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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СКАЧАТЬ did her best to reassure me. ‘But why do you love me?’ I'd ask over and over. I thought maybe she liked me because I bought her lots of meals and flowers and treated her like a lady, but she said no, it wasn't that. It was the fact that I let her see the vulnerability beneath the extrovert veneer of a successful businessman and joker. The story of my childhood moved her deeply and made her want to care for me. She claimed it was the real Stuart she fell for, not the public mask.

      Still I had problems trusting. Roughly three months after we'd moved in together, things came to a head and we agreed that I would move back to my Mum's pub until we could sell her house and buy somewhere new together – somewhere without history, that was just ours; somewhere she hadn't lived with another man.

      Without her there to cuddle up to every night, I started hooking up with the lads and going out drinking and drugging with them. It wasn't long before Tracey began to complain bitterly that I either disappeared at weekends or was too hung over to do much with her, so to make things up I took her away for the weekend. On 20 August 2000 we ended up in Wales, in the village where my stepfather was now living, and briefly met my Aunt Doris and her husband Stewart.

      Later that night, tortured by all the memories, and convinced that I would never be able to form a good relationship until I got answers to some of my questions about the past, I drove back to visit my stepdad to try and talk to him about everything. But once I got inside his house, I became a frightened little boy again rather than a thirty-two-year-old man. Dozens of little things triggered horrific childhood memories: his dogs' bowls sitting on the step, which made me remember all the times he'd forced me to eat from them; his feet soaking in a bowl, which brought back their vile, rotten smell and all the times he made me scratch the dead skin off them; the way he sat in his chair with that twisted smile on his face. There was a hammer beside him in just the place he would have kept whatever weapon he was about to beat me with.

      He started shouting at me and I began to sob convulsively, crouching down on the sofa in a submissive, child's posture. He ranted and raved, denying everything, utterly furious with me, and when he stood up I felt sure he was standing to attack me.

      ‘Please, Daddy, no!’ I screamed. I lunged across and grabbed the hammer and brought it down on his head in a moment of blind terror. It was a gut reaction, a pure survival instinct. It was and still is like a terrible nightmare that never happened.

      Even as I ran out of the house and down the hill to my car, I was terrified he would be running after me and about to grab me and beat me to a pulp. I fled like a naughty child as if my life depended on it, my veins flooded with adrenalin, my teeth chattering and my entire body twitching with shock. There was a buzzing in my ears and I felt hot all over. I've never been so scared in my life. I thought that any minute he was going to catch me and beat me to a pulp. I didn't realize that he was dead.

       Chapter Four

       BEING INSIDE

      The next morning I was arrested and taken into police custody. It was only then I found out that David Howarth hadn't been my real dad; George Heywood, Mum's first husband, was my biological father. Although I'd had my suspicions after overhearing the conversation in Wales, it was still a very strange surprise.

      I told the police about all the abuse I'd suffered as a child and they interrogated me in detail about it. There were hours and hours spent going over and over events until I thought my head was going to explode.

      I was in a state of extreme fear and confusion as I was marched to the cells and strip-searched. Right from the start prison was a huge shock, a dog-eat-dog world where both inmates and guards seemed out to get me. My nerves were jangling; every sound of a clanging door or a shout from another inmate left me petrified and shaking. I'd killed a man. My life was over. I made up my mind to kill myself as soon as I got the chance – but they put me on suicide watch so there was nothing I could do.

      At this stage I'd only been with Tracey for five months. Most women would have run a mile, and with my set of life problems and issues I was sure that's what Tracey would do too. When at last she was allowed in to visit me, my first words were: ‘Just leave me now. It's over.’

      Looking me straight in the eye, she said: ‘I'll never leave you, Stuart. I love you.’

      A couple of days later, as I sat in my prison cell, a letter was tossed inside. I recognized Tracey's writing and when I picked it up I felt something hard inside. I ripped open the top of the envelope and a white-gold wedding ring fell out and spun across the floor. As I bent down to pick it up, my heart ached. A note from Tracey said simply: ‘I'll never leave you and I will always love you.’ It was the most powerful gesture of love that I'd ever experienced in my life. Who was this amazing woman and what on earth did she see in me?

      Over the next seven months while I was on remand awaiting trial, Tracey visited me every single day, bringing me the few items of clothing I was allowed and some CDs to try and relax me. But the regime in prison was a living nightmare. I was in a permanent state of terror at the unpredictable nature of the other prisoners and the cruelty of some of the guards. It culminated one night when I was told I was being moved to a cell just by the sex offenders unit and I totally lost the plot. I had hidden two safety razors in my cell and I used them to slash at my arms until blood was spraying round the room and gushing down my legs.

      They stopped me before I managed to kill myself but after that I was transferred to Manchester's Strangeways prison, where things went from bad to worse. There were some sadistic guards in there who used strip search as a form of punishment, and after I complained about it my treatment got even worse. My food bowl disappeared, I was moved to increasingly dilapidated cells, there was verbal abuse and all kinds of insidious harassment. I began to keep a diary of events and that seemed to wind them up even more.

      At my trial in March 2001 I was sentenced to two years in prison for taking the life of the man I had always known as ‘Dad’. The judge said he believed I'd had diminished responsibility at the time and told me that the case was one of the most graphic and depraved instances of child abuse he had ever come across, and that my stepdad was a sick and twisted man. Taking into account the time I had already served, I would be released in September, six months hence. But how would I get through those six months without losing the plot completely?

      Tracey was the only thing that kept me going, but it was tough for her too. After I was sentenced the visiting was substantially reduced and she was only allowed to come once a week. It got even harder when I was placed on the category A side of Strangeways. Category A is for hardened criminals or those assumed to be a risk to the public or national security. Category A prisoners aren't allowed to leave the wing so any visitors have to come to them. When she visited me there, Tracey had to walk right into the heart of the prison past all the other prisoners, who would whistle, catcall and jeer as she went by.

      We sat for an hour facing each other across a table with a guard hovering nearby, only allowed to kiss briefly at the beginning and end of each visit. I desperately needed to hug her for comfort but this was never allowed. Yet Tracey turned up faithfully every single visiting time, trying to lift my spirits as best she could.

      After a visit when she knew I was in a bad way, she would drive back late at night and park on the road outside Strangeways where I could see her from my cell window, then she would get out of the car and wave to me, shouting that she loved me. It brought me a lot of comfort on the lonely nights. We'd talk daily whenever I wasn't banged up in my cell and got a chance to reach the phone, and we would write letters to each other СКАЧАТЬ