A Family Secret

by Maureen Wood

  Each weekend, too, she and John Wood would take two of us to the pub for a few drinks, and it was the highlight of our month. I loved going with them, but I was rarely chosen.

  ‘You never behave yourself, Mo-Jo,’ Mum would tell me, her lip curling. ‘You need to be a good girl.’

  There was a kids’ room at the pub, with games and a snooker table, and it was usually full of children from our estate. At the time I thought it was a treat, a genuine effort on Mum’s part to be nice. Now again, I wonder whether she was just playing a game, glossing over the grim depravity of our home life with a veneer of respectability. It was all about how she was thought of and not what she was actually like.

  Aside from the sexual abuse, she was physically and mentally cruel, too. I can’t remember her taking me on outings much, or on any proper holidays. Once, all seven of us piled into a Reliant Robin and drove all the way to Glasgow to see our grandparents. We got a puncture near Loch Lomond and had to wait by the roadside whilst she and John Wood argued about fixing it. But I loved that trip, every minute of it. I was surrounded by relatives the whole time, so I knew I was safe from wandering hands and mouths. Up there, I felt like my soul was washed out and clean again. But as soon as we were back home, it started again. And I retreated, like a frightened animal, back into my shell.

  Our local working men’s club organised an annual trip to the Blackpool seaside, which was always an eagerly awaited event. It felt like our whole estate emptied out for the day. When we arrived, Mum would usually dump us in the Fun House and go to the pub. But it was a day out and it was such fun.

  Many years later I would read about child sex exploitation in Blackpool and smile bitterly at the irony. Even on a day out, I never really escaped it. The summer after the abuse started, Mum didn’t allow me to go.

  ‘You’ve been naughty,’ she said. ‘You can stay at home. On your own.’

  Maybe she didn’t want me spending time with other adults in case I spilled the beans. Maybe she just hated me. Either way, there was no point in arguing. I bit back tears as the coach pulled away from the club car park. But in truth, having the house to myself for the whole day turned out to be absolutely glorious. It was hot and sunny in Stoke, and I sneaked out to play and to buy sweets, even though I had been forbidden to leave my bedroom. In the afternoon I spent hour after peaceful hour reading my book, and I wished and wished they would never come back. When the coach returned I was thrilled to hear that the trip had been a disaster and it had rained all day.

  ‘We couldn’t get near the promenade,’ Mum complained. ‘The weather was dreadful.’

  I couldn’t help thinking it was just what they deserved and maybe, just maybe, there was someone on my side after all.

  I had always enjoyed learning, but after the abuse began school became my refuge. Even if I was ill, or out of sorts, I was up and dressed in my uniform way before the alarm clock every morning. I literally couldn’t wait to leave the house. The place was suffocating. It pushed down on me like a physical weight, threatening, at times, to crush me completely. I was constantly on edge, always afraid, always anxious of what would happen next. It was all the more frightening because I couldn’t work out what I had done to deserve such brutality. I still suspected, in fact I was becoming increasingly convinced, that it was all my own fault. But I knew I had no chance of curing the problem unless I could identify what it was.

  In the sanctuary of my school I was a different child. I was bright and alert. I did my homework, and more besides. I read more than ever before, too, but now my children’s books held no appeal. Since the abuse started I’d found the Famous Five and the Secret Seven totally unpalatable. It wasn’t so much that I had outgrown my old favourites, more that I had been wrenched out of that world and flung into another. Instead, I moved on to reading J. R. R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I drank in the tragedies and the heartbreak and the raw injustice of life. This was my world now.

  With my head in the pages of The Lord of the Rings, I could, at last, lose myself. I could forget who I was and what was happening to me. The two sides of Sméagol were like the two sides of myself. He battled against what he didn’t want to hear. I fought against what I didn’t want to feel. I felt a pathetic empathy with the creature. I knew how it felt to be tortured. And to be an outsider.

