The Step Child

by Ford, Donna

  Everyone called him Don. He wasn’t a tall man – about five foot seven. He wore a white shirt every day. When he was at home, his shirt sleeves would be rolled up, his tie off, and he’d have a sleeveless pullover or a cardigan on, the type with pockets in the front and big brown buttons. When he was going out, he’d take off the pullover and don his tie, suit jacket and winter overcoat. Being an ex-army man, his shoes were always polished. I know of the services part of his life only from seeing photos of him in Germany, posing with his comrades, and some of him swimming in a river having fun. He seemed to be acting like a different person in those pictures, but I was getting used to people having ‘fronts’, to having so many faces they put on, that I didn’t necessarily see my Dad as someone who was living a life he had never anticipated. I knew that he had also trained as a French polisher because he was always doing something with bits of furniture, and he had boxes full of tools and endless bottles of lacquer and varnish. He loved to tell people about his ‘skills’, and he was quite a good carpenter too. I can remember when he’d be busy sanding and polishing odd bits of furniture for someone, and the smell of shellac still reminds me of those times.

  There seemed to be such a contrast in the ways he behaved, according to whatever was going on at the time – and it was Helen who always determined the tone of family life. I did look up to him when I first arrived home; he was my Dad, and even at that age I knew what Dads were for. But Helen made it very clear to my Dad that I was nothing special, and I shouldn’t expect anything. Gordon was her child – and he should take precedence over me, even in the early days. She had told me straight away that she was not my Mum and I was never to consider her as such. I was such a tiny little thing and so desperately in need of love that my desire for his attention actually hurt me. I had so many questions – why didn’t he pick me up? Why didn’t he sit me on his knee as he did with Gordon? Why did I never really get any notice taken of me unless it was bad? I just wanted to be cuddled, I just wanted to belong to a proper family; but Helen made sure it was never going to happen, and my Dad did absolutely nothing to stand in her way. We were both put in our places really.

  I heard Helen shouting so much in those early days – it wouldn’t stop as the years went on, but I wasn’t used to it yet. She would tell him that I wasn’t to be spoiled, that I was to be made to realise how lucky I was. It seemed to me that everything was very difficult, even though I had no idea why or what place I played in it all. My Dad rarely stood up to her – and if he did, it was only verbally and briefly before he left the house yet again. He seemed to be working all the time. When I first went there, he worked on the buses. When I was very young, he would arrive back from work on a Friday evening with his pay-packet in his pocket, which he gave to Helen immediately. Sometimes my Dad would have a comic for me, and always – every Friday evening – he brought a brand-new Matchbox car, still in its little cardboard box, for Gordon, his son with Helen. Dad was very affectionate with Gordon, picking him up and throwing him around playfully. I can remember watching the scenes and envying Gordon his easy life. That child was never hit, never starved, never abused – in fact, it wouldn’t be long before he would turn on me too.

  I remember getting to go on the number one bus in Easter Road (the one Auntie Nellie and I had also taken). It was an old-fashioned double decker bus with no door, just a pole to hold on to, then upstairs, two wooden steps at a time. I’d hear him call: ‘Tickets please!’ Then he’d come around with his metal ticket box, turning the handle, issuing the pink ticket with the blue writing giving stage number and price, and with ‘Edinburgh Corporation Buses’ stamped on to it. I can remember him walking up the wooden slatted floor in his blue serge uniform with the metal and enamel badge clipped to his jacket. Everyone chatted and endured the bumpy ride up the cobbled street – they all cracked jokes and bantered with each other. I take it he didn’t earn much on the buses, and it wasn’t long before Helen started hassling him about their lack of money. He then took a job in the General Post Office in Edinburgh, while we still lived in Easter Road, which meant he left really early in the morning. My Dad took as many extra shifts as he could and just stopped ever really being around.

