by Donna Ford
These parts made me laugh. However, other parts spoke to me more directly:
You cannot possibly give of your mental or intellectual best unless you are spiritually settled.
This line summed everything up for me. Life is about looking after all areas of our well-being. We can have great careers and good family lives, but we also need to take care of the not-so-obvious parts of us that need attention. I didn't know back then – sitting on a rock in the African sun reading these words from a time long gone – how I could look after and heal the parts of me that were broken and damaged, but I knew they were there because it was hard for me to find peace. Now, after all these years and the journey I have travelled telling my story, I understand so much more clearly.
Chapter Thirty-two
BREDA
AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF The Step Child, there was one question asked by everyone – including me. What had happened to Breda? Where was my mother?
It wasn't until I was in my forties that I was able to find out anything concrete about my biological mother. That only came about because I received my files from Barnardo's prior to the court case against Helen Ford.
From these files I learned that Breda was born on 3 May 1935, and that she used a different name on my birth certificate and those of my older half-brother and half-sister. On my birth certificate she is named as Brenda Ford, although she was never legally married to my Dad. It was noted that she was also known as Breda or Bridie. A letter to my maternal grandmother dated 31 January 1961 queries my mother's true name and states:
. . . we find that the children's birth certificates give different versions of your daughter's Christian names. Will you please help us over this and let us have by return of post, a letter telling us exactly what are your daughter's Christian names.
A letter from my maternal grandmother in reply, dated 2 February 1961, says:
In reference to your letter regarding my daughter's names I would like to state that her Christian names are Bridget Mary.
So at least I was able to find out her birth name, even though she always seemed like Breda to me. I also discovered from the files that Breda had two older brothers, and that they and my maternal grandparents lived in Kent at the time we were taken into the care of Barnardo's. Although this was, again, meagre information, it was more than I'd ever known as a child. What I didn't like reading, though, were the comments written about her. I knew my mother had left us – I'd been told this many times as a child. What shocked me, though, was that reading about my mother's character was almost like hearing Helen's words pounding in my ears. The words leapt from the page:
Lapsed Catholic; the mother bore a very bad character; was suspected of associating with many men.
This was my mother being spoken about. She was only 26 years old at this point and had three children under five by different fathers. She had been legally married to only one of these men, my older half-brother's father.
The files go on to say how my Dad was working down in Kent with a view to us all possibly settling there. While he was away he had heard through the grapevine that my Mum was 'carrying on' behind his back:
He paid a surprise visit to her home in Edinburgh, and found several women occupying the premises as well as the mother. After a somewhat hysterical scene the mother walked out with her women friends, and has not been seen since. At this time the three children were in the City Hospital suffering from whooping cough.
So that was it – as much information as I could manage to get regarding my mother.
I couldn't leave it there.
I tried to make sense of it all. I felt outraged at what was written in these files because it seemed so biased and one-sided. I didn't want to think this was a true depiction of my mother because in many ways it sounded so like Helen's version of her. When it came to writing about Breda in The Step Child I tried to be objective. I didn't want to write this version of her down in black and white because I still believed in the fairy tale I had created of her, of the woman my older half-sister had told me about who had lovely dark hair and was so pretty. I wanted to believe in the version that my half-brother had told me of the woman who sat and played with us on the lawn making daisy chains.
I tried to look at her circumstances – this young girl who had come over from Ireland on the boat with her older brother, abandoning the strict Catholic upbringing of her life in Tipperary to find freedom in Britain. At that point I could only speculate about what kind of woman she may or may not have been. Noone from her side of the family had ever contacted us in all of the years I was growing up. No-one ever came along to find out if we were being well looked after or, indeed, to tell us about Breda or own lives.
In 2006 I visited Ireland with my then husband. It was a sad and weary trip because I knew I was looking for some evidence of my mother but that it was unlikely I would find any. I was also in a relationship I was struggling to hold on to. Everything seemed dark and dreary from the moment I set foot on the ferry from Stranraer to Belfast. The cold, wet day matched my mood. There were very few passengers and it seemed as if we had the whole place to ourselves. On top of that, the ferry was old and worn, and I could almost imagine my mother's own journey over the Irish Sea to her new life all those years ago.
I went to many places in Ireland, from Belfast to Dublin, over to Galway then down to Tipperary, where I stopped off to look around. I wandered through the streets of Tipperary, and even looked around the Catholic graveyard I came across, searching the graves for the name 'Curran', and thinking I could maybe get a glimpse of some evidence of my ancestral heritage. I found nothing to suggest my family had ever been there. On our way to Tipperary, we'd stopped off in the town of Carrick for a spot of lunch – soup and soda bread. I didn't know then that it was indeed here that my mother had once lived, gone to school and grown up.
