Was my mother matchmaking? Paying me compliments? Wonders would never cease. I called in at the pub the next day and got talking to Edward, who turned out to be a very gentle man with a lovely sense of humour. He asked me out on a date and I accepted.
At this stage I was working as a receptionist for a group medical practice in a nearby city, a job I loved. The doctors treated me well and became almost like friends to me. One of my duties was to write the repeat prescriptions for patients, and it was only while doing this that I realised for the first time that the pills I was taking were actually antidepressants. I mentioned it to one of the doctors and he was horrified when I told him the dose of medication I was taking and the length of time I had been taking it. I tried to stop taking them but the headaches they had been prescribed to treat came back worse than ever so, after a chat with my
GP,
I decided to keep taking them. No one mentioned anything to me about dependency or long-term side effects. If the GP thought it was OK, surely it was?
Things continued to go well between Edward and me. He asked if I would sleep with him but when I said no he respected that and didn’t push me. And then, after we had been seeing each other for a few months, he asked me to marry him. I knew little about love and marriage at that stage. He made me feel
happy and he made me feel safe, so I said yes, I’d love to. I would be part of a loving family and the wife of a man who loved me for myself. It sounded perfect.
We planned to have an engagement party, and because Edward’s parents ran a pub and it was difficult for them to take a night off we decided to have it there. Logical decision, you would think—but someone was not pleased.
‘He’s the son of a publican!’ Mum exclaimed, as though this was an almighty sin. ‘A party in a pub! What do you take me for? I’m not going to any party in a common public house!’
I tried to remind her that he had been living in a pub when she pushed me to go round and visit him that first day but she wasn’t having it. If my engagement party was held in a pub, she wasn’t going to be there.
We went ahead and had the party anyway, but none of my family came. Mum made sure of that.
‘You’ve made me ill over all of this,’ she shouted. ‘You must be trying very hard to hurt me. Well, you’ve succeeded.’
I was still confused. ‘But I’m so happy with him, happier than I have been for a long time,’ I said, but this made her even more angry. Suddenly she threw herself on the floor, clutching her chest.
Was it another game? Was she play-acting to scare me? She succeeded.
Anne started screaming, ‘She’s ill, you’re making her ill!’
I called the doctor. Our GP came and examined her and after one of the shortest examinations I’ve ever heard of he pronounced her fit and well.
‘She’s fine, Cassie,’ he said as he left. ‘Nothing at all wrong with her.’
I never got angry, but I was angry now. I marched into the front room.
‘The doctor said you’re fine, that there’s nothing wrong with you,’ I told her.
She jumped up and started raining blows on me. I ran into the hall and she came after me, grabbing me by the hair and knocking me against the banisters. As I pushed her away, she pulled a hank of hair out of my head. I reeled back in pain. Whatever happened to being ill?
Then Mum ran upstairs to my room and started throwing my belongings down the stairs, where my young sister proceeded to hurl them out into the garden.
‘I’ll show you!’ Mum screamed. ‘I’ll show you. You get out of here and don’t come back. All you’ve ever done is cause me pain and hurt. You can have what I let you take but nothing that I paid for!’ She sounded furious and hateful.
‘Mum, please don’t. I was relieved the doctor said you were OK. Please stop this,’ I begged, but she didn’t listen.
She was throwing me out. It was midnight by this stage. How could she do this? Where would I go? What could I do?
I was pushed outside and the door was slammed shut. I stood with all my belongings on the lawn in front of the family home. It was very dark and very cold. And once again I was alone.
The only person I could turn to was my fiancé.
Fortunately Dottie, his mother, agreed to take me in. The next day she went round to try and talk sense into my mother
but she came back seething with rage, saying that Mum hadn’t listened to a word. She didn’t agree with the engagement but had no good reason to give. She wouldn’t have me in the house if I continued to see Edward. She would definitely play no part in any wedding arrangements.
