I Won't Forgive What You Did Read online

  In terms of squalor, it wasn’t a lot different from Grandpops’s house, where my mother had lived before marrying my father. She’d lived there all her life, a few miles from the village where we now were, and her family were real country folk – very poor – who were generally suspicious of outsiders.

  She was the youngest of three; she had two older brothers whom she idolized and had always been close to. Both her brothers and her mother (my maternal grandmother, who suffered from chronic depression and who Pops treated appallingly) knew full well Pops sexually abused her. Today it’s clear that whatever the roots of her strange behaviour, her brothers knew her escape from their father was vital and when she met my father, and marriage was on the cards, they couldn’t get her out of the house quick enough. It would soon prove to be a case of frying pans and fires, but when, despite Pops’ objections, they wed and she moved in with my father’s mother and her husband, her brothers felt deeply relieved.

  My parents didn’t stay long with my paternal grandmother however, only until my father completed his national service. His work soon took them both to a tiny hamlet where my mother now lived a life of virtual isolation. She had two tiny children and a third on the way but was cut off, both physically and emotionally. She was no longer sexually abused by her father, but still abused, albeit differently, by her new husband.

  By the time I was born, though I obviously didn’t know it, my mother was suffering from anxiety and post-natal depression and seemed unable to function domestically. Though at this time she still sometimes dressed smartly and wore make-up, she was remote and unreachable and seemed to live in her own world.

  More often than not, and particularly towards me, her ‘attention’ consisted of being cruel. One of my earliest memories is of the way she’d taunt me whenever the ‘scissor man’ was due to come. The ‘scissor man’ was a travelling knife grinder, who’d visit people’s houses to sharpen knives and scissors.

  ‘He’s coming,’ she’d tell me, ‘to cut off your tongue. To cut off your tongue with his knife!’

  She’d go on to expand on and intensify her attack, her descriptions becoming more and more lurid.

  ‘He’ll put his knife in your mouth,’ she’d say ‘And slice right through your tongue, and it’ll fall to the floor, and you’ll never be able to speak again.’

  She’d laugh then. ‘He’ll be here soon,’ she’d warn, as I cringed in fear. Then she’d look out of the window. ‘Is that him I can see coming?’ Then she’d laugh a bit more. ‘Unless,’ she’d add, ‘he’s been held up on the way, cutting out another little girl’s tongue.’

  I’d be so frightened by now that I could hardly breathe. I’d run and hide, terrified I’d be sick on the floor or wet myself, and bring even more unspeakable horrors down on me. The eventual knock on the door would send me frantic, feeling trapped and defenceless and unable to think straight.

  And that was the point at which she’d really laugh hard, throwing her head back in mirth and then watching my expression.

  ‘Here he is!’ she’d say, as she opened the door. ‘Here he is to cut off your tongue!’

  Then, as I hid behind the sofa, she’d tell the scissor man all the things she’d told me about his purpose in coming to our house. And when she passed him the knives she’d be laughing even harder. ‘Which knife do you want to use?’ she’d ask gleefully. ‘Do you want the bigger knife, here, or the smaller, sharper one?’

  My mother only ever really laughed for two reasons. When she was being disgusting – talking about wee or poo or ‘blowing off, for instance – or, as with the scissor man, when she was being cruel.

  But my mother wasn’t just cruel on the spur of the moment; she often seemed to want to be cruel. And the most devastating cruelty she inflicted when I was small was one that would stay with me for decades. She told me that because I’d been born on a Wednesday, I was therefore a ‘Wednesday’s child’, and full of woe.

  Just as I believed the scissor man would cut off my tongue, I absolutely truly believed this. Being born full of woe, she kept repeating, was my lot. It was used as the explanation for all of my feelings and, as a consequence, whatever feelings I had were dismissed, be they my terror of the scissor man or my fear of my father or the distress and revulsion I couldn’t articulate or understand every time Grandpops tickled me. After all, went the reasoning, those feelings wouldn’t have existed had I not been born on the wrong day.

