Free The Step Child by Donna Ford, Linda Watson-Brown

could. As time went on, my dreams of being rescued – of someone seeing how mean Helen was – focused on the Woods, but she was good at maintaining a pretence with them – I’m sure they only ever saw her as a young woman, baby on hip, with a heavy burden to carry.
    I can’t remember having anything that belonged to me, any personal possession. In my room there was a photograph of Frances, Simon and myself before we went into Barnardo’s, and it gave the place the only bit of homeliness I could focus on. I was still waiting for them to come home, still sure that everything could be perfect once they arrived. Although Frances had a little smile on her face in the photograph, the three of us looked sad and confused. Helen would often ridicule us because of the image – with me it was ‘look at the petted lip’. This was a favourite saying of hers – ‘get that petted lip off your face!’ or ‘what’s the petted lip for?’ I never knew what she meant, but I did know it was something else to make her mad.
    In terms of other family or household possessions, I have to filter it all through what was happening to me. We did have a television at one point, but I didn’t get to watch it. I would generally be standing in a corner, or in the recess, or in the hall, when Helen’s favourite programmes would start up. I knew what the telly was like when it was switched off – a big black screen in a wooden surround with Bakelite knobs – but what it spewed out impinged on me only as background to one of my punishments. Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, Coronation Street – they were all theme tunes I recognised, and vague voices I heard regularly, but there was no interaction for me.
    It was the same with radio. Helen loved music – she called the radio and her Dansette her ‘treasures’. Sunday afternoons she would cook food I was never allowed to eat, while the smells wafted towards me wherever I was being punished, and the sound of Sing Something Simple came from the radio, with the high-pitched tones of the performers singing their old-fashioned medleys. Helen played the Beatles, Andy Williams, Nancy and Frank Sinatra, Sandy Shaw. Just hearing a few bars of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ can transport me back there, even now.
    Music didn’t soften Helen Ford. It may have provided asoundtrack to my abuse and neglect, but it did little else. It wasn’t long before I was constantly tense, always waiting for something to happen. I knew that most days I would be punished.
    I’d be sent to stand in the damp recess for hours.
    Punched.
    Starved.
    Slapped.
    Stripped and made to wait in the freezing bathroom.
    Screamed at as a witch.
    Kicked.
    Threatened.
    Have a burning poker held to my face.
    Told I was ugly.
    And I learned to expect it all.

Chapter Five
     

     
M Y L ITTLE L IFE
     
1964–1967
     
    THAT WAS MY LIFE at Easter Road. That was what I was given instead of Haldane House. I was too little, too inexperienced to know that keeping things the same would never be enough for someone like Helen. She always needed to be the boss, to have me terrified, and I was getting too used to the punishments being meted out.
    I was still young enough, still naïve enough, to think that things would get better. After a few weeks at Easter Road, the next big change in my life loomed large. I was going to school! For most children, the first day at primary school is a big deal. Weeks of preparation, of buying the uniform, getting a new pencil case and pencils, culminate in the day itself. Photographs are taken, and the child in question is generally left feeling rather special. That didn’t happen for me. I knew that I was going to Leith Walk School, and I knew that it would be happening on the morning of Monday 24 August 1964, but that was where it all ended. There was no real excitement in the family, and even though Helen’s real cruelties had not begun in earnest, the lack of occasion given to my first days in the big