Tell Me You're Sorry, Daddy--Two Scared Little Girls. One Abusive Father. One Survived Against All Odds to Tell Their Story

by Caryn Walker

  Jenny was still on the ‘At Risk’ register and another social worker, Mrs Stuart, was brought in to support Miss Williams, to cover her absences and to act as a further safeguard. Before Jenny went to her new school, Miss Williams met with the Head, Mr Wootton, and told him the story – they both agreed it would be a struggle to get Jenny to school not smelling, and that she would be taunted for it by the other children. Miss Williams says in the report, ‘I feel Mr and Mrs Yeo are inclined to lie in and let the kids fend for themselves in the mornings.’

  Yes, that’s exactly what they were ‘inclined’ to do. But while social services were watching Jenny, I was dealing with Dad’s ‘inclinations’ every night. He’d force my legs open, put his penis in between my legs, then close them tight. At first he’d rub himself to orgasm, then he would enter me. It always followed a pattern – he’d take my pyjama bottoms off, talk to me, tell me loving, twisted things, then do what he wanted to do. I hated it. The pictures in his magazines were really scary to me – I knew he was doing those terrible things to me, and the images would flash through my mind. I’d try to squirm away but I was so small and his whole body pinned me down. He’d often call me Nettie after my Auntie Jeanette, grunting and saying her name over and over again. He’d leave his mess on me and the bed, meaning I had to lie in it that night and clean it up as best I could the next day.

  Sometimes, the raping was very quick but it was always excruciating – I bled a lot but I couldn’t tell anyone. Often, I’d throw my knickers in the bin and get into trouble for that. I’d get no sleep, either through the fear of him or him being there, but I’d still be off to school the next day, walking in pain, trying not to cry. I learned not to feel or say anything, though; I just got on with it. I had an overwhelming sense of being completely bad and completely guilty. ‘This must be my fault because I am so bad,’ I would think. ‘Mum can’t die, Dad can’t leave – I have no choice.’

  I bit my nails down to nothing – and Mum teased me mercilessly about it. She once made me go to school with plasters on the ends of my fingers and said I had to leave them there for weeks to make me stop biting. In normal kids, who had baths and washes, they would fall off naturally but we rarely washed so they just got dirtier and dirtier. Eventually they did fall off, and I was terrified I would get into trouble, but Mum had lost interest by then. I also had a squint in my eye that I’m convinced was related to the trauma I was going through – I don’t have it any more, but it was very evident back then. I lived in a constant state of nervousness. I was the quietest of the family, according to Grandma, and I tried to keep out of the way whenever I could. At night-time that was an impossibility because he knew where to find me, but during the day, I just wanted to try and guess what would keep Mum calm so my world would be less horrific.

  I often sat in the corner on my own, but that could enrage her too, so I would try to judge, try to second-guess – a habit I have to this day whenever I’m with other people. I’m always scanning a room, attempting to work out what would cause the least drama. I think it’s something many survivors do; it’s hard-wired into us. There were nights when I got no peace, even after Dad had left me once that night’s abuse was over, because if Mum was drunk – and she was a rotten drunk – she’d often take it into her head that she wanted company, so she’d scream at me to come downstairs, where she’d be watching a Barry Manilow concert or something on TV. Often bleeding, always sore, I’d crawl out of bed, my hands feeling the damp patches on my bed, or my legs feeling sticky, or my feet touching the mess he had left on the carpet from his disgusting body, and stagger downstairs to be shouted at for nodding off, or not ‘enjoying’ myself more. In the morning they’d still be asleep, drunk or idle and I’d be sitting at my desk at school like a zombie, with teachers thinking I was stupid or lazy as my body and mind paid the price of what went on virtually every evening at home.

  Mum’s behaviour could switch very easily and there were always drinking sessions, sometimes with parties, sometimes not. These parties could go on for days and, again, I would have to navigate it all. There were usually fights, clothes thrown out of windows. Sometimes we’d be bundled out to Grandma’s if it got really bad. Mum had scars on her forearm where she punched her way through a glass front door to batter someone on the other side. I definitely remember being taken away somewhere else that night. There was always someone fighting, whether there was a party or not, as Mum and Dad rarely stopped even when they were alone. Once, Mum threw an electric fire at Dad; another time she stabbed him. She was always trying to get a reaction but it was only fishing or abusing me that ever roused him.