  I remember his Post Office jacket hanging up on a peg, with its brass embossed buttons, alongside the old sack bag in which he carried the mail. On one very rare occasion, he took me to deliver letters with him. We were still living in Easter Road at the time. The beatings and punishments had already started and it was summer. I’d had a kicking from Helen while my Dad was standing in a corner of the tiny shared bedroom. I don’t know who else was in the house but I could hear kids playing in the back green as usual. Don and Helen had been shouting at each other for what seemed like for ever and I knew what was coming. Helen had started blaming any of the disruptions in the house on me. I listened to them as they stood over me – it was all going to be laid at my door again. ‘She’s a little madam,’ she was screaming. ‘She’s a spoilt brat.’ It all just became noise after a while, but on this day there was a break to the pattern. Suddenly, I was told to get dressed by my Dad. We were going out. I couldn’t believe my luck! Getting away from Helen was a treat in itself, but getting my Dad to myself was something so rare that I could hardly contain myself. Was he finally cottoning on to her? We went all the way to Wallyford on his bike, with me perched on the crossbar, and delivered a batch of letters. After my Dad had done his deliveries, he bought me a bun from Crawford’s the bakers. I hardly remember the beating – that was becoming my normality – but I do recall the delight of being with my Dad, away from it all.

  He was and still is a bit of an enigma to me. My feelings regarding him are so mixed that I don’t know quite what to do with them. I know he beat me when I was a small child but I also know that it was at the insistence of Helen. When she left he gave me the odd ‘cuff round the lug’ but never beat me. My best memories of him are when he visited me in the Barnardo’s home, because he was always smiling in those days and bearing gifts: sweets, magazines, a little toy. It’s only when I moved back home that the memories become more contradictory. When Frances and Simon came back from Barnardo’s, Dad would take us for walks if there was any time he wasn’t working. I can remember him taking all of us on walks around Arthur’s Seat, with a bag of boilings from Casey’s at the top of Easter Road stuffed in his pocket to dole out when it looked like we were getting bored. He’d tell us all about Holyrood Palace and the park and we’d go and feed the swans at St Margaret’s Loch. I also remember him taking us to Chambers Street Museum and to the Museum of Childhood. He took all of us there for years – including Karen when she was small enough to be in her pram. Helen was never there so they are fond memories. However, when all the arguments started between him and Helen, it suddenly seemed that he wasn’t around much.

  It’s not easy to speak about the feelings I had – and have – for my father because he let me down so badly. He was the only one who could have really saved me, and he didn’t. I don’t know if he was controlled by Helen in the same way that I was, but what other answer can I hold on to? He did many things that said he was not a bad man. He knew that Helen’s youngest child was not his, yet he reared her as his own after she left. Never do I recall him letting on to Karen that she wasn’t his – he didn’t call her names or stigmatise her or make her feel less like one of his own.

  When Helen left us, I asked him why he would bring up a child who wasn’t his own and who was a constant reminder of Helen. He just replied, ‘It’s no’ the bairn’s fault.’ Karen always had a high regard for him, and I know that many of the people who knew my father really liked him. It was often said to us that he was a kind man. But from my perspective, I find it so hard to know what he was all about.

  When Helen left, Dad’s pub visits became even more frequent. He started going to Middleton’s all the time, and it escalated from being ‘a quick pint’ or ‘a wee bit of company’ to the place being his second home. I hated that place and everything i
t stood for. After Helen had gone, I did have hopes of us being a real family in a proper home, not a permanently pissed-up excuse for a Dad in a stinking boozer rolling in at all hours. ‘It’s just a wee drink, hen,’ he’d say. ‘Just trying to enjoy mysel’ a wee bit.’ But, for me, men and drink and so-called enjoyment rarely meant fun or happiness. Even though I was still so young and faced with the responsibility of looking after Karen, I harboured such dreams. If only Dad would stay out of Middleton’s, maybe our family could finally be put back together again.

