The Step Child Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Prologue

  ONE: Breda’s Babies

  TWO: This Little Family – January 1961–July 1964

  THREE: Going Home – July 1964

  FOUR: The Little Witch – 1964–1965

  FIVE: My Little Life – 1964–1967

  SIX: New Beginnings – 1967

  SEVEN: Auntie Nellie – 1965–1967

  EIGHT: Gordon’s Revenge – 1967

  NINE: Party Time – 1968

  TEN: The Barber – 1968

  ELEVEN: What Ugly Little Girls Deserve … 1969–1970

  TWELVE: Blind Jimmy – 1969

  THIRTEEN: Helen’s Departure – 1970

  FOURTEEN: Moving on … 1973–1976

  FIFTEEN: … and Catching up

  SIXTEEN: My Hero

  SEVENTEEN: Hopes and Dreams

  EIGHTEEN: Finding Donna

  NINETEEN: The Trial

  TWENTY: Where Endings Lie …

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN I STARTED THIS BOOK, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. But I knew I wanted to tell my story.

  As a little girl I had no voice. No one ever listened to my cries for help. I eventually stopped asking for forgiveness. I stopped asking for reassurance. I stopped asking for food. I stopped asking to go to the toilet. I stopped asking if I could get dressed to keep warm. Words didn’t bring help or comfort – they brought only anger and hatred. Just as I stopped asking for things, I also stopped hoping. The social services turned a blind eye to my life. The school seemed blinkered to bruises, and bones sticking out from starvation. I was not just a child without a voice – I was the invisible girl too.

  My life is different now. I have three children whom I have reared with love and respect. I have tried to instil in them a good sense of who they are. They are always listened to and their opinions are valued; they do not live with fear or guilt. In spite of the abuse I suffered as a child I have gone on to achieve my personal goals of being a good parent and nurturing my artistic talent, allowing me to earn a living from something I truly love to do. I can enjoy healthy, balanced relationships based on trust.

  I am lucky because I am happy. This is my vindication.

  My reasons for writing this book and telling my story are numerous, but my main one is to give that child – that me from that time – her voice. Although my story is horrific, I hope it will bring some encouragement that we can survive child abuse, and move on to become caring, thriving, balanced adults – not because of what is done to us, but despite it. It is a terrible way to learn to be a good parent, but for too long society has denied not only what happens to victims of abuse but also what becomes of those children when they grow up.

  I don’t know what you will make of my story, or indeed if you will care. But I hope it makes you think about your role as an adult in the life of any child whose path you cross. Every child has a right to be loved, nurtured, respected and educated. Not abused, not beaten, not starved, not used as an object. The child abuse statistics haven’t changed much since I was a child. I am one of those statistics. I’ve waited 30 years for justice and to tell my story, and here it is. Now I can close those chapters of my life and move forward.

  Donna Ford, November 2005

  This is the story of a little girl … and a wicked stepmother.

  Like all stories which start that way, the little girl was good – but was always told she was evil; while the stepmother had more badness in her than anyone could imagine.

  But the little girl could imagine. She knew exactly how malevolent the stepmother was. She was the one who lived a life so terrible that the grown-ups couldn’t even bring themselves to open their eyes to what was going on.

  This book is about what happened to that little girl and that wicked stepmother.

  It is for the woman that little girl became – a woman I now call a friend.

  It is for the daughter of that woman – who was told reworked stories of Snow White with her mother at the centre of them.

  It is for all the other little girls and boys out there who are still living lives like this. And whose stories we are still not listening to.

  Linda Watson-Brown

  November 2005

  PROLOGUE

  Edinburgh, 1967

  My name is Donna Ford.

  I am eight years old.

  And I am a really, really, really bad little girl.