  I struggled still with friendships. I had never had many schoolfriends, but now the few I had seemed so dreadfully silly and immature. I no longer wanted to skip or giggle with other ten-year-olds. I certainly didn’t want to play dolls, mummies and daddies, happy families. I was a world-weary adult in a child’s body, bitten by life.

  One afternoon, after school, there was a knock at the door and I heard strange voices in the hallway. I was reading in my bedroom but I peered over the bannister to listen in.

  ‘A report about your children … Mrs Wood … we take this seriously …’

  Mum nodded and agreed and put on her best posh voice as she ushered them out of the house.

  ‘I completely agree,’ she was saying. ‘It’s a malicious report. Absolutely unfounded.’

  She waited until their car was out of sight, then she flung open the front door, stuck her chin out into the street, and yelled, to nobody in particular: ‘If I find out which one of you bastards it was, you’re dead.’

  I hadn’t a clue what was going on but I ran back into my bedroom quickly, before she turned her temper on me. Years later, many years later, it would all become clear.

  Aged eleven, I moved, with my friends, to St John Fisher RC High School. It was a big event for us all, and to me the school seemed enormous. But by now I was settling down into a group of girls, and although I was considered the quiet one and, quite possibly, the weird one, I did at least have a sense of belonging. As they hit puberty, the only topic of conversation was boys.

  ‘I fancy him, do you fancy him, Maureen? Do you want me to ask him out for you? Would you snog him?’

  Their chatter both bored me and confused me. I stared ahead, blankly, unable even to pretend to join in. They wore makeup and bought tighter tops and shorter skirts. But I dreaded the idea of attracting a boy. The thought of kissing someone was repulsive. I refused to wear makeup. I dressed in baggy clothes and tracksuits, making myself as unappealing and unremarkable as I could.

  ‘We can’t work you out, Maureen,’ my friends laughed. ‘You’re such a funny girl.’

  Our education broadened out, too, and we began studying Biology, and with it sexual education. Ours was a Roman Catholic school so it was hardly explicit, but as I listened to the explanations of how sexual intercourse was performed – ‘between two loving people, a husband and a wife’ – I had a sudden and sickening awakening. This was it. This was exactly what my own parents had been doing to me.

  The lessons went on. We had to label male and female genitalia. We had to learn about the different stages of conception. The kids around me collapsed into helpless giggles as they wrote ‘cervix’ and ‘penis’ on their worksheets. But I sat in silence, cold with the realisation that I was being sexually abused.

  ‘It’s not funny!’ I wanted to shout. ‘It’s disgusting! You should avoid it for as long as you can!’

  But nobody noticed my shaking hands and my blanched face. Our teacher was a stunted man who was probably more embarrassed than most of the students. He was not someone I could confide in. And my friends, though they meant well, could never have understood. Theirs was a world so far removed from mine, it might as well have been in a different galaxy. There was one girl in our class who wore the latest clothes and trowelled on makeup. She was very pretty and all the boys fancied her. The rest of the girls all envied her and wanted to be like her. But I felt nothing but pity for her.

  ‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ I wanted to tell them. ‘Trust me, I should know.’

  There was one teacher, who was in charge of R
E, who I felt I could talk to. One day I’d had a bust-up with a friend in the playground and she had helped to sort it out. She was compassionate and understanding, and I would often invent scenarios in my head where I blurted out the truth to her. But every time, despite my rehearsals, I lost courage at the last minute. The context did not help; it was a strict Catholic school in the early 1980s and sex, and sexual abuse, simply was not discussed. It was kept behind closed doors. In bed. In secret. And even if it had been less stifling, I still don’t think I would have found the words. I could not share it. It would have to be coaxed out of me, pulled out of me, like one of the strands on my pink bedspread.

  One day we were in the playground at lunchtime when Jock roared up to the gates on his motorbike.

  ‘You’re wanted at home, Maureen,’ he said. ‘Mum’s not well.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘I’m at school,’ I protested. ‘I’ll get into trouble if I just walk out.’

  Jock wrapped his gloves tighter around the handlebars.

