by Jane Elliott
For years after that I had dreams that the police had come knocking on my door to tell me that they’d found my mother dead in a pool of blood because she’d let Richard know that she believed what I’d said about him.
Very soon afterwards Richard and Mum moved to the other end of the estate.
From the moment he’d learned the truth, Steve had thought I should go to the police and report what had happened to me. His parents were the same and I had to tell them that it was never going to happen, that I was never going to be able to find the courage to stand up in court and accuse my stepfather openly of the things he’d done to me, that the repercussions would be too terrible. They could all see that they were putting me under more pressure by going on about it, so they stopped, but I knew they still believed it and in my heart I knew they were right.
When I looked at my two girls, I wondered what I would say to them if they came to me one day and told me someone had attacked them. If I said they must go to the police and they turned round and said, ‘But you never did’, what would I say to them?
It’s terrible to know that you should be doing something but not be able to find the courage to do it. It makes you feel bad about yourself every day. Not that I needed any new excuses to feel bad about myself. My relationships with any new friends I made were all going wrong and the pressures were building up. On top of that we had terrible money problems. Steve’s salary only just covered the mortgage repayments and there was the cost of the petrol needed to get him to and from work. When Sophie was born, she had to be dressed and equipped completely from car-boot sales or with hand-me-downs from friends and Steve’s family. We could hardly afford to feed ourselves properly. For Christmas we were only able to give Emma six Caspar videos, which we’d been able to get for a pound each. She was so excited about them that it was one of the best Christmases she ever had, but we felt terrible. ‘Another Caspar video!’ she exclaimed in wonder as she unwrapped each one.
As soon as Sophie was sleeping through the night I took a job as a cleaner to try to help with the money. I would work from seven in the evening to three in the morning, scrubbing toilets and everything else, but the strain, along with everything else, was too much. I had to give it up after a few weeks.
One of the things I was fed up with was all of us having different names. If we were going to be a family, then we should do it properly.
‘Let’s get married,’ I said to Steve one evening and he happily agreed. ‘The girls can be our bridesmaids.’
I always found life easier to cope with when I was busy and had things to plan. A wedding was a great distraction from the clouds forming in my brain, even if we couldn’t invite most of the people who were important to us, but once it was all over I was back in the same life, with the same problems.
Once Sophie was old enough to start going to playgroup, there were a few hours a day when I had nothing else to do other than brood. Although the house we had moved into was nice enough, it was almost exactly the same layout as every council house I had ever had to live in with Silly Git, and when I was inside it I still didn’t feel I had really escaped. So many things could trigger a bad memory or a panic attack — something the kids might say or a smell I recognized from my childhood — and pictures would come flooding back, reminding me of the things I’d fought so hard to forget.
Over the next couple of years my drinking grew worse whenever I felt low. Every morning after dropping Emma at school and Sophie at playgroup, I would buy a couple of bottles of wine and another packet of paracetamols, some from this shop, some from that shop, and would spend the morning drinking and staring at the tablets, trying to pluck up the courage to take them and end it all. Every day I would bottle out and just get drunk instead.
I found the drink allowed me to have a cry and feel sorry for myself. When I was stone cold sober I would tell myself that there were plenty of people in the world who were worse off than me and I would force myself to get a grip. Once the wine had taken a hold, however, my grip would loosen, the tears would flow and I would weep for everything that had been taken away from me. I would become convinced that I was ruining everyone’s lives, including Steve’s and the girls’, and that they would all be better off without me.
I regularly considered all the possible methods of suicide and on more than one occasion crossed a busy road with my eyes closed. It seemed as if I had a guardian angel, however, because not only did the traffic miss me, but the various implements I used to try to slash my wrists never seemed to hit the right spot. Sooner or later, though, I was in danger of succeeding and Emma and Sophie would be without a mum.
One day I had all my hair cut off. When Steve left the house in the morning I looked as I always had, with long hair, when he came back in the evening it was all gone and I had shorter hair than him.
‘Yeah,’ he said, swallowing back his urge to say what he really thought, ‘no, I like it. Yeah, it looks great. No, really.’ It was a long time before he plucked up the courage to tell me just how shocked he had been by the transformation.
All the strain of propping my failing sanity up was now falling on Steve’s shoulders, with a little support from a few friends I had made in our new location.
Steve’s parents were always so kind to me, but it must have been a terrible shock to them when their son first brought home a girl from the sort of family background I’d had. I’m sure they were relieved when we split up for six months, but once Steve had made his mind up that I was the one he wanted, they always backed us both up in every way possible and treated me just like a daughter.
