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

Even if they had come visiting more often and asked us more probing questions it probably wouldn’t have done them any good. I would never have spoken up to anyone in front of Dad, or even talked honestly about him if he weren’t there. It would be years before I found the courage to do that. Sometimes I would sit silently staring at the social workers who did make it into the house, trying to talk to them with my mind, trying to send them messages, hoping they would be able to hear my telepathic cries for help, but of course they didn’t. I have vivid memories of being asked questions like, ‘Are you getting enough to eat?’ and my stomach was rumbling but I didn’t dare to say we hadn’t had any food at all that day and only a few chips the day before. They took my silence as meaning that I had nothing I wanted to complain about. I would try to drop hints and clues but they never picked them up; maybe I was being too subtle or maybe they just didn’t want to hear. It was bound to be easier for them if they could feel reassured that we were OK.

I was as terrified of Dad as anybody else, but I still adored him and wanted to be living with him. I just wanted them to make him be nice to us and to tell him to stop doing some of the things he was doing, such as beating us. I hated Mum for deserting us because I could see how devastated my brother and father both were and I despised her for abandoning them when they loved her so much. Hating her brought me even closer to Dad, giving us something else in common.

His broken heart was a terrible sight to behold, and I began to feel I had a responsibility to look after him. The worst times were always when he’d had a few drinks and the melodrama of his own self-invented life story would become heightened beyond anything any country and western songwriter would have dared to write. Time after time Terry and I would find him on the sitting room floor on his hands and knees, weeping and praying for ‘his Jane’ to come back to him, screaming hysterically at the gods in his abject misery.

He always became furious whenever Terry or I cried about anything, shouting at us to shut up, hitting us, seeing our tears as a sign of weakness, so I couldn’t understand how he could be so willing for other people to see him cry so openly. For him it seemed to be like a badge of honour, a way to show everyone how wicked Mum was to have broken his heart and how much pain he was in.

‘I can understand your mum leaving all the other children,’ Dad would say to Terry, ‘but not you because you were her favourite. How could she leave you? A mother is supposed to love her first-born child more than anyone.’

I would be able to see the pain in Terry’s face as the words sank in, and feel my own pain at hearing someone confirm out loud that Mum had loved Terry more than me, even though I knew it to be true. Terry rarely cried but the tears would swell in his eyes at those moments and I was upset with Dad for being so cruel and for continually rubbing salt into my brother’s emotional wounds.

However much I hated the way he behaved, Dad always managed to convince me of his undying love and favouritism towards me, as if to compensate me for the fact that my mother hadn’t loved me enough to stay. He would assure me that as long as I stood by him everything would be OK.

‘All mothers love their first sons and all daddies love their little girls,’ he would say, as if merely saying it was enough to prove it was true. He never backed it up with displays of affection or kindness but these few crumbs were enough to keep my loyalty and adoration intact.

All the same, he managed to inflict maximum damage on both of us in his outpourings of misery. Terry would be heartbroken to think that his mother had done that to him and I would feel crushed to think that I hadn’t been of importance to her, that only Terry would have mattered to her. Why would Mum have loved him more than me? I would wonder, deciding that it must be because I was such a bad person. Then I would decide not to care, telling myself that it didn’t matter what she had felt for me because I was Dad’s favourite and he was still there for us.

He had a particular skill at making other people feel so bad about themselves that they actually believed he was their hero, the only one who cared about them, the only one who was there for them when their lives fell to pieces. More often that not he would be responsible for reducing people to needy wrecks in the first place, then when he had them hooked and dependent on him he would remind them how useless they were, making them all the more grateful to him for being the one who looked after them. He did it with Mum and every other woman he ever went out with, and he did it to us children as well. I would go to him constantly, trying to climb onto his knee and telling him how much I loved him, but he would always push me away in disgust.

‘You’re too fat and ugly,’ he was always telling me. ‘No one will ever love you except me. Even your own mother left you.’

Looking back now I know I wasn’t fat, just a normal healthy child, and I don’t think I was ugly. But he convinced me of both at the time. Dad liked overweight women because they would be insecure about themselves and that would give him a chance to dominate and taunt them, calling them fat, useless whores.

