Going to nursery was like stepping foot on another planet. The rooms were brightly painted, warm and full of toys; the staff there were welcoming and engaging. They loved children and enjoyed being around them – they cared. At home we were left to our own devices, but in nursery our days were structured and we had activities to occupy us. The environment was safe, no one was shouted at and we were given hot meals.
I can only imagine the condition we were in when we arrived. Our clothes would have been dirty and smelly and, on several occasions, we were sent home with clothes from the lost property box because they were a better alternative to what we were wearing. We scoffed whatever food was put in front of us. When I was much older, I also learned from social services documents that I was suffering from scabies, an infectious skin condition caused by mites that burrow into the skin. This, coupled with the asthma and eczema I suffered, would have made me a poorly sight. It was at the nursery that people began to notice we were being neglected because my files show that it was around this time that the social services department in the area we lived began to take an active interest in me. It must have been obvious just looking at all of us, and observing the way we behaved, that things at home were not right. I was only three or four when I started going there; I hadn’t socialised with other kids, I didn’t know how to communicate properly or have a conversation with anyone who wasn’t a sibling. At first I couldn’t speak to an adult without looking at the floor but the staff there were so nice and friendly, they encouraged me and I looked up to them – it was like going on holiday each time I went there.
I was so overwhelmed by the caring nature of the people at the nursery that it gave me the lifelong ambition to work in a care environment. In those early years the only meaningful interaction I had with adults other than my grandparents was with police officers, ambulance drivers who came to take Terri away and nursery staff. Ever since then all I have wanted to do is to work as a police officer, a paramedic or in the care industry. I’ve always wanted to protect or help people.
The nursery also opened me up to the world of words and numbers and stories. At home, we were never read to and we didn’t have books. Through nursery, we began to learn the alphabet and to string letters together to form simple words. Back at home, Kirsten and I would spend a lot of the time helping each other to learn things, remembering what we had been taught at nursery that day. Terri and Shane never took an interest in what we were doing or whether we were learning anything. As I grew older, I remember Terri was becoming more engrossed in drug taking. I didn’t know what was happening at the time but I do remember how she would hold a lighter under a spoon and chase the fumes with a straw, and I can only imagine with us at nursery her drug taking and drinking grew worse as she had more time to indulge herself.
She was often frazzled when she came and picked us up and took us home, when she spent ages trying to hide the bottles she had drunk that day (she never bothered with glasses, wine and spirits were slugged straight from the bottle). She was almost childlike in the haphazard way she tried to cover her tracks. She folded pieces of paper around bottles in the hope that Shane would ignore them. It was surreal; she had a complete lack of sense. I remember her with a bottle in one hand and a fag in the other, dropping ash on the floor; being a mess and tripping up around the house, but never passing out.
Terri never did anything with us. She never sat down with Kirsten and me to do our hair or play with us. The truth was, she didn’t care and the older I got, the less I cared about her. I hated her for being with Shane, and I hated him for attacking her.
It’s hard to feel sad about the situation because there was never affection, so there was never any loss to mourn.
Chapter three
MOVING ON
Often there were strange men in the house. I assume now that they must have been drug pushers, supplying Terri. Mainly, people stayed away – it wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to visit or would feel comfortable in. One of the few visitors who did come on a fairly regular basis was a distant relative called Pat. I wasn’t sure who he was related to but I dreaded him coming. He would often arrive with Shane after the two of them had been drinking. They would come barging through the door, carrying cans of Skol, and drunkenly terrorise us all for the rest of the night. After turning on loud music, they would order Terri around, directing her to get them food and more alcohol. Sometimes she was hit if she didn’t do as they said; often she joined in the party.
Pat was a large, sweaty man with a foul mouth – he didn’t care whether there were children in the room or not. He would cuss and shout and, depending on his mood, became aggressive. Around 5ft 10in tall, he had a large, protruding belly; often it poked out from the bottom of the T-shirts and vests he wore. I only ever saw him in polyester tracksuit bottoms and he stank of beer, bad breath and body odour. Bald, with tattoos on both his arms, he was never smart or washed. His teeth looked like yellow tombstones; crooked and rotten in bloodied gums.
I was terrified of him and whenever I heard him come into the house I would hide under the dirty blanket that was sometimes left on the couch by whoever had slept on it the previous night. Praying he wouldn’t see me, I would close my eyes and try to cover myself completely, sinking between the cushions. But Pat would always come and find me and, whenever he did, he touched me.
It started when I was around three. Thankfully, I only remember fragments of what occurred. I don’t know where my parents were when it happened and I don’t remember my brothers or sister being there with me; I know that often I found myself alone with him. Fixing me with a faraway look, his eyes would become hooded and dark.
‘Come here,’ he growled. ‘All kids do it. Your dad says it’s allowed.’
I didn’t know whether this was true or not, but he was an adult and as a child I believed everything adults said.
