I Did Tell, I Did

by Cassie Harte

  After a while he released me and said, ‘You must meet my wife, Pamela,’ and I was OK with that. He went over to a pretty lady in a smart suit, who was talking with some other mourners, and brought her by the hand over to me.

  ‘This is Kath’s daughter, Cassie.’

  She looked at me closely. ‘So you’re Cassie,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived with your ghost for all of my marriage.’

  I didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to say anything.

  Steve smiled and said he was glad we had met again. I asked if his older brothers would see me. I wanted to tell them on behalf of my mother that I was sorry. Steve said that it wasn’t the time, because they were obviously still very upset at their mother’s death. He promised to ask them after a while if they would meet me, but he wasn’t optimistic. They had been very close to their mum and were very protective. Both the older boys had been young lads when I was born and the affair came to light; they had seen what it had done to their mum, so he wasn’t optimistic. He asked me for my telephone number, I gave it to him and then I left. Although I felt I was intruding, neither of these younger boys said I was. They both agreed that I had a right to be there, as their half-sister.

  When I arrived home, I felt shattered. I hadn’t expected any of what had happened. But it felt good. I had often wondered how it would be if we met again, my young love and I, and now I knew. We would be OK. We were OK. Warmth and love had surrounded us standing in that beautiful sad garden, love for each other that hadn’t died but had changed through necessity and time. We now had the love of a brother and sister, and that felt good. Life had been enhanced once again.

  But it wouldn’t last.

  Steve phoned me the next day and asked to see me. Of course I said yes and we arranged to meet the following evening at his house. I was nervous and my husband offered to take me there. Daniel was keen to meet this person from my past whom he had heard so much about. He still didn’t know much about my childhood, and he certainly didn’t know about the horrendous sexual abuse I had suffered at the hands of Steve’s father. I hadn’t told him, as I hadn’t told anyone. Except Mum, and then Peter.

  As we arrived, Pamela, my half-brother’s wife, was leaving. She smiled warmly at me and said she would be back later, that she had a meeting to attend. I was relieved to see her smile. That meant she didn’t have a problem with me.

  Steve, Daniel and I had a coffee and started to talk about the past. Steve told me that none of Bill’s sons had attended his funeral. They had hated the way he treated their mum and had all fallen out with him before his death.

  I don’t know if he saw the look on my face when my abuser’s name was mentioned, but he saw something.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cassie,’ he said kindly, ‘I know how you loved him, but he was a bad man.’ He came over and crouched at my feet. He sounded angry, angry and hurt.

  I started crying uncontrollably. Before he could say any more, I put my hand on his arm. ‘I didn’t love him,’ I gasped through my tears. ‘I didn’t love him.’

  ‘But we all thought…’

  I was suffocating under years of pretence and lies and at last the truth burst out. ‘He raped me,’ I said. ‘He raped me.’ My voice was sinking to an almost inaudible whisper.

  Daniel tried to move over to comfort me, but Steve put his arm out to stop him. It was he who held me—Steve, with his own demons, his own pain and hurt, held me and cried with me for what seemed like forever.

  Steve really hated our abuser, the man who had treated his mother so badly. He said my revelation had made him angrier than he would have thought possible. He knew how badly my mum had treated me, but he had never known that the evil man had also so cruelly and horrendously abused me. He told of the hatred the whole family felt towards my mum. It was hard to hear about the terrible pain that these two people, my parents, had caused to Steve, someone I loved.

  At the end of that evening, I was feeling a furious anger that I hadn’t thought I was capable of. I wanted to see my abuser face to face. The fact that he was dead had always been a comfort to me because his death had removed the fear and terror I had felt, but now I wished he were here, alive, so that I could somehow make him pay for the pain he had inflicted on us, his victims.

  I was also worried about the way this horror had been blurted out in front of my husband. He knew now. He knew the whole horrible everything. What would he think? Would he still love me? Please let him still love me.

  When we got home, I asked Daniel how he felt and he held me and reassured me that nothing from my past would ever make him change the way he felt about me. With that love, that reassurance, we went to bed and tried to put the evening where it belonged, in the past. But for me it was still very raw.

  I couldn’t forget, couldn’t leave it alone, but I didn’t know what I could do with it either. I just knew I had to do something with this horrendous information. The anger I felt towards Mum had no bounds. I believe that this strength made it possible for me to take the action I took next. It didn’t matter what I did now or what repercussions there might be, because nothing could make this right and nothing would take away the wrong.

  I decided to write a letter to my mother. It wasn’t difficult; it didn’t take long. I just sat and poured my heart out in a letter.