  For an adult who’s been brought up in an atmosphere of love and care, it’s obviously easy to realize such silly labelling cannot possibly matter. For me, though, as a small terrified child – and as an adult – it impacted on all areas of my life. I was so conditioned to believe it was a part of who I was, that it became an integral part of my being.

  I hated being a Wednesday’s child. I used to cry and plead with my mother for me not to be a Wednesday’s child. Not to have this terrible burden to carry. To be a different child, a better one. A Monday’s child, maybe – fair of face. I liked that. Or a Friday’s child perhaps. If I was loving and giving like a Friday’s child, then maybe my mother would love me better. I’d happily have been any child other than the one I’d been born. But no, I was born on a Wednesday and was woeful, and as a consequence it seemed I could never please her. I tried so hard, but it never seemed to work, and she always called me ‘stupid, silly Faith’. Indeed, the only time she didn’t seem indifferent to my presence was when she was telling people how stupid and silly I was. Naturally, I soon learned to play along and act in role when required. Anything was better than what I mostly had – her total indifference.

  She used to remind me of my woeful status throughout my childhood; not only that I’d been born a woeful Wednesday’s child, but also, wittingly or unwittingly (I didn’t know which), that I was the only Wednesday’s child in the whole world.

  Not that the day of my birth mattered really. I had plenty to feel woeful about, whatever day of the week I’d been born, as I was about to find out.

  CHAPTER 3

  By the time I was four I was no longer the youngest, my mother having now produced two further children: my sister Karen – eighteen months my junior – followed by my younger brother Jack, who was now six months old. My older sister was at school, but that still left four of us at home, under five, and our house was in constant chaos.

  Though externally we might have seemed like any other family, behind closed doors we were not. There was always muddle. All the rooms had dirty clothes on the floor and strewn on the furniture. There was washing on the kitchen floor and outside in the yard. My mother would sometimes throw things behind the sofa, so there seemed less of a mess before my father came home, but there was little she could do about the smell, even if she noticed – and there wasn’t any evidence that she did. Mouldering food was left on crockery, next to soiled cotton nappies, which lay wherever she last changed a baby. These smelled horrible, as did all the dirty baby bottles, which had thick films of white lining their insides, where she’d added cereal to stop the babies crying.

  My mother told me babies only cried for two reasons – because they needed feeding or changing. The trouble was that these two things were under her control, and she’d only attend to them when she decided. Most of the time, my siblings’ cries went unheeded, bar her remarking they were being ‘bloody little sods’.

  If they persisted, and, being babies, they did, she’d sometimes pick them up and shake them to shut them up. Even as a little girl this evoked strong feelings inside me, for I knew this had been my treatment too. How she’d force food down my throat and, much as I was gagging, how grateful I’d feel I was being fed at all.

  I was glad to be four now, and to be walking about. Glad not to be just lying there waiting for the sound of her footsteps, and whatever her mood meant she’d do.

  Not that I had any understanding, at four, of just how appalling our lives were. I knew what I knew, and it was all I knew, and though much of what happened to me felt wrong – Gran
dpops’ weekly sessions of ‘tickling’, for example – I persisted in the idea that this must be down to me, to my having been born so full of woe.

  At that time, therefore, any moment of brightness was something I cherished, which was probably why a close friend of the family, Daniel, who was in his thirties, meant such a lot to me. Just as with Grandpops, there was never a time when Daniel was not part of it. He’d known me from babyhood and visited several times a year. As an adult, I would come to realize the horrible truth about him, about how carefully he groomed me so he could do what he wanted, but to the four-year-old me, a child desperate for attention, he was a light in the darkness of my emotionally cold world. He seemed to care for me, be interested in me, wanted to seek out my company. He seemed to love me, which made me love him.

  Everyone seemed aware of Daniel’s special interest in me, but no one appeared to think anything of it. I was simply his favourite, so no one thought it strange or unusual that he’d want to spend all his time with me.

