Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed

by Stuart Howarth

  My body twitched and shook, my tears and saliva running over the barrel. After what seemed like an age he withdrew the barrel, looking at me with pure disgust. He hated me and I knew it.

  ‘Now fuck off.’

  Chapter Seven

  JUST MESSING AROUND

  At weekends Dad used to have a gardening job at a big Victorian house on the other side of town. He was always working hard and he taught me the importance of making your own way in the world. Considering how hard he worked, it was strange that he never had any money. I suppose he spent it all in the pub. Work has been a great comfort to me down the years, providing the approval I always wanted to receive from him.

  He had his own big gardener’s shed at the house, where he used to keep another stash of pornographic magazines and would sit masturbating. I would go with him sometimes and it would make me feel proud to be going to work with my dad, even if he would stride ahead and leave me behind on the way. He would have me picking up leaves or whatever he needed doing, shouting orders and criticisms at me all the time like he hated me.

  The lady of the house or her daughter used to bring us out tea and biscuits on a tray and he played the part of the respectful gardener perfectly; they thought he was great. Once they’d gone back into the house he would tell me he was going to go in and give them both ‘a shagging’. If he went into the house for any reason he would come back and tell me he’d been ‘having a bit’. I hated it when he talked like that to me.

  He was becoming more and more sexually explicit with me all the time, almost as if I was his mate, sometimes, rather than his son. He used to like to help the terriers to mate, masturbating Bobby, the dog, to get him excited and making me touch him and Trixie and then sniff my fingers. I would try to look away and he would get angry with me.

  ‘Watch the shagging, you little bastard,’ he’d shout as he masturbated himself. ‘Watch the shagging.’

  I didn’t like it and would try to look away.

  ‘Fucking look at it!’

  Dad often would masturbate on to the carpet in front of us and then call the dogs to clean up the mess.

  At school I was a bit boisterous, but desperate to please everyone. I wanted them all to see that Stuart was a good boy, not a naughty boy. I got myself into the football team and longed for Mum and Dad to come and watch me play, but they never did.

  Sometimes in the evenings we would be left with a babysitter. He was a lad from the big family in Smallshaw whose mum had fought with our mum in the street. He and Dad seemed to be close, although I never quite worked out what was going on between them. He used to get into bed with me and then the bed would start shaking, just like with Dad. But it was different from the way Dad went about things — the babysitter would coax me with kindness and sweets and tickling. He didn’t seem to want to prove he had power over me like Dad did; he didn’t seem to want to hurt me or humiliate me, but he did want to use me to satisfy himself.

  Shirley used to be taken swimming at the local baths every so often by some charity helpers, and I was allowed to go with them. The pool was closed to the general public so the disabled kids could have it to themselves for a couple of hours. After one session, when I was five or six, I was in the showers with the two men who had been carrying Shirley around, just the three of us, and they persuaded me to masturbate them. It seemed to me as if every grown man I came across wanted the same thing. I guess kids from dysfunctional families are always going to be easy prey to paedophiles.

  When Clare was about a year old I woke up in the night to hear a lot of shouting and screaming going on downstairs. Instantly afraid, I listened to the sounds growing louder and more violent. I heard footsteps running up the stairs and the bedroom door burst open as Mum ran in with Clare in her arms.

  ‘I’m getting in with you,’ she said, climbing into my bed.

  A few seconds later Christina followed, white-faced and wide-eyed, and curled up at the bottom of the bed, followed by Dad in the purple suit he sometimes wore to go out.

  ‘You fucking slag,’ he shouted, reeling into the room, roaring drunk. ‘You fucking get back downstairs.’

  ‘No, David,’ Mum said, ‘I’m not coming downstairs. You really hurt me.’ He’d been punching her and now nearly pulled her arm out of its socket as he tried to drag her out of the bed. She clung on desperately. We were all crying, terrified of what would happen next. He gave up trying to pull her out, pushed us over instead and forced himself into the little bed as well.

  ‘I’ll stay here then.’

  Then he seemed to change his mind. I had a heavy metal clock by the side of the bed, which he’d salvaged from the bins. He climbed off the bed and pulled his sock off, stuffing the clock into it. Standing up he started swinging it unsteadily around like a cosh. He had lurched over by the window and for a second I considered rushing at him and toppling him backwards through it. I knew it would mean I would fall with him, but hopefully I would land on top of him and he would cushion the impact for me.

  Panic-stricken, I jumped out of bed as he lunged forward towards Mum with the cosh, and I made a dash for the door. I could feel the warmth of urine trickling down my leg. Christina was on her feet and running too and Dad was right behind us. The bedroom door seemed to take ages to open, but we managed to get through it and started down the stairs. I was forcing my legs to take the steps as quickly as possible, knowing he would kill us if he managed to get his hands on us.

  I knew the front door would take even longer than the bedroom door and was sure he would get us there, but he must have stumbled on the way down the stairs because I managed to get the locks open and we were out in the street. It had been snowing and the pavement was like ice under my feet as I ran.

  ‘Daddy’s killing us! Daddy’s killing us all! Help!’ I yelled as I ran, expecting to be grabbed from behind at any moment.

