The Step Child (20 page)

I also have the most awful back problems relating directly to the beatings I endured as a child. I remember one occasion in particular when Helen gave me a beating and really damaged my back. We’d just come back from a holiday in Kinghorn – two weeks at a chalet in a holiday camp in Fife. I’d enjoyed it so much as we’d had more freedom there than we were ever allowed at home. I think most of that was due to Helen wanting us out from under her feet, but there was also the fact that my Dad was
around for the whole holiday. After breakfast, we’d be shunted out for the day. Simon and I would head off rock-pooling, catching minnows or sticklebacks. We’d go on long expeditions and find caves; we’d jump in the water off the pier.

Most of it was good.

But Helen had packed a little extra in her holiday bag. Her beloved tawse. When my Dad was around, she was okay – but when he went drinking to the clubhouse, she’d get the beating belt out, concentrating on my back as much as possible. Simon and I got a lot more than one leathering on that holiday, reminders that lasted longer than the few happy moments at the rock pools.

Shortly after this holiday, Simon and I got a really bad hiding for an imaginary slight. It was Simon’s go first. This was one of Helen’s preferred approaches. She made us queue up outside the bathroom door, taking turns, waiting, listening to the other child’s cries of pain in anticipation of what was coming our way. Simon was screaming; when it stopped, he came out of the bathroom crying, hugging himself and slouching with pain. He scurried to his room. I was next. I did the usual – held on to the cold bath and listened to Helen’s words.

‘You know why you’re being punished.’

‘You know you’re bad.’

‘You know you deserve it.’

‘Say it! Say it! Say you’re bad, you deserve this!’ she would scream.

Eventually I would.

‘I am bad. I deserve to be punished.’

She’d tell me to bend over. Not to move. I’d lean over the bath and wait for the stinging thwack of the belt. But this time, this one time, it wasn’t the belt – it was the buckle. I don’t know whose belt it was, whose belt she had chosen to beat me with, but it was heavier than usual, and the cumbersome brass buckle on it put me in agony each time it came down as she hit me. I tried my
hardest not to show just how much pain I was in, but I failed miserably. My back was aching and I swear I heard a crack. Helen just kept hitting and hitting and shouting and shouting. Eventually she stopped and I hobbled off to my room. The pain was so much worse than I had ever felt from a belt beating before, and I kept hearing the cracking noise, over and over again. Ever since that day my back has troubled me and hurts virtually every day. Years ago, a chiropractor looked at it. He scanned his eyes over the x-rays. ‘Have you survived a bad car crash?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Just a bad childhood.’

As I mentioned before, my other most significant health issue relates to my eating habits. I spent years as a child going for days on end without food. As a result, I’ve been left with an inability to eat normal-sized portions or, indeed, even a full meal. I have to pick and eat small parts of any plateful. It frustrates me and annoys me and is extremely anti-social. When you’re invited for a meal, people look, and you can see their eyes questioning. Being small anyway, I’m sure people think I have an eating disorder. In a way I do, but it is not self-imposed. Years of starving have left me this way, and the only way I can compensate is by cooking for other people, which I love.

I have come to terms with the fact that these things are simply part of me now – but that doesn’t stop me questioning how it all happened in the first place. Some of the main questions I have are for Barnardo’s. I feel so let down by them. Although they looked after me competently enough while I was at Haldane House, I can’t help but blame them for not adequately checking up on what I returned to.

Why did these people not save me? Why did they not do something? They couldn’t have known the situation I was going to face, but if they had got us placed elsewhere then maybe Helen
would never have got her hands on us. I know it was on the cards because I have read it in old reports. In one it says: ‘Unfortunately, neither of their parents seems able to keep in very close touch with the children and we are therefore planning to find a suitable home where they can be fostered, so that this will give them the opportunity of growing up in the environment of a normal happy home, where they will receive every loving care and attention.’ The fact that I had been so close to a different life chills me to the bone.

A normal happy home.

Every loving care and attention.

These were things I would dream of for so long. Things I believed I did not deserve. Things that had been within touching distance without me even knowing. There are so many ‘what ifs’. What if I had been placed with another family and managed to enchant them so much that they wanted me as their own child? What if I’d had a completely different childhood? How would I have turned out?

I also want to know how on earth teachers could have been so blind to what was going on in front of them every day. As I have said, my first school was Leith Walk Primary, and I started there at the end of the first summer that I returned to stay with my father and stepmother. Did the teachers at that little Victorian school choose to ignore the skinny, terrified little girl who stank of piss? Each day when they patrolled the separated girls’ and boys’ playgrounds, did they just fail to notice me, isolated, excluded, bruised and starving?

It was my treatment at home that finally brought me to the attention of those who should have looked out for me long before – but it did little good. I had become so obsessed with food that I stole food from the pockets of another child one day. (When Don and Helen found out, it was used as just another excuse to beat me.) This was raised at the court case as evidence of my evil streak – Helen was being tried for procuring us for
sexual abuse as children, and lawyers tried to make out that it was all made up because I was the sort of evil kid who lied and stole food! I’ll say now what I said under oath – only one type of child steals food, and that is a hungry child. At the time, it was enough to get me sent to an educational psychologist.