  I never knew much in advance when Daniel was coming. Sometimes I’d overhear my parents talking about when he was due. One day, however, I hadn’t had even this prior notice, and the first I knew of his arrival was when I heard the sound of greetings coming from the front door, and him saying, ‘Hello, Pamela, how are you?’ to my mother.

  Hearing this, I did what I always did when Daniel arrived. I ran off and hid behind the sofa. I wasn’t ever really sure why I did this. I knew he’d come to find me as soon as he was able, even before my mother had made a cup of tea.

  I sat on the floor, by the wall, against the back of the sofa, my legs bent and my knees clasped to my chest. The sofa was old and shabby, a big, musty-smelling brown thing, and I hid behind it, hating the anticipation, feeling ‘on guard’, even though I wasn’t quite sure what I was guarding. It was confusing, feeling all this anxiety welling up, while at the same time there was a sense of such excitement. Despite my stress, I also wanted his attention. I knew I was important to Daniel, because his wife had always told me that I was ‘the apple of his eye’.

  I could hear him approaching and my sense of confusion about my anxiety increased. Why was I anxious? I wanted to see him – he was always so gentle and asked questions about what I’d been doing, and though I didn’t answer – I always felt too shy – he didn’t seem to mind at all.

  Eventually, I emerged, my stomach churning, the anticipation of knowing he’d find me having become impossible to bear.

  ‘There you are!’ he said, beaming. He looked happy to have found me. ‘You little minx! You’ve been hiding from me, haven’t you?’

  He was tall and thin, smartly dressed and slightly balding, with white teeth, and cotton wool in one of his ears. I liked lots about Daniel, but I didn’t like the cotton wool. I never knew why it was there.

  He reached towards me now, his arms outstretched, laughing as he pulled me towards him and picked me up. His face was so close I could feel his breath on my eyes as he moved to kiss my forehead and my hair. He sat down then, on the sofa, cuddling me tightly on his lap, his face close as he rubbed his cheek against mine. He was stroking my fingers, slowly, individually, while whispering: ‘You little girl, why were you hiding from me? You funny little thing. You know I love you, don’t you?’

  When I was older, my mother told me that Daniel ‘couldn’t get enough’ of me, and that whenever he came, he’d always ask, ‘Where’s that Faith?’ upon which he’d pick me up and cart me off somewhere. By this time, I remember feeling rage, albeit subconsciously, at her pathetic acceptance of his behaviour. I would eventually come to realize it might be even more than that; I wondered if she secretly enjoyed the knowledge that something so disgusting was being done to someone else, just as it had been done to her all those years before – that somehow she felt a sense of sick revenge, or justice. Her own sickness, I came to understand, really was that bad.

  But it wasn’t just my mother who condoned his behaviour, all the adults in my life seemed complicit. It was as if by saying ‘He really loves your girl, Pamela’ it made what he did to me okay.

  But seeing Daniel, and having Daniel give me all this attention, was at that moment the best feeling in the world. He stood up again now, and carried me out of the front door, up the road, through the field, then down a path that led towards the river. No comments had been exchanged between him and my mother; we just went out.

  Daniel walked in silence till we came to the stile we always stopped at, and he sat me down on the step grown-ups would stand on if they wanted to climb over. He was now humming gently, and staring straight at me. I found it impossible to look at him, but I could feel his eyes on me. He never looked anywhere else at this point.

  My feet dangled. I couldn’t reach the grass below me, but he was standing next to me and I knew he wouldn’t let me fall. My head was level with the top of his legs now, and he held it tight into him and began stroking my hair. He had his other arm around my shoulders and was hugging me. First tight, and then looser, and then tightly again, squeezing and unsqueezing with a rhythmical motion, and, after a bit, moving his body from side to side. As he moved, the middle part of him brushed across my face, and every so often he’d stoop a little to kiss my hair again. I didn’t mind this – in fact, it felt nice; he was so gentle. The only thing that bothered me was the fabric of his trousers; the material brushing against my mouth felt all itchy.