  I started by telling her about Gwen’s funeral and about my feelings of guilt on her, my mother’s behalf. I told her how I had felt betrayed as a child after I told her that Uncle Bill had sexually abused me and she had done nothing. I reminded her of how she shouted and screamed at me that it wasn’t true, that I was a liar. I went on to tell her that this sexual abuse continued throughout my growing years and how I had to endure it on my own. Terrified and alone. I told her that her affair with Bill had caused other people tremendous pain and hurt and had left me with a legacy that was hard to bear. I reminded her of the tranquillisers I had taken and the reason they were first given to me. How at first, before I knew the dangers, they had helped me to get on with my life and shut the boxes that held the terrible truth. She knew how dependent I had become on them and I reminded her how she turned her back on me, once again, when I was going through withdrawal.

  As I wrote this letter, I cried. Cried for the child who was me, little Cassie who had grown up in a loveless childhood, a childhood that was filled with horror, abuse, cruelty and loneliness. I cried for the boy I had loved, whom I should never have loved, for the pain and sadness that she, my mother, and her lover had caused to him and his family. I cried, remembering the times my dad, my beloved dad, had suffered mental cruelty at her hands. Lots and lots of tears. The letter continued to ask her why. Why hadn’t she believed me about Uncle Bill? Why had she not wanted me? Why couldn’t she love me?

  I’m not sure why I wrote this long, long letter. I needed to put this to bed, leave it in the past, but not before she knew. Not before I had told her that I knew the whole truth now.

  I posted the letter before I had a chance to change my mind. I posted it and tried to forget what I had discovered, forget the truth.

  But life isn’t that easy.

  I wasn’t allowed to forget.

  A few days later I arrived home to find a policeman at my door.

  ‘We’ve had a complaint,’ he said, ‘a complaint about you having sent malicious mail, threatening letters.’

  Daniel was at home and we both looked at each other, speechless.

  The police officer continued, ‘You wrote a letter to your mother recently?’

  I replied that I had, but that it was a private matter.

  He took a letter out of his folder and handed it to me. ‘Is this the letter?’ he asked.

  I took the offending pieces of paper out of his hand and told him it was. It was the letter I had written to her.

  ‘We were called to her flat because of the distress it caused her receiving it,’ he said.

  Distress? She didn’t know the meaning of the word. I wasn’t sure what to say. I explained to him that I
had sent it because of some new information I had heard a few days previously. I was hurting and I wanted her to know the pain she had caused me. I felt that I had to tell her what I knew and show how it made me feel. I never meant to hurt her.

  ‘We have to follow up every complaint. It’s our duty,’ he said kindly. ‘She made the complaint but then she wasn’t very happy about letting me read the letter.’

  I don’t suppose she was. She hadn’t reckoned on that when she called the police. Now others would hear the truth and she wouldn’t like that at all.

  ‘So what happens now?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. I read the letter and because she insisted that I take it further and show a senior officer, I had to carry out her wishes. The superintendent I showed it to agreed with me, that the letter is the pouring out of a daughter’s pain to her mother.’ He looked at me with such warmth that my fears dissipated. ‘I have told your mother to stay away from you, not to contact you in any way, and I suggest you do the same.’

  He didn’t need to say this.

  I never thought for one moment that Mum would reply to my letter. And I certainly didn’t think that she would stoop this low. But the complaint had backfired on her. She had been seen for who she was, warts and all. To have someone else read what she had been accused of must have been very painful for her, the woman who cared so much about what people would think. But I didn’t care. She had opened this up to people outside the safety of her family. She had made our secrets public, not me. I had been warned as a child never to tell. This time I definitely told!

  When I’d told her about Uncle Bill’s abuse back at the age of seven, maybe, just maybe, my childish explanations were unconvincing. Now I had set it out unequivocally, in black and white, you’d think any normal mother would have been horrified and racked with guilt that they hadn’t protected their child. But mine wasn’t any normal mother. Far from rushing round to apologise and condemn the man who had made my childhood a living nightmare, she tried to have me arrested. She was a cold, heartless woman.

  Writing the letter didn’t make me feel any better. I didn’t feel released from my past, but I was able to move a little further away from the memories. I had to, to survive. My childhood and young adulthood had caused me so much pain that the only way I had been able to continue living was to take the tranquillisers and leave the horrors of the abuse, the betrayal and the loneliness in the boxes I had made for them. Leave them boxed up and throw away the key. But now the boxes had been ripped open and all the contents strewn at my feet. I couldn’t avoid them any more, but I didn’t have to look at them closely. I knew they were there—I was aware of that every day—but I didn’t have to look at them.

  In August 1996 my husband, youngest daughter and our menagerie all moved to Wales and I decided to go back to college and train to be a counsellor in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. It was tough doing the course as it forced me to analyse many more issues from my past, but eventually, just before the new millennium, I gained my Masters degree.

  At the graduation ceremony, as I walked up on stage to receive my scroll, I was nervous about tripping over in front of the watching crowd. And there was something else as well: I was scared that I would be found out to be unworthy. I was the little girl who was unloved and unwanted. Everyone there would somehow know where I had come from and see through me, see the real me.

  Then suddenly I realised the truth.