Dottie was furious. She made up her spare room with floral curtains and bedding and told me it was mine and that I was welcome to stay there until I married her son. I was so touched that I began to cry. This lady, this wonderful caring woman who was to be my mum-in-law, came straight over and put her arms around me.
‘It’s good to have you here,’ she said. ‘I already see you as part of the family.’
Is this what mothers do? I wondered. Is this the kind of love I have been missing all my life? I was overjoyed. This is what I had always wanted, to be part of a loving family. A family like Claire’s. A family where I was loved and safe. The only things I missed from my old life were my beloved dad and my best friend, my dog Bobby. Unbeknown to me, Dottie went to see Mum again and asked if I could have my dog. The reply was that as far as Mum was concerned I had no dog. I was heartbroken, but not surprised. I’d been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty many times before.
I had to let this go. I missed Dad a lot and was often tempted to ring him but I knew that if Mum answered, his life wouldn’t have been worth living.
The huge bonus in the whole situation was that I wouldn’t have to see Bill any more. He couldn’t get to me now that I was
living with Dottie and Edward. There was always someone around to stop him. So I really was safe from the evil, nasty man and his despicable acts.
Back in the 1960s you needed your parents’ consent to marry if you were under twenty-one. Edward and I wrote to Mum and she refused point blank to give it, so we had no alternative but to wait until my twenty-first birthday on 12 November 1966. I wanted my dad to give me away but Mum had already said that he had ‘no right’ and that she wouldn’t allow him to do this for me. She and I knew who she thought should.
Even if Bill hadn’t abused me, even if I had discovered the truth about my parentage and things had been good between him and me, I would still have wanted the dad who brought me up to give me away. As it was, I asked my brother Tom.
Mum wasn’t finished yet. She rang the vicar of the church in which I was to be married and claimed that because I was under twenty-one he couldn’t call the banns in church. Our vicar told us that he had assured her that as long as I would be twenty-one on the day of the wedding he had the right to read the banns and plan the service. He said he had never, in thirty years of working for the church, had this kind of issue. He went on to tell us that he had to put the phone down on Mum to put a stop to the torrent of the abuse she directed at him. I could only imagine her anger and was secretly quite worried about what her next move would be. Because there would be another move. I knew there would.
On the Friday before my big day I received a package. In my hurry to get to work I took all my post and this package with
me to open on the way. I didn’t recognise the writing on the envelope and couldn’t think what it was. I was actually on the ferry with a friend when I opened it and suddenly the deck and my lap were covered with tiny bits of paper. When I bent to pick up some of the pieces, I realised what the contents were. I recognised some of the special paper on which I had written poems for my mother when I was a small child, hoping against hope that they would make her love me. It seems she had kept every poem I had written, every certificate I had won and every story that was mine. Now she had torn all these items to shreds and posted them to me, just before my wedding. The cruelty of the gesture stunned me, even though I was used to her by now. It could only have been done to hurt me. She wanted to spoil my happiness on the big day.
‘Try not to think about it,’ my friend said angrily. ‘It’s her problem. This just shows what she can be like. Try and forget it happened.’
I gathered all the pieces back into the package and continued with my day and did my best to push her out of my mind, but it wasn’t easy after a stunt like that.
On the morning of my wedding I woke up with no voice. I couldn’t say a word. I know now that I was suffering from severe stress, but at the time I just thought I was coming down with a cold or something. The reality was that, although I didn’t show my new family or my friends, I was overcome with worry about what the day might bring, and above all I was getting increasingly anxious about my wedding night. My fiancé had been patient and I thought, naïvely, that when I was
married everything would be OK. That magically sex would become wonderful, that it would come easily to me. Married to someone who loved me—how could it not be good? How could I not want to make love to this lovely man, my husband?
It couldn’t have rained any more that day if I had paid for rain. The heavens opened, and some of Edward’s friends, who were firemen, tried to shelter me under huge umbrellas as I ran up the church path. I descended into the church lobby with my dress hitched up around my waist. What a sight I must have been!
