After the psychiatrist had written a report, the solicitor put together the evidence for my case and sent it all to the council’s solicitor. It was a long and complicated process that took almost two years, during which time I continued to live at Pam’s house. I was claiming benefits and felt as though I was living in limbo, just waiting for whatever was going to happen next, and I was really glad not to be on my own.
It was during that waiting period that Pam gave me some driving lessons for my birthday. I burst into tears when she told me, because I’d always wanted to learn to drive but thought I was too stupid. So I was very proud when I picked it up really quickly and was able to drive home to Pam’s house at the end of my first lesson. Six months later, I took my test and, much to my surprise, passed first time. I had been told all my life that I was nothing, I was thick, there was something wrong with me, I wouldn’t ever be able to do the sort of things normal people do … And I’d believed it.
Before I went to live at Denver House, Mum used to joke about my lack of confidence, the fact that I found it difficult to look people in the eye, that I only spoke if I was spoken to, and that I was too timid to go anywhere on my own. In fact, I can remember Ben saying one day that if I ever dared to go on a bus alone, I would have to walk on to it backwards to avoid making eye contact with the driver. Then he and Mum roared with laughter.
Now though, I had a driving licence to prove that I was more competent than I’d thought I was!
The case that Shamra put together on my behalf was for damages for ‘personal and psychiatric injuries and consequential losses arising from sexual, physical and emotional abuse suffered as a result of social services’ negligence’ when I was between 13 and 21 years old. Amongst the vast piles of papers and documents, there was something else Shamra wrote that made me feel quite emotional, but that I thought summed up the case very succinctly: ‘Hers is a very sad story, with so many missed opportunities by family members, social workers and the police to step in and rescue her. She is a very intelligent young woman who could have pursued a career and lived a very “normal” life but was deprived of this opportunity from a very young age.’
Eventually, the council responded, although not until just before the legal deadline, and I’m pretty certain that sympathy for me didn’t play any part in their decision not to offer any defence and to want to settle out of court. So then there was a settlement meeting in London, which again Pam came to with me.
The council’s solicitor and barrister were in one room, while Pam and I, a barrister, my solicitor and another woman from the firm were in a different one, although Shamra and our barrister spent most of the day going back and forth between the two, making offers and being given counter-offers until eventually a sum was agreed on.
When Pam and I left and were heading back to the train station, I decided to treat us to some cake. There was a Morrisons supermarket on the corner just opposite the station and when we walked in, they were playing a Céline Dion song called ‘Incredible’ and I can remember thinking, ‘Yes! Love is incredible. It’s what I’ve held on to throughout all these years, and it’s what motivates people like Pam and Shamra to do the things they do for other people.’ So it seemed very fitting that we should have chosen that moment on that day to walk into that supermarket.
I know some people have nothing good to say about lawyers, but my solicitor was brilliant. I had plenty of experience while I was at Denver House and subsequently of people who were just doing a job and didn’t really care about the person on the receiving end. So I know that Shamra did care – about me and about ensuring that the council accepted the fact that they’d made mistakes so that, hopefully, they wouldn’t make the same ones again.
Although I would have hated to have had to go into a courtroom where I might have been bullied, disbelieved and disparaged by the council’s barrister, I would have liked some answers to the many questions I still have about why it was all allowed to happen. But I suppose it was because they didn’t have any answers to those questions that the council was so anxious to settle out of court.
I also sometimes wonder what action, if any, the council took against the members of staff who failed so abysmally to provide even a small part of ‘what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection’ of the children in their care. I know that some of the people who worked at Denver House while I was there still work for the same council, although not all of them in social services. In fact, I saw a TV documentary not long ago with a bit in it that involved a woman who was a member of staff when I was there. She was doing a completely different job, but she was still the same bossy, aggressive woman who punched me in the face and cut my lip when she was restraining me one day by pinning me down on the floor because I’d refused to give up the bottle of beer she found me drinking. She was being given verbal abuse by a member of the public in the TV programme, which made me laugh because he clearly didn’t know who he was dealing with!
The settlement that was reached was quite a lot of money in terms of what I’d been earning at the warehouse and as a fitness trainer, and Shamra said it set a precedent for similar cases, which I was pleased about, because it meant that it might help other people get a bit more in the future too. So it was a good outcome in that respect, particularly as I hadn’t really expected to get anything at all. But it was a hollow victory in some ways, because it seemed to highlight the fact that no amount of money can ever erase what happened to me, repair the damage that’s been done to me, or heal the many psychological and emotional wounds I’ve been left with, which I know will continue to affect me to some degree for the rest of my life.
One of the positive aspects of receiving the money was that it enabled me to buy a car and a little house in a town about ten miles away from where Pam lives. I got the house for quite a good price because it needs some doing up, and it really does make a difference to me psychologically to know that I’m safe and don’t have to depend on anyone else. I think Pam must have heaved a sigh of relief too, when I finally moved all my stuff out of her house!
