was like having her in the house with us. I have a vague memory of a woman making jellies at a birthday party but can’t picture her face. There would be no children’s parties after she left so it must have been Mum who was there in the kitchen making jelly. She says it was.

Nearly everything I have described so far I learned from her many years later or from other people who were around at the time, or from reading my social services records. It was always hard for Terry and me to piece together exactly what happened around the time she disappeared because Mum and Dad had such different views on it.

I do remember her coming back one time after one of her absences, although I still can’t picture her face. To celebrate our reunion we all went to the pictures as a family, the four of us together. (I guess Chris and Glen were back at home in their room as usual.) I still can’t actually visualize her being there, but I remember the event because as we came out of the cinema I got lost. I must have run on ahead in my excitement and taken a wrong turning. I don’t think I was gone for that long, but when Dad found me he was really angry with me for inconveniencing him. When Mum finally left home he would tell me that I was the reason she had gone; that it was because I had got lost and been a nuisance to her that day after the cinema trip that she had decided she couldn’t take any more. He was very good at making out everything that went wrong in his life was someone else’s fault. I believed him because he was my dad so he must be right and because I already knew that I was a bad girl; he told me so all the time and had convinced me totally. So for years I believed it was all my fault that our mother had gone and that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with any of us.

I think each time Mum came back to Dad after one of her bids for freedom, she hoped that he would have been shocked into changing his ways, but each time he would start putting her down again, hitting her, nagging and bullying her to go back on the game again.

‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘there’s one of your punters. Why don’t you do just one more?’

If she didn’t respond to the cajoling then he would resort to violence. Nothing made him lose his temper more thoroughly than one of us refusing to do as we were told. Mum must have realized that as long as she was with him nothing was ever going to change, she was always going to have to do whatever he decided for her, that she would always be selling herself just to keep him in drinking and betting money. So she made up her mind to disappear once and for all.

One day in 1973 Mum sneaked home from the shoe factory in her lunch hour, when she knew Dad would be safely settled in the pub, and packed her case. Terry and I were probably sitting outside whichever pub Dad was drinking in. It didn’t matter because she wasn’t planning to take any of us with her this time. I suppose she knew that if she had children in tow Dad would be able to trace her through social services and make her go back to him. She wanted to vanish off the face of the earth. The psychiatrist’s warnings about being married to ‘a very dangerous man’ must have been ringing in her ears as she hurried from the house for the last time with her few possessions hastily packed, slamming the door behind her. Chris and Glen would have been able to hear her movements from behind their bedroom door but by that stage they must have been so weak from hunger that they wouldn’t have had the strength to cry out to her. There would have been no point anyway.

At first she went to a male friend and asked him to put her up. Initially he promised to care for her until she sorted herself out, but it wasn’t long before she realized he was going to want to pimp for her just like Dad and she knew her only chance was to leave Norwich for ever and start afresh somewhere else, somewhere where no one knew about her past. When you’re known to be a prostitute and all the people you socialize with belong to the same world, it’s almost impossible to change anything as long as you stay in the same town; you have to make a clean break. Carrying the suitcase that contained all the possessions she had left in the world she walked out to the ring road on the edge of town and hitched a lift with a lorry driver.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.

‘Blakeney,’ he replied.

‘That’ll do,’ she said and that was where she ended up. She was only about thirty miles up the Norfolk coast from us but as far as we were concerned back at home she might as well have been on the other side of the world.

She got herself a job in a hotel as a chambermaid and found a bed-sitting room. She contacted social services back in Norwich to tell them she’d gone and to ask them to take us into care, telling them yet again what her fears were for us. Her greatest fear, she said, was for me because of the number of times Dad had told her, and anyone else who would listen, that he was going to ‘break me in’ and put me on the game as soon as I was old enough. She knew him well enough to be sure that he wasn’t bluffing. If he had been willing to put his own wife, the love of his life, on the game, why wouldn’t he do the same to his daughter? She told them how dangerous she knew Dad was, feeling certain that they would take us away from him and put us into safe homes.

When the social workers arrived at the house that day, Dad was out with Terry and me but they must have broken in because they found Chris and Glen, who were two and three years old by then, abandoned in their locked bedroom as usual. Neither of them reacted to the strangers who suddenly appeared beside them. They just stared 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.

It was that scene, discovered by social workers, that sealed Mum’s reputation as a terrible mother, giving Dad the opportunity to make out he was some sort of local hero by default. Even though the state those babies had got into was as much his fault as hers, he somehow managed to make himself seem like another victim of her neglect and cruelty rather than the cause of most of her problems. Mum says she was having a breakdown during her final years with us and I imagine that must have been what happened. There’s no other explanation why a mother could neglect her own children to that extent.

I don’t remember coming home that day to find Mum gone. Because she’d disappeared before, I probably assumed it was like the other times and she’d be back eventually. It was only gradually, over time, that I realized she wasn’t coming back this time and that Terry, Dad and I were on our own now. I was six years old, nearly seven, and I had to become the woman of the house. A cold knot of panic formed in my chest when I thought about it.

The social workers took both Chris and Glen into care but, for some reason that no one has ever been able to explain to me, they decided it would be all right to leave Terry and me at home with Dad. Perhaps at that stage they thought Mum was the bigger problem; after all she was the one who was on the game, a lifestyle that carried so much stigma and suggested she couldn’t possible be a decent parent, and she was the one who had deserted us. Perhaps they thought that with such a shameless woman gone from his life Dad might be able to do a better job for us. Who knows what he told them at the time to make himself look good and her look bad. Dad could convince anyone of almost anything when he put the full weight of his charm into it.

When Mum heard from her parents that Terry and I had been left with Dad she boarded the first train back to Norwich and went to see social services, to plead with them to do something. It must have been a nerve-racking trip for her, constantly looking over her shoulder for fear of being seen by someone who would tell Dad she was back in town. Both of the social workers she had dealt with in the past had been moved to other areas and she had to explain her whole story all over again to someone new. She pleaded and begged, telling them again about Dad’s drinking problems, his violence, his involvement in prostitution and his promise that he intended to put me on the game as soon as possible. They refused to take her warnings seriously. Maybe they hear stories like that all the time and thought Mum was exaggerating to get back at her estranged husband.

‘All your children are subject to care orders,’ they tried to reassure her, ‘which will stay in force until they are eighteen.’ This was supposed to mean that social services took responsibility for us and made decisions about such things as where we lived and what schools we went to. No doubt they promised to keep an eye on us and to remove us if they thought we were in any danger, but I doubt if that would have put Mum’s mind at rest. She knew how clever Dad was at manipulating people and making them believe whatever he wanted them to believe.

Although I have all my social services reports from the time, it is hard to work out from the things they have written why they made some of the decisions they did. I always felt hopeful in the following years whenever I knew that a social worker was due to call on us, because I thought each time they were bound to realize that something was wrong and would try to help us. But the main social worker who was allotted to us in the early years was so terrified of Dad she refused to come to the house unless she had a police escort or one of her bosses with her. Her visits were very infrequent and were over as quickly as everyone could manage. Her fears were not unreasonable, of course, since Dad had already served six months in jail for beating up that other social worker. But if they knew he was capable of that level of violence, did they not guess he was capable of being violent to us? What made them think it would be all right to give us straight back to him as soon as he finished his sentence?