  Christina had gone in the opposite direction and to my relief I realized he’d decided to go after her first. I had a few minutes in which to get help. A friend of mine, Gary, lived further up the street and I banged on his door, yelling for help. The moment his dad opened the door I ran in, slamming it behind me, as if there were a pack of wolves snapping at my heels.

  ‘Please, please, you have to help us,’ I sobbed hysterically. ‘He’s killing us all.’

  Gary’s mum gave me a hug and tried to comfort me as I sobbed and gabbled on about how Dad was going to kill Clare, while Gary’s dad went round to the house. They all came back together.

  ‘Don’t worry, lad,’ Gary’s dad tried to reassure me. ‘Your mum and dad have explained they were just messing around.’

  I was horrified because I could see he believed what he was saying and thought I was wrong. I just wanted to stay safe with Gary’s mum. I wanted them to tell someone in authority what was going on in our house. I wanted Mum to admit how bad things were and take this opportunity to get us help. But none of these things happened. The grown-ups closed ranks, all reasonable and concerned and keen to get us back home as quickly as possible. I was terrified what would happen once we were back behind closed doors, but the cold air must have sobered him up because that night they just put us back to bed as if their cover story had been true, that they had just been messing around and had allowed their games to get out of hand. Maybe Dad had realized he had endangered everything by pushing his luck a bit too far. I felt guilty about talking to other people about him and hoped he wouldn’t decide to punish me for it the next day.

  By the time I was ten I was desperate to earn a bit of money for myself, so that I could at least buy myself something to eat from time to time. There was a milkman who delivered in our area called Stuart. I used to smile at him and he used to wink back, a friendly older man with a beard. One day I asked him if I could help him on his rounds and he said I could. I knew I had to keep it secret otherwise Dad would put a stop to it, and I felt very guilty about deceiving him, but my urge for a little independence was stronger than my fear of the reprisals.
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br />   Each morning I would let myself out of the house while everyone was still asleep and run to find Stuart’s milk float. He would let me do the running up and down with the bottles and I learned which houses left out money for him to collect. At the end of the round he would give me some money and I would be straight up the shop to buy sweets. I would stuff in as many as I could before I got home, making myself sick in my haste to cram them in, throwing the rest away in case Dad found them and realized what I had been up to without his permission. I loved Stuart the milkman because he would tell me I was a ‘good boy’, which was all I ever wanted to hear.

  It was 1979 and I was eleven years old when I came home one afternoon to find my Auntie June in the kitchen with Mum, Christina and Clare. Mum should have been at work, which was puzzling, and Dad was nowhere to be seen. I could tell something dramatic had happened, it was written all over their faces, and their shock hung in the air like a dark, ominous cloud.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Your Dad’s been messing with the girls,’ Mum told me. ‘And he’s gone.’

  ‘Yeah, but where’s he gone?’

  ‘Why don’t you go back out and play, Stuart? Me and your Auntie have a few things to talk about.’

  I was shocked, even though I had seen things happening and should have guessed that they had gone a lot further when I wasn’t around. I suppose I’d been blocking out the truth, unable to believe that even my dad was such a bad man that he would do such things to innocent girls, especially Shirley, who could do nothing to defend herself and was already suffering a life of relentless pain and boredom.

  I went off to pass a few more hours while they talked grown-up talk. I went to a den I’d made in some waste ground at a disused coal pit nearby and began to cry. I wondered what I had done wrong that I should be sent away while they talked. I wanted to know what they were saying. Had they found out I was really bad and naughty? Now that the truth was coming out, would I be put in a home just as Dad was always threatening? Would the police come for me? Might I even die? Might Shirley or Clare die? Would Mum leave me? Would they take Christina away from me? There were so many unknowns and each one was more frightening than the last.

  Sometimes Dad used to tell Christina and me that Shirley was going to die, so I was always aware of the possibility. He would say that to save Shirley we would have to be good and do whatever he told us. But I hadn’t been good. I knew that because he was always telling me so.

  Eventually I found out a bit more of what had happened that day while I was at school. Dad had been threatening the girls, making lewd promises about what he was going to do to them next time Mum was out, and Christina finally couldn’t stand it any more. When Mum announced she was going out to bingo, the girls begged her not to go.

  ‘Why ever not?’ she asked, shocked by the vehemence of their pleading, and then they told her some of what had been going on.

  Unable to think clearly, she had gone straight round to get my Auntie June. I guess she felt she needed support in case Dad turned violent when confronted. June was furious with him and stormed back to the house with Mum, going straight up to Dad and slapping his face. Apparently he tried to deny it to begin with, but when they threatened to call the police he confessed. At first he said he had done it to teach them what to do when they were older. Then he said he knew it was wrong and that he didn’t know why he did it. Mum sent him away from the house and he left without an argument.

  Mum knew how often he battered me around, but she also knew how much I loved him despite all that and how much I wanted him to love me. It never occurred to her that he might have been doing the same to me that he had been doing to the girls. I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone, because if I did they would know that I had been a naughty boy and they would probably take me away to a home. In my muddled young mind what he had done to the girls was different; he had been wrong to punish them, but he had been right to punish me because I was so bad. When I realized that no one was going to find out how bad I’d been I felt relieved, but I still didn’t like all the uncertainty, which was now affecting all of us.

