by Donna Ford
Reading through my files, I found that there were many issues about money from the time my mother left. Apparently, she'd left many debts. I also know that while we were in Barnardo's, a contribution towards our keep had to be paid by my Dad to the authority concerned. One document states:
We shall require Mr Ford to contribute at the rate of 8/- per week each for the older boy and girl and 10/- per week for Donna . . . covered by the family allowance.
Of course, when we went to live with them not only did my Dad and Helen then receive the family allowance for us, but they were also paid for the 'fostering' of Adrian.
Whatever her reasons for taking us on, financial or otherwise, it was clear that Helen was very resentful of the responsibility we brought, and that she didn't like us. My sister and I were often attacked by her for our looks. I know now that I was a pretty little girl (although it has been a long, hard journey to realising that) and so was my sister, but Helen did everything in her power to make sure that we thought we were horrible. We were told that we were ugly over and over again, and one of Helen's favourite methods of physical abuse was to grab me by the hair and ram my face up against the mirror. In time to each thrust into the glass, she would shout: 'Look at you! You are so ugly! Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!' It's hard not to believe this sort of thing when it is drummed into you time and time again.
In particular, I was so happy to have my big sister home to stay. Frances was beautiful. She had the longest dark hair and the prettiest face – in fact, she reminded me of Snow White. It wasn't long after she returned from Haldane House that Helen sat her down in the living room on one of the wooden dining chairs. She calmly placed a bowl on Frances's head and cut off all of her beautiful hair. She butchered my big sister. I remember crying as I swept the hair up and held it, touching its softness and darkness as I put it in the bin. Helen's face was a picture of smugness and contentment as she looked at Frances – she had managed to transfer some of her own ugliness onto my beautiful sister.
I loved Frances so much. She would hug me and play with me, and when I cried would wipe the tears from my eyes. Adrian was different – he looked confused most of the time and was both shy and nervous.
We had a social worker who visited us every four to six weeks. Prior to these visits, Helen would sit us down on the settee in a row. She would point at a little brass ornament of three monkeys which sat on the mantelshelf and she would say to us, 'That's the three of you. See no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil. If the social worker asks you if you're happy, you tell her yes! If she asks if I am good to you, say yes!' She would stand behind the social worker as she spoke to us and glower at us with what we called the 'evil eye'. We really stood no chance. We were powerless to question this woman's actions towards us. Although Helen's strictness was observed, it wasn't investigated further. In one report from those days, the social worker writes:
Mrs Ford is quite strict with the children . . . There is a tendency for the three older children to stand to attention.
It was noticed then that we were treated differently from Gordon, but it wasn't followed through.
Any normal bonding that should have occurred between me and my half-siblings was thwarted at every turn by Helen. We had different schools, different doctors and different dentists. With regard to punishments, she gave us pretty much similar beatings but always kept us separate when doing so, presumably to stop us knowing too much or ganging up on her.
I have one strong memory of Adrian and I getting into trouble for something. I can't remember what it was, but I do recall the two of us standing in the living room in front of the fire with our hands by our sides while Helen shouted at us. My brother was then told to go into the bathroom and I was to wait outside. Helen came through minutes later with the belt and went into the bathroom. I could hear Adrian being beaten. I heard every whack of the belt as she shouted at him. He was to say sorry, she kept screaming, and to say that he was bad. I was terrified because I knew it was almost my turn – and indeed it was. After Helen had beaten us, both in our underwear, we were each made to stand in separate places; he in the recess in the lobby and me in the bathroom.
While this went on, my sister was in the living room looking after the baby. It wasn't that she was a favourite in any way – she got her share of beatings too – but a lot of the time Helen used her for babysitting or other chores and keeping things together while she whacked us other two. Even in the files there is a mention of Frances coming back from the launderette with the family wash when she was just 10 years old.
This was the pattern of the contact between Frances, Adrian and I for the duration that Helen was living with my father. My sister got out sooner than us, however. There's a great deal of speculation about how and why she left, and I know only a few things. I do know that when she went she was around 15 years of age and she was taken back into care. I know for a fact that my father would not speak to Frances after she left because there had been some 'accusations'. What those accusations were I do not know, but she left. I saw her only once after that when I was around 16 and she would have been 20. She was living in a flat in the Meadows.
I feel so sad for the little girl my sister was and for the little boy my brother was. I wish I had some memories to call on of being with them both, of playing with them and laughing with them, but sadly I have only memories of a desperate sense of isolation from each of us. It was sink or swim under the 'care' of Helen, and we each had to look out for ourselves, although I was the one she seemed particularly keen to break.
