I Did Tell, I Did

by Cassie Harte

  He didn’t come upstairs that day. I was left to myself, although after he went Mum came up and gave me a huge row for being so rude.

  I reverted to my old strategy of trying to avoid being in the house when I knew Bill was coming round. I’d walk the dog for longer and longer stretches of time; I’d stay behind after choir practice; I would even go and help Auntie Mary in her fish and chip shop, peeling potatoes or cleaning the deep-fat fryers—anything that kept me out of the house. But it got harder and harder to predict when he was coming, and Mum tried to arrange his visits so that I’d be there, for some reason. It was as if she was trying to force him upon me.

  After he had been back in favour for about a month, he asked if he could take me out for a drive one day. I froze, and my face must have shown the sheer terror I felt, but Mum said, ‘That’s a good idea. You two go off and have a nice time together.’

  I panicked. ‘Please, Mum, I’ve got lots of homework that I have to do by tomorrow. I can’t go. Please don’t make me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Cassie. Of course you can take an hour off to spend with your favourite uncle. He’s missed you. He’s been looking forward to spending time with you.’ She gave me a don’t-you-argue-with-me look.

  ‘I really can’t, Mum. My teacher will be cross. I’ll get into trouble at school. Don’t make me go.’

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ she snapped. ‘Poor Bill is standing here offering you a treat and you throw it back in his face. Get out to the car right now. I won’t hear another word.’

  There was nothing I could do. As we left the house and walked down the path, Uncle Bill took my hand, for all the world as if he were a loving uncle with his favourite niece. He was always telling me I was his favourite: that I was special, that he cared about me, that he loved me. Words, lying words. To me the word ‘love’ meant something nasty and horrid and evil. The word ‘love’ was a lie.

  Bill led me to the car and helped me into the front seat, his grip vice-like just in case I decided to make a run for it. He wasn’t going to let me slip away now. He was going to make sure he had his way.

  I didn’t know where we were going: didn’t know and didn’t care. Anywhere was going to be bad. He could have taken me to Heaven on Earth but it would have been Hell for me.

  We drove for a long time, much longer than usual. He was talking to me, I think, but I didn’t listen and I’ve got no idea what it was about. There was a rushing sound in my ears and my heart was beating hard. I knew what was about to happen. I knew he was about to hurt me.

  Bill was obviously dying to get to our destination because he swore when we came upon a diversion sign in the road. He had no choice but to follow the signs, but shortly after we turned into the new road he pulled up in the middle of nowhere, just by a path that led into a field. What was he doing? What now?

  He suddenly lurched towards me and grabbed my leg, pulling it over to his side of the seat, and he began to kiss me roughly, squashing my teeth against my lip. ‘Oh, I’ve missed this. I’ve missed you,’ he slurred, grabbing at my skirt and trying to push his hand inside my panties.

  I wanted to cry for him to stop but I couldn’t. I was so terrified I couldn’t make a sound. I hadn’t forgotten the pain of the many times he had abused me before. I prayed that this time he would stop before he hurt me as badly as the other times.

  I prayed that God would prevent this happening. After all, I was a good girl. I’d been confirmed now. Why wasn’t God listening?

  Uncle Bill grabbed my hand and thrust it into his trousers. There were no preliminaries today, no pretence that we were playing a game of ‘find the love toy’. He seemed desperate. He was swearing under his breath, and his hands were rough and urgent. He couldn’t wait.

  Suddenly he pulled my legs apart, yanked my panties to one side, lay on top of me and pushed inside me with a loud grunt. I braced myself for the onslaught of shoving and pushing but this time it was all over in a second and he had collapsed on top of me with a sigh. Was that it? Had God been listening? Was it over already? Could we go home now?

  The relief I felt was short-lived. He fastened his trousers again, fumbling with the buttons, then started the car and pulled out onto the road, still driving in the same direction. Why hadn’t we turned back towards home? What was going to happen now?

