Escaping Daddy

Escaping

Daddy

A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl

MARIA LANDON

with Andrew Crofts

For the true heroes of this story,

Brendan and Thomas

xx

‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood’

Tom Robbins

Epigraph

Foreword

Chapter One - Childhood

Chapter Two - The Overdose

Chapter Three - A Ready-Made Family

Chapter Four - Rodney and Me

Chapter Five - Husband and Brothers

Chapter Six - Sticks and Stones – and Words Will Always Hurt Me

Chapter Seven - A New Baby

Chapter Eight - The Human Yo-Yo

Chapter Nine - An Escape Route

Chapter Ten - Breakdown

Chapter Eleven - Finding Marion

Chapter Twelve - The Inner Child

Chapter Thirteen - Chasing Happy Ever After

Chapter Fourteen - More to Me Than Frying Eggs

Chapter Fifteen - Terry’s Wedding

Chapter Sixteen - A Time to Die

Chapter Seventeen - Self Help

Chapter Eighteen - A Promise to Glen

Chapter Nineteen - Toni

Chapter Twenty - Positive Thinking

Chapter Twenty-one - Becoming a Teacher

Chapter Twenty-two - Thoughts on a Spanish Beach

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

‘Get that down you,’ Dad said, handing me a vodka and lime.

I took a big gulp and shuddered as it burned my throat. My hand shook as I applied eyeliner in thick black strokes. I was just thirteen years old and getting myself ready for a night working on the Block, the section of Ber Street in Norwich where men cruised in their cars looking for sex.

‘Hurry up!’ Dad growled. ‘The sooner you get started, the sooner it’ll be over.’

I took another big swig and the alcohol made me dizzy but didn’t relieve the sheer terror about what lay ahead. Every time I got into a strange man’s car I knew I could be robbed, beaten up, or worse. It never got any easier.

Dad gripped my elbow and led me out onto the street. I was teetering in my ridiculously high heels, stumbling with fear, trying to make my mind go blank. Just do it, just get through it, I was thinking. There’s no way out.

There were other girls working the same patch and they eyed me with suspicion and hostility as I arrived in their territory. None of them said anything while Dad was around because they all knew what he was like. I was by far the youngest one out there, but none of the customers were going to complain about that.

When the time came and a car pulled up, I couldn’t bring myself to actually walk forward and talk to the driver. My heart was beating so hard I thought I was going to faint. Dad stepped out of the shadows behind me and pushed me towards the road.

‘Get out there now,’ he hissed. ‘Go and earn your keep.’

I knew from experience that he wasn’t going to change his mind and let me go home now. I had no choice but to go through with it.

‘Do you want business?’ I asked the next driver through the open window, my voice not much more than a whisper.

He did. Terms were agreed and I got into the car under Dad’s watchful eye, then we drew away from the others into the darkness.

Working on the Block was a regular part of my life between the ages of thirteen and fifteen but never something I got used to. I always hated it but I didn’t think I deserved any better. It was my destiny to provide men with what they wanted and to be controlled by Dad. That’s all I was good for, as he had told me over and over again throughout my childhood.

So when I started trying to break away from Dad’s influence and form adult relationships with men, I didn’t have a clue how they should work. I thought I needed a man to protect me in the world, and in return I had to provide him with sex and do as he told me. Was that what other women did? Was that how the world worked? Wasn’t it?

‘No one else will ever love you, Ria,’ my dad would always tell me, ‘not the way I do. I’m the only one who will ever truly love you.’

I still believed those words long after I should have been grown-up enough to know better. Everyone wants to believe what their parents tell them, don’t they?

Even when I stopped having anything to do with Dad, the lessons he had taught me rang in my ears. There was an invisible chord still linking us no matter how hard I tried to pull away. What hope could I have of ever being happy? What would it take?

Chapter One Childhood

Right from the beginning Dad would say I was his favourite child, and that would make me very proud. He was big and handsome and always seemed heroic to me because he was so popular and flamboyant, always the centre of attention wherever he went. Everyone loved my tall, dark, handsome dad. He had a powerful presence, always immaculately turned out in a suit and tie and known for being good company, never able to resist playing up to an adoring crowd of admirers. He was so plausible he could tell people anything and get away with it. He cultivated an image for himself as a lovable local rogue and ‘a bit of a character’, but as well as being a charmer he was a bully and a show-off and he had an uncontrollable temper, which frequently spilled over into violence.

I always wanted to please him, to obey him, to win his approval and to avoid getting a beating. But the more I yearned for his approval the more he would withhold it, telling me how worthless and fat and ugly I was, and I continued to believe him even when I could clearly see the sort of man he truly was beneath the superficial bravado. My father was a pimp and a drunk and had been all his adult life.

