Free I Remember, Daddy by Katie Matthews Page B

show us, dear. I expect it’s just irritation caused by soap or washing powder. I’ll tell Mummy to make sure she’s rinsing your clothes properly and then I’m sure it’ll go away. Just don’t scratch it.’
    Nothing more was ever said to me about it, even when, shortly afterwards, I developed a rash of boils on the same area of my body. At first, they were just small, itchy, red spots. But they quickly grew larger and more painful, until they were so bad I could hardly walk and the doctor had to come to the house to lance them. Even then, no one seemed to wonder why a three-year-old child had boils around her genitalia. These days, I imagine, questions would be asked. But, in the 1960s, I doubt whether anyone ever considered the possibility of sexual abuse within a family – and certainly not in a family like ours, with a father who was a high-earning, well-connected and well-respected businessman.
    I used to wonder what my mother thought had caused those boils. But she was naïve, and as used to feeling responsible for bad things as I was to become, so she probably remained convinced that she’d caused them by not rinsing the washing powder out of my clothes properly.
    In many of my childhood memories, my mother isn’t present. Even when she was at home, she’d usually be in the kitchen, two floors below the rooms where my brother and I spent most of our time as children, while we were looked after by whoever was our current nanny. We had a constantly changing stream of nannies – who were actually au pairs rather than qualified child carers, as that name would suggest. None of them lasted very long, because my father slept with all of them and when my mother found out, she got rid of them, one by one. However, a casual observer might not have noticed when one left and another took her place, as it was difficult to distinguish between all the young, blonde, pretty Scandinavian girls my father insisted on employing. There was one, though, that I remember clearly. She was different from all the others, being English and dark-haired, but everyone agreed that she adored me. Her name was Margaret Kennedy.
    One day, just after Sam was born, I found a photograph of myself, aged about three, wearing a pretty pink dress and standing barefoot in a garden I didn’t recognise. I asked my mother where it had been taken and whose garden it was.
    ‘It was at Margaret Kennedy’s house,’ she told me. She took the photo from my hands and smiled. ‘She loved you so much. She and your father used to take you there sometimes, so that she could show you off to her family and friends.’
    I suddenly felt as though I was going to be sick. I closed my eyes and kept swallowing the saliva that was flooding into my mouth until eventually the feeling passed and I reached out and took the photograph from my mother’s hand. I examined the photo for a moment and then looked at my mother. Even for someone who’d been too brainwashed and under my father’s thumb to think about it at the time, I was certain that she must have realised how ridiculous what she’d just said had sounded and be wondering why my father had gone with Margaret on those visits to her home. But apparently not, because she was still smiling wistfully at some fond memory of my childhood the photograph had falsely evoked.
    Suddenly, an image flashed into my mind: I was lying on a bed and Margaret was holding my arms above my head, pressing them against the mattress until they hurt. Then, as quickly as it had come, the picture evaporated and was gone, leaving me feeling as though someone had punched me in the stomach and dreading the prospect of remembering whatever had happened next.
    The photograph I’d looked at with my mother that day represented just one of the causes of the many hours I spent crying and rocking myself backwards and forwards in the corner of my room at the hospital. Because the memory it had begun to unlock was of what really happened when my