I Remember, Daddy (16 page)

It was the first positive thing that had ever seemed possible amidst all the many negatives associated with my father’s abuse of me, and as soon as I was well enough, I signed up to do a college course in social care.

As a little girl, I’d assumed that all fathers treated their daughters the same way my father treated me. You don’t even think about your life when you’re a child; it just is. So it had been a terrible shock when I was 12 years old and had finally realised that he – and his friends – had been sexually abusing me. I think that’s when doors had started slamming shut in my mind, sealing off the worst of my childhood memories because they were too awful for me to try to make any sense of them. Then, more than ten years later, the birth of my son had triggered the gradual opening of those doors – a process that had proved too much for my mind to cope with.

Over the years, I’d told a few people who were close to me just a little of what my father had done to me, and they all said, ‘That’s appalling. I simply can’t imagine how that must have felt.’ So I’d always felt very alone and had often wondered ‘Why me?’ And then, while I was doing the course at college, I read a book that had an incredible effect on me. It was about a woman who’d been abused as a child, and who felt exactly as I had done. It was a shocking, miserable story, but it struck a chord that was so exciting for me that I wrote to the book’s author. I didn’t expect a reply, so I was amazed when I received a letter from her almost by return post. And what she wrote changed the way I felt for ever.

It sounds strange to say that discovering there were lots of women – and men – who’d had childhood experiences similar to my own made me feel part of something; but it did. My psychiatrist had been the only person who’d ever seemed able to empathise with the way I felt – and that was only because he’d learned about child abuse by reading about it in textbooks and by hearing stories like my own. And then, through the author of the book I’d just read, I met other women who knew exactly how degraded, damaged and unloved I’d always felt, because they felt the same way too.

Over the next few months, I set up a small local support group for survivors of child abuse and several of us met every week to provide each other with emotional and often practical support. Although the struggle was far from over – and perhaps it never really does end for people who’ve been abused as children – that was an important turning point for me, and I’ll always be grateful to those women for talking to me about their fears and their feelings and for listening when I told them about mine.

They were all really nice people – damaged, as I was, but, without exception, decent human beings. Not one of them was ‘bad’ or ‘worthless’, and although they were all still affected – to varying but significant degrees – by what had happened to them, none of them was defined by it. Gradually, the thought began to take root in my mind that perhaps I was just like them – not bad, not useless; just a young woman who’d had a terrible childhood through no fault of her own and who was trying, desperately, to do her best, against all the odds.

Talking to people whose own pain was so great that they were able to cope with hearing about mine was an extraordinary experience. And it was my elation at feeling that they really understood what I was saying, as well as a growing sense that a widespread injustice of enormous proportions was being virtually ignored, that prompted me to decide to take my father to court.

People kept telling me how brave I was and how they were behind me 100 per cent; they meant it, of course, and I was buoyed up by their praise and encouragement and by the righteousness of my cause. What I didn’t realise, though, was that I wasn’t ready to take such a momentous step.

I went to the police – which was something I never thought I’d have the courage to do – and told them my story. I was expecting them to have one of two possible reactions: total disbelief, particularly when I told them who my father was and gave them the names of some of the men who’d abused me; or disgust that I’d allowed something so repellent to be done to me, even though I was just a child at the time. I knew that it would be an ordeal, whatever the outcome, and I had to keep reminding myself that I had to speak out, because telling my story might encourage other people to tell theirs, and only when enough victims of abuse were shouting loudly enough would we stand any chance of being heard.

When I arrived at the police station, my heart was thumping erratically, my hands were soaked in sweat and my legs were trembling so violently I could barely walk up the steps to the door. And although I continued to feel as though I was going to be swamped by panic every time I talked about my father’s abuse, I was amazed by how sympathetic and supportive the police officers were. I’m sure they’d have been equally compassionate whatever the situation, but what probably helped my credibility was the fact that they’d already started to investigate the activities of my father and several of his friends, and I think they viewed the information I was giving them as an unexpected and very welcome gift.