  I’M BAD AND I’M ugly and I deserve all the things that happen to me. I’m an evil little witch. I can’t remember any of the bad things I do; I can’t remember any of the evil that I spread; but I know it must be true because my stepmother keeps telling me. She tells me every time she slaps me. She tells me every time she punches my stomach. She tells me every time she kicks me when I’m lying on the floor.

  I’m standing here today and I’ve been bad again. Maybe I said a bad word. Once I said ‘bloody’ and then I had to get beaten. Maybe I looked at my stepmother in an evil way. Sometimes I look like she thinks my real Mummy must have looked and then I have to be punished. It’s hard to tell what I’ve done this time, but there must have been something. I must have done something to deserve it. And that will be why I’m standing here. In our bathroom. In my vest and pants.

  It’s so cold. I’ve been here since this morning, and although I don’t have a watch or a clock to tell the time, I know that it’s been a while because it’s getting dark now. I know that the others – my stepmother, my stepbrothers – have had a morning snack and some lunch and something else to eat after that, and now I can hear them getting dinner ready. I won’t get out to eat dinner – and I wouldn’t have had anything for lunch either. I don’t get much to eat because I’m so bad. Maybe if I get out when they’ve all gone to bed, I can sneak into the larder and get a handful of cornflakes. That would be bad though – and I’d get punished if I get caught.

  The cold is biting into me now. I hate this room, hate this bathroom. I spend so much time here, days like this, one after the other. When I do something bad, something she doesn’t like, she screams at me and sends me here. I have to take off all my clothes, but if I’m lucky I get to keep my vest and knickers on.

  I have to stand completely still. Sometimes in the bath, sometimes on the floor. Sometimes facing the window, sometimes facing the wall. She says that she will know if I move at all, even if I move an inch. And she would know that – she knows everything. The weird feeling starts in my legs. My toes get very, very cold, so cold that I can’t really feel them. Then, even weirder, the cold doesn’t start shooting through my legs straight away. That’s what you’d expect, isn’t it? You’d think that the cold would spread up and up and up, but it seems to take a break. It gets my toes all frozen up, then stops, then starts on my fingers. It’s only once all my toes and fingers are icy that the rest of me starts to feel it. My nose. My cheeks. My legs. My arms. The space on my tummy where my too-short vest doesn’t meet my too-small knickers. I get all goose-bumpy, and then even the goose-bumps are too cold to stay.

  I’ve tried lots of ways of not feeling so bad when she sends me in here. I just wish I could find something that works. Sometimes I try to think of nothing, to just make my mind go completely blank. Other times, I make up lists in my head, or invent a world from a book I’ve read, or use my eyes to trace patterns in the cracks in the wall. One day, I tried to listen to absolutely everything that was going on in the rest of the house. I could hear them all talking and laughing and just getting on with things. I could hear normal family stuff going on – meals being made, the kettle boiling, the radio being switched on and off. But that wasn’t a good
day. It dragged on forever. Every little thing I heard seemed to sound louder and last longer than it would if I wasn’t standing here in this freezing cold room. I just have to wait on the seconds and minutes and hours passing, and then hope I’ll be told to go back to my room without making her even more angry at me.

  Today, I’ve got a problem. Before I was sent in here, I had a glass of water. Now I need the toilet. But I can’t use the one that stands in front of me. I’m not allowed. If I use that, I will have to move. And I’m not allowed to move. If I ask to go to the loo, I’ll have to talk. And I’m not allowed to talk. I can’t even use the toilet when other people come in. That happens a lot – my stepbrother comes in and pees in front of me, and I have to stand there in silence, not moving, listening to the rush of his piss in the toilet and desperately wanting to do that myself. He calls me names and tries to provoke me because he knows that if I answer back, or nip him, then it’s me who will get into trouble. So I have to stand there like a statue, and take whatever he throws at me.

