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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