Chapter Four
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
HELEN FORD WAS UNDOUBTEDLY TO blame for the vast majority of the absolute horrors that were inflicted on me as a little girl, but there have to be questions asked about my father as well. Who had Donald Ford been, and was there anything in his past that could have made him the pathetic excuse for a father he would turn out to be?
Before meeting my mother, Breda, my Dad had spent some time in the forces after being conscripted. I recall seeing some small black-and-white photographs of him during his time in the army, in which he looked very smart and happy. He had also trained as a French polisher, and still did odd jobs in that line when he was asked. In fact, the table that had once belonged to his mother, and which I would see once he took me home, had been polished by him and he would proudly show people his handiwork.
I still own a jewellery box that he made. It is one of only two things he ever gave me (the other thing is a set of brass letter scales my Auntie Nellie gave him). I'm not sure whether the box is teak or mahogany, but it's about six inches long and four inches high. It has a wood veneer on the top with a paler inlay of a simple line pattern. I was given the box while I was still at home. My Dad told me that it was his apprentice piece, and that he had made it from scratch. I have had it ever since and I use it now to keep foreign coins in from my travels to Greece, Portugal, France, South Africa, Jamaica, Turkey and India. I have kept this box because I have so very, very little from my childhood. Every tiny thing I did manage to keep – a couple of dinner tickets I wanted to hold on to and a few other bits – have all been put into this innocuous little box. I have never questioned why until writing this now, but I suppose in a way I have kept it because it is something my Dad created before life came in and changed the young man he once was, the one I never got to know. I know what he did and what he didn't do for me, and I have no respect whatsoever for that man. However, I do like to think that at some point he was good, and so were his intentions. The box has always been with me, and if one of my girls wanted it they could certainly have it, but I don't think it would mean much to them.
So, my Dad did have a profession, which that jewellery box symbolises for me, yet when I came to stay with him and Helen in the Easter Road house, he was working on the corporation buses. I remember his work uniform and ticket machine, and I also remember getting to go with him on the number one bus when he was doing a shift one day. This was in the days when there were
old buses with an open back, spiral stairs and wooden decking on the floor. Gallus – lively – young people would hold on to the metal pole, swing around it and then jump off before the bus stopped.
The next job he had was working for the General Post Office as a postman. They wore grey suits in those days with brass buttons stamped with GPO, and carried heavy sack bags. Sometimes he cycled to work on an old black bike. I remember going with him while he delivered letters, propped on the front of his bike while he cycled with two bags full of post slung over the back of it. Those were great times – me and my Dad together, as it should have been, as I'd dreamed it would be, but as it was, so rarely. But always, always, at the end of it, there was my return home to a living hell.
From these sparse recollections, I've gathered that he was conscientious and worked to look after his family. In the early days of my return from Barnardo's, he would always come home from work on a Friday with a brand new Matchbox car in its little box for my new brother. I was a bit jealous, but what I really wanted wasn't a gift. I didn't want anything material at all, and I still don't. All I ever wanted was love and a little bit of time spent together with the only parent I had, away from the madness of my days with Helen. I got it sometimes, but it was rare and precious.
I would sometimes go on walks with my Daddy to feed the ducks and throw a penny in the wishing well in Holyrood's Kings Park. Those days were lovely and he would always stop off at Casey's sweet shop at the top of Easter Road to buy a bag of mixed boilings. Casey's was a lovely old-fashioned family-run place. The smell of that little shop with its multicoloured rows of jars full of toffee doddles, bonbons, sweet-peanuts and kola cubes is one of the memories I hold dear to my heart. A visit there would always round off the day perfectly.
It hurts.
I want to know where that Daddy went, the Daddy who would hand me a sweetie from a white paper bag while telling me stories of old Edinburgh as we walked. He could do that – he had the capacity to be warm and loving, but it ended up becoming even rarer as time went on. I remember a party in the house shortly after I returned from the home. He was singing and laughing. All of his family were there: his two brothers and his sister, my granny and various other faces that I can't place so long after the event, and they had all come to meet me. I felt so proud, so loved and, in this memory, my Dad seems truly happy.
When I look back on this time – the sweet shops, the trips to the wishing well, the times alone with him – I think I can see my Dad as he could have been, as he would have been, as he wasn't allowed to be. I know that his relationship with Helen was fraught, and I understand that what goes on between two people can never really be understood by outsiders. But I know some other things too. What went on and what happened to me as a result of him choosing to live with and marry that woman stole my childhood from me and, to this day, has repercussions on my identity and being.
He didn't protect me. He didn't take me to safety, away from her. He ignored and minimised what was happening. He closed his eyes tightly against the evil that would be wreaked on me for years and years. Evil that wouldn't leave just because Helen did.
