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  While many teenage girls tend to appear rather older for their age, I was the opposite: I looked much younger and because I’d been kept away from the world and hadn’t interacted with other children, my social development was not what it should have been. While the other girls were figuring out how to talk to boys and doing the usual teenage experiments with black nail polish and violent blue eyeshadow, I was living in a vacuum, away from it all. So I really don’t understand how I figured out that Mum was having an affair with John, but I did.

  One day my father came home from work and saw Mum and John having sex in our swimming pool. Apparently, he went back to work without saying anything. Most men faced with the realisation that their wife is making love to their best friend could be expected to react rather more visibly and even violently – but that didn’t happen, perhaps because Dad realised it may have given him an opportunity to end the marriage.

  What did happen after the swimming-pool episode is that Dad seemed to accept it; and from then on the four of them continued to meet up – except now Mum slept with John and Dad slept with John’s wife, Sue. It was like some horrendous, cheap suburban fantasy. My father has since explained: ‘I was in a loveless marriage but I didn’t want to leave you girls. I was suddenly offered the opportunity to sleep with John’s wife who was very young and attractive. I realised my wife had no intention of stopping the affair with John so it seemed to me to be the best of all options. I just went along with the situation.’

  John would go into my parents’ bedroom with Mum and Sue would sleep with Dad in the spare bedroom. As for me, well, I just got on with things as best I could. My upbringing had ensured that I was both introverted and conditioned not to question things. Vanessa was too young to know what was going on so we just went to our room and played as if nothing was happening. It was just the way things were.

  The swapping continued for quite some time but, not surprisingly, it didn’t work out happily ever after. For Dad and Sue it was always going to be a compromise situation. Sue was young and the relationship fizzled out. Not long after Dad started an affair with his father’s secretary, Denise. This wasn’t to last either. Dad was now deeply unhappy and it was inevitable that my parents would split up. He was very upset at having to leave us and conversations with him in recent years have revealed that he carried a lot of guilt with him. Much later, when he discovered that he had left us in the same house as a man who was to violate us in the worst possible way, it tore him apart.

  I was absolutely devastated by the split. My schooling was affected and I had to stay down a year, putting me behind the others of my age which really hurt because I knew I wasn’t stupid. In fact, it was around this time I began to take a huge interest in word puzzles of all kinds; not just completing them but making them up as well. I was so good at devising puzzles that my dad offered me the princely sum of 50p a puzzle to design them for the crossword magazines he was now producing which had titles like Letter Fit and Easy Crosswords. My father’s move into publishing came as a progression from the book and magazine shops that he ran with his brother Ralph; creating magazines seemed a natural extension to selling them. I took my responsibility very seriously and particularly excelled at ‘Find a Word’, where you have to make a number of words out of one word or subject. I still love crosswords and puzzles, and feel obliged to issue the warning that I am a highly competitive, demonic Scrabble player.

  The puzzles were a way of extricating myself, at least mentally, from the pain and confusion at home. I even worked on them during lessons because I wanted to earn money and be independent; it was a big incentive. It was also around this time that I finally found some friends at school. There was Michelle Yarrow, Beverley Dalton and Karen Carter. At the time I was probably closest to Karen, who always struck me as very grown-up so I looked up to her, and we both drooled over Donny Osmond and David Cassidy! Karen and the other girls seemed a lot older and self-aware. I had absolutely no dress sense at all and was still an ugly duckling: freckly, pasty and very skinny. Like many young girls I was a late developer, a fact that was not overlooked by my mother’s new partner.

  John’s presence in the house completely changed things. We were all terrified of him. He had a fiery temper and would explode at the slightest provocation. When he came back from work we would all listen to how hard he threw his keys on the table so we could determine what mood he was in. Whenever Mum’s friends or family unexpectedly visited, he would usually pour himself a whisky and disappear to his ‘den’ in a huge sulk. He sulked like no adult I’ve ever met – or child, for that matter. Dad would come over every Thursday night to see Vanessa and me, and we would sit and try to make conversation. It was very strained and John would again go off to his room. He was a heavy drinker and, under his influence, Mum also began to drink very heavily. She may have loved John, or thought she did, but it was not a healthy relationship. She was as much in fear of him as we were and he knocked all the confidence out of her. I was sorry for her and wanted so much for her to be happy.

  John wasn’t someone who engaged with people and that included me and Vanessa – he did, however, come up to the room we shared to kiss us goodnight. I didn’t like him and didn’t feel any affection for him so I just never reacted. Then one night when he came in, he put his tongue in my mouth; to be honest, I didn’t understand what it meant. After he did it, he went straight out again. Now, having read about paedophiles, I believe it was the start of his ‘grooming’ of me. John knew exactly what he was doing. He could see that I was cut off both from my mother and the rest of the world. My mother was totally in awe of him so the field was clear for him to do as he wished.

