Tell Me You're Sorry, Daddy--Two Scared Little Girls. One Abusive Father. One Survived Against All Odds to Tell Their Story

by Caryn Walker

  The house was furnished with things my parents got from social services – they only had to ask and it was provided, all the furniture they needed. It was all very functional, though; just reasonably bare rooms, painted blue.

  Every time Jenny wet the bed, Mum would make her strip it, hand-wash the bedding and put her wet knickers on her head. I do feel it was often about humiliation; there are ways to deal with that sort of thing, even for parents who have little education or understanding, but ours seemed to have a natural radar for what would cause the most emotional damage.

  They drank a lot, and always had flaming rows with our neighbours – Mum would punch people’s front doors during her fights with them, getting furious if no one reacted, and in the morning she’d be too hungover to get up, so we’d sort ourselves out for school, even though we were all still very young. I wore second-hand clothes, and old-fashioned things like a plastic mac hat; there were no nice clothes or pretty things in my world – although none of that would have mattered anyway if I had felt loved and safe. No one ever really said anything about the state we were all in as we were recognised as the trampy family anyway, and I suspect many other kids were warned to stay away from us.

  I have no idea when my own abuse started, as I can’t really remember a time in my childhood when it wasn’t going on. I have often wondered if anyone else was involved, as there were often unsavoury characters in the house. We would all be sent upstairs when they had one of their ‘events’, but it was quite obvious what was happening. I do remember – when we were in our first house, so I was no more than seven – Dad taking me to visit another man, someone who lived nearby. I know he had black curly hair that I focused on while I sat on his lap, as he tickled me and touched me under my clothes, but I don’t have any memory of anything or anyone else. It might have been worse, it might have been nothing, because there is always the chance I blocked things out, given how horrific my life was about to become. I can’t dwell on that sort of thing though. I can only focus on what I know to be true and factual.

  Mum had spoken to me about sex from a very early age. In fact, I can’t remember a time when she didn’t – it was just one of her ‘go-to’ topics of conversation, as natural to her as telling me I was dilatory, or getting me to choose which of my siblings should be battered when Dad came back from fishing. She told me her story about how every man she had ever met had raped her, but I had no idea what that was. The word ‘rape’ meant nothing to me, although I knew it was something she enjoyed talking about as she returned to the subject so often, and her eyes lit up when she informed me that every man in her life couldn’t keep their hands off her. She was irresistible and they were all sex-mad bastards.

  ‘I’ve no one else to talk to about these things,’ she would say. ‘Are you listening? You’d better be.’ I would nod, and try to look as if I was taking in every word, but I wasn’t terribly sure of what had happened. As well as ‘every’ man raping her, she was sure that Dad was having an affair with each woman who crossed his path. At one point ‘a blonde’, as Mum put it, moved in across from us. When Mum saw this woman chiselling a hole in her front door one day, she claimed that was a signal for Dad to have sex with her. It was bizarre.

  ‘I do everything he asks me to, you know,’ she would say, ‘every dirty, perverted thing you could imagine, just so that he doesn’t start on you lot. He makes my life a fucking misery, but I just take it all.’

  I never heard cries and I never saw a mark on her. As an adult, I am all too aware that relationships can hide a multitude of horrors behind closed doors, but there was certainly never anything I could point to and think, ‘Yes, he is awful to her.’ In fact, when some of the women she said Dad was having sex with turned up at our house, it looked as if she got on well with them. I would muffle my ears with a pillow as they all got more and more drunk, and louder and louder.

  I need to stop here for a moment, Jenny, because this is one of the trickiest parts of all. You weren’t there, you weren’t there to help me – no one was – but I hope you can help me be brave now and tell the world how it all started. I do wonder. I wonder why anyone, any parent, would talk so openly about sex to a little girl – not sex as a normal, natural thing, but the detail that I was exposed to by Mum, whether it was always talking about rape, or speaking to me as if I was someone her age that she was having a gossip with. Why was that? And what did it do to me? I wonder if it laid the groundwork.

  I didn’t know what rape was when she told me it had happened to her so much, but I knew men wanted things, wanted things from women’s bodies, and I knew this was just the way of the world. Seven years old and already thinking that; already being desensitised to it. Mum’s ‘talks’, the way we were all treated, the violence, the psychological torture, the isolation … it doesn’t take much to guess what came next, does it, Jenny?

  And there he was. There he is. My father. At my bedroom door.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said, a smile playing on his lips. He closed the door behind him and sat down next to me on the bed. I had been dozing, but as soon as the bed shifted with his weight, I scooted up, hunched my knees to my chest. Instinctively, I was wary, but I always was. Good things didn’t really happen in our house. And here was the next thing. I remember it was a summer evening, the late sun was still coming in my window and I should have been playing outside, but that wasn’t allowed. I had to stay in just in case my ‘ill’ mother needed me. She would have these ‘episodes’ where she declared herself seriously unwell and I was required to keep watch, which meant staying indoors for hours at a time.

  ‘Look,’ he whispered, and opened a magazine he had on his lap. It was full of pictures. Pictures of naked women. It was very explicit, I know that. It wasn’t ‘just’ women with their clothes off, it was women with their legs open, things being done to them, positions and acts that my mind couldn’t even comprehend.

