Joe Peters - Cry Myself to Sleep - He had to escape. They would never hurt him again.

Cry Myself to Sleep

He had to escape. They would never hurt him again.

JOE PETERS with Andrew Crofts

In loving memory of my wonderful dad ‘George William’, 1944–78.

Thanks for those early years together. These memories I will treasure for a lifetime; until the day we meet again I accept you’re here by my side in spirit.

To my baby that I never got to see, may God rest your soul. Granddad will look after you until the day we meet in heaven and I finally get to see you.

In my thoughts all the time.

Love,

Dad x

Chapter One My Life Goes up in Flames

Chapter Two Sold

Chapter Three Thrown Out

Chapter Four Standing on the Slip Road

Chapter Five The Muslim Samaritan

Chapter Six Never-never Land

Chapter Seven A Confused Boy

Chapter Eight Max’s Flat

Chapter Nine The Great Escape

Chapter Ten The Squat

Chapter Eleven Lisa

Chapter Twelve Street Crime

Chapter Thirteen My Baby

Chapter Fourteen The Aftermath

Chapter Fifteen Nowhere to Go

Chapter Sixteen Prison

Chapter Seventeen My Kind Defender

Chapter Eighteen Looking for Lisa

Chapter Nineteen On the Beach

Chapter Twenty Farmer Joe

Chapter Twenty-One A Walk On the Wild Side

Chapter Twenty-Two Descent into Madness

Chapter Twenty-Three Bids for Freedom

Chapter Twenty-Four On the Run

Chapter Twenty-Five A Bit of a Houdini

Chapter Twenty-Six Surviving Abroad

Chapter Twenty-Seven Boy Meets Girls

Chapter Twenty-Eight California Dreaming

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

E-book Extra

Copyright

About the Publisher

I was only five years old and my father was the centre of my universe. I knew he was the most important person in my short life, but what I couldn’t possibly know at that terrible moment was that he had been the only protection I had from enemies I didn’t even realize I possessed. I knew that I loved him far more than I loved Mum and I knew that he loved me with the same intensity, that I was ‘his boy’; but I didn’t realize how much Mum hated me for being Dad’s favourite, or how much my half brothers wanted to hurt me.

Mum and Dad’s marriage was in tatters by that time, and Mum must have seen me as being on his side and so loathed me in the same way that she loathed him. I knew she was capable of physically hurting me, because she had done so in the past, but I had no idea how far she would be prepared to go in the coming years.

On the day when everything changed for ever I watched my father burning to death in front of my eyes. I could do nothing to help him as he ran around the garage in flames, screaming from the pain while I struggled to escape from the car, where he had left me in order to go to work. It was as if everything was happening in slow motion and all the other grown-ups were rooted to the spot by the horror of what they were witnessing. There had been a smell of petrol and a carelessly thrown cigarette end which had been caught by the wind and blown back into the building, igniting the spilled fuel and turning my father into a living torch as he worked underneath the engine. Eventually I fought free of the car and ran to help him, but someone grabbed me and held me tight before I could reach him.

Dad never recovered consciousness after the ambulance took him away, and Mum instructed the doctors to turn off his life-support machine a few days later. I had to listen while she and Marie, Dad’s girlfriend, fought about it in the hospital, and then fought about me. Even though I wanted to stay with Marie, Mum wanted me back, not because she loved me but because she wanted to take her revenge, and the law was on her side. I had to accept that Dad had gone for good and I was going to have to live back home with Mum and my sister and four brothers, two of whom hated me as much as she did.

From the moment I walked through the door, a small boy needing to be comforted for his devastating loss, it was made clear that my place in the family was lower than that of any pet animal. I might have been Dad’s favourite, but now I was loved by no one. My brothers were free to kick and punch and abuse me in any way they chose and there was nothing I could do about it. They used to eat at the table but I had to lick up the scraps they tossed on to the floor for me. I wasn’t allowed to sleep in a bed, unless it was to allow my brothers to sexually abuse me and hurt me, but was relegated to the floor in a corner of the room with only a single blanket to cover me.

As the endless beatings and humiliations escalated, my throat and tongue seemed to close down, with the result that I started to stutter and gulp more and more, until eventually I was unable to speak at all, or even to make any sounds beyond tiny squeaks. When I cried, my tears ran silently down my face and no sobs escaped from my heaving chest. I had been silenced by the shock of what I had witnessed and could no longer beg for mercy or hope that I would ever be able to tell anyone about what was being done to me by my own family. I was trapped inside my own head.

Everything I did seemed to anger and disgust my mother and brothers even further, and the violence and abuse escalated with every passing month. They were constantly telling me how worthless and vile I was, and it became harder and harder to remember that Dad used to praise me and tell me how much he loved me. As the weeks turned into months, I started to believe the things they were telling me about myself: that I was beneath contempt and deserved to be hurt and demeaned all the time.

Eventually Mum could no longer bear to have me in her beautiful clean house any longer and I was dragged away and thrown into the dark, damp Victorian cellar with nothing but an old mattress to lie on and a bucket for a toilet. I sat in the darkness, dreading the threatening sound of approaching footsteps on the stairs even more than I dreaded the loneliness and hunger. Sometimes I would be left there for days on end without food or water, unable to call for help or beg for mercy, trapped inside my own silence, not even able to scream when they came down to beat or taunt me. In my head I would talk to Dad; I was able to see him sitting next to me in the gloom and able to hear his voice. It was my only comfort.

Things grew a thousand times worse when Amani became my mother’s new lover. To me he seemed like a giant, ugly, alien figure. I heard that he came from Africa, but as far as I was concerned he could have come from another planet. My mother encouraged Amani to visit me in the cellar and relieve his sexual and sadistic needs whenever he chose. It started with him working off his sexual frustrations on me whenever he felt the urge, twisting my private parts painfully if I made any attempt to resist, and then he seemed to want to hurt me for the sheer pleasure of inflicting pain. He would rape me and then throw me aside, spitting on me and calling me names, as if it was all my fault and I was the dirty one. It seemed that to him I wasn’t even human. The violence of his attacks and the force of his contempt for me seemed to amuse Mum and my brothers, reinforcing their own ideas of my worthlessness.