I kept my mouth shut throughout this time because I was too young to understand that it wasn’t my fault at all. I decided to just put up with it and do the best I could at not letting anyone find out. As far as I was concerned, it was my fault. There was something about me that made him do it; something dirty and he could see that filth in me. I didn’t want to hurt everyone just so I could feel better.
I loved my ma and brothers so much, and I pictured us all going into different homes and being taken away. I couldn’t face the prospect of not living with my brothers and Ma. She didn’t have a job, and I worried about how she would cope. She’d be crying all the time and I felt that it would all be my fault, so in my childish brain I concluded it was better for everyone if I said nothing.
*
Da used the move to Castleknock to further improve his credibility. In many respects, the move represented the completion of his transformation into a new man.
My father spent his life trying to forget his past, conceal his depravations and trying to act out the role of a self-made man. He was always too ashamed to tell anyone he’d been born on Gardiner Street; that he came from humble beginnings, which I think would have shown that he was even more talented.
The house in Castleknock was his new start in life and his castle. And he wanted to show his own family what a great man he was. I don’t believe he saw anything wrong with his sexual interest in children.
He was a man who constantly referred to his own achievements, boasted about his business acumen and spoke to others as if they were beneath him. He had an opinion on everything. I listened to him talk about subjects that he knew nothing of, and wondered how anyone could tolerate him.
The unemployed were one of his favourite targets. He would often say that people who claimed the dole were living off the state and should be made work. He would offer his opinions on everything, regardless of whether anyone wanted to hear them or not.
I think he felt compelled to exaggerate his own importance in order to conceal his weakness.
It was only in later years that I really came to understand that my father was an illusionist and a manipulator. Every breath he took was a strategy.
Everything he did had the potential to turn into something sinister.
When I’d go to bed at night, he was always the one to settle me to sleep. He would climb into bed beside me and offer to read a story but with one hand burrowing its way underneath the duvet, while the other held the book upright.
He’d stay for a half an hour or so, until any chance of me falling asleep had been destroyed, and then he would gratify himself. I was his to abuse.
I was about ten years old when we moved. By this time, I was mentally unwell. Many mornings through my childhood and teenage years, I used to wake up and I could not recognise my own speaking voice. It never sounded like me. It was a different person; a nicer person. When this voice would appear, I would talk or sing just to hear it. I had no idea why it happened, but it was strange, a bit scary, but also a novelty.
It was like I had another person inside me, but I was in control of this other person. This voice was more like another version of me. A nice me. One I liked. I controlled her and made the words that I wanted to hear, but she had a nicer voice, a kinder voice, a sweeter voice. But it wasn’t my voice. My voice was horrible. I was a crow, and common when I spoke. This was a completely different one, not even like me when I spoke—it was a posh voice. It only ever came out when I was alone in my bedroom, either talking to myself, playing a game or singing. Then I would hear the nice voice come out and I would keep talking or singing, just to hear it. I liked this new voice and it stayed with me until I was about 13. I didn’t notice when it went away. It just never came back.
I think it’s likely that this was the voice of my ‘inner child’, the person I might have been if my father hadn’t stolen my childhood. This was literally the child inside me trying to come out. It was the child I repressed because an abused child is one who has lost their innocence. My spirit kept fighting to break out, until I finally learned to silence her. She was not to awaken for many years to come.
*
My self-esteem continued to plummet after we moved house. I felt that I didn’t fit in with the other kids in Castleknock. They all talked with posh accents. Da reinforced this notion that I was an inferior girl because I spoke with a Dublin accent. He really never stopped telling me that people and strangers wouldn’t respect me and that I wouldn’t get a job if people thought I was common.
I had long stopped caring about my education by this time and didn’t really think anything of the school I had been sent to.
I made a couple of friends when I entered the school but I didn’t let anyone get close to me. The girls were nice kids but they lived in a different world to me. Although I was someone who picked up accents easily, I tried my hardest not to pick up theirs. It wasn’t that I didn’t think they had nice ones, I just wanted to rebel against everything.
I had come to hate and detest everything my father approved of. As far as he was concerned, people were not good enough unless they pronounced their words properly and measured up to an invisible yardstick he used.
In time, this sense of rebelliousness intensified. I’m still not sure whether this was a cry for help, or that I simply did not want to conform, but I refused to do anything that was asked of me.
I was ten years old and in sixth class but I discovered that I was the only thing that I could control.
My education was the first thing to suffer as a consequence of my new found liberty. I fell behind in my schoolwork for the first time because my mind was filled with such bad feelings that I no longer cared.
I also grew to hate Castleknock because Da loved it. From my point of view, his fuck-off house represented everything that was bad in this world. I hated it and him. I hated the fucking ground that he walked on.
But it was at this stage that my life also began to fall apart. You might say that I became dysfunctional though I would counter that I became functional in order to survive.
