I lived inside my own protective bubble and I wouldn’t let anyone else in because I didn’t want them to see the real me. I thought there was something wrong with me and I felt ashamed. I was growing up with no help or comfort from Mum, the person who should have been guiding me, and I felt mentally and emotionally let down by her. The scars from the sexual abuse were getting deeper and deeper. I became more practised at putting the bad things away in a box and trying not to look at them, but the more I hid them from the light, the more I came to feel that I couldn’t let anyone else close in case they saw what I was really like and despised me for it.
After about six months Nana moved out of our place and went to live with a friend of hers, and I missed her badly. It had been lovely having a secret ally in the house.
At school my friends starting talking about what they wanted to do for a career. I thought I might like to be a journalist, going all over the world and reporting from trouble spots, or maybe a teacher, because all the teachers I had known had been kind, caring people who had shown concern for me. I would pretend in quiet moments that I was already a grown-up person with a career, off interviewing famous people or teaching my class, and then I could feel nice, like a good person.
The rest of the time I felt not nice, dirty, ashamed of how my life was, both at home with Mum and when I was out with Uncle Bill. I didn’t feel I could possibly be a ‘nice’ person then.
I would try hard not to be conspicuous, try to fade into the background. When people looked at me, could they see the truth? The dirty, nasty reality?
When I was fifteen, my periods started and I was so naïve that I had no idea what they were. No one had ever thought to tell me, so when I rushed up to the bathroom with pains in my tummy and found that I was bleeding, bleeding a lot, I panicked. Was I dying? Had something happened to me because of what Uncle Bill did? I was terrified. The pain was one thing; I often had cramping pains in my belly after the abuse. And I had bled the first time I was with Bill, but I knew this was different. This bleeding was heavy and I was scared. But who could I talk to?
The only person I could ask was my brother Tom. I knew he would help; he would know what to do. Thank God he was in the house that day. I called him and he came to the bathroom door.
‘Tom, I don’t know what to do. I’m bleeding. From my private parts.’ I thought maybe he would call an ambulance for me. ‘Am I dying? Or do you think I am having a baby? I’ve read that you bleed when you have a baby.’
I wrapped a towel round myself and let him into the room. He smiled and gave me a hug. ‘It’s OK. This happens when a girl grows up. It’s the start of you being a woman.’ He stroked my back, comforting me. ‘Of course you’re not having a baby. You have to have sex to become pregnant.’
Now I was really scared. He thought he was reassuring me, a naïve child, but I wasn’t reassured at all. I had had sex, hadn’t
I? Awful, horrific sex. He had no idea the terrors I had endured. Maybe they had made me pregnant?
Tom went downstairs to tell Mum what had happened to me and came back up again soon after with a bandage and a huge pad-like sanitary towel. There were no tampons in those days. During our periods, we walked around as if we had bricks between our legs.
‘Did you tell Mum?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, that’s why she gave me these things.’ He handed them over.
Mum left it to my teenage brother to explain to me that periods were something that happened monthly, and to give advice on how to deal with them. Surely any other mother would have at least come upstairs to offer comfort instead of leaving it to her teenage son—but mine was far from being a natural mother.
I washed myself, worked out how to assemble the sanitary garment and went back into my bedroom to study. I was still scared that I might be pregnant, but as the days went by and a baby didn’t come out I began to believe Tom, that it was just a part of growing up.
The next time I went out with Uncle Bill, I was still bleeding. I told him that I had started my periods. Surely he couldn’t abuse me then? He’d have to leave me alone, wouldn’t he? Otherwise, he’d get blood all over him.
‘Well, we’ll just have to be happy playing other games,’ he said, sounding disappointed.
Happy? I thought, aghast. Who on earth was happy?
‘We can find other ways to make up for the grown-up sex. We can’t have that any more,’ Bill continued.
The games were different that day, more hurried, as though he was annoyed with me. But that was fine by me, because it was over more quickly. After he had satisfied himself, he looked deep in thought.
‘We’ll have to be inventive. We can still have lots of fun and find other ways to enjoy the games,’ he said. ‘But we can’t risk you getting pregnant. Can’t have that.’ I had really thought that he would stop making me do these things, now that my periods had started. But it seems he had other plans.
