The Step Child

by Ford, Donna

  ‘Are you okay, diddums?’ her voice sing-songed. ‘Is precious feeling better now?’

  I lifted my throbbing head up.

  Why wasn’t she coming in, either to help me or taunt me some more?

  ‘I’ve been thinking. If you’re so unwell, the best place for you is in quarantine. Stay there until we all go to bed tonight. Keep away from the rest of us. If you’re riddled with something nasty, I don’t want me or Gordon or Andrew to catch it, you filthy little cow.’

  Hours passed as I lay there on the tiles, feeling freezing cold one minute and boiling hot the next.

  Once more, much later, I plucked up all the courage I had in my scrawny little body. I crawled along the corridor to the room where Helen was. ‘Please, Helen,’ I croaked. ‘Please, help me, I feel awful. Please can I go to my bed? I’ll be good. I’ll be quiet.’ She turned the television off. Stared at me. Then she opened her mouth and bawled as loudly as she could. ‘Get out! Get out of here! You’ve no right to be here! Get back on punishment! Go! Go! Go!’

  She made me stand there all evening. Every now and again, as I drifted in and out of things, I could hear her coming along the corridor, checking up on me. After a while, I realised everyone had gone to bed. My Dad was out, working overtime as usual. And me? I thought, I really thought, that I was going to die. Eventually Helen went to bed too – I heard her come out of the living room and go down the lobby into her bedroom. She didn’t bother to check up on me. She knew that I’d still be in there, still ‘on punishment’. Finally, I couldn’t bear it any more. I staggered out of the bathroom, and sheepishly knocked on her bedroom door. I heard nothing. I knocked again. Still nothing. I opened the door a tiny bit, just a crack. ‘Helen,’ I whispered. ‘Helen, can I please go to bed?’ A whirlwind flew at me, knocking me back. She must have been sitting in there waiting for me to request this most outrageous of privileges. ‘Bed? Bed? You’ve got some brass fucking neck, haven’t you?’ she screamed. I was sweating through my temperature as she started hitting me. She was a mad vision in her slippers and dressing gown, lashing out, knocking me off the wall, slapping my head from one side to another. ‘Ill? I’ll give you bloody ill! You’ll know what ill is when I’ve finished with you!’ I ran back into the bathroom, still pleading for a doctor, and closed the door behind me. She followed me in, absolutely berserk, and continued the beating.

  Finally, she seemed to run out of energy and went back to her bedroom. I knew I couldn’t even afford the luxury of slumping to the floor, despite my desperate need to do so. If she came back and caught me slacking off, who could tell what she might be capable of? I stood there as long as I could, but I must have fainted, must have lost consciousness, because I remember coming round on the floor to find her standing over me, yelling: ‘You! Get to your bed, now! And don’t tell your father!’

  Next day – actually, probably only some hours later – she came into my boxroom with my Dad. She started fussing around my bed – the pair of them were hardly ever in that room, so it was quite a performance. ‘Look, Don,’ she said, ‘I’m really worried about the bairn. All last night, I kept telling her something was wrong and she needed to let me get the doctor in – but she’s that bloody stubborn, she wouldn’t hear of it.’ My Dad looked at her as if she were Mother Bloody Teresa. ‘You’re too good, Helen,’ he muttered. ‘The bairns don’t know how much you do for them. Well, it’s time you just put your foot down. If you think she needs a doctor, I don’t care how pigheaded she is about it – she’ll get a doctor.’

  So, to the doctor I was taken. Penicillin and rest were prescribed – and Helen made a great show of how tired she was of looking after a sick child; how much easier it would all have been if only I’d got medical attention when she’d first suggested it rather than digging my heels in. Her show was for my Dad, the doctor, the neighbours, anyone who would listen – anyone who would open their ears to her lies, while closing their eyes to the fact that the ill child in front of them couldn’t have fought her way out of a paper bag, was covered from head to toe in bruises, and barely had any skin over her bones.

