Slave Girl Read Online Free Page B

wasn’t allowed to telephone me either, but that didn’t stop him: he used to get his friends to make the calls and then when I picked up the phone he would come on the line. He just wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe he couldn’t.
    At the end of the four months, I was sent to a smaller family group home. There were three other children, all around my age, being looked after by really caring people. But after the children’s home it felt claustrophobic and oppressive: I couldn’t settle and started running away. In the end the social workers gave in and I was sent back to the children’s home.
    Despite Dad’s behaviour I felt safe there. It was the first extended period of time since I was three that I hadn’t been abused. I formed tentative friendships with the other children – though these were always tempered by our mutual determination to appear tough and never to drop our guard. Maybe that’s why I can’t recall the name of a single boy or girl living there.
    The staff were kind to us kids: they talked to us calmly – even the times we threw tantrums, slammed doors and generally behaved appallingly. We even went on holidays to Scarborough and once over to France. But my rebellious streak seemed determined to stop me settling down: I smoked openly and defiantly now, challenging the staff to try and confiscate my precious fags. And I would run away every so often, hiding out, waiting and hoping that someone would come looking for me, would care enough to find me and bring me back.
    In the end I suppose they decided they’d had enough of this. At the age of 13 I was sent to a much more secure children’s home, miles out in the countryside. What happened there made me question the very idea of this ‘care’ I was supposed to be living in. I’d love to name and shame this place, but there are legal reasons why I’m not allowed to do so. I can, though, describe it – even though doing so brings back horrific nightmares.
    It was big, draughty old building in the middle of what seemed like a huge swathe of fields and about a mile away from the nearest village. The furniture was bare, stark and basic: as soon as I walked through the doors I knew this wasn’t going to be a comfortable place to live.
    There were about 25 children in the home – both boys and girls – all of us teenagers. There was a sullen, resentful air in the place: no one smiled or welcomed me as I was shown to the little box-room where I was to sleep. It felt like being sent to prison – or at least what I assumed prison must be like.
    They took security seriously: as well as the care home staff and teachers there were night watchmen who patrolled the ground with big Doberman dogs. And it was one of the night watchmen who gave me my introduction to the place on the very first night I arrived.
    I was in bed and asleep, worn out by the stress of being uprooted once again. I woke up to see a torch light coming towards me through the dark: the man holding it turned slightly and shone it straight in my eyes. I felt a hand grab and drag me from the bed; I knew then what was coming.
    What I didn’t know then was that I would be kept in this home for nine long months. Imprisoned in this cold, black hole of a place – a dark, brooding Colditz where kids like me were taken, dumped and forgotten.
     
     
    I wasn’t only one being sexually abused, of course: there wasn’t anything that special about me. But the fact that some other girl or boy was being touched and groped and hurt didn’t make it any better.
    I don’t know if it’s my mind playing tricks on me, but I can’t remember a single night there when I wasn’t molested. I had grown used to the feeling of an erect penis being thrust at me – or in me – and knew what I had to do to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. That’s one of the terrible things about long-term abuse: it makes the child almost complicit in the sex. Not because he or she wants it – God, no –