  After what seemed like eternity, we drove down a path by a stretch of water, the towpath of a canal or river, although I’ve got no idea which it was. Then we stopped and he put the car in reverse and drove slowly alongside a boat. A houseboat.

  Bill parked carefully and put the brake on, then turned to me with excitement, his face animated. ‘We are going to have such fun here,’ he grinned. ‘There’s no one around so we can play games for as long as we want.’

  My stomach was knotted so tightly I couldn’t move. Bill came round to my side and grabbed my hand to pull me out of the car.

  ‘Don’t you want to come and have a look?’ he asked, as if I should be excited and eager. Did he really think I enjoyed these games? Did he honestly think they made me happy? Why did he think I cried and screamed and begged him to stop? Was he deaf and blind to my pleas?

  ‘Come on, let’s get on board,’ he urged.

  ‘I don’t like boats,’ I said in a small voice, the only one I could manage. I didn’t like boats, didn’t like his games, didn’t like him.

  ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll look after you,’ he told me.

  I knew about his kind of looking after and I didn’t want it. I wanted to be back at home, in my bedroom, on my own. I looked around, up and down the towpath, but there was no one else in sight. No other boats were moored on that stretch. I was utterly and completely at his mercy. I considered trying to make a run for it, but where would I go? In which direction would I run? Anyway, he was a grown man and would catch me before I got far at all. I was still a skinny little girl and not a fast runner.

  The houseboat was brown and a bit grimy. He pushed me up onto the deck then down some wooden steps into a room that had a sort of bed in it. There was nothing else except a bed. I went cold. I suppose I had hoped that there would be very little room in a boat for him to be able to hurt me again, but there was plenty of space in there for him to do whatever he wanted. He sat on the bed and stood me in front of him.

  ‘Take your clothes off,’ he ordered, and I began to cry.

  I had been trying to teach myself to switch off during his abuse. I don’t mean I switched off to what was happening to the extent that I didn’t make any memories; that would have been wonderful but I couldn’t manage that. Instead I taught myself to concentrate on something else, such as the sea. I would think about waves washing up on the seashore, the shushing sound as they pulled back along the sand, and their rhythmic, timeless movement. It didn’t stop the fear, but it made it bearable. I tried to shut myself off in my head, to put all the horrid nastiness into a box and keep it there with the lid firmly on. If I could learn to do it really well, I hoped I’d be able to cut off from what was happening to me. But when he made me take my clothes off, I felt so exposed that I couldn’t switch off, couldn’t pretend I was anywhere else but there. Present. In that moment. I was a small, helpless child.

  ‘Get them off!’ he ordered again, and I obeyed because there was nothing else I could do. Slowly I unbuttoned my school cardigan and shirt, pulled my vest over my head, then sat down on the edge of the bed to remove my socks and shoes. All the time Bill was staring at me, touching himself and making groaning noises in his throat.

  ‘Lovely,’ he leered. ‘You’re lovely and you’re all mine.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to remove my panties, but Bill came over and ripped them off then pushed me back on the bed, forcing my legs apart.

  ‘Oh. I love you. You know that, don’t you? I’ve missed you and missed our games. I know you must have missed this too, haven’t you?’

  Before I could answer, there was the sudden horrendous pain again. Pain like I had never felt before in
my young life. He kept pushing and pushing himself inside me and I was trying to scream that it hurt but no sound came out of my mouth. The love toy had become an evil monster controlled by him, my godfather, the man they called Uncle Bill. How could he do this to me? Why? What had I done to deserve this?

  I had stopped crying. I kept my eyes closed and tried to stop breathing altogether. I stopped being, stopped living. I was a thing, an object, not a person. On and on it went without respite, for longer than it ever had before.

  When it was over, the man who professed to love me pushed me away so hard that I fell onto the floor. He was swearing and trying to get his trousers back on and he couldn’t do the buttons up for some reason.

  ‘Get up, get over here and button these up!’ he shouted.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t touch his sweaty, smelly trousers. I couldn’t move. I was hurting and scared. Why should I do anything to help him when all he ever did was hurt me?

