Can’t Anyone Help Me?
JACKIE HOLMES WITH TONI MAGUIRE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2011
Copyright © Jackie Holmes and Toni Maguire, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196673-1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
When I wrote my own story, Don’t Tell Mummy, I thought there couldn’t be one that was worse. Sadly, I was wrong. Since I wrote it, I have had many letters and emails telling me of distressing, damaged childhoods. Three of them I turned into books.
But nothing had prepared me for Jackie’s story. When I received her email telling me the bare facts of her past, I was more than just upset. Horrified, moved – there are no adequate words to describe what I felt.
Phone calls followed and several emails, and a few months after the initial correspondence, Penguin agreed to publish her story. I caught a train to the north of England to meet her.
She was waiting for me at the station, a small, pretty woman with bright blue eyes who beamed at me as she introduced herself. I felt like hugging her. To have gone through what she had and be able to give me such a warm, welcoming smile – I was simply amazed.
That evening, armed with notebook and pen, I sat down with her to fill in the blanks that her email had not covered. It was I, not Jackie, who needed to take breaks as I listened to her story.
We spent two days together. At the end, I’d filled two notebooks, my arm ached, and I felt drained and relieved: drained from hearing more graphic descriptions of horror than I have ever written about before, and relieved that Jackie had been able to overcome the trauma of such a terrible childhood. And, above all, I admired the strength she had found to do so.
I believe that stories like this one have to be told, so that no abused person will ever feel that it only happened to them. Until children feel free to talk, and free of shame for the actions that are not of their making, child abuse will never be eradicated from our society.
So, thank you, Jackie, for being brave enough to tell me your story. You are truly remarkable and I hope I have done it justice.
Toni Maguire
1
An image has haunted me for thirty years. It comes to me when I am only half awake and have no control over my thoughts. But it also surfaces when I am eating, watching television, or drifting off into what I hope will be a dreamless sleep.
It is of a room where a small naked child is standing. She is so still and quiet, that little girl, so dazed. I know she is trying to think of something, anything, that will take her away from the bleak space where she is trapped. Outside the sun is shining, its warmth penetrating the brick walls of that room, but still she is shivering. She wraps her arms around her small body, raises her bony shoulders so they are almost touching her ears as she waits for what she knows is to come. For a few moments all she can hear is the pounding of her heart. Then the silence is broken by the sound she has grown to hate.
Click-click, it goes, followed by a flash that illuminates the room, exposing its bare walls and ugly metal chairs.
The little girl squeezes her eyes shut against the sudden glare.
‘Open your eyes, Jackie. Open them wide for Uncle,’ says the voice she recognizes. Knowing what she will see, the child unwillingly obeys and finds she is looking into the cold, blank eye of the camera’s lens.
Over the years that spanned the time I have always called ‘when everything that happened, happened’, she has called out to me, asking for help – but, in denial of what I see, I have always tried to push aside her desperate need.
There are other pictures and memories that try to follow, but when the first comes I stop them in their tracks.
Except when I’m unable to.
There must, I think, have been times when I was a happy child. One who chortled with glee when her father swung her in the air; scraped out a mixing bowl; ate a cake still warm from the oven; made an innocent wish when she’d blown out the candles on a birthday cake; built sandcastles on the beach; hung up a stocking for Santa; helped put up decorations at Christmas and squealed with childish joy on opening a brightly wrapped present. My mother told me there were times like that, but I cannot remember them.
I visit friends with small children, hear the sounds that are the essence of a happy home: children’s spontaneous laughter, voices calling out to one another, morning sounds of teeth being scrubbed behind the bathroom door, and favourite songs sung softly along with the radio. Then I wonder if, once, my home had been like that too.
I watch curiously the joy on a toddler’s face when he or she takes their first steps, and the trust of a child who has fallen, raising their arms to be picked up and kis
sed better by a loving parent. I see the special smiles that mothers bestow on their children who, having known nothing but love, smile radiantly back. Was I ever a child like that? Somehow, I don’t think I was.