I came back from that trip to Ireland saddened because I'd found nothing. The only highlight had been in Galway where I'd met a lovely fisherman called Michael. He came from the Connemara area north of Galway and still fished in the round coracles of ancient times. He told me that, without even knowing my story, he thought by my dark colouring that I seemed very Irish, and I reminded him indeed of a Connemara girl.
By the end of the year in which The Step Child was published, I was again intent on finding out more about my mother. Who was she, where had she gone and where was she now? Breda has always been the missing piece of the big jigsaw that is my life. I went through the files time and again, looking for anything at all that could point me in her direction. Had I missed something first time round? I hoped so. I finally settled on trying to see if I could contact Breda's brother. I knew roughly where he was because my older half-brother had been in touch with him, but I hadn't been given a contact number for him. So, getting his name, I set about trying to find him.
Linda, who has written the books with me, used her journalistic contacts to try and track him down. Meanwhile, I searched through the phone book for people with his surname and initial in the area where he'd lived when he was mentioned in the Barnardo's files all those years ago.
You can maybe imagine my utter surprise when the first call I made from the extensive list turned out to be his number.
Finally, I'd managed to track down an actual surviving relative of my biological mother! I was so excited. However, I was utterly dumbfounded by my uncle's reaction. I had hoped for at least some welcome; maybe for a bit of an insight into where my mother might have gone after she left us. I would have been more than grateful for any information, but it was not to be.
It transpired that my uncle had read The Step Child, and he was furious. He had even contacted the publishers and was angry, very angry, that I had 'decried' his family. I had never set out to hurt anyone by telling my story. I told only the truth as I knew it. I speculated over what might have happened to my mother; over what kind of woman she may have been. I tried as best as I could to be as objective as possible in the given circumstan
ces. My uncle told me that I was wrong in my assumptions and that he was prepared to sue me over what he saw as defamation of his family.
But that was never what I had set out to do.
I had been abandoned by my mother at a very early age. Not one thing I had read about her was good, nor did I hear a good word spoken about her by others, and she never came back. I gave her the benefit of the doubt despite all of that. My uncle went on to say how they were a close-knit, loving family, and that had he known what we had been enduring he would have taken us in. What futile words! In light of what happened his words meant nothing – if this family had even scraped the surface of what was going on, they would have seen what our lives were like. We were all deprived of not only a mother but also a gran, grandad, aunties, uncles and cousins. My uncle declared that he had heard nothing of my mother since the 1960s, which also leads me to question the closeness of the family bonds.
He promised to contact me again. He never has, and that is that I suppose. He never once asked how I was, how I was coping; never once said how sorry he was and how he would make it up to me by bringing me into the family who now knew that I existed.
I hired a private detective to try and find out any little thing about my mother, yet still nothing turned up. She had gone, disappeared it would seem off the face of the earth. Did she change her identity? Did she die? What on earth happened to her? I don't know – and may never know – the answers to these questions. What is evident is that she had a family – three little children – that she just decided she no longer wanted to be a mother to.
I can't remember ever having a mother. My earliest memory is of living in an institution with many other children in the same position as me, with families who visited sporadically. I had no real sense of who I was or where I belonged. Bizarrely, it was Helen herself who brought the question of my own mother into my head. It was from her that I first heard any reference to my 'real mother'. It was not in any way a nice reference as it came in the form of her screaming abuse at what a whore Breda was and how I was her 'bastard' child, but it made me start missing my Mummy. I can recall watching Helen lavish love and attention on her firstborn, singing and cooing to this little boy, while, in complete contrast, she would shout and scream at me and hit me. What I felt from her was utter hatred. I wonder now if her hatred of me stemmed from her jealousy over my mother.
When I was little and suffering abuse, I would cry for this elusive Mummy. I would weep and sob and wish that she would come and take me away, and love and protect me like other mothers did their children. On a few occasions I asked my Dad about his ex-lover, but he was always reluctant to give me any information other than that she was Irish. This fact was backed up by the records left behind by my Mum – Irish rebel tunes such as 'The Wearing of the Green' and 'Danny Boy' on black plastic vinyl. Dad would occasionally play these on the old record player. This would often cause an argument, with Helen accusing him of missing 'the cow'. My Dad would, of course, deny this, claiming only to enjoy the tunes.
I no longer miss her. I wouldn't know what to say now if I was ever to meet her. I would still like the opportunity to find out more about my heritage and medical history – birthrights that many take for granted. I would even like to give her the opportunity to tell me her side of the story because, like us all, she too has a story to tell. But it seems as if fate has decided it is a story I will never hear.
