by Caryn Walker
Dedicated to my sister, Jenny – this book will give you the voice you never had.
And for all the victims of childhood abuse – I hope this gives you the courage to come forward and speak up.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 TOXIC
CHAPTER 2 FOUNDATIONS
CHAPTER 3 A BROKEN, TWISTED WORLD
CHAPTER 4 WHERE THE MEMORIES BEGIN
CHAPTER 5 LEGACY
CHAPTER 6 YOUR BABY, MY BABY
CHAPTER 7 GONE
CHAPTER 8 HER NAME WAS JENNY
CHAPTER 9 FINDING MY STRENGTH
CHAPTER 10 THE TRIAL
CHAPTER 11 SENTENCES
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
PROLOGUE
Dear Jenny
This is going to be hard. I won’t pretend anything other than that – I am trying to put together the story of our lives and I know there will be times when I won’t even be sure that I’m doing the right thing. I’m surrounded by files and notes and records, but I’m also surrounded by ghosts and memories and heartache. I won’t get through this without a lot of tears, but I know, no matter how many I shed, they will never bring you back; they will never make up for what was done to you.
But I watched them. I watched them for years, Jenny. I saw what they did to you, how they made you hate yourself, made you think you were worthless. I knew our dad abused you and I knew our mother made you feel as if you were nothing. I was just a little girl, just the little sister – and it was happening to me too. I saw it all, Jenny, and I lived it all. For so long I was helpless – unable to act, unable to get myself out of it, and at the mercy of people who should have done something to break up our toxic family.
There was nothing I could do, Jenny …
… until I could do something.
What they all forgot was that little sisters grow up. Scared girls, abused daughters, watchful siblings – they grow up. And they never forget. I made a promise to you and it’s time for me to keep that promise. I’ll make them pay. I’ll make them pay for what they did to you, Jenny. There will be a price for me too, I know that, but I don’t care. After all, it can never be as steep as the one you paid.
So, I’ll try to write it – my story, your story, our story – but who knows where this will take us? I am uncovering things all the time. The folders and bits of paper that make up our lives, the parts that were recorded by other people. They didn’t know the half of it. It’s time for me to put it all together, and to do justice to your memory.
There will be horrors here, but it all comes from a place of love. My love for you: the big sister who isn’t here to help me through this; the big sister I will always remember. There are so many like us, an army of the broken and the abused; we exist in numbers that would shock the world if anyone paid attention to the lives of horror so many children experience; but we have a strength inside, a core of steel that makes us survive and makes us soar above it all once we finally realise it was never our fault. None of this was your fault, Jenny; none of this was my fault. We asked for none of it, and we each had to get through it in the best way we could. Our endings may have been different, but we are bound for ever, and I want the world to know your name. To acknowledge that you mattered.
Some people say that our stories are written in the stars, others that we make our own fortune. I’m not sure what to believe, because part of me feels that we were doomed from the moment we were born, but part of me thinks that you can always fight, you can always try to make the life you deserve, even when the universe has seemingly done all it possibly can to stop that from happening. Which one was it for us, Jenny? That’s what I’m trying to work out. The only thing that is certain is my love for you and my belief that we all deserve a chance to break free from the lottery of our birth. I love you, Jenny – and I’ll need your love to get me through this. I’ll be back to share our story with you. I’ll be back to take your hand as we go through this together.
Are you ready? This is where our ‘once upon a time’ begins …
Your little sister, Caryn xx
CHAPTER 1
TOXIC
1970
Mum had a life before she met Dad. Everyone does, of course, but sometimes it doesn’t matter. Some people plod along through life, some people manage to stay within the lines; my mother wasn’t ‘some people’. It hadn’t been a spectacular life – she didn’t have an amazing career or a talent that stopped people in their tracks – but there was a history there, a back story, which would impact on everything that happened to me and my sister.
Mum was born into a very normal family. Her father, Bert, had been in the Navy, and her mother, Ivy, had her own seamstress shop. They were good, solid people. They had a neat, tidy house that was always clean as a new pin. They were upstanding neighbours, working-class, decent, respectable and reliable. They believed you should never get into debt, and that hard work was its own reward. They were the type of people who have been the backbone of this country for years. But times were changing, and those changes would be beyond anything they could ever have imagined.
Ivy and Bert had two little boys called Philip and Peter, and a girl called Jeanette. They were happy, settled, straightforward – and they also had Mum. Born a few years after World War Two had ended, their first child, she should have been the apple of their eye. Instead, as Nanny Ivy would later tell me, ‘Our Lesley was born bad.’
The older I got, the more I heard these things. ‘Lesley was a naughty child from the get-go,’ Nanny would say with a sigh. ‘She came home from school on her first day with a big grin on her face. I hoped they’d been able to tame her and she would be happy with the structure of being at school, but no – she was delighted with herself that she’d been in trouble from the moment she got there and made the teacher’s life a misery.’ Nanny had a saying she often used about Mum – ‘She was on the clock from day one.’ It did seem that Mum just enjoyed being naughty, and while as a child she might have been no more than infuriating to others, she took it into her teenage years and beyond, where it went well into the realms of danger and upset.