  He kept saying he loved me, I was special. So very special. I did want to be loved, of course I did, but if this was the only love I deserved, it was because I was bad. Mum was always angry with me – nothing had changed in that department. He’d say, ‘Touching there is just like an arm or a leg, it’s just skin, isn’t it?’ He was looking at my body more as it changed and I became just something for him to play with. They were both twisted and we didn’t stand a chance.

  While Dad abused me sexually, Mum didn’t seem to let up on Jenny psychologically. Jenny had asked Mum why she had been sent away and there was a vague story given about Mum not being well and maybe smacking her too hard so the doctors decided to separate them. When Jenny asked, ‘Why only me?’ Mum said it was because she loved her best and sometimes mummies hurt the child they love most. Horrible lies; horrible things to put in a child’s head.

  We were both learning to blame ourselves, learning that there was little we could do. As I got older, I’d try to pull away or say no, but Dad had an answer every time.

  ‘It’s better that I do this with you than another woman as that would be really wrong,’ he’d say. ‘I’d have to leave, and then what would happen to your mum and the boys?’ Another favourite line of his was, ‘I’m doing you a favour because when you get a boyfriend, you’ll know what to do.’ He liked that one a lot.

  None of those actions were the worst things, though. The worst thing by far was the shame of the sensations feeling nice – and that haunts me. I now know it just means your body is working normally, but any nice sensations as an adult then come with guilt. This is something I feel very strongly about, and it’s a part of my story I have wrestled with. I am so ashamed, but I also know that many other survivors feel the same way and it’s important to let them know it isn’t their fault. They’re not the only ones who have this, and it’s nothing to do with them being bad or dirty or shameful. Your body is simply set up to react in a certain way to certain things – it does it without understanding the context or the perpetrator; it just does. I hate him for that. He didn’t just take my childhood, he took parts of my adult life too; he took it all when I was just eight years old. The sad truth is, I rarely considered it an option to tell him to stop. I’d been groomed since birth to be no one, nothing.

  We moved quite a few times and those moves are the real markers of the different stages of my life. Not that long after the abuse began, we left for a big four-bedroomed council house that Mum had really pushed to get. I can see in the files that she was always complaining about where we lived, that it was making her life a misery, that we deserved somewhere better. Wherever she lived was never right for her though. I guess you can’t leave yourself behind, no matter how many times you move to another building – you carry what is inside you and that’s why everything just kept on as it was; wallpaper and more bedrooms could never alter how broken our family was.

  The physical and sexual abuse continued, and I can remember it much better from that point. There are lines in my head, in my memory, depending on where we lived, and in that one, I vividly recall the constant backhanders across my face, the bleeding noses, the way she wound my dad up to batter me black and blue. Any time I tried to gather the courage to ask for something, it would be thrown back in my face. I desperately wanted to join the Brownies and finally managed to bring myself to make the terrifying r
equest, which was immediately refused.

  In terms of my grandparents, I only really had contact with Molly and Harry but there wasn’t much of a real relationship with any of them. Jenny and I didn’t see Ivy and Bert very much; they didn’t visit us and only ever had anything to do with Ian. My mother would tell me they hated me, and that they thought I was the instigator of all the problems in our family, so I didn’t go to see them. On the few occasions I did go to their house, I remember feeling as if I wasn’t wanted there, so it wasn’t something I was keen to do.

  I think there was a deep sadness in Molly, my paternal grandma. Dad was their only child. Although they had tried to have more, sadly it wasn’t meant to be. Grandma used to talk a lot about her lost babies, and sometimes she would cry. ‘I had more babies, you know,’ she would tell me, but I didn’t really know how to react, as I was only little myself. It was very sad.

