Slave Girl Read Online Free Page A

of all – that I’d never see Mum, my brother and sister, or my step-mum’s kids again. On top of that, he threatened to do more than cut me with that kitchen knife: he would wave it in front of me and warn me that if I told a soul he would come and get me and I’d never be seen again.
    Did I believe him? You bet I did.
     
     
    So that was my life as I approached my teenage years: trapped in a little flat above a backstreet Gateshead restaurant with an abusive dad, a downtrodden step-mum and her two terrified kids. For a bed I had a grubby mattress; baths were in a big black bin in front of the gas fire.
    They say that schooldays are meant to be the happiest of your life. I wouldn’t know since I rarely went to school. Most days I stayed home looking after my two stepbrothers. Dad would either be out working or drunk in a pub somewhere. I used to dread him coming home – and not just because of what he would do to me.
    Every so often the school would ring up and ask where I was. They either left messages for Dad to call them or – occasionally – managed to phone while he was in. I knew that would lead to trouble: Dad would storm off, generally the worse for drink, and go into school. He’d make a nuisance of himself, tell lies, do anything until they stopped asking where I was. And then he’d come back and take it out on me.
    I can’t say I ever liked my step-mum. She was rough and coarse. But when I look back it could have been living with my dad that made her that way. He was enough to turn a saint into a devil, my dad.
    And in the end I suppose she did me a favour. One night after he’d used her as a punch bag, he sent her upstairs and once again he started on me. But this time – I still don’t know why – she didn’t stay in bed: she sneaked down and sat on the stairs, and heard what was going on. The next morning she confronted me and told me she knew what Dad was doing to me. Like I say, I hated her, but that morning it was such a relief to hear someone else saying they knew my terrible secret. Unfortunately, that was the last bit of good fortune I was going to have for a long time.
    These days when someone tells the Social Services about a child being sexually abused at home, it’s the person accused of doing the abuse who has to move out while investigations are made. In 1988 it wasn’t like that.
    I was taken into Care and stuck in a big old children’s home outside Gateshead, not far from where the Angel of the North sculpture is now. There were around 20 kids in the home, all of different ages, and all from pretty rough backgrounds. There was an unspoken sense of being in something difficult together – a sort of half-formed camaraderie, I suppose – but we were all cautious about giving much away about our lives: all of us had learned – or been taught – not to talk about what we’d experienced, and were quite confident that even if we did no one would do anything much about it.
    I was in the home for four months while they assessed me. No one ever really talked to me about what was going on with my dad. I was just stuck there while some kind of enquiries were made and I was expected to put up with it. I suppose the idea was to keep me safe, to get me out of Dad’s clutches. But if so, it didn’t work. Dad used to hang around outside the children’s home: he was trying to intimidate me, I think – and he certainly succeeded.
    I was only 12 but I’d been smoking for a while by the time I was taken into Care. Where I come from we call cigarettes ‘tabs’ and most kids I knew were hooked by the time they went to secondary school. Smoking was against the rules in the children’s home but we all used to sneak outside for a quick puff on a tab and hope we wouldn’t get caught. Mostly we didn’t – except that my dad seemed to be there almost every time I sparked up a ciggie. He would stand and stare at me till I had to go back inside.
    Of course he wasn’t supposed to be there. He