Escaping the Darkness

by Sarah Preston

  We spent the summer that year relaxing for a few weeks. For the first time ever, we had decided on a touring holiday, and drove all night, travelling to Cornwall’s most southerly point, where I fell completely in love with the stunning coastline on the Lizard Peninsula. The people were friendly and the couple that owned the campsite where we had booked, welcomed us with the kind of warmth you would expect only be given to very, very close friends.

  We spent four nights camping in Cornwall and then moved on to Dorset and Cerne Abbas where we stayed for two nights. The Lizard Peninsula was like a dream – warm sunshine, beautiful scenery and the ocean. This was the first time I had seen the ocean and the Atlantic did not disappoint; it was quite literally mesmerising, especially when you viewed its vastness from high above on the cliff-top path that wound its way around the spectacular coastline. Every day was hot and sunny, the nights cool and foggy. Each evening, as we lay in our beds, we heard the sound of foghorns – like a distressed dragon in a blackened sky – coming from the lighthouse close to the cliffs; a sound that haunted the earliest hours of each new day that was about to dawn.

  I never imagined a place could captivate my heart in such a way as Cornwall did. Before I had seen Cornwall, there was only ever one place I loved and that was the Lake District – for me that was simply heaven. Once we left Cornwall, we travelled to Dorset where my eyes were opened further. We travelled along tree-tunnelled lanes on our journey into Cerne Abbas, where beautiful buildings greeted us. It was a sleepy village lost in unspoilt time. Afterwards we travelled to Cambridgeshire because we wanted to go to the Imperial War Museum and show the boys the planes that they all shared a love of – James was particularly fond of aircraft, and often dreamed of becoming a pilot.

  Two days later we packed up our tents again, and travelled into the Cotswolds to show Andrew the car known as ‘Brum’ (regularly shown on BBC TV) at the Cotswold Motoring Museum in Bourton-on-the-Water. This museum was a fascinating place, and it was especially interesting to show the boys one of the first tiny caravans that people owned and used for holidays. The memories that we made on that holiday still make me smile because we all had such a wonderful time. If I close my eyes, I am instantly transported to those places we visited. I see the boys, each one of them, enjoying themselves so very much.

  Finally we finished in Lincolnshire, staying close to where my mother used to live, before travelling home.

  In September the boys returned to school and I started my first year at university. My father recovered from cancer and I felt the need to spend time with him. Why this was, I wasn’t really sure: after all he had also been responsible for some of the bad experiences I’d had as a young girl. Perhaps I thought that if I was alone with him, he might tell me why he had chosen to abuse me when I was a child. And not just any child either, but his own child, his precious daughter. I tried to spend as much time with my father as I could, and worked hard to fit this in with everything else I needed to do. I didn’t want the boys to feel left out or for Sam to feel neglected – not that he would ever complain. He was always so supportive of everything I did or wanted to do in my life.

  There was only ever one time I can remember when Sam did not support me. It happened after we had walked up to Stickle Tarn in Langdale and then continued the walk across the fells. As we sat having lunch with the boys by the tarn (a small mountain lake), I said to him that I wanted to do ‘Jack’s Rake’, which was a path that led up the front of Pavey Ark – the huge, rocky outcrop of stone that stood firm above the tarn. As we sat there, you could see other walkers attempting to go up the diagonal gully, which was frightening in parts, especially in the exposed sections. He looked at this path and said, ‘Are you mad, have you forgotten you’re a mother?’

  I laughed at him and said, ‘One day I’ll do it, but I’ll wait till all our sons are grown.’

  Sam took me in his arms and kissed me, ‘We’ll see,’ he said. I still haven’t climbed that little rock. But I will one day!

  Once we were home again, I visited Dad almost every day and felt guilty when I didn’t. I don’t know why I felt this guilt, but it weighed me down like one of the boulders that I felt used to when I was an innocent child, when I was the victim of two grown men’s abusive obsession.

  Over the months that followed, I fought to keep a grip on the things that mattered to me. I tried to be a good mum, a caring wife, a hard-working student and a worker too, without losing control of any of these things or tiring myself out. I can’t remember where my strength came from but it was there. As the first few months of 1997 passed by, it was obvious that my father wasn’t recovering quite as quickly as he should be doing. He was in pain again and struggled to stay awake all day. The little bit of weight he’d gained began to disappear. He went to the hospital for his twelve-weekly check-up and was told by his consultant that his cancer was back.

  This time the tumours were growing at an alarming rate and were now in his lungs. His condition was inoperable. As he struggled more and more over the next few months, I knew that his time was running out fast. I got behind with some of my work at university and fought hard to keep everything in perspective. I knew my father was dying. He was admitted to hospital and he started deteriorating rapidly. He seemed to be in pain all the time. He came home two weeks later at the end of September. On the following bright, sunny Sunday he was picked up and taken to the hospice six miles away. It was beautiful weather for October. He lived out the last twelve days of his life there, five of which he spent in a coma.