  I can’t stop thinking about going to the loo. I’ve been standing here for hours, and I’ve got even more hours to go, but I can’t do the most natural thing in the world, the thing that everyone else does in this room. This has happened before, and I’ve got to work out what would be for the best. If I do ask to go I’ll get battered. If I don’t ask I’ll have to piss myself – and I’ll probably get battered for that too. If I do just let it go, then at least I’ll get a bit of heat while it runs down my leg. That doesn’t last though, and it’ll go cold really quickly and there’ll be a smell. Tomorrow’s a school day, and she won’t let me get washed before then. I know I’ll have to wet myself – I don’t really have a choice – and I’ll have to do it a few times if I’m in here as long as usual. It’s the smell I hate when I go to bed and have to lie in my wet knickers, and then I get up in the morning and I’ve been lying in it all night, and when I go to school the other kids call me names and refuse to sit next to me because I stink.

  My tummy hurts. It hurts from needing the loo, and it hurts from being punched most days, and it hurts so much from being hungry all the time.

  My head hurts too. I get headaches because I go from being in the dark most of the time to bright light when I’m dragged out of my room. It aches from thinking about what I need to do, how to avoid my stepmother and her anger, how to behave from one day to the next, whether to cry and risk her getting really cross at me again, whether to shut myself off and risk it even more.

  My body hurts from being kicked and hit practically every day. I may be small and skinny, but it doesn’t stop my stepmother using me as a punchbag. I’m never without bruises. The fact that most other kids have bruises too doesn’t help; it makes me feel worse to know that they get theirs from playing, from climbing trees and mucking about. I’m not really allowed out to play or to have friends. My bruises come from other things. My back aches and I’m sore all over. There’s barely a place on me that she hasn’t battered.

  But most of all, my heart hurts.

  I don’t want this to keep happening.

  I don’t want to be a bad girl any longer.

  I don’t want to be without a real mummy.

  I want this hell to stop.

  Edinburgh, 2003

  The hell never did stop.

  I’m 44 years old. I’m married with three wonderful children. I’m a successful artist with a history of acclaimed exhibitions and commissions. And I’m sitting in Edinburgh’s High Court looking at a woman I haven’t seen for 30 years.

  Helen Ford is standing in the dock. She looks much smaller than she did the last time we had anything to do with each other.

  Back when she was my stepmother.

  Back when she locked me in cupboards.

  Back when she starved me, beat me, tortured me.

  Back when she organised her parties, turned the music up louder, and laughed while the men she called her friends raped and abused me in our home.

  When I left this morning, my six-year-old daughter asked me what I was going to do. I told her that when I was little, a woman called Helen had been mean to me, but now, today, someone in charge would be telling her she had to say sorry. My daughter takes it all in, trusts every simplified word. Whether I believe it myself is another matter. The hope that someone might finally listen is more than I can dare to believe.

  I didn’t ask for this.

  I haven’t brought this case.

  I haven’t sought retribution, or revenge, or even justice for what she did to me all those years ago.

  I have pushed all this from my mind for so long that my head and body are in shock from having to face these memories.

  This woman standing in front of me looks so innocuous. She is completely unmemorable to people she passes every day of her life. She could be any woman in her late 50s going through a perfectly normal day. Her hair is short, plain, unstyled. Her face is free from make-up. Her dark jacket and tapered trousers are unexceptional. Her white blouse and court shoes anonymous. She still wears big prescription glasses as she did when I was little. But Helen Ford looks like an unremarkable woman.

  Over five days, she won’t flinch when asked about battering me when I was little more than a toddler. She will not weaken when it is put to her that she regularly smashed my face into the mirror, fed me dog food, made me stand almost naked for hours in a bath, forced me to clean the house with a nailbrush, threatened to flail me within an inch of my life. She will not baulk when asked for any justification, any reasoning for imprisoning a child and refusing to feed it. The questions will not upset her. Why was I malnourished? Why did I steal food from the pockets of classmates at school? Helen Ford answers in monosyllables whenever she can. She shows no emotion at any stage of the proceedings.

