Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (25 page)

There was a flicker of something, and then she finally said the words I’d wanted to hear all those years: ‘I love you too.’ But she said them in a casual, throwaway manner, just as she might have said ‘I love chocolate’ or ‘I love that hat’. There was no depth, no sense that she had reached any understanding of our tortured, brutal history.

I wanted her to realize that this could be her last chance to try and put things right between us, so I said ‘Mum, you will be going to Heaven soon.’

She turned and looked at me, her eyes empty.

‘You go first,’ she said stonily. ‘You go first then come back and collect me. I don’t want to go on my own.’

I was shocked. Why would she say such a thing? What mother would want their child to die before them? Even though I knew she wasn’t in her right mind any more, I still felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I left that evening feeling hurt and confused, with Mum’s words ringing in my ears and with the awful sense that these would be the last words she would ever say to me.

My son Richard went to see Mum and spent four hours chatting and making his peace with her. She’d never been a loving or affectionate grandmother to him, but I was glad he’d had the chance to speak to her, to tell her that he forgave her and things were fine between them.

Somehow I still couldn’t let go despite knowing there was nothing more she could give me. I visited her every day for those last few months, making the two-hour journey up the motorway and back. I was exhausted, but I could sense that I didn’t have much time left with her.

Then one day I arrived at the nursing home to be told that Mum had slipped into a coma during the night. I kept a vigil by her bedside all day watching for signs that she might open her eyes, give me one last kind look before she went. The nursing home assured me that her vital signs were still strong, so the following afternoon I took a chance and slipped off to fulfil a long-standing commitment. I phoned the nursing home at four o’clock and they said Mum’s condition was unchanged. About an hour later
I had the strangest experience. Suddenly I smelled Mum’s lily-of-the-valley perfume and her old lady smell really strongly, as if in a cloud around me. There was no one near by, nowhere it could have come from. Instantly I knew something had happened and I called the nursing home again.

‘I’m afraid she’s passed away,’ a nurse said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

And with those simple words, my world changed. All those years of bullying, cruelty and violence were over. Just like that. She could never tell me I was fat or ugly or horrible ever again. I suppose I should have felt relief but instead a huge wave of sadness washed over me.

In the next few days the strength of my grief surprised me. It was a complicated kind of grief tied up with anger and longing and disbelief. Mum had been such a force of nature, it was hard to accept that she had been snuffed out like a candle flame.

The day before she was buried, I drove to the Chapel of Rest. I don’t know why, but I wanted to see her actual body, partly to confirm to myself that it really was Muriel Casey who had died and not some other nursing home resident who had been confused with her. This was the same Chapel of Rest I had seen both my brother Nigel and my father in when they died. It was hard enough then, I didn’t know if I could bear it again. I made myself get out of the car and walk up the path. As I pushed the door open, I felt my mouth go dry. The woman lying there had Muriel’s features all right but it didn’t look like her. The character I’d known as Mum simply wasn’t there. What was left of her was just a deathly mask, an empty shell. I couldn’t bear to look for more than a few seconds before I
had to run out of the room, gasping for air. That was it. She was gone. Forever.

Around thirty to forty people came to the funeral on a grey, drizzly March morning. Most of them were strangers to me, but Uncle Roy was there and the daughter of Mum’s sister Hetty. None of the Canadian relatives came over. I don’t remember much about the day because I broke down and sobbed hysterically, as if my heart was breaking.

My head was filled with regrets: that she never said sorry for what she had done to me over all those years; that she never relented and told me the truth about my real parents. But over the weeks after her death, I realized that her refusal to say anything was an answer in itself. In my heart, I felt that Margery had been my mother, and Dad my own father, but I would never know for sure.

Then a strange sense of peace came over me. Perhaps I didn’t need to know as much as I thought I did. What difference would it make now, anyway? Margery was dead, Dad was dead, Mum was dead – none of them could be a parent to me now. Towards the end I had been the parent anyway and Mum had been the child. I’ve got no regrets about all the time I spent caring for her, despite our history. I do sometimes slip into thinking that if only Dad had left Mum and I had been brought up by him and Margery, everything would have been completely different for me. But that kind of speculation gets me nowhere.

It was time to let the past go, as I had before when I released myself from the pain of my childhood and looked forward to the future and the good life I could make for my own children.

I thought of Mum during the years she spent in a nursing home – bitterness had etched lines on her face, two
frown lines between her brows, grooves running down from the corners of her mouth, multiple little smokers’ furrows on her top lip – and I realized that I felt sorry for her.

What kind of life had she led, if my theories were true? A husband who gave her a beautiful house and all the money she wanted for clothes and shoes, but who went elsewhere week on week for warmth and affection. An adopted son with severe epilepsy that killed him at the age of twenty-four, and a daughter who may have been the bastard child of her husband’s lover.