Sometimes Dad would cuddle me, but it would only last a few seconds before he would shove me away again. I hated the feeling of rejection and eventually I stopped going to him. I still loved it when he told me I was his favourite, although it would make me feel sorry for Terry, but I didn’t believe I deserved such an honour.

We weren’t with Dad all the time because he quite often got taken off to prison for thieving or beating someone up. Whenever that happened Terry and I would be put back into foster homes and children’s homes for a few months, or however long the sentence was. We were taken to visit him in prison sometimes and it was always a terrifying experience. Even sitting in the waiting room amongst the other visitors was intimidating. Everyone appeared to be so angry and aggressive and there always seemed to be the sounds of shouting in the distance, as well as the banging of the big iron doors and the clanking keys on the wardens’ belts. It all added to the atmosphere of fear for small children who didn’t understand half of what was going on or what was being said around them.

Once we were taken through to where he was waiting for us it was distressing to see our dad, who was normally so smartly turned out, reduced to baggy prison clothes, looking so vulnerable. We were used to him being the powerful one, the one in control of everyone around him, and it was unnerving to see him being forced into a subservient position, being bossed around by the wardens. He would become very emotional when he talked to us on those visits, promising that everything would be different once he got home, that our lives would be wonderful and that he would get a job so he could buy us all the things we needed. It was as though he was playing some hard-done-by character from a country and western song – one man struggling bravely to bring his children up right in a hostile world. I always wanted to believe him, even when he kept on letting us down and breaking his promises, and I would always stick up for him in front of other people, even when I finally realized just how bad a father he really was.

As soon as he got out of jail, I would find a way to get back to Dad from wherever we were staying at the first possible opportunity. I felt I owed him my loyalty because, whatever he was like, at least he hadn’t walked out on us like Mum had. He had stuck by us and so we belonged to him, we were his and it felt right that we should be with him. ‘No one else will ever want you,’ he’d say. ‘Only me. You’re fat and useless but at least you’ve got me.’

He couldn’t stand the idea that Terry and I might be taken permanently into care because he didn’t think it was anyone else’s business how he brought us up, and because he didn’t like to lose the benefits that he got as a single dad. We were his devoted little followers, part of his entourage, and he resented any attempts to part him from us.

He did try for many years to get Chris and Glen back as well, even though he had never known what to do with them when they were babies and wouldn’t have been any better with them once they were older. He went round to the foster home where they spent their whole childhood a few times to try to see them, but thankfully for them he was never allowed access. I heard he even made a pass at their foster mother. I suspect she might have had a bit of a soft spot for him because virtually everyone did when he decided to turn on the charm. He was good at convincing people that his children were the most important things in his life; that he was a dutiful dad who had been wronged by a bad woman and a heartless state.

Although Terry and I didn’t get to speak to Chris and Glen again until we were all adults, we did see them a few times just after we were all split up when they were brought to visit the people who lived next door to us. I suppose their foster parents must have been friends of our neighbours. Our front doors were inches away from one another, only divided by a tiny fence, and we could see them coming and going, but we were still ordered by social services not to speak to them. I remember peering out the window, seeing how cute they looked in the nice new clothes their foster mother had bought for them, and just feeling sad. After a while someone must have realized how cruel they were being to all of us by allowing these visits because they suddenly stopped. I didn’t see Chris and Glen again after that until I was twenty years old.

Chapter Five

just the three of us

Dad did little more towards looking after Terry and me when he had sole charge of us than he had when Mum was there. We had to feed ourselves most of the time. I would make jam sandwiches if there was any bread in the house, or we’d dig up some spuds from the back garden and make chips. I suppose I’d seen Mum doing these things and I was a fast learner but it’s scary to think I was heating a chip pan at such a young age. Dad kept chickens in the back garden, about twenty of them, and they provided us with eggs but they were always escaping and causing problems with the neighbours. I hated those birds, especially the cockerel and the aggressive way it would fly at me, flapping and squawking when I was sent out to collect the eggs. Dad always said his dream was to have a smallholding out in the country where he could be completely self-sufficient but he never did anything about getting one. He never actually did anything about improving any of our lives, just taking refuge from it all in the pubs, hoping to win enough money on the horses to make all his problems go away.