His total possession of me started on the morning I was born, when I’m told that he paraded boastfully around the hospital, completely drunk, puffing on a cigar and joking that he was going to make me ‘the best little prostitute on the block’. Except he wasn’t joking; he was deadly serious.

‘Pity I haven’t got four girls,’ he would tell anyone who would listen, ‘because then I could run a proper little brothel and never work again.’

To him these weren’t such shocking announcements because that was the world he lived in, the world he sought to control in any way he could and the world I grew up in. He truly believed that all women were ‘sitting on a goldmine’ and that they were mad if they didn’t exploit it to their own advantage, and if possible to his advantage as well. He never held down a proper job in all the years I knew him, drinking away whatever money he could bully the women in his life into earning for him by selling their bodies on the streets, combined with whatever welfare payments he could blag.

Despite the fact he always swore that my mum was the love of his life, just as she would swear that he was the love of hers, he had even nagged and bullied her into selling her body to passing kerb-crawlers in order to provide him with drinking money. Such behaviour seemed normal to him because all the friends that he spent his days and nights with were the same: either alcoholics or hookers, or both. I was too young to be able to remember the years when Mum and Dad were together, but I can imagine how it was from what they and other people have told me, and from the way he went on to treat me and everyone else. Despite the fact that he worshipped Mum, he still undermined her confidence at every possible opportunity, one minute telling her how gorgeous she was and the next telling her she was ugly and useless. He would beat and kick her ruthlessly when she tried to stand up to him, determined to break her spirit and make her obedient. When she finally decided she had had enough and left us when I was six years old, he spent the rest of his life telling everyone how brokenhearted he was, and threatening to kill himself whenever he was drunk.

It was the same technique he used to manipulate and control everyone in his life. Dad had a way of making people do what he wanted with a mixture of charm, violent bullying and manipulation. He dominated and terrorised Mum in the same way as he would later dominate and terrorise us. The fact that she had borne him four children made no difference to the way he treated her or the things he expected her to do for him.

My brother Terry was the first to be born from their great teenage love affair and I came along a year later in 1966. It seems Dad was willing to tolerate our existence, although he still enjoyed hurting and frightening us whenever the mood took him, but by the time our brothers, Chris and Glen, came along in 1969 and 1970 he had lost all patience with the demands of small children. He was so violent towards the two babies Mum didn’t dare bring them out of their bedroom when he was around and, as she slipped into a pit of depression herself, they gradually became forgotten for longer and longer periods, remaining silent and fearful behind that closed bedroom door.

I was only little but I remember glancing at that door, hearing the whimpering noises behind it and smelling the awful, eye-watering smell of their unchanged nappies, a smell that permeated through the upper floor of the house. Mum only dared to bring them out to feed and change them when Dad had gone out somewhere, and they were pitiful creatures: very thin, with scratches and sores all over their skin, and huge staring eyes. I felt desperately sorry, and guilty that I was allowed to come downstairs and eat meals with the family while they weren’t–but what could I do about it? I was just too young to help them.

Dad managed to convince Mum that she would only have to turn tricks once or twice, that he was just asking her to do him a favour because he was skint and they both needed some drinking money, but it wasn’t long before she realised she was being naive and that the more she earned for him the harder he would make her work. Dad had realised that pimping was the easiest way imaginable for him to earn money. However much she might have loved him, there was a point beyond which even she wasn’t willing to put up with him any more.

Mum finally gave up hope of anything ever changing and had a nervous breakdown, walking away from all of us without even saying goodbye. I have only the dimmest of memories of a time when she was there with us and I have no picture of her leaving. All I can really remember is me and Dad and Terry on our own together and being told that she had gone. She left us all, including Chris and Glen, still festering in their locked bedroom. Dad couldn’t believe that he had lost the love of his life and his drinking grew steadily worse, increasing the lake of self-pity he chose to wallow in. I think he was genuinely shocked that she’d gone, but he was also upset at losing the money she had brought in.

As soon as she could, Mum alerted social services to the danger we were all in now that we were alone with Dad. When social workers came round they found Chris and Glen shut in their bedroom in a terrible state. They were two and three years old, staring straight ahead with deadened eyes. Chris was rocking rhythmically back and forth in his cot and Glen was so hungry he was actually eating the contents of his own soiled nappy. Dad told everyone who would listen that Mum was the villain of the piece for leaving her children in such a state and he was able to make out that he was the innocent victim of her cold heart just as much as we were. Chris and Glen were both put into a foster home while Terry and I were left with Dad, who was busy boasting how he was going to bring us up on his own, thus winning the sympathy of all his women friends in the pub.

‘Poor old Terry. His wife’s up and left him and he’s doing his best to be a good dad to the little ones,’ they’d say, oblivious to the fact that he didn’t look after us at all. It fell to me to get meals for us, try to clean our clothes and get us to school on time, while Dad was out cavorting with his girlfriends or staying up all night drinking.

