‘Let go!’ I whimpered. ‘Please.’
‘I’m going to teach you a lesson,’ he said. ‘I’m going to tickle you until you promise you’ll definitely be here next time I come.’
His fingers were everywhere—in my ribs, under my arms, my legs, my tummy.
‘I promise,’ I gasped. ‘I promise.’ I kept repeating it, until he eventually let me go.
I felt a bit strange afterwards. A bit uneasy. I couldn’t explain it any more clearly than that. It didn’t feel wrong, but it didn’t feel right either.
One day soon after that, when I was sitting on Uncle Bill’s lap in the best room, things definitely started to feel wrong. Some friends of Mum’s had come to visit, and as they sat chatting I felt a movement under my skirt. It felt as though something was trying to get in between my legs. I wriggled and Uncle Bill laughed and held me closer. That’s when I realised that he had his hand underneath me and was rubbing at the top of my thigh.
‘No,’ I said quietly and tried to get off. ‘Don’t.’
He laughed and lifted me up, walking towards the door. ‘I think she’s getting bored,’ he said to the ladies. ‘I’ll take her outside to play.’
He carried me out into the garden and, as he set me down, he slid his hand up my skirt and inside my panties onto my bottom. I didn’t like it. I felt that it was wrong. I wriggled to get away, and he laughed.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We’ll play another time.’
Play? I didn’t think I liked this kind of ‘play’. Claire’s dad often played with us, chasing us up and down the stairs, or playing catch in the garden. He would sometimes throw us up into the air, or give us a hug and a goodnight kiss on the cheek. This kind of ‘play’ was good and never made me feel uneasy.
I began to feel less comfortable around Uncle Bill after that. Next time he came round I eyed him warily, trying to stay at arm’s length. I still wanted to be his favourite girl—needed to be—but I didn’t always like his kind of games. They made me feel funny. He was still the kind uncle who brought me presents and said he loved me but I wasn’t so relaxed when he was around. I wished with all my heart that we could just go back to the way things were before. Before he started wanting to ‘play’ with me.
A
t home, Mum gave me the hardest chores to do round the house. Tom would occasionally be asked to dry the dishes after dinner, but I was the one who had the tough jobs: I had to scrub the wooden draining boards with a scrubbing brush and carbolic soap that left my hands raw; polish the front steps with Cardinal red polish, which I had to be careful not to smudge onto the path; and squeeze the washing through the huge mangle, which was much bigger than I was. These jobs were physically tough for me, but I had no choice. If I argued about the unfairness, I would be punished for daring to question her.
One day, when I was pushing a sheet through the roller of the mangle, it got stuck. ‘I can’t do this, it’s too hard for me,’ I called to Mum.
She came out and I thought at first that she was going to help me, but she angrily grabbed the wheel that turned the rollers and yanked it round before I had a chance to move my hand.
I screamed ‘Stop! Stop!’ as my hand began to disappear between the huge rollers. She stopped the wheel and wrenched my arm hard, releasing my squashed fingers. The pain was awful and I couldn’t stop crying, holding my crushed hand to my mouth. Suddenly I felt a slap across my face.
‘You stupid girl—look what you’ve done now.’ She pointed to the sheet that was now tangled between the rollers. ‘How am I supposed to get that out?’
She ordered me back into the house and I ran up to my bedroom and cried.
I didn’t resent having to do all the hard work while Tom sat and played, but it did occasionally make me feel like Cinderella. Except that I didn’t go to the ball, I didn’t meet my prince, and he didn’t whisk me away.
In our free time, Tom and I had fun together. I would tag along with him wherever he went and he never seemed to mind. He bossed me around a bit but I was happy to be his slave if he would just love me in return. I’d have done virtually anything he told me to do as a youngster.
When I was five, and we were both at the same infant’s school, he called me over while I was standing in the dinner queue and told me that it was home time. I was confused, as all the other children were queuing to go in and have their dinner. But Tom insisted that we had to go home because school was over for the day.
I believed him. I would have believed anything he said. He was my idol. We left the school together, my brother and I. Once out and running along the pavement, he admitted that I
was right, that it was dinner time not home time, but he said that he didn’t want to stay in school and it would be OK because I was with him. So I believed that it was OK. If he said it was OK, then it was.
