The Step Child

by Ford, Donna

  The days continued, into weeks and months. I spent my first Christmas with my new family in that hell hole, and it was as miserable as all the other birthdays and Christmases that would follow. No one could have survived the sort of terror I had been through in that house every day. Beatings and hatred marked my everyday life – there was always something, and some days the something was even worse than usual.

  Looking back on it, I do wonder where my father was in all of it. Did he really see nothing? I was so thin, so covered in bruises and so terrified that, as a parent myself now, I find it laughable to think that a father wouldn’t notice. Maybe he did see and didn’t care. Or maybe he chose not to see. He certainly spent most of his time at work. When he came back, he was faced with Helen shouting at him about how unhappy she was, how little money she had, how he had to work harder, do more hours, get an extra job. Perhaps he just switched off. The only time she ever spoke to him about me was to complain. I was evil. I gave her funny looks. I was difficult. She would tell him he had ‘no idea’ what I was like. And she was right. He was absolutely clueless. How could a grown man not notice that Frances had been scalped? That Simon was terrified? That I was starved? My father does not escape from this story without guilt, and I will never know just how much he did collude with Helen in my misery.

  He and Helen were obviously still maintaining some sort of relationship because when I was seven my next half-brother was born. This time, I was under no illusions. Gordon was four by this time, and Helen had turned him really nasty. I had no reason to suspect that Andrew, the new child, would be any different.

  But things were about to change. Our family was getting bigger, but the announcement that we were going to move house came as a surprise – a very welcome one. We weren’t moving far – only a few hundred yards really – to another part of the Easter Road area. Our new house was to be in Edina Place, and, to me, this represented the possibility of a new beginning. Perhaps the family life I had dreamed of when in Haldane House would magically appear once we left the increasing hell of our flat in Easter Road.

  I was about eight years old when we moved, and all I knew was that the new house would have more space. With five children, this could only be good. I had spent the three years at Easter Road since my return from Barnardo’s in a state of terror. From Helen’s initial labelling of me as a ‘bastard’ and a ‘little witch’, I had lived through one horror after another. I had no life at all. Even at school, I couldn’t relax. Helen had the time it took me to travel to and from school worked out to the nearest second. I was told when to leave the house in the morning, and she made sure I had no time to play or dawdle. She knew exactly how long it took me to get home again, and God save me if I was later than she deemed accurate. I couldn’t breathe for a moment – I couldn’t play skipping before the bell went, I couldn’t play hopscotch on the way home. Everything revolved around my fear of my stepmother and what she would do to me if I was late. A part of me hoped against hope that the move to the new house would distract her and perhaps buy me some breathing space to do all the normal things which little girls should do. It wasn’t asking for much – but it was never going to happen.

  Helen was already honing her cruel skills on me, but I would soon find that in Edina Place, she would have even more freedom. It would become so much easier for her to imprison me without other people noticing at all. My new beginning would become nothing more than a fresh hell.

  We did the move ourselves, roping in other family members, Dad’s mates from the pub, and anyone else who was around that day. It would look funny now to see an entire family trailing their worldly goods from one side of the street to the other, but it wasn’t so unusual in those days. The pram, which had already seen a lot of use, was now put into action as our removal ‘van’. It would get piled up with as much as we could balance, string tied across the top, and wheeled over to the new place time after time. There was a non-stop procession that day from Easter Road to Edina Place, with people coming and going, helping out when they could. I can remember the day itself quite clearly and I knew that Helen would be fine as she had an audience to play to.

  For me, the years at Easter Road had been focused on punishment, and wondering what I would have to endure each time she came near me. The physical and emotional abuse escalated relentlessly. Looking at the overall picture, it was an incredibly fraught situation. Nothing excuses what my stepmother did to me, even in those early years, but we were living in tiny quarters with two young babies and three children who had spent so long in a children’s home. It would be hard for anyone. Add Helen’s particular brand of evil to the mix and things were reaching breaking point.

  And I was the one she wanted to break.

  Chapter Six

  NEW BEGINNINGS

  1967

  AS SOON AS I saw Edina Place, my heart soared. This, I felt, would be where things would change. The house seemed absolutely massive. Although it was a tenement with people living above us, we were a cut above – having the main door flat meant we didn’t share stairs with anyone else. It was ours. I thought we were incredibly posh. This type of house was common in Edinburgh then, and remains so.

  The layout of Edina Place is important when I think of what was to happen to me there. After entering the main door, there was a vestibule with a terrazzo floor. The tiles were absolutely beautiful, and in keeping with the rest of the place which was immaculate when we moved in. An old couple had been living there and had clearly taken enormous pride in their home. We would soon wreck all of that. After the vestibule, there was a glass door leading to a very long hall, on which my Dad eventually did some work.

  On the left-hand side going up the hall was the first room, which became the bedroom of Helen and my Dad. It was a big room with all the original wood still visible and a fireplace which could still be lit. The size of the room alone was enough to impress me, but what struck me more were the beautiful glass panels in the front windows. They were stunning, covered with birds of all kinds. The panels could be taken out to clean, but the reality was that the easy access meant they were sold at the earliest opportunity. The bottom half of the windows were decorated in a sort of opaque fashion to give some privacy, and above all the windows, running around the room, were lovely cornices.

