The Step Child Read online

  Combined with the clicky false teeth, the ‘Deirdre’ specs and the never-quite-right beehive was a fashion sense which always seemed a bit out of kilter as well. She loved miniskirts. In those days, it didn’t really matter if your legs were up to it or not; if fashion decreed you wore something that made you look awful, you just had to go along with things. Her favourites were checked and woolly, and she liked to pair them with skinny-fit nylon jumpers. I remember Helen’s legs a lot, presumably because I was so small, and I can vividly recall that, no matter how thick the American Tan tights she wore, you could still always see the mottled skin creeping through. We used to call it ‘fireside tartan’, where women’s legs took on a blotchy effect that showed they loved sitting too close to the fire even more than they loved the latest style.

  While she was indoors, Helen always wore her ‘baffies’, or slippers, and I have this image of her from the feet up. She was tall, or seemed so to me, almost as tall as my Dad (although he was a bit of a shortie). The baffies – which smelled and were falling apart – led to the thick American Tan tights, which showed off her fireside tartan legs right up to her short woolly miniskirt, into which was tucked a nylon, static-filled jumper. Her hands would play host to lots of gold rings with big stones – she loved fake amber jewellery – and, above the blue eyeshadow and eyeliner she loved, it was all topped off with one of her hairdos, or a conglomeration of curlers with a satin headscarf on top, tied under her chin, if she had to nip out to the shops.

  All of this, all of the physical presence of Helen, is still with me. I know what else there is – I know what she was planning, what she would eventually do, but sometimes it is only by picking it apart in small pieces that I can put it together again. What did my stepmother look like? What did she wear? All of this can be approached in a way that makes sense to me, in a way that I can’t really apply to the physical, mental and sexual cruelty which was already building up.

  The flat itself at Easter Road was damp and permanently cold. There was nearly always a coal fire lit, which Helen would constantly prod with a poker. The fire seemed to be on the verge of calling it a day at any given time, so the poker always had to be kept there, always at hand, and always white hot. One day, when I was still only five, Helen threw the poker down. As usual I didn’t know specifically what I had done to annoy her. Maybe I’d said something; maybe I’d been singing; maybe I’d been staring at her clicky false teeth. She got up from her knees with rage burning in her eyes. I started to shake as she leapt over to me. ‘Come here! Come here, you little witch!’ she screamed. She grabbed me by my hair and forced me down by the fireside. ‘Kneel there,’ she hissed. ‘And just you wait …’

  As I got on my knees before her, she reached out for the poker which was still burning from poking the fire a few seconds earlier. ‘Put your hands out,’ she commanded. ‘What?’ I whimpered. ‘Put your hands out in front of you!’ she roared. I stretched out my skinny arms, keeping my palms downwards. ‘Up!’ she shouted. ‘Get your hands up!’ I turned my palms to face her and she began lowering the poker down towards them. It came so slowly. Every inch, every part of an inch, that brought it closer meant I could feel the heat moving nearer. My tiny, shaking hands knew that this could really hurt. I would never have touched the poker on my own – I knew it was dangerous – so to have Helen bring it so close could mean only one thing – she wanted to hurt me, and she wanted to hurt me really badly this time. It was coming down closer and closer.

  ‘Please, Helen, please …’ I started to cry. It was against my better judgement – even at that age – to show any sign of breaking down in front of her. I don’t know if it was because it might make her even more angry, or whether I just wanted to feel I could retain some part of me which she couldn’t touch, but I always tried not to cry or show emotion. However, this time, with danger so close, I couldn’t take it anymore. ‘Please, please, don’t burn me, don’t burn my hands.’ She started laughing at me. ‘Does little Donna not want her handies burned? Is little Donna scared? Well, maybe, just maybe, you should have thought about that before acting like such an evil little witch then,’ she ended with a shout. I didn’t care what she said – the poker was moving away from me. It had been so close to my hands that, even now, I can still feel the heat burning me. She stuck it back in the fire as I gasped with relief and scrambled away to my room. Maybe even Helen had boundaries. Everyone else would see if she burned my hands, so perhaps it was just an empty threat, I reasoned to myself.

  I should have known better. Helen wouldn’t give up such a good game when she had only just discovered it. Over the next days and weeks, I almost got used to that poker. Every time it seemed to come a little closer. Sometimes it grazed me. She held it so close to my face that I could feel the heat, even although it never touched me completely. I was scared to death that she was going to burn me. What would tip her over? ‘I only do this because you’re so bad,’ she would say. I didn’t want to be bad, I wanted to be good; but I didn’t know what I was doing that was so terrible.

  All around me, normal life went on. Helen was still shouting at me and calling me names, but the little slaps and pushes had now given way to out-and-out punches and kickings. I was being beaten regularly, for absolutely no reason at all. The flat on the left of ours belonged to Mr and Mrs Woods. They were absolutely lovely, and I would try to see them whenever I could. As time went on, my dreams of being rescued – of someone seeing how mean Helen was – focused on the Woods, but she was good at maintaining a pretence with them – I’m sure they only ever saw her as a young woman, baby on hip, with a heavy burden to carry.