No one realised what was happening to me, so no one offered to help. My teachers found themselves having to deal with an unruly student who looked for trouble.
I also distanced myself from other girls at the school. I was terrified that if I got close to them, Da would too, and then I’d lose them all eventually.
I was always on guard, waiting for someone to blow my cover by pointing a finger at me and yelling, ‘Look! There it is—the dirt! See how dirty she is.’
This became an obsession of mine. I used to wonder if anyone knew what he did to me. The truth was that nobody knew. I remember seeing Da laughing with some people one day and my mind had become so distorted that I was convinced he was telling them exactly what I let him do to me. Of course he wasn’t, and they hadn’t a clue what was going on, but I thought they were laughing at me, the dirty little bitch. My stomach churned and I felt hot and humiliated.
At other times, I would wonder when Da would be arrested for being a pervert. I remember one day the gardaí came to the school about some suspicious man who’d been seen in the area. All I could think was, ‘Here we go again! Me fucking Da is at it again.’
I didn’t want to hear the details of the car or anything that might confirm it was him. It wasn’t Da but I assumed it was. My abiding memory of that event is of not being afraid of meeting the strange man the other girls feared. I wasn’t afraid because I believed I knew him already.
I gave up on life in my last year of primary school. I stopped going to school by pretending to be sick. When I did attend class, I never paid any attention to my teacher or did my homework so it made no difference whether I was there or not.
Ma would ask me about homework, but I would either answer that I had none or that I’d done it already.
The abuse altered my life in every conceivable way. I never slept at night. If Da abused me, I would inevitably stay awake all night thinking about what he’d d
one. If he didn’t happen to enter my room on a particular night, I would stay awake for fear that he was about to arrive. I lived in a state of perpetual fear.
The lack of sleep had an adverse effect on my intellectual development.
It also caused me to develop serious psychological problems.
The effect of sleep deprivation was obvious. I would waken each morning barely able to concentrate or focus on anything. Instead I would struggle to wake up, make my way downstairs and spoon Rice Krispies into my mouth while Da sat across from me, acting normal, like the previous night’s events had never happened.
In fact, he sometimes shouted at me for causing him to run late.
It was around this time that I began to develop serious behavioural and psychological problems. Given that I had no control over my body, I began to control everything else by organising strict rituals which allowed me to exercise some control over my life.
At breakfast time, I would only eat from a certain bowl and use a certain spoon to eat. If breakfast was given to me in another bowl, I would refuse to eat it.
Of course, the bowl which I chose to eat from was old and battered. The spoon was equally battered—it was covered in sharp edges from where the garbage-disposal unit in the kitchen sink had swallowed the spoon so often that it was barely safe to use now. But I didn’t care. To me, the bowl and spoon were like a rattler to a baby—soothing and comforting.
I ate my breakfast from that bowl and spoon every single morning, right up until I was married and had my first child.
I would then move on to my next ritual. Each morning, I would flatten the Rice Krispies in just the right way as they floated in a bowl. I would never swallow a spoonful until I had it perfect. Even the milk had to be just the right temperature and volume or I wouldn’t go to school. And after every spoonful of cereal, I had to rotate the bowl a few degrees. I ate my breakfast in this exact way for more than 30 years.
My life quickly began to revolve around daily rituals. It was unnatural but it was a ten-year-old girl’s way of remaining sane.
Behavioural and psychological problems were not the only issues I faced. My body started to turn against me, and I stopped being able to hold down food.
After breakfast each morning, I would go to the toilet and puke up my breakfast. I never made myself sick. My stomach just turned every morning after breakfast had been served and everything would come flying back up again.
I inevitably started to lose weight which affected my periods. It was awful.
I was quite young when I got my first period—I was only about ten years of age. In the beginning, my periods were so heavy that they lasted two weeks out of every four.
I was only 12 years old when I had a womb scraping done in an effort to get to the root of the pains that troubled me.
After school, if I even went that is, I’d collapse with exhaustion on the sofa and sleep for the rest of the evening. I was so tired from the lack of sleep, lack of food, and stress.
At one stage, I was diagnosed as suffering from anorexia although I did eat. My stomach just turned as soon as it saw food. I didn’t want to be sick. I didn’t like the feeling—it just happened.
I had long since learned how to separate body and mind so I no longer had a rational thought process—I just did things as my subconscious dictated.
Fake pains and real pains—I stopped being able to tell them apart.
I was taken to hospital on countless occasions and underwent surgery for mysterious illnesses.
I induced cramps and severe pains in the hope that a doctor would be able to get rid of the physical pain in my guts, then maybe, while they were in there, they’d also be able to take away the dark, empty blackness that sometimes accompanied this pain.
Or at least give me some tablets that would make it all better. And that would be the end of these bad feelings— the pain I couldn’t explain.
On one occasion a surgeon operated on me because I had complained so much about the pain, but nothing of medical significance was found. I still complained of a pain afterwards though.
