getting a good hiding. Any attention was better than none at all.
The only person whom I felt ever truly loved me was my mum. I was her special child, because I was my father’s daughter, and my father was the only man she had ever loved. Mum, too, had been the outcast in her family, as had her mother before her, so maybe that was another reason why she loved me – she understood me better than anyone else. I believe that my mother saw herself mirrored in me when I was young, and could see the hurt I was feeling from being rejected. My mother shielded the blows that life threw at me, always trying to cushion the physical and emotional knocks. When someone hurt me, my mother would worry and get upset. Out of my love for her, I would never let her know just how bad I was feeling.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT of myself as being the unluckiest girl I knew. I was, I believed, a ‘jinx’. Nothing much good happened to me, and if anything bad were going to happen to anyone … it would happen to me! Life had been a bitch to me and I grew up expecting that nothing good would come of me or my life.
I was used to being let down and feeling unwanted. I knew how it felt to be disliked by those who were supposed to love me; they didn’t mean to make me feel bad about myself, but that’s what happened.
I felt I had two different faces, two separate personalities. Each of my personalities was at odds with the other. I was a rebel, a spoilt brat and a little show-off. Many times, my stepfather Alf would rebuke my behaviour with the line, ‘You can sit down now, Caroline, we’ve all seen you.’
I was the troublemaker of the family, the argumentative one who answered back, the one who never did as she was asked first time – it was always ‘In a minute’ with me. I pushed my luck, constantly defying my parents and annoying my older siblings. From ‘little bitch’ I progressed to ‘dirty little bitch’. I was used to the name-calling. It had started when I was four years old and continued right up into my twenties – and that was just in the place I called home.
My other personality was the ‘shy girl’ – the little girl who would sit for hours on her own in a field full of horses, dreaming of owning one some day. I would make bridles out of rope, straddle a kitchen chair and have my imaginary mount gallop off. I pretended it was my pony. I had a huge appetite for reading books on how to care for a pony and how to ride. I would see other kids riding their real ponies at the gymkhana, hoping one of them would take pity on me and offer me a ride, but they never did.
All I dreamed and longed for was a pony of my own and of being with my real dad again. My dad had told me how he had been raised on a farm in Ireland and went on to say that Grandma had a pony and how she would love me to be there with her and my dad.
All of this, though, was just a dream; Grandma’s farm and the pony existed for me but, years later, I was to find out that I didn’t exist for them – at least not for Grandma, nor anyone in my dad’s family. The dad I had hero-worshipped and adored had given me up without a fight when I was four years old. As a devout Catholic, he was ashamed of me, the bastard he had fathered. I was the dark secret he took to his grave.
When I was in my teens, people outside the family and the home saw me as a pretty, bubbly and friendly girl who liked the boys – a little too much at times – and the boys certainly seemed to like me too. I was well mannered and helpful, always available to babysit, always kind and polite, with a good sense of humour and a smile on my face. I would put the smiles on to hide the fact that more often than not I would just have had my head smashed against the wall for answering back.
I called this face my ‘happy face’; I used it many times, to mask my tears and my pain. I didn’t want other people to be embarrassed at my expense; I didn’t want them to know why I had been given a beating. I didn’t want them to know what a horrible young girl I could be. I needed them to like me and I needed their approval. I could also use this ‘happy face’ to deflect the pain caused by the scathing words and remarks that people would use against me.
When one of my brothers, or my stepfather, said or did anything that hurt my feelings, I would lock it away. I learned how to hide my feelings of hurt with displays of bravado and sarcasm – or a big smile. If someone wanted to hurt me, I would beam a huge smile at him or her, just to be annoying; it always did the trick.
Sometimes, I wouldn’t be able to control my temper and I would lash out verbally and, sometimes, physically, but only towards those who knew me best – my family, especially Alf and Phillip and later my boyfriends. To them I could be a bitch, but in my twisted little mind I was just surviving.
I’d had so many bad things happen to me that I knew it would only be a matter of time before I ended up dead. I had many, many dreams about my demise. Vivid dreams that I thought were most probably premonitions of what was to come. I kept these dreams to myself. Very often, I dreamed of my death at the hands of some madman – or woman. I knew by experience that women were not to be trusted any more than men when it came to me. In my dreams, I knew how it felt to be strangled, gasping for breath, my tongue jutting out between my blue lips, my eyes bulging and bloodshot. I also knew what it felt like to have a knife stab me through the stomach – it didn’t seem to hurt that much, though it made me feel sick as my stomach gurgled and churned, but when the knife pierced my chest it hurt like hell! I would be fighting for breath as though I was drowning in my own blood; this panic feeling always woke me with a start and I would go to pieces.
I knew I would be famous one day, but it wasn’t until I was seventeen years old that I began to keep a diary so someone could write a book about my poor, sad life, when (I predicted) I died of unnatural causes. Yes, I thought, it would come in very handy when my body was found dead and buried under the paving stones of Gloucester.
MUM TRIED TO give me confidence by telling me, often, what an attractive girl I was, and when I complained of having no nice clothes to wear she would say, ‘Caroline, you could be wearing a sack and you’d still stand out and look beautiful.’ I found that being attractive had its downside though, as it meant that I attracted all sorts of people – including the perverts and weirdos. I learned to my cost that I was attractive to paedophiles as a child. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was thirteen years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there.
A man had followed me into the public toilets in Gloucester Park; I was waiting while my friend used the cubicle first. Initially, I thought he had come in by mistake and I had started to tell him that the ‘Gents’ was around the other side of the building. He kept coming towards me with a blank look on his face. I backed away from him until the cold tiled wall pressed up against my back and stopped my escape. He grabbed at me. I struggled to get away as he forced his hands down my knickers. I tried to scream, but all that came out was a weird gurgling noise. I grabbed at his fingers, trying to pull them away, but he was too strong for me. I heard a cracking sound and was sure I must have broken his finger, but still he wouldn’t let go.
My friend Dawn came out of the toilet to see me squatting down with this elderly man bent over me. Dawn was only eleven, and tiny for her age, but even so she jumped on his back and tried to get him off me; he was too strong for both of us though.