  The illnesses I had while a child, and when Helen was around, had repercussions which lasted a lot longer than if I had been properly fed, cared for, and given treatment when I required it. I had constant tonsillitis until I was 12 – at that age, I had my tonsils removed and spent a week in Astley Ainslie Convalescence Unit recovering. I loved that week, because of the attention and the feeling of safety. The nurses used to let me help them with little bits and pieces, and I felt so secure that I never even noticed the pain.

  Tonsillitis was one of the more minor problems of my childhood. Other, more serious, health problems persisted into my adult life. When I was being sexually abused, I was always sore ‘down below’ and had terrible problems with my ‘waterworks’ (how strange that, despite the awful things being done to me, I was never allowed to use ‘dirty’ – that is, proper – words for bodily parts and functions). The fact that I was unable to go to the toilet when I needed to didn’t help the situation at all. For as far back as I can remember, from the day of arriving at Easter Road right up to the present, I have had issues with my ‘waterworks’. As a child, I wet the bed, and this became a major issue for Helen. I couldn’t help it; I was five years old! I’d just come out of care, I wet the bed and, for some reason, she thought this was the end of the world. She got more and more annoyed about it until eventually she started to rub my nose in the sheets in the morning, make me take my wet pants off, rub my face with them, make me put them back on and wear them. It’s no surprise that at school I was called pissy pants.

  Another one of her remedies for my bed-wetting was to make me strip the bed down to the rubber sheet. I hated that rusty red sheet, stinking of rubber and pee. I’d have to scrub the rubber sheet in the bath, trample the sheets, then wring them before hanging them out to dry in the back green or, if it was raining, on the pulley. As I got older, I would get more and more embarrassed about going to school stinking of piss. I would run to the girls’ toilets where I would try to clean myself with the powdery borax soap and dry myself with hard, green paper towels. I even got to the stage of washing my knickers then putting them back on wet. Nothing helped – either with the smell or with my problems with ‘normal’ toilet behaviour.

  I also have the most awful back problems relating directly to the beatings I endured as a child. I remember one occasion in particular when Helen gave me a beating and really damaged my back. We’d just come back from a holiday in Kinghorn – two weeks at a chalet in a holiday camp in Fife. I’d enjoyed it so much as we’d had more freedom there than we were ever allowed at home. I think most of that was due to Helen wanting us out from under her feet, but there was also the fact that my Dad was around for the whole holiday. After breakfast, we’d be shunted out for the day. Simon and I would head off rock-pooling, catching minnows or sticklebacks. We’d go on long expeditions and find caves; we’d jump in the water off the pier.

  Most of it was good.

  But Helen had packed a little extra in her holiday bag. Her beloved tawse. When my Dad was around, she was okay – but when he went drinking to the clubhouse, she’d get the beating belt out, concentrating on my back as much as possible. Simon and I got a lot more than one leathering on that holiday, reminders that lasted longer than the few happy moments at the rock pools.

  Shortly after this holiday, Simon and I got a really bad hiding for an imaginary slight. It was Simon’s go first. This was one of Helen’s preferred approaches. She made us queue up outside the bathroom door, taking turns, waiting, listening to the other child’s cries of pain in anticipation of what was coming our way. Simon was screaming; when it stopped, he came out of the bathroom crying, hugging himself and slouching with pain. He scurried to his room. I was next. I did the usual – held on to the cold bath and listened to Helen’s words.

  ‘You know why you’re being punished.’

  ‘You know you’re bad.’

 
‘You know you deserve it.’

  ‘Say it! Say it! Say you’re bad, you deserve this!’ she would scream.

  Eventually I would.

  ‘I am bad. I deserve to be punished.’

  She’d tell me to bend over. Not to move. I’d lean over the bath and wait for the stinging thwack of the belt. But this time, this one time, it wasn’t the belt – it was the buckle. I don’t know whose belt it was, whose belt she had chosen to beat me with, but it was heavier than usual, and the cumbersome brass buckle on it put me in agony each time it came down as she hit me. I tried my hardest not to show just how much pain I was in, but I failed miserably. My back was aching and I swear I heard a crack. Helen just kept hitting and hitting and shouting and shouting. Eventually she stopped and I hobbled off to my room. The pain was so much worse than I had ever felt from a belt beating before, and I kept hearing the cracking noise, over and over again. Ever since that day my back has troubled me and hurts virtually every day. Years ago, a chiropractor looked at it. He scanned his eyes over the x-rays. ‘Have you survived a bad car crash?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Just a bad childhood.’

