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Published by HarperElement 2006
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 + 2
© Stuart Howarth 2006
Stuart Howarth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-0-00-723638-1
ISBN-10 0-00-723638-7
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
TO MY SISTER
SHIRLEY ANNE HOWARTH
1 february 1965 — 8 february 1991
aged 26 years
I miss you, ‘Shirl the Whirl’,
and today I know that you escaped away
to peace and freedom.
I watch you dance in the summer meadows,
running free and chasing butterflies.
Today I smile for us all —
love you!
Acknowledgments
To my darling Tracey You are my love, my life, my faith, my strength, my today, my tomorrow and my everlasting!
To Mum (thanks for keeping us together as a unit), Trevor, Christina, Clare, Rosina, Maria, Mark and Dominic. Now is the time to begin our journey as a family To Sebastiano (God bless you) and to Eric (rest in peace).
To Matthew, Rebecca, Jamie and Lee. Thank you for teaching me how to be a father and for the warmth that engages me every time you are around. Thank you for my grandchildren and for the unconditional love they bring.
To Sue and Geoff Hadfield and the Hadfield family. You believed in me and showed much love where others would have turned their backs. I will always be grateful — thank you.
To my legal team: Padhee Singh, Ash Halam, Peter Pratt, Dr Keith Rix, Dr Lucinda Cochayne and the very honourable Mr Justice Elias.
To Colm O’Gorman (One in Four) — you heard my cries and felt my pain; Neil Fox (counsellor) — prison needed good men like you; the God Squad at Strangeways and the few officers who fought my cause (you know who you are), and the hundreds of men I came across in the prison system who shared their stories of abuse, hurt and pain with me (your anonymity remains as requested).
To Anthony Kelly (I followed the dream, thanks for the reviews); to Colin and Colleen Heath, the Taylors, Dean Mylchreest, Martin Cashin, the Sweeney Family, Jimmy Barlow (Do not fear, Uncle Jimmy is here), Vic Scantlebury, Del, Big Roy, Brett, Big Scott, Wints, Mark Brittain (big boys do cry), Scott Gledhill and Kerry Kayes (thanks for the support in prison), Colin and Leanne and the bike club, Roy Bailey, Roy Radcliffe, Tommy, Bob (oh yes), Derek, Big Steve, and all the Altrincham crew.
To Judy Chilcote and Andrew Crofts. Thanks for helping make this happen, for helping expose the truth and reality of this often cruel world.
To Richard and Helen McCann. Thanks for your unconditional support, encouragement, advice and assistance.
To Jim Browne (Fire in Ice Liverpool), Steve Bevan (Survivors Swindon), James Brett (your story must be told and I love you, man), Mike Lew (Victims no more) and Craig Charles (a brave and courageous man — expose the truth). To the thirty brave men I met recently on retreat who I saw reduced to small boys in pain and with tortured souls. You too can recover!
To Anthony Akka, my sponsor and trusted friend (direction and honesty) — you are an example to me; to Murad Mousa my pally, pal, pal and to Patrick Gallagher for your unreserved love. To Big Paul (up the Irish), the Prichards, Dennis, Daz Millington, Dave M., Mark, Dean (Scouse), Howard (Fireman Sam), Keith and Julie Clarke (MVS), Andy Banks, Steve Mather and Woody and Mike.
To all the staff at Altrincham Priory and again at Castle Craig (without you our souls would be lost forever); Wynn Parry, Jonathan, Richard, Bill, Ian, Eddy and Kevin — thank you. To the fellowships up and down the country who live their lives one day at a time and follow the righteous path!
To Ken and Kathryn. Your love for each other is amazing and you are in my thoughts and prayers on a daily basis. God bless you!
To the still suffering and survivors around the world. You are never alone. Feel no shame or guilt and break free from the horrors of the past. Expose your abuse and make the world listen.
To the families of those who suffer. Please forgive them and allow them to recover. Like a pebble dropped into a pond, the ripples run far and wide, and without recovery the symptoms pass on through generations.
Finally, to all those people that have been affected by my actions either directly or indirectly. I bow my head and offer my unreserved apologies.
Introduction
There are thousands of kids out there, just like me, who suffer abuse on a daily basis. You can turn a blind eye and consider this too nasty to read about, or you can take a courageous step forward and share a few moments from my world. We can only bring about change by doing something positive and being prepared to listen. This is my story.
Please,
Daddy,
No
Chapter One
DRIVING WEST
I know when I set out from Mum’s pub that evening, 20 August 2000, I intended to go to pick up my girlfriend, Tracey, from her house. I know I intended to because otherwise I would never have taken the road I did. If I had set out with the intention of driving back to Wales I would have taken a more direct route.
Something happened inside my head between leaving Mum’s and getting to Tracey’s place, which stopped me from turning off the road. I just kept on going west. I know I didn’t have any set plan in my head; I just wanted a lot of answers to a lot of questions. Why had he done the things he’d done to me and the girls? Did he still love me? Was he sorry for what he’d done to the family? Was he really my dad or not?
