‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m happy to leave it at that because his mother seems quite strict.’
‘Oh, believe me,’ Mum said, ‘I’m going to sort him out when I get him home. He won’t be doing anything like this again.’
The store manager seemed satisfied as he watched me being literally dragged out of his office by my ear. Once we were safely in the house I was given another beating for being so useless. I then headed back to the care home for sanctuary, telling them that I didn’t want to stay at home any longer. It sometimes felt as though I was trapped in a cycle that would never be broken – in care, back at Mum’s, in care again. At least I had choices, though, and that made me feel a lot stronger than I ever had before.
Chapter Seventeen
Moving On
Thomas and I got closer over that year. I was fifteen and he was almost thirteen by then and my best mate in the world as well as being my baby brother. I knew he had been through many of the same ordeals as me and that gave us a bond I didn’t share with anyone else. At weekends when I was at home, if we had any spare time, he and I would go scrumping apples in next door’s garden, which drove our neighbour mad. Or we would go over to the woods behind our house just to get away and talk about our lives and our plans for what we would do the moment we were old enough to escape Mum once and for all. The neighbours tried complaining to Mum once or twice about us stealing from their garden and she actually used to stick up for us, which meant she fell out with them just as surely as she had fallen out with poor old Paddy at the previous house.
Larry and Barry remained unbearable, though. I never had any kind of decent relationship with either of them. One day I went for a wander in the woods on my own and, as I trampled through the undergrowth, I suddenly came across Barry lying naked on his back with his legs in the air and Larry on top of him. My stomach turned over at the sight.
‘Get off him!’ I shouted, giving Larry a shove.
Larry grabbed hold of my arm tightly. ‘You’ve got no right to fucking say anything, and if you do you’ll get a battering!’
They carried on with what they had been doing, and it made me want to retch. It brought back so many disgusting memories that I had suppressed of what happened at Uncle Douglas’s house: twosomes, threesomes, the men who just liked to watch, and that older lad who’d enjoyed it all and explained to the rest of us how to do it right. How could Barry be getting pleasure from something I had found such torture? But then, he was twenty-four now and I’d only been nine when it started.
‘Fuck off, you little wanker!’ Barry shouted.
I walked away feeling angry and confused. Once my eyes had been opened to it I realised it was happening all the time and the two of them were constantly disappearing off into the woods together. They tried to convince me that it was all just a bit of fun and that I should join in with them but I couldn’t get my head round it. I’d been in the outside world enough to realise that it wasn’t normal behaviour for brothers to have sex with each other. It was sick and wrong and I didn’t want to be anywhere near it.
I found it increasingly difficult to stay in the house knowing what was going on and I went back to the care home yet again, needing some space to sort out my mixed-up head. After a while I became worried about Thomas still being in that environment so I went home to try to persuade him to come away with me and we could tell someone about all the sick things that had happened in our house.
‘No, no,’ he was adamant. ‘Mum’ll kill me if I tell.’
‘That’s what she used to say to me,’ I said. ‘But she never did.’
‘Yeah, and look where it’s got you!’ he shouted. ‘You’re in care and no one believes anything you say. What have you got? At least I’ve got a home and a family.’
‘That ain’t a family.’
I threatened to tell someone about our ‘family’ myself and he became angry. We ended up fighting, which was something we had never done before. He was able to handle himself well by then and he did me a fair bit of damage before I realised I wasn’t going to get anywhere and walked away. By the time I got back to the care home I was absolutely stewing with anger and exploded in my bedroom, smashing everything I could get my hands on. A key worker came running in and tried to calm me down but I was past listening to reason and in the end he had to restrain me forcibly. I put up a fight, my anger making me strong, and I managed to escape from him, running downstairs, swearing and shouting all the way, slamming the doors as I went. I didn’t know where I was going; I just knew I wanted to get away.
Once I got outside I could see all the other key workers sitting around in their room, having a meeting. They looked so smug and so useless, sitting there behind the picture window, deciding all our fates but having no idea what it actually felt like to be us. I picked up a brick and hurled it through the glass with all my strength, hitting one of them on the shoulder. Then I turned and ran as fast as I could, still with no idea where I was going, just wanting to get away from everyone and everything. Worried that I was going to do something really stupid the staff at the home called the police out to bring me back, although I don’t know why they bothered.
By about five o’clock I was back in the home and the window had been boarded up. The man in charge of all the homes in the area called me into the office. He looked like someone who had finally had all he could take.
‘You,’ he said, ‘pack your bags and get out. And don’t come back.’
‘I ain’t got nowhere to go,’ I spat.
‘Go back to your mother. You’ve got a home to go to.’
‘You don’t understand …’
‘You’re not coming back in here. You’re sixteen now so we’ve got no duty of care to you.’ My birthday had passed unnoticed just a few weeks before.
‘So can I have my pocket money?’
‘No, you can’t.’
That evening I found myself outside on the doorstep, with my rucksack thrown after me. I knew Mum and the others had gone away that afternoon to stay in a caravan for a few days and that the house was empty, so I went back and slept in the garden shed for the night. It was cold and I had trouble getting to sleep, which gave me plenty of time to think over my position and what I really wanted to do.
I knew there was no point in staying at home any longer. I had tried and tried to get on with Mum and the others and it was never going to work. I had even fallen out with Thomas now. I knew that if I wanted to make anything of my life at all I had to make a new start somewhere else, somewhere Mum wouldn’t be able to find me to persuade me to go back. But where? And how?
