Making Beds in Brothels Page 3

  Our house, other than one small gas fire, went unheated even during the harshest Pennine winters. And anyone who knows winters in the hills of North-West England will understand just how cold it gets. I often only had the clothing I stood up in. A school photograph survives, of me aged around eleven. In it, my hair is cut badly in the much-ridiculed basin bowl hairstyle, my white shirt is grey with dirt, an old black T-shirt pokes out and over it is a frayed black sweatshirt. These were the only clothes I owned. As for toys, they simply didn’t exist. They were not bought, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses lack of organised festivals in which gifts could be shared provided a good excuse for their absence.

  On one occasion, one of the wealthy families from the Kingdom Hall, sent me a bag of clothing that their own children had grown out of. T-shirts, jeans and jumpers, all four or five years out of fashion, and poorly fitting, but I was so happy that I didn’t think twice about the fact they were dated; it was thrilling simply to have a change of clothes. Oddly my father wasn’t ashamed of his wilful neglect, he would tell me that when I got a job, I could afford to buy my own clothes. That seem a very odd thing to say to a young child, but that was his reasoning.

  There was often very little food in the kitchen, and Father would vanish for long periods of time for work, leaving no food in the house. All we had to eat was sugar out of the bag and black tea to drink. He encouraged my older brothers, as they matured into employment, to eat the food they bought with their wages in front of me, so I would watch them eat with hunger knots in my stomach. He told me it would encourage me to appreciate where food came from and, when I was earning my own money, I too could eat what I liked. He wasn’t unemployed, in fact he was a grafter, working as a long-distance lorry driver. There were times, like in any family, that things might have been tight, but at other times he had a decent wage coming in and I sometimes wonder exactly what he considered his parental duties to be, other than terrorizing us.

  I didn’t realise until many years later that wilful neglect is just another facet of controlling abuse. His behaviour was a continuation of the beatings and control. The impact of that lifestyle was damaging so that I grew up without understanding money, how to manage it, or having any real respect for it. This made me susceptible to being impressed by those things I had been deprived of: money, clothes and food. My father didn’t understand the role that pocket money, gifts and gift-giving play in fermenting character, in setting us up for independence. But then I don’t think my father, like many abusers, liked to think of his victims as grown up.

  Chapter 5

  Why didn’t you do anything? It’s the age-old question. People like me mostly respond with the usual platitudes about, control, power dynamics and fear; that they simply couldn’t do anything while they were still living in that situation, and I do understand that this is often the case. Well, I did try to do something. I was ten or eleven when I tried to save myself and my older siblings. I cannot recall the internal struggles that must have filled my young mind, but I decided to speak to the police.

  I’m not a naturally brave person, but I will physically make myself do things against the natural inclination in me to run away. I forced my small thin legs forward. I was underweight and poorly dressed. I had a permanent tremor; I literally shook with anxiety for years. I had facial spasms, probably brought on by stress, that people used to comment on. Anyway, I went up the steps into the reception of the police station and spoke to the policewoman behind the desk.

  “Can I help you?” asked the sergeant.

  “Yes,” I replied in my tiny high-pitched voice, “I would like to report that my father hits me, please”. A brief report was taken, and I was returned to my father. Just like that.

  Three times I went to the austere police station in the centre of Mobberley and reported that my father was abusing me. Three times nothing was done. No social workers were called, no review or check by the police, not a single investigation. All that happened was that each time I was returned to my father, and later received the beatings of my life as a result. Those visits to the police made things much worse for me. After they left, he was incandescent with rage.

  In retrospect, I suspect fighting back was empowering. It had set something off inside of me and I think he knew that I wasn’t going to sit back and take it from him for much longer. We were getting older; my siblings were all well into their teens and I wasn’t submitting mindlessly to his demands anymore. Somewhere there must have been the beginning of an understanding that this couldn’t go on for ever. That in the near future we would be adults and beyond his reach.