A good few miles down the road, when it dawned on me where I was heading, I phoned Tracey. ‘I need to sort this thing,’ I told her. ‘I need to see him.’
‘You’re lying,’ she said, ‘aren’t you? You’re just going out with your friends again to do more drugs, aren’t you? I thought this was going to be a new start for us, Stuart, but you aren’t going to change, are you?’
I switched the phone off and just kept driving west. I could understand exactly why she would think the way she did; I’d let her down often enough in the past, why should she have faith in me any more? But there wasn’t enough space in my head to think through what I might be doing to our relationship, the best relationship I had ever had in my life. Feelings, thoughts, memories, confusion and enormous pain were all mixed together. The thing I wanted most of all was to try to make some sense of it all, to find some sort of resolution with the past.
Chapter Two
MUM AND THE BIN MAN
He always seemed to be there, part of my life — my dad. But it must have been around 1972 that he first started courting Mum. He would be in the garden, sweeping up for her, or coming round to see us, bringing sweets, or presents that he’d picked up on his bin rounds. He was a great collector, was Dad, a real magpie. Anything he found that he thought still had any life in it he would cart home: furniture, broken toys, even a telly, which was the first we’d ever had. From having absolutely nothing, our house suddenly started to fill up with stuff that other people didn’t want, much of which we n
eeded badly and some of which just cluttered the place up.
His bin round was in an area of Ashton-under-Lyne where the residents threw out things that were better than anything we had ever had. Some of the things still worked. The telly did sometimes if you banged it very hard on the side in just the right place. Most of the time the screen was pierced with a single, tiny white dot.
I would get up close and try to peer through the dot, in the hope of seeing the picture through it, like a ‘What the butler saw’ peep show. My efforts were usually only rewarded by a short period of blindness while my eyes tried to refocus. I loved pushing the buttons in and out. I discovered that if I pressed two together they stuck in, but if I pressed a third button it would release them. Intrigued by these experiments I tried pushing all six while Mum was out at work, and they all jammed. Dad was furious, slapping me hard on the backs of my legs, making my skin burn, punching and kicking me until I went numb.
‘Please, Daddy, no! I’m sorry!’
He threw me up the stairs and I dragged my battered body to bed, sobbing myself to sleep, crying for my mum. I was so sorry for being such a naughty little boy. I wanted to turn the clock back to just before I’d committed my crime and to make my daddy love me again. I vowed to myself that I would make an extra effort to be good for him.
He was always very scruffy, as you might expect a bin man to be, always wearing his welly boots however hot the weather, but no small boy worries about details like that. I was often out in the street with no clothes on at all myself, caked in dirt. None of the men round our estate was exactly what you would call smart, although Dad was probably one of the worst. He was big, over six feet tall with black hair, which he would wear with a side parting on the left. I would watch him combing it over with his left hand in the mirror and then patting the top of his head to flatten it out, imitating the action even though I had hardly any hair of my own. He had a moustache too, although it never seemed to grow that well. Thinking back now, I suppose that was because he was still a young man himself, barely out of his teens. When he was around the house he liked listening to sentimental songs like ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’, or anything by the Carpenters.
He had a slight limp from some childhood accident, and there was always a skirmish of dogs swirling around his boots. Mum had her Alsatian, Tina, and Dad had his Jack Russells, Bobby and Trixie — a working man’s terriers, dogs that were quick enough to catch a rat when necessary and intelligently loyal to their master. Mum had got Tina while she was living on her own with us, as protection. This was a time when the Moors murders were still fresh in people’s minds, when lone women felt nervous and vulnerable.
Our street was full of big families with no money Most of them had no fathers around either, the mothers struggling to bring up as many as ten children on their own, in any way they could. Most of the kids would have different dads and even some of the women weren’t sure who the fathers were. My sisters and I felt special because we had a dad and we believed he would protect us if we needed it, because he was big and tough and hard. I believed fervently he could fight anybody and win; he was the best, my dad; he was my hero.
Mum had been brought up in Mullingar, in Southern Ireland. My Nana came over to England to get work, promising to send for the children once she was settled. Mum loved it in Ireland, living with her Grandma Lacey. But when my Nana met and married a man called Albert in England she sent for her children and Mum had to leave Ireland.
After an unhappy few years, Mum met George Heywood. She was sixteen and he was much older, somewhere around forty. She stumbled getting off a bus one day and had to go to hospital. The ambulance that arrived to take her was already carrying George, which was how they met. She always said she married him to get away from her family life, and I have no reason to doubt her. Their first baby, Shirley, was born in 1965 with spina bifida and other problems. Christina followed a year later, at a time when Shirley was being operated on in another part of the same hospital. I came along two years after that in 1968. Life for Mum at that stage must have seemed hopelessly tough, but she never considered giving any of us up or handing us over for someone else to look after.
