Tracey Miller - Sour - My Story - A troubled girl from a broken home. The Brixton gang she nearly died for. The baby she fought to live for.

The X-rays revealed a freshly fractured skull, and a long, unhappy marriage’s worth of broken bones and damaged organs. I was six weeks old.

Oh yeah, he was a proper nuisance, my dad. And you know the irony? With the stepdads who followed, I still remember Mum as being the violent one.

She was working in two jobs – clerk during the day, a cleaner in the evenings – living for the weekends when she and her friends would follow the sound systems round south London, stealing drinks and befriending bouncers.

The Dirty Dozen weren’t Yardies. They weren’t in that league. Sure, they’d beat up an ice-cream van man with a chain, but their crime wasn’t organised, not in the way the Yardies’ was.

Still, anywhere they got to was pure war.

The first night my parents met, Mum watched Dad beat up a bouncer so bad they took him to the hospital. He had taken offence at being asked to pay an entry fee.

Next time they met in the Four Aces nightclub in north London.

“He had cut off his locks, he looked like a proper gentleman,” she recalled.

Not quite gentlemanly enough, of course, to hang around for my birth.

“Not one of those fathers was by my side when I was pushing dem babies out,” she still complains, as if that was the worst they did.

He popped in and out of our lives.

We lived in and out of mother and baby units, as she moved in with him and moved out again. I remember a garden, a Housing Association house in Tooting, with pears and apples and strawberries. But the council got a bit fed up with Mr Miller’s illegal gambling nights in the front room, so we lost that too.

The punches went both ways. Dad was once lay waited outside a club, after bursting a chain off this girl’s neck. Her friends tried to attack him with a samurai sword. They were the ones who ended up in the dock. Would you believe that it was poor, innocent Wellington who took to the witness stand to testify as the victim?

It wasn’t long before he was in court again.

I still remember the day those blueshirts stampeded into our house to take him away.

“BATH RAPIST GETS JAIL TERM” it said later in the News of the World .

Let me share it with you. It’s enough to make you proud.

“ A man was jailed yesterday for raping a woman in her home, after a court heard his victim was so terrified she allowed him to have a bath and scrubbed his back. Wellington Miller, 33, unemployed of Dulwich, denied raping the woman. ”

She was 24. It was a summer’s day in June, 1983, when my dad broke into her home in Tooting.

He told the Old Bailey he only intended to rob the place, but insisted that this kindly housewife had offered him a coffee and ran him a bath.

Because that’s what women do when men’s robbing them, ain’t it? Offer them a bath!

What actually happened was that he forced the woman to scrub his back then raped her once in the bathroom and again in the bedroom, in front of her four-year-old son. His defence lawyer blamed his drinking.

You know what he said?

“When he drinks, he goes for walks early in the morning and can’t remember what he’s done.”

I ain’t never heard of that drink – y’know, the one that turns you into an amnesiac rapist.

The judge called him an “insensitive bulldozer”.

I can think of other words. He got three years and three months.

So why is he still in prison now? Because two weeks after being released on parole, no word of a lie, he left his bail hostel in Islington and in the early hours of the morning battered down the door of a house just a few yards away, and tried to rape the mother and three girls who had barricaded themselves in a bedroom. The police arrived just in time.

He’s still in jail for that one. I’ve lost track where – he’s been moved around that much.

He got life. Could have been out by now if he’d admitted his guilt. He still insists he is innocent. Deep down I think he’s scared. I don’t think he wants to come out.

He wouldn’t be able to use a mobile phone. He wouldn’t be able to drive, or use a computer. Hell, the year my dad went down, Alan Sugar was bringing out his Amstrads. The first cool ones with the computer games, remember them? But the world has moved on while he’s been inside and my dad knows it.

So maybe it’s easier to lie about being innocent, than face the world outside.

He wrote to me when I became a bad girl. “Heard you become a gangster,” he said. “Whassat all about?”

There was no lecture. No judgement. Not even disappointment. It sounded like he was simply curious. Maybe he wanted to know what kind of gangster his daughter had become.

If I’m totally honest, for most of my young life it felt glamorous to have an incarcerated dad. No one said “rapist”, of course. It would be a long time before I found out exactly what he had done. I didn’t trouble myself to find out. All I knew was that having a dad in prison felt like something to boast about. It felt cool and rebellious. It felt like an assertion of status.

The last time I went to visit him, he claimed I wasn’t his. Said he had something to tell me, a secret he’d been keeping. He said he was convinced I must be Marmite’s. I never saw him again after that. One day, I’ll take that DNA test, but not now. Truth is, I’m scared to find out. Which result would be worse? Finding out you do have a rapist for a father. Or discovering you’d wasted all those tears and anger on a rapist who was no relation at all?

So, that’s me – a by-product of fuckery. Beyond those black marks, my past is blank. Or maybe there are no good bits to know about. As they say, badness is genetic. I think they might be right.

They call it bipolar now, but it was manic depression back then. Mum’s episodes meant my brother and I would be shipped out around foster carers and care homes a couple times every year, a few months here, six months there, but we always ended up back in the same place in south London: the Roupell Park estate.

Althea was nine years older than me. I’ll be honest, there were times that she got on my nerves, but sometimes she could be a cool sister to have. She didn’t take no shit. Her hair was always nice. She wore beehives, French plaits and Cain rows and had a nice boyfriend. She had a good job in WH Smith and went to work every day. When Mum was ill, she had our backs. She wasn’t afraid to cuss people off, tell them to mind their own business. But as Mum’s episodes became more frequent, Althea’s patience ran out. Then of course, there was the balcony incident.

Besides, she was pregnant. Did I mention that? Not heavily – can’t imagine Mum would have had the strength to dangle two – but it was enough to make her pack her bags. I couldn’t blame her for getting out when she did. She left home early, coming back to visit now and then.

We’d started fighting a lot by that point, so can’t say I missed her.

Now Melanie. She was a different story. Mel was seven years older, and a virtual stranger. Althea he could cope with, but my dad took a dislike to this younger child taking all Mum’s attention away from him, so she was sent to live with her dad. He had married this white lady in Clapham, so yeah, Mel got lucky.

When she walked back into our lives as a teenager, after a fight with her dad, it was like having Naomi Campbell coming to visit. I remember when I first set eyes on her I couldn’t believe it.

She was modelesque, man. She had long, glossy hair and pale skin. She was tall and slim and beautiful. Nothing like Althea in her WH Smith shirt with her silver name tag. I liked the swagger of this new person I was going to have to get to know.

At last, a breath of fresh air in our claustrophobic yard. Best of all, she worked in fashion. OK, so she was a sales assistant at an Army and Navy surplus store, but don’t matter if it’s camouflage gear. Clothes are fashion, innit?