I can honestly say though that even if the doctors and nurses had asked me the right questions, I wouldn’t have told them anything. If a social worker had called to my house, I would have done everything I could to hide the truth. If they’d asked me if my father was sexually abusing me, I would have smiled sweetly and said, ‘No, nothing is happening.’
Da knew this. It would have killed me to have been taken from my home. I’d have lost more than I would have chosen to lose. What little control I had would also have been removed.
I never linked all the illnesses—both real and perceived— to the abuse until I was an adult.
The depression, the fake pains, vomiting and the inexplicable pains were all completely separate as far as I was concerned. I was one hurt little girl yet I still helped prevent Da’s dirty little secret from getting out. I thought I was doing a great job ’cause no one ever asked any questions.
The rest of the family looked upon Da as an honest and good man because they didn’t know the truth. No one knew what he was doing. Our family was a success. I didn’t want to be the one to put my hand up in the air and cause our family express train to come screeching to a halt.
*
It was during a family holiday to France that I began to understand exactly what lengths my father would go to in order to gratify himself. That summer, he brought a trailer tent and took us on holiday to France.
The trip was memorable for two reasons. The first was the ferry crossing which caused me to get seasick. The second reason why I remember that holiday is that it was the first time that Da found it difficult to conceal his sexual interest in me.
My family spent the holiday travelling from campsite to campsite. We made friends with lots of other families, of all different nationalities. I met other girls of all ages, who Da also befriended.
I don’t know if he abused any of them but I suspect that he did.
I can recall watching him scan the campsite for little girls whom he could encourage me to talk to.
He would get as close to these children as he could. He might suggest that we go to the swimming pool or play together.
He would put blankets over them, offering to help make them ‘cosy’ when they emerged from the water.
Prior to this holiday, Da had always used me for his own sexual gratification. He considered my body to be a tool which he used to pleasure himself. He never really looked at me or my body but all that changed during our holiday to France.
Throughout the holiday, Da found it difficult to conceal his sexual interest in me. In fact, he hardly took his eyes off me. Everywhere I went his eyes followed, looking me up and down before coming to rest around my chest area.
I found this terrifying and revolting. And with reason; what if he went further than he had before and got me pregnant? He also began talking to me in a way that made my skin crawl. He constantly made remarks about how I was changing physically.
‘Oh, look how your little buds are growing,’ he said whilst leering at me.
One day he went further and touched my breasts in public as if I was enjoying his attention.
To stop him, I decided to wear as many clothes as possible that covered my body. I started wearing a 70s-style long red cardigan, and refused to take it off. This became a huge bone of contention between me and my mother.
She couldn’t understand why I refused to wear the new clothes that she bought me to wear on the holiday—halter-necks, shorts and skirts.
As far as I was concerned, wearing these clothes was tantamount to inviting trouble. The red cardigan covered up everything. While I couldn’t stop him from molesting me, I could stop him looking at me.
I thought that if I could make my body invisible then maybe Da might leave me alone for a while and let me enjoy my holiday. But I should have known that would never happen.
That holiday also stands out because it was the first time that Da
took risks to abuse me.
At the time, I thought I would be relatively safe because we were all crowded into a two-room trailer tent. Ma and Da slept on one side and we slept on a double mattress on the other side. But one night, Da got undressed and came over to our side of the tent and climbed into bed beside me. He was talking away, asking me and my brothers what we thought of the holiday so far and if we were having fun, when all of a sudden I felt his hand tugging at my knickers underneath the blankets. He started rubbing my vagina and prised my legs apart so he could push his fingers inside me. All the while he chatted away to my brothers as if nothing was happening.
I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to think. I just lay there, trying to concentrate on what my brothers were saying. Five minutes previously I had been like any other child, happily discussing the day with my brothers. Now I just lay there like a zombie trying to project my mind to a different place.
This happened a few times on the holiday, with my brothers lying inches away. They were oblivious to what was happening. It was humiliating for me. I felt so used, like an inanimate object that my da made use of when it suited him.
But it also made me angry. I hated it and when he molested me in such circumstances, it proved to me that I was being used. This was a turning point.
We did lots of touristy things on that holiday. We visited the Louvre Gallery; we ate croissants for breakfast and tasted frogs’ legs and snails but I can’t remember how any of these smelled, tasted or felt. What I do remember, and will never forget, is how it felt to have Da climb under the covers beside me at night, rubbing his body parts all over me and soiling all the good memories of the day in the process.
There were other family holidays that I did enjoy, however, simply because Da wasn’t there. We went to Butlins on holidays for a week every year, but Da usually stayed at home for most of this week. I loved going to Butlins, not only for the obvious reasons, such as having fun with my friends, but because it was a break from being abused. I could be a real little girl in Butlins, concerned only with sweets, the fair ground and playing the day away.
All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed Page 5