We went into an orchard where he told me we were allowed to pick fruit. Again I believed him. We ‘scrumped’ plums and apples, eating them as we went round. It was fun, climbing trees and throwing fruit at each other. An adventure. An in-between time.
At the end of the afternoon we left the orchard and I remember feeling quite poorly. My tummy hurt and we sat down on the kerb. Unfortunately, we were spotted by a friend of our mother’s. She asked us why we weren’t at school and, quick as a flash, my brother told her that we had a dental appointment and were late. We scurried off.
We might have got away with it, except that this woman was about to visit our house. When we got home later, our formidable mother was waiting, arms folded, at the front door. ‘Where the hell do you think you’ve been?’ she screamed at me, clipping me round the ear. ‘Get to your room.’
‘My stomach hurts,’ Tom moaned, bending over and clutching at it.
‘See what you’ve done? You’ve made your brother ill. Now, get out of my sight!’
In my head I was protesting: ‘He told me it was okay. He said we were allowed. It’s not fair. My tummy hurts too.’ But out loud I didn’t say anything. Whatever scrapes Tom got me into, I loved him anyway and I would never do anything to hurt him.
I don’t remember Mum ever hitting Tom, but she hit me. She was a big woman and she’d slap me so hard that it sent me flying across the room. I once lost a hank of hair where she grabbed hold of it and pushed me against a wall, and the handful came clean out of my scalp.
The physical pain wasn’t the problem, though. It was the emotional pain. I was desperate for her to love me, dying to find a way to win her affection. As soon as I could write, I started writing her poems and notes telling her I loved her. I used to slip them into the drawer where she kept all her letters, thinking she would find them and be touched by them, but she never mentioned that she’d seen them. Sometimes I would be too afraid to give them to her so I kept them in a scrapbook under my bed. I hoped one day that she would change and show she loved me, then I would give her all these secret things. I made presents for her as well, or drew pictures, but more often than not if I handed them over she dumped them straight in the bin. I tiptoed around, trying my hardest to please her, but nothing I could do was right.
I could never understand why I annoyed Mum so much, but I was always looking for clues, and one day, when I was six years old, I overheard her chatting to a friend of hers we called Auntie Prue. Normally I was sent out into the garden or up to my room when she had company—‘Get out of my sight and stay out!’—but on this particular occasion she’d sent me into the kitchen to lay out a tray of tea and biscuits. As I walked back through the hall with it, I heard Auntie Prue mentioning my name and I stopped for a moment.
‘She was a mistake. A very unfortunate mistake. Having her ruined my life,’ Mum said passionately.
I must have made a sound in the hall—an intake of breath maybe—because Mum realised I was standing there listening. She jumped to her feet, took the tray from me and placed it on the table, then grabbed me by the hair.
‘You’re the reason for all the unhappiness in our family,’ she screamed. ‘You know that, don’t you?’ As she shouted, she dragged me by the hair to the back door and threw me out into the garden.
I huddled down, sobbing and trying to work out what she could possibly have meant. In what way was I a mistake? Did that mean she hadn’t meant to have me? I didn’t know where babies came from but I assumed you had to ask for them in some way, that they didn’t just come uninvited.
My Nana C had been an assistant midwife and she used to talk about ‘bringing babies into the world’. As a child I thought that perhaps there was a door somewhere and Nana C opened it and brought in a baby. That’s how naïve I was. I guessed that maybe the midwife who brought me had picked up the wrong baby by mistake. Was that what Mum meant? When Anne was born, Mum had been delighted with her, and still was. She must have been the right baby. She wasn’t a mistake. It was just me. I was the problem.
After a while I heard Mum going out, so I crept back into the house and ran up to the bathroom and locked the door, shaking, scared and confused. I’d been in there for quite some time when I heard footsteps approaching up the stairs and then Uncle Bill calling my name.
‘Cassie? Where are you, sweetheart?’ He tried the bathroom door and, realising it was locked, sat down to talk to me through it.
‘Mum doesn’t love me,’ I sobbed. ‘She said I was an unfortunate mistake. She says I ruined her life.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ he soothed. ‘She doesn’t mean it. Anyway, you’ve got me and I love you. I’ll look after you.’