  After that bedroom, going up the hall, was a cupboard my Dad used largely for storage. He had originally trained as a French polisher so he had lots of tools and was always pottering around, doing things – badly – at home. He rarely finished these jobs, lending a cumulative feeling of neglect to wherever we lived. Further on from that cupboard was the pantry. Once we got organised, that would house the cooker and electricity box, and other things that kept the place running.

  These rooms were all innocuous. They were part of where I was now living, but they wouldn’t really play much of a role in my life. However, some rooms haunt me still. At the very top of the hall, facing the front door, was the bathroom. To this day, I shudder when I think of it. Helen had already shown how fond she was of incorporating our previous bathroom into her punishment routine – with this one she would go even further to make every day a living nightmare.

  To understand the layout, it’s easier to go back to the front door as the bathroom takes the house to a natural midpoint. By coming up the hall again from the front door, the first room on the right would become the boys’ bedroom – Simon, Gordon and Andrew would all sleep there. It was a very square room, but the most important feature for me was that in the left-hand corner there was a door leading to a boxroom – mine and Frances’s bedroom. That boxroom was to become the centre of my world. It would originally have been the dressing room in Victorian times, I think, and it still had a certain charm when we first moved in. Some of my Dad’s do-it-yourself projects impinged directly on the room where I would be a virtual prisoner. Soon after we moved in, he tried to lower the ceiling in the hall. I think this was to try and create some sort of space above in which he could keep all the parap
hernalia he collected. The only effect I could see was that he had put in huge beams which never did get cut to size, and which came straight through into the boxroom.

  Coming back out into the hall again, the next entry would be the main door to the boxroom, with another cupboard beside it. Further down the hall was the last door on the right – the living room. In that room, which again was a very square shape, was a recess that aligned with the hall cupboard. A wooden door in the recess also led to the boxroom, so both the living room and the boys’ bedroom had, in theory, access to the room which I would ironically call ‘mine’.

  Apart from these rooms, there was one other place that became important. Outside Helen’s bedroom was a cellar. Many a time my father would take me down there, as Helen would scream at him that I ‘needed’ a leathering.

  I can take myself back to my room in an instant. It was long and narrow with a really high ceiling. My bed was pushed against the door that led into the boys’ bedroom, and one of their beds was pushed against it on the other side. Initially the décor of the room was dated but in reasonable condition. However, Helen and my Dad always seemed to need to interfere with things, and it was wallpapered over with woodchip. I hated it – and do to this day. I spent so long in that room, staring at nothing but sharp little pieces of wood poking out from the paper. I detest all wall coverings really, because I had to obsess about them so much as a child. In the parts where they hadn’t put the woodchip, there was paper embossed with roses, glazed and dusky pink. Soon after we moved in, Helen renewed her routine of sending me to stand for hours at a time, facing the wall. I’d trace my fingers round those roses, thousands and thousands of journeys. The floors offered no comfort. There were no carpets or rugs, just plain floorboards, not sanded or varnished. Just cold. Inhospitable like everything else.

  Frances lived in that room with me when we first moved in – but not for long and I felt so lonely when she left. I can only think that because Frances was the eldest, she was the hardest for Helen to control. Once my two half-siblings came home from Barnardo’s, Helen tried to keep them down, just as she did with me. They too felt the back of her hand; they too were slapped and punched. But while Simon cowered and found his own ways of dealing with things, Frances often answered back. It used to terrify me. I wanted to be brave like her, but I was so scared of what Helen would and could do that I generally tried to keep as quiet as possible – not to complain about punishments, to not say that things were unfair, not to cry when tears were all I could think of. Frances would shout back. She would scream and stamp her feet. And she would run away. I know that she had disappeared while we were living at Easter Road, and she and Simon had also gone together once, as I’ve mentioned before. However, in Edina Place, the running away became more and more frequent. I have no idea what was happening to Frances, what was going on in her life, and I can only hope she was not experiencing the same hell as me.

  One day, Frances left my life and I never saw her again. She hadn’t been with us at Edina Place for long, and her time there had been characterised by running off and police visits. Where she went, I never knew – all I’m left with are yet more questions.

  Whatever the real story, the outcome was the same – Frances disappeared from Edina Place not long after we moved in, and I was left alone in the boxroom.

  Loneliness was one of the main markers of my time there – little was I to know that one day I would yearn for it: being alone would be infinitely preferable to the horrors I would face when subjected to the attentions of others. My memories of Edina Place don’t really cover many communal events because it was so unusual for me to be involved in anything resembling family life. Helen would have to be in an exceptional mood before I would be allowed into the living room. I do remember the initial buoyancy of moving, as things were a bit more relaxed for a short while, but it soon settled back into the familiar, horrendous pattern.