Once Mum had gone we never heard from her again for eight years. We didn’t hear from our grandparents or any of our other relatives either. Somehow Dad managed to intimidate them all into staying away, just as he intimidated Terry and me into obeying his every order with the beatings and the hours we spent locked in the windowless coal cellar if we displeased him. We never even received any birthday or Christmas cards from other family members. It seemed he was right when he told us the whole world had forgotten we existed and he was the only person we could rely on to care about us and look after us.

‘I’m the only person you can trust,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m the only person who will ever love you.’

With Mum gone he turned the full force of his pain, anger and misery onto us, while to the rest of the world he remained the jovial life and soul of the party, the hero whose feckless wife had deserted him and who was struggling to bring up the kids on his own. In the privacy of the house he did everything he could to make sure we were his devoted slaves, particularly me, playing endless mind games to make sure I would stay loyal and obedient and crushed.

‘You’re fat and ugly,’ he would tell me all the time, ‘no one will ever love you except me. Even your own mother left you.’

I was convinced it was all true. Sometimes he would cuddle me and then push me away for no reason. He would tell Terry that he had been Mum’s ‘favourite’, making it all the worse that she had deserted him, and making me feel all the worse for not being as good as my brother. He certainly didn’t bother about our clothes or any other aspects of our care. I got a letter home from the headmistress of my school, suggesting that it would be a good idea to ‘clean Maria up’ but Dad countered with such a string of expletives that the poor woman never dared to follow through with a face-to-face meeting.

I wished Dad wouldn’t treat Terry and me so badly, but I still adored him and was still desperate to please him in any way I could, following him around like a faithful little puppy. All his days were spent in the pubs and the bookies, with us waiting outside in the cold for him to stumble back out, while his nights were spent drinking and playing cards with his friends. Sometimes he would force us to join in till the early hours of the morning; other times we would be sent upstairs and threatened with dire consequences if we even came out to use the toilet. He would make us go shoplifting, mainly to steal whisky for him and his friends, and he even had us cashing stolen giros at one stage.

Dad couldn’t read so I always had to read things out for him. By the time I was eight or nine he had started making me read to him from his pornographic magazines while he masturbated. I didn’t understand what he was doing but I knew it felt wrong and weird. I had no choice, though, because if I refused I’d get beaten with a stick or with his slipper. Then he began to make me lie beside him so he could slide his fingers inside my pants, which I hated. He said he would teach me everything I needed to know, but if I ever told anyone about what he did I’d be sent away to live in a children’s home full of perverts who would torture and rape me. It sounded terrifying and I begged him not to make me go there.

His sexual demands didn’t stop at touching me.

‘Do you want a lollipop?’ he asked one evening when he got in from the pub.

‘Yes please, Daddy,’ I said, confused as he marched me upstairs and started masturbating in front of me.

‘Do you want a lollipop, then?’ he asked again.

‘Yes. Where are they?’

‘Come here,’ he said and as I leaned across he grabbed my head. ‘Suck this!’

I felt as though I was suffocating and I struggled to get away, which made him angry. Tears were streaming down my face and I was gagging and choking, certain he was going to kill me. I couldn’t breathe because his thing was so huge. It was a nightmare that never seemed to end.

Soon he was forcing me to take his penis in my mouth regularly and then he began trying to have penetrative sex with me, not caring how much he hurt or frightened or disgusted me, making it clear that there was no point struggling because it was going to happen anyway and I would just make it harder for myself by fighting. It hurt so much that I was convinced I was going to die. I thought I was being torn in half, but there was no point in struggling because he was too big and strong. He told me over and over that I must never tell anyone about the things we did together, terrifying me with stories of what would happen if I did.

‘If I go to prison you and Terry will be sent to a children’s home and everyone will hate you,’ he would warn. ‘You need to have your daddy here to protect you. This is our secret. No one will believe anything you say until you are ten anyway.’

I hated the things he did to me, but I still adored him and longed to please him so that he would stop hurting me and telling me how bad I was. I longed for the times when he was nice to me and told me I was his favourite. I’d do just about anything to win his praise. He was my dad and I loved him.

When I was twelve he took me up to the streets where the city’s hookers plied their trade to kerb-crawlers. This was his little kingdom where he set himself up as a pimp, the place where everyone knew who he was. I knew a lot of the girls already because they often came round our house after they had been beaten up or robbed, looking on Dad as a friend and someone who understood their world because he was a part of it. Some of them were really good to me and I considered them to be my friends too. He proudly showed me where he had put Mum to work and where he was going to make me follow in her footsteps, spending my evenings lurking in the shadows as a steady stream of punters slowed down in their cars, in search of business, taking a look at the goods on offer.