At the altar I had to mime my vows, making a promise to go back into the vicarage on my return from honeymoon to repeat them audibly. I kept glancing over my shoulder in the church, hoping against hope that Mum would turn up at the last minute—just as I had watched for her years before when I was three years old and dancing in a concert. But of course she didn’t. Hope disappointed me once more.
But Edward and I were married, and at last I was pretty sure I was safe. Safe from Mum, and safe from Uncle Bill.
S
uch a little word, ‘safe’. A little word with a huge meaning for me. Married life was going to be safe, or so I thought. But on the first night of our marriage I realised that there are many different forms of unsafe. I stupidly thought that once I was married that ugly word ‘sex’ would change into a wonderful word, meaning something else. ‘Love’ perhaps. Something that it had never meant to me before. But a band of gold on my finger and some vows spoken in a church were not enough to overcome a lifetime of conditioning.
On our wedding night my kind and patient husband tried to show his love and tried to make love to me, but it ended with me screaming and sobbing. I became hysterical and this poor man didn’t know how to cope with me. He soothed me, saying that we would be OK and that over time our lovemaking would become something special.
I must have appeared frigid, unloving and cold. I must have seemed hysterical to this lovely man who had no idea of my
demons or the chaos in my head. How could he? I’d never told him. I’d never told anyone—except Mum.
After our honeymoon, life settled down. I loved having my little house and garden. I was a good housewife, as I had lots of experience of doing chores. But this was different. This was mine. My own home. My husband didn’t push the sex issue but I was aware of his growing impatience. We had a good social life, and often had Edward’s friends around for card evenings and suppers. Life was fine.
Then, one day, my new safety was shattered. My husband had gone to work and I had a day off. There was a knock on my door and I went to open it, not ready for what I was to find standing on my doorstep.
Him. Uncle Bill. For a moment my heart stopped. I began to tremble. All the fears of the past came flooding back. I was straight back to being the child again. I had frozen to the spot. He just walked past me into my hallway and the sickly grimace on his face made my tummy churn. What was he doing here? Why had he come?
What a stupid, stupid question. We both knew why he had come. I guessed that Mum must have given him my address.
At first he just looked around. He said how nice I had made the place. He seemed quite calm. Almost normal, whatever that meant. But then suddenly he made a grab for me. I pushed him away and ran to the back of the house, heading for the garden, but he was too fast. He grabbed me and held me tightly.
‘I’ve missed you, Cassie,’ he leered. ‘I’ve missed all our fun games.’
‘I’m a married woman now,’ I cried. ‘You can’t do this to me any more,’ hoping that this would make him leave me alone. But it made him laugh.
‘Yes, I know. That makes it even better.’ I didn’t understand. ‘Now we can go back to our adult games as you’re living a married life. It’ll be OK,’ he said, grinning.
Living a married life? Little did he know that all the horrendous times he had abused me and made me take part in his evil games, all of this had rendered me incapable of living a normal married life. My new husband and I had never consummated our marriage. Every time Edward got too close, too intimate, I went cold and pushed him away. I often became hysterical and he would retreat and apologise, saying he wouldn’t push me. Then we would become distant and I would be full of shame and guilt. This guilt was different from the guilt I’d felt as a child. But how could he have understood this? He didn’t know, did he? I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone.
He tried to kiss me. ‘Come on, let’s have some fun,’ he said. I pushed him away.
‘I’ll scream!’ I threatened, but this seemed to make him more excited.
He pulled me down onto the hall floor and I struggled, oh how I struggled. He was writhing around on top of me, trying to get a hand inside my trousers, when he must have heard something. Suddenly he jumped up and away from me, swearing. I scrambled to my feet and decided that I would stand my ground. I couldn’t go on like this. He couldn’t hurt me any more.
‘I’ll tell,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell my husband.’
This made him laugh again. ‘And how could you do that? What would you say?’ He seemed highly amused. ‘How will you explain, when I say that we have been doing this for years? He won’t believe you. No one would. If you hadn’t liked the games then why didn’t you tell someone in the beginning?’