Maria Landon - Escaping Daddy

Escaping

Daddy

A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl

MARIA LANDON

with Andrew Crofts

For the true heroes of this story,

Brendan and Thomas

xx

‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood’

Tom Robbins

Epigraph ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood’ Tom Robbins

Foreword

Chapter One - Childhood

Chapter Two - The Overdose

Chapter Three - A Ready-Made Family

Chapter Four - Rodney and Me

Chapter Five - Husband and Brothers

Chapter Six - Sticks and Stones – and Words Will Always Hurt Me

Chapter Seven - A New Baby

Chapter Eight - The Human Yo-Yo

Chapter Nine - An Escape Route

Chapter Ten - Breakdown

Chapter Eleven - Finding Marion

Chapter Twelve - The Inner Child

Chapter Thirteen - Chasing Happy Ever After

Chapter Fourteen - More to Me Than Frying Eggs

Chapter Fifteen - Terry’s Wedding

Chapter Sixteen - A Time to Die

Chapter Seventeen - Self Help

Chapter Eighteen - A Promise to Glen

Chapter Nineteen - Toni

Chapter Twenty - Positive Thinking

Chapter Twenty-one - Becoming a Teacher

Chapter Twenty-two - Thoughts on a Spanish Beach

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘Get that down you,’ Dad said, handing me a vodka and lime.

I took a big gulp and shuddered as it burned my throat. My hand shook as I applied eyeliner in thick black strokes. I was just thirteen years old and getting myself ready for a night working on the Block, the section of Ber Street in Norwich where men cruised in their cars looking for sex.

‘Hurry up!’ Dad growled. ‘The sooner you get started, the sooner it’ll be over.’

I took another big swig and the alcohol made me dizzy but didn’t relieve the sheer terror about what lay ahead. Every time I got into a strange man’s car I knew I could be robbed, beaten up, or worse. It never got any easier.

Dad gripped my elbow and led me out onto the street. I was teetering in my ridiculously high heels, stumbling with fear, trying to make my mind go blank. Just do it, just get through it , I was thinking. There’s no way out .

There were other girls working the same patch and they eyed me with suspicion and hostility as I arrived in their territory. None of them said anything while Dad was around because they all knew what he was like. I was by far the youngest one out there, but none of the customers were going to complain about that.

When the time came and a car pulled up, I couldn’t bring myself to actually walk forward and talk to the driver. My heart was beating so hard I thought I was going to faint. Dad stepped out of the shadows behind me and pushed me towards the road.

‘Get out there now,’ he hissed. ‘Go and earn your keep.’

I knew from experience that he wasn’t going to change his mind and let me go home now. I had no choice but to go through with it.

‘Do you want business?’ I asked the next driver through the open window, my voice not much more than a whisper.

He did. Terms were agreed and I got into the car under Dad’s watchful eye, then we drew away from the others into the darkness.

Working on the Block was a regular part of my life between the ages of thirteen and fifteen but never something I got used to. I always hated it but I didn’t think I deserved any better. It was my destiny to provide men with what they wanted and to be controlled by Dad. That’s all I was good for, as he had told me over and over again throughout my childhood.

So when I started trying to break away from Dad’s influence and form adult relationships with men, I didn’t have a clue how they should work. I thought I needed a man to protect me in the world, and in return I had to provide him with sex and do as he told me. Was that what other women did? Was that how the world worked? Wasn’t it?

‘No one else will ever love you, Ria,’ my dad would always tell me, ‘not the way I do. I’m the only one who will ever truly love you.’

I still believed those words long after I should have been grown-up enough to know better. Everyone wants to believe what their parents tell them, don’t they?

Even when I stopped having anything to do with Dad, the lessons he had taught me rang in my ears. There was an invisible chord still linking us no matter how hard I tried to pull away. What hope could I have of ever being happy? What would it take?

Right from the beginning Dad would say I was his favourite child, and that would make me very proud. He was big and handsome and always seemed heroic to me because he was so popular and flamboyant, always the centre of attention wherever he went. Everyone loved my tall, dark, handsome dad. He had a powerful presence, always immaculately turned out in a suit and tie and known for being good company, never able to resist playing up to an adoring crowd of admirers. He was so plausible he could tell people anything and get away with it. He cultivated an image for himself as a lovable local rogue and ‘a bit of a character’, but as well as being a charmer he was a bully and a show-off and he had an uncontrollable temper, which frequently spilled over into violence.

I always wanted to please him, to obey him, to win his approval and to avoid getting a beating. But the more I yearned for his approval the more he would withhold it, telling me how worthless and fat and ugly I was, and I continued to believe him even when I could clearly see the sort of man he truly was beneath the superficial bravado. My father was a pimp and a drunk and had been all his adult life.

His total possession of me started on the morning I was born, when I’m told that he paraded boastfully around the hospital, completely drunk, puffing on a cigar and joking that he was going to make me ‘the best little prostitute on the block’. Except he wasn’t joking; he was deadly serious.

‘Pity I haven’t got four girls,’ he would tell anyone who would listen, ‘because then I could run a proper little brothel and never work again.’

To him these weren’t such shocking announcements because that was the world he lived in, the world he sought to control in any way he could and the world I grew up in. He truly believed that all women were ‘sitting on a goldmine’ and that they were mad if they didn’t exploit it to their own advantage, and if possible to his advantage as well. He never held down a proper job in all the years I knew him, drinking away whatever money he could bully the women in his life into earning for him by selling their bodies on the streets, combined with whatever welfare payments he could blag.

Despite the fact he always swore that my mum was the love of his life, just as she would swear that he was the love of hers, he had even nagged and bullied her into selling her body to passing kerb-crawlers in order to provide him with drinking money. Such behaviour seemed normal to him because all the friends that he spent his days and nights with were the same: either alcoholics or hookers, or both. I was too young to be able to remember the years when Mum and Dad were together, but I can imagine how it was from what they and other people have told me, and from the way he went on to treat me and everyone else. Despite the fact that he worshipped Mum, he still undermined her confidence at every possible opportunity, one minute telling her how gorgeous she was and the next telling her she was ugly and useless. He would beat and kick her ruthlessly when she tried to stand up to him, determined to break her spirit and make her obedient. When she finally decided she had had enough and left us when I was six years old, he spent the rest of his life telling everyone how brokenhearted he was, and threatening to kill himself whenever he was drunk.