There wasn’t even enough money to buy me a cot, so I would sleep in drawers or whatever Mum could find to hold me. Then I was put into a bed with Christina, which I liked because it made me feel loved and comforted, although it meant that if one of us wet the bed both of us got wet. Sometimes we would share with Shirley as well but if we wriggled in the night we would catch her spine, making her cry out in pain.
George, I’m told, proved to be a heavy drinker and a bit of a womanizer, and found the strains of family life, particularly with a disabled child, too much to handle. He and Mum parted soon after I was born, although she was always vague about the exact timing, and the council moved us all to a semi-detached house in Smallshaw Lane on the Smallshaw estate. I guess our area was where they put troublesome families whom they thought might disturb the tranquillity of nicer neighbourhoods. There were no fences or gates; doors were always open, with people going neighbouring all the time, scrounging knobs of butter or cups of sugar off one another. There was always a whiff of hostility in the air as everyone struggled to ensure their own survival.
Knowing that I was too young to remember any different, Mum decided to pretend that George was nothing to do with me.
‘You know,’ she would say to me from time to time, when Dad wasn’t around, ‘you are a very special little boy You know you really are your Dad’s, don’t you? He’s not the real father of the girls, but he is yours. But we don’t want to make the girls feel left out, do we? So we’ll pretend he’s your stepdad too.’
I felt sorry for the girls, having a different dad who had gone off and left them, but proud that Dad was mine, even if he did have his faults. Knowing who my dad was meant I knew who I was and where I’d come from. He gave me an identity that not many of the kids around our way could hope for. What kid doesn’t want to have a real dad? Sometimes Mum would spot George in the street and point him out to the girls, and I felt I was better than them because my dad was the one taking care of us at home while George had deserted them. In my mind my dad was better than theirs.
‘You’re my fucking son,’ Dad would say to me sometimes, almost as if he was angry with me for allowing any element of doubt in the matter.
There were no carpets on the floor in our house, nor in most of the houses in Smallshaw, and no curtains at the windows. Families that wanted privacy would stick up newspapers, or smear Windolene on the panes, which would serve the dual purpose of keeping out prying eyes and providing us with a canvas to play noughts and crosses or draw silly faces on. My earliest memory is of sitting outside the front of the house in the dirt, digging a hole with a discarded lollipop stick.
Things just kept coming through the door as Dad increased his collection. There was a PVC suite to replace our ripped and stained old sofa. The arrival of new furniture would always bring a troop of neighbours in to have a look, to admire or to mutter jealously.
‘This will be good for Shirley,’ Dad announced. ‘It won’t soak up her piss and we can just wipe it.’
My sister Shirley was incontinent and the house always stank of urine, although it wasn’t all hers. The smell of urine, dogs and fags pervaded everything. The grown-ups were always having to change poor Shirley because there was nothing she could do about it herself The trouble with the plastic material on the new suite was that it stuck to the backs of our bare legs after we had been sat on it for a while, and it would hurt to tear ourselves away, like ripping plasters off cuts.
I never realized when I was tiny that we were washed less often than most kids, that we were always dirty and covered in dog hairs. It was only when other kids started to take the mickey that the penny dropped. We always wore shorts, swapped between me and Christina, and Mum would only ever buy us new stuff from jumble sales, or nick it off the washing lines of the
better-off areas.
We were always being sent out to scrounge things off the neighbours. Once I’d been given whatever I’d been sent to ask for I would walk back home slowly. If it were margarine it would be wrapped in a bit of foil and would start to melt, giving me a chance to lick the sweetness from my dirty hands. Mostly we ate jam and sugar butties, or sometimes lard or dripping. Anything we could get hold of we crammed into our mouths to stave off the continuous pangs of hunger.
The ice cream man hated coming up our street because he always got hassled for broken lollies and wafers; twenty kids all milling round the van shouting at him at once. Sometimes he would feel sorry for me if he found me on my own and would give me a chocolate flake. ‘Don’t tell the others,’ he’d warn, and I never did.
Mum always seemed to owe people money and we would have to hide behind the sofa if men came knocking at the door. Because I was the youngest in the family and most innocent looking, she would send me to the chip shop most days, usually with no money. ‘Tell them you’ve forgotten it,’ she would say.
I hated doing it, but I hatted being hungry even more. When the lady behind the counter asked for the money I would burst into tears. She would then feel embarrassed in front of the other customers and tell me to bring it later. After a while she started asking for the money before she served me. In those days you could take your own plate to the chip shop to be filled up. Mum would send me with a bowl, which the lady would fill up with gravy, giving us more to go round. Even when I was only two or three years old I would lurk outside the chip shop late in the evening asking customers for a chip as they came out with their dinners, having spent the evening in the pub. If they were in a really good mood they would buy me a whole portion of my own.
Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed Page 1