  School days were pretty much all the same. I sprang up as soon as I heard the house waking as I didn’t want to give her any chance to come in and start on me. From the moment I woke, I’d feel sick. There may have been nothing in my stomach, but I’d still feel nausea creeping over me as I wondered what sort of mood Helen would be in. Would it be a lucky day when she would only hit me a couple of times about the ears or head before I left? Or would there be a threat? ‘Just. You. Wait. Until. You. Get. Home.’ Those words would ooze out of her. She’d almost whisper them to me and they would hang over my entire day. The thought that she would have been brewing her anger all of the hours I was at school sent me cold. Her words would haunt me and I knew she’d always think of something else to make things worse.

  Even seemingly little acts twisted the knife still further.

  ‘You won’t need this,’ she’d laugh, and take the broken light bulb from its socket in my room, never to be replaced in all the years she was there.

  ‘And what would you need a door handle for? You’re not going anywhere,’ she’d cackle, removing the handle from my side of the door – my only independent means of getting out of the room.

  Keeping me in my place. Control. Making sure I knew she was in charge. Always.

  I don’t have dates for these constant cruelties. I didn’t have a diary. I didn’t log it all. But I do know that the physical, mental and emotional abuse piled up from soon after we moved into Edina Place until the day she finally left.

  Playing it back in my mind and talking about it as an adult, I can see my own past as flashes. I can picture scenes in my mind, and the recognition that this is my own history retains the power to shock and, indeed, to take me back there. The memories I have may be Easter Road, Edina Place, a school day, a weekend or a holiday, but there are unchanging elements – the cruelty, the baiting, the overriding need for control on Helen’s part, which allowed her to do those things to a child without ever flinching.

  Food played such a big part in it all. Even now as an adult, I pay the price of those early years of forced starvation and torture. I have no idea what size child I would have been, how big I might have grown, but I know that, to this day, I can’t eat as other people do. When I make new relationships, potential friends probably think ‘eating disorder’ because I am thin, I have problems with food, and it’s obvious to anyone who spends time in my company. Sometimes it’s easier to let them think that way, because how else should I explain it? My stepmother starved me? She treated me worse than a dog? She fed me scraps at best, and I stole food wherever and whenever I could?

  Food was a weapon for Helen, one of the many in her arsenal. It had started in Easter Road, but intensified in Edina Place. Most of the time, I’d either be standing still in my room, tracing wallpaper roses with my fingers, or in the bathroom standing equally still, cold, half-naked and terrified. I’d listen to the others having their tea. First of all, I’d smell the food cooking; then I’d hear the table being set. As the minutes dragged on, plates would be scraped, and the noises of normal family life would go on. The façade of normality – apart from the fact that one member was completely isolated. As the chairs were pushed back, I knew what was coming.

  ‘You!’ Helen would shout. ‘Get through here, now!’ Embarrassed by the fact that I was in vest and knickers, shivering and pathetic, I’d go through to where she was. ‘Well, then,’ she’d goad, ‘what should we do with you tonight? What do you think, Gordon? What does she deserve?’ Helen would then go through the charade of discussing with Gordon what I was entitled to. She knew, he knew, I knew that I had done nothing to ‘deserve’ punishment. I had certainly done nothing to deserve being starved. But this was a ritual just like all the others. My rations would be decided.

  ‘She’s been rotten today, Mum,’ Gordon would wheedle. ‘I don’t think she should get anything.’ They’d laugh and giggle to themselves, then the bargaining would begin. Did I deserve full rations? Rarely. Half-rations? Quarter-rations? Whatever I was going to get, I was grateful. If half- or quarter-rations were determined, I’d be s
ent back to my room, and Gordon would come along some time later, kick the door open and throw my food in. It would usually fall on the floor, but I didn’t care. Sometimes, he would spit in it for good measure. I still didn’t care. Half-rations meant one slice of spam, four chips and maybe a teaspoon of tinned spaghetti. Quarter-rations barely marked the plate. But even if I was on no rations at all, I would be ‘allowed’ to do the dishes while the rest of the family went about their lives. I managed to get something out of this, because at least I would be a little warmer while I worked, and, if Helen wasn’t being too vigilant, I could maybe steal a few scraps the others had left on their plates as I scraped them into the bin.

  And that was my life. A room without a light in it. A door without a handle. A belly without food. Standing still for hours. No friends. No love. And a father conspicuous by his absence. I was never allowed out of my room unless expressly let out by her. I got no food unless it was given by her. She was my constant jailer and she would never let me forget that I was completely dependent on her. I tried to get out for food but I hardly knew where to start. She’d put a padlock on the pantry door, the cupboard opposite the living room. Yet, despite the dangers, I devised a system of getting in, even if I rarely had the confidence to use it. I was so desperate for food that I had stolen a knife from the living room, a brown-handled steak knife. With this, I could poke the old brass fitting and turn the handle, opening my door. Then, standing on a chair, I could unscrew the hasp and staple, letting myself in to the pantry. I’d take a few biscuits or some bread, or sometimes just some dry cornflakes. I’d stash them on me, usually down my pants. Then I’d put everything back in place and get back to my bed where I’d devour whatever I’d pinched, under the blankets, as quietly as possible, my heart thumping in my chest. Despite the fear, I really felt I’d won at times like that. I’d beaten Helen at her own game – even if only for a few scraps that barely touched the hole of hunger at the centre of me.