If he hardly ever bothered to feed us, he didn’t give a second thought to clothing us; in fact he expected me to help him rather than the other way round. From the moment Mum left I was the one washing and ironing his shirts every day. I’d learnt how to do it by watching Nanny when we visited her bungalow. I had to become good at it because if I made the slightest crease in the wrong place he would give me a slap and shout at me for being stupid, like some eighteenth-century plantation owner overseeing his slaves. But at the same time he would boast to his friends about how wonderful his little girl was, doing all these things for her old man, as if it was evidence of how much I loved him. In a way it was. I felt proud when he talked about me to other people like that but confused that the things he said to my face were completely the opposite. I never knew where I really stood with him, which was one of the ways he kept control in all his relationships and friendships.

Terry and I didn’t have any opportunity to wash our own clothes and Dad wasn’t worried about how dirty or smelly they became, but he did take an uncomfortable amount of interest in our bath times. He always boasted about how at ease he was with nudity around the house and quite often he would make us have baths with him. The bathroom was off the kitchen, a tiny room containing a sink and a bath that had been crammed in under the slope of the staircase. He’d get in the bath first and then he would call us in when he’d had time for a bit of a soak. Once Terry had washed and got out Dad would tell me to stay and he would sit up on the end with his legs open, ordering me to turn round and look at his naked body while he played with himself.

‘I don’t want to,’ I would protest, staring hard at the taps at the other end, knowing something was wrong with what he was doing but not sure what it was. ‘Can’t I get out now?’ But he would make me stay there until he’d had enough and was ready to get out.

I had long blonde hair, which he was fanatical about, always insistent that I shouldn’t have it cut. Every week or two he would wash it for me in the bath and would always rinse it in freezing cold water, laughing as I gasped at the shock of the cold but becoming furious if I cried or made a fuss of any sort. He was like a sadistic little schoolboy sometimes. He had all sorts of mad theories about my hair, like deciding to rinse it in vinegar to give it a shine, and when it came to brushing the knots out he would turn what should have been a pleasant experience for both of us into the most horrifically painful ordeal possible, laughing gleefully all the way through it as I squeaked and squirmed under his brutal tugging.

He had a cruel, warped sense of humour, like a little boy with his practical jokes. When Mum was still with us, he used to pee in the vinegar bottle and watch joyfully as she sprinkled it on her chips. He often used milk bottles to relieve himself in when he was upstairs and couldn’t be bothered to come down to the toilet. He would shout for Terry or me to go up and fetch them from him and empty them. If he didn’t have a milk bottle handy he would just open the bedroom window and piss through that. He didn’t believe any of the rules of normal decent behaviour applied to him; he believed he could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.

Dad also seemed to get pleasure from inflicting any sort of pain on people weaker than himself. Sometimes Terry and I would be sitting with him watching television or playing a game quite peacefully and he would suddenly jump up and give one of us a Chinese burn, twisting our little arms as if he was wringing out a wet towel. If we cried out in surprise or pain he would start laughing or would shout at us to ‘shut up!’ like it was some sort of initiation ceremony designed to toughen us up and we had to be brave.

The unsettling thing was that we could never predict how he would react to anything; sometimes he supported us to an almost lunatic level. He loved his football and one year when Norwich City were in the FA Cup Final, he settled himself down in front of the telly to watch his home team, sending us out into the street to play. Terry got involved in some sort of an argument with another kid and came back indoors crying. Dad was annoyed at having his viewing disturbed but instead of giving Terry a hard time for being a pathetic crybaby, as he normally would have done, he stormed outside to deal with the problem himself. The other lad’s dad then also got involved and the two fathers ended up fighting so viciously the police had to be called to separate them. Dad was arrested and taken to the police station. He was angrier about missing the game than anything else. For years afterwards he would tell this story to anyone who would listen, using it as proof of how much he loved his children and how he would always stick up for them when they needed it. But he was unpredictable and Terry and I knew that he could just as easily have laid into him for being a wimp that day and sent him back out into the street to sort it out for himself.

If Terry and I ever started fighting with each other, as we did sometimes like any normal siblings, Dad would urge us to punch properly and not just pull hair or 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.

I knew never to disobey Dad or to put up an argument about anything. I might ask him to let me off doing something, but if he said no that was the end of it. The moment I heard his voice start to get angry I would always stop pleading because I would know it was hopeless and that if I kept going I was bound to end up being beaten.