  But when he ordered me again, my courage failed and I got up and did his bidding with shaking fingers. My whole body shook after our ‘games’. It was as if my muscles went into a spasm of revulsion. My teeth were chattering, my legs felt like jelly and there were palpitations in my chest. Every part of my body was protesting at the way it had been treated.

  In the car on the way home, I sat mute, huddled, with my arms round myself. Bill looked over and grinned. ‘We’ll have to go to the boat again really soon, Cassie. But remember this is our secret. You can’t tell anyone. You know what will happen if you do.’ He left the threat hanging in the air. ‘Besides, no one will believe you anyway.’

  He didn’t have to remind me of that. I knew that already. I had told Mum and I hadn’t been believed.

  Uncle Bill dropped me off outside our front door, patting my knee and smiling as though we’d just been out for a treat together, like the zoo or a funfair. ‘See you again soon, Cassie,’ he said. ‘Tell your mum I had to dash but that I’ll see her next time.’

  I went into the house and straight up to the bathroom, where I locked the door behind me. No one shouted up to ask if I was OK or if I’d had a good time. I ran some water in the bath, took my clothes off then I climbed into the water and scrubbed and scrubbed myself until I bled. I wanted to erase any last trace of Bill’s smell from my skin, get rid of any lingering stickiness from the yucky stuff he left inside me.

  I didn’t go downstairs for tea and no one came up to ask why not. I just dried myself and went straight to bed. I prayed to God yet again to rescue me from my uncle and then I cried myself to sleep, muffling the sound of my sobs in the pillow. I must have been the loneliest girl in the world at that point. No one was listening. No one cared.

  After the first visit to the houseboat, things settled into a routine. Bill arranged with my mum that he would pick me up after school three nights a week, when I didn’t have choir practice or Girls’ Brigade. I was safe on Tuesdays and Fridays but not the rest of the week.

  ‘She needs a hand with all those books to carry,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got the car so I’m happy to do it.’

  On the way home, he would pull off the road into the bluebell wood, telling me we had to play our secret game. This might be pushing his love toy inside me, or making me lick it or forcing my hands round it until the white stuff squirted out. We’d be late home, but Bill would always have some explanation for Mum—an errand he had to do, something he needed to pick up, or the car needing petrol. Not that she ever asked where we had been. It didn’t matter to her. She wouldn’t have noticed.

  We went to the houseboat most weekends, and then there was more time for his sick games. He would tell me that the love toy became very angry if it wasn’t treated well. Treating it well, I had learned, meant touching and stroking it until it became hard then, the worst part of all, licking it until he said it was clean.

  I never looked at it. Never looked at him. I did my best to find a safe place in my head where I could forget about the ugly purple piece of flesh in my hands or in my mouth or between my legs. I tried to forget about the grimacing, sweating face looming over me and the fat lips covering my face and neck with their slobber.

  After we began to go to the houseboat on Saturdays, Bill made Mum tell Claire’s mum that I couldn’t stay over on Friday nights any more because he wanted me up bright and early, ready for him to pick me up for a full day of abuse. I took this new blow without complaint. I had no power to affect anything about my life any more. I was utterly powerless. Some Saturdays he would bring a picnic with him, or he would stop and get some fish and chips at a nearby shop, but I could never eat. I was too scared and tense to eat, too sickened by what he did to me. We never stayed overnight but we could be there all day. Long horrible days that left me in a lot of pain.

  Life was utterly unbearable. The in-between bits were very rare now. I was sleepwalking from one assault to the next. I hardly ever saw Claire, except at the Girls’ Life Brigade meeting when we were busy and didn’t have time to talk, then I would have to say goodbye to her at the bus stop and go straight home afterwards. At the age of thirteen she left the Brigade when schoolwork got too demanding, and I did the same. The hope seemed to have disappeared from my life altogether and I thought God had gone with it. My life was a sham. A painful, scary sham.