  Dad moved up to the pen, just like his dad had before him, but he kept coming back to the house, being charming, trying to show that he was sorry and that it would be OK for him to come home because he’d learned his lesson. He asked Mum if he could take Christina and me up to the pen with him, and she said yes. He had a little van at the time, like a box attached to a motorbike really, and he let us both drive it up the lane. I really missed him, even though I didn’t miss the batterings and everything else. I was sure he would behave better if he were allowed to come back now. He couldn’t go back to his old ways now that he’d been found out, could he?

  He started turning up at school like a model father, waiting to pick us up and telling us he was going to be coming home soon. But Mum was adamant she didn’t want him back, so when the charm didn’t work after a few weeks he returned to his usual bullying and shouting — banging on the door when he was drunk, threatening to kill us all, shoot us and burn the house down. I stayed out of the way as much as I could, just wanting my parents to sort everything out between them like grown-ups should.

  One evening I came back from playing football on the local school fields. As I emerged from the ginnel almost opposite our house I saw the front door open and two men came out with Dad. I ducked back out of sight, not wanting to be in any sort of trouble. The men looked official. They walked Dad to a waiting car; one of them opened the back door and when he put his hand on Dad’s head to make sure he didn’t bang it as he got in, I realized Dad was handcuffed. I’d seen people being helped into cars like this on the television news and in police dramas and I knew it meant he had been arrested.

  I was overcome with panic. Did this mean the police knew everything? Did they know just what a naughty boy I had been all my life and how often Dad had had to punish me? If they were taking him away for whatever he had done, would they be back to take me away as well? Maybe they would take me away and put me in a home, just like he had always threatened they would. Not knowing where else to go, I ran to the school playground, hugged the wall and cried for what seemed like hours.

  When I finally went back to the house Mum was sitting in the kitchen. ‘They’ve taken your dad away,’ she said, and I felt overwhelmingly sad. I didn’t want my Dad to be taken away. I didn’t want him to go on treating me the way he had in the past, but I didn’t want to lose him completely.

  The courts must have told him he had to stay away from us until the time of his trial and he went to Wales to stay with his sister Doris and her husband, Stuart. Doris had never liked me much, and the feeling was mutual. She seemed resentful and bitter like Dad, and used to slipper me at the slightest provocation. But Stuart was a nice man, another bearded ‘Father Christmas’ figure. I had always wished Dad could be more like him. My cousins, John and Cheryl, I used to love to bits, and we would play in the fields and the quarries just like normal children whenever we were together. Dad never abused me during the times we stayed there, when there were other people around. At times like that he would always behave like the perfect, loving father, the one I always wanted him to be. Aunt Doris never believed that Dad had done anything wrong or that anything had gone on between him and the girls. She had never had much time for Mum, and I think she tarred Christina with the same brush, believing that if anything did go on it was because she had wanted it to happen.

  Once the truth was out Shirley, Christina and Clare had to go and see doctors and child psychologists to check how much damage he had done to them. But I was pretty much left to my own devices. I ran wild out of the house most of the time. Perhaps the grown-ups thought they were sheltering me from terrible truths by sending me out to play while all the details of what he had done to the girls were being gone over and over. But I knew truths they were only just starting to imagine.

  Shirley and Christina were supposed to give evidence at his trial, but Shirley
wasn’t able to do so because she got too upset and Mum was afraid it would bring on her epileptic fits. Even without Shirley’s testimony he was sent away to prison for two years, although he probably would have got much longer if she had spoken up. It never occurred to anyone to ask me if anything similar had happened to me — after all, I was a boy. It confirmed to me that Dad had been wrong in what he had done to the girls, because they had never been naughty like me. I had deserved my punishments, I understood that, and I didn’t want everyone to know just how bad I had been for so many years, so I continued to say nothing.

  I wanted my dad back, but I didn’t want to have to return to living in terror. Mum must have had similar mixed feelings. She started sleeping downstairs and we could hear her crying at night. Even though he was gone, none of us hugged each other or showed any outward signs of how much we loved one another; we’d had all that sort of thing beaten out of us. None of us could trust anyone for fear of getting hurt, not even each other. I didn’t know how Mum would react if I did tell her what he had been doing to me all those years. I didn’t even know if she would believe me, and I didn’t want her to think I was a naughty boy too. So I kept quiet, just as I always had.

  ‘It’ll be all right, Mum,’ I would say when I found her crying. ‘I’ll look after you. We’ll get through.’

  ‘You’re the man of the house now,’ she said, giving me a cigarette for the first time. I’d been smoking since I was nine, but never in front of her.

  ‘I know, Mum,’ I said, trying to puff on the fag as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I took her words as a challenge. If I were the man of the house, then that meant I would need to be the provider from now on. It made me feel important. She went through all her bills with me, working out the mortgage repayments and the electric bills. There was never enough left over for us to buy food.