  ‘Look,’ he kept saying, ‘look.’ His eyes flitted from the pages to me, back and forth, back and forth. I had no idea what he wanted from me. Would I get into trouble for looking, or for not looking? When he didn’t get a reaction from me, he started talking about them, the women in the magazines, telling me I would be like that soon. I was eight. I was so embarrassed by it – yes, that was my strongest emotion that first night. Embarrassment. I was only a little girl; I didn’t want to see naked bodies. Things did go on in our house, and Mum did talk about grown-up things with me, but this was something new, and I just wanted it to stop. It was disgusting and horrific, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to react – what would cause the least chance of me being hit or shouted at?

  ‘You’ll be doing all of this soon,’ he told me. ‘Do you like it? Do you like them? Do you like what they’re doing?’ I felt concerned, but I didn’t know why; he didn’t touch me, so it wasn’t that. I guess it was just a sense of foreboding. And I certainly had no intention of ever doing the things he was showing me in those images. ‘Not long now though!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, you’ll be like that soon.’

  He stayed for a while – I don’t really recall how long – then he left, patting my leg and still smiling, as if we had enjoyed something nice. A touching father-and-daughter moment. My first experience of pornography, my first real exposure to what his twisted mind enjoyed.

  He didn’t give me any warnings that night, didn’t tell me to keep it quiet – he didn’t need to. I had no one. I hoped it was a one-off, but I should have known nothing he or Mum ever thought of was ever a one-off. He was back the next night, but this time there was no magazine. I know I must have been asleep when he came in, because the first thing I remember was feeling groggy but waking up because he was lifting up my nightie. I came round very quickly as he started touching me.

  ‘No!’ I shouted.

  ‘Ssh,’ he whispered, ‘ssh, there’s nothing to worry about.’

  And then he said it.

  He said the thing he would keep saying for years.

 
All dads do this with their little girls.

  It’s normal.

  Everyone does it.

  After this first time, the routine would become relentless but, although I knew I didn’t like it, I’m not sure at that stage I actually knew it was wrong. One morning, at breakfast, I blurted it out.

  ‘Dad comes into my room every night.’

  No one said anything, so I tried again.

  ‘Dad comes into my room, into my bed, every night.’

  Mum ignored it and so did he. That made me think nothing was wrong with it, that he was telling the truth – dads and daughters did this. I wasn’t trying to tell, I was just pointing out a fact, and if they didn’t react, then he must have been pointing out a fact to me as well when he told me it was normal.

  As the weeks progressed, Dad did something else that was new. He spoke to me. He gave me attention. He made me feel special. And that was the key to it all. That was how he managed to carry on the abuse for years. When he first came to the bedroom of that eight-year-old, he knew I was a child who had never been loved, who had never been made to feel special. He knew that because he was one of the parents who had ensured it was the case. He used it in a way that was so cruel, and yet was so desperately needed by me. He would sit in my room for hours, every evening, and I had never, ever had that before.

  He’d say such things to me, and the honest truth is, I wanted to hear some of them. I was starved of love, starved of affection, so I hung on to the nice parts.

  He told me I was special.

  He told me I was his queen.

  He told me that, if I was chocolate, he’d eat me.

  He told me that I was all that mattered.

  He told me he loved me.

  And then, when he had told me all of those things, all of those twisted things combined with the nice things, he would touch me. He would sit on my bed, and touch me. It didn’t hurt – we were both in our pyjamas – and it was attention, it was normal, it was what daddies did with their little girls, everyone was doing it. Then, after the touching was over, he’d talk to me again. The same words, over and over.

  He told me I was his queen.

  He told me that, if I was chocolate, he’d eat me.

  He told me that I was all that mattered.

  He told me he loved me.

  He told me I was special.

  It would go on into the middle of the night, while Mum was in bed; but, at some point, he changed tack. Maybe the type of touching he was doing wasn’t enough, maybe he had just been testing me to see what he would get away with; whatever the reason, he changed.

  ‘If you don’t want your mum to die, then you do know that this is for the best?’ he would say.

  I didn’t want Mum to die. I knew she was often gravely ill (she wasn’t), I knew she had been at death’s door many times (she hadn’t) and I knew I had to be a good girl (I wanted to be). One night, he took me through to their bedroom while Mum slept. With a finger to his lips, telling me to be quiet, he slowly removed her clothes.

  ‘Look,’ he said, just as he had with the magazines, ‘this is what you’ll look like!’

  He was excited, I know that, and I was so worried that she would wake up. In retrospect, I wondered if she knew full well what was happening. Could she have slept through it? Might she have heard him, panting with the thrill of his sordid little adventure? More than once, he put me in bed beside her – she slept, he touched me and I shook with fear that I was the one who would get into trouble.

  Things changed very quickly after that in the sense that he seemed almost fearless; I think he escalated the abuse to putting his fingers inside me after three or four weeks. I can remember the shock of the first time very well, but I have struggled to know how to deal with it here. I want to be honest but there is a part of me that wonders who is reading this. I know there will be kind people who will recognise that little girl and her awful life, I know some will be supportive, but I can’t help but think there may be people like him too. I don’t want to give them hints about what to do, how to get away with it, and neither do I want to write anything that will be exactly the sort of thing they want to read, the sort of thing they think of all the time, the sort of thing they dream of.