The only decent meal I ever got was on a school day. Simon and I were given free school dinners. We were marked out by the pink tickets we held up for all to see and sneer at. All the people who paid for their dinners got first sitting and us paupers went in last. The advantage of last sittings was the opportunity to get ‘seconds’, even though the favourite dishes had usually been snaffled by the paying diners. I didn’t care that we had to be labelled to get free school meals – I still dreamed of them. I looked forward to lunch so much, often anticipating and almost drooling whilst trying to imagine what it would be each day. Would it be mince? Sloppy, dark brown with carrots in, accompanied by a perfect scoop of mashed tatties complete with lumps and black-eyes? Then maybe followed by cake and custard? Whatever was served, I ate every morsel.

Now, thinking back, I have such evocative memories of the dinner hall, the clanking of the aluminium trays, the smell of the hot food which would permeate the corridors from just after playtime. Food meant everything to me at school. I came to school hungry so my mind was on my belly for most of the time. When I got to school in the morning, I thought about when milk would be served. I liked milk time – more so in the winter when it was icy cold – a third of a pint in its little glass bottle with a foil cap. It was someone’s job to trek down the long corridor to where the milk was kept and return to the class with the crate. Someone else would then give out the milk which you would sip through a pink plastic straw. As well as using the straws to drink our milk, we would often join them together in three-dimensional geometric shapes, then carefully cover them in coloured cellophane, sometimes sweet wrappers – and hang them
haphazardly around the classroom. They looked so beautiful – like jewels or magic lanterns. I vaguely remember being told it had something to do with maths, but to me it was even more evidence that good things came from having a full stomach.

In the early days at Easter Road, I do remember having breakfast most days before leaving for school, usually cornflakes with milk and sugar, or toast. For a little while, I even got a playtime snack – a packet of Golden Wonder crisps or a chocolate biscuit, a Tunnock’s caramel log, a caramel wafer or a Blue Riband. I don’t know exactly when breakfasts and playtime snacks stopped, but I know it was quite soon after Frances and Simon came home. I had those school lunches to look forward to for such a short while. For some reason – perhaps control, power or pure nastiness – Helen stopped the school dinners and I’d have to run back to the house each day, panting and nervous, maybe late or disappointing her in some way. I’d be given a tiny, snack-size sausage roll from McGill’s the baker on a good day and then sent back to school. On a bad day, I got nothing.

So I would have to find ways to get food. I’d pick up sweets off the streets on the way to school or bread that had been left out for the birds. I’d scrounge at playtime, hanging around the kids who had snacks, trying to make them feel guilty and making them hate me even more for my pathetic attempts. I’d take any opportunity to get out of class to rifle through the coats and bags in the cloakroom for food or loose change. If I got a penny, I’d go to the dairy on the way home. The dairy was the little grocer/newsagent/tobacconist, a tiny shop on our street. I’d buy a penny dainty, just like the one the Barber had given me, in a green and white tartan wrapper. It was a lovely piece of creamy toffee. I’d either eat it straight away or savour it, hiding it in my brown leather school bag to eat in privacy. I knew if Helen came across it I’d be in trouble.

The way I was being treated at home obviously made me the
child I was. In turn, that prevented me from having a normal school life with normal interests and normal friends. I certainly don’t really remember having friends at school as such, although I do remember sometimes being ‘cawed in’ at the skipping in the playground if they were short, and even being allowed to hold an end of the rope on special occasions. Even though I was an outsider, I loved watching the games and singing the songs. When I first started school and Helen was nicer than she became, I played a bit and got to join in. As time went on, however – and I turned up to school smellier, scruffier, more tired, hungry, withdrawn and undoubtedly stranger – I became an easy target to pick on.

As time went on, the knot of tension I felt in my stomach at the prospect of going home, also began to apply to school. I did enjoy some aspects of it, though, particularly history and geography and anything that involved drawing a picture to illustrate work. I loved it when we did a project on the Bayeux tapestry and made a collage. We once got the opportunity to learn French but it didn’t last long. I was fascinated by the strange-sounding words and mesmerised by the French teacher, her stories of France and how exotic it all sounded. I liked music and remember our music teacher very clearly. A big part of the reason I liked her was that she reminded me of Auntie Nellie, as she had the same school-marm look with tweed skirts and sensible black lace-up shoes. She made us sing with a round mouth, twirling our finger in our mouth while reciting the scale to ensure we kept our lips in a perfect circle as we sang ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Early One Morning’.

I also liked writing – it was close to art, which was to become my life – and looked forward to practising my handwriting with a proper fountain pen and writing the alphabet over and over in perfect italics. I hated the times tables and despaired of being asked to stand up and recite what we were expected to learn in maths that day. Numbers bored me and didn’t make sense –
mental arithmetic was just hell. Of course, I already knew that reading was a delight. I started off with the ‘Janet and John’ books, and it wasn’t long before I was looking for more and more challenging scripts. I always put my hand up first in spelling but I was never first in line when it came to sports. I was always cold so I would get as near as I could to the radiator and huddle in doorways in the playground rather than run around.

Christmas was the best time at primary school. The gym would be festooned with paper decorations and a huge ‘real’ tree with twinkling, sparkling, shimmering baubles and tinsel. There was a school party and we’d all gather in the big hall where we’d career up and down the wooden floor doing the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’, the ‘Dusty Bluebells’, the ‘Farmer’s in his Den’, followed by a tea of miniature egg sandwiches, sausage rolls, sweet sticky cakes and orange squash. Santa would visit, we’d all sing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ then it would all be over. I wished I could take it home with me and felt sick to my stomach when it ended.