The Step Child

by Ford, Donna

  She ended by saying that the police wanted to pursue a case against Helen Thomson Laing Ford. I could take as much time as I wanted to think about whether I would be involved. If I did, then I would need to give a statement or, more likely, a series of statements, to help them secure a conviction.

  They stood up, gave me their contact numbers, said they’d be in touch and left. I heard the front door close as I sat there in a state of shock. I was utterly stunned. The first thing I needed to do was throw up. Once that was over, the real effect hit me. Not that I might be involved in a criminal trial against my stepmother. Not that the police had just turned my world upside down. No, the main thing that struck me was this – they wanted to listen.

  The two people who had just left actually wanted to hear my side of the story. They were asking so much – but at least they were asking. And what would my story be?

  Of the times she beat me from the days when I was a small child in her care?

  Of the times she held a red-hot poker to my face and threatened to scar me for life?

  Of the times she made me stand almost naked in a freezing cold bathroom while she tormented me?

  Of the times she starved me and I stole food?

  Of the times she slapped and kicked and strapped and burned me?

  Of the times she held parties where her ‘friends’ would abuse me?

  Of the times she encouraged those ‘friends’ to rape her stepdaughter?

  Of the times she sent me to neighbours to be sexually abused with her blessing?

  Would they listen to all of that? Would they believe it? Would they do something about it?

  To say this wasn’t something I could decide overnight is an understatement. In fact, it took about six months before I gave my first police interview. My partner and friends all assured me that they would stand by me, no matter which road I decided to take. They made me feel strong and that I was in a place where I could cope with all that would emerge. But could I? Could I go back to those places? Could I go back to that terrified little girl standing cold, alone, starving, beaten and abused in a dark, empty room with absolutely nothing in her world?

  I thought I could.

  But where would I start?

  For years I had lived my life trying to bury the past and moving on with an existence far removed from what I had as a child. When I made the decision to pursue the case against Helen and seek some form of justice, I thought I would be strong enough to do so without it affecting me negatively, but so much came to the surface as a result. The run-up to the court case was such a harrowing time for myself and my family. The pressure of the impending court case had brought forth a backlash of trauma. I was suffering from nightmares and flashbacks so real that it was as if I had been transported back to those days.

  All the normal, day-to-day stuff which simply has to be done seemed insurmountable. I couldn’t even go out of the house. Every morning, I woke up with such dreadful feelings of anxiety and fear that I was throwing up. And the eating problems from which I have always suffered were there with a vengeance. I had tried so hard to get over these problems by learning to cook, and enjoying food whenever possible. Now I was back to square one. The nightmares. The anxiety. The inability to keep food down. She was getting to me again. I lost so much weight that even strangers could see there was something wrong with this ghost of a woman.

  I was so angry inside – but why? Nothing had really changed. I’d always had to live with what Helen had done and what she had facilitated. What was new now? I would often vent my anger on my partner and we argued constantly. We were both completely lost.

  The situation got worse and worse. I lived with all of this for two years while things moved on towards the eventual court case. The material had to be prepared, statements had to be gathered, evidence had to be collated. I was living with it every moment of every day. I couldn’t pack it away any longer. There were so many cancellations and false starts – usually due to Helen’s defence team saying they weren’t fully prepared – that I began to think it would never happen. But it did.

  I had to work out how I wanted to face this.

  I didn’t want anyone with me at the court. I wanted – and needed – to do this on my own, and I also didn’t want anyone to be tainted by it. I was going to have to speak of things I had kept inside for so long, and I had no idea how I would deal with that when the time came.

  When the day arrived – Wednesday 1 October 2003 – my partner dropped me off in a side street. I was prepared for this. I was wearing old, but smart, clothes that I intended burning when the case was over. I carried a folder of my art work to remind me of the woman I was. And I had photographs of my children – just for me – to reaffirm everything that I knew was right and good in my world.

  All I could think about was how I would feel when I saw her. Would I be able to cope? Would I collapse? Would I lose control? I hadn’t seen Helen Ford since I was 11 years old and totally under her vindictive power. How would I react to her presence now that we were both adults? Uppermost in my mind was the conversation I had been having with my younger daughter the previous day: telling her that I was going to court and that the woman who had been so nasty to me when I was a little girl was going to be forced to say ‘sorry’. If only it were that easy!

  There was such a long wait before I was eventually called to the stand. I was looked after by a court social worker who tried to explain to me what would happen, but I was miles away. I was going to see her. I was going to see Helen again.

  I was absolutely terrified but doing everything in my power to hide it. Everything seemed so intimidating and I knew exactly what I was so scared of – that the little Donna would come out. I was petrified that I would look at my stepmother and be taken back, that I would regress and wouldn’t be able to add anything to the trial. I was trying desperately to hang on to my adult self. Every time I came into contact with someone – a court official, any other staff member – I would go out of my way to explain myself to them as an adult. I showed them my art work, I told them about my life as an artist. It was all part of me silently screaming: I’m a different person! I’m not that scared child! I’m strong and I will do this! This gave me so much confidence. Every time I looked at the reminders of who I was now it brought the reality of the situation home to me – I was the one in control now.