  I can’t remember having anything that belonged to me, any personal possession. In my room there was a photograph of Frances, Simon and myself before we went into Barnardo’s, and it gave the place the only bit of homeliness I could focus on. I was still waiting for them to come home, still sure that everything could be perfect once they arrived. Although Frances had a little smile on her face in the photograph, the three of us looked sad and confused. Helen would often ridicule us because of the image – with me it was ‘look at the petted lip’. This was a favourite saying of hers – ‘get that petted lip off your face!’ or ‘what’s the petted lip for?’ I never knew what she meant, but I did know it was something else to make her mad.

  In terms of other family or household possessions, I have to filter it all through what was happening to me. We did have a television at one point, but I didn’t get to watch it. I would generally be standing in a corner, or in the recess, or in the hall, when Helen’s favourite programmes would start up. I knew what the telly was like when it was switched off – a big black screen in a wooden surround with Bakelite knobs – but what it spewed out impinged on me only as background to one of my punishments. Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, Coronation Street – they were all theme tunes I recognised, and vague voices I heard regularly, but there was no interaction for me.

  It was the same with radio. Helen loved music – she called the radio and her Dansette her ‘treasures’. Sunday afternoons she would cook food I was never allowed to eat, while the smells wafted towards me wherever I was being punished, and the sound of Sing Something Simple came from the radio, with the high-pitched tones of the performers singing their old-fashioned medleys. Helen played the Beatles, Andy Williams, Nancy and Frank Sinatra, Sandy Shaw. Just hearing a few bars of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ can transport me back there, even now.

  Music didn’t soften Helen Ford. It may have provided a soundtrack to my abuse and neglect, but it did little else. It wasn’t long before I was constantly tense, always waiting for something to happen. I knew that most days I would be punished.

  I’d be sent to stand in the damp recess for hours.

  Punched.

  Starved.

  Slapped.

  Stripped and made to wait in the freezing bathroom.

  Screamed at as a witch.

  Kicked.

  Threatened.

 
Have a burning poker held to my face.

  Told I was ugly.

  And I learned to expect it all.

  Chapter Five

  MY LITTLE LIFE

  1964–1967

  THAT WAS MY LIFE at Easter Road. That was what I was given instead of Haldane House. I was too little, too inexperienced to know that keeping things the same would never be enough for someone like Helen. She always needed to be the boss, to have me terrified, and I was getting too used to the punishments being meted out.

  I was still young enough, still naïve enough, to think that things would get better. After a few weeks at Easter Road, the next big change in my life loomed large. I was going to school! For most children, the first day at primary school is a big deal. Weeks of preparation, of buying the uniform, getting a new pencil case and pencils, culminate in the day itself. Photographs are taken, and the child in question is generally left feeling rather special. That didn’t happen for me. I knew that I was going to Leith Walk School, and I knew that it would be happening on the morning of Monday 24 August 1964, but that was where it all ended. There was no real excitement in the family, and even though Helen’s real cruelties had not begun in earnest, the lack of occasion given to my first days in the big world was perhaps a warning.

  When the day itself came, I was simply up and dressed as normal, and taken along the road by Helen, with Gordon in his pram. I was excited – but I kept it as quiet as I could. I do remember her giving me a ticking off for skipping as we went along the street. I do remember that she pretty much shoved me through the gates and left me to fend for myself. Other children were there with parents or older siblings. They were trying to look brave, or crying, or casting their eyes around rather bewildered. I was just left to get on with it.

  I had high hopes though. Maybe this was where my normal life would begin; maybe this was where I would become a little girl just like all the others. Not a Barnardo’s kid. Not a stepchild. Just me.

  It never happened.

  I did try. I tried to learn, I tried to play, I tried to make friends. But I was to become labelled, marked by the cruelties and abuses which Helen would be dishing out to me in such force so soon. All around me, adults would be able to close their eyes to the physical marks – the fact that I was so small, so skinny, so hungry, so bruised – but children don’t work like that. They knew there was something else about me. The smell. The look. The attitude. I was an outsider very quickly, and school didn’t become the haven I had hoped for.

  Teachers certainly didn’t save me from the world that was going to suck me in, but they weren’t the only ones. There were other people who should have been looking out for me – but Helen was too quick, too sly, too clever for them. It’s incredible really. This barely educated woman, hardly out of childhood herself, would be able to run rings round the authorities for years. My father was rarely around, and she made sure that he most definitely wasn’t there on any occasion when her words and the reality of the situation I was living in might tell different stories.

  As a child who had been with Barnardo’s for some time, there were obviously some rules and regulations in place. As I have already said, there were concerns about handing over my half-siblings to my own father, given that he had no biological link to them. Similarly, when I was taken from Haldane House and returned to the Edinburgh flat, I was part of a paper trail which would be punctuated with visits. Staff from the social work department and from Barnardo’s would come to Easter Road at various times to check on my progress and that of Simon and Frances when they arrived. From what I can tell, letters would be sent to my home with a date and time of the proposed meeting – in effect, giving Helen a chance to clear the decks. She knew when my father would be out, or could make sure that he would be. In fact, there are notes from her in my Barnardo’s file acknowledging the planned visit times and stating that, unfortunately, her husband would not be able to attend. Conveniently.