The next morning I broke into the house and went through it collecting every bit of small change I could scrounge, as well as all the food and clothing I could find in the cupboards. As I went I left a trail of devastation through all the neat, shiny rooms, smashing everything that came within reach. I turned Larry and Barry’s room upside down. I was releasing some of my pent-up anger and deliberately making it impossible ever to return, burning the last of my bridges. Mum would know that I had done this to her precious house and if she ever got her hands on me she would beat me up again. Maybe next time she would actually kill me, as she had threatened she would do so many times before.
Like tens of thousands of young people before me I decided to head for London, a city that would be big enough for me to disappear in and where Mum would never be able to find me, even if she wanted to. I had virtually no money in my pocket, no friends or even acquaintances anywhere that I could turn to, but I still thought the capital city would be my best bet for survival. Once I had done all the damage I could to the rooms, I walked out of the house for the last time. I knew it was going to be tough. I’d heard that the place the homeless kids went to was Charing Cross, but I had no idea beyond that of what might happen in my search for a new life.
As I stood by the roadside with my thumb out, I felt this great burst of happiness. I was free at last. No more living in fear of Mum’s temper. I could do whateve
r I wanted with my life. I didn’t yet know what that would be but I knew there was a world out there a lot better than the one I’d experienced so far. The emotion that filled me was an unfamiliar one. I’d never really thought about the future much – just about getting through one day at a time. Now, for the first time, I felt a strong sense of hope, and it was an amazing feeling.
Epilogue
I had a hard time finding my feet in London and there were moments when I thought I wasn’t going to make it, but I suppose there must be a strong core in me somewhere. I’d survived three years of solitary confinement in a cellar, starvation, beatings, rapes and all kinds of abuse, and then almost four years servicing clients in Uncle Douglas’s revolting porn factory. If you can survive that, I reckon you can survive virtually anything.
Whenever I read in the papers about some celebrity or other being taken to court for ‘downloading images of child abuse’ or about yet another ‘paedophile ring’ being exposed by the police, or a ringleader being tracked down and arrested in some deceptively ordinary-looking house somewhere, I think about how little the average person understands that kind of world. What happens to some of the most abused children in our society is much darker and more disturbing than the common misper-ceptions most of us carry around. Children in Western countries are very seldom snatched from the streets by strangers. (It is a different story in other parts of the world where poverty is more intense and the trafficking of vulnerable people is more widespread.) When it does happen and a child vanishes on the way to the local shops or, worse still, from the safety of their own home, it is headline news for weeks or months on end, but this is partly because of the rarity of such events.
When we read about the children who are filmed being abused and the images being sold over the Internet, we are all naturally terrified that such a fate could befall someone in our own families. But in most cases our fears are unfounded because the children who appear in those films, that are downloaded by people who are unable to overcome their curiosity or their own urges to watch scenes of torture and inhumanity, have nearly always been introduced to that world by their parents or by guardians or by someone else in their close family. They have usually been ‘sold’ and dehumanised just as surely and cold-bloodedly as any other slaves in history. The abusers of children like me never see us as human beings, never consider our feelings, never ask us about ourselves, never even use our names. I wish the press and social services and the police would get their heads round this and learn to listen and be patient when children seem disturbed but can’t explain why.
I never saw my mother again after the day I left Norwich, or Larry or Barry, or my sister. I never heard again from Wally or Marie or Aunt Melissa, and I only see Thomas occasionally. For a long time, I didn’t want to look backwards in my life; I just wanted to move on. Then, when I was twenty-five, the most incredible thing happened. I met a girl who was beautiful and kind and what was amazing was that she seemed to like me as well. She must have done, because she agreed to marry me and we’ve been together ever since.
I hadn’t thought I’d ever be able to have a normal relationship after everything I’d been through. We had problems in the early days as I struggled with my hang-ups from the past, but she stuck by me and became my true soulmate. I plucked up the courage to tell her, bit by bit, what had happened to me, and she was horrified and sickened by it, but it helped her to understand me more and together we got through our problems. We talked at length about whether I should go to the police and press charges. It would have been good to see Uncle Douglas and Joe and all the members of his paedophile ring sent to jail, but I didn’t do it. I still had my strong distrust of the police and people in positions of authority. They’d never believed me in the past, so why would they do so now?
My wife and I have five children now, and I’ve worked hard at being the kind of parent I wish I had had – the kind I think my Dad would have been if he’d lived. You hear about some men who come from backgrounds like mine becoming psychopaths when they’re older because they’re so full of anger, but I went in the opposite direction. I just made up my mind that I was going to be the best parent and the best husband I could possibly be. It still feels like a miracle, but I’ve got a very happy, tight-knit family – something I never ever thought would happen.
Now I’ve found happiness in my family life, it’s given me the strength to tell my story in this book. I know it’s not an easy read, but I hope it will help those of you who have made it to this last page understand the evil that still exists in our society. The more people who understand, the more chance there is of getting help for any other child who finds himself in a similar position in future.
Acknowledgements
To
Sue Quinn and Team (C.W. Company),
Alan and Fiona Stokes,
and Dr R. H. Davies (P.O.W.) Coiety Clinic
for your support and call beyond duty.
Copyright
This book is based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, some names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed.
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First published by HarperElement 2008
© Joe Peters 2008
Joe Peters asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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