  It was as though everything I’d ever had had been stolen from me. I was living a lie, pretending to everyone around me, lying about where I’d been because the truth was just too awful. I never cried any more. I just went through the motions of going to school, doing my work, then walking out the school gates to where Uncle Bill’s black Austin was parked. It never occurred to me to make an excuse and say that I had to stay behind late or something. The caretaker locked the gates at 4.30 anyway, so it wouldn’t have worked.

  If it was raining, my friends would say, ‘Aren’t you lucky having someone to give you a lift home?’ Not many of their parents had cars in those days. I’d just look at them and think how little they knew me. Bill would never get out of the car to greet me. He’d just wait till I got in, then he’d start the car and drive off to the woods.

  When I look back, I don’t know how I survived. But I was just surviving, not living. I couldn’t share what was happening to me. I was twelve years old and I felt like the walking dead.

  I became more and more introspective. While my friends liked Elvis Presley, I preferred sad ballads like Patsy Cline’s ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ and Carl Smith’s ‘Why? Why?’ I started reading romantic novels and poetry because they took me outside my own head to a make-believe place far away. Friends invited me to parties but I always refused, embarrassed because I didn’t have anything to wear, and didn’t know how to be around boys. What would I say to them? What would they expect of me?

  Ellen and Rosie were working in the local hospital and both had boyfriends, so I watched them dressing up in the big full skirts of the period, giggling as they checked their makeup and pulled on stilettos. Tom left school at fifteen and joined the Marine cadets and I liked to help him clean the brass buttons and white belts of his uniform. He was the only one I felt remotely close to. I loved him and I think he cared about me as well, but we never had a conversation about what was really going on in the house and I couldn’t ever have told him about my misery. Anne was still the baby of the family, but I began to worry that Uncle Bill might turn his attentions to her one day. I thought about warning someone, telling them to keep an eye on him—but how could I, without telling what he was doing to me? So I said nothing.

  I hadn’t had any sex education at school but I knew what Bill was doing was wrong. My friends had talked about kissing boys and ‘playing around’ but I didn’t know what ‘playing around’ meant. I thought it must be fun and what was happening to me was anything but fun. One day Wendy told us that her mum and dad were having a baby and she exclaimed that she hadn’t realised they had sex. Maureen laughed and began to describe graphically what happens when a baby is created. It was only then I realised that
what Uncle Bill was doing to me was grown-up sex, the kind that makes babies. Up till then I’d been unsure and confused.

  One day we were lying on the bed in the houseboat after he had raped me, when he said something that shattered me: ‘If you told anyone about us now, they’d think you must have been enjoying it all this time. They’d think you agreed, that you wanted to be my girlfriend. Have you ever thought about that?’

  The thought that anyone could believe I enjoyed his attentions had never occurred to me. Of course it hadn’t.

  ‘They’ll think you must have loved it. That you made advances to me and flirted with me. You’re the guilty one and I’m innocent. They’d probably send you away to a home, a place where you could play these games all the time.’

  I thought about what he said and decided it was probably true. I’d been playing games with Bill since the age of seven and I was now a teenager. He first forced himself inside me when I was eleven. If I hadn’t wanted to do it, everyone would assume I’d just have stopped. They wouldn’t understand how he drained the will to resist from me, drained the will to live. He persuaded me that everyone would believe I’d been in love with him and it was all my own fault. Was it my own fault?

  Now I felt guilty as well as dirty. That is, when I felt anything at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  When I was about fourteen, my Nana C, Mum’s mum, came to stay with us. She had been very poorly and Mum was the only family she had so, reluctantly, Mum agreed she could move in. We didn’t have a spare bedroom upstairs but a bed was put into the back room of the ground floor of the house and she was installed in there with all her bits and pieces.

  I was pleased when she came as I was very fond of her and she was kind to me whenever Mum wasn’t around. Mum told me that it was my responsibility to look after Nana. This gave her an excuse to exclude me from family outings to the fair or to the beach, but I didn’t mind because I was much happier staying at home with Nana.