I had just one condition before I agreed to talk to the policewoman: that no one must know I was giving evidence against my father until the police had put together a case against him and were ready to prosecute him. I knew that if he got wind of what I was doing, he’d bully, browbeat and threaten me until I dropped my accusations against him. He’d boasted to me once of having put some poor man ‘six feet under’ and although I didn’t know if it was true, or just a baseless, veiled threat to make me toe the line at the time, it was certainly something I thought he’d have been capable of – by proxy, at least. True or not, however, it was enough to make me afraid and to wonder if I’d made a terrible, potentially fatal, error by setting out on the path I’d taken. But I was reassured when the policewoman told me that they, too, had every reason to keep their investigations quiet.

I was interviewed on several occasions by the same high-ranking and empathetic policewoman. It was difficult telling a complete stranger about things I hadn’t even been able to admit to myself until very recently, but I knew she was trying to make it as easy for me as possible. My mother was interviewed as well, and between us we were able to provide her with some quite detailed information.

Although my father had always been very careful not to put in writing anything potentially recriminatory, I still had the one letter he’d written to me and the telephone conversation I’d taped when he’d demanded that I should tell my mother not to pursue him for maintenance payments. Although the tape wasn’t directly linked to the accusations I was making against him, the way he spoke on it did illustrate the fact that he wasn’t the nice, good-humoured man many people thought he was.

I had various other bits of documented evidence that I gave to the police, and the policewoman asked if I could get a copy of my medical records. She said they’d be useful because they’d corroborate some of the things I’d told her, for example the fact that I’d developed boils as a very young child, and because they included my psychiatrist’s reports. So I went to see my doctor and told him what I wanted, although I didn’t tell him why.

‘That’s no problem,’ he said. ‘I’ve just a couple of pages here.’ He picked up the brown envelope on his desk. ‘The rest must be in the file in reception. I’ll be back in a minute.’

He got up and walked out of the room, leaving the door open slightly behind him, but when he returned a few minutes later, he looked puzzled.

‘It’s very odd,’ he said, sitting down behind his desk. ‘But that’s all there is: just those two pages. In fact, even those aren’t actually consecutive. One’s the latest one, but the other is from some years ago. I can’t think what’s happened to the rest. It was a pretty substantial file, as I’m sure you know.’

I felt a knot of anxiety tightening around my stomach and the doctor must have noticed the uneasy expression on my face, because he smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll track them down. They’ll be here somewhere.’ Then he shrugged as he added, ‘It’s a mystery, though.’

However, despite an exhaustive search my medical records never did turn up.

I was told by the doctor’s receptionist that there was some confusion about what had happened to them after I’d asked to see them a few years previously.

‘But I’ve never asked to see them before,’ I said. ‘This is the first time.’

It wasn’t until a few days later that I remembered the blank piece of paper my father had got me to sign on the pretext of helping me to sort out the problems with my house. It had happened shortly after the media had begun to investigate his activities, and those of some of his friends, and although I didn’t connect the two things at the time, I’d known as soon as I’d written my name that I’d done something foolish. When my father didn’t contact the solicitor who’d dealt with the sale of my house, as he’d promised he’d do, I’d resigned myself to never knowing why he’d really wanted my signature on that piece of paper.

But, suddenly, it all made sense. If he’d been afraid that I might say something to the journalist who’d phoned me – either deliberately or accidentally – about how he and his friends had abused me as a child, he might well have wanted to make sure I couldn’t back-up my allegations with evidence from my medical records. And all he’d have needed to get hold of them was a piece of paper signed by me – with all the ‘blah blah’, as he’d called it, filled in by him.

It seemed like a ridiculously cloak-and-dagger explanation. But I knew the lengths my father was prepared to go to in order to protect his carefully constructed pack of cards from attack. He had a great deal to hide – and a great deal to lose – and he was ruthlessly determined to keep it hidden. He’d been living two parallel lives: one as a successful businessman and pillar of society, and the other centred on his obsession with sex and on his substantial additional income of dubiously earned money. So he’d needed friends in high places to ensure he remained one step ahead of anyone who might set out to drag him down. Which was why, for years, he’d been building a wide-ranging network of useful people. And I was certain he’d have taken whatever steps seemed necessary to ensure that I could never expose and humiliate him – including something as relatively simple as gaining access to my medical records.