Evil which has left me with a question that I still want to scream at him: Do you know what you did, Daddy? Do you know what you did?
Chapter Five
HOME
IF I AM TO TRY AND understand my father's role in all of this, I have to go back to the beginning. And the beginning is painful for me. I had hope. I thought I was going to a family – my family – who would love me and protect me.
My initial reaction at seeing my new home is etched on my memory, even though I was so young. I'd been living in that large rambling children's home since I was a baby, but here I was being taken 'home' to a one-bedroom basement flat in a tenement block. Everything was so small. There was the one tiny bedroom, a bathroom and a living room with a bed recess at one end and a scullery at the other. The flat would have been big enough for a young married couple alone, but it was nowhere near spacious enough for a family of four – and it certainly wasn't the size required for the family of seven it would house within the next couple of years.
The living room itself doubled as a bedroom for my Dad and Helen. It had a double bed in the recess, where they slept, and in front of the post-war tiled fireplace sat a three-piece suite in darkred embossed leatherette fabric. On the dark wooden sideboard against one wall was a black-and-white television, the same television I watched as Winston Churchill's funeral was broadcast. There were two drawers in this sideboard that were full of cutlery. In the two cupboards below, cereal and biscuits and other foods jostled for space. I recall the smell of this cupboard more than any other because it was where the food was; food I was to be deprived of so often, for so long. In the window space, there was a table with chairs, which looked out on to the communal back garden, or back green as we called it.
Everything was cramped and claustrophobic compared to the vast rooms at the Barnardo's home. There was nearly always a coal fire lit as that was what heated the water by means of a back boiler. It soon became my job to clear the fireplace of ashes, and to roll and twist newspapers ready for the next lighting. Sitting in the hearth was a brass fireside companion set, complete with tongs and pokers. That would become another instrument of torture once Helen got going.
The one bedroom was used as the kids' room. When I arrived it already had a set of wooden bunk beds and a cot. There was a large window opposite the door and a fireplace to the side of it, over which hung a picture of Jesus whose eyes would follow every move of anyone in that room – or so it seemed to me. Under the window was a small chest of drawers and that was about it. This room, like all the other rooms in the house, was very neat but cramped. I suppose that I might have seen the place as cosy, had I been in the heart of a loving family. What 'could have been' may be a silly game to play, but sometimes it's hard to prevent yourself falling into that trap.
The rooms I have already described had their horrors, but the bathroom in this first house was to become my most dreaded room. It wasn't even appealing to begin with – it had a high ceiling and an old-fashioned deep cast-iron bath with a Victorian toilet and cistern complete with pull chain. I was soon to get to know every crack on every wall in this room, every embossed swirl on the frosted glass door, as I was made to stand in there for hours on end, starving, shaking and freezing with cold.
Food was to become a big issue for me as a child. I was soon regularly deprived of it by Helen, as one of her means of exerting control over me. It will come as no surprise, then, that I have really strong memories of the times I was actually fed. In those early days I remember the food Helen gave me. Breakfast would be a bowl of cornflakes with a cup of tea and some toast. Lunch would be something like soup with a pudding, perhaps rice or jam. Tea, as we called it, could be anything from mince and tatties to cold meat and chips, to my dreaded and most hated meal of all – tripe and onions.
Helen didn't just stop giving me food all of a sudden. It happened gradually. She would make me miss out on a meal for being naughty (in her eyes), which eventually led to me not knowing when I would next be fed. In fact, this was a pattern with my stepmother, as the abuse she was leading up to began in the same fashion. To start with, I would be told off for things I did – such as playing with toys that belonged to her son, speaking when not spoken to, taking a biscuit before being offered – and many other things she would just decide were bad from one day to the next.
There was, however, one type of behaviour so abhorrent to Helen that she placed it above all of my other so-called transgressions – and that was wetting the bed. Memories come flooding back to me sometimes when I least expect them to, and often they are things I've buried. One striking recollection I have is the terrible telling-off I would get for not going to the toilet in the middle of the night.
I did have a problem with this while I was in the children's home, and I remember the way it was dealt with there. On a Saturday all of the children would be
gathered in the main room. They would sit down in little seats which had been placed in rows before a large table. Behind this table sat two or three members of staff who would hand out pocket money and sweets (usually homemade tablet) to each child. We would traipse up, say 'thank you' and return to our seats clutching our little stash. However, the children who had been naughty, for one reason or another, would be singled out, their crimes would be revealed and they would forfeit either their pocket money or their sweets – or both, depending on the severity of the crime. Wetting the bed was one of these crimes, as I knew full well. I remember the sheer embarrassment of sitting there and having my name called out, and then going without the trip to the shops to spend my money or without the only sweet treat of the week.