Nanny always said that Mum seemed happy when she reported that the teachers were at the end of their tether or that she’d got into trouble yet again. She loved attention and didn’t care how she got it.
It wasn’t only outside home that she caused friction. Auntie Jeanette was epileptic and, as such, probably did command a bit of extra attention from Nanny Ivy – rightly so – but Mum acted out against this and, when they were children, was caught pushing her vulnerable little sister downstairs on more than one occasion. When challenged, she would either just deny things – even when it was perfectly obvious that she was the guilty party – or smile. Both responses infuriated Nanny Ivy and, even years later, she would always mention Mum’s ‘nasty streak’.
‘That girl has a side to her that no one realises,’ she would say. ‘She’d start a fight in an empty room, and she cares for no one but herself.’
I’m getting ahead of myself here but family histories are funny things. They start before you come into the picture, before anyone has even thought of you, but it all matters; it all affects how you’ll be and how your story will turn out. There are foundations laid, there are tendencies that are nurtured or denied, there
are slights that people carry with them forever, and there are tales that get passed down from generation to generation. I read something once that said we all have a particular role to play in any given relationship; and it’s not as simple as just being wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend. It’s more about how people expect us to act within those roles, and the behaviour we bring to each relationship. I think many of us feel that keenly, and we often fall into a trap of being less than true to ourselves in some relationships or friendships, as the other party expects us to be the friend who never complains, or the partner who always reacts, or the person who is a martyr. When we finally recognise that, we can move out of unhealthy behaviours and start to be our authentic self; but my sense of Mum, from the many stories I’ve been told, as well as witnessing her behaviour at first hand for years, is that she was never one to bow down to other people’s expectations and she always did what she wanted; and she broke her parents’ hearts in the process.
Mum turned from a naughty little girl into an uncontrollable teenager. Ivy and Bert despaired of their eldest and became almost resigned to the tales that would reach their ears. Lesley was mixing with a bad crowd, she was too fond of boys, she was running wild. Neighbours gossiped that she was involved with a married man and, before long – almost inevitably – they were faced with scandalous news: their unmarried daughter was pregnant. Such a thing was still seen as shameful. The permissive sixties were not all that the history books would have us believe. Young, unwed, working-class women who became pregnant after unprotected sex with married men were hardly welcomed by their families or their communities. My grandparents were distraught, wondering where they had gone wrong and what they could have done differently with this one daughter. From what I’ve been able to piece together, Mum’s lover had no intention of leaving his wife for the teenager who thought he was her ticket to getting out of the life she found so boring. The birth of my half-brother, Ian, did nothing to change his mind. Nanny Ivy and Granddad Bert decided they would do all they could and supported their daughter. With the disapproval of neighbours and other family members very obvious, they – once again – stood by their child and looked after the new baby. They should have known that a leopard doesn’t change its spots. Mum acted as if it was only right that they should take on the responsibility of baby Ian, while she used the time to meet up with her boyfriend whenever she could.
I have no idea whether Mum thought she could change his mind by getting pregnant again, but she went for that option anyway. She was only twenty when she conceived my half-sister, Jennifer, and it made absolutely no difference whatsoever to her relationship with the father. Her married boyfriend still refused to leave his wife – in fact, he told her that he wanted nothing to do with her or their children ever again.
At that point, Mum’s luck changed – whether by accident or design, she met Norman Yeo. He didn’t seem to mind that she was pregnant with another man’s child, or that she already had a young baby, as he proposed after only a few months of courting. That would set the scene for much of their relationship – impulsive and with no thought of consequences.
Dad was an only child and his parents had always wanted ‘their Norman’ to have a special wedding day. It was to be the first of many disappointments for them in relation to their son and his new wife. Mum and Dad married just after New Year in 1970, going off to the local town hall in secret and announcing what they’d done after the fact. Molly and Harry were distraught that their son had wed without them there, but they were even more upset when they found out that their new daughter-in-law already had a child and was pregnant again – to another man.
Jennifer was born later that year. By that time everyone around them, family and friends, had agreed that Norman was one of the good guys. After all, a woman who had two children to a married man wasn’t much of a catch. Mum’s parents may have been unwittingly supporting her lifestyle by looking after Ian, but her name was still mud in the area where they all lived. Babies born out of wedlock were bastards back then, the women sluts or ‘fallen women’ and the men … well, the men tended to get away with it. It would have been perceived that, in marrying Norman Yeo, Mum had landed on her feet rather than her back for once. When he adopted Ian, and then Jennifer soon after she was born, it only added to the high esteem in which he was held.
As I grew up, I was used to hearing this from the people who knew our family. ‘That man’s a saint,’ locals would say, when they became aware of what he’d done. Mum was the sinner, and he was the perfect saviour who had swooped in to save her and her bastards from a terrible life.