  She stands there accused of ‘procuring a child for sexual abuse’ and it barely registers on her face. But I am that child. It was me who was procured. It was me who shivered in terror every time I heard the music outside my room get louder and the handle on my door turn. It was me who knew the fear of being sent on ‘errands’ to local men who would abuse me as easily as they would say ‘hello’ to their neighbours. It was me who lay on my bed petrified, awaiting the ring of the doorbell which signalled another of Helen’s ‘friends’ had come to rape her eight-year-old stepdaughter.

  And I’m waiting. I’m waiting for the story to end, for some reason, some explanation to appear and make sense of the memories I have denied for so long.

  I’m waiting for her to say ‘sorry’ …

  Chapter One

  BREDA’S BABIES

  I HAD A MUMMY once. But I lost her.

  Her name was Breda. Was. Is. I’m not sure – she may be reading this now; she may be dead. In my memory, my Mum can’t be pinned down. Some records will say her name is Brenda; others that she was called Bridie. My Gran said once that it was Breda, and that seems to fit, so Breda she is.

  I have a photograph of her on her wedding day. She is in white. There are four people in the picture. On the far left is Adam, the man who would be her first husband, the father of my elder half-brother. He is wearing a dark suit, his right leg slightly bent – it looks as if he is trying to make himself smaller to accommodate the tiny Breda standing next to him. My mother is dark-haired; she wears a short veil and a dress that ends some inches above her ankles. She carries a handbag and wears a corsage. A couple stands beside Breda and Adam – I have no idea who they are, or who they were to Breda at that time. Witnesses? Good friends who disappeared? Strangers dragged in off the street for the day?

  No one in this picture looks particularly happy. They are standing on some paving slabs with a railing beside them and tall buildings either side. This area now has a shopping mall nearby, the St James Centre, one of the ugliest constructions in Edinburgh. It’s hardly a scene of bridal delight. There is no joy in the photograph, nothing I can really hold on to. God knows I’ve tried. This is all I have of my mother. She looks so young, her
dress too big for her, a girl playing at being a bride. And yet by the time this image was taken, she had already been the subject of scandal, ripped her own family apart, shamed them. Or so the legend goes. My own experience tells me that there will be another version of her life, another layer, as yet unheard – Breda’s tale.

  My mother was born and raised in County Tipperary in the Republic of Ireland. Her life began on 3 May 1935 but the details I have of her are few. What is known about Tipperary is that, like the rest of Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, times were hard for women. Most people will only have heard of the area through the song, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ – but outsider knowledge of the county itself is, like much of Ireland, more myth than dreary reality.

  Any quick glance at a tourist brochure will give you the official angle – Tipperary is Ireland’s largest inland county, completely landlocked. Those who have visited speak of its beauty, and the 2,300-feet-high Slievenamon mountain. That Slievenamon translates as ‘mountain of the fairy woman’ in Irish Gaelic is unsurprising – the Irish like their fairy tales as much as they like their theoretical admiration of women.

  It’s only real life that spoils things.

  Breda Curran, my Mum, had three brothers that I know of – Pat, John and her eldest brother, Michael. In 1953, when she was only 18, she left Ireland along with Michael and headed for England. The details I have are sketchy, but I have been told that both my mother and Uncle Michael managed to find work in London, where they settled for a while. As time went on, things must have looked a lot better than Tipperary, as my maternal grandparents and their two other sons also came to these shores. However, this was not a happy family set-up. Breda was considered headstrong – she was described as knowing her own mind; having a clear idea of what she wanted; not being backward at coming forward. To me, these phrases sound all too familiar, ways of simply putting down a young woman who was probably trying to get away from the shackles of an oppressive family life. Being an only girl in a family of boys, with staunch Catholic parents who themselves were living in a strange land, did not necessarily make Breda wild. It’s an age-old story – a girl trying to break free of the straitjacket of stereotyping is always perceived to be so much more trouble than a boy doing the same thing.