Lots of women complain about their periods but they were a good thing for me. I only wish they had started a few years earlier and they could have spared me a lot of misery. But at fifteen, at last I had a reprieve of sorts. Bill would continue to abuse me in every other way he could think of, but we didn’t have ‘grown-up sex’ any more. I hated the other things he made me do too, but nothing was quite as bad as the pain of feeling him pounding away inside me, raping me, invading me.
T
here was a new sound in our house when I was fifteen: the sound of babies crying. Mum had applied to be a foster mother and we had a string of young babies through the door who needed to be looked after for a few weeks as they awaited a decision about where their permanent home was to be. Some of them were on their way to adoptive parents, while others had been removed from their families and placed in council care because they were felt to be unsafe at home. The irony of this did not escape me. Somehow Mum had passed all the council tests and proved herself a caring, fit mother of young children. If only they knew what sort of mother she had been to me!
As with Bobby, my little dog, a lot of the unpleasant chores fell to me. Rinsing out soiled nappies then running them through the mangle was added to the list of my other responsibilities around the house, along with meal preparation, changing the beds, scrubbing and polishing. Mum would sit with a clean, gurgling baby on her lap whenever a health visitor came
round and then as soon as the door was shut and a nappy needed to be changed she would hand the child over to me. I wasn’t sure why she took these babies in until I realised that she was paid. She didn’t care about these babies at all; she was only doing it for the money.
I still sang in the choir, and still saw Uncle Bill about four times a week. During the in-between times, which were very few. I worked hard at developing my world of make-believe, in which I could pretend he had never touched me and I had never felt those awful ashamed feelings. I was trying to be a normal, busy teenager, just like all my friends…only they didn’t have a big dark secret locked in a box inside their head.
At the age of fifteen I was selected, along with five other girls in my school, to be the first pupils at a secondary modern to take O levels. It was a great honour, although as was to be expected Mum didn’t recognise it as such. I wanted to do well but, what with the treatment I received at home and the sexual abuse I was enduring on a regular basis, I didn’t have time for any extra studying and couldn’t keep up with the work. I began to suffer from severe headaches and one of my teachers suggested that I should go to my doctor.
I went to the surgery and broke down in tears when the doctor asked me what was wrong. What could I say? I told him about the pressure I was under to do well in my exams, and how miserable I felt in general—but I didn’t tell him the real reasons why. He was concerned and caring, but didn’t push the issue, and I left the surgery with a prescription for benzodiazepines, which I thought were headache pills. I’d
never even heard of tranquillisers at that age. I trusted my doctor so I started taking the pills and, sure enough, the headaches became less intense and less frequent. Life was slightly easier and I felt that I just might be able to cope after all, although my head felt a bit fuzzy and my thinking was clouded. When the exams came around, though, I found myself staring miserably at the papers. The upshot was that I failed all five of them.
I was devastated because in the back of my mind I still had the idea that I wanted to be a journalist, and I knew I needed good exam results for this. There was no question of a re-sit, though. My life wasn’t my own. I may have been allowed to make decisions for myself once, when I chose not to take the Eleven Plus re-sit, but the choice of my career was apparently Mum’s, and she had decided that I should train to be a nurse. She enrolled me on a pre-nursing course at a college a train ride away, to start in the autumn of 1961.
I was sad to leave school at the end of the summer term but my friends all promised to stay in touch. Mum arranged a summer job for me in an electronics factory so that I could earn my keep during the holidays. I was to work on the shop floor, putting components together for the defence industry. Mum and I were sitting in the kitchen one day working out how much of my wages I needed to keep for bus tickets and expenses and how much I should hand over to her, when Uncle Bill arrived.
I tried to leave the room, making the excuse that I had to take the dog for a walk, but Mum wouldn’t let me.
‘Don’t be so rude. We’ve got a guest. Stay and talk to him,’ she ordered.
Some guest! I thought guests were supposed to be people we liked, instead of the reason for everything that was nasty, horrible, scary and painful in my life. But I couldn’t say any of this, of course, and he knew I wouldn’t. I was too scared to tell.