I want to think that as a baby my world was a warm, safe place where, lulled by my mother’s voice during the day, I felt loved and secure. And at night, when I slipped into sleep, it was perhaps to the silvery notes of the mobile that hung over my cot. There is something in me that needs to imagine that my sleep was dreamless, content. I hope that my mother cuddled me as she cooed into my little pink ears before placing me in the cot. But however hard I try to conjure that image, it evades me for, of course, I cannot remember as far back as that.
Often I try to peer through the tiny peephole in time to the years before I was five, when the bad things started, for a flash of my innocent past. Sometimes a memory I haven’t managed to suppress emerges and what I see makes a little sense. At other times it is too painful for me to give it more than a hasty glance before, cowardly, I push it away.
At night, dreams of hazy images or of darkness, with a feeling of being out of control, drift into my subconscious and force me awake. Those frighten me but there is one that is worse than all the others: the one that has come time after time for as long as I can remember; the one whose tendrils cling to me even after I have woken.
In that dream, there is a small child. I cannot see her tiny figure, only feel her presence. She is in a windowless room where she knows there is a door, but she cannot see it for the darkness has blinded her. Round and round she runs, her hands outstretched as, scrabbling at the walls, her fingers search desperately for a smooth surface or a crack where that door must be. She knows that if she fails to find it, something terrible will happen.
In my sleep, her panic and terror transmit themselves to me and I feel what she feels. I sense that someone else is there, someone intent on destroying her. Terrified, I open my mouth to scream. It is then that cold hands cover my mouth, smothering the sound. There is a weight pressing against my throat and I cannot breathe. Choking, I writhe with the effort of gasping for air. I hear a voice calling my name – and then I’m back in my brightly lit bedroom: in my house the lights always remain on. But still I clutch at my bedding as my mouth fills with that thick sour taste: the terrible taste of my childhood.
My eyes dart around the familiar surroundings and, for a few seconds, I fear that the creature that lived in my nightmare has followed me. But the bedside light illuminates every corner of the room and I see that it is empty – but even then I am not reassured.
2
There are times when, in the small hours of the morning, the recurring dream wakes me and I fight sleep, fearing its return. It is then that those snippets of my past force their way into my thoughts, tormenting me as they make me feel, again and again, the pain that I lived with for such a long time. And as I lie still, my hands curled around the edges of my pillow, I search my mind for the child who was once me. That little girl who, when she came into the world, had no knowledge of the horrors that awaited her. I want to ask her one question, then tell her she must leave me for ever. But, however hard I try, I cannot find her.
It is when the fear and anxiety that the dream has left in its wake makes my heart beat faster and my hands dampen that I climb out of bed. I go to the cupboard where the proof that she lived exists on sheets of paper. Not written in a padlocked diary, which spans the time between childhood and teenage years, by a happy child, but by the psychologists and psychiatrists of Social Services on their formal stationery. Their reports gave their opinions, their diagnoses and their comments. All these assessments were collated and placed in an official-looking lever arch file, which was finally handed to my adult self. I take it down and start turning the pages.
The first report I read documents an interview between a psychologist to whom my school had referred me and my parents. In it, the psychologist wrote less about the child whose problems he had been asked to analyse than he did about the details my parents had given him. He stated that my mother had informed him that when I was little more than a toddler I had started to change into a difficult child. One who had become nervous and fretful, who woke with a start and cried at the slightest sudden sound. No questions were asked as to whether anything had changed in that little girl’s life or if my parents could remember something that might have triggered the stress.
But by the time that first psychologist had seen the child he had written about so sparingly, the damage had already taken root. Rage, one of the strongest of all emotions, had already started to grow deep within her. Just a tiny drop to begin with, sometimes disguised by the occasional smile and her childish chatter as she learnt to form words and sentences. It went unnoticed but, still, it was there.
But emotions have no need for words: they are stored as unlabelled facts in the recesses of our minds. And the anger the small child felt, an anger well documented in that file, was directed at her primary carer: her mother. If she was left alone in a room, her frustrated screams filled the house. When she was given food, she threw it on the floor. She would only sleep if a night light was left burning. And as she grew, so did her rage, until one day it erupted.