  The abuse built up over a period of time. He would make me feel special and boost my obviously fragile confidence by saying nice things to me. These were things I hadn’t experienced before and didn’t know if I was supposed to experience. I know that John was very affectionate to Vanessa but he didn’t pay her as much attention as he did me. In fact, she only recalls him touching her on one occasion but he did take nude pictures of her. Looking back, I think that even though she was younger, John kept away from Vanessa because she was far more feisty than me which made her too much of a risk. Like any paedophile who studies his subject, John surmised that I wasn’t going to tell a soul. I wanted to tell someone but I was also scared, not just of John, but my mother as well. My cousin, Russell, was one of the few people I tried to talk to about what was happening to me. Once when I was twelve, they were visiting and I told him, ‘John gets fresh with me.’ My mother overheard me and told me to stop telling lies.

  I can’t remember when things went from touching and kissing to more sinister abuse but one event really stands out. When I was thirteen my father paid for all of us – Mum, John, Vanessa and me – to go on a cruise to the Caribbean. He didn’t have to do this but maybe it was his guilt. The list of destinations looked fabulous: Martinique, St Vincent and Barbados were all on the itinerary. I was so excited.

  On the cruise ship one day, on the way to lunch, I started feeling ill so it was decided that I should go and rest. Halfway through the meal John left Mum and Vanessa and came to my cabin. I can’t picture the specifics of that day but he undressed me and led me into the shower. He’d just let me come out when my mother turned up at the cabin door. John had locked it but Mum looked through the keyhole and saw him there with me. She banged loudly on the door. He unlocked it and, still pulling up his trousers, walked straight past her and out the door, saying nothing at all. Seeing me naked and dripping wet, my mother just walked up to me and slapped me across the face. She never confronted John but she did ignore me totally for the rest of the holiday.

  After that incident I believe she knew exactly what was going on. The more I thought about it, the more I felt rejected by her and responsible for what was happening to me. I knew what John was doing wasn’t right or normal and kept asking myself what I had done wrong. I was also living in a time when children did not discuss issues like a
buse with other people. It was not commonly mentioned in the media as it is today and children were not warned to watch out for people who might be possible abusers. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it didn’t exist. Even professionals were not very adept at handling it, as evidenced by my encounter with a female GP. I had gone to see her for my self-inflicted constipation. Over the years I had developed this habit of holding my bowels so that I didn’t go to the toilet, at one point for two weeks. I was in a huge amount of pain. Psychologists would probably see it as a desperate child’s attempt at gaining some foothold and control in the world and I suspect there is a great deal of truth in that.

  I was scared of doctors but I was also aware I was alone with my GP for the first time. As she examined me, I suddenly blurted out something like, ‘I’m being sexually abused at home.’ Instead of making me feel comfortable and giving me the confidence to talk about it, she coldly asked, ‘Shall I send round a social worker?’ Hearing those words sounded so threatening I immediately said no, for fear of getting into or causing trouble. In those days the impression of the social worker was someone who took you away instead of helping you. After that episode and my childish attempt to tell my cousin, I kept the whole thing to myself. I couldn’t tell my father, who had absolutely no idea what was going on – in fact, it’s only recently that he has discovered what went on in that house.

  John’s abuse went beyond the sexual. He was one of those people who was menacing, even when he wasn’t around. My mother became totally submissive to him. I won’t say she was besotted in a loving way. He controlled her and she spent her whole life pleasing him, so Vanessa and I had to do the same. Mum’s sole mission in life was how to keep John happy. He was not only her partner; he was also her main topic of conversation. She talked about him incessantly. When it wasn’t about John, it was about his dog. And that was it: she had no other interests. John would often mock me, taking something I’d said and repeating it back to me as if I was stupid. Mum would then join in with him. His influence meant that she would put me down, often in front of people. I often remember hearing her say in front of visitors, ‘Jacqueline’s so plain and clumsy.’

  As if the sexual and emotional abuse wasn’t enough, there was also the ‘work’. I don’t mean picking up our clothes off the floor or tidying our rooms, but seriously hard labour. After we did our homework, we weren’t allowed to watch TV or relax. We had to apply ourselves to one of four forms of work that John had decreed. One of these was housework, specifically cleaning. Often I would take on the worst room in the house, which was the kitchen. I don’t know how Mum did it but she managed to make it filthy so I had to scrub it. There was no rest for anybody. My mother’s chronic rheumatoid arthritis did not exempt her (although she had lighter jobs) and neither did Vanessa’s age (she was only five when John came to live in our house). With John there were no excuses. He liked to have us working in the garden where he made us dig a vegetable patch. We’d be out there until it got dark trying to make inroads into the stubborn clay. Our work took place every day of the week; at the weekend we worked from the moment we got up until we went to bed. It was relentless. It also ruined our beautiful house that Dad had left us. Over the years John destroyed the look of the house and garden by chopping down the lovely cherry and birch trees and knocking down walls, replacing them with ugly outhouses and walls made of breeze blocks. He had no sense of style and seemed to do it for the sake of it. Our formerly beautiful house was now cold, untidy, unclean and generally neglected.

  One of his favourite tasks for us was logging. Our garden led to a one-acre piece of woodland which my father had bought for my mother as an addition to the house. John would do the macho bits with the chainsaw and then it fell upon Vanessa and me to carry the logs to the living room. We had to carry them through the woods, across the lawn, up the steep hill, across the other lawn and inside. It was back-breaking work.