  With the emerging realisation that he was losing control, he had started to get reckless; the beatings became much worse. Once, whilst lashing me with his heavy leather belt, the metal buckle caught me hard on the corner of my eye socket; he could easily have blinded me. He started beating me when people might see, once dragging me screaming out of the bath when there was a houseful of guests from Kingdom Hall. He only allowed us to bathe once a week, and I stank. I was often ashamed about my terrible worn and ill-fitting clothes, and this day I was so embarrassed about being around the visitors I had crept into the bathroom for a wash.

  That afternoon he beat me so hard around the head that I developed blurred vision. I thought, with some justification, that he was probably going to end up murdering me. I sincerely believe that this would have been the outcome for me. In the end I did the only thing left open to me: I ran away. I returned to my maternal family in Manchester. I was immediately returned to my father and I ran away again, and again, and continued to run away, and God knows that was the beginning of a fight.

  You might think he would be pleased to get rid of a child he had brutalised so often, yet he had no desire to lose control over any of us. He was furious that I dared involve anyone outside the family, furious at the thought of having to defend himself. I fought him hand and tooth, it was absolutely a battle, a battle for my survival, and during this period, he could not lay a finger on me.

  I could tell, by the way he looked at me with pure hatred in his cold blue eyes, that he had sincerely never wanted to beat the shit out me more. But he couldn’t touch me because he knew he was being observed, under the spotlight. It was imperative that I win, or things would get even worse. It didn’t cross his mind for a second that he wouldn’t win, for he never lost a battle in the private fiefdom of our house, where the normal rules of parenthood didn’t apply, and his eyes told me exactly what he planned to do to me.

  Eventually it went to court, even there I was so frightened of him that I didn’t tell the authorities half of what was actually going on. Regardless, the judge allowed me to decide what was in my own best interest, stating that I was old enough to choose where I wanted to live. That was the first taste of freedom I had ever enjoyed, the first fight I had ever won. Sadly, by then, I was too shattered to feel any real joy. I was physically and emotionally wrecked, the damage had already been done.

  Oddly enough, my siblings chose to continue to live with him. I would find out later that loyalty to an abuser isn’t unusual, but at the time I couldn’t understand why they didn’t seize that opportunity to leave. They were of an age where they could have left of their own free will, yet they stayed and were often disarmingly loyal to him, particularly Deborah. She argued in his favour, saying I was the traitor, that I was in the wrong. This caused a rift between us for years.

  My sister later told me that it wasn’t until she was about twenty, years after I had left, that she was talking naturally to a friend about life at home, when she noticed the expression on her friend’s face, which altered from one of normalcy to one of horror. My sister was so normalised to abuse that her conversation didn’t seem strange; she had forgotten herself and disclosed some recent events without any thought. Her horrified friend explained to her that she was accepting a home-life of abuse. She helped Deborah contact the correct agencies, and my sister moved into her own small one bedroomed flat in Hyde. She later w
rote to the friend:

  Dear Jack & Co,

  It’s taken me sixteen years to get to this point. When you rescued me, in 1996, I was anorexic with a stammer… thank you so much for helping me out of that god-awful situation…

  I wish I could say that ended the contact Deborah had with our father; it didn’t. Realisation is a process, and that takes time. It took her years to fully understand, and it was only when she found strength to have him charged with her sexual abuse that she severed ties with him. He received a six-year prison sentence for what he made her endure.

  I want you to stay well away from me [says a scribbled note addressed to our father on a scrap of paper in my sister’s handwriting]. I can honestly say you have ruined my life, and no doubt you ruined my brothers’ lives too.

  Strangely however, when I was clearing out Deborah’s home, I found all the family photographs carefully preserved, including those of my father. I don’t understand why she kept them. I was horrified and took all his photographs into her small backyard, where I burned them.