Now they were under relentless pressure from my family, who were making threatening phone calls in the night and doing a lot of other stuff they wouldn’t tell me because they didn’t want to upset me. They were not the sort of people to be easily intimidated, but it was making their lives unpleasant and confirmed that we had made the right decision in not putting that same pressure on anyone else who might have buckled under it.
With Sophie’s arrival, there were three people who needed me to get better in order to be able to cope with our family life properly. Finally, after spending a year on the waiting list, I was given an appointment with a clinical psychiatrist at the local mental health centre. She talked to me very nicely, explaining where I was on the scale between depressed and euphoric — and I was pretty near the bottom.
I kept begging her to section me. I just wanted a rest and to be looked after by someone else.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘If you didn’t have a family then I would, but if I take you away from them there’s a danger you’ll simply give up.’
Many times when I was in her waiting room over the coming weeks I would hear people crying and screaming because they had been sectioned when they didn’t want to be and I was envious of them.
She prescribed me tranquillizers, anti-depressants, vitamins and sleeping pills, some of them so strong they could only be dispensed by the hospital, and referred me on to a psychologist.
‘You’re a man!’ I said when I first walked into his office. Not only was he a man, but he also looked about my own age, which I thought was going to be a bit embarrassing.
‘Is that a problem?’ he asked.
‘I think so. I want a woman. How do I know you aren’t doing these things to your own kids?’
‘Since you’re here, why don’t you try me?’ he suggested. ‘Because it could be a long wait if you ask to go to someone else.’
I did as he suggested and immediately knew that I had found the right person. It was as if a lead weight had been lifted from my shoulders from the first moment I started talking to him. I poured out everything that had happened to me since the age of four, sparing him none of the details, and he listened and understood how I felt. Someone was actually paying attention to me and not getting angry or being shocked or telling me to pull myself together or to go to the police or anything, just listening.
Often as I talked his eyes would start water
ing up. ‘It’s me who’s meant to be crying,’ I would joke, ‘not you.’
When I showed him some poems I’d written during my bleakest moments he asked if he could take them home to read as he found it a bit much with me in the room. He later told me that everything I had written was classic for someone who had been through what I had.
Over the coming months he did a brilliant job at making me feel better about myself. For the first time I began to believe that everything that had happened to me hadn’t been my own fault and I started to feel my courage growing. I still didn’t feel strong enough to go to the police and start the long battle to have Silly Git put away, but a number of things were falling into place in my head. I actually began to think that perhaps I didn’t have anything to feel guilty and ashamed about. I truly was the wronged party here.
The psychologist also recommended books for me to read which opened my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t alone in the world, there were other people who understood it all. After years of being told that reading meant putting on airs and graces, I was suddenly reading books all the time. It was as if my brain had been starved for years and years and now I had to stuff as many pages into it as possible.
One of the books I read was A Child Called It by Dave Peltzer and I was inspired by the way in which he had got his life together after his abused childhood. I knew a lot of people who had read it and said they couldn’t believe that everything he had written about his mother was true, but I believed it because I had been there too. I could imagine every single scene that he described.
‘You have to read this book,’ I told my psychologist on my next visit. ‘You absolutely have to read it. There must be a school somewhere turning out these people, because they’re all the same.’
‘What people?’ He took the book from me, looking puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘People who do these things to children. They must all come from the same place. They do all the same things. Everything his mother did I can imagine my stepdad doing.’
It took a year of psychotherapy before I felt able to seriously think of going to the police. You can’t overcome a lifetime of fear overnight and I changed my mind a hundred times, but I finally decided I felt strong enough to do what I had always known I should.
‘I think I might be able to go to the police about Silly Git,’ I told Steve one day.
It was just what he had been hoping to hear. He believed with all his heart that no man should be allowed to get away with those sorts of crimes against a child and he had wanted me to speak out for years. He and his parents had kept saying things like ‘How will you feel if he does it to someone else and you could have stopped him?’
Now Steve went straight to the local police station on my behalf. There they told him that he had to lodge the complaint at the station in the area where the crimes had been committed. He drove straight there. I think he wanted to make sure he got the ball rolling before I had a chance to change my mind. He was right. I changed my mind at hourly intervals from then on, but it was too late to go back now and most of the time I knew I was doing the right thing, even if sometimes the fear became almost too much to bear.
An officer called Marie from the Child Protection Unit came to visit me first. I could see that she was more or less going through the motions and I felt guilty for bothering her. I kept apologizing and saying I was sure there must be better things she could be doing with her time, rescuing children who were in danger now rather than listening to a grown up complaining about something that happened years ago. I always felt guilty when I watched news programmes about children starving in Africa or losing limbs to landmines, thinking that I really didn’t have that much to complain about. Now I kept saying that it wasn’t that bad and that kids were probably going through worse all the time. I must have been undermining Marie’s confidence in the case with every new thing I said.
