Maria Landon - Escaping Daddy

It was the same technique he used to manipulate and control everyone in his life. Dad had a way of making people do what he wanted with a mixture of charm, violent bullying and manipulation. He dominated and terrorised Mum in the same way as he would later dominate and terrorise us. The fact that she had borne him four children made no difference to the way he treated her or the things he expected her to do for him.

My brother Terry was the first to be born from their great teenage love affair and I came along a year later in 1966. It seems Dad was willing to tolerate our existence, although he still enjoyed hurting and frightening us whenever the mood took him, but by the time our brothers, Chris and Glen, came along in 1969 and 1970 he had lost all patience with the demands of small children. He was so violent towards the two babies Mum didn’t dare bring them out of their bedroom when he was around and, as she slipped into a pit of depression herself, they gradually became forgotten for longer and longer periods, remaining silent and fearful behind that closed bedroom door.

I was only little but I remember glancing at that door, hearing the whimpering noises behind it and smelling the awful, eye-watering smell of their unchanged nappies, a smell that permeated through the upper floor of the house. Mum only dared to bring them out to feed and change them when Dad had gone out somewhere, and they were pitiful creatures: very thin, with scratches and sores all over their skin, and huge staring eyes. I felt desperately sorry, and guilty that I was allowed to come downstairs and eat meals with the family while they weren’t–but what could I do about it? I was just too young to help them.

Dad managed to convince Mum that she would only have to turn tricks once or twice, that he was just asking her to do him a favour because he was skint and they both needed some drinking money, but it wasn’t long before she realised she was being naive and that the more she earned for him the harder he would make her work. Dad had realised that pimping was the easiest way imaginable for him to earn money. However much she might have loved him, there was a point beyond which even she wasn’t willing to put up with him any more.

Mum finally gave up hope of anything ever changing and had a nervous breakdown, walking away from all of us without even saying goodbye. I have only the dimmest of memories of a time when she was there with us and I have no picture of her leaving. All I can really remember is me and Dad and Terry on our own together and being told that she had gone. She left us all, including Chris and Glen, still festering in their locked bedroom. Dad couldn’t believe that he had lost the love of his life and his drinking grew steadily worse, increasing the lake of self-pity he chose to wallow in. I think he was genuinely shocked that she’d gone, but he was also upset at losing the money she had brought in.

As soon as she could, Mum alerted social services to the danger we were all in now that we were alone with Dad. When social workers came round they found Chris and Glen shut in their bedroom in a terrible state. They were two and three years old, staring straight ahead with deadened eyes. Chris was rocking rhythmically back and forth in his cot and Glen was so hungry he was actually eating the contents of his own soiled nappy. Dad told everyone who would listen that Mum was the villain of the piece for leaving her children in such a state and he was able to make out that he was the innocent victim of her cold heart just as much as we were. Chris and Glen were both put into a foster home while Terry and I were left with Dad, who was busy boasting how he was going to bring us up on his own, thus winning the sympathy of all his women friends in the pub.

‘Poor old Terry. His wife’s up and left him and he’s doing his best to be a good dad to the little ones,’ they’d say, oblivious to the fact that he didn’t look after us at all. It fell to me to get meals for us, try to clean our clothes and get us to school on time, while Dad was out cavorting with his girlfriends or staying up all night drinking.

Once Mum had gone we never heard from her again for eight years. We didn’t hear from our grandparents or any of our other relatives either. Somehow Dad managed to intimidate them all into staying away, just as he intimidated Terry and me into obeying his every order with the beatings and the hours we spent locked in the windowless coal cellar if we displeased him. We never even received any birthday or Christmas cards from other family members. It seemed he was right when he told us the whole world had forgotten we existed and he was the only person we could rely on to care about us and look after us.

‘I’m the only person you can trust,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m the only person who will ever love you.’

With Mum gone he turned the full force of his pain, anger and misery onto us, while to the rest of the world he remained the jovial life and soul of the party, the hero whose feckless wife had deserted him and who was struggling to bring up the kids on his own. In the privacy of the house he did everything he could to make sure we were his devoted slaves, particularly me, playing endless mind games to make sure I would stay loyal and obedient and crushed.

‘You’re fat and ugly,’ he would tell me all the time, ‘no one will ever love you except me. Even your own mother left you.’

I was convinced it was all true. Sometimes he would cuddle me and then push me away for no reason. He would tell Terry that he had been Mum’s ‘favourite’, making it all the worse that she had deserted him, and making me feel all the worse for not being as good as my brother. He certainly didn’t bother about our clothes or any other aspects of our care. I got a letter home from the headmistress of my school, suggesting that it would be a good idea to ‘clean Maria up’ but Dad countered with such a string of expletives that the poor woman never dared to follow through with a face-to-face meeting.

I wished Dad wouldn’t treat Terry and me so badly, but I still adored him and was still desperate to please him in any way I could, following him around like a faithful little puppy. All his days were spent in the pubs and the bookies, with us waiting outside in the cold for him to stumble back out, while his nights were spent drinking and playing cards with his friends. Sometimes he would force us to join in till the early hours of the morning; other times we would be sent upstairs and threatened with dire consequences if we even came out to use the toilet. He would make us go shoplifting, mainly to steal whisky for him and his friends, and he even had us cashing stolen giros at one stage.

Dad couldn’t read so I always had to read things out for him. By the time I was eight or nine he had started making me read to him from his pornographic magazines while he masturbated. I didn’t understand what he was doing but I knew it felt wrong and weird. I had no choice, though, because if I refused I’d get beaten with a stick or with his slipper. Then he began to make me lie beside him so he could slide his fingers inside my pants, which I hated. He said he would teach me everything I needed to know, but if I ever told anyone about what he did I’d be sent away to live in a children’s home full of perverts who would torture and rape me. It sounded terrifying and I begged him not to make me go there.

His sexual demands didn’t stop at touching me.

‘Do you want a lollipop?’ he asked one evening when he got in from the pub.

‘Yes please, Daddy,’ I said, confused as he marched me upstairs and started masturbating in front of me.

‘Do you want a lollipop, then?’ he asked again.

‘Yes. Where are they?’

‘Come here,’ he said and as I leaned across he grabbed my head. ‘Suck this!’