  My mother was absent, I grew up not knowing her, [was she called Mother, Mum, Mam, Mummy?] Seeing her as I did only once a year, I was only aged three when she left, too young to recall what my sister called The Bill and Judith Show: the four of us taking ring-side seats as our parents screamed at each other until the punches flew, then the clatter of our mother’s heels up the garden path, and the sudden explosion of glass as she hurtled a brick through the living room window as a departing gift. Then the dark-eyed dark-haired lady had gone. She had walked out before but eventually it was for good. She tried to gain custody of us through the courts, but my poor fragile, damaged mother didn’t stand a chance against my father. To Deborah she became an unforgiven absence, the source of her deepest sense of betrayal; to me, a distant memory of warmth and love, a place of safety.

  Although my family in Manchester tried their best, taking me to school and trying to provide me with a loving and stable environment, they had no experience with children, let alone children who had experienced such sustained and horrific abuse. I think there was avoidance, from my family, of facing the reality. They hoped it would sort itself out. Perhaps they felt some guilt, knowing full well what my father was like. In fact I believe there was probably awareness all along, and now the evidence was put in front of them. It’s easier to block out the unpleasant realities, rather than face them.

  I was never taken to a child psychologist or given counselling, and I was probably suffering from chronic and complex post-traumatic stress, perhaps with some active dissociative condition, pathology that is a normal response in children who survive this type of trauma. I desperately needed some type of intensive cognitive therapy, or residential institutional help, but I was offered nothing.

  Eventually I stopped attending school. My misbehaving was firmly placed at my door. I was considered a problem child, my family washed their hands of me and I was put into foster care. And from that moment, my life unravelled. I was on my own from fourteen years of age; a small, frightened, messed-up child, without the basics in social or survival skills. I was out among the sharks; it was almost inevitable that my life was going to turn out badly.

  Later, among Deborah’s effects, I found dozens of replies in response to letters she had written to social services, to her MP, and others, as she tried in vain to find out why we had been under the radar of social services. How were we allowed to live out our childhoods in the unsupervised care of a known, violent and predatory paedophile? The fury and anguish in which she wrote them was acknowledged in their responses which offered their ‘complete sympathy over the abuse’ that we suffered. She desperately wanted to see records of social services or any department who might provide answers, and she struggled with solicitors and the local authority until she was granted her wish.

  Sadly, there was nothing that could appease my sister. The harm had been done. It destroyed all our lives to some extent, but my sister could not move past it. Unable to come to terms with the trauma of her childhood, Deborah descended into chronic mental illness and spent decades in and out of institutions. She was shattered to the point she could not heal or see past her experiences. She carried her rage like a badge of honour and would unleash it on anyone she considered deserving. It destroyed her and impacted on the lives of those around her.

  Yet it means a lot to know that, even in retrospect, she had fought valiantly for answers for years. She may have lost the battle, but she died fighting, and I admire her for that, for her strength and courage. I often think bitterly, how different our lives would have been if a police officer had taken my complaints seriously, contacted social services or done a cursory background check on my father. Some of my suffering could have been avoided, and the harm inflicted on my siblings been lessened. Perhaps it’s even possible that had the strain and stresses been reduced, my sister, Deborah, may have lived.

  Chapter 6

  Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester 13, is an inner-city area of South Manchester, bordering the city centre, Ardwick, Moss Side, Rusholme and Longsight. It’s not a large area, easily crossed on foot. At just over a single square mile the district is so small that many people not familiar with Manchester fail to distinguish Chorlton-on-Medlock from the outlying areas. The district was a victim of Manchester’s ill-conceived wholesale slum clearances of the late 1960s. Many former residents now live on sink estates that satellite the city, where I had grown up. It was a genteel, if dilapidated, area of red brick Georgian townhouses, Victorian terraces, grand civic buildings, educational institutions and churches, all of which was swept away. It’s unlikely someone travelling back fifty years from the past would have any idea of where they were.

