The Step Child (30 page)

He turned and looked at me once.

Our eyes met.

This was my father. This was the man who was responsible for me being here. He had answers. He could tell me things. He
could even lie – and if it was convincing enough, I would have him back again.

He turned away without a word.

I never saw my father again and he never did give me any answers.

MY DAD RECOVERED SUFFICIENTLY
after his stroke to be able to leave the hospital and go home. It was decided by others that he couldn’t go back to his flat because he wouldn’t be able to manage, so he was offered supported accommodation in Abbeyhill. Karen, who was still only in her early teens, moved with him. In the winter of 1981 he was admitted to Leith Hospital where he was treated for a chest infection, amongst other things. Just as my Dad was due to be released from that hospital, he suffered an extreme bronchial attack which resulted in his death. After much personal angst, I decided to attend his funeral. I remember very little about it. The death of my father meant so many things – I’d never get the answers to the questions that haunted me. I’d never find out what he knew or suspected. I’d never discover why he allowed it all to happen, or what hold Helen really had over him. I had been cheated again. How would I ever work out who I was, what I was, with so many pieces missing?

My feelings that day come to me only in parts. I know that I was confused. I know that I was upset – not for his passing, but for the gap I was left with. I know that I was angry – as I watched hypocrites like Dougie Galbraith stand there as if past abuses had
never happened. As I stood there – a strange combination of numbness and seething emotion – I saw Dougie walk towards me. The last time I had seen this man, he had abused me. What could he possibly want? To apologise? To make some crass comment about the loss of my father?

‘Donna! How are you, hen?’ he questioned. ‘Terrible loss. Terrible.’ So that was how it was to be.

One of the many men who had wrecked my early years was standing in front of me and I was expected to collude in the game. Play along, Donna. Don’t rock the boat.

He looked confused. ‘Your Dad, Donna? Good man, really good man. Terrible shame.’

How dare he! He had abused my father’s hospitality and then abused me. He had taken advantage of my father’s gullibility, come into his home, and violated that man’s child. And now, it was all water under the bridge, was it? He had such a clean conscience that he could turn up at that man’s funeral? It was rubbing salt into the wound.

The platitudes continued. I heard various words about my father, his death, my loss. It meant nothing to me. I dragged my eyes up from the ground to meet those of Dougie Galbraith. I saw a flicker of recognition. Then I spat at his feet with all the hatred I could muster. He quickly turned round and walked away – and I was left wondering whether, yet again, I had missed the chance to name someone for what they truly were.

Those were strange days after my father died. What was I now? What was my place? I still didn’t know whether my mother was alive, and I had no contact with Helen, but half of my genetic heritage was certainly in the past. And, in some strange way, I felt freed.

I believe that I have made myself the best person I can be.
What happens to us as children obviously has an effect – we are moulded in those days – but we also have some choice about the adults we become. My mother, my father and Helen all had that choice – and, as a child, I paid the price.

After my Dad died, and to this day, I was left with so many questions for the three people who made my life what it was in those days.

I had already faced my father with the question I really needed to ask. I put it to him in his dying days. Why did he let it all happen? When he refused to answer that, when he turned away from me, I was left with another question – why couldn’t he answer me? Was he too ashamed and guilty because he knew what had gone on? Or did that shame and guilt come from a too-late realisation of what an evil cow Helen was? Or was it for some other reason that I have always found too awful to comprehend or even spell out? Did he know? Did he know?

I want to think that he wished he had realised sooner, but why couldn’t he even say that to me? Why did he take so much shit from her? Why didn’t he stand up for himself? Why did he beat me when she told him to? I can’t forgive my father for bringing Helen into my life, and neither can I forgive him for leaving me to the devices of his sick friends after she left. I want to believe that he never knew about the drunken attacks after he brought ‘friends’ back to the house, but he should have protected me. That’s what Dads are for.

There were times when I almost touched his heart – I saw it in his eyes – but Helen was always stronger than either of us. Did he really believe her when she told him I was evil? He made excuses for her, let her get away with it, gave her permission to punish me even more, and then became actively involved by meting out beatings to me at her command.