Chapter Thirty-three
STRENGTH, BLAME AND FORGIVENESS
THE LIFE AND EXPERIENCES I described in The Step Child – and now in this book – are not the sum total of all that has happened to me. Like everyone, my story can't be distilled into a few easy chapters. Unlike most people, the story of my childhood was a horrific one, but few stories end at childhood. As I left my wicked stepmother and her world behind, I did not enter a fairy-tale life. The past has left its mark on me – the years of starvation as a child have left me with an eating disorder; the years of beatings on an almost daily basis have left me with constant and agonising back pain; the years of sexual abuse have left me afraid of intimacy and at odds with my own sexual feelings; and the years of loneliness and neglect have left me constantly seeking connections, making me vulnerable and susceptible. Exploring what happened to me as a child, and trying to understand the after-effects, brings with it a freedom – the memories no longer haunt me. To get to that point, I have had to delve into not just my years with Helen Ford, but also my teenage and adult lives, where additional horrific memories have surfaced since my first book was published.
People often ask me how I am so strong and why I am so forgiving. I am strong because I have to be. I must sink or swim – and I choose to swim. I know that what I endured as a child damaged me and had a direct influence on my adult relationships, but I have only just discovered that by exploring the past and the damage I can deal with it once and for all. As for forgiving, I feel that it isn't my place to forgive the people who committed the crimes against me. Can they forgive themselves? Do they sleep at night? Does the violation of a child and the twisted methods used by these people warrant forgiveness? Why should I, as a person whose whole life has been contorted by the sick yearnings of a very disturbed group of people, forgive? Could you? I've lived my adult life trying to understand my sexual needs and those of the partners I've been with. For most of the time, my life has been clouded by very bad memories, memories of men forcing me as a young girl to pleasure them while constantly telling me that I liked it. Do you know what? I never, ever liked it. I hated it. It wasn't normal. It isn't normal. It's sick and perverse and it was only ever about them.
I was always vulnerable as a child, and I was put in that situation by Helen. Although I don't often think about what she did to me and why she did it, I see it all much more clearly now than when I was standing in the High Court in Edinburgh facing her. Back then, in 2003, I was still that little girl she had tormented and abused. I was so scared of facing her, and when I did she managed to make me feel just as frightened as when I was a child. But now – sitting here safely, having reclaimed my birth name for the first time in many years – I can see Helen Gourlay Ford for exactly what she was, for what she was doing to us and what she herself was getting from it. I have no desire whatsoever to concern myself with what made her like that. Wouldn't it just be so easy to blame it on childhood traumas? Wouldn't it be so easy if she could just say that she was abused as a child? That would be so wrong – so insulting to everyone who was ever hurt as a child but who has fought to be a good person and break the cycle.
Dangerous men and women lurk everywhere. The world is a difficult place for children who aren't protected and loved, and we must all – whether parents or not – look out for little ones, always. I have already told of how Helen left our lives that New Year, but she had also left my father for a few weeks shortly after the birth of Karen. I was overjoyed but missed Karen terribly. The house was buoyant and my Dad seemed all right about Helen's departure – apart from when he'd had a drink, when all he spoke about was getting her back. My Dad constantly made excuses for her. He would say she had 'women's troubles' and use the phrase 'when your Mum gets back', never knowing what wrath would be brought down on me had I ever dared to call her that.
In files dated 10 February 1971, the social worker's report on a home visit states: 'Mr Ford explained that his wife was not at home; they had had a row and she left three weeks ago taking the baby with her.' In this same report it states: 'Donna was one of the reasons for the increasing number of rows Mr and Mrs Ford had been having. Mrs Ford complained that Mr Ford never punished Donna.' That was a laugh.
My Dad was going out quite a bit to Middleton's pub and to the bowling club at that time. On some of these nights he brought a friend back, a local guy with a wife and two children. Henry was a really nice man and so lovely to me – to start with. He brought me sweets and made sure that my Dad got to bed when he rolled home drunk from the pub. This helped me a lot as that was my responsibility in H
elen's absence.
My Auntie Nellie had given us a piano some time ago that was gathering dust in the boys' room. One night, my Dad came back from the pub and said that 'Uncle' Henry was going to start giving lessons – to me, only me. I was delighted as I really wanted to learn to play the piano. I had plinked it a few times but the thought of being able to play real tunes on it was so exciting.
A little while after this announcement, my Dad came back from the pub during afternoon closing hours with Henry. They sat chatting for a while and then my Dad, as always, fell asleep. 'How d'you fancy a piano lesson then, Donna?' Henry asked over the sound of my Dad's snoring. I jumped at the chance. Helen had been away for only a little while and here was the evidence that things could change – for the better, I assumed. Henry gave the boys some money to go and get sweets then took my hand to follow him into their bedroom to begin the lesson. I was absolutely brimming with excitement as he sat down at the piano. He was a small, balding man who always seemed to be ready to burst out of his shirt at any minute. He had a huge beer belly and always smelled a bit of body odour which he tried to mask with aftershave – unsuccessfully.
