Escaping Daddy

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.