  ‘I just said, Mum’s ill. Now get on the bike.’

  I knew better than to argue. I waited until the dinner lady had turned her back and then I slipped out of the gate. Jock handed me a spare helmet and I climbed onto the back of his bike. I knew my friends were watching and probably in awe. But I felt nothing but revulsion. The proximity of him was repugnant. I had no choice but to cling to him as he set off, but I hated touching his waist.

  We tore down our street – but went straight past the house – and suddenly, my heart was in my shoes.

  ‘Please, Jock, no,’ I begged. ‘Let me go back to school.’

  But my voice was drowned out in the wind. He pulled up at the bottom of Black Bank and dragged me up there. Amongst the ferns, and in my school uniform, he raped me, without a word.

  Then he handed me my helmet and drove me back to school. He left me at the gates and simply disappeared. I sat in class that afternoon, mute with despair. I couldn’t concentrate on lessons. I could barely remember my own name.

  ‘You seem to prefer gazing out of the window rather than following the text,’ said my history teacher. ‘Would you like to share your thoughts with us, Maureen?’

  I shook my head numbly. I really would not have known where to start.

  Chapter 5

  The cycle of abuse and misery continued for three years. Mum and John Wood were as regular and as sickening as clockwork. It was almost as though they had it written in a diary. Jock would visit sporadically and unexpectedly and snatch what he could, when he could. I would watch his St Christopher necklace swinging above my head, back and forth, back and forth, and silently plead for an end to it all.

  But compared to the horrors I went through on a Saturday night, the abuse from Jock almost paled into palatability. His attacks were hesitant and fumbling, almost as if he was reluctant. It felt as though he was going through the motions, doing what he was driven to do, for whatever reason. John Wood was a completely different ordeal.

  Nothing – but nothing – was more painful or more appalling than the brutal and unforgiving rapes by my stepfather, with my malevolent mother watching on; a twisted sidekick in a hairnet and a winceyette nightdress.

  ‘Go on, John, go on. She loves it,’ she would say.

  Her short dark hair was plastered to the sides of her head with sweat. Her eyes were like bullet holes in the darkness. I could feel her long nails scraping at me. I could smell her cheap Charlie perfume and her rancid breath.

  ‘Stop it, stop it. I hate it,’ I would plead.

  It was early in the spring of 1984, when, aged thirteen, I started feeling sick, mostly in the mornings. I couldn’t even turn over in bed without a wave of nausea sloshing over me. The smell of coffee was enough to turn my stomach and I’d baulk if anyone came near me with a cigarette. I noticed changes in my body, too. I had always been stick-thin, like a little match girl. But now I was developing curves and contours. At first I presumed it was puberty, but when my stomach began to curve also, I knew exactly what this was.

  We’d finished the sex education classes at school, and I knew how babies were made. But I also knew better than to breathe a word of it.

  ‘Your secret is safe with me, angel,’ I whispered, with one hand on my tummy.

  I carried the knowledge around with me, like a precious gold pendant, hidden under my clothes. A glorious secret that nobody else knew. I felt like I was carrying a smile with me.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ I repeated conspiratorially. ‘Just you and me.’

  A couple of weeks later, Mum collared me on the stairs, frogmarched me into her bedroom, and closed the door.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ she demanded.

  Just hearing the word out loud sent a frightening thrill through me. I wanted to say it myself too, just to hear it. I wanted it to be true. But I knew I had to be careful.

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Definitely not.’

  She pursed her lips and glared at me.

  ‘You’d better bloody not be,’ she said menacingly, shoving me back out onto the landing.

  Instinctively, I knew she wouldn’t let me keep the baby, and already I loved him dearly. This baby, this little heartbeat inside me, felt like the answer to all of my dreams and my hopes. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to love someone, and for them to love me back. All I wanted was a pure and innocent love. And this was my chance.

  ‘I know you love me,’ I whispered, as I stroked my swollen belly. ‘And I love you too.’