I
hadn’t seen my father for some time when I bumped into him one day in a bar, shortly after my visit to the doctor. He was in his flamboyant persona, the one he adopted in public when there were people there to admire and be amused by him. I hardly listened to what he was saying, however, because I was trying to pluck up the courage to say something myself.

I hated hearing him showing off, telling stories and jokes and being charming. I didn’t want to be there with him for a moment longer than I had to, and the anxiety of waiting began to make me feel panicky. Eventually, though, he turned away from the group of people he’d been entertaining and I took a deep breath and told him, in what I hoped sounded like a casual tone, ‘I went to my doctor the other day, and it seems that most of my medical records have disappeared, including all the ones from my time in hospital.’

I’d hoped he’d look guilty, or at least uncomfortable, but I should have known better: there was very little anyone could do or say that would discomfort someone as supremely arrogant as my father. He just looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, took a mouthful of his whisky and asked, ‘What did you want them for?’

‘Oh, I just needed them for something to do with college,’ I told him, letting my own eyes slide away from his face and feeling my fingers curl into tight fists.

‘Don’t worry,’ my father said, bending one arm in front of him to look at his watch. ‘I’m on the board of directors. I’ll be able to get them for you.’

‘You’re a director of the hospital?’ I asked him. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, there are lots of things you don’t know about me.’ He laughed and turned away from me, towards his friends.

Nothing happened, of course, and after a few days I phoned him and confronted him about what he’d told me. ‘You lied to me,’ I said. ‘You’re not on the board of directors at the hospital.’

‘Oh, did you think I said I was on the board?’ I could hear the sneer in his voice. ‘No, I meant that I know someone who’s on the board. Knowing people in high places can be very useful – for all sorts of reasons. Not least because it often enables me to hear about some things before they even get a chance to happen.’

It sounded as though he was warning me – or perhaps it was a full-blown threat – and I felt my stomach contract with fear.

A few days later, I was contacted by the police and a date was set for me to make my final, official, statement. The interviews had been harrowing. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the whole process of telling my story to the police had proved to be as traumatic as I’d thought it would be, and I’d begun to wish I’d never embarked upon it at all. But it did make me feel better knowing that the police believed what I’d told them, and also because it appeared that, at last, my father was going to have to answer for all the terrible things he’d done.

I’d admired the courage of other people I’d heard of who’d spoken out about their experiences of abuse and I was proud to feel that I could now count myself amongst them. Telling my story to the police had taken its toll on my mental well-being and had left me feeling more battered and vulnerable than I’d anticipated. But I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps it might help someone else to realise they weren’t all alone in the world and that they didn’t have to be ashamed because of what someone else had done to them.

And then, one morning, I had a phone call from a journalist.

It was a Saturday and I was at home, washing dishes in the kitchen of my flat, when the phone rang. I reached for the little towel that was looped through the handle on the oven door and carried it with me into the living room as I wiped my hands.

I didn’t recognise the voice of the person who spoke to me when I picked up the receiver, but he seemed to know me.

‘Hi Katie,’ he said. ‘Have you got a moment to chat?’

‘I’m sorry, I …’ Some sixth sense made me hesitate and I could feel the goose bumps pushing through the skin on my arms.

The man had started to say something, but I interrupted, trying to keep my own voice steady as I asked, ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Joe,’ he answered. ‘Joe Kennedy. I work for the local paper.’

I sank into the chair beside the phone, closing my eyes for a moment as I concentrated on fighting my rising sense of nausea. My heart was racing and for a moment all I could hear was the hollow echoing sound of blood pumping in my ears. I struggled to concentrate and to try to think why a journalist might be phoning me at home on a Saturday morning. But all I could come up with were a couple of ridiculously implausible explanations that made no real sense at all.