  Of course they would. This was me. This was the Cassie I had always wanted to be. The Cassie who had struggled through childhood and earlier times, without being able to show who she really was. This is who they would see—me! And it was OK. For the first time ever, I was beginning to like myself.

  It was a wonderful moment, a moment when I knew that life was good. That God was listening after all.

  Epilogue

  I hadn’t seen or heard from my mother since the letter episode, which was fine by me. Or so I thought. But one Christmas I sent her a card. I don’t know why I did that or what I thought would happen. I hadn’t expected a reply but when an envelope arrived with her writing on it, I was excited. I thought she had sent me a card in return. I hoped that she wanted contact with me. Why did I still keep hoping?

  I tore the envelope open excitedly and there it was—the card I had sent to her, returned. Returned with a note saying that she had no daughter called Cassie. She had all the family that was hers, all the family she wanted, in her life.

  She hadn’t changed. I threw the card in the bin.

  Some of the old issues kept coming back because I kept inviting them. I decided to let go of any hopes about her and get on with the rest of my life.

  I only saw Mum one more time, in the summer of 2003. Tom rang to let me know she was seriously ill in hospital and, although Daniel cautioned me against it, I decided to visit her to say my goodbyes. When I walked in I peered round the ward, looking for her. Where was this huge influence on my life? Where was this formidable woman who had hated me so much?

  A nurse came over and pointed to a bed where a frail, greyhaired woman was lying. It was her. The woman who couldn’t love me, the woman who hadn’t believed me or helped me, the woman who was my mother.

  She saw Daniel and me walking towards her bed. At first I don’t think she realised who I was, then, as recognition dawned, she looked behind me and saw my husband. She had an audience, someone to play-act to.

  ‘Oh Cassie,’ she cried, ‘my darling Cassie, I’ve been so ill, so unhappy.’

  She reached for me, stretching her arms up as I bent down to her bed. Still acting after all these years!

  ‘How are you?’ I asked in a neutral voice. ‘Are you feeling any better?’

  ‘I am now, dear,’ she said using her small poor-me voice. ‘I am now you’re here.’ She looked over at Daniel. ‘Thank you for bringing her,’ she said.

  ‘It’s OK, I’d do anything for my girl,’ replied the man who loved me, the man who supported me in everything I did.

  ‘She’s only half yours,’ retorted this woman in her sick bed. ‘The other half will always be mine.’

  It sounded cruel and possessive, not a motherly kind of sentiment, but one of ownership that I didn’t like the sound of.

  We stayed and talked with her for a while but all she could do was moan about everything: her treatment in the hospital, my other siblings, how seldom people visited her. It was all a game to make people feel sorry for her. She had always played games with me and she was still playing games now.

  ‘Promise me you’ll come to my funeral,’ she asked before we left, and so I agreed that I would.

  A few weeks later I got a phone call from Tom’s wife to say that Mum had died that morning. My reaction surprised me. I screamed and collapsed on the floor sobbing, great awful sobs that wracked my body. Why was I crying? She’d never loved me, I knew she hadn’t. What did it matter?

  But I wasn’t crying for her. I wasn’t crying for losing a mum. How could I cry for something I’d never had? No, I was crying for me. For the lost opportunities, for lost maybes, but most of all for lost hope. Hope that one day she would explain her inactions; explain why she had treated me the way she had. That one day she would say she was sorry and that she loved me. But now, this day would never happen. Now hope had died forever. I felt bereft, yes, but not for her. My tears were for the child I had been and for myself.

  I kept my promise to Mum and went to her funeral. There were only eight of us there—a family saying goodbye to whatever the being in the coffin had meant to us. I didn’t want to say anything except goodbye—goodbye to the woman who had been my mother and goodbye to my past.

  When we got home that evening, I felt somehow free. Free from the past, free to move on to the next part of my life. A huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. And now that hope had gone, I felt acceptance. Acceptance that she had never loved or wanted me. Acceptance that she had never protected me, that she wasn’t sorry. Acceptance th
at I would never know in full the reasons for her hatred of me.

  I could go back to being happy. No, I wasn’t loved as a child. But I know I am loved now, and ultimately that is all that matters.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Gill Paul, my patient and sensitive editor, for helping me through the hardest parts and understanding my need to be honest.

  To Carole Tonkinson of HarperCollins for seeing the book’s potential on first draft. And thanks to Kate Latham, also of HarperCollins, for her kindness and understanding. Thank you also to Andrew Lownie, my literary agent.

  I would like to say thank you to Peter for his belief in me and his zany sense of humour in our numerous e-mails. But most of all I want to say thank you to my wonderful husband and friend, for his love, endurance and endless support not only for now but for the past twenty-two years. A special thank you to my daughters for their love and support, especially my youngest daughter and best friend, for her love, patience and endless reminders that I am Me and Me is good.

  The last thank you is for my half-brother who, when told of my book, encouraged me by saying, ‘Go for it, love.’ So I have taken his advice and gone for it!

  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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