  My other job was cleaning the swimming pool. The truth was they couldn’t afford to maintain it so it would fall into a state of complete neglect. Then John would decide to empty it and I’d have to get into the pool with a scrubbing brush – a small one. I would scrub and scrub until my fingers were red raw and he would stand there waving the hose over it so the mildew would run off. The mildew meant that the surface of the pool was slippery. One day I slipped, banged my head and ended up with concussion. There was no sympathy from anybody. John was very annoyed with me and frustrated that I couldn’t continue. My mother didn’t care that we were working so hard. She just seemed to turn a blind eye. During the school holidays John would return from work (which he did not enjoy) and ask us to give a detailed report on what we’d done during the day. There was no respite.

  During the summer he would insist we all sunbathed naked while in the garden and even fixed a device on the gate so he could tell if anyone entered. The thought of him watching and leering at us is one that revolts me to this very day. It is very menacing when you know someone’s eyes are constantly on you. It is even more menacing when you know that he is going to sexually abuse you – but you don’t know exactly when. The result was that I constantly lived in fear of him coming into my room. He was constantly following me, coming into the bathroom when I was there and watching me in the shower. He would engage in some form of sexual activity with me, on average, once a week and, during that time, did everything except penetrate me fully with his penis. He frequently went close to penetrating me but then stopped. Perhaps it was the fear of making me pregnant?

  Some of my most desperate moments were when Mum left the house. My grandparents lived half an hour away and Mum would often go and look after them since my grandfather had had several strokes. If Grandad had a turn in the middle of the night, Mum would take Vanessa and leave me alone in the house with John. I knew what would happen. She would also take Vanessa with her when she went shopping. I would beg and plead with her to take me with them but she would just say, ‘No you stay here and keep John happy. He likes you.’ I think she knew what was happening but whether she used it to gain favour with John, I don’t know. He was a verbally violent person and they were constantly rowing. I don’t think he hit her but on one occasion I saw him with his hands tightly around her throat leaning her across the staircase.

  Mum hated it if John was not pleased. He used to have sulky moods that went on for days that I thought were weird for anyone, let alone an adult. He would go into his den and stay there and Mum would get very restless over this. Because he was nine years younger, she was always scared he would leave so she would constantly do things to make him happy. ‘Make him a cup of tea and take it up to him,’ she’d say. ‘He likes you.’ Those words make me shudder. He didn’t like me. He didn’t care about me. If he had, he would never have done what he did. All he cared about were his own perverse desires.

  He never threatened us directly but his manner and the way my mother insisted that we had to pander to his every need made him a very scary figure indeed. To his own friends he was very popular, a good laugh and one of the boys but nobody ever knew what happened inside our house. The design of the house was somewhat unusual in that when you entered the front door, there was a large hallway with bedrooms and a bathroom leading off it. You would go downstairs from there to the lounge and kitchen. There was another staircase on the same level as the front door leading upstairs which you accessed through a wrought-iron gate. At the top of the stairs was my and Vanessa’s bedroom. When John came to live with Mum he bought a padlock and chain, and each night he chained the gate shut so we couldn’t come out. I remember that at weekends we were sometimes not allowed out until 1pm. I’m not sure but I think Mum also chained it up sometimes.

  I actually tried to run away from home twice. The first time I went to St Marks Church in Biggin Hill (where my mother’s funeral was held in 2003) and hid there, crying, for hours. I then walked to the house of a school friend called Claire Firmin; Mum was called later that day by Claire’s parents, and she came and picked m
e up. I didn’t tell anyone why I’d done it. Another time I was about fifteen. At that point I had been moved to what used to be the study. John had been in there and put earth in my bed and my drawers, among my underwear and T-shirts. Apparently our dog, Kelly, had knocked John’s cactus off the window ledge in his and Mum’s bedroom. There were about ten plants in all that he had brought back from their holidays in Spain. When he found the fallen plants, he was very annoyed because I hadn’t cleaned it up but his reaction was clearly not that of a normal person. I was very upset when I saw all the dirt in my things and just thought, ‘My god, I have to get out of here.’ I climbed out of my bedroom window, navigated the slippery eaves below, jumped to the ground and walked from Biggin Hill to my father’s apartment in Croydon. It was a long walk in the middle of the night and I suppose I was lucky to be picked up on the way by police – who found me in Addington – and not by some weirdo. I told them I was going to my dad’s so they took me there. Dad was packing to go on a skiing holiday in the next few hours. I couldn’t tell him the truth although I wanted to and he just assumed it was because Mum was overprotective and strict. He drove me back and I climbed back up through the window and wrote about it in my diary. What I didn’t know was that John read my diary. One day I came home and he’d nailed the windows shut.

  Eventually, the serious sexual abuse stopped. One day I came downstairs on a Saturday afternoon. Mum had gone out shopping with Vanessa and I had been upstairs, physically shaking, thinking about what was going to happen. I never spoke to John even when he abused me which makes what I did that Saturday quite extraordinary. He was standing in the bar when I came downstairs. I said, ‘This has got to stop.’ Then I blurted out, ‘It’s not fair to Mum.’