I Just Wanted to Be Loved: A boy eager to please. The man who destroyed his childhood. The love that overcame it.. Stuart Howarth

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       Chapter Two

       TRYING TO MAKE A LIFE FOR MYSELF

      With Dad gone, I cast myself in the role of ‘man of the house’ and started worrying about how I could take care of Mum and my sisters. I nicked food from the local Presto store, sold some of the junk Dad had brought home at second-hand shops, and I even joined a church choir because they paid you £2 to turn up every Sunday. Our house began to fall apart around us so I decided to set fire to it to try and get the insurance money for Mum, but my plan backfired when the council decided to take Shirley into a special-needs home instead of rehousing her with us. We got a new council house but I really missed her when she wasn't there every day.

      After Dad got out of prison, he went to live with his sister Doris in Wales. I didn't want him to come and live with us again but I wanted my male role model back – someone I could look up to, who would protect me and teach me how to be a man – so I decided to go down and visit him there. He looked just the same as before and he was being perfectly nice to me, but one night from my bedroom I overheard a conversation between him and Auntie Doris in which she said, ‘I thought he knew he wasn't your lad?’

      Straight away I hurried down to confront him about this, but he denied it. ‘Of course I'm yer dad,’ he said. ‘Don't be daft.’

      I was confused, and left the next day without feeling I'd got the answers I wanted from him. And then he met a new woman who had three kids of her own. They had another son together, and Dad and I lost touch. He didn't make any effort to keep up with me, and I felt excluded by his new ‘family’. I also felt pushed out at home with Mum because when I was fifteen she got a new boyfriend called Trevor who usurped my ‘man of the house’ role.

      I left school at sixteen and did a few different jobs before training as a steeplejack. I went out with a couple of girls but I was really messed up and hated the way other boys talked about girls as slags and whores or bought pornographic magazines. It felt wrong and dirty to me. I had this dream of having an intimate, loving relationship with a girl but no idea how I could achieve such a thing. The only person I was close to was Shirley, who I visited whenever I could.

      At the age of eighteen I met a girl called Angela, a gentle girl with lovely long, dark hair. I pushed all memories of my childhood to the back of my mind and did my best to form a good relationship with her. When she announced she was pregnant, I said straight away that I would marry her and I vowed that I would look after her and our little boy, Matthew, who was born in 1989.

      I loved him to pieces, but inside I was full of self-hatred and drinking heavily every night to drown out all the childhood memories and flashbacks that ran through my head like an illegal porn film, frame by frame. I looked at my son's little body as he lay in the bath and I was terrified that someone would abuse him one day. Questions would haunt me until I wasn't even sure if it was all right for me to be in the bathroom with him. Was even that wrong? Dad used to abuse me in the bathroom sometimes. I hadn't had a role model for fatherhood that I wanted to copy but I didn't know how else to be.

      The following year, my world fell apart when Shirley died. She was left unsupervised in a bath, had an epileptic fit and drowned. All the feelings I'd been trying to repress exploded out of me in a torrent. I felt angry with the staff at the home, with God, the universe and everyone who had ever crossed me.

      All my coping mechanisms broke down and the childhood memories came flooding out like torrents of water raging through a ruptured dam. I got into fights, drank even more than before and started arguing fiercely with Angela as well. In the midst of all this she announced she was pregnant again, but I felt no joy at the news – only increased stress.

      I was a workaholic, choosing jobs that took me away from home a lot, and I started to doubt our whole relationship. How could Angela possibly love me? I was a disgusting, bad person. The pressure built inside me until one day I came home and told her I didn't want to be married to her any more. She was desperately upset, in an advanced state of pregnancy, and she just couldn't understand what was going on and why I was cracking up. I'd told her bits and pieces about my childhood but nothing like the whole story.

      Our daughter Rebecca was born while we were living apart, and six months later I reached rock bottom and tried to throw myself under a train. I spent three days in hospital, where a psychiatrist suggested that I should get counselling, but nothing was ever done about it.

      With my next girlfriend Lorraine I was even more messed up. I tried to kill myself twice while I was with her, the first time by attaching a pipe to my car exhaust and trailing it back through a window as I sat in the garage, the second by slashing my wrists when we were up in Edinburgh for Hogmanay. She tried her best to get through to me, to reassure me that she loved me and wanted to help, but by this stage I had discovered cocaine, and it fuelled the rage I was feeling.

      I left Lorraine just as I had left all the women I'd gone out with up to that point, because I was scared that if I didn't then she would leave me and I knew I couldn't bear that. I'd never told anyone about my dad and everything he had done to me. I was too ashamed, as if it was my fault in some way, and I just couldn't face all the trauma it would bring to the surface if I talked about it. Then in February 2000 I found a woman who seemed as though she would make all the difference: someone who I thought could fix me and make me able to live with myself again.