What Daddy Did (5 page)

Any normal bonding that should have occurred between me and my half-siblings was thwarted at every turn by Helen. We had different schools, different doctors and different dentists. With regard to punishments, she gave us pretty much similar beatings but always kept us separate when doing so, presumably to stop us knowing too much or ganging up on her.

I have one strong memory of Adrian and I getting into trouble for something. I can't remember what it was, but I do recall the two of us standing in the living room in front of the fire with our hands by our sides while Helen shouted at us. My brother was then told to go into the bathroom and I was to wait outside. Helen came through minutes later with the belt and went into the bathroom. I could hear Adrian being beaten. I heard every whack of the belt as she shouted at him. He was to say sorry, she kept screaming, and to say that he was bad. I was terrified because I knew it was almost my turn – and indeed it was. After Helen had beaten us, both in our underwear, we were each made to stand in separate places; he in the recess in the lobby and me in the bathroom.

While this went on, my sister was in the living room looking after the baby. It wasn't that she was a favourite in any way – she got her share of beatings too – but a lot of the time Helen used her for babysitting or other chores and keeping things together while she whacked us other two. Even in the files there is a mention of Frances coming back from the launderette with the family wash when she was just 10 years old.

This was the pattern of the contact between Frances, Adrian and I for the duration that Helen was living with my father. My sister got out sooner than us, however. There's a great deal of speculation about how and why she left, and I know only a few things. I do know that when she went she was around 15 years of age and she was taken back into care. I know for a fact that my father would not speak to Frances after she left because there had been some 'accusations'. What those accusations were I do not know, but she left. I saw her only once after that when I was around 16 and she would have been 20. She was living in a flat in the Meadows.

I feel so sad for the little girl my sister was and for the little boy my brother was. I wish I had some memories to call on of being with them both, of playing with them and laughing with them, but sadly I have only memories of a desperate sense of isolation from each of us. It was sink or swim under the 'care' of Helen, and we each had to look out for ourselves, although I was the one she seemed particularly keen to break.

HELEN FORD WAS UNDOUBTEDLY TO
blame for the vast majority of the absolute horrors that were inflicted on me as a little girl, but there have to be questions asked about my father as well. Who had Donald Ford been, and was there anything in his past that could have made him the pathetic excuse for a father he would turn out to be?

Before meeting my mother, Breda, my Dad had spent some time in the forces after being conscripted. I recall seeing some small black-and-white photographs of him during his time in the army, in which he looked very smart and happy. He had also trained as a French polisher, and still did odd jobs in that line when he was asked. In fact, the table that had once belonged to his mother, and which I would see once he took me home, had been polished by him and he would proudly show people his handiwork.

I still own a jewellery box that he made. It is one of only two things he ever gave me (the other thing is a set of brass letter scales my Auntie Nellie gave him). I'm not sure whether the box is teak or mahogany, but it's about six inches long and four inches high. It has a wood veneer on the top with a paler inlay of a simple line pattern. I was given the box while I was still at home. My Dad told me that it was his apprentice piece, and that he had made it from scratch. I have had it ever since and I use it now to keep foreign coins in from my travels to Greece, Portugal, France, South Africa, Jamaica, Turkey and India. I have kept this box because I have so very, very little from my childhood. Every tiny thing I did manage to keep – a couple of dinner tickets I wanted to hold on to and a few other bits – have all been put into this innocuous little box. I have never questioned why until writing this now, but I suppose in a way I have kept it because it is something my Dad created before life came in and changed the young man he once was, the one I never got to know. I know what he did and what he didn't do for me, and I have no respect whatsoever for that man. However, I do like to think that at some point he was good, and so were his intentions. The box has always been with me, and if one of my girls wanted it they could certainly have it, but I don't think it would mean much to them.

So, my Dad did have a profession, which that jewellery box symbolises for me, yet when I came to stay with him and Helen in the Easter Road house, he was working on the corporation buses. I remember his work uniform and ticket machine, and I also remember getting to go with him on the number one bus when he was doing a shift one day. This was in the days when there were old buses with an open back, spiral stairs and wooden decking on the floor. Gallus – lively – young people would hold on to the metal pole, swing around it and then jump off before the bus stopped.

The next job he had was working for the General Post Office as a postman. They wore grey suits in those days with brass buttons stamped with GPO, and carried heavy sack bags. Sometimes he cycled to work on an old black bike. I remember going with him while he delivered letters, propped on the front of his bike while he cycled with two bags full of post slung over the back of it. Those were great times – me and my Dad together, as it should have been, as I'd dreamed it would be, but as it was, so rarely. But always, always, at the end of it, there was my return home to a living hell.