  As I mentioned before, my other most significant health issue relates to my eating habits. I spent years as a child going for days on end without food. As a result, I’ve been left with an inability to eat normal-sized portions or, indeed, even a full meal. I have to pick and eat small parts of any plateful. It frustrates me and annoys me and is extremely anti-social. When you’re invited for a meal, people look, and you can see their eyes questioning. Being small anyway, I’m sure people think I have an eating disorder. In a way I do, but it is not self-imposed. Years of starving have left me this way, and the only way I can compensate is by cooking for other people, which I love.

  I have come to terms with the fact that these things are simply part of me now – but that doesn’t stop me questioning how it all happened in the first place. Some of the main questions I have are for Barnardo’s. I feel so let down by them. Although they looked after me competently enough while I was at Haldane House, I can’t help but blame them for not adequately checking up on what I returned to.

  Why did these people not save me? Why did they not do something? They couldn’t have known the situation I was going to face, but if they had got us placed elsewhere then maybe Helen would never have got her hands on us. I know it was on the cards because I have read it in old reports. In one it says: ‘Unfortunately, neither of their parents seems able to keep in very close touch with the children and we are therefore planning to find a suitable home where they can be fostered, so that this will give them the opportunity of growing up in the environment of a normal happy home, where they will receive every loving care and attention.’ The fact that I had been so close to a different life chills me to the bone.

  A normal happy home.

  Every loving care and attention.

  These were things I would dream of for so long. Things I believed I did not deserve. Things that had been within touching distance without me even knowing. There are so many ‘what ifs’. What if I had been placed with another family and managed to enchant them so much that they wanted me as their own child? What if I’d had a completely different childhood? How would I have turned out?

  I also want to know how on earth teachers could have been so blind to what was going on in front of them every day. As I have said, my first school was Leith Walk Primary, and I started there at the end of the first summer that I returned to stay with my father and stepmother. Did the teachers at that little Victorian school choose to ignore the skinny, terrified little girl who stank of piss? Each day when they patrolled the separated girls’ and boys’ playgrounds, did they just fail to notice me, isolated, excluded, bruised and starving?

  It was my treatment at home that finally brought me to the attention of those who should have looked out for me long before – but it did little good. I had become so obsessed with food that I stole food from the pockets of another child one day. (When Don and Helen found out, it was used as just another excuse to beat me.) This was raised at the court case as evidence of my evil streak – Helen was being tried for procuring us for sexual abuse as children, and lawyers tried to make out that it was all made up because I was the sort of evil kid who lied and stole food! I’ll say now what I said under oath – only one type of child steals food, and that is a hungry child. At the time, it was enough to get me sent to an educational psychologist.

  The only decent meal I ever got was on a school day. Simon and I were given free school dinners. We were marked out by the pink tickets we held up for all to see and sneer at. All the people who paid for their dinners got first sitting and us paupers went in last. The advantage of last sittings was the opportunity to get ‘seconds’, even though the favourite dishes had usually been snaffled by the paying diners. I didn’t care that we had to be labelled to get free school meals – I still dreamed of them. I looked forward to lunch so much, often anticipating and almost drooling whilst trying to imagine what it would be each day. Would it be mince? Sloppy, dark brown with carrots in, accompanied by a perfect scoop of mashed tatties complete with lumps and black-eyes? Then maybe followed by cake and custard? Whatever was served, I ate every morsel.

