Escaping Daddy

The other prostitutes working in King’s Cross all looked older and harder and more vicious than any of the girls I had ever met in Norwich. These were people who everyone had given up on, junkies and schizophrenics and God alone knew what else. I’d never really known many black people before and I didn’t understand the way they or their pimps acted or talked to me. It was like occupying an alien landscape and everything seemed strange and dangerous, angry and aggressive. Most of the time I got myself high on speed or acid before I went out to work, just so that I could overcome my fears.

When the police eventually caught up with us they arrested Brian and Dad, accusing them both of living off my immoral earnings. Everyone knew Dad was a pimp but I was forced to stand in the witness box for an hour and half with him staring long and hard at me as I finally plucked up the courage to give evidence against him. Even then I still hated and loved him in equal proportions. I was relieved that people now believed me and that he was going to have to pay for what he had done to me over the years, but I also felt guilty that I was betraying him and ensuring he went back to prison again.

Everyone, including the judge, could see that Brian was my boyfriend and not a paedophile in the way Dad was, but he had still broken the law by sleeping with me while I was underage and so he had to serve six months in jail while Dad was given four years.

I don’t think anyone in social services thought that I would wait for Brian, but I did, putting all my energies into finding new ways to escape from the care homes they put me in. Eventually, once Brian was free and I was seventeen, they admitted defeat and let us live together in Brian’s council flat, which was the moment when I fell pregnant with his child.

I desperately wanted a child, having already suffered a miscarriage the previous year. Most of all I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted my baby to have the best possible start in life and never be made to feel the way I had felt throughout my childhood. As the date of the birth drew closer my intentions became more and more serious and I began to realise that Brian was never going to be able to be a good and responsible father. He might be a lovely, kind man, but he would never hold down a proper job and I could see that his drink and drug problems were getting worse not better. Dad would soon be out of prison and I was terrified of being forced back into his clutches simply because I had no alternative. I didn’t want him to be allowed anywhere near my baby when it arrived.

I had wanted so much to be independent and to show the world, and Dad, that I was an adult and could manage on my own, but I realised the relationship with Brian wasn’t going to work and I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of the social services. I needed help. I hated the idea of people seeing me as a failure again and I was terrified they would insist on taking the baby away from me, but they responded graciously to my plea and eventually put me into a little flat on my own. So many people in the social services over the years had told me that they thought I could do better with my life, but I had never believed them, always allowing Dad’s words to undermine my confidence and make me suspicious of anyone who told me I was better than I thought, that I could make something of my life if I wanted to.

My baby, Brendan, was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t sleep at all the first night after his birth, just lying there staring at him, promising him I would do everything I possibly could to give him a decent life and that I would make sure he didn’t have to endure the sort of upbringing I’d been given. I convinced myself that just because Mum had left us and Dad had abused me and put me on the streets didn’t necessarily mean I was doomed to repeat all their mistakes. I told myself that by having such a wonderful baby to look after I would be one of the damaged children who managed to escape from their past. I had imagined that Dad was the only problem, not realising there would be other people and emotions lying in wait to ambush me.

In the euphoria of the first few hours with my baby I thought my problems were behind me–but they weren’t. I was eighteen years old but inside the tense, feisty teenager I had become I was still a sad, desperate child. Despite the aggressive, cheeky face I showed to the outside world, I was feeling as lost and alone in the world as I had when my father first raped me and then laughed at my pain, terrified now that the shadows of my past would catch up with me again, dragging me back into his world of scams, populated as it always was by hookers, addicts and drunks.

Chapter Two The Overdose

When I was a little girl, if anyone had asked what I wanted to do with my life I would have told them, ‘I want to get married and have four children’. I guess that was because Mum and Dad had had four of us and I wanted to make up for all the mistakes they had made, do everything completely differently to the way they had. Perhaps I was hoping to get a childhood for myself through my own children. As I hadn’t been able to do all those great parent/child things when I was the child, at least I would be able to do them as a mum.

But the reality was that after Brendan’s birth I was lonely and broke, and insecure about my parenting skills. I didn’t even seem to be able to make enough money to keep my new baby warm and safe without having to resort to shoplifting. I can still remember the sick feeling of guilt I experienced when I was caught stealing some bedding from a department store in Norwich. I had Brendan with me at the time and when they took me up to the police station I dissolved into helpless sobbing and hysteria because I thought they were going to take him away from me.

I was never a good shoplifter, although I was a lot better than my brother Terry in the days when we were both small and Dad used to send us out every day to steal his whisky or some food for our supper. Whereas Dad seemed to see nothing wrong in stealing at all, as though it was just a fact of life that we had to get used to, I always felt guilty and tried to wriggle out of it. I stole an eyeliner pencil for myself once and felt so bad about it I took it back the next day. I was even more scared of being caught returning it than I had been when I originally slid it into my pocket.