Despite being meticulous about his own appearance, Dad didn’t care what we went out looking like. We could stink to high heaven and be clad in rags for all he cared. Once a week we would take our dirty washing up to his mother’s house, and she would do it all for us so we could pick it back up the following week. One set of clothes always had to last us the whole week, even our socks and underwear. We would take it back and forth between the houses in black bin liners. Terry and I would have to carry the sacks while Dad strode ahead as if he was nothing to do with us. We would try desperately to keep up and if I cried from the pain in my legs he would laugh at how weak I was or become angry with me for complaining. Even Nanny used to tick him off for the state my socks got into, telling him to buy me more clothes so they didn’t get so dirty, but he took no notice. No matter how bad they got she always managed to get them clean somehow. My most vivid memory of her is standing at the kitchen sink surrounded by piles of wet washing, scrubbing away like a demon.

It must have been obvious to everyone who saw us or smelled us that we were in a desperate state, and one day the headmistress of the school we were attending decided things had gone far enough and wrote to Dad saying that he needed to ‘clean Maria up’. Dad still couldn’t read or write so he made me read the letter out loud to him. The idea that anyone else had the right to tell him what to do with his children was impossible for him to grasp. He was absolutely furious that anyone would dare to interfere with the way he ran his family. He might be willing to take that sort of criticism from his own mother, particularly as he needed her to do the washing, but he certainly wasn’t going to accept it from someone outside the family setting themselves up as an authority figure.

‘You write down what I tell you,’ he fumed before starting to dictate a letter to me, which was full of four letter words and graphic insults. At one stage he sent me over the road to ask a neighbour how to spell the word ‘whore’. Although I didn’t know exactly what it meant, I somehow knew that this wasn’t a good thing to be calling my headmistress. I’d heard him use the word often enough when screaming abuse at women or venting his anger at our absent mother, so I knew it was rude.

The neighbour obviously thought it didn’t sound right that a child of my age should be asking him such a thing either and came back over with me. Maybe he thought I was trying to wind him up and wanted to check that Dad really had sent me.

‘Why does Maria want to know how to spell a word like that?’ he asked.

When Dad told him what he was doing the man tried to dissuade him but it didn’t work and the next day I had to take the letter in, complete with every expletive copied out in my best neat handwriting. I was mortified because I knew that it wasn’t right. I’d always quite liked the headmistress and didn’t want to antagonize her, but I was more frightened of angering Dad by not doing as I was told than I was of any teacher.

The letter was delivered and I suppose it was read but nothing further was ever said to me on the matter from either end, and Dad made no more effort to clean me up for school. I guess the headmistress decided that it wasn’t a battle worth fighting and Dad put it down as yet another of his famous victories over petty bureaucracy and nosey parkers.

Social services used to give Dad an allowance to take us out and buy clothes but he would just spend it all on drink. When the authorities realized what he was up to they tried giving him vouchers instead but he worked out he could sell them to his friends down the pub for cash. He always had a dozen different schemes going to ensure he had a constant supply of spending money for the pub. Sometimes he put so much effort into trying to get something for nothing that it would have been easier to just have gone out and earned the money he needed, but that wasn’t the point for him. The point was to win the game, to get something over on the rest of the world, to show that he was cleverer than everyone else, particularly the people who tried to tell him what to do.

Although he didn’t care about Terry and me wearing the same clothes every day he would be very strict about the oddest things, like not chewing bubblegum or not swearing, and he insisted on us polishing our shoes each night. At that time everyone else at school was wearing plimsolls, partly because they were comfortable and partly because it had become a bit of a fashion statement. We used to beg him to let us do the same but he always insisted we wore some proper leather shoes that had been given to us by a kind neighbour. Because we desperately wanted to be like everyone else Terry and I would put our plimsolls in our bags and once we were round the corner from the house we would hurriedly change into them. He must have suspected something was going on because one day he decided to follow us. He caught us red handed and dragged us back home, furious that we were trying to ‘get the better of him’. I can’t remember what my punishment was, but he forced Terry to wear a great big brightly coloured orange and yellow patterned tie to school. He looked ridiculous and he was crying and sobbing and begging Dad not to make him do it because all the other boys would take the piss, but Dad made him wear it for days on end. Terry was far too scared of what his next punishment might be to be willing to risk disobeying Dad and taking the tie off as soon as he got round the corner. These sorts of intimidations were Dad’s way of keeping control of every little aspect of our lives. He loved to humiliate other people in order to demonstrate his own superiority and power over them.