  When Helen knew the Barnardo’s staff were coming, there was always a summit meeting. She would make me stand in front of her and then the warnings would start.

  ‘Do you want to go back to the home?’

  No.

  I didn’t want to be a child without a family again. I just wanted the family I was in to be so much better, so much kinder.

  ‘You’d better tell the truth when they come. Do you know what happens to little girls who tell lies?’

  No.

  But if I was living this hell despite being good, what on earth would happen to me if I deliberately went against Helen? She was turning night into day, black into white. I would be asked questions about how my life with her was – and I was being warned not to tell lies. What lies? I would be lying if I said I was happy. Lying if I said she was nice to me. Lying if I said I was loved and warm and satisfied and cared for. Is that what she meant?

  ‘You know what to do, don’t you? You know?’

  No. No. No.

  I didn’t know what to do. How could I?

  She answered her own question.

  ‘Of course you bloody well do – but you’re too stupid or pigheaded or difficult to help me out, aren’t you? Well, let me tell you, madam, so there’s no room for doubt. You don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. You don’t tell them anything unless they ask.’

  But that wasn’t it, really, was it? If they asked if she hit me, could I say she did? If they asked if she didn’t feed me, could I tell them how hungry I felt? If they asked if she never hugged me or told me I was pretty, could I say how bad it felt? I knew I couldn’t.

  ‘They ask if you are well looked after – you say “yes”. They ask if you like being here – you say “yes”. They ask if I’m good to you – you say “yes”. I want them leaving here thinking you’re living with a fucking saint – you hear me, Donna?’

  It was all about appearances, all about what other people would think of Helen, and I had to collude with it all. I had to help her make a pretend Helen – ironically, the type of Helen I truly wanted as my stepmother, the type she was so far from being.

  I don’t remember how many visits there were from the social work department or Barnardo’s, or from anyone else who may have had a professional interest in me, but I do know that they all took on the same form. On the day of a visit, I would be fed – and the feeling of the food, the knowledge that I wouldn’t be hungry that day, made me so grateful that I always thought it was the start of things going well. Only later did I realise it was nothing more than a bribe. I would have my hair brushed and be put in clean clothes. Much more attention would be paid to Gordon, even though he wasn’t the subject of the visit. Her golden child would be dressed up in his best clothes and paraded as a perfect specimen of what Helen, the good mother, could produce. Any faults would then be seen as mine – if she did so well with Gordon, it was inconceivable that I wouldn’t be cared for.

  I knew what to do – I knew to answer the questions as she wanted me to, and never to offer extra information. When my Dad came home, Helen would, of course, tell him that I had given her a ‘showing up’ and I would get walloped again. It’s hard for me to comprehend how blind my father chose to be. Did he never ask any questions? Did he never have any suspicions? Did he never want to be involved?

  I was always thinking that things would be different once Frances and Simon arrived. In Haldane House, we hadn’t been together all the time, but I knew they were there. Because I was still so little, they were my brother and sister to me; there was no talk of half-siblings or different fathers.

  This lack of paternity for Simon and Frances has always bothered me. I suppose, to begin with, Don Ford might have had some notion of responsibility to my Mum’s other children; perhaps he even thought she would be home soon and he would try to keep us all together for that day. I can only assume that, at some point, he realised this wasn’t going to happen, and that looking after three tiny children and holding down a job – even with the help of the teenage Helen Gourlay – was more than he c
ould manage. But why did he and Helen take all three of us back to Easter Road eventually? I had been there for eight months by myself, with things getting progressively worse, when Simon and Frances arrived ‘home’. In later years, when I questioned why all of us were ‘rescued’ from Barnardo’s, given what was waiting for us, I was told by one family member that the initial reason had been a practical one. The flat in Easter Road had been bought by Frances’s father for Breda. I don’t know what happened regarding ownership, but I do know that the imaginary continuing presence of Breda, my mother, continued to haunt Helen. She hated anything that reminded her of her predecessor, so the fact that we all lived in a flat which had been bought for Breda (even if, ultimately, for her daughter), a flat in which she had given birth to her three children, a flat in which she had loved my father, was anathema to Helen. Having me there was bad enough, but why put up with another two children who had no blood link to her – or, indeed, to her husband? I have been told that Helen wanted to move to a bigger house, a council one, and rent out the Easter Road property. By taking on even more children, she must have thought that being rehoused would be more likely. It seems strange now that the council would have allowed them to keep a privately-owned home while using up rented accommodation, but things must have been different in those days, and files from Barnardo’s seem to confirm this. It seems that Helen wasn’t a rescuing angel – she just saw us as a means to an end. We were potentially useful – with Frances, Simon and me in Easter Road, along with two adults and Gordon, things would be intolerably cramped and the council could come to our rescue.