The fact that I was having to turn to shoplifting again in order to provide for my baby made me feel like even more of a failure, as though I was fulfilling all Dad’s worst predictions about how my future would be without him. However much I hated the way things were going, however, I also couldn’t see any way I would ever be able to turn my life round and make everything decent. Once you have become part of that world of thieving and drinking and prostitution, especially when it is all you have ever known or had experience of, it is very hard to break out.

Although I was physically safe in my tiny flat, and was no longer being forced to climb into cars with strange men, inside I still felt like the same little girl whose father had decided on the day of her birth to turn her into a street walker. Even though I loved my baby, Brendan, more than anything or anyone I often found the pain of living too much to bear.

Apart from Brendan I had no family to turn to for comfort as the empty hours ticked by in that lonely little flat. Mum was living locally and I could telephone her whenever I wanted but she might as well have been at the other end of the country for all the help she was able to give me. I used to go to see her once a week for a few months after Brendan was born but her new partner had made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with her children from the past so I could only visit when he was out at work. When she saw me struggling to cope it must have brought back memories of how she had been at my age, when she was weighed down with kids that she hardly knew how to look after, and constantly bullied by the man who was supposed to be the love of her life. It’s easy to see why she might want to shut out anything that reminded her of those times, and that perhaps made her feel guilty for the way in which she had abandoned her children. Whatever the reasons, I knew I was on my own with my problems.

The people at social services did their best to help me in every way they could, which meant we wouldn’t starve and we had a roof over our heads, but I was desperate to do better than that for my precious child. I couldn’t bear the thought that I could do no more than keep him alive. But what could I ever do to earn money? Dad had completely convinced me that I was no use to anyone and had ensured that I had no education or skills apart from street walking. The only thing I knew about was working on the Block, but returning to that option seemed too terrible to contemplate. I knew that I was lucky to have survived for as long as I had selling casual sex to strangers in cars. I dreaded the thought of being forced to go back to taking such enormous risks, but Dad had told me a million times that that was all I was good for, and in the increasingly frequent number of moments of self doubt I believed he was right.

Most children are lucky enough to have wise and kind guides to help them find their paths through life, mentors who have their best interests at heart and want to see them be happy and want to help them to thrive and succeed at whatever they choose to do. But what happens if the people you are forced to rely on for guidance at the very beginning of your life are not wise or kind? What if they are quite the opposite and do everything they can to tempt and force you down the wrong paths in life, being more interested in themselves and the gratification of their own desires?

No one can spend their whole lives blaming their parents for everything that goes wrong in their lives; after a while it comes down to the choices you make for yourself as an adult and you have to take responsibility for them, but how good or bad those choices are will very largely be determined by the foundations that have been laid in the early years of your life. I might have been eighteen years old when I had Brendan, but I still felt as completely lost as I had been at eight when I was forced to lie down beside Dad with those magazines and at thirteen when I sat in the cars of strangers and they did whatever they wanted to me.

One night when I was drowning in unpaid bills and utterly desperate for money, I left Brendan with a babysitter and went out onto the streets in search of motorists looking for business. The despair I felt as I climbed into those strangers’ cars was the deepest and darkest I had ever experienced. I didn’t ever want to go back to being that desperate. I only did it a couple of times but afterwards I sank into the blackest of depressions and decided I would rather end it all and let someone more responsible than me take over bringing up Brendan.

Since I was twelve or thirteen I had been cutting my arms with knives and any other sharp implement I could get my hands on. I just wanted to hurt myself because I thought I was so worthless I didn’t deserve to be treated any better, to punish myself for being such a terrible person. I suppose it also gave me some kind of control over my body in ways that I didn’t have otherwise. When the blood flowed, I always felt a sense of release, however momentary.

I started seriously trying to kill myself when I was about fourteen. The first time, I saved up paracetamol tablets by telling different people in the care home I was in that I had a headache or period pains and then swallowed them all one night but I was found and rushed to A & E to have my stomach pumped. I tried again not long afterwards but the same thing happened.

Whenever I was actually putting the tablets in my mouth I always intended to kill myself, but sometimes I would change my mind a few moments later. A kind of survival instinct cut in, making me panic and tell someone what I had done. They then raised the alarm and I was left with all the shame and embarrassment of having had my stomach pumped out and being given a load of lectures. With each failed attempt my self-esteem would shrink further.