I haven’t lived in my own place for very long. I found it difficult to relax when I first moved in, and was still scared to go to bed at night. The warnings my mum used to give me about hands in my bed, and the stories she used to tell me about my dad still affect my sleep even today; I think they always will. So I’d drink every evening to begin with, which did make me a bit less frightened, but didn’t stop the horrible nightmares I’ve had to accept I’ll also probably always have. Then, one day, I thought to myself, ‘I didn’t ever believe I would escape, but I have. I got out. And now this is going to be my home. I can’t change the past. I can’t get back what I’ve lost. But I can put all my efforts into making a better future for myself. I’ve done it once and I can do it again. I deserve to feel safe and to be able to enjoy my life.’
They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Well, maybe I’d been strong all along without realising it; I just wasn’t strong enough as a child to cope with being ill-treated and abandoned by my parents, let down by social services, and trafficked by men who didn’t really see me and the other girls they were exploiting as being human beings like they were.
I still feel that I’ve been robbed – of a childhood and of the chance to live a normal life – and I sometimes feel very sad when I think about everything I’ve lost. But I know I’m lucky too, because there are things I want to do now that give me a reason to get up in the mornings. And for the first time in my life I can actually imagine having a future and growing old.
When everything’s stripped away and all you’re left with is you, there has to be something positive inside you that makes you believe it’s worth carrying on. Whatever that something is, I’ve been surprised to find that I’ve got it inside me. Maybe that’s why, when I used to feel angry with myself for not being able to give up properly, something always seemed to cushion my fall just before I hit rock bottom.
One day, after
I’d moved into my own house, I decided to write down three different questions – Will I find my soulmate? Will I be okay? Will I ever be happy? – and put one under my pillow every night for the next three nights, in the hope that I might get answers to them in my dreams. Nothing happened on the first or second night, but on the third I had a bizarre dream about my dad. He was wearing the work clothes he always wore when I was a little girl and used to wave to him as he was going to work, and he was very emotional because he knew he was dead and couldn’t stay with me. Then he started singing a Westlife song called ‘Angel’s Wings’, which I hadn’t ever heard him sing when he was alive.
The words of the song were still going round in my head when I woke up, particularly the bit about knowing that, whatever the question, love is the answer. Suddenly I realised that the love I’d been searching for wasn’t the sort of love I’d hoped to share with Jess. It was much bigger than that, because what really matters is having the ability to love and care about other people, rather than expecting to be loved. I’d been so fixated on one day finding someone special, I hadn’t realised I’d already got special people in my life – Tony and his mum Evelyn, who still keeps in touch with me; Shamra, who believed in me and helped me fight for justice; and Pam, who I know will always look out for me and be there when I need help.
It was like a release, letting go of the sense of failure I’d felt because I hadn’t found the partner I’d always thought was out there somewhere waiting for me. What I should have realised after my disastrous relationship with Jess was that that sort of love doesn’t belong to you, the way the other sort does. I’d put everything into that relationship, but what I was really trying to do was fill the empty space inside me, the space where my mother’s love should have been. I think that’s what Jess was trying to do too, which meant that our relationship was built on need rather than love. And maybe any relationship between two needy people who aren’t able to fulfil the need in each other is bound to fail.
Chapter 21
I haven’t seen my mum for more than a year now. The reason I always clung to the hope that I could fix things for her and with her was because I thought it was my fault that she didn’t love me. Reading my social services files and winning my case made me re-evaluate that belief, and when I realised it hadn’t ever been my fault, I also had to accept the fact that I couldn’t fix it. Only she can do that, although first she’d have to take responsibility for what she did, and I don’t think that will ever happen.
It’s really hard to say this, but I think she hates me and always has done. What’s even more difficult to come to terms with is the way she deliberately turned me against my dad by telling me lies about him and making me afraid of him, simply because she didn’t want me to have a good relationship with my dad when she hadn’t had one with hers.
She must have had a horrible childhood. But the irony is that the reason I can sympathise and understand what that must have been like is because I had a horrible childhood too – thanks entirely to her. Because although social services were responsible for a lot of the terrible things that happened to me, it was because of what my mum did that I was taken into care in the first place, although she blames me for that as well.
I do feel sorry for her sometimes, because I think I’ve got something at the core of me that she hasn’t got – something that allows me to see things in a different perspective and that nothing can reach, however bad things become. I’m not consciously aware of it all the time, just often enough to keep me moving forward in my life, despite the occasions when everything seems to unravel and I find myself almost back where I started, with another huge struggle ahead of me.
I stopped seeing my nan about three years ago too. I went to her house to clean it, wash her clothes and cook her a hot meal every day for several months. But even when Nan was reliant on me for her day-to-day care, she criticised everything I did – I couldn’t cook as well as her, I didn’t make the fire as well as she did, I wasn’t as good at cleaning up as she was …
Mum did her shopping once a week and dropped it off at her door, and although Ben visited her occasionally, Jake and Michael never did. In fact, none of us saw much of Michael after Dad died. They’d had a good relationship and Michael took his death really badly, which resulted in him going off the rails a bit and spending most of his time at friends’ houses.