‘Are you still there, Katie?’ The man sounded friendly, but I imagined I could hear in his voice the hiss of a snake when he said the letter ‘s’.

‘I don’t …’ I stopped and inhaled slowly to try to regulate my breathing. ‘What do you want? I’m busy at the moment. I can’t really talk.’

‘Oh, this won’t take a minute,’ the man assured me cheerfully. ‘I just wanted to ask for your confirmation of a few points in relation to what you’ve been discussing with the police.’ He paused for a moment before adding, ‘About your father.’

‘I can’t speak to you,’ I almost shouted at him, and then I pressed the disconnect button on the telephone and threw down the receiver as though it had burned my hand.

I walked slowly back into the kitchen, sat at the little breakfast bar looking out over the familiar houses and streets below me, and tried to concentrate on what the journalist had just said to me. My whole body was shaking and my mind was so full of a chaotic jumble of irrational half-thoughts that nothing seemed to make sense.

He couldn’t have got hold of any of the information I’d been giving to the police, I told myself. His phone call and questions had just been a lucky shot in the dark. It wasn’t possible that he actually knew anything, because I’d only spoken to two very senior police officers and they’d promised me that everything I told them would remain strictly confidential until all the statements and documentation had been sent as evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service.

But, however much I tried to convince myself otherwise, I knew that Joe Kennedy was following a story, and that, worst of all, if it was ever splashed across the newspapers, my father would know where the information had come from.

Throughout the morning, my phone rang repeatedly, but I didn’t answer it. Instead, I sat in a chair and tried to think. Apart from my mother, almost no one knew that I’d been talking to the police – and the few people who did know were all people I trusted completely. So how had a journalist found out?

During the next few days, I expected to be contacted by the policewoman I’d spoken to. But, when no call came, I phoned the police station and asked to speak to her.

‘I had a phone call from a journalist,’ I said, as soon as she answered the phone. ‘You promised me it would be all right. You promised that no one would know about it until later.’

‘I’m so sorry, Katie.’ She sounded distracted and wary. ‘We had a call from him too. But I just don’t know how he found out. I really am sorry.’

‘I can’t go on with it,’ I told her. ‘I can’t give evidence now. I thought I was strong enough to face it, but I’m not. I don’t want to talk to you again, not for a while anyway. Just keep all the stuff I gave you and maybe I’ll change my mind in time.’

‘Okay. I’m sorry,’ she said again, and this time I thought I could hear a note of impatience in her voice.

‘I just can’t believe how this could have happened,’ I said. ‘I told you that my father wouldn’t hesitate to do something to shut me up, even have me killed if he thought I was going to ruin him, and you promised me that no one would know.’

Even in the state I was in, the claim sounded crazy and melodramatic. But I really didn’t know how far my father would be prepared to go to preserve his reputation, or what he was capable of doing. On many occasions when I was a little girl, he’d beaten me with a belt until the skin on my bottom was raw and bleeding and I was sobbing and begging him to stop. And on many occasions I’d seen him punch and kick my mother until she was almost unconscious on the floor. Each time it had been a punishment for having irritated or displeased him. So it didn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to believe he might kill someone who threatened to expose him and whose evidence might send him to prison.

‘I do understand how you feel,’ the policewoman said, although I doubted whether she really did. ‘We’ll keep everything locked up here until the dust has settled and you let us know what you want to do.’

It was just another empty promise, as it turned out, because when I did ask for the documents, photographs and letters to be returned to me a couple of years later, everything had apparently ‘gone missing’.

Not long after I’d been contacted by the journalist, I was visited by a friend of my father.

‘He isn’t well,’ he told me. ‘He’s in hospital. He’s got cancer. He has to have an operation, although I’m afraid the best we can hope for is that it will prolong his life a bit. It doesn’t look as though he’s likely to survive more than a few months at most. I’m sorry Katie, but your father’s dying.’