  By the 1990s it became a nondescript area dominated by the city hospitals, the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, the studios of BBC North-West and the cathedral-like bulk of the Church of the Holy Name, all built along Oxford Road. While the situation may be unlovely, Chorlton-on-Medlock is rather a special place, one of those ‘thin’ places that act like a crucible, producing talent and change. For such a relatively small area it punches well above its weight. Ideas have begun here that have, literally, changed the world.

  Thomas de Quincy spent his part of his childhood at the family country house in Chorlton-on-Medlock. His most celebrated work, Confessions of an Opium Eater, records his life from boy to man, the development of his drug addiction, its impact on him, his descent into suffering, and his futile struggle to overcome that dependency. It is considered by many to be the prototype of the psychological memoir, the first of many over subsequent centuries.

  Friedrich Engels, who alongside Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, lived here in the mid-19th century, and it’s likely that Marx knew the area well as he visited Engels often. Little did they know the effect that the distortion of their philosophy would have in the hand of despots, such as Stalin, whose paranoia led to the Soviet Terror, the Gulags and the death of countless people.

  Lord Ernest Rutherford split the atom in the university laboratories in Chorlton-on-Medlock in 1917, igniting the nuclear age with an innovation that brought nuclear holocaust to Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII, and would bring the world the closest it had ever been to total destruction during the Cold War. Codebreaker Alan Turing came to Manchester in 1948 and did much of his ground-breaking work on computers at the University of Manchester’s Coupland House. Just up Oxford Road, outside the Palace Theatre, he met the young man who lead to his arrest for gross indecency and to his eventual suicide. We owe him the computer age, although whether the computer is a source of good or evil is yet to be seen.

  And Emmeline Pankhurst’s home still stands, marooned in a car park, on what was Nelson Street, in the shadow of St Mary’s Maternity Hospital. Without the militant resistance of Pankhurst and her fellow activists, it is unlikely that women in Britain would have been enfranchised as soon as they were. Mrs Pankhurst and I were to meet later.


  Coincidently, I too originated in Chorlton-on-Medlock, at St Mary’s. My mother gave birth to me here, inauspiciously, in the early hours of November 31st 1980. My father, typically, chose to stay home and watch the boxing. I was a large baby, nine pounds, and mostly head according to my mother. I was beautiful and bonny and very smiley at this time; destined to grow into a beautiful child, and to be the last my parents had together. Adam Brock – no middle name. My father apparently took one look at me lying peacefully and quietly in my Moses basket and sneered, “That baby don’t know he’s been born yet”.

  Just off All Saints, a sub-district within Chorlton-on-Medlock, named for a long-demolished church. The Gay and Lesbian Community House, known simply to us as Gay House, sits hunched along the narrow remains of Melbourne Street. At one time the street boasted fine Georgian townhouses, now it only runs a few yards before abruptly ending in a carpark and flyovers. An eminent Victorian, known as ‘the prisoners’ friend’ was born here in 1789. In 1994 his home still stood, although long derelict, its windows black-eyed and boarded over and its façade leaning dangerously out onto the street. A blue plaque attached to the crumbling wall attests to his birthplace. He devoted his life and career to the betterment of those imprisoned in Britain, eventually gaining great acclaim for work he did among those considered the lowest of the low in Victorian society. He gave practical help, finding employment for many and attending many executions too. In an era not known for its compassionate treatment of the condemned, he provided those unfortunate people some comfort in their last hours.

  Gay House was only a few years old when I started attending the youth group that was held twice weekly on Tuesdays and Saturdays. It was a basic, cheaply-built, yellow square brick structure containing two large rooms constructed of breezeblocks and painted white. The room you entered from the front door is a large atrium and reception area. Beyond this is another with a steep pitch so that you could clearly see the underside of the roof. The rooms were lit only from above, as the walls of windowless rectangles were plastered with young people’s projects and slogans such as OUT AND PROUD! or WE’RE HERE AND QUEER!, written on paper banners.