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

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СКАЧАТЬ be different once he got home, that our lives would be wonderful and that he would get a job so he could buy us all the things we needed. It was as though he was playing some hard-done-by character from a country and western song – one man struggling bravely to bring his children up right in a hostile world. I always wanted to believe him, even when he kept on letting us down and breaking his promises, and I would always stick up for him in front of other people, even when I finally realized just how bad a father he really was.

      As soon as he got out of jail, I would find a way to get back to Dad from wherever we were staying at the first possible opportunity. I felt I owed him my loyalty because, whatever he was like, at least he hadn’t walked out on us like Mum had. He had stuck by us and so we belonged to him, we were his and it felt right that we should be with him. ‘No one else will ever want you,’ he’d say. ‘Only me. You’re fat and useless but at least you’ve got me.’

      He couldn’t stand the idea that Terry and I might be taken permanently into care because he didn’t think it was anyone else’s business how he brought us up, and because he didn’t like to lose the benefits that he got as a single dad. We were his devoted little followers, part of his entourage, and he resented any attempts to part him from us.

      He did try for many years to get Chris and Glen back as well, even though he had never known what to do with them when they were babies and wouldn’t have been any better with them once they were older. He went round to the foster home where they spent their whole childhood a few times to try to see them, but thankfully for them he was never allowed access. I heard he even made a pass at their foster mother. I suspect she might have had a bit of a soft spot for him because virtually everyone did when he decided to turn on the charm. He was good at convincing people that his children were the most important things in his life; that he was a dutiful dad who had been wronged by a bad woman and a heartless state.

      Although Terry and I didn’t get to speak to Chris and Glen again until we were all adults, we did see them a few times just after we were all split up when they were brought to visit the people who lived next door to us. I suppose their foster parents must have been friends of our neighbours. Our front doors were inches away from one another, only divided by a tiny fence, and we could see them coming and going, but we were still ordered by social services not to speak to them. I remember peering out the window, seeing how cute they looked in the nice new clothes their foster mother had bought for them, and just feeling sad. After a while someone must have realized how cruel they were being to all of us by allowing these visits because they suddenly stopped. I didn’t see Chris and Glen again after that until I was twenty years old.

      Chapter Five

      just the three of us

      Dad did little more towards looking after Terry and me when he had sole charge of us than he had when Mum was there. We had to feed ourselves most of the time. I would make jam sandwiches if there was any bread in the house, or we’d dig up some spuds from the back garden and make chips. I suppose I’d seen Mum doing these things and I was a fast learner but it’s scary to think I was heating a chip pan at such a young age. Dad kept chickens in the back garden, about twenty of them, and they provided us with eggs but they were always escaping and causing problems with the neighbours. I hated those birds, especially the cockerel and the aggressive way it would fly at me, flapping and squawking when I was sent out to collect the eggs. Dad always said his dream was to have a smallholding out in the country where he could be completely self-sufficient but he never did anything about getting one. He never actually did anything about improving any of our lives, just taking refuge from it all in the pubs, hoping to win enough money on the horses to make all his problems go away.

      If he hardly ever bothered to feed us, he didn’t give a second thought to clothing us; in fact he expected me to help him rather than the other way round. From the moment Mum left I was the one washing and ironing his shirts every day. I’d learnt how to do it by watching Nanny when we visited her bungalow. I had to become good at it because if I made the slightest crease in the wrong place he would give me a slap and shout at me for being stupid, like some eighteenth-century plantation owner overseeing his slaves. But at the same time he would boast to his friends about how wonderful his little girl was, doing all these things for her old man, as if it was evidence of how much I loved him. In a way it was. I felt proud when he talked about me to other people like that but confused that the things he said to my face were completely the opposite. I never knew where I really stood with him, which was one of the ways he kept control in all his relationships and friendships.

      Terry and I didn’t have any opportunity to wash our own clothes and Dad wasn’t worried about how dirty or smelly they became, but he did take an uncomfortable amount of interest in our bath times. He always boasted about how at ease he was with nudity around the house and quite often he would make us have baths with him. The bathroom was off the kitchen, a tiny room containing a sink and a bath that had been crammed in under the slope of the staircase. He’d get in the bath first and then he would call us in when he’d had time for a bit of a soak. Once Terry had washed and got out Dad would tell me to stay and he would sit up on the end with his legs open, ordering me to turn round and look at his naked body while he played with himself.

      ‘I don’t want to,’ I would protest, staring hard at the taps at the other end, knowing something was wrong with what he was doing but not sure what it was. ‘Can’t I get out now?’ But he would make me stay there until he’d had enough and was ready to get out.

      I had long blonde hair, which he was fanatical about, always insistent that I shouldn’t have it cut. Every week or two he would wash it for me in the bath and would always rinse it in freezing cold water, laughing as I gasped at the shock of the cold but becoming furious if I cried or made a fuss of any sort. He was like a sadistic little schoolboy sometimes. He had all sorts of mad theories about my hair, like deciding to rinse it in vinegar to give it a shine, and when it came to brushing the knots out he would turn what should have been a pleasant experience for both of us into the most horrifically painful ordeal possible, laughing gleefully all the way through it as I squeaked and squirmed under his brutal tugging.

      He had a cruel, warped sense of humour, like a little boy with his practical jokes. When Mum was still with us, he used to pee in the vinegar bottle and watch joyfully as she sprinkled it on her chips. He often used milk bottles to relieve himself in when he was upstairs and couldn’t be bothered to come down to the toilet. He would shout for Terry or me to go up and fetch them from him and empty them. If he didn’t have a milk bottle handy he would just open the bedroom window and piss through that. He didn’t believe any of the rules of normal decent behaviour applied to him; he believed he could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.

      Dad also seemed to get pleasure from inflicting any sort of pain on people weaker than himself. Sometimes Terry and I would be sitting with him watching television or playing a game quite peacefully and he would suddenly jump up and give one of us a Chinese burn, twisting our little arms as if he was wringing out a wet towel. If we cried out in surprise or pain he would start laughing or would shout at us to ‘shut up!’ like it was some sort of initiation ceremony designed to toughen us up and we had to be brave.

      The unsettling thing was that we could never predict how he would react to anything; sometimes he supported us to an almost lunatic level. He loved his football and one year when Norwich City were in the FA Cup Final, he settled himself down in front of the telly to watch his home team, sending us out into the street to play. Terry got involved in some sort of an argument with another kid and came back indoors crying. Dad was annoyed at having his viewing disturbed but instead of giving Terry a hard time for being a pathetic crybaby, as he normally would have done, he stormed outside to deal with the problem himself. The other lad’s dad then also got involved and the two fathers ended up fighting so viciously the police had to be called to separate them. Dad was arrested and taken to the police station. He was angrier about missing the game than anything СКАЧАТЬ