  When we were small I remember sometimes going to Grandma Molly’s house just round the corner from us, in the night when Mum and Dad fought. We would be bundled round there and would all be put onto the large sofa in the parlour, a room where we were never allowed normally. I would look at the ornaments (mostly of the Queen’s corgis) and photos. I can still remember the smell of their house, and the movement of the big rocking chair in the back room where everyone sat. There was a dining table with a thick red table cover and, on the odd occasion us kids went there alone, we played cards with Grandma and Grandpa at that table. They used to keep 2p pieces in a tub of Steradent cleaning tablets for false teeth, or we would play for matches.

  I also remember they kept a toy with magnetic numbers and letters on and it was a really special treat to be allowed to play with that. The only couple of happy memories I have of my whole childhood are from being with Molly and Harry; they were very kind people. Grandma would give us orange juice and Grandpa would rub his bristly chin on my forehead and call me ‘little ears’. I think they loved us. I think so.

  I stayed at their house one time and there was a chair next to the bed with a little blue torch on in case I needed to get up in the night. Their house was old, with steep stairs and extra steps to the bathroom. I remember thinking that night, ‘Wow, Dad can’t come in, he isn’t here!’ And it was quiet, so quiet, and so very warm – Grandma had tucked me in with a heavy feather quilt that felt like safety. She had lots of crystal ornaments in that bedroom and I used to pick them up one by one, really carefully, thinking I had never seen anything so beautiful.

  Grandma worked in a fruit shop and if I went past she would give me an apple and I would devour it. On the rare occasions they did visit our house, they would always bring food, electric cards, phone stamp cards for my mum and dad, while Grandpa would always bring each of us a single piece of liquorice.

  I only ever had one family outing, a walk along Seacombe promenade, on the Wirral, one afternoon with Molly and Harry. Mum and Dad had been fighting as usual, so Molly had taken us to their house, which was one minute from the promenade, and we all went for a walk. It was just how it should be – us kids and our grandparents – but I knew what we were going back to and there was a nervous ball in the pit of my stomach the whole time.

  It’s a sad fact, though, that when I was small I was always wary of Grandma and Grandpa, even though I’m thinking of them warmly now. I don’t think I really wanted to go back and look at those memories because tied up in them, like with everything, is Mum. I never ‘felt’ like I should be scared of Molly and Harry, but my mother had told me horror stories about them both, so I knew they weren’t to be trusted from her point of view. I was told Grandma had sexually abused my father and his friends, and walked naked around the house. Mum told me Molly had abused my oldest brother when they were left to care for him when Jenny was born. I was also told Grandpa had tried to rape my mother; that he was horrible and under the thumb of Grandma, and that they wanted Jenny to live with them, and would never let her see the rest of us.

  So, there it is – the only people who I could have confided in, if I hadn’t been groomed into silence, I wouldn’t have told anyway, as I believed they were also abusers.

  Around the time we moved to the four-bedroomed house, Mum really ramped up the hypochondria. Of course, I didn’t know that was what it was back then; I really thought she was dying. It brought some very strange emotions to the surface. I hated what she did to me, what she did to Jenny, but she was my mother. It’s very hard to break free from that, and children still want a relationship with their mum. I didn’t want her to die – I just wanted her to change.

  Any time I wanted to do anything, such as play outside, she would tell me I couldn’t, because of her vague illnesses. If I asked to go out she would say, ‘Do what you like’ really nastily. This made me feel too guilty to go anywhere, as I thought she was so ill. ‘You’ll have to stay in and look after me,’ she’d say. ‘Not that you’re any good at it – you’re a dilatory little bitch, but I’ve got no one else, have I?’

  I never thought to ask, ‘If I’m so useless, why do you try and keep me with you in your last days?’ It was just another way to control me. She would keep me out of school if she needed to go shopping. I was still a tiny little thing, but she would make me drag the full, heavy wheeled trolley up the hill to our house with one hand while pushing her by the small of the back with the other. She’d huff and puff, saying I was doing her ‘no fucking good at all’, and I would feel my lungs burn with the effort of pushing a grown woman and dragging the shopping along at the same time.