Is that how he intended things to be? Would any father actually choose that? Opt into it? I can remember the day he took me ‘home’ from Barnardo’s so well. I remember holding his hand
so tightly and looking up at this man who would protect me. I was so proud! He was my very own Daddy.

But I was left in her hands by the man who should have been looking out for me, wasn’t I? He never even bothered to tell me about my real mother – not one scrap – and that was his duty. I had a right to know. The truth means so much more to a child than speculation, but speculation was all I had.

Even at my father’s funeral, I was ashamed of him. I had no love or respect for him, even at a time when we could, maybe, have made our peace with each other. I know that he is no longer here and can’t answer my criticisms, but I did give him that chance and he chose not to take it. He threw that away – the same way he had thrown away my childhood. So much was now lost and, with my father’s death, can never be retrieved. Little girls need a hero for a Daddy, and Don Ford was far from that.

These thoughts all race through my mind. I know that my relationship with my father (or his memory) is a complex one. My only chance of forgiving him in some way, at some point, is by looking at what I have become and what I have achieved. I am here, confident, fulfilled and happy. That is due to the people I met along my path, who in some way filled the voids my father both ignored and created. He lost out so much by not putting my needs as a child at the front of things. Because of that I pity him, I pity his wasted life. He never knew the love of his grandchildren or the satisfaction of seeing his own child happy – or the sleep which comes at night from knowing you have been a good parent.

Ultimately, I think I do forgive my father, purely because doing so makes me feel better than lifelong anger. But where he may invoke some degree of forgiveness and pity, Helen Ford can strive for neither.

To this day, I remember how Helen could make me feel so worthless, so insignificant, in everything she did. Not just the beatings, not just the starvation or the abuse, but in every little word she made me think I was nothing. One day, barely seven years old, I was scrubbing the lobby floor in Easter Road. I got a backhander right across the face for the word I had used. The word was ‘mum’. ‘You will call me Mrs Ford!’ she screamed. ‘Not mum – I’m not your mum and never will be!’ That was the voice of the woman who was supposed to be caring for me, feeding me and showing me the love of a mother. Her voice, those words, stung me as much as the beating I was in for.

Now, as the woman I have become, those words have a sweeter ring. I am overjoyed that she was not my mother and that I do not share her evil blood. I am proud of that. My only regret is that she gave birth to Karen because it is hard to believe she could have anything to do with the existence of such a lovely individual. Maybe she doesn’t even remember her daughter – the dumped baby, the child abandoned at 18 months, left with a man who wasn’t even her father.

Helen Ford said something in court about being a ‘loving mother’. What loving mother abandons her baby? I speak from experience because it happened to me too. But leaving Karen wasn’t her only crime. She stood in that court and lied, lied the same way she had done for years. Did she remember the three monkeys? See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. I certainly remember them well. We shook with fear, with those monkeys in our mind, telling the social workers all the lies she had battered into us. Who else did she lie to? It has to be quite a list – doctors, family, teachers, friends, neighbours. Everyone really. Ultimately, she knows what the truth is. As do I. She knows how much she hated me and wanted to destroy me, and how little she thought of my life to allow her sick, perverted friends to use me. She does know, she does, and I cling to the hope that the knowledge will finally destroy her.

I have had so much to go through when I think of my father and stepmother, and when I try to separate what they each, in their own ways, did to me from the strong woman I have become. In my quest to find the real ‘me’, the core of the person which hasn’t been tainted by what was done, my own mother comes back to me time and time again.

I don’t even know what to call her. Breda? Brenda? Mother? Mum? Who is she? Where is she? Is she still alive? I have missed her my whole life, longed for her presence my whole life. I wonder whether she has ever thought about me in all these years. Well, I’ve certainly thought of her. I’ve cried rivers of tears for the woman I never knew, for the lack of her. I wonder if she would instinctively know that – or even care. So many times in these tears, when Helen Ford beat me and her friends sexually abused me, I called for my Mummy, I cried for her to come and save me. Throughout my adolescence I needed her comfort and words. She wasn’t there to see me marry, and she wasn’t there to hold my babies, as the proud grandmother should have been.