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

– but you’re too stupid or pigheaded or difficult to help me out, aren’t you? Well, let me tell you, madam, so there’s no room for doubt. You don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. You don’t tell them anything unless they ask.’
    But that wasn’t it, really, was it? If they asked if she hit me, could I say she did? If they asked if she didn’t feed me, could I tell them how hungry I felt? If they asked if she never hugged me or told me I was pretty, could I say how bad it felt? I knew I couldn’t.
    ‘They ask if you are well looked after – you say “yes”. They ask if you like being here – you say “yes”. They ask if I’m good to you – you say “yes”. I want them leaving here thinking you’re living with a fucking saint – you hear me, Donna?’
    It was all about appearances, all about what other people would think of Helen, and I had to collude with it all. I had to help her make a pretend Helen – ironically, the type of Helen I truly wanted as my stepmother, the type she was so far from being.
    I don’t remember how many visits there were from the social work department or Barnardo’s, or from anyone else who may have had a professional interest in me, but I do know that they all took on the same form. On the day of a visit, I would be fed – and the feeling of the food, the knowledge that I wouldn’t be hungry that day, made me so grateful that I always thought it was the start of things going well. Only later did I realise it was nothing more than a bribe. I would have my hair brushed and be put in clean clothes. Much more attention would be paid to Gordon, even though he wasn’t the subject of the visit. Her golden child would be dressed up in his best clothes and paraded as a perfect specimen of what Helen, the good mother, could produce. Any faults would then be seen as mine – if she did sowell with Gordon, it was inconceivable that I wouldn’t be cared for.
    I knew what to do – I knew to answer the questions as she wanted me to, and never to offer extra information. When my Dad came home, Helen would, of course, tell him that I had given her a ‘showing up’ and I would get walloped again. It’s hard for me to comprehend how blind my father chose to be. Did he never ask any questions? Did he never have any suspicions? Did he never want to be involved?
     

     
    I was always thinking that things would be different once Frances and Simon arrived. In Haldane House, we hadn’t been together all the time, but I knew they were there. Because I was still so little, they were my brother and sister to me; there was no talk of half-siblings or different fathers.
    This lack of paternity for Simon and Frances has always bothered me. I suppose, to begin with, Don Ford might have had some notion of responsibility to my Mum’s other children; perhaps he even thought she would be home soon and he would try to keep us all together for that day. I can only assume that, at some point, he realised this wasn’t going to happen, and that looking after three tiny children and holding down a job – even with the help of the teenage Helen Gourlay – was more than he could manage. But why did he and Helen take all three of us back to Easter Road eventually? I had been there for eight months by myself, with things getting progressively worse, when Simon and Frances arrived ‘home’. In later years, when I questioned why all of us were ‘rescued’ from Barnardo’s, given what was waiting for us, I was told by one family member that the initial reason had been a practical one. The flat in Easter Road had been bought by Frances’s father for Breda. I don’t know what happened regarding ownership, but I do know that the imaginary continuingpresence of Breda, my mother, continued to haunt Helen. She hated anything that reminded her of her predecessor, so the fact that we all lived in a flat which had been bought for Breda (even if, ultimately, for her daughter), a flat in which she had