  During his last week of consciousness, my father became the man he had once been when I was a child. He looked at me in the same way a doting father would have looked at his only daughter. I saw him every day and shared cups of tea with him, and we talked about the things that mattered to us. The plants in the garden, his grandchildren and all the things we once did as a family. He never mentioned the time Mum left him, or the time he discovered someone else had abused me, or the way he abused me, or what had driven me to leave home when I was fifteen.

  He never told me he regretted what he had done to me or begged me for his forgiveness. He just looked at me and acted as if he had been a wonderful father to me all my life. He wasn’t – he’d failed. Never once did I see the word sorry etched in his fading, watery, dying eyes. As he slipped into a state of unconsciousness, I sat at his bedside searching for answers, yet none came. I spoke to him often while he slept. I wished his cancer would leave him just for a moment so I could get the answers I desperately wanted. I felt the amount of courage I needed enter my body, giving me strength to ask him why, but he never woke up and so my question remained unheard. I never knew what had made him do such immoral things to his own twelve-year-old daughter.

  During one of those long nights at the hospice, I told my oldest sister, Caroline, that Mum’s friend Bill had abused me. I never told her any details, just that it had happened. Even though I’d had all those counselling sessions with Bess, I still felt to blame for those events that had overshadowed my life. Caroline held me: we cried. I wasn’t sure if at that time she was crying for me or for our dying father, too. I hoped, quite selfishly, that it was for me.

  Now, sixteen years on, I know it was. My sister has always been there with her shoulder to cry on whenever I need it. We have become good friends and I miss her dreadfully when we’re apart. I think we make each other proud of the people we have become.

  On the 25 October 1997 my father lost his battle for life and I was trapped in a world I didn’t understand. I started to grieve for a man who I shouldn’t have loved at all for the past twenty-three years. He didn’t deserve the love I had given him since that fateful day when I was twelve, when he should have known better than to abuse me. Yet at that time I still did love him, although why I did, I wasn’t sure.

  I asked myself familiar questions as to why I loved him: was it because he told Mum I was keeping my first-born child when I gave birth to him at the age of just sixteen? (This was despite
Mum telling me I was too young to bring up a child.)

  Or was it because he had always made me feel welcome over the past couple of years when I had visited him with my sons?

  I wasn’t sure why, but I did grieve and grieve sincerely – he would have been proud of my continued loyalty.

  When I look back at that point in time, I don’t sense the need to be sad anymore. I just feel an anger and hatred for the man I never really knew after my twelfth birthday. I wasted so many months of my life feeling sad. Had he felt sadness for me? I wondered about this and doubted very much that he’d ever lost sleep or felt remorse for what he had done. Was he in heaven or hell? He was probably in the former, but he, like so many other sick and twisted men, almost certainly belonged in the latter.

  For almost a year after his death, I longed for answers to these questions in my dreams, but they never came as I had hoped they would. At night when I got into the bath, I would lie there with a small towel across me, covering my otherwise exposed, naked body, because I was convinced he was watching me from a little spot in the ceiling. How daft was I? But I found it increasingly more and more difficult to sit in the bath and not cover my intimate parts. There were even times when I tried to have a bath in the dark! I wouldn’t even let Sam leave the light on in the bedroom when we undressed. I used to tell him I didn’t want him to see my body as I had gained a few pounds. He said he didn’t mind, but turned the light out anyway because he knew I wanted him to. Sam knew me, he knew there was something else, and he just never asked me or fished for answers until he knew I was ready to be asked.

  After the next couple of months had passed, I pulled myself together the best I could and I gradually returned to my study at university. It was hard at first but eventually I sorted out my feelings and decided to concentrate on the here and now. I had essays due in and even more essays overdue. I don’t know how I coped but I did. I just think I must have been a little crazy back then. I had to deal with my father’s death, university, running a house and home, and being wife and mother. It was ten months before I started feeling safe in my own bathroom and stopped sitting there with a towel over me. I just quietly spoke into the space that surrounded me one night: ‘Go on look if you want to, you were a pervert then, what makes you being dead any different?’

  From then on, after I had uttered those words, I knew I was all right, that some small part of my mind was healing and I never worried about being in the bath again. As the rest of the year drifted past, I continued to busy myself doing everything I had done all my married life. It was therapy and for a time my past stayed buried and didn’t haunt me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  AS ONE DOOR of my life closed, another one had opened, letting me into a world that I found difficult to get used to, but desperate to succeed in. I wanted so much to make a go of university, but my father’s death had affected me so badly that I had taken three months out and had also asked for extensions on my essay deadlines. Now, after giving up my job, I was back for the new semester. I found it hard to write essays, as I didn’t have my notes, because I’d missed some lectures.

  My friends willingly gave me their notes to help me, but it wasn’t the same as having my own. I sat up late into the night but found I was too tired. Not only did I have my Christmas term essays to write, but I had the spring term ones to do, too. I decided to tackle my work in a different way. I went to bed a little earlier and set my alarm to go off 3 am.