Then Nan went to live in a home, and after visiting her there a few times and having to listen to her making spiteful comments about me, I stopped going the day she said, ‘Your brothers must be very ashamed to have a sister like you.’ She was referring to my sexuality, because I was living with Jess at the time. But it made me think about the fact that she had never liked me, never said anything nice to me or about me, and never tried to do anything for me. So I decided, ‘You know what? I don’t need this any more.’
After Mum told me that she’d been abused by her dad when she was a little girl, I didn’t talk to anyone about it until eight years ago, when I told Ben about some of it. We didn’t really discuss it; I just remember being surprised that he didn’t seem to be particularly shocked by it. But I think he’s struggling with it now, because of the things Nan said before she died a few months ago.
Nan had always been a bit of a snob and was very concerned about what other people might think. In fact, according to Mum, Nan had only married Granddad because she was pregnant with her. What Mum also told me after Dad died was that Nan had been quite happy for her to have a relationship with an older, married man when she was in her late teens and still living at home, simply because he had an expensive car that he used to park outside their house, where all the neighbours could see it. And apparently, from what Ben told me later, right up to the moment she died, Nan was still blaming Mum for what Granddad did to her when she was a little girl. In fact, all she seemed to be concerned about was Mum continuing to keep the secret.
I wasn’t there when Nan died. No one told me how ill she was, not even Ben, which I found very hurtful. Ben and Mum were with her just before she passed away though, and Ben said she kept saying, ‘I’ll never tell. It was terrible,’ then looking frightened, as if she could see something no one else could see.
‘What was terrible, Nan?’ Ben said he asked her. ‘What did you see?’
‘I didn’t see it. I heard it,’ she whispered. Then, a bit later, after she seemed to have calmed down again, she suddenly said, ‘It was sexual though. I know it was,’ before adding angrily, ‘But she was always showing her Mary off.’ And then, ‘I’m ready now. I’m ready for God.’
She’d been in a home for five or six years by that time and she used to do things like refusing to wash or go to the toilet. But she didn’t have dementia; she was just being stubborn for some reason. Then she got ill and was taken to hospital, and after a couple of days they said there was nothing more they could do because her organs were shutting down. So they all knew she was going to die, and still no one bothered to tell me, which, in retrospect, was probably a good thing, because I’m sure that if I had gone to see her, she’d only have said something nasty to me; and if I’d known she was dying and hadn’t gone, I’d have felt guilty.
When Ben told me later what she’d been saying, I realised that until the moment she died her only concern was what it always had been – to protect herself against any accusation that she’d been to blame for doing nothing to stop her husband sexually abusing their daughter. She let it happen and then made Mum keep it a secret; not because she was sorry for the role she’d played, but because it wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted other people to know about.
‘Mum went to see her every day when she was in hospital,’ Ben told me, ‘and on the last day, when Nan knew she was dying and Mum had gone there straight from work, all Nan said to her was, “Did you have to come dressed like that?”’
Apparently, her last words were ‘It was terrible.’
Mum rang to let me know that Nan had died. But I didn’t go to the funeral. When she ph
oned again not long afterwards, she talked a lot about Nan and about how it had been her fault Mum hasn’t been the woman she should have been. And because she was nice to me during the phone call, I thought maybe she was starting to work things through in her mind and might eventually realise that I hadn’t actually been to blame for her unhappiness. Then she phoned again a couple of days later to say, ‘I’m cutting you out of my will. Why should I leave anything to you when you’ve done nothing to help me? You’re dead to me now.’
I shouldn’t have been hurt by it after all the cruel things she’s said and done to me for as long as I can remember. But I was. Apparently though, I’m not the only one of her children she’s cutting out of her will: Ben told me she’s going to leave the house to him, which is the only thing she has. It needs a lot of work, and Ben was telling me about all the improvements he’s going to make to it – not now, while she’s alive and could benefit from them, but after she’s dead. He didn’t seem to see any irony in what he was saying. But perhaps there’s some sort of karmic justice in it all, because she was very opposed to Dad buying the house when he did, and when he died and she discovered he’d paid off the mortgage and it belonged to her, she just laughed and said, ‘I win.’
I know she’s in a world of her own and doesn’t have any comprehension of what she’s done – to all her children, in one way or another. But I really thought that what my nan said just before she died might open her eyes and make her start to think about it. Because I do love her, despite everything. Then I began to realise that all her long phone calls to me, when she talked about how upset she’d been by things her mum had said to her, were supposed to make me feel sorry for her. So although I tried to be sympathetic, I kept thinking, ‘Am I missing something here? Can she really not make the connection between what her own mother said and did and what she’s done – and continues to do – herself?’ Obviously, the answer was ‘No’.
Trafficked Girl Page 21