  One night she told me it was time for her to ‘go’, so I would have to sleep beside her as she died.

  ‘I’ll lie here on the couch and I can only hope it’ll be painless,’ she said, all the while looking the picture of health. ‘Don’t you fucking dare fall asleep, not while I’m on my last legs. You can sit there –’ she pointed to the floor – ‘and if I need anything, I’ll tell you.’

  I did sit there, by the old-fashioned brick fireplace, and waited, exhausted, as my mother ‘died’. Finally it was too much. Mum was snoring, wrapped up in blankets, and I closed my eyes.

  I woke up to her screaming, ‘You little fucking bitch!’ and kicking me as I lay there. ‘If you can’t be bothered to look after me, then fuck off to your bed, go on!’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mum, please let me stay,’ I begged, confused as always by the twisted emotions I was feeling, but knowing I couldn’t bear for her to die that evening, alone, on the sofa, thinking I didn’t care. ‘Please, Mum, please!’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ she said, and stormed upstairs to her own bed. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, terrified that she would be dead in the morning; but there she was the next day, large as life, and it was never mentioned again. Well, not that particular ‘dying’ scene, but it stuck in my mind – Mum could die at any moment, so, above anything else, I had better try to be a good girl. For both of them.

  We are warriors, Jenny, all of us survivors. We are warriors and we survive for a reason. I wish I could save us, you and the little Karen, and I’m trying to do so the only way I know how, by telling our story, but even warriors get tired. At times, I am exhausted by all of this. Writing it down makes my body ache and my head throb. I want to forget it all, but only by remembering will it be our legacy. I don’t want to hold on to the past any more; I’m not a victim. It has taken me a while to realise I don’t need anyone else’s permission to be who I am – I can decide. I have that power. So, yes, warriors get tired, but they always rise again – always.

  CHAPTER 5

  LEGACY

  1984–1985

  We moved again, when I was eleven, to a semi-detached place on a council estate. I have to admit, Mum had started to look after our places better. She was proud of this house, which was well decorated with a smart new door. In previous houses, she had never really done anything homely, and always blamed the council for us not having nice things and for the lack of luxuries, but in this house, she made more of an effort.

&nbs
p; Mum watched a lot of TV, and she also liked the radio, so these were focal points of the living room and kitchen in every house we had. Previous houses had been full of what you would consider typical 1970s décor. There was a lot of orange and brown, with the few ornaments being glass, striped fish and a couple of wooden wall hangings. The gaudy three-piece sofa set and net curtains of earlier houses were dumped when we moved to the new place, and the furniture and décor became a lot plainer. I think that was a general move that most families made as the technicolour horrors of the 1970s got left behind.

  I don’t really have memories of specific things, to be honest. Most people don’t truly ‘get’ the monotony of an abused childhood. For me, the day-to-day worries about when my dad was going to get me, or what Mum was going to do, are there as constants now, just as they were there as constants then. I don’t remember the happiness of dancing around to the charts on a Sunday evening or popping out to the ice cream van with friends during summer holidays – in fact, I’d be hard pushed to tell you what was in the charts at any given point, or even to say what my favourite ice cream flavour was. It was a childhood of joylessness, and if I was to detail every second of that, you’d soon put this book down, I’ll bet! But I was living it. Of course, not every second was torment, but there was always a wariness, a watchfulness, checking to see where they were, trying to sense what the mood was, and that took away from any childhood pleasures or more innocent memories.

  Irrespective of where we lived, Mum still liked to have a drink, always if she was out at a pub and often at home too. She’d take any excuse, any company, and, unfortunately it always led to trouble, whether that was fighting, kicking someone out, or trouble for me or anyone else who was around.

  In high school, I had very few friends apart from one girl called Jo. She’d call for me to go to school, but never come in. I’d go to hers, though, and I thought her mum was amazing as she was always baking and was really nice to me. I’d never before seen the sort of family environment that Jo had, where people loved each other and were caring. I was welcomed and, ever since then, I’ve spent my life looking at families with envious eyes.