Mum explained to Bill what we had been talking about, and he came up with an offer that chilled my blood.
‘I’ll take her to the factory,’ he said, looking at me. ‘I could collect her as well. I’ve got nothing else on at the moment.’
‘Oh, that will be good, won’t it?’ Mum said, delighted that a solution had been found that would save her money. ‘Isn’t that kind of Bill? Say thank you to your uncle.’
Why would I say thank you? He was only giving himself more opportunity to hurt and abuse me. Why would I thank him for that?
It was all decided. He would collect me in the mornings and take me to work and then, just to make my day even less bearable, he would pick me up and bring me home at the end of the day.
‘No problem,’ he continued, obviously very pleased with himself. ‘I might have to make a short detour on the way home sometimes if I have to run errand or two.’ He tried to catch my eye but I wouldn’t look at him. All I could do was sit there miserably as he and Mum collaborated to arrange my summer of abuse.
My days at the factory job were made bearable by a girl I met called Katie, who was going to be starting the same
pre-nursing course as me in September. I’d been apprehensive about starting somewhere new because of my natural shyness, and because of the secret I carried round with me, but her friendship made it all much more bearable.
But then there were the long hours of abuse I had to put up with on the way home from the factory—either in the car, in a field or on the houseboat. I didn’t struggle now. I just switched off my thoughts and did whatever he wanted, trying not to feel, not to be present. I didn’t get raped because he was worried I would get pregnant—that was one thing—but he still hurt, disgusted and humiliated me in all sorts of nasty, despicable ways.
September came and as soon as I started at the college I met a lovely crowd of girls and new friendships came effortlessly. I soon became very close to Katie. We shared the same sense of humour, teasing each other about boys and comparing notes about our tutors and course work. We got close on a deeper level as well. She told me all about her home life with her father, who was a dentist, her mum, who sounded really nice, and one sister. One day, in the midst of a heart to heart, I found myself on the verge of telling her about Uncle Bill. My life was so busy since starting the pre-nursing course that I only saw him at weekends, but I still had to go with him to the houseboat and put up with whatever disgusting things he wanted to do to me that day.
I looked into Katie’s warm, compassionate face and considered the words I would use. By now I knew that what he did to me was rape and sexual abuse. I knew it was wrong and
criminal. But I still feared that people would consider me an accomplice. Surely, they would think, I must have wanted it to happen, encouraged it even? Otherwise, why had I put up with it for the last nine years, since the age of seven? Bill kept reminding me that everyone would think I had instigated it. ‘What do you think people would think of you?’ he would say. I believed him, that they would be suspicious about why I hadn’t told anyone during this time.
Of course, I
had
told—but I’d told the wrong person. My mother.
There was nothing I could do except keep myself as busy as possible so that I had no time to see Bill, no time to think. I volunteered to be on the entertainment committee at college and was soon organising dances, day trips, rag days and all kinds of fun events. On Friday nights I sang with a local group that toured the youth clubs in our area, then Katie and I usually met each other on Sundays after I had been to church, or whenever I wasn’t at the dreaded houseboat. I felt I was deceiving her somehow when we chatted about boys we were attracted to and plotted how to bump into them accidentally on purpose or make sure they attended a dance we were planning to be at. How could I consider going out with a boyfriend? How could I think of getting married?
But when I fell in love, I realised it’s not something you can stop if you try. It just happens and you are powerless against it. The strange thing for me was that the boy I fell in love with was someone I had known when we were much younger, someone the same age as my brother Tom. He was Uncle Bill’s son
Steve. We had played together as children. He used to come to the motorbike rallies, where he chatted to Tom and the two of them would gang up to tease me. We lost touch for a few years after Gwen and my mother fell out but met up again at a family party when I was sixteen. I felt shy with him at first because he was very good-looking and I was immediately attracted to him. We sat and talked in a corner of the hall and I realised he was a really nice person as well. When he asked if I would like to see him again, I couldn’t believe he was interested in me in a boyfriend-girlfriend sort of way. He wanted to go out with me! I said yes straight away, unable to believe my luck.