Текст бизнес-книги "Daddy’s Little Earner: A heartbreaking true story of a brave little girl's escape from violence"

Автор книги: Maria Landon

Раздел: Жанр неизвестен

When Mum was rushed into hospital for the caesarean, Terry Junior, Chris and I were placed with a foster family. I suppose Dad didn’t think he could cope with us on his own or maybe Mum had told social services that he couldn’t and that we needed to be protected from him. By that time I think the authorities were becoming aware of his violence. We must have been considered to be at risk.

One of the few memories I have of that period is of coming downstairs the first morning that I was in the foster home.

‘Good morning,’ one of the family said when they saw me appearing in the doorway and I froze, my face turning the colour of beetroot, totally unable to find the words to reply. The greeting must have taken me by surprise because people didn’t exchange those sorts of simple pleasantries in our house; they just grunted and shouted at one another if they needed to communicate. From then on the foster family all called me ‘dummy’. They may only have said it a few times, and they might just have been gently teasing me, but I was still mortified enough for the word to be burned indelibly into my memory. I knew it was my own fault for not speaking up as soon as I was spoken to, and it convinced me that I was inferior to the other children there, a worthless creature who had no right to be in their home at all but wasn’t wanted by anyone else, least of all her parents.

When Mum had recovered from her operation we were allowed to go home again. The doctors said it could be dangerous for her to have another pregnancy and prescribed her with the contraceptive Pill. Once there was no danger of her falling pregnant again, Dad decided the time was ripe to put her on the game. He’d talked about it before, apparently, never seeing anything wrong with the idea. In fact it was a bit of a mystery to him why all women didn’t do it.

‘Every woman’s sitting on a goldmine,’ he would say. ‘Pity I haven’t had four girls because then I could run a proper little brothel and I’d never have to work again.’

It might seem ironic that he beat Mum up because he suspected she’d been unfaithful to him yet he was prepared for her to be a prostitute, sleeping with any man who could pay the going rate – but that would be entirely consistent with his warped kind of logic.

‘If you’re going to do it, you should get paid for it instead of giving it away for free,’ he’d always say.