  Despite what I achieved, the moment I stood in the witness box for the first time is etched on my mind for ever. I still ask myself the one question that matters most: what did I feel when I saw her again? Where can I start?

  I didn’t realise just how difficult it would be to face her again. My rational adult self told me that she was just a sad, tired, old woman.

  Then she looked at me.

  When I saw her sitting caged in behind the glass panel in the courtroom, I knew that I had won in many ways. I could stand tall and proud in the dock. I faced her not as a little girl, but as a woman who was loved, strong and respected. At that moment, I realised how pathetic Helen was. During the trial, there was a part of me that wished she would fully admit what she had done. Apologise. Look for forgiveness. She could have made an excuse – too young, too many pressures. People would probably have believed her. They may even have felt sorry for her, in the way they did when I was a child and I was always told what an angel she was, taking on Don Ford’s children.

  But she didn’t apologise. She didn’t try to excuse herself. Every time she was asked something specific about what she had done to me, she answered in monosyllables. She denied everything. There just didn’t seem to be anything there. I can only think that, by now in her life, Helen Ford has told so many lies that she actually believes them herself.

  The day that she was convicted was the most profound day of my life. I find it difficult even now to find words to express how I felt. I sat almost directly behind her, staring at her profile as she fidgeted with her hair and squirmed in her seat. It was surreal. The courtroom was packed – and I wondered why
. What did people hope to hear and see? What would be a ‘good day’ for them? The trial had been held in a closed court until the day of the verdict, but now it was full to bursting point.

  I was still so nervous and worried – mostly because I thought no one would believe me, as I remembered her saying all those years ago. I couldn’t conceive for one minute that Helen Ford would be found guilty. When the word was finally said, my reaction was audible. I just couldn’t help the long, deep sigh and the cry of ‘Yes!’ that came from me. I was shaking, smiling and crying all at the same time.

  Now I could look at her.

  And she was a pathetic sight.

  This was my vindication – what goes around, comes around.

  She was guilty – and, as if that wasn’t enough, Lord Hardy, who presided over the case, made it clear that he wished he could have done more. Helen Ford was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on charges of sexual procurement. The judge said, directly to me: ‘I wish it could have been more.’ That meant so much – he believed me and so did others. Finally.

  Once the trial was over and the verdict reached, the fear passed. Now I don’t pity her or hate her – I don’t really feel anything for her at all. I can’t forgive her – not because I don’t have forgiveness in me, but because her crimes are actually unforgivable. She will have to seek her own retribution, if she can. I can’t go down the road of feeling bitter because that would affect me, not her. She will already have made her own assumptions about how I feel, but she can’t really know what is in my heart. I don’t want my feelings for her to take anything away from me or the strength I have found. I understand the damage that was done to me and know that it will come up at times, but I need to keep it in one place. I know that there are others who can’t do that and who need revenge.

  When I read the newspaper reports of the trial, I am amazed that my life, all those years, can be summarised in so few words. One is entitled: ‘Woman tells court of abuse at age five.’ In only 145 words, it attempts to relay the horrors of my life. I am interested in what they perceive to be the ‘highlights’: ‘A little girl was beaten, starved and held prisoner in a darkened room to be sexually abused … the alleged victim was often so hungry that she ate bread left out for the birds … she also described being beaten black and blue with a belt and said men visited her room during drink parties … the woman said she was once made to eat from a dog bowl and was held up to a mirror and told she was an ugly witch.’ That’s me – I’m that little girl, and that is the sum total of what was done to me. It seems so slender, so quick when it’s written down that way.

  No matter what I think of the past and of the trial, it’s time to move on. I’m left with so many questions from my childhood, and some new ones too. Now that Helen has spent time in jail, I wonder whether she has been punished. Was she fed, or starved? Was she beaten? Humiliated? Did monsters come into her bed in her tiny room and abuse her in the dark? Was she treated worse than a dog?

  I don’t even know what I honestly hope the answers to those questions are.

  Chapter Twenty

  WHERE ENDINGS LIE …

  LIKE EVERYONE, I HAVE my bad days. Sometimes I don’t know why; sometimes I don’t even know what I’m feeling. At other times, I know exactly what’s going on, what the questions are, where I feel the gaps still exist.

  There is so much of my childhood that I have no words to describe, and there are other parts which I can only verbalise and analyse as an adult. That little girl who was me just couldn’t work out what was happening in the way an adult would. I know the words now. I know the consequences. I can apply morality and judgement and principles to all of this. And that is what hurts and angers me so much.