  At first I still felt tired, but by the end of the first week it was working out really well. I would get up, write for two hours, and then go back to bed for an hour. It was wonderful working when the house was so still and quiet. Sam worried at first that I would wear myself out, but he knew it was how I wanted to tackle the backlog of work so he went along with it. At weekends, he spent even longer than usual with the boys, giving me more time to catch up. I don’t know quite how I managed to get four essays written and handed in in five days, but I did it. By the end of my second year, I had passed my entire course for that year. I was amazed at my achievement. My marks weren’t brilliant, but at least I was still on my course.

  Wow, this was totally unbelievable. I had succeeded! Study didn’t come easy to me either. I constantly recorded my lectures and listened to them repeatedly each day. I had, and still do have, problems remembering and recalling information, so I used to take twice as many notes as most students normally would. As each new essay question was posed, I had to get out my dictionary to decipher words I had heard before but wasn’t sure of their meaning. Once I had done this, I could then think about tackling the question.

  I did this throughout my degree course. If I hadn’t, then I would not have been able to do the work. It was a hard two years and during this time I was perhaps the most relaxed about my past – once again I had buried it deep in the back of my mind. There were many days – months even – when I never gave it a second thought.

  At the end of my degree course, I couldn’t believe I had passed. Despite having no academic qualifications after leaving school, I had done what so many people only dreamed of doing: to become a graduate. It was my dream and I had made it come true.

  Years before, when Mum had refused to mind Michael, I had told myself that I would finish my education and finish it well. I never once imagined that I would be thirty-four years old by the time I actually went back to do it, but that was just the way things turned out. I wanted to raise my family and give them all the love and support they needed. I always wanted to be a good mum and vowed that I would never leave the children to be looked after by anyone other than me or Sam.

  I had been so wrapped up in family life that nothing else seemed to matter, until Sam said I should follow my dream and take some time for myself. So that was what happened. I studied, raised my boys and lived a happy life with Sam. At first I don’t know how I coped. I don’t know anyone else who was as mad as I was, who would tackle a full-time degree course at the same time as raising five boys. I don’t think I could have done any of it without Sam’s support.

  One of my close friends at uni, Janet, was also married. During her first year of studying she got pregnant again, this time with her third child. Her husband didn’t understand her desire to learn, and after her son was born, he assumed she would stop chasing the impossible dream and give up her studies to become a full-time housewife.

  Janet and I wanted more, and we promised each other the day we met, back in September 1996, that we would graduate together. We were determined to achieve the goal we set, and when we graduated in 2000, our smiles were so big we could have easily lit up the whole stage in the conference centre without even flicking on a light switch.

  After graduation I felt lost for a while, uncertain what to do with my life. I felt as if all the normality had been taken from me; in a sense I felt I had lost my home. It was a very surreal experience. During the time I spent at university, my friends and I had become very close. I felt like I was with a family, not just my peer group. I knew I had Sam and the boys, but the academic side of my life had now gone; there would be no more mad dash bus rides to university, desperate to get to lectures on time, no more coffees and lunches with friends in the refectory. The student routine that I had become accustomed to over the last four years suddenly stopped.

  I now had nothing to fill my spare hours or take up my thoughts other than my family. Once my degree was over and I had handed in my dissertation, we went away camping for the weekend in Yorkshire. We had a really relaxed time on holiday. We shared champagne and strawberries with my sister and her husband. We had wonderful weather and everything was perfect. In the village, there was a little second-hand bookshop housed in a quaint little courtyard that stocked rare volumes. It was here that Sam bought me an antique book, which dated back to 1849. This was The Annual Register or a View of The History and Politics of The Year 1849. It was remarkably interesting and I loved turning the pages to read something that was printed so many years ago. It was the perfect presen
t for a history graduate.

  As usual, we went off to Cornwall that year and camped on the Lizard Peninsula – a favourite spot that held me like a captive spirit since the first time I saw it. Sam and I had always said we wouldn’t go back to the same place twice, but we fell in love in 1996 all over again, except that this time it was with a village and the amazing coastline nearby. We met up with friends, lazed in the sun, visited the Minack Theatre, had trips out to neighbouring villages and totally chilled out. It was how I imagined heaven to be. Life was sweet and so, so special.

  After the holidays, I began working in the local government offices. It was completely different from everything I had done before and I loved it – once more I had something else to focus on. At first I felt like I wasn’t clever enough to work there, but Sam reminded me that I was a graduate. I still smile every time I think of that moment. I worked for a year at that job but then left because I wanted to do more with the qualifications I had spent four years studying hard for.

  I was then offered a job in a school and went on to further my career and become a history teacher. I don’t know what drew me to this path, because when I was studying at university I wanted to use my history degree to work in a museum as a curator. I loved my subject with a passion; however, the minor part of my degree was in education studies and I was also interested in teaching children with special needs. The only museum job that came up at that time was in Manchester, which was just too far to travel, especially when I still had to take the boys to school each day. I remember thinking ‘I’ll do that in a few years when they are all older’, but I never did. My life was destined for another path.

  My life had been full of decisions that year and I remember hoping that I had made the right ones.