The only person Mum ever seemed to have loved was her father, Charles Pittam, a sick and twisted man. More than ever, I was convinced she used to be ‘Daddy’s special girl’. If I’m right, then the only love Muriel ever knew was flawed, damaged and unhealthy. The only love she was able to feel was for a paedophile.

I look at my own life now and I admit it’s been a long, hard journey but I am lucky enough to have learned about love along the way and am so grateful for it. As a child I was loved by Nan and Grandad Casey, by Dad and Nigel, and that is what helped me to survive. They say that the abused often become abusers but I have been able to break this pattern and bring up my children with limitless, unconditional love. From the first moment that I held Samantha in my arms, I knew that I would walk over burning coals for her. I felt the same when Natalie and Richard came along. I know, and they know too, that whatever happens in the future I will always be there for
them if they need me and will do whatever I can to make their lives happy.

But, most of all, I am a survivor. I came through the torments of my childhood and I am still here.

Learning to give love is an even bigger gift than being able to receive it and for poor Muriel, it’s a lesson she never learned. I loved her, but I realize now that she never knew what it felt like to love. She missed out on the most important thing in life. In the end, despite everything she put me through, she was the one who was truly punished.

‘R
ia, you’re my favourite,’ Dad would tell me throughout
my childhood. ‘All daddies love their little
girls the best.’ I’d fill with pride at this announcement
from my big, handsome, heroic father. I was his special
one. My brother Terry might be Mum’s favourite but Dad
loved me most and I’d have done anything to please him.

Mum says that right from the start he boasted to all
and sundry that he was going to train me to be ‘the best
little prostitute on the block’, but I only gradually got an
inkling of what that meant. I probably didn’t want to
know so I blocked it, even when he brought home his
prostitute friends and dressed me up in their clothes.
Even when he started breaking me in.

Years later, when my testimony put him in jail for
living off my immoral earnings, he said: ‘You can cut me
into a thousand pieces but I’ll always put myself back
together again and I’ll be there for you, no matter what
you do. I’m the only one who will ever truly love you.’

I think he genuinely did love me, to the extent that he
was capable of love, and I stayed a daddy’s girl right into
my teens. He was my dad, the only one I had, after all.
And he had a lot of charm, he could talk the birds down
from the trees. There are plenty of people, even now, who
have a soft spot for him, despite knowing everything
he’s done.

Without that charm, none of it would ever have happened.
Mum wouldn’t have fallen head over heels for
him, a lot of other people wouldn’t have got hurt, and
I wouldn’t have found myself working the streets at the
age of thirteen to keep him in booze.

Every little girl has the potential to be a pop star, a
ballerina, a doctor, a barrister, a policewoman or a prostitute,
but to make the right choices they need support and
guidance from the people whose responsibility it is to care
for them. With a dad like mine, I never stood a chance.

T
erry and Jane, my mum and dad, were always described
as a glamorous couple. Anyone who knew
them when they were young in the early 1960s would agree
on that, however much they might later disapprove of the
way they both behaved. It was obvious to everyone that they
absolutely adored one another; you might even say they
were obsessed, and that it was their obsession with one
another that led to so many of our problems.

If they were both the loves of one another’s lives, as
they undoubtedly were, you would have thought that
would have given us, their children, a secure start in life –
but there were other darker elements of their relationship
at work almost from the moment they met, which turned
our family and our lives into a nightmare.

Everyone in the pubs that he frequented loved Dad. He
was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a powerful
presence about him. He was invariably immaculately
dressed in a suit and tie and known for being good company
wherever he was, never able to resist playing up to
an adoring crowd of admirers.

Mum was only five feet four, but she had a perfect figure,
slim but curvy, which she readily showed off with
mini skirts, hot pants and tightly fitted tops, everything
that was fashionable amongst the young in those days,
even in Norwich, a good few miles away from ‘swinging
London’. I don’t have any early memories of her but I’m
told she was strikingly beautiful, with long jet-black hair,
deep brown eyes and flawless skin.

Dad was the black sheep of his family, or so the legend
was whispered, the one with a dubious past who never
did the right things but who prided himself on doing the
wrong things with style. He always claimed that he was
conceived when his mother had a fling with another man
during the war, while his father (his mother’s husband,
that is) was away from home doing the honourable thing
and fighting for king and country. If that was true it
would certainly go some of the way towards explaining
why Dad was so different to the rest of his family, and
why we were always treated as though we were outsiders
in some way that was never actually put into words.
Having a different father to his siblings meant there was
always a gap between them and him. His life seemed to
travel on totally different tracks to theirs, partly from his
own choice and partly because of the way he was and the
things he believed. Maybe the fact that he had a different
father was also the reason why Dad was his mother’s
favourite, the one she would always stick up for no matter
what he did.