  My life settled into a new pattern. I’d still come tearing out of school, still have others waiting for me. But now, it was a race to get home, pick Karen up, stick her in her tatty buggy and push her up Easter Road to try and beg some money off Dad for our dinner. The pubs closed for a while in the afternoon, but by the time I got us going, he was back there, propping up the bar or slumped in a chair – I wouldn’t have known where else to find my Dad. I always had high hopes of getting a pound each time, but it all depended on how much he’d drank, how guilty he felt about five children needing to be fed, and how lucid he was. I’d shove the door of Middleton’s open with my backside as I reversed in with the buggy. The stench of stale beer, fag smoke and dead lives hit me like a brick wall. All the men looked the same. You couldn’t really identify their ages; they were wrecked to the same stage. Perfect specimens of poor eating and good drinking, these men in their little worlds could see nothing wrong with a child having to beg money off her own father so that she could feed the baby she had been left with.

  Apart from Middleton’s, Dad liked the bowling club, the Hibs club, and the merchant seamen’s club. All of these ‘clubs’ took food out of the bellies of children like me and Karen, and sent more drunk men home to families who needed the money – families who didn’t need the sorry excuses for fathers and husbands who thought their need for ‘a wee bit of company’ was the be-all and end-all.

  Still, there were worse things than my Dad being on his own in a pub, with me and Karen pathetically begging for his spare change. Worse by far were his ‘mates’. By the time I was about 13 or 14, on quite a few occasions – too many – Dad would have someone ‘staying over’. These great pals of his were generally just other lushes from the pub, who suddenly became a bosom buddy over another pint and a sob story. Sometimes he barely knew them; other times he’d been drinking with them for years but had still only scratched the surface of any so-called friendship forged through beer goggles.

  I actually felt sorry for some of them, even the ones who would cadge off us for weeks on end, sleeping on the sofa in the living room. There was one man called Ernie who was absolutely fine. When Dad staggered home with him, amidst much backslapping and calls of camaraderie, I wasn’t bothered. Ernie was genuinely down on his luck – he had suffered some accident at work and lost fingers through a chainsaw incident, I think. He would just doss down when he needed to, and not really bother any of us. He certainly never touched me or made me feel uncomfortable. There was another bloke whose name I can’t remember, even though I can picture him really clearly. He was incredibly tall – to me – with sandy hair, and I recall him saying that he was in the Merchant Navy. He had an air of respectability about him, and was, indeed, always very respectful to me, despite my youth and the fact that my Dad didn’t exactly set the scene for anyone to treat me particularly well.

  But there were others. There always had been.

  Dougie Galbraith lived nearby with his wife. He was one of my Dad’s regular drinking partners, always looking for a soft touch and a free round. When Galbraith split with his wife, my Dad was there with his ever-open offer of a sofa and lodgings – only this time, I was part of the offer in Galbraith’s twisted mind. I can still see him so clearly when I close my eyes. ‘You alright there, doll?’ he would slur at me when he rolled in. I hated that man from the outset, hated him when he was still with his wife, hated him more when he decided I was there to be pawed and abused. He would leer over me whatever I was doing, but I thought for a while that that was as far as it would go.

  One night, he and my father staggered in. My Dad was blind drunk as usual, and Dougie Galbraith was certainly acting that way. For a while. I’d been home for hours, fed Karen on the scraps I could throw together, and got her settled down for the night after the latest chapter of the story I was making up for her from my imagination. I was a long way from turning in for the night. I was in sole charge of cleaning, cooking, organising, getting myself prepared for school, making sure Karen had clothes that were as clean and presentable as I could manage. My Dad, oblivious to everything, stumbled through to his bed, and collapsed, fully clothed. The stench from him wouldn’t get any better by the morning – and there was a good chance it would be joined by some vomit and piss which would be left for me to clean up.

  Still, I checked on him. He looked like he would survive until morning. I went back to what passed as our living room, and Galbraith was already sitting there, legs splayed, smirk on his face, looking like he owned the place.