From these sparse recollections, I've gathered that he was conscientious and worked to look after his family. In the early days of my return from Barnardo's, he would always come home from work on a Friday with a brand new Matchbox car in its little box for my new brother. I was a bit jealous, but what I really wanted wasn't a gift. I didn't want anything material at all, and I still don't. All I ever wanted was love and a little bit of time spent together with the only parent I had, away from the madness of my days with Helen. I got it sometimes, but it was rare and precious.

I would sometimes go on walks with my Daddy to feed the ducks and throw a penny in the wishing well in Holyrood's Kings Park. Those days were lovely and he would always stop off at Casey's sweet shop at the top of Easter Road to buy a bag of mixed boilings. Casey's was a lovely old-fashioned family-run place. The smell of that little shop with its multicoloured rows of jars full of toffee doddles, bonbons, sweet-peanuts and kola cubes is one of the memories I hold dear to my heart. A visit there would always round off the day perfectly.

It hurts.

I want to know where that Daddy went, the Daddy who would hand me a sweetie from a white paper bag while telling me stories of old Edinburgh as we walked. He could do that – he had the capacity to be warm and loving, but it ended up becoming even rarer as time went on. I remember a party in the house shortly after I returned from the home. He was singing and laughing. All of his family were there: his two brothers and his sister, my granny and various other faces that I can't place so long after the event
,
and they had all come to meet me. I felt so proud, so loved and, in this memory, my Dad seems truly happy.

When I look back on this time – the sweet shops, the trips to the wishing well, the times alone with him – I think I can see my Dad as he could have been, as he would have been, as he wasn't allowed to be. I know that his relationship with Helen was fraught, and I understand that what goes on between two people can never really be understood by outsiders. But I know some other things too. What went on and what happened to me as a result of him choosing to live with and marry that woman stole my childhood from me and, to this day, has repercussions on my identity and being.

He didn't protect me. He didn't take me to safety, away from her. He ignored and minimised what was happening. He closed his eyes tightly against the evil that would be wreaked on me for years and years. Evil that wouldn't leave just because Helen did.

Evil which has left me with a question that I still want to scream at him: Do you know what you did, Daddy?
Do you know what you did?

IF I AM TO TRY AND
understand my father's role in all of this, I have to go back to the beginning. And the beginning is painful for me. I had hope. I thought I was going to a family – my family – who would love me and protect me.

My initial reaction at seeing my new home is etched on my memory, even though I was so young. I'd been living in that large rambling children's home since I was a baby, but here I was being taken 'home' to a one-bedroom basement flat in a tenement block. Everything was so small. There was the one tiny bedroom, a bathroom and a living room with a bed recess at one end and a scullery at the other. The flat would have been big enough for a young married couple alone, but it was nowhere near spacious enough for a family of four – and it certainly wasn't the size required for the family of seven it would house within the next couple of years.

The living room itself doubled as a bedroom for my Dad and Helen. It had a double bed in the recess, where they slept, and in front of the post-war tiled fireplace sat a three-piece suite in darkred embossed leatherette fabric. On the dark wooden sideboard against one wall was a black-and-white television, the same television I watched as Winston Churchill's funeral was broadcast. There were two drawers in this sideboard that were full of cutlery. In the two cupboards below, cereal and biscuits and other foods jostled for space. I recall the smell of this cupboard more than any other because it was where the food was; food I was to be deprived of so often, for so long. In the window space, there was a table with chairs, which looked out on to the communal back garden, or back green as we called it.

Everything was cramped and claustrophobic compared to the vast rooms at the Barnardo's home. There was nearly always a coal fire lit as that was what heated the water by means of a back boiler. It soon became my job to clear the fireplace of ashes, and to roll and twist newspapers ready for the next lighting. Sitting in the hearth was a brass fireside companion set, complete with tongs and pokers. That would become another instrument of torture once Helen got going.

The one bedroom was used as the kids' room. When I arrived it already had a set of wooden bunk beds and a cot. There was a large window opposite the door and a fireplace to the side of it, over which hung a picture of Jesus whose eyes would follow every move of anyone in that room – or so it seemed to me. Under the window was a small chest of drawers and that was about it. This room, like all the other rooms in the house, was very neat but cramped. I suppose that I might have seen the place as cosy, had I been in the heart of a loving family. What 'could have been' may be a silly game to play, but sometimes it's hard to prevent yourself falling into that trap.