I liked it the first time Dad got his friend Lucy to dress me up in a tight skirt and stilettos. I felt glamorous, like a little girl playing make-believe, and I was happy when Dad admired my legs and said they were just like Mum’s. I didn’t let myself think about working on the streets though. I hated what Dad did to me in his bed and couldn’t bear to think about any other man doing it to me. My throat closed up in dread every time he talked about me becoming the best little prostitute on the Block.

But when I was thirteen, the day came when Dad decided I was ready to start fulfilling the destiny he had chosen for me. I felt an overwhelming sense of hopelessness as I got ready, knowing there was no way out of it so I might as well get it over with, just as he had told me a hundred times when he raped me. I obeyed him automatically, like a robot, still wanting to please him and win his love despite everything he had done to me. I had to drink a lot of vodka to build up my courage before the first time I went out on the street but I got through it somehow, trying to make my mind go blank as I spread my legs and let businessmen thrust away inside me.

Once I had serviced a few punters and earned him some money, Dad bought a bottle of whisky and took me back to Lucy’s house to celebrate. The mix of whisky and vodka was too much for my young stomach and I threw up all over Dad’s suit. I thought he would be angry but he wasn’t–he just thought the whole thing was funny and in a way I was glad that I had been able to make him happy. But I dreaded having to work on the Block again. No matter how many times I did it, I always felt terrified as the car pulled off with me inside, and I always felt as though I had been raped afterwards, even though I was clutching the punter’s money.

All the girls would use drink and drugs to help them get over their fears every time they went out on the street, or to drown out the memories afterwards. The irony was that once they had habits, they needed to go out to work more often in order to earn the money they needed to satisfy their cravings, creating vicious cycles that many never escaped from. I was no different to the rest and Dad was always happy to supply me with as much drink as it took to make me co-operative. He didn’t approve of drugs, but there were plenty of other people around who were happy to supply me with those when I asked. I started on cannabis but before long speed became my drug of choice and I took it whenever I could get my hands on some.

There were times when Dad would get caught by the police for thieving or fighting and sent to prison for a while. Terry and I would then go into children’s homes or foster homes and I was surprised to find that they weren’t as terrible as Dad had warned me they would be. But by that time he had messed with my head so much that I couldn’t settle anywhere. A lot of teachers and social workers told me that they thought I had the potential for a better life, but I always ended up back in trouble one way or another. As soon as he came out of prison Dad would order us to go back to him and I always wanted to go, hoping beyond hope that things would be different this time; that this time he would be kind to me, that he would stop doing those things to me.

But it was all a game to him. He convinced me that wherever I was taken I should run away and go back to him at the first opportunity. I never questioned this wisdom, even though I sometimes knew I was better off in the places the social workers sent me to. I desperately wanted us to be a happy little family, but he just wanted to have me in his power in the same way he had with Mum. Whatever efforts the authorities made to get me to safety he just had to snap his fingers and I would go running back to him. Sometimes I would try to explain to people what he was doing to me, but Dad always managed to get out of it, to turn everything round so it seemed as if I was the problem, not him.

Social workers were as confused as I was. One wrote about me: ‘Maria is in some ways functioning at a four-or five-year-old level and in others at a sixteen-year-old level, plus being an intelligent twelve-year-old. She is over-fond of her dad and wants him close to her, up to a certain point, and beyond that she starts complaining.’

At one of the homes, when I was fourteen, I asked if they would try to make contact with Mum for us. They managed to track her down and she actually came to see us. For a while it looked as though Terry and I might be able to live with her, but we were all too damaged. Within six weeks the relationship had broken down because Mum couldn’t cope with our disruptive behaviour and we were taken back into care.

I was fifteen and on the run from one of the care homes I’d been assigned to when I met a guy called Brian. He was a thirty-five-year-old biker and I fell in love with him because he was a kind and decent man. I had ‘property of Brian’ tattooed on my upper arm, just above a tattoo I already had of Dad’s name. We even bought a silver ring down the market and announced to the world that we were in love. Brian gave me the courage to break away a little from Dad, even though I was still working on the street to make the money I needed for the drink and drugs I was using.

Brian wanted to help me to escape from my fear of Dad and from the social workers who he thought were letting me down, so we hitchhiked down to London together. It was a dream that neither of us had thought through and we ran out of money almost immediately. Brian might have been older than me but he wasn’t capable of earning a wage and supporting us; he was a dreamer with a dope habit who liked playing his guitar. The only way we could support ourselves was for me to go back to work doing the one thing I knew how on the streets of King’s Cross. I was terrified and I didn’t want to do it, but the thought of going back to Norwich and letting Dad know I had failed was worse. I didn’t want him to see that he had been right, that I couldn’t manage without him.