  ‘That’s the old man out for the count then, doll?’ he asked. I couldn’t even look at him. Even now, it really disgusts me to think about him. He had a gap between his front teeth, and always, always smelled of old beer and cigarettes. For some reason, he thought the height of elegance was the tightest pair of jeans he could pour himself into, and he even managed a bit of a swagger. I don’t doubt for one second that Dougie Galbraith thought the single women of Edinburgh were delighted at the thought of him on the market again after his split from Jean. As my Dad lay virtually unconscious in another room, his ‘mate’ unzipped his welded-on jeans and took out his penis. ‘Come on, doll, give’s a wee bit of help here.’ He held out his hand as if he was performing some great gentlemanly act. ‘Sit beside me on the sofa here. We’ll have a wee chat, get to know each other. You’re a lovely looking wee lassie you know. Could easily have a boyfriend. Mind you, maybe you want a real man. Is that it? You holding out for Dougie?’

  Galbraith’s ‘advances’ had been pretty obvious for some time. He was a vile, lecherous man who would stare at me whatever I was doing, and always seemed to sober up remarkably quickly whenever my Dad was out of the room. Galbraith’s empty compliments were a clumsy way of trying to make me feel that this was actually some sort of relationship. He would tell me I was good-looking, tell me I was worth his time – and I was so starved of affection, so ignorant of what a normal relationship was, that I actually did wonder. I walked over to the sofa where this ugly, rancid excuse for a man was asking me to masturbate him. Did I shout on my comatose Dad? Did I scream that his friend was trying to abuse his daughter? Did I even tell Galbraith where to go? No. I sat beside him, on that awful sofa, in that vile living-room and did exactly as he asked. And how did this great romantic interlude end? ‘That was spot-on, doll,’ he hissed through the gap in his teeth as he wiped himself off on his manky Y-fronts and shoved himself back into his skintight denims. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’

  Many people would say to me: ‘Your Dad’s a good man.’ Many would tell me: ‘Your Dad would do anything for anybody.’ Many would inform me: ‘Your Dad would give a man the shirt off his back.’ Well, my Dad gave them a damn sight more than that. He served his daughter up on a plate too.

  There were four different men who abused me over this period. I know where some of them still live. Most of them have families. They all followed the same pattern – they’d be men my Dad had met out drinking. They’d doss down on our sofa when they were down on their luck or too drunk to go home, then they’d start on me. These men were offered hospitality but took so much more. Of course, it’s hard for me to talk about the specifics of these incidents because even years later the pain is still there – not just the pain of what they did to me, but also the pain which comes from knowing that, yet again, my Dad turned a blind eye. And, yet again, I thought it was all my fault. Yes, they gave me compliments and yes, I accepted their words – but how could I have been so
starved of everything that I would do all of the things they demanded just for those scraps of attention? It’s not just my Dad’s involvement I have to pick apart – I have to go back and look at myself too, and at a child who thought she deserved such treatment time after time.

  What hurts the most is that, for years, I had really believed that my Dad would save me one day. He would see it all; he would work out – at last – what was happening to me. He would get on his white steed and ride to my rescue.

  Now, it hit me full in the face.

  He was never going to save me.

  He made things worse.

  Some hero.

  Chapter Seventeen

  HOPES AND DREAMS

  IT WAS TIME FOR me to face up to facts. The only person who was going to save me was myself.

  I don’t get the feeling that my father wanted to be party to any of Helen’s ‘activities’, but I can also see that he does deserve some blame, not only for what happened while she was on the scene but also for closing his eyes to the later abuses which happened. Just as she made choices and must be held accountable for her actions, my Dad also played his part. I think he was a very weak man, who for some reason, needed this awful woman so much that he not only turned a blind eye to what was going on, but also became party to some of it. He most definitely knew about the violence, and surely he must have seen that I was a bag of bones. He must have known that there were problems at school, and that I was a terrified scrap of a child. I tried to talk to him about it a few years ago when he was dying. He couldn’t do it. Whatever I asked, whatever I brought up, he shook his head and looked away.