Stuart Howarth - Please, Daddy, No

A BOY BETRAYED

WITH ANDREW CROFTS

HarperElement

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

The website address is: www.thorsonselement.com

and HarperElement are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Published by HarperElement 2006

© Stuart Howarth 2006

Stuart Howarth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007279975

Version 2019-10-22

TO MY SISTERSHIRLEY ANNE HOWARTH

1 FEBRUARY 1965 – 8 FEBRUARY 1991AGED 26 YEARS

I miss you, ‘Shirl the Whirl’,and today I know that you escaped awayto peace and freedom.

I watch you dance in the summer meadows,running free and chasing butterflies.

Today I smile for us all –love you!

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One Driving West

Chapter Two Mum And The Bin Man

Chapter Three The Pen

Chapter Four A More Private World

Chapter Five A Very Naughty Boy

Chapter Six Our Clare

Chapter Seven Just Messing Around

Chapter Eight The Man Of The House

Chapter Nine No Answers

Chapter Ten My Rock

Chapter Eleven A Time Bomb

Chapter Twelve Tracey

Chapter Thirteen The Lump Hammer

Chapter Fourteen Forget Everything

Chapter Fifteen Kicking Off

Chapter Sixteen Strangeways

Chapter Seventeen Did You Enjoy It?

Chapter Eighteen Guilty Or Not Guilty

Chapter Nineteen Pictures Of The Outside World

Chapter Twenty A New Father Figure

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

There are thousands of kids out there, just like me, who suffer abuse on a daily basis. You can turn a blind eye and consider this too nasty to read about, or you can take a courageous step forward and share a few moments from my world. We can only bring about change by doing something positive and being prepared to listen. This is my story.

I know when I set out from Mum’s pub that evening, 20 August 2000, I intended to go to pick up my girlfriend, Tracey, from her house. I know I intended to because otherwise I would never have taken the road I did. If I had set out with the intention of driving back to Wales I would have taken a more direct route.

Something happened inside my head between leaving Mum’s and getting to Tracey’s place, which stopped me from turning off the road. I just kept on going west. I know I didn’t have any set plan in my head; I just wanted a lot of answers to a lot of questions. Why had he done the things he’d done to me and the girls? Did he still love me? Was he sorry for what he’d done to the family? Was he really my dad or not?

A good few miles down the road, when it dawned on me where I was heading, I phoned Tracey. ‘I need to sort this thing,’ I told her. ‘I need to see him.’

‘You’re lying,’ she said, ‘aren’t you? You’re just going out with your friends again to do more drugs, aren’t you? I thought this was going to be a new start for us, Stuart, but you aren’t going to change, are you?’

I switched the phone off and just kept driving west. I could understand exactly why she would think the way she did; I’d let her down often enough in the past, why should she have faith in me any more? But there wasn’t enough space in my head to think through what I might be doing to our relationship, the best relationship I had ever had in my life. Feelings, thoughts, memories, confusion and enormous pain were all mixed together. The thing I wanted most of all was to try to make some sense of it all, to find some sort of resolution with the past.

He always seemed to be there, part of my life – my dad. But it must have been around 1972 that he first started courting Mum. He would be in the garden, sweeping up for her, or coming round to see us, bringing sweets, or presents that he’d picked up on his bin rounds. He was a great collector, was Dad, a real magpie. Anything he found that he thought still had any life in it he would cart home: furniture, broken toys, even a telly, which was the first we’d ever had. From having absolutely nothing, our house suddenly started to fill up with stuff that other people didn’t want, much of which we needed badly and some of which just cluttered the place up.

His bin round was in an area of Ashton-under-Lyne where the residents threw out things that were better than anything we had ever had. Some of the things still worked. The telly did sometimes if you banged it very hard on the side in just the right place. Most of the time the screen was pierced with a single, tiny white dot. I would get up close and try to peer through the dot, in the hope of seeing the picture through it, like a ‘What the butler saw’ peep show. My efforts were usually only rewarded by a short period of blindness while my eyes tried to refocus. I loved pushing the buttons in and out. I discovered that if I pressed two together they stuck in, but if I pressed a third button it would release them. Intrigued by these experiments I tried pushing all six while Mum was out at work, and they all jammed. Dad was furious, slapping me hard on the backs of my legs, making my skin burn, punching and kicking me until I went numb.

‘Please, Daddy, no! I’m sorry!’

He threw me up the stairs and I dragged my battered body to bed, sobbing myself to sleep, crying for my mum. I was so sorry for being such a naughty little boy. I wanted to turn the clock back to just before I’d committed my crime and to make my daddy love me again. I vowed to myself that I would make an extra effort to be good for him.

He was always very scruffy, as you might expect a bin man to be, always wearing his welly boots however hot the weather, but no small boy worries about details like that. I was often out in the street with no clothes on at all myself, caked in dirt. None of the men round our estate was exactly what you would call smart, although Dad was probably one of the worst. He was big, over six feet tall with black hair, which he would wear with a side parting on the left. I would watch him combing it over with his left hand in the mirror and then patting the top of his head to flatten it out, imitating the action even though I had hardly any hair of my own. He had a moustache too, although it never seemed to grow that well. Thinking back now, I suppose that was because he was still a young man himself, barely out of his teens. When he was around the house he liked listening to sentimental songs like ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’, or anything by the Carpenters.