Cry Silent Tears: The heartbreaking survival story of a small mute boy who overcame unbearable suffering and found his voice again. Joe Peters

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СКАЧАТЬ now had a husband who was blatantly sleeping with her best friend and making it obvious that he preferred her company. I don’t think Dad was making any secret of how he felt about Marie, which must have been hard for Mum to handle, but at the same time I doubt if Mum was making much of an effort to win him back with charm, knowing what her temper was like. It’s always hard to know exactly what goes on in other people’s relationships and I was certainly too young to understand anything of the emotional whirlwind swirling around me in those first five years of my life. All I knew was that Dad was my protector, whereas Mum was quite likely to give me a beating for no apparent reason if he wasn’t looking after me. Maybe my older brothers had undergone exactly the same levels of discipline when they were small, but Dad hadn’t been around to protect them. They weren’t really his problem. His main concern became keeping me safe from her anger and he did that by having me with him at every possible moment.

      Because we were always together and because he made no secret of how much he loved me, Mum began to view me as an extension of him. She saw me as part of the conspiracy against her, part of a team with Dad and Marie, part of her humiliation. Knowing that I was the most precious thing in the world to Dad, she would use me against him whenever she had an opportunity. On one occasion, when I was still a small baby, I’m told she dangled me by the leg from an upstairs window. My father had just stormed out of the house after a row and she shouted at him down in the street below: ‘Do you want the little bastard then?’

      My father panicked at the sight of me dangling fifteen feet above the hard pavement and ran back. Kicking the front door in he raced upstairs to rescue me, probably aware that she was more than capable of actually dropping me on my head at a moment like that. By the time he burst into the room she had pulled me back to safety, having achieved exactly the reaction she’d wanted. Apparently there was a big fight, in which she ended up with a thick lip and he got two black eyes. He says he’d never raised his hand to a woman before that day but she pushed him too far after risking my life like that. Dad left the house clutching me tightly and vowing to himself that he would never trust her alone with me again.

      Mum then called the police to tell them that Dad had abducted me and that she needed their help to get me back. She could be very plausible when talking to people in authority and with her bruised face she wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing them that she was the injured party, that she was a good and dutiful mother who had her child’s best interests at heart, while Dad was a violent philanderer who should never be trusted to look after a baby. By hitting her and grabbing me he had inadvertently played into her hands, making her look like the innocent victim of a brutal man. The police got involved and instructed him to give me back, which meant he had to come back too if he wasn’t going to risk leaving me alone with her. It must have been an agonizing choice for him and it must have made him resent Mum all the more for forcing him into a corner.

      As far as Mum was concerned, of course, her plan of using me to blackmail Dad into giving up Marie and staying with her had temporarily paid off. Not wanting to lose his son, knowing that I would need him there to protect me from her anger, he was forced to come home. She had gambled on him being more frightened of losing me than of losing Marie and the gamble had paid off, although not for long. He must have felt as though he was being torn in half, unable to give either of us up but constantly frightened of what Mum might do next. Even though he was back living in the house he was always nervous about leaving me alone in a room with her and he would take me everywhere with him, especially to work and also to Marie’s house when he could no longer resist the temptation to be with her.

      It wasn’t long before Mum realized that her plan wasn’t working and that his feelings for Marie were too strong for him to be able to stay away from her, as long as he felt that I was safe. It must have been galling for Mum to know that he preferred to be with Marie and she saw me as an accomplice in his behaviour, another enemy, even though I was far too young to understand what was going on between the grown-ups in my life.

      Despite the explosive nature of their relationship, or maybe because of it, Mum and Dad still managed to get it together enough during their periods of reconciliation for her to fall pregnant by him twice more, giving birth to a girl called Ellie, born eighteen months after me, and then a boy called Thomas, who was almost three years younger than me. I suppose there must have been some positive passion in their relationship as well as all that anger for them to continue creating a family in the midst of their battles.

      From the moment she was born, my sister Ellie was Mum’s favourite, her little angel, and she never seemed to want to hurt her in the way she did me. Thomas was treated badly, but she didn’t hate him with the same depth of loathing that she harboured for me. With a strange kind of warped logic, she blamed me for Dad’s misdemeanours but not the other two. Maybe it was because I was so clearly his favourite. Maybe it was because I looked so much like him.

      People who knew our family at that time tell me that Dad never became as obsessed about the other two as he was with me. Maybe he didn’t think they were in the same danger from Mum as I was. Maybe he could sense that my mother harboured a dislike for me that went far beyond anything rational. Perhaps he deliberately kept his other two children at arm’s length in the hope that she would bond with them better if she didn’t associate them with him and Marie. Or maybe he just liked having me around because I was that little bit older and adored him so completely. Once he had a boy to be his constant companion, perhaps he didn’t feel that he needed any more. I’ve got no idea what he was thinking or feeling during those early years of my life. I just know he was my hero, my pal and my protector.

      Soon after Thomas was born, Mum and Dad decided to try to patch everything up once and for all. Dad reluctantly parted from Marie and went back home to attempt to be a father to all six of us (including three step-kids), but he still made sure I was always under his watchful eye. Terrified of being hit I would cling tighter to him and the closer I stuck to him the more annoyed Mum became with me. Her hatred of me seemed to grow deeper every day. The attempt at reconciliation soon floundered and by the time I was four Dad and I were more or less living full time with Marie. Mum’s desperate attempts to hold onto her second marriage had failed and she was finally losing him. He was setting a divorce in motion and all she could do was rage against us to anyone who would listen. I dare say she got a fair bit of sympathy as she was the deserted party, but anyone who knew what she was like in the privacy of her own home would never have been surprised that Dad had chosen Marie over her.

      In his determination to keep me out of her grasp Dad went to the courts to say that Mum was an unfit mother to me and that I would be in danger if he left me with her. There were hearings and discussions with the welfare services and his sister Melissa has since told me that she began to believe that Dad was becoming overly protective and obsessive about me. No one in the outside world could know what Mum was really like towards me.

      Dad’s relationship with Mum had reached such a low point at one stage that he became convinced Thomas wasn’t his child. I don’t think he was right, but someone must have told him something about seeing Mum messing about with another man that had made him suspicious and once those suspicions took a hold he didn’t seem to be able to shake them off. Maybe subconsciously he wanted Mum to have betrayed him so he wouldn’t feel so bad about his affair with Marie. Or maybe he thought Thomas would be safer from Mum’s campaign of revenge if it turned out that he had been fathered by another man.

      Marie must have been desperately in love with Dad to have put up with so much and to have continued to take him back even after he had got Mum pregnant twice more. When he went back to Marie for the final time Dad promised her he was going to divorce Mum on the grounds of her adultery, although I don’t know how he thought he was going to be able to prove it. Marie told me with great excitement that she and Dad were going to get married one day soon and we would be a happy family together. I was delighted about this and couldn’t wait until it was all sorted, but they must have been painful, turbulent times for all the adults involved.

      Marie then fell pregnant as well, adding yet another СКАЧАТЬ