  I told nobody. Instead, I began saving money secretly. I formulated a plan, in the darkness of my bunk bed, to buy a train ticket and to run away to London, where I could raise my baby in peace and anonymity.

  ‘Just me and you,’ I told my bump.

  It was of course a childish plan and doomed to fail. But then, I was just a child myself.

  I kept myself busy, doing odd jobs for the neighbours, tidying gardens, running errands and doing shopping. I washed cars, too. As soon as my household chores were finished, I’d be out in the street, touting for work.

  ‘Can’t play out,’ I told my friends. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’

  I had responsibilities, demands and stresses. And I loved it. Little by little, my stash of contraband cash grew. A month later, I counted out the grand total of £30 and my eyes shone as I thought of the possibilities ahead. I hid it behind my chest of drawers, until the time was right.

  To keep up pretences, I began wearing baggy clothes – old sweatshirts and tracksuit pants. I had always dressed boyishly anyway, I had never been a girly-girl like my sisters, so I hoped I wouldn’t attract too much attention. And, of course, it wasn’t as though anyone paid me any attention in the first place. At four months I felt the first stirrings of movement and with them the beginnings of something I had never felt before – pure and unconditional love.

  One afternoon, after I’d been cleaning, Mum came into the bedroom to inspect my work. She ran her fingers across the furniture to check for dust and then pulled out the chest of drawers, to make sure I’d hoovered behind it. My heart sank as the little bag of money dropped from its hiding place and onto the carpet.

  ‘What’s this for?’ she demanded, tipping it out onto the bed. ‘Where the hell did you get this?’

  ‘I earned it,’ I said truthfully. ‘I earned every penny. I’m saving up for something nice.’

  Mum scoffed and scooped the lot into her own pocket. My mouth fell open, but there was nothing I could do.

  ‘Girls your age don’t need money,’ she said. ‘You’re getting above yourself, Mo-Jo.’

  And that was that. I couldn’t argue. Now I would have to start again, from scratch, and be so much more careful this time, too.

  One Saturday night soon after, when I was around five months pregnant, Mum ordered me into her bedroom for the usual ritual of torture. I could never ge
t used to it, but I was accepting of it. I had to be.

  I gripped the sheets, closed my eyes tight and, in my mind’s eye, I slipped off the bed away from them. It was with such ease, I could almost have been made of liquid. Noiselessly, gracefully, I glided across the room and settled on the windowsill, away from the slithering hands, away from the stale, stinking breath.

  Mum had her fingers inside me, moaning horribly, when suddenly her face froze.

  ‘You lied to me!’ she screamed. ‘You dirty little bitch!’

  In that moment I was sucked back across the room, as if by a vortex, and dumped back into my own body.

  ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ John Wood demanded.

  ‘She’s fucking pregnant, that’s what’s going on,’ Mum screamed demonically. ‘I felt the baby moving inside her. She’s a liar.’

  John Wood’s face was a picture. He looked terrified – truly terrified – for the first time ever. I had never seen him so scared. I scrambled off the bed in alarm, my legs twisting in the quilt, tripping over my own feet as I ran. I closed the door behind me and got into bed, figuring they were less likely to burst in and batter me with my sister sleeping in here too. Under the covers I tried to slow my breathing, with one hand on my belly.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ I whispered. ‘It’s going to be fine.’

  My fears now were not for me, but for my baby. My heart was hammering against my ribs and I tried desperately to calm down, so that he was not distressed. I waited a while, listening to Mum and John Wood arguing in the bedroom, but they didn’t come for me. As I drifted off to sleep I remembered my mother, spittle flying, screaming: ‘Dirty little bitch.’

  She was the one sexually abusing her own daughter. Yet I was the dirty one.

  On Monday morning Mum took me to see the doctor. I could see she was rattled. Really rattled. And although I was fearful, a small part of me was pleased, too. I was glad she was suffering a little because it was long overdue. All the way there she kept up a tirade like a machine gun, spitting out streams of words like bullets.