Maria Landon - Daddy’s Little Earner - A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence

A heartbreaking true

story of a brave little girl’s

escape from violence

MARIA LANDON

with

Andrew Crofts

To Glen Love you and miss you always xx

‘Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.’

Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

‘Ria, 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.

Chapter One

Terry 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.