When I was first given the file I asked myself the same questions my parents had asked of the many specialists I was taken to. At what age do the self-destructive emotions of rage, bewilderment and fear infiltrate the mind to create a disturbed child? Yes, they asked that, but they didn’t ask why they occurred.
The correct answer, I know now, was ‘At the moment the adult world betrays the child, shattering their sense of safety.’ But that reply was never forthcoming. I wondered what the specialist had said to them instead. Whatever it was, no written notes recorded it.
Instead, over the next few years the psychologists documented the times I had throat infections, without any thought as to what might have caused them, and wrote pages of praise for my parents at their forbearance in dealing with their problem child.
The specialists I was taken to wrote page after page, in their impersonal clinical language, of my descent from troubled three-year-old to disturbed teenager. But, like my parents, never once did one of those specialists ask the critical question: why? Why did a child from such a supposedly good home background display all the symptoms that she did? The facts were in front of them, but instead of asking what was wrong with my life they asked another question: what was wrong with me? Then, unable to think that any outside influence could have been the cause, they gave me coloured plastic bricks to build with and puzzles to work out, as though how I completed them would show the level of my intelligence and the deep inner workings of my mind.
It is when I get to the section of the file where the reports document how my behaviour became the talk of our village, and my parents accused me of bringing shame to our family, that the words blur, making it impossible for me to read any further.
It is always when I come to those pages that I put the file down, for that part I can remember only too well. Reading those impersonal words still has the power to bring back the humiliation and rage that I was made to feel then. Instead I open a small manila packet, the one containing the photographs of my family and myself. One by one I take them out and study each picture, as I have done so many times before.
There is a child dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, whose flaxen hair is tied back in a thick plait. Another shows her in a dark blue velvet dress when she was a bridesmaid at a winter wedding, surrounded by happy faces. There she is again, aged around seven, smiling almost tentatively up at her father. There is even one of her as a teenager, caught unaware, talking to her mother while they sit in the garden. Of course I know the girl is me, but I cannot remember one of the occasions on which those photos were taken.
I search each picture for the child I once was. But, however hard I look, these images are of a stranger. I can see her pain and her fragility – but I do not know her.
There is one more pho
to, its face turned down. My hand hovers over it. The urge to pick it up is as inexplicable as the urge to scrape a partly healed scab with a sharp fingernail, then watch it ooze blood. It is the one picture that has the power to transport me back in time.
In a pink cotton dress and surrounded by soft toys, a small child gazes unwaveringly into the camera. She looks neither shy, as so many children do when a camera is aimed at them, nor animated as she stares unblinkingly into the lens.
But why would she? She was no stranger to a camera. Photo after photo had already been taken of her but, of course, none of those others had ever been pasted into the family album. By the time this picture was taken the child had not just suffered horrific abuse but had learnt about rejection and betrayal by those who should have protected her.
It is then that the image that haunts me in my dreams is in front of my eyes again, this time clear, painfully in focus, and I am unable to push it away.
‘There’s a good girl,’ she hears that voice say to her again. The voice she recognizes. She tries to see where it’s coming from – she knows he is somewhere behind the tripod and the white light – but all she can see is a dark shadow where he must be.
Click-click, the camera goes again.
‘Smile for me, Jackie,’ says the disembodied voice. ‘Lower your hands, turn around – there, that’s better, that’s what I want.’ Each time she does exactly as he asks.
At last it is over and her uncle comes over to where she is standing, a man who is always immaculate. His thick dark-blond hair is brushed smoothly back from a surprisingly youthful face. He’s somewhere in his forties, but only a hint of his age shows behind the deep tan that comes from the sun and the tanning booths.
The little girl looks into the face she knows so well, watches his mouth with the plump lower lip, a mouth that seems too small for the face, with its sharp planes and piercing blue eyes, forming the words that only he ever says to her. ‘Such a good girl you are – such a pretty little one too. There, that didn’t hurt you, did it?’ Sweets, a child’s reward for good behaviour, are pressed into her hand. Warm hands caress her, smooth back her hair, then help her into her clothes. ‘I love you,’ he says then. ‘I love you as though you are my own daughter. When you’re not here, I look at your pictures. They’re all I have until you come back.
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