To the rest of the world, he was a good man, a great father, a loving husband – but the rest of the world can be very blind to a lot of things that go on behind closed doors. There was so much they didn’t see. From an early stage, there was a problem in that Mum and Dad were just too much alike. They were both lazy, to the point of being bone idle, and their priorities were completely wrong. They acted as if they thought the world owed them a living, and they would never do anything for themselves if there was some poor mug who could be persuaded to do it for them.
My maternal nanny was never slow in telling me what she thought of the situation. She had taken care of Ian when he was born, and regretted it deeply. ‘I was only trying to help out,’ Ivy once said to me, ‘but I made things a hundred times worse. I should have left her to it – if she’d had to do the hard work, who knows what might have happened? Maybe she wouldn’t have been so quick to rush into having another one. I knew that your mother wouldn’t scratch her own backside if she could find someone else to do it for her, and I should have realised that at the time.’
And now, with Norman, she’d found someone just as lazy and entitled as her.
It was a sad truth that things got a lot worse when she met Dad. They were two people who should never have got together. Rather than a saint and a sinner, they were as bad as each other, always looking at how they could make their own lives easier, and completely careless about who might get hurt in the process. Mum was a troublemaker, manipulative beyond belief; she also had the best memory of anyone I’ve ever met. She could recall any perceived slight, any dirty look, anyone who she decided had ever been a ‘bitch’ to her. Her own faults were nothing; she was a born bully but she always thought she was the victim. She certainly changed some aspects of Norman as soon as they wed, but a lot of that was down to how lazy he was anyway. He always went for the easy route, so when Mum wanted to spend lots of money on clothes for herself he didn’t complain, he just saw it as a way of keeping her quiet. He only had one set of things to wear and couldn’t have cared less if he smelled or was a state every day. Mum waltzed around in furs, while he wore the same outfit until it fell off him. She did seem to be the one calling the shots – which added to other people thinking he was a ‘saint’ – but I know that his idleness was behind a lot of it. He didn’t need to be clean or dress well, as he never intended to work. He didn’t need money, as Mum would always go running to her parents if she’d spent everything on herself and the kids needed feeding. They seemed to have no sense of responsibility whatsoever.
The newly-weds were given a flat in a popular area of the Wirral, which they duly complained about. Mum went to the council every day to shout about needing somewhere with a garden, somewhere bigger for the four of them. She could find a bit of energy when she thought she could get something for free, but the energy would never stretch to something as upstanding as employment.
Within a few months, they were moved to a ground-floor council maisonette, where they fought every day and drank every night and all weekend. They did nothing homely to that place; in fact, social work files from that period say that it was ‘substandard’ – a description of what the pair of them had done to it, not the state when they moved in.
Mum was a violent woman from the start, and she took a lot of it out on Norman, but she saved most of her hatred for my half-sister, Jennifer, and that’s well documented
in official files. Ian had spent a lot of time with Mum’s parents since he was born, and it stayed that way when she married my father. However, Ivy and Bert hadn’t developed that same link with Jenny. When Ian was still a baby, Mum was chasing after her married man, meeting up with him whenever she could, but by the time Jenny was born, she herself was married – it was far from perfect but she had a house and a husband, so Nanny and Granddad stepped back. They still looked after Ian a lot, though.
Mum got pregnant with me quite quickly, and I was born in 1971. She was always keen to show me the card Dad sent her, which said, ‘Thank you for our beautiful baby’, but the truth was, he ignored us for years. He was often away fishing, his excuse to escape from Mum, I think, and when he came back she would be waiting at the door to tell him what little shits we’d been and what a terrible time she’d had since he’d been gone. He could be violent at times, but she was the one who was constantly smashing windows and throwing things. She would try to scald us and hit us with the pots a lot of the time. She punched the front door in once in a fit of temper, and I remember from when I was very little that she set fire to the bed when Dad was in it. Another time she threw boiling water at him. There was no damage done to him, but it showed what she was capable of. I don’t really remember much of my very early years apart from that constant backdrop of violence, but to me, it was normal. It was just how my family was; I didn’t know any other way to live.
Mum was certainly more of a presence in my life to begin with, not just because Dad was away on his fishing trips so much but because she was loud and she was attention-seeking. She was always well-dressed and she always found the money to buy clothes and go to the hairdresser, even if it meant that her kids went short. It was the early 1970s and she liked to follow fashion. She wore mini-dresses and always had her make-up done, with brown lipstick and lots of black eyeliner. Her hair was dyed very dark, and she often had a perm – she always had a fad to follow. Dad was quite handsome, dark and tall, but he never cared about taking care of himself the way Mum did; he was far too lazy. I think I look like her – I don’t see him in me at all, but perhaps that’s just wishful thinking. I suppose there’s a chance that he isn’t even my dad, given how much Mum apparently slept around, but he claims he is, and I have to live with that.