I know exactly when my father first started using me sexually. My first memory of it was during the summer holiday in 1964 when I was ten or eleven years old.
I know this is right because it was around that time that he left the Royal Navy and my mother started working. I checked all this out with my mother and my two half-sisters. So, I was at home a lot on my own during the school holidays when my father wasn't working.
I have a clear memory of it happening in my parents' bedroom on sunny afternoons. They had single beds. The dressing table was in the bay window. It had a large mirror. I can recall his reflection in the mirror as he left the room afterwards. It also happened on his boat, which was moored in a local creek. He was always working on it and I used to go with him, often for the whole day. We would have Tizer and chocolate. He showed me how to chew the chocolate and then take a mouthful of Tizer to wash it down.
I have a vague memory of a time before that, lying awake in my bed at night in a state of anxiety and excitement. I used to have recurrent nightmares about him being ill or hurt and dying. My mother told me this. I poured bleach or some sort of toilet cleaner over my penis when I was four or five years old. I was circumcised as a result of that "accident".
He never actually buggered me. He had me suck him and then he would turn me over, rub cream between my buttocks and come by rubbing his penis there. He wiped it off with a tissue or toilet paper. I was always naked. I think he only ever took his trousers and pants off. He never hurt me but I was shocked by the sensations, by how hairy he was and by his smell. I felt nauseous and sometimes that sensation would come over me in other settings.
I remember throwing up suddenly and unexpectedly once at school. I was at a boys' grammar school. We were singing a Christmas carol, a roundel called Torches. I was imagining sucking the male music teacher who was taking the lesson. It was a teacher I liked. The sensations of texture and smell were so strong that I was physically sick. Even now, I can induce those sensations by having those thoughts.
My father never threatened me, although every time he told me that I mustn't tell my mother. It was our secret. He seemed vulnerable and scared of my mother, in the same way I was scared of her. This endeared him to me. He seemed like a child too, afraid of being caught out. I didn't tell anyone.
I made friends with another boy around that time. Christopher's father used to do the same sort of things to him. His father was in the navy too. We used to talk about it and we would go into the woods and bushes, where we would take our clothes off and "have sex". It was like there was something secret and special between us.
| I tried to kill myself during a summer holiday when I was twelve years old |
I tried to kill myself during a summer holiday when I was twelve years old. There was a song called Grocer Jack on the radio at the time. I stole painkillers from a local shop and took them together with my father's codeine. I drank milk to swallow them. I lay on the settee in the living room for a while, listening to the radio. The room was spinning and I felt ill. Eventually I telephoned my mother at work and told her what I'd done. She was angry but she was panicky too. She called the family doctor and he made me sick. She told me that he thought I was "wicked" to do this to her.
I was a very naughty child between the ages of seven and fifteen years. I would guess that I was one of the naughtiest children in each of the three schools I attended during that period. I had no respect for teachers. I used to steal and I could be extremely violent. I have a vivid memory of stamping on a boy's head and stabbing another boy in the back with a pair of dividers. It feels like I was constantly being beaten. I remember the headmaster at my primary school losing his temper and throwing me around his office. I was on the point of being expelled from my grammar school when my parents moved abroad again and sent me to a public school as a boarder. I was thirteen years old. They expelled me when I was sixteen years old, after I had taken my 'O'-levels. My last school report described me as a menace to society.
I had several sexual relationships with other boys at my boarding school. Apart from one they weren't really "relationships". They were just sex, often when we were pissed or stoned. We called ourselves "hippies". I don't know if I was sexualised in this way as a result of what my father had done to me or because of the context of a British public school in a south coast seaside resort during the late sixties.
My father never used me sexually again. He died from an overdose when I was fourteen years old. The coroner said it was accidental. He was abroad at the time. I didn't go to the funeral. I wasn't asked. For years, I didn't believe he was dead. I believed that he had run away, perhaps with another woman, and my mother was covering up.
I found out much later that he had sexually abused both my two half-sisters. They are both a lot older than me. The child in me is still angry with them because they didn't do something about it. They didn't think that the same thing might be happening to me.
I get really mad when I hear of social workers removing girls from a sexually abusive father but leaving the boys. As if all child abuse is "heterosexual". And when children have been removed from an abusive step-father but leaving the "natural" or "birth" children. As if he won't step over the taboo of "your own flesh and blood".
It was only when my mother died, three years ago, that my sisters and I talked about what happened to us. None of us had the courage or, perhaps, the cruelty to talk to her about him before she died. We suspect that she knew. If she did know, we all want to ask her why she didn't do something about it. Why didn't she protect us?
I honestly don't know how all this has affected me, or my sisters. None of us can, or want, to see a direct correlation between what he did to us and what we are now. That would be like saying I am what I am as the result of a bad experience as a child, as a result of abuse, therefore there must be something wrong with me. I refuse to see myself as "damaged", although this thought does worm its way in when I am being selfish, inconsiderate, or destructive in my personal relationships. In that way, I am like those sex offenders who try to blame or excuse their abusive attitudes and behaviours on their own experience of abuse as children.
My father would have done that. He would have wept. And he would have blamed my mother for being cold and frigid. I can't be doing with that.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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