Now, at the age of eighteen, I decided I had to make sure I died this time. I loved Brendan so much it hurt and I was terrified he was going to end up being damaged by whatever choices I made in life. Just looking at his perfect, innocent little face as I changed or fed him made me cry. But I had become increasingly certain I was the worst mother possible for him. He was helpless and trusted me completely but I believed that I had to let him go in order to give him a better chance in life than I had been given by my parents. I just wanted all the pain and shame to end and there only seemed to be one way to make that happen.

If I killed myself, Brendan would have a better life than I could ever give him and I would be released from my misery. I didn’t think I deserved to live. I believed I was worthless, because that was what I had always been told by Dad and virtually everyone else I came across, and I now felt that I was so useless as a mother that even Brendan would be better off without me. On the evidence of what had happened so far, I didn’t believe I was going to be capable of looking after him properly.

I didn’t want to kill myself with him in the flat since I had no idea how long it would be before anyone found my body. My first priority was to ensure that he was somewhere safe before I did the terrible deed and ended the horrible charade of my short life forever.

I always tried to hide from everyone the fact that I wasn’t coping but Doris, my social worker, had been able to see how much stress I was under beneath my seemingly cheerful, argumentative exterior. Doris had introduced me to a nice woman who worked as a foster mother and she had been doing a bit of babysitting for me, giving me a chance to get out and have a break now and then. As the darkness of my despair threatened to engulf me once and for all I took Brendan round to her house and asked if I could leave him with her for a while. She agreed immediately without asking any questions. She was a kind woman and I knew he would be in safe hands for as long as he was with her. I think perhaps I hoped that she would adopt him once I was gone, because she had already formed a bond with him.

It was agonising to say goodbye to the baby I loved more than anything in the world, to walk away from him feeling as if my insides were being physically torn from my body, but at the same time I was in a hurry now that I had made up my mind to get the whole thing over, eager to move on to a better place, or at least to be at peace, and to finally put an end to the pain. If Brendan was going to be better off being brought up by someone else I didn’t want to have to be around to watch it happening; I wouldn’t have been able to bear that. It was better that I acted quickly and decisively to end my life for everyone’s sake. He would be free to get on with his life and I would be free of the pain.

I took him from his pram on the pretext of checking he was dry and comfortable, and held him for as long as I could bear, drinking in the scent of his skin as I kissed him for the last time and passed him across to the kind foster mother who had no idea of the turmoil churning around inside my mind. I was always good at hiding what I was feeling, giving people the impression that I was on top of everything, that I didn’t have a care in the world.

After handing him into her care I left the house without looking back because I couldn’t bear to see his trusting little face watching me go, and I walked straight back to my flat. I didn’t want to think about anything else now that the final decision had been taken. It was a relief to be able to work on autopilot. The pain in my heart was so agonising I was frantic to numb it as quickly as possible.

I had been saving up paracetamol for weeks, knowing that this moment would come, that I would eventually have to admit defeat and give up Brendan and my life. Stockpiling tablets whenever the opportunity presented itself had been a habit of mine for many years. Knowing that I had them there was like knowing that there was an emergency exit available to me if life became intolerable. Having a potential way out sometimes made life seem a little more bearable during the years when I was with Dad or locked up in one children’s home or another.

That morning, the moment I was alone behind my own front door I swallowed the tablets in greedy mouthfuls, washing them down with swigs of cheap wine. Then I sat down and waited for them to take effect, relieved to have finally made the decision to give up the struggle and to go on to somewhere peaceful. I was in a confused and emotional state already and once the tablets started working their way into my system reality became even more blurred, the world around me drifting into a sort of comfortable haze, a bit like a waking dream. The pain was fading just as I had hoped and life began to float away from me.

I could hear the phone ringing but I couldn’t make any logical decision as to whether to answer it or not. In the end my hand just picked it up, like a robot, wanting to stop it from making such an irritating noise, and I put it to my ear. The deep voice on the other end was unfamiliar and I had to struggle to take in the words, forcing my brain to try to make sense of them and my mouth to respond in the way that the caller might expect. It sounded like a kind voice, someone who was trying to make a connection with me. It was probably only a few seconds but it seemed like an age before I realised it was a man called Rodney I had met a few days before, who had asked for my number. There must have been something comfortable and reassuring about him that had struck a chord because I had given him the number without hesitating, which I would never normally do with a stranger.

Who knows why he chose that moment to make a call? Maybe there was some higher force directing his actions, someone or something that wanted to stop me from doing what I was doing, or maybe it was just a lucky break.