His breath stank as he leaned towards me. I was so confused, I couldn’t understand what he was doing or why he was doing it, but I knew it made me feel uncomfortable. I tried to squirm out of his grasp but he just laughed and pawed at me with his dirty, rough hands. Sometimes I heard Shane laughing drunkenly somewhere else in the house or Terri shouting. Often I could hear the footsteps of my brothers and sister on the floorboards upstairs and wished for Jayden to come in and save me. I wanted to be invisible; to fall asleep and wake up when it was all over.
There were times when I tried to tell Terri what was happening to me. I didn’t have the words to describe the act and instead I told her that I was hurting. Either she couldn’t understand what I was trying to say because her brain was so addled with booze or she didn’t want to understand and address the situation. She just looked at me mutely or told me I would feel better after a little while.
As I grew older, the abuse became more frequent. I told myself this was normal; it was how adults behaved towards children. I had been let down and beaten by adults all my life, I didn’t expect anything else from them.
As I got bigger, Shane’s aggression towards me and the rest of the family escalated. I still have the scars to remind me.
By the age of four I was developing enough courage to tell him when I thought he had been particularly cruel. This streak of defiance, he told me, was down to my ‘fiery tongue’. One day, in a drunken haze, he decided to try to cut it off.
He pinned both my arms down and waved a knife in front of my eyes. I struggled and wept but that only seemed to encourage him.
‘I’m going to sharpen my knife on that fiery tongue of yours,’ he slurred.
He began to scrape the knife around my mouth and chin.
‘Show me that tongue,’ he persisted.
Determined not to let him have his way I kept my mouth clamped firmly shut. Inside, I was terrified.
Then I felt a searing pain under my chin. He had pushed the knife in hard enough to puncture my skin. Feeling the blood trickle down my neck, I whimpered. I couldn’t understand why any adult would treat a child in this way, let al
one a father and his own daughter. He got off me and tried to stop the bleeding but I needed to go to hospital to have the wound glued shut. I’m not sure what excuse he gave them, but obviously he didn’t tell them the truth because there were no repercussions.
I also remember being hospitalised for another knife incident when my finger was slashed open, but thankfully the full memory of that particular episode has been buried in my mind.
Shane was crazy. I’ve no doubt if anyone knew the full extent of his behaviour he would have been sectioned and locked away. A danger to the public and a danger to his own family, he lived and breathed violence. It wasn’t just Terri and his kids he attacked, he got in fights all the time. I once heard him boast about smashing in someone’s face in the pub and breaking someone else’s nose; I remember times when he came home with blood on his clothes, bruises and swelling on his face, and scraped knuckles. He was excitable and drunk, and talked about how hard he was to scare us; he made sure we all knew the levels of violence he was capable of. Violence had been a theme throughout his life. The last time I heard about him, much later on in my adult life, was through the newspaper report about his attack on the two women. The piece mentioned that he had scores of convictions. As children, we didn’t need to be told how hard he was because we already knew: it was evident to us how aggressive he was because of the beatings dished out to Terri. Then, when we were older, he told us his fighting tales in the way that old soldiers tell their war stories.
Despite his fearsome reputation, he made more and more of an effort to stay out of Jayden’s way. I’m not sure why – Jayden was still only a child. He grew up into a strapping man you wouldn’t want to mess with, but as a child Shane could easily have coped with him. I can only think his reluctance to cross swords was because Jayden was his brother’s son and perhaps his brother was also a violent man and, had he found out that Shane was beating Jayden, he would have avenged his son.
We never had days out with our parents; we were never taken places and treated. The nearest we ever got to having a day out was when the police came and took us away. We spent a lot of time at the police station and it was a treat to go there: we loved the excitement of being taken to a new place where there were people who talked to us, entertained us and gave us food and drink. The police officers who looked after us were always lovely. They knew how tough we were having it at home, having noted the state we were in when we were taken in. We all wore a mish-mash of clothing picked from whatever was lying around on the floor at the time. There was no organisation in the house and no one ever bothered to make sure we were suitably dressed so, more often than not, we wore odd shoes and odd socks – we just grabbed whatever fitted. The police officers noticed this and often raided the lost property department for clothes for us. They always managed to find toys for us to play with and spent time talking to us; they even allowed us to wear their hats. It was a real adventure going to the police station and we became regular visitors.
I would have happily lived in the local station; I wanted to stay there forever. The policemen were especially protective. Knowing what I know now, it must have been hard for them to see the state of neglect we were in and still have to hand us back to our parents because Terri never pressed charges against Shane. The officers often said they were going to stop him doing it again each time an attack happened, and, although I wanted to believe them, I always knew in the back of my mind that once I was home there was nothing they could do. However, they were very kind and I’ve no doubt they did the best they could in a system in which their hands were largely tied. In those days, domestic incidents were not treated with the same severity as they are today. At least they tried to return us home clean, well fed and clothed. On one occasion, my sister and I were playing in a room at the station when one of the male officers noticed we were wearing dirty, scuffed, odd shoes.