I wanted to shout in his face, ‘Hurray! I’m glad. I’m glad he’s finally come up against something he can’t control. I’m glad he’s going to die. He deserves to suffer for what he’s done.’ But, for some reason I couldn’t understand, I didn’t feel glad. What I actually felt like doing was bursting into tears and bawling like a child, because I knew that when my father died, any chance that he might one day love and care about me would die with him.

As well as feeling sad, though, I had a sense of relief knowing that his death would bring to an end a chapter in my life that I might not have to think about any more. And then I felt guilty, partly because I was used to feeling guilty about everything and partly because relief seemed a horrible emotion to have when someone tells you your father is going to die.

Later, however, it became clear that a more appropriate reaction to the news might have been sceptical disbelief, because it turned out that although my father did have an operation, he didn’t have cancer at all, and he’d never been in any danger of dying. He’d just seen his pending surgery as an ideal opportunity to try to make me feel sorry for him. Perhaps, like the journalist, he’d somehow got wind of the fact that I’d been talking to the police about him and he thought I’d be so upset that he was going to die that I’d withdraw my accusations against him.

Coincidentally, perhaps, a few days later I was contacted by the wife of a friend of my father. Her husband was a man in a high-profile, influential job, and she wrote in her letter to me, ‘I know that you were abused by your father when you were a child, because I heard my husband discussing with him on the phone the other day what they could do to stop you talking to the police. I’d be happy to tell the police about that conversation if you want me to.’

I was grateful to the woman for having written that letter and for her offer of support, but I’d realised by that time that I wasn’t strong enough to do battle with my father. I was still reeling from the ordeal of telling my story to the police and then discovering that a journalist had found out what I was doing, and I knew that trying to expose my father and make him accountable for what he’d done was going to take more emotional and mental strength than I’d ever be able to muster.

The woman who wrote to me divorced her husband not long afterwards, and her children publicly corroborated the allegations she made about how he used to beat her up and was violent towards all of them. At the time, though – and despite his children’s statements – the man claimed that his wife was crazy, and it wasn’t until quite recently that she was finally believed, after he was sacked for ‘compromising his professional position’.

Some of my father’s friends and people close to him for various reasons were exposed from time to time. But, even when he had known links with them, he somehow managed to maintain just a peripheral role in their stories, so that the finger of blame was never pointed squarely in his direction. For years, he’d been systematically building up contacts with people who were, or might prove to be, useful to him. More importantly perhaps, he’d gathered incriminating information about powerful men who were lynchpins in the systems that control all our lives.

The media and the police had already got close to him once before and he’d outsmarted them. So what chance did I have of doing what they had been unable to do? Whatever I wanted to believe about how right ultimately triumphs over wrong, I knew that, in the real world, the Davids rarely overcome the Goliaths and that those who try to do so are often destroyed in the process.

So, instead of doing battle with my father, I concentrated on my college course and the work I was doing with young people who’d been abused. When I was working, I could separate my adult self from myself as a child, forget about my own experiences and focus on the young people whose problems were more current and more urgent than my own. And, gradually, the good days began to outnumber the bad.

There were still bad days, though, when I’d think about how much my son had had to put up with in his young life – not least having to witness my sometimes erratic, frightening behaviour when I was ill – and I’d feel guilty. Sam was a wonderful child, and he’s grown up to be an amazing young man. But, although he was protected from my illness as much as possible by his father and grandparents, I knew that it must have had an effect on him – which is something I regret deeply to this day. And, on some days when I was feeling low, I’d think that he’d be better off if I were dead.

One day, Sam was staying with me and we were being driven somewhere by my friend Jenny. Sam was sitting at the back of the car and I was in the passenger seat at the front. I’d been feeling anxious and depressed for several days, and I’d started to become obsessed by the thought that I was an obstacle to Sam’s chances of being happy. I’d said almost nothing since we’d got into the car, and Jenny had been chatting to Sam over her shoulder, trying to mask my gloomy presence and reassure him that everything was normal and okay.