Her husband, who was a farmer, got into a lot of debt
when he came back from the war and, unable to see a way
out, he shot himself in the shed at the bottom of their garden.
Dad said he was the one who found the body when
he was still just a small boy. No one else ever verified that
story for me so I have no way of knowing if it was true,
but I certainly believed it at the time. Maybe it was true.
Whatever happened, I certainly didn’t have a grandfather
on that side and Nanny lived alone in her bungalow
a few miles away from us.

Rumour also had it in the family that my dad and my
grandmother slept in the same bed until he was fourteen.
That seems very believable, given how close they were
and how she tried to protect him from everyone, including
me. It might also have explained why he was as
relaxed as he was about everything to do with sex and
nudity.

My aunts and uncles all grew up to be very different
to Dad, quite middle class in their values and successful
in their lives. They’ve bought their own homes and run
their own businesses and none of them would have
wanted to have anything to do with the sort of people
that Dad liked to hang out with, the thieves, alcoholics
and prostitutes who trooped in and out of our home at all
hours of the day and night, and drank with him in the
pubs of Norwich.

Dad didn’t learn to read and write until long after I
could – and I know he spent some time in an approved
school as a boy, although no one ever told me what for.
There was a story about him throwing a bus driver off
the bus when he was still quite young and I believe the
chap later died of a heart attack, although I don’t know
any more details. I doubt anyone could have been sure the
two events were directly linked but it sounds like the
sort of thing Dad might have done. As well as being a
charmer he was also a bully and a show-off and he had an
uncontrollable temper, which he frequently vented with
violence.

Although Mum’s family lived in a council house and
hadn’t done as well as some of Dad’s relatives, she had
been a bit spoiled by her father. Like Dad, she was always
a problem to her parents in her early teens, running away
from home, being wild and causing them no end of worry.
Mind you, she can’t have been that wild because on the
night she met Dad, when she was still fifteen, she had
gone out to the pictures on a date with another lad and
when he tried to put his hand up her skirt in the dark she
was mortified and slapped it away. Apparently affronted
by such forward behaviour she immediately ran out of
the cinema and set out to walk home alone, having
successfully protected her honour. Just up the road she
bumped into Dad, whom she had never met before. He
was only a couple of years older than her but was already
very skilled at laying on the charm and flattery. He was
tall and well-dressed, a proper ladies’ man, and her head
was turned. He must have worked some magic because
he didn’t meet with any of the resistance the poor guy in
the cinema had encountered and they ended up having
sex together that very first night. That was how the great
love affair, which was to destroy so many lives, began.

When Dad first brought Mum home, my grandmother
was overjoyed and immediately encouraged
them to get married and start having children, but of
course they had to wait until Mum was old enough. Dad
had been in a fair bit of trouble when he was younger,
always drinking and mixing with the wrong crowd, and
Nanny was probably relieved to think she could get him
off her hands, hoping he would settle down now that
he had met the right woman.

Mum’s parents were not as pleased by this great love
match as Dad’s mum was. In fact they went to court to try
to stop her from seeing him. As she was only fifteen I suppose
they thought they had a chance of saving her from
him before it was too late. They must have been able to
see through his charm and bravado immediately and they
despised him, believing he was no good and would end
up hurting their daughter. As it turned out they were
completely justified in their fears. They had probably
hoped she would meet some steady guy with a regular job
who would be able to calm her down, and anyone meeting
Dad would have known instantly that he was not
going to be the man for that job.

The more her parents told her not to see him, of
course, the more determined she became. By disapproving
of her choice her parents had turned the affair into
something illicit, adding to its glamour and excitement,
making Dad seem like a forbidden fruit. From the first
moment they spoke up against him they didn’t stand a
chance of keeping two such wilful, self-destructive kids
apart.

Mum was nineteen when she fell pregnant for the first
time, and they got married a week or two after my brother
Terry Junior was born in 1965. Dad’s mum was
thrilled; I think she paid for the marriage licence and
everything. Mum’s parents must have realized they had
lost the battle by that stage and were going to have to
make the best of a bad job. Perhaps they hoped that having
a baby would make Terry and Jane settle down a bit
and take their responsibilities seriously.

I was born a year later, in 1966, followed three years
after that by Christian and then by Glen in 1970. Right
from the word go I was a proper little daddy’s girl. I adored
him, while Terry was more of a favourite for Mum.

‘The moment you were born you were his,’ Mum once
told me, and I knew it was true. He loved my brother
Terry too, but once I was born Terry became Mum’s and
I was his. The night of my birth I’m told he paraded
around the hospital, completely drunk and smoking a
cigar, much to the annoyance of the sister in charge.

‘Right from the start,’ Mum said, ‘from when you
were born, he used to joke that he was going to make you
the best little prostitute on the block.’

Click here to buy the full eBook now