  As a grown-up, I can’t make sense of how such damage can be voluntarily inflicted on a child. How can an adult choose to do these things? What makes a person decide that she will bring men to the family home to abuse her stepdaughter? What makes a woman send that child to strange men for her starved body to be attacked? What makes those men – fathers, brothers, grandfathers – believe it is permissible, justifiable, to rape a child? How can these perfectly ordinary citizens go about their business on a day-to-day basis, knowing what they have done and what they continue to want to do? How do abusers actually deal with the fact that their own needs, their own so-called desires, mean that children will be living their own personal hells?

  It is the adult who knows what they are doing, who knows the words and the language for what is going on. I firmly believe that nothing an adult goes through as a child excuses them continuing the cycle of abuse which so many choose. And it is a choice, let’s make that quite clear. If those who believe the cycle cannot be broken are right, what does that say about me? All I can say in my defence is that I know the person I am. I haven’t been broken. I haven’t been changed into some monster who cannot escape her past. If I was nothing more than a victim of what went before, my own children – my flesh and blood – would now be living the nightmare I endured. At no point was that ever an option. I have to say to those who think we victims cannot escape, to those who think that continuing abuse can be explained away by past horrors, that at no point did I have to fight any desire to turn into an abuser.

  When I looked at my babies, when I raised my children, all I felt was love and a desperate need to protect them. They are not wrapped in cotton wool, and never have been. For me, the measurement of my success as a mother has been that my children are that word we are all scared of using these days – they are ‘normal’. They laugh, they cry, they play, they have dreams. They have good times and bad times, but there is nothing that would ever stop me from doing absolutely everything in my power to give them a safe haven. And I do have that power. I know that now. It has taken me a while to get there, and my children have helped me on the journey, but I have never been a sacrificial lamb to my own history. Those who claim that all ‘survivors’ spend their time either fighting, or succumbing to, their pasts insult all of us who know differently.

  My past won’t go away. I am no different to anyone else in the sense that it made me who I am – the irony being that what I endured was so awful that it took parts of me away at the same time as it built me up. One of the reasons I needed to write this book was to make sense of that strange combination. How could something so bad not have broken me entirely?

  Anyone who has experienced abuse as a child will process it in their own way – I never wanted this to be a self-help manual for survivors. Within my own family, different people have different stories to tell and they must find their own way, their own peace. But I know that the way forward for me was to tell my story – because, finally, I know that it is mine. What I went through was caused by others, by their choices, by their depravities, but the eventual culmination of it all is me. I have needed to possess that in order to reach any sort of closure with my past, and I know that now is the time to do it.

  This is the right thing for me. I knew absolutely that I would never get the inner peace I have sought for so long unless I told my story – only the time and the way of doing it had to be right. That ring on the doorbell on that fateful day when my past truly came back to me, it was an opportunity – not one I willingly went after at the time, but one I have chosen to follow through. The trial afforded me the opportunity to say certain things, but any court process has its own format which will allow victims only a certain degree of voice. However, I am grateful both for the opportunity to say what I did at that time and in the period leading up to the trial, even if it did only scratch the surface. Going beyond that surface has opened up so much more, so many wounds, so many bad memories. At this point, I truly believe that the more we speak about these things – the more we open up to the realities of some children’s lives – the more we will move towards attitudinal change.

  What happened to me was taboo. It went on behind the closed doors of a private home, but the collusion was deeper. I am still incredulous that so many people, so many aut
horities, did nothing, did not see, did not hear. Although many adults were involved in my life, I know of no one who ever did anything about my plight. There were so many who could have acted – Barnardo’s, social workers, teachers, neighbours – and who could have changed this story, but who made their own choices. The choice to do nothing.

  No child should go through what I did. If, by telling my story, I can make one person think about what they can do to help a child, I have achieved something. When I was a child, there came a point when it was beyond my wildest dreams that anyone would ever pay heed to me, let alone listen to my story. Finally, someone did. But it was too little, too late.

  I have spent my adult life trying to take myself away from my own childhood. Now, in my mid-40s, I desperately want to be rid of the heavy heart, anxieties and insecurities which I inherited from the abuse doled out to me by my stepmother. I’ve spent most of my adult life with my past buried as deep as I could possibly shove it. Now, as an adult, I believe in fairness and in balance. It’s time to write my own ending, even if it has taken me this long to find any sort of peace. The little girl without the voice has finally found that she can shout.

  Rearing my children to become happy, centred individuals has been the main focus of much of my adult life, coupled with the ongoing nurturing of my career as an artist. Writing this book meant exposing my soul and bringing into the light the darkness of the abuse I suffered. I had to think long and hard about doing that. I am leaving a legacy here – and such a thing cannot be undertaken lightly. My children can now read my story without distortion, but what will it do to them and to my relationship with them? How much do any of our children truly know of us? We are their mothers and fathers; we should be their rocks and their safety nets. My children have had those things, but now their mother has told her story, I have had to consider how that will impact on them. Will they want to know all of my story? Will it alter how they view me? Will it change how they act as adults and future parents?