Marie asked me if my stepfather had ever been arrested and I said he’d been arrested hundreds of times but he never ended up going to prison because he always intimidated the witnesses and anyone who brought charges against him always withdrew them again under pressure. I could see that she was becoming exasperated and I realized that it did sound like a far-fetched story.
‘Pull his file,’ I said. ‘Then you’ll be able to see for yourself.’
By the time she left I think Marie was thinking about just putting my complaint on file and leaving it at that. She had explained very patiently how hard it was for the Crown Prosecution Service to actually prosecute in a case like mine. I wasn’t surprised, sure that I must be one of millions who had had terrible things done to them in their childhood, but pleased that I had at least spoken up. As long as my complaint was on record somewhere, I reasoned, Richard would be less likely to get away with the same thing again.
To my surprise Marie came back the very next day, having checked Richard’s record.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said, holding a roll of paper up level with the top of her head. She then allowed it to unravel all the way to the floor. Every inch of it was covered in data about my stepfather.
‘That’s just his arrests in the last seven years,’ she said.
I felt a surge of relief, realizing that someone in authority was actually going to believe what I was saying.
‘I think we’d better start again from the beginning, don’t you?’ Marie said.
We set to work to sort out my memories and build a case that her bosses would be willing to take to court. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service will only take this on if they think there’s a reasonable chance of winning it,’ she warned me.
It wasn’t hard remembering the many dreadful things that had happened to me, but it was almost impossible to get them into any sort of coherent order as my mind jumped from one thing to the next. I could see that the more I told Marie, the more confused she became.
‘Did he do that to you when you were five or ten?’ she would ask. ‘Did it go on for a month, a year? When did that happen? How often? How long?’
So often I couldn’t give a definite answer and every question sent me off on another babbling stream of consciousness as Marie’s pen flew over the page, trying to get it all down in some form that would make sense later. Realizing that there was more than the normal amount of material to sift through, she was forced to bring in a colleague to help her.
In most child abuse cases the abuse only happens for a few years before the child is either saved or the abuser loses interest because their victim matures. Seventeen years was an astonishingly long time to have been systematically abused and made the task far harder than usual as I dredged up one ghastly memory after another.
Marie went to social services to get my file to see whether they had had any idea what was going on and what they might have been doing about it.
‘They’ve lost the file,’ she told me over the phone. ‘I’ve told them they’ve got a week to find it before I send in a team to search properly.’
I could tell how angry she was. She told me it was not the first time this had happened to her in the course of an investigation.
A week later nothing had surfaced and she sent in a team of police to go through every file in the building. They found nothing. Someone had removed every trace of the evidence.
‘What does this mean?’ I wanted to know.
‘It means his defence team will say it would have been impossible for him to have been treating you the way he did because social services were coming round all the time to check that you were alright.’
‘But they never came near me that I can remember,’ I insisted. ‘And even if they had, I would never have had the nerve to tell them what was going on.’
Undaunted, Marie and her colleague continued getting everything they could out of me, until their fingers were aching with the pain of writing.
‘We’re going to have to stop now,’ Marie told me finally. ‘We can’t put in every last thing he ever did to you or this case wil
l last forever.’
They went away to have the whole sorry story typed up. When they came back with the typescript, Marie was armed with a pair of scissors and a Pritt stick.
‘You’ve got to go through this,’ she explained, ‘and cut it up and stick it back together in some sort of order so that the lawyers can understand it.’
I tried to do as she said, but I was still having trouble putting things in order.
‘The woman who typed this up,’ Marie told me as we went through it together, ‘has been working in the department for nearly twenty years, but she had to keep leaving the room because she was crying when she was typing up your words.’
‘So do you think they’ll prosecute him?’ I asked.
‘Who knows?’ Marie shrugged. ‘But if they don’t then it won’t be for lack of trying.’
Now that I had chosen my path forward I was determined to do as good a job as I possibly could. Marie and her colleagues were being so good I wanted to help them in every way, so that they wouldn’t end up wasting their time. We went over and over the document until we’d got it as accurate as we thought we possibly could. Marie then took it away to try to persuade her bosses that it was worth prosecuting.
She came back a few days later with a broad grin on her face. ‘My guv’nor reckons we should go after your mother as well,’ she announced gleefully.
‘Really?’ I was amazed. ‘What for?’
‘He reckons she knew exactly what was going on and we could get her for neglect.’
In the end, however, they decided that going after Mum would be too difficult and they would focus their attention on proving the case against Richard.
I was thrilled. For a short time it was a huge weight off my shoulders. I felt I was finally moving forward towards a happy ending. But then reality struck. The whole process was going to take a year to come to court, during which time Richard would know we were after him and would be doubling his efforts to find us in order to intimidate us into silence.