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

The blows themselves hurt badly enough, but it was the expectation of them that became the real torture. He would always tell us in advance that he was going to beat us, leaving the stick standing by the fireplace, just glancing at it now and again, reminding us what was coming, prolonging the dread and making me cry before he had even struck a single blow. He would tease us with it. ‘Do you want some of this?’ he would ask as he tested it against his own palm.

He didn’t always use the stick – sometimes he would use a slipper – and he didn’t need to be drunk in order to decide to grab hold of one of us, wrench down our pants and put us over his knee. Sometimes he was stone cold sober, feeling pissed off with life and wanting to take it out on someone smaller than himself.

‘It’s about time you had ten of these,’ he would announce and we would know there was no getting out of it.

One day I remember in particular Dad issued one of his usual orders for me to go over to him to take a beating with his slipper. ‘Take your knickers down,’ he commanded and I was so frightened I stayed rooted to the spot and started to cry and plead with him even though I knew it was hopeless.

‘Stop crying,’ he ordered, ‘or you’ll get twenty hits instead of ten.’

The short walk across the sitting room towards him seemed impossible and I stayed rooted to the spot, out of his reach. I knew what would happen if I defied him but my legs just wouldn’t move, like in a nightmare.

‘Get here now!’ he bellowed, furious at being disobeyed, and I jerked into life, lurching forward.

The nearer I got to him the more he smiled and for a split second I thought he had changed his mind, that he was just teasing me, having a bit of fun. Although my whole body was trembling with fear I forced my mouth to smile back at him, trying to make him love me enough not to want to hurt me. The moment I was within reach he grabbed me and threw me across his long legs. As he raised the slipper in the air I let out an almighty scream, which made him laugh.

‘I haven’t even touched you yet!’

I couldn’t stop the crying and it made him angrier still so he doubled the number of hits to teach me a lesson, to teach me to be brave and strong, to teach me to obey his orders the moment they were issued. His lessons worked because I soon learnt to stifle my screams and take my punishments in silence. I always concentrated hard on counting each stroke to try to distract my mind from the pain and to keep myself from crying and angering him more.

Once he had finished he would throw me to the floor and I would scrabble to pull up my knickers, the tears silently streaking my cheeks, a wave of relief sweeping through me at the thought that it was over and that I had survived an ordeal that I had thought a few minutes earlier was going to kill me. Why had I made such a fuss? I would ask myself. It wasn’t so bad. I was still alive even if my bottom did hurt. Maybe Dad was right and I was making a fuss about nothing. I would then crawl into a chair and try to sit down, but it would hurt too much and I would have to lean on my side. My punishment was over, but however hard I tried I wouldn’t always be able to stop the tears. I would try to sniff them back up before he saw them.

‘Stop snivelling,’ he would bark, ‘or you’ll get another lot and this time it will be the stick!’

Him shouting would just make me want to cry more. I wanted to run over to him and tell him I was sorry for whatever I had done and that I still loved him. I wanted to ask him to hold me and cuddle me, but I knew better than to do that because such weakness would only aggravate him. So instead I would desperately fight to swallow my sobs and stop the tears from flowing.

I remember witnessing him beating up Terry really badly one day, punching him with his fists. I watched Terry sliding down the wall, the wallpaper behind him smeared with his blood. I couldn’t intervene because I would have received the same treatment for daring to go against him, so I just had to watch and wait for it to be over. If you tried to ask why he was angry or to argue with him you would merely make the ordeal last longer and give him an excuse to become more vicious.

Mum was useless at protecting us because by this stage she was utterly terrified of him as well. He wasn’t the kind of man that many people found the courage to resist. Gradually he undermined Mum’s confidence, telling her she was ugly and useless. He used to beat her about as well, kicking her in the mouth once and knocking out some of her teeth so she had to get false ones. She still has a prominent scar on her chin from that attack.

Things must have been volatile between her and Dad right from the moment they met but it was when she fell pregnant with Glen that she says it all started to go badly wrong. Dad was drinking a lot by then and when she was a few months pregnant they passed a Chinaman in the street on their way home from the pub. Maybe it started as a joke and then got out of hand, but Dad accused her of having an affair with him and then became convinced that Glen really was the Chinaman’s baby. The whole idea was patently ridiculous since Mum had never set eyes on the man either before or after that chance passing in the street but Dad seemed to have convinced himself until he became so incensed by her imagined treachery that he threw Mum down the stairs with Glen inside her, sending her into premature labour. She had to have an emergency caesarean and, as they prepared her for the operation, the doctors discovered that she was suffering from anaemia and malnutrition. She was kept in hospital for a while receiving treatment for all her ailments.

Dad’s theory about Glen having been fathered by a Chinaman was shown to be ridiculous once Glen was born because he looked more like Dad than any of us, but that didn’t stop him from continuing with his delusion. He started claiming that he couldn’t go out to work for fear that he would find Mum in bed with another man when he got back. I don’t believe this for a moment, but he repeated it time and time again over the years to get sympathy, and I’m sure his cronies in the pub took him at his word. Poor old Terry, with a wife he couldn’t trust.

When Mum was rushed into hospital for the caesarean, Terry Junior, Chris and I were placed with a foster family. I suppose Dad didn’t think he could cope with us on his own or maybe Mum had told social services that he couldn’t and that we needed to be protected from him. By that time I think the authorities were becoming aware of his violence. We must have been considered to be at risk.

One of the few memories I have of that period is of coming downstairs the first morning that I was in the foster home.

‘Good morning,’ one of the family said when they saw me appearing in the doorway and I froze, my face turning the colour of beetroot, totally unable to find the words to reply. The greeting must have taken me by surprise because people didn’t exchange those sorts of simple pleasantries in our house; they just grunted and shouted at one another if they needed to communicate. From then on the foster family all called me ‘dummy’. They may only have said it a few times, and they might just have been gently teasing me, but I was still mortified enough for the word to be burned indelibly into my memory. I knew it was my own fault for not speaking up as soon as I was spoken to, and it convinced me that I was inferior to the other children there, a worthless creature who had no right to be in their home at all but wasn’t wanted by anyone else, least of all her parents.

When Mum had recovered from her operation we were allowed to go home again. The doctors said it could be dangerous for her to have another pregnancy and prescribed her with the contraceptive Pill. Once there was no danger of her falling pregnant again, Dad decided the time was ripe to put her on the game. He’d talked about it before, apparently, never seeing anything wrong with the idea. In fact it was a bit of a mystery to him why all women didn’t do it.

‘Every woman’s sitting on a goldmine,’ he would say. ‘Pity I haven’t had four girls because then I could run a proper little brothel and I’d never have to work again.’

It might seem ironic that he beat Mum up because he suspected she’d been unfaithful to him yet he was prepared for her to be a prostitute, sleeping with any man who could pay the going rate – but that would be entirely consistent with his warped kind of logic.

‘If you’re going to do it, you should get paid for it instead of giving it away for free,’ he’d always say.

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