‘Your shoes don’t match,’ he frowned.
‘They never do,’ shrugged Kirsten.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
We were taken out of the station and down the local high street, where the kindly officer found a shoe shop and took us in to be measured. He bought us both a new pair of trainers. Mine had flashing lights in the soles, which lit up whenever I started running. They reminded me of the police cars that would arrive after a fight to take us off to safety.
I didn’t know it at the time but things were changing. The attacks and incidents were being noted. Our lives were being monitored, and Shane and Terri were running out of chances. The police had been called too often; the nursery had reported too many incidents of neglect.
The final incident, which set my siblings and me on a new course in life, happened one night when I was around four or five. Shane had been out all night; we hadn’t seen him so it had been a relatively quiet evening. The only drama we had to contend with was Terri’s drunkenness, which we were so used to by this stage that it would have been strange if she was sober. She had fallen asleep somewhere but Jayden had checked on her to make sure she was still breathing and wasn’t choking on vomit or unconscious. We all started going to bed, or falling asleep in dribs and drabs.
At some point, in the early hours of the morning, Shane stumbled in, drunk. Again, this was nothing new, and I had learned to sleep through the noise. However, on this occasion he came into the bedroom and started to shuffle around in the dark. This was something that never happened and so I started to wake.
The next thing I heard as the fog of sleep cleared from my head was a roar from Shane and a scream. Initially I was confused, Shane was shouting and I heard one of my brothers howl in pain. He sounded terrified.
The light went on and I saw Harry, who was only a toddler, screaming and holding the back of his head. There was blood seeping through his fingers. Next to him, on the dirty bed sheets, was a kitchen knife. Shane, suddenly sober, was staring at him in horror. It was the first time I had ever seen him scared.
‘It was supposed to be your mother,’ he stuttered.
Pandemonium broke out as each of us children began screaming. This scared Harry even more. Jayden, who had been asleep somewhere else in the house, burst in.
‘What have you done?’ he screamed, scanning the scene in front of him.
Shane looked at him, turned and ran.
The ambulance and police arrived within minutes. Jayden called them. The house was filled with flashing blue lights as medics and police officers hurried around the house. Terri was somewhere in the middle of the chaos, confused about what was going on. I didn’t see her.
Whatever tensions were apparent between her and Shane that day must have been building up to the point where he decided he wanted to kill her. And so after a long boozing session he returned home, grabbed a knife and went straight to the room where he thought she was and stabbed out in the dark. In the event, among the pile of bodies in the bed, he hit Harry instead. He got him in the back of the skull. There was a lot of blood but luckily the blade did not penetrate bone and, although Harry needed several stitches, he was not seriously hurt. He was taken off in an ambulance to be stitched up and, as the shock subsided, it became an adventure for him. He’d already seen so much violence in his short life, he was used to it.
I learned later that Shane was arrested nearby. After questioning we were taken from our home to the police station and, a short while later, someone from the local social services came to speak to us. They explained that we would be sent to stay with temporary foster carers that night. It was doubtful we would all be able to go to the same house, so Kirsten and I would be sent somewhere and the boys would be sent somewhere else.
Wherever it was we ended up that evening we were exhausted. The following weeks were a merry-go-round of different placements. Often people from social services arrived and talked to us. We stayed with different people in around five or six houses. The movements seemed to take place on a weekly basis. I wasn’t aware of the process at the time, but we were being shuttled between foster carers while a
more permanent home was found for us. We had been placed in temporary care before so we knew the drill. In each home, there would be clothes and food provided; we didn’t have our own possessions. Normally the people we stayed with were well meaning and tried to engage with us and keep us occupied. Sometimes we stayed in big houses with gardens and had our own rooms, but Kirsten would inevitably sneak into my room at night and come into bed with me. We had been so used to sharing a bed she was scared and exposed on her own. Sometimes we would be placed in a flat and shared a room. The people we stayed with were always couples or single women. We didn’t get attached because we always knew we were moving on.
We didn’t really understand the implications of what was happening. We weren’t told what had happened to Shane and Terri, but I didn’t care. I didn’t know that Shane had been charged over the stabbing or that Terri was in rehab.
We tumbled through the care system until we were told by social workers that we were going to live with a nice couple in a town several miles away. They were called Graham and Pauline and they had an older son, who was adopted. We weren’t given any choice in the matter and, again, I didn’t care. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, I didn’t miss anything about our house and I didn’t miss anything about my parents. The people I really missed were my brothers. At various times, we were brought together for visits, usually in places like play or leisure centres. During those visits, we hugged and excitedly told each other where we had been and what we had been doing. And always we played because we had the luxury and freedom of being able to be children. Harry proudly showed off his stitches, prominent on the patch of scalp that had to be shaved so the medics could clean and care for his wound.
Girl for Sale Page 3