My eyesight as a child was terrible and I went for years without being able to see the blackboard in class properly but not wanting to say anything for fear of drawing attention to myself. Eventually the school picked up on the problem and advised Dad to take me to an optician. He refused to do anything about it, saying I was just pretending not to be able to see in order to get attention. In a way I wasn’t too bothered by his reaction because National Health glasses for children were not exactly fashionable in those days and it would have been one more thing making me different to everyone else. I was already a target for some bullies at school and I didn’t want to give them yet another reason to pick on me. Eventually one of the children’s homes I went into got me glasses while Dad was away on one of his stints in prison and my schoolwork immediately improved, although my self-esteem sunk a few notches further down the scale.

Although I loved Dad, I realized very early on that our family life wasn’t normal because I had occasionally managed to glimpse into other people’s lives and knew they were all nicer than ours: there was that nice family the Watsons who fostered us once and then a couple called Ivan Bunn and his wife Ann, who lived a couple of doors up the road from us. They had two daughters called Frances and Denise and a little boy called Stephen, with whom I was very friendly. There was a piano in their house that they let me have a play on whenever Dad let me go round there, which wasn’t that often. Although he didn’t mind us playing out in the street if it got us out from under his feet, he was always nervous about us becoming too involved with other families. Maybe he was worried we would say too much about what went on behind our closed doors, or that we would realize that life with him wasn’t normal. Probably he just didn’t like the idea of losing any control over us, of allowing any other adult to have an input into our upbringing or to influence our thinking.

The Bunns must have known that things were tough for us because when I was seven or eight they even invited me on holiday with them to Hemsby, on the Norfolk coast, one summer. I don’t know how they got Dad to agree but I was glad they did because it was one of the happiest times of my young life. Ann bought me some pink cotton pyjamas with stripes on the bottom and polka dots on the top and I thought they were the prettiest, softest things I had ever seen. I got sunburnt playing outside during the day and she gently rubbed calamine lotion onto my skin in the evening to try to cool me down and prevent me from peeling. At that moment I felt so cared for and so normal, although all through the holiday I still felt like the odd one out in the group, like an observer merely there to see how a normal family worked. I believed that I didn’t deserve to be loved and cherished like the Bunn children were, although I wasn’t sure why not. I believed that everything horrible in my life was my own fault; that I was a bad person and didn’t deserve any better. I knew that was right because Dad was continually screaming it at me, although I didn’t know why or what I should do to become a better, more lovable person.

Many years later, when I was in my thirties, I bumped into Ann when she came into the B & Q store where I was working and we chatted about that holiday all those years ago.

‘I’ve never forgotten that time,’ I told her.

‘I’ve got some photographs at home somewhere, and some of you playing in our garden too,’ she said. ‘I’ll pop them in to you if you’d like to see them.’

I was so pleased I could have kissed her, but at the same time I felt a stab of pain to think that this woman, who was really no more than a neighbour, had thought it was worth keeping some photographs of me when my own family had never cared enough to do that. It had always hurt me that no one valued me enough to take any pictures of me and the fact that Ann Bunn had some made me realize all the more how little my own parents had cared for me. When she brought them in a few days later it was like looking at a stranger. I’d had no idea what I looked like when I was small. I was surprised to see that I was really quite cute, not fat, ugly and unlovable as Dad was always telling me I was.

There were always plenty of new opportunities coming along for Dad to mock and humiliate me. I loved music lessons at school and I enrolled to learn to play the violin. You had to be on a waiting list to be allowed your own instrument and it was a great privilege when you were eventually given one to learn with. When it was finally my turn to be allowed a violin and I was told that I could take it home for a week or two to practise I was thrilled. I felt so proud as I stood in the front room and started playing a few notes for Dad. I was eager for praise and encouragement but instead he just laughed and belittled me.

‘You’re pathetic,’ he sneered. ‘You’ll never be able to master that.’

And then he grew angry at the noise I was making.