  So, I think I have to keep it straightforward. I have to say the facts. He started by touching me, then he got bolder and started to put his fingers inside me. At that stage, even though I believed his lies about it being a perfectly normal thing to do, it didn’t feel right. I knew that part of me was private and I had a sense that it was wrong for someone else to touch me there, but he reassured me all the time.

  You’re so special.

  I could look at you all night.

  It’s OK, it’s nice, this is nice, you like it.

  This is what dads do with their little girls.

  You’ll thank me when you’re older.

  You’ll be glad I showed you how to do this when you get a boyfriend.

  I’m making it easier for you – you’ll know just what works when you’re a woman.

  He never said anything nice to me when we weren’t in my room; he was still the father he had always been when it was daytime, or the others were there. The further he pushed his fingers inside me, the more painful it was, but whenever I flinched, he would try to reassure me. I never screamed, I never cried. I had no voice.

  I want to rush through all of this, Jenny. I don’t want to dwell on those nights, so many of them, when he would come to my room. It was every night, if I’m honest, in those early days – it was as if, now he had started, he couldn’t stop. I wonder, had he just been waiting? Waiting to start this? If so, what was it that he was waiting for? It hadn’t been my birthday, I hadn’t done anything right or wrong, I hadn’t drawn attention to myself. There couldn’t be any of those excuses. He made the choice that now was the right time, but I have no idea what led him to that choice at that moment. I can’t go into detail of every night, because they were all the same. He would come in, talk to me, say nice things, then touch me where he shouldn’t, then talk to me again. It was a pattern set from the beginning. Did he do it to you too, Jenny? Did he do it to you?

  As time went on, he’d give me money – that felt worse. I didn’t want to be paid for this. I didn’t want to ‘earn’ it. He would sit on the edge of my bed, or kneel – he’d touch me and he’d touch himself. I remember seeing the ejaculate afterwards but not understanding what it was. He’d just keep telling me I was special when it happened, so very special. Sometimes he stroked my hair, always saying, ‘It’s OK, it’s nice.’ Then after ejaculating, he’d leave the room and I would be left with that stuff on the floor. I knew no one should see it, so I would go to the loo for paper and clean it up. It was constant.

  After a while, he started to do things to me with his mouth, but I had no idea what the words were for these things, would never have known to call it oral sex. I did wonder, why in the world would he do that? What would even put such an idea into his head? He’d finish himself off or get me to touch him.

  ‘Do you like it? Doesn’t it feel good?’ he’d ask, but I’d never answer him. If he asked questions and I’d said, ‘No,’ it’d burst the bubble and I was terrified of what the consequences might be. From the moment he started to guide my hand to where he wanted it to be, to what he wanted me to do, I just accepted it. He’d often get me to start, then he’d finish. I guess he knew what to do. I’d just lie there, trying to keep my eyes closed. He built it up, but I was too naïve to realise what he was building up to. He told me I was responsible for cleaning ‘it’, his penis, and that was why I had to move it back and forwards, that was part of the cleaning, but, one day, after I had started to do that, he said, ‘Close your eyes.’

  He hadn’t told me to do that before. Even though I often did, it was my choice, when I didn’t want to look at that ugly, disgusting thing in his pants.

  I shook my head, still not able to bring myself to say ‘No.’

  ‘Go on, queen,
close your eyes,’ he said.

  I assumed he wanted me to clean it until he ejaculated but, as I sat there, he took hold of my head and tried to force himself into my mouth. I coughed. Gagged. Tried to move away. He stopped. I can honestly say that I will never shake that feeling off, that first time when he tried to push it in, a sensation that’s as fresh today as I write this as it was then. He tried another couple of times, but it never worked. Sometimes he would change his mind and try again, keep pushing it in, but he knew I wasn’t playing along with that and I guess he didn’t want to spoil his little fantasy that I was enjoying it all. He was always touching my breasts (such as they were), always touching me down there, always putting his fingers in me, also making me accept oral sex.

  It impacted on everything. From that moment on, I always felt I wasn’t good enough, that I was a bad girl who no one would like. I felt stupid and scared and filthy. I felt that I did everything wrong at school and at home, that the things he made me do were appalling; but I had no choice. As always, I had no choice.

  There was still a lot of social services involvement throughout this time, but they had no idea what was going on in my life, in the dark, with Dad. Mum was constantly telling me I was selfish, she had made sacrifices for me, I was spoiled and I made life miserable for her, but my big sister had it a hundred times worse.

  When Jenny came back, she would wet the bed constantly, no matter what the social workers were saying about her improvement away from home, and she would be subjected to the same emotional push-pull as ever. In April 1979 Jenny was collected from Frodsham, where she had been for four and a half years – I was taken along to collect her, as they were worried Jenny would be upset and thought it might settle her to see me. ‘I am trying to get all concerned to normalise the situation and accept Jennifer as a normal member of the family without reminders or threats.’