No one else had ever told me they loved me before—not Dad, or Tom, or my sisters, and certainly not Mum. The only affection I ever got was from Uncle Bill, and no matter how uneasy I had felt that day in the garden, I desperately needed his love. Eventually I unlocked the door and came out, and he gave me a great big hug, which brought on a fresh wave of sobbing.
My mother came back at that point. ‘Is she still creating?’ she shouted up the stairs. ‘Why don’t you take her out for a drive to calm her down and get her out of my hair?’
I thought anything was better than staying in the house with her, so I got my cardy and followed him out to the car, holding his hand trustingly.
Uncle Bill was very proud of his car—a black Austin. He was the first person in the neighbourhood to get a car and he never missed a chance to be seen out and about in it. I felt special sitting on the front seat with him, gazing out the window, breathing in the leathery, petrolly smell.
We drove out to the countryside, to a lovely spot that he knew I liked, high up on a hill with a view over the sprawling city below. It was a perfect sunny day and Uncle Bill had brought a picnic with him, of biscuits, fruit and orange squash.
He also had a packet of sweetie cigarettes, my favourites. He spread out a rug to sit on and we ate first, then we played ball and chased butterflies and picked wildflowers. I felt loved, safe and special. After all the earlier emotional turmoil, I felt happy again so I was sorry when the day came to an end and it was time to get back in the car and head home.
Uncle Bill put his arm round me. ‘Let’s get into the back for a cuddle. That will end the day nicely,’ he said.
I had no reason to be afraid after such a lovely, happy afternoon so I clambered into the back of his car and he wrapped his arms round me and held me tightly. But then he started to kiss my face roughly, in a way that he had never done before, and when I tried to pull away he held my head so I couldn’t move it. Next his hands started to touch me all over—on my back, my bottom, then between my legs—and I knew instinctively it was wrong.
‘No, you’re hurting me,’ I cried. ‘Please don’t do this. Please stop.’ It was as if he didn’t hear me. He was a big man, a strong man, and all my pushing him away made no difference. He was still professing his love for me but at the same time he was hurting me, his big rough hands gripping my skinny little body, his fingers poking me inside my panties. I was terrified.
‘Please stop, please don’t do this.’ I began to cry.
He seemed shaken by my tears and at last he pulled away. ‘All right, all right, I’ll take you home,’ he snapped, sounding cross. He clambered into the front seat, then turned to me with a nasty tone. ‘You can’t tell anyone about this, do you hear?
You can’t tell what happened because if you do they’ll blame you.’
I was confused. How could this be my fault? What had I done to deserve this?
And then to make things even worse, he continued, ‘If you say that I hurt you and made you cry, they won’t believe you.’ He laughed. ‘After all, did I make you climb into the back of the car?’
I was shaking with fear. Why had he done that? Where was the nice uncle who said he loved me? He shouldn’t have done that.
We drove home in silence. I couldn’t understand how he could have hurt me this way. He loved me, didn’t he? Everything was confusing.
As soon as we got home I ran up to the safety of the bathroom. I felt dirty and sore between my legs so I stood in the bath and scrubbed myself with hot, soapy water. It began to sting but I kept scrubbing because I wanted to make what had happened go away. I felt bruised all over where his big fingers had gripped me so tightly, but worse than the physical pain was the terrible loneliness and fear. Who could I turn to now? How could I ever feel safe again? I had no one left on my side. When I had finished washing, I took myself to bed and cried until I was so exhausted that I finally fell asleep.
Shortly after this, Mum announced at breakfast one Saturday that Uncle Bill was going to spend the day with me. My sisters had returned from boarding school a few weeks before and they were taking Tom to a pantomime—a family treat that
of course I wasn’t included in—while Mum and Dad were going shopping.
‘I’ll be OK in the house on my own,’ I said quickly, terrified that the things that had happened in the car might happen again.
‘Don’t be so ungrateful,’ my mother snapped. ‘You’re staying with Bill and that’s that.’
When he arrived, grinning from ear to ear, I couldn’t bear to look at him. As soon as Mum and Dad left, I told him I wanted to go out and play with a friend, but he wasn’t about to let me do that.