Maria Landon - Escaping Daddy

My little council flat, which had seemed so deadly quiet and cold when it was just me and a sleeping Brendan, now buzzed with family life. I soon realised that Rodney was a brilliant father in many ways, totally supportive and ‘there’ for his kids. It was a startling contrast for me when I thought back to all the hours that Dad had spent inside pubs while Terry Junior and I either sat outside or waited at home, with no idea when we would see him again or what mood he would be in. Now that I was watching a good father at work it made me feel all the sadder for the things that I had missed out on.

Another great benefit to being with Rodney was that he had money, and he was generous with it. The ways in which he earned a living were probably similar to the ways his ancestors had been doing it for centuries. When I met him he was buying and selling cars and trucks without bothering much about official details such as registration papers. He always had a wallet full of cash in his pocket, although most of the time I had no idea where it had all come from, and as far as I could make out he never bothered with any paperwork. He had never learned to read or write, which was like my father, who didn’t learn until he went to prison as a grown man. The difference was that whereas being illiterate embarrassed Dad, it didn’t bother Rodney in the least. When we first met he said he’d teach me to drive and I could teach him to read and write in exchange, but although I did learn to drive he never got around to reading. He went to adult education lessons once to try to learn, but he didn’t have the patience to persevere, especially as he was able to manage perfectly well without it.

It was an attractive, carefree attitude to life which appealed to someone of my age, much as I used to be impressed by Dad’s swagger when I was a small child gazing with awe as he got a friend to drive him in a Jaguar to pick up his dole money, or he would ostentatiously light a cigar with a ten-pound note after a win on the horses. Rodney had the same lack of interest in convention or authority, but without my father’s tendency to show off and boast about it. It was just the way he was. I would never know what car I would be driving from one week to the next. I could come home of an evening and find he’d sold the car I’d been planning to go shopping in.

‘So?’ he’d say when I complained, unable to see what the problem was. ‘Take the truck.’

I actually enjoyed that side of his character, the unpredictability and the spontaneity. Once he’d bought a truck or a car he would immediately be stripping it down and changing the engine over, which was a skill he had taught himself over the years of dealing with scrap vehicles in places like his dad’s yard. I guess he must have been tinkering with engines since he was tiny and understood instinctively how they worked. I once had to phone him from a petrol station where I’d stopped for fuel because I couldn’t remember whether the van I was driving had a petrol or a diesel engine now.

Like his dad he was always working, always thinking, always doing deals, always looking for an angle. It was nice to have a man like that looking after me, having never been able to rely on my idle father for anything, never even knowing if there would be food on the table at the end of a day.

Money went out as easily through Rodney’s hands as it came in, which sometimes made me nervous. And he was never one for paying the bills that I thought were important, like our rent or the poll tax. If I challenged him he would shrug and claim it was the ‘traveller’ in him, firmly keeping his wallet in his pocket and leaving me to find the money somewhere else if I was so keen to pay it. He might have thousands of pounds on him some days but if I asked him for some rent he would always say no. I didn’t like that. Ever since having Brendan I had always wanted everything straight and above board, all my bills paid. After my childhood I didn’t ever want to be dealing with bailiffs or debt collectors or social workers again if I could help it. I wanted things to be secure and legal. Since Brendan was born, I had this deep-seated fear of social services saying I was an unfit mother and coming to take him away from me and I didn’t want to give them any excuses to do so.

Even with all this new family life buzzing around me Brendan was still the centre of my life and I was determined not to do anything to risk losing him or to mess up his chances in life. If I ever did get into debt it would worry me incredibly until I had managed to pay it off. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to think that I had failed in my attempt to be independent and to be a good mother. I had done enough failing in my life.

Most of all I wanted to prove to Dad that I could manage without him. Ever since I was a small child he had told me how useless I was and how I would never be able to manage without him. That had been how he had managed to force me to keep silent when he was abusing me himself, and how he could get me to go out to sell myself on the streets over and over again despite the fact that I hated it and was terrified every time. I never wanted to give him any chance to say that I had messed up my life once I’d left him so it made me nervous whenever Rodney took risks with my home and security. The worst thing would be to have to go back to Dad and ask for shelter, mainly because I didn’t want to have him anywhere near Brendan. I had to keep Brendan safe and protected at all costs, which meant I had to do everything possible to keep a roof over my head.

Rodney might not have liked wasting his money on annoyances like rent and poll tax, but when it came to spending on life’s pleasures he was never mean–far from it. After so many years of scrimping and scraping and having to sell my body or steal just to survive, it was like having a ten-ton weight lifted from my shoulders. For the first time in my life I was able to walk around a supermarket and just put whatever I wanted into the trolley, knowing that Rodney would happily pay the bill when we got to the till. For so many years I had felt like an outsider in this world, like some Victorian street urchin with my nose pressed up against a shop window, watching other people leading lives of what seemed to me to be unimaginable luxury but which was in fact just normal. Suddenly I could behave like all these normal people. It was a heady experience. I’d always been more used to buying one or two items at a time down the corner shop, existing from one makeshift meal to the next, always wondering if I had enough change in my pocket to manage till the next day. When you have been brought up in a house where there was never any money and where you only went into supermarkets in order to nick drink for your father, it felt like a dream come true; a shopping experience amongst the packed supermarket aisles that would be a chore for most people was like a day out in a theme park for me.

In one jump I had gone straight from being a suicidal teenage single mum, struggling to survive from day to day, to being a full-time stepmother and wife from the first day that Rodney moved into my life. In many ways, when I was busy and distracted, it felt like it was the most natural thing in the world, as if none of the pain and anger and resentment in my past had ever existed. Whenever Rodney was in charge there was always too much going on for me to have time for introspection and self-doubt, too much work to be done, too many people talking at once, too many surprises. There was no time to think about Dad or to remember the terrible times he had put me through, the memories that still haunted my nightmares. I thought that was a good thing. I thought that with Rodney’s help I really was going to be able to put everything behind me and be happy. There were moments when I actually felt like I might be a worthwhile person after all.