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

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СКАЧАТЬ They refused to take her warnings seriously. Maybe they hear stories like that all the time and thought Mum was exaggerating to get back at her estranged husband.

      ‘All your children are subject to care orders,’ they tried to reassure her, ‘which will stay in force until they are eighteen.’ This was supposed to mean that social services took responsibility for us and made decisions about such things as where we lived and what schools we went to. No doubt they promised to keep an eye on us and to remove us if they thought we were in any danger, but I doubt if that would have put Mum’s mind at rest. She knew how clever Dad was at manipulating people and making them believe whatever he wanted them to believe.

      Although I have all my social services reports from the time, it is hard to work out from the things they have written why they made some of the decisions they did. I always felt hopeful in the following years whenever I knew that a social worker was due to call on us, because I thought each time they were bound to realize that something was wrong and would try to help us. But the main social worker who was allotted to us in the early years was so terrified of Dad she refused to come to the house unless she had a police escort or one of her bosses with her. Her visits were very infrequent and were over as quickly as everyone could manage. Her fears were not unreasonable, of course, since Dad had already served six months in jail for beating up that other social worker. But if they knew he was capable of that level of violence, did they not guess he was capable of being violent to us? What made them think it would be all right to give us straight back to him as soon as he finished his sentence?

      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 СКАЧАТЬ