  All too soon, however, I felt anxious, the familiar anxiety I always felt at this point – a sense of ‘badness’ whose origins I didn’t understand.

  He stopped then, stood straight, and turned away from me, and when he turned back around, his hand was moving up and down on the thing I knew he would put in my mouth, even though it was too big and made me choke.

  Sometimes, he’d only get it close to my mouth before stuff came out and made a big mess down my chin, but today he moved it slowly across my lips once or twice before staring straight at me as he pushed it between them.

  At this point, being with Daniel no longer made me happy. Now it filled me with apprehension, fear and panic. I began to feel sick, and all wobbly and unsteady. I tried to scream – I always did – but no sound came out, and I knew I must try to open my mouth as wide as it would go. I didn’t want it in my mouth but I was frightened that if I didn’t let him, I’d choke on it and then I’d die. The feeling was horrible. I couldn’t breathe with Daniel’s thing in my mouth. I thought I would be sick and keep choking and then I’d definitely die. I knew about dying because I knew about kittens. Daddy would put them in a bag and throw them in the river and, because they couldn’t breathe, they all died.

  He was staring harder now, going: ‘Look at me. You know I love you, don’t you?’ and I had to force myself to do it, because I really didn’t want to. Looking at him made me feel even more afraid. But why? Daniel loved me and was kind to me. So why did I feel so desperate to scream and run away?

  He made a sound in his mouth now, and took the thing out of mine, holding on to it and making strange blowing sounds, before putting it back in again, more slowly this time, then keeping it very, very still.

  I knew what came next because it always came next. He pushed it hard, suddenly – pushed it down my throat – and I was retching and retching, but terrified of biting it, as I needed to close my mouth. And then the bitter taste came, and made me retch even more, and when he took the thing out I bent down so he couldn’t see, and spat the stuff into my hand. I wiped it down the sleeve of my pink jumper, because I didn’t want to get it on my red tartan pinafore. I couldn’t bear to eat it, but I couldn’t let him see because I really didn’t want to upset him. I knew I mustn’t upset Daniel, because he liked me.

  He plucked me up from the stile then, and we set off back for home, him cuddling me and telling me he loved me, but in a different, much less intense way.

  Sometimes he’d take me to watch football or cricket, where the local teams played – but I didn’t like being in the unfamiliar surroundings, an
d would be anxious to return to my mother.

  Today we went back the way we’d come, and though Daniel seemed less and less interested in me as we did so, he still said ‘You know I love you. You’re my favourite. You’re very special, as we made our way back to my house.

  By now I didn’t feel special at all. I felt all too aware he wanted to leave me, which left me sad, and feeling strange, and full of woe. I shut my eyes tightly to try to make it go away, and told myself everything was all right.

  The adults barely looked up as we came in, and Daniel set me down on the red tiles. However upset I was, I at least still felt important. I’d been given special attention because I was special – different from my brothers and sisters.

  I went back to where I’d been when he’d arrived – behind the sofa – and my mother went to make him his tea. By now, I didn’t want to be around him any more, because I knew he’d start getting all anxious about leaving and saying what a long drive it was home. I also knew that once he went I’d be unable to sit still and would wander around, as if there was something missing and I was looking for it. I wouldn’t find it, of course, because it was simply the anticlimax after all the excitement of his arrival.

  And now he had gone again, and my mind was a muddle; I was relieved the bad bit of seeing him was over, but at the same time felt this great sense of loss. Daniel loved me and was happy to be with me, and I knew if I hadn’t been a woeful Wednesday’s child, I wouldn’t be so stupid about it all.

  CHAPTER 4

  It would be many, many years before I would fully understand that Daniel’s tenderness towards me was not an expression of love, but the conscientious grooming of a small child he wanted to abuse. All I knew, as a child, was that Daniel, who was so gentle, was one of the few welcome things in my life. It made no difference that I felt bad when he had me do things I didn’t want to. Daniel was everything the rest of my life wasn’t; he was kind, he seemed to love me, he wasn’t violent. In contrast, life at home seemed very dark.