  Now, thinking back, I have such evocative memories of the dinner hall, the clanking of the aluminium trays, the smell of the hot food which would permeate the corridors from just after playtime. Food meant everything to me at school. I came to school hungry so my mind was on my belly for most of the time. When I got to school in the morning, I thought about when milk would be served. I liked milk time – more so in the winter when it was icy cold – a third of a pint in its little glass bottle with a foil cap. It was someone’s job to trek down the long corridor to where the milk was kept and return to the class with the crate. Someone else would then give out the milk which you would sip through a pink plastic straw. As well as using the straws to drink our milk, we would often join them together in three-dimensional geometric shapes, then carefully cover them in coloured cellophane, sometimes sweet wrappers – and hang them haphazardly around the classroom. They looked so beautiful – like jewels or magic lanterns. I vaguely remember being told it had something to do with maths, but to me it was even more evidence that good things came from having a full stomach.

  In the early days at Easter Road, I do remember having breakfast most days before leaving for school, usually cornflakes with milk and sugar, or toast. For a little while, I even got a playtime snack – a packet of Golden Wonder crisps or a chocolate biscuit, a Tunnock’s caramel log, a caramel wafer or a Blue Riband. I don’t know exactly when breakfasts and playtime snacks stopped, but I know it was quite soon after Frances and Simon came home. I had those school lunches to look forward to for such a short while. For some reason – perhaps control, power or pure nastiness – Helen stopped the school dinners and I’d have to run back to the house each day, panting and nervous, maybe late or disappointing her in some way. I’d be given a tiny, snack-size sausage roll from McGill’s the baker on a good day and then sent back to school. On a bad day, I got nothing.

  So I would have to find ways to get food. I’d pick up sweets off the streets on the way to school or bread that had been left out for the birds. I’d scrounge at playtime, hanging around the kids who had snacks, trying to make them feel guilty and making them hate me even more for my pathetic attempts. I’d take any opportunity to get out of class to rifle through the coats and bags in the cloakroom for food or loose change. If I got a penny, I’d go to the dairy on the way home. The dairy was the little grocer/newsagent/tobacconist, a tiny shop on our street. I’d buy a penny dainty, just like the one the Barber had given me, in a green and white tartan wrapper. It was a lovely piece of creamy toffee. I’d either eat it straight away or savour it, hiding it in my brown leather school bag to eat in privacy. I knew if Helen came across it I’d be in trouble.

  The way I was being treated at home obviously made me the child I was. In turn, that pr
evented me from having a normal school life with normal interests and normal friends. I certainly don’t really remember having friends at school as such, although I do remember sometimes being ‘cawed in’ at the skipping in the playground if they were short, and even being allowed to hold an end of the rope on special occasions. Even though I was an outsider, I loved watching the games and singing the songs. When I first started school and Helen was nicer than she became, I played a bit and got to join in. As time went on, however – and I turned up to school smellier, scruffier, more tired, hungry, withdrawn and undoubtedly stranger – I became an easy target to pick on.

  As time went on, the knot of tension I felt in my stomach at the prospect of going home, also began to apply to school. I did enjoy some aspects of it, though, particularly history and geography and anything that involved drawing a picture to illustrate work. I loved it when we did a project on the Bayeux tapestry and made a collage. We once got the opportunity to learn French but it didn’t last long. I was fascinated by the strange-sounding words and mesmerised by the French teacher, her stories of France and how exotic it all sounded. I liked music and remember our music teacher very clearly. A big part of the reason I liked her was that she reminded me of Auntie Nellie, as she had the same school-marm look with tweed skirts and sensible black lace-up shoes. She made us sing with a round mouth, twirling our finger in our mouth while reciting the scale to ensure we kept our lips in a perfect circle as we sang ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Early One Morning’.

  I also liked writing – it was close to art, which was to become my life – and looked forward to practising my handwriting with a proper fountain pen and writing the alphabet over and over in perfect italics. I hated the times tables and despaired of being asked to stand up and recite what we were expected to learn in maths that day. Numbers bored me and didn’t make sense – mental arithmetic was just hell. Of course, I already knew that reading was a delight. I started off with the ‘Janet and John’ books, and it wasn’t long before I was looking for more and more challenging scripts. I always put my hand up first in spelling but I was never first in line when it came to sports. I was always cold so I would get as near as I could to the radiator and huddle in doorways in the playground rather than run around.