I forced my brain to focus on what he was saying. It sounded as though he was asking me out. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I couldn’t accept the invitation because I would be dead in a few hours’ time. I don’t know if the words that were coming out of my mouth were even making sense by that stage as I strained to make normal conversation.

The call from Rodney gave me a cause to hope, a tiny straw to cling to. It sounded to my desperate ears as if he was my knight in shining armour. When you are as near to the edge of the precipice as I was, the smallest thing can tip you either way. Just hearing from another human being, knowing that someone out there thought it was worth picking up a phone to call me, that this man was actually wanting to get to know me, made things feel different. By the time I finished the conversation and hung up, my life no longer seemed to be the same terrible black hole of despair it had been just a few minutes earlier. I had even managed to make a date to meet him, but meanwhile the drugs I had put into my system were well into the process of closing my life down.

Now that things weren’t as painful and bleak as they had seemed before his call I no longer wanted to die but my head felt so heavy I wanted more than anything else to lie down and go to sleep. This stranger on the phone had thrown me a lifeline and I grabbed it, battling to stay awake, knowing that once I gave in to sleep that would be the end, that by the time anyone found me I would be long dead. I had to keep going, but the drugs had penetrated deep into my blood by then, relentlessly doing their work of shutting everything down. I had just enough brain cells functioning to know that I couldn’t do this on my own, I had to get help.

I didn’t have the strength left for more than one phone call by then. Not able to think of anyone else to turn to as I struggled to stay awake, I forced myself to concentrate for a few more seconds and dialled my mum’s number. If my brain had been functioning logically I would have tried to think of someone else. This was the woman who had disappeared for most of my childhood and although we were back in contact again, there was no maternal bond between us. But in those moments, as my life was slipping away, I wanted my mum to be the one who was there for me. No way would I ever have wanted to rely on her for support or advice if I had had a choice–but I didn’t. She was my only chance.

As soon as she answered I somehow managed to make her understand what I had done despite the fact that I could hardly get the words out. She made it clear to me that she was pissed off to have me messing up her day but a few minutes after hanging up the phone and lying back on the verge of surrendering to sleep, I heard the distant wail of an ambulance siren responding to her call. I was drifting in and out of consciousness by the time it arrived at my door and fell silent, replaced by the sounds of running feet and banging doors. At that moment I gave in to the tablets, knowing I was no longer alone as I slipped into unconsciousness, only vaguely aware of feeling myself being lifted onto a stretcher.

In hospital, after I had my stomach pumped, a psychiatrist came to talk to me, and then within a day they were releasing me back to my old life and all the problems that came with it. I was terrified that now they would take Brendan into care but to my surprise, Doris gave such a glowing report on my mothering skills that they didn’t even mention it. They said they weren’t surprised I felt suicidal after everything I had been through in my life and that they would look around for more ways to support me.

I’d been given another chance. Now it was up to me to try and make it work.

Chapter Three A Ready-Made Family

When Rodney first spotted me from the window of his van as I pushed Brendan’s pram along the pavement, there was no way either of us could tell anything about the other. He must have seen an eighteen-year-old girl that he fancied and guessed from the fact that I was pushing a baby around that I was a mum, but he wouldn’t have been able to even begin to imagine what the first eighteen years of my life had been like and that beneath the aggressive, cheeky exterior that I showed to the world there lurked a damaged little girl who lacked all self-esteem and any hope for being able to build herself a better future.

Likewise, I just saw a bloke in a van who had asked for my telephone number. I’d seen enough men through the windows of cars since I was twelve to know that they were seldom planning anything pleasant. He didn’t look like anything special. I couldn’t tell then if he was a knight in shining armour sent to save me from my past, or yet another useless man who was only after one thing and would either let me down or treat me badly. To be honest I wouldn’t have given it that much consideration at the time, my thoughts being dominated by my own inner demons and my worries about how I was going to feed and look after my baby.

Rodney was a short, stockily built man, and not bad looking. You wouldn’t say he was exactly handsome but he had a way about him that was attractive to people. My previous experiences of men hadn’t only been with callous abusers like my father and the many punters and kerb-crawlers that he steered me towards over the years. There had been kind men too, like Brian, but in the end even the good ones turned out to be a bit hopeless at managing their lives, and were completely unable to offer me any of the guidance or support I needed as I stumbled to find a way to give my child a decent start in life. These men were as lost as I was, more so in most cases. Nearly everyone I knew had been led into using drink or drugs unwisely as they searched for ways to escape from the grim reality of their lives and themselves. Their addictions usually hastened the collapse of everything else in their lives, blighting their relationships, draining them of money and often making them unemployable. There was no way of telling if this man who had shouted out to me from his van was going to be any different or whether he would just add another level of pain to my life.