CHAPTER THREE: Talking To Strangers.

One evening, my mother summoned me to her side and told me that she was going to have to go away for a few days but that when she returned she would be bringing home a wonderful surprise. Daddy would be putting me to bed that night, she said, and he would be taking me to school in the morning. I was to be a good girl and remember never to talk to strangers.
There was some confusion in my mind about the word ‘stranger’. I assumed it was the same as the word ‘strange’ which signified to me something which was odd, funny or peculiar. Therefore, I surmised, a stranger was someone who was a bit weird and it stood to reason that you wouldn’t want to talk to them if you could help it. I couldn’t understand why my mother was always going on about such people. Still, I was very curious and excited about the wonderful surprise.
My father seemed anxious and distracted when he gave me my breakfast the next morning and attended to my getting ready for school. I was startled and dismayed when he told me I would have to walk to school by myself that day because he had to leave on an urgent matter. I could not believe what I was hearing. There was not a child I knew who walked to school unescorted; besides, there was a road to cross and that was something I had never done on my own. I pleaded with him and told him that I was frightened but he was insistent and firmly propelled me out of the front door.
Our house was not a great distance from my school. There was a wide footpath which led from the end of our crescent to a road. It was not much of a road - probably no more than a quiet country lane - but to a small child like myself it was as daunting as a four-lane dual carriageway. On the other side of the road was an open space where people picnicked in summer and where my mother had once let me stop to pick buttercups. Not very far from here was a spinney through which you could take a short cut. Some of the trees in the spinney were very old and they had gnarled and twisted roots which disguised a multitude of grinning, impish faces like the illustrations of Arthur Rackham. I was always careful to avert my eyes when my mother and I walked throught those trees. Once you had passed through the little wood, you were almost at the school. In all, it couldn’t have been more than a ten minute walk.
My father was a cruel and wicked man, I told myself. I felt sure that if my mother knew I was going to school by myself she would be furious with him. Tears were pricking my eyes and my heart was thumping loudly as I made my way along the familiar route until I came to the road which I would have to cross. I stood on the path, wondering what to do. There was no sound of approaching traffic but still I dithered, unable to summon the courage to take the giant leap. Then, suddenly, as if he had materialised from nowhere, a man appeared at my side. It’s very difficult for a young child to give an accurate assessment of the age of an adult; this man was much older than my father but not quite as old as my grandfather.
‘Do you want to cross the road?’ he asked, offering his hand.
Relief flooded through me and I nodded, full of gratitude. I held his hand trustingly as we began to cross the road.
‘Would you like to see a little birdie in the bush over there?’ he asked as we reached the other side. I nodded, eagerly, because I was fascinated by birds. Still holding my hand, he led me into the bushes and I looked around, expecting to see the promised bird. Suddenly, his manner changed. He stood behind me, gripping me tightly around my shoulders and began to whisper, hoarsely.
‘Are you a clean little girl?’
I nodded because my father had supervised my washing that morning. With one arm still holding me by my shoulders, he bent down, lifted up my skirt and put his hand inside my knickers. My heart gave a terrible leap of fear and I knew, in that moment, that I was in grave danger.
In the language of animal behaviourists there is something known as the ‘predatory sequence’. It refers to the options an animal has when confronted by a predator and they call them the ‘four F’s’: fight, flight, freeze or flirt. In the instant that my situation became apparent to me, my animal instinct caused me to freeze. My heart seemed to be squeezing itself inside my chest and I found found myself gasping for breath. I was totally paralysed, rooted to where I stood. The next moment, the man was groping with his rough fingers in that place my mother had forbidden me to touch.
‘Yes,’ he said, with a funny catch in his voice, ‘you’re a nice, clean girl!’
With my back towards him I couldn’t tell what he was doing but I sensed he was fumbling with his clothing. He lifted my jumper and I felt something hard and uncomfortable pushing into the small of my back.
‘I play this game with my little neice,’ said the man, his voice shaky. ‘She likes it. She says she always has to go and have a wee-wee afterwards.’ The hard thing continued to push and rub against my back and the man’s grip on my shoulder grew tighter still. At last, he gave a great sigh and I felt him relax. He removed his arm but I remained frozen with fear and unable to move a single muscle. He re-arranged my clothing and turned me around to face him but I would not look at him.
‘You had better get off to school, now,’ he said. ‘I know your teacher - she’s a pretty little woman, isn’t she?’
Without a word, I scuttled off, instinct telling me to get as far away as possible from that place. I dared not turn around to see if I was being followed and as I ran through the spinney I was terrified that he might leap out at me from behind a tree. I ran so fast that my legs began to give way and I was gasping audibly for breath. At last, I saw my school in the distance and I knew I was safe when I saw other children with their mothers walking to the entrance. As I slowed to walking pace I became aware that something cold was running down one of my thighs. Puzzled, I looked at my leg and saw a trickle of whitish, opaque liquid which, in my innocence, I thought was milk. Some instinct warned me not to touch it so I shook my leg to try to shake it off. For the rest of the day my thoughts kept returning to what had happened to me. Could it be that the man was one of those ‘strangers’ my mother had warned me about? If so, and she found out that I had spoken to one and as a consequence something bad had resulted, then I would be in the most terrible trouble. My father had told me that when you hurt yourself or something unpleasant happened to you, it was the Devil’s way of punishing you for being bad. I must be a very bad girl indeed, I concluded, and determined that I would never tell anyone about the frightening and horrible result of my disobedience.
These days, the activities of paedophiles are seldom out of the news and I think this has led many people to conclude that it is a modern phenomenon. However, I believe that there were just as many adults who directed their sexual desire towards children then as there are today; the only difference is that the subject is discussed more openly now and paedophiles are able to communicate with and encourage each other in their activities through the Internet. Also, the word ‘paedophilia’ was never mentioned in my youth; sexually abused chidren were always described as having been ‘interfered with’.
I have sometimes wondered what became of the man who ‘interfered’ with me. He had already confessed to abusing his neice; when she was older and realised that what he was doing was wrong, perhaps she told somebody. It could be that he had many victims which surely would have led to his being found out eventually. Or perhaps he got away with it and there is a grave somewhere with a headstone describing him as someone’s ‘loving husband’ or ‘loving father’. If there is such a thing as an afterlife, I hope that man has been condemned to everlasting torment.
That afternoon, at home-time, I was on my way to the cloakroom with the other children to put my coat on when my teacher called me aside and sat me on her lap. I stiffened and shrank away, worried about the funny white stuff which the bad man had put on my leg. I’d been so scared to touch it that I handn’t even been able to wash it off and it had dried on my skin. I felt as though I had been contaminated and it made me feel uncomfortable to be in such close contact with my teacher.
‘Your daddy’s here’’, she said, ‘and guess what?’ You’ve got a baby sister! Isn’t that wonderful?’
I didn’t know what to say in reply. A baby sister? I’d had no idea I was going to have a baby sister. I wondered where she had come from and guessed that her arrival had something to do with my mother’s going away. Now I realised what the ‘wonderful surprise’ I had been promised was.
A few days later, my mother came home with my new sister. Her name was Jean, she told me, and she was so preoccupied with looking after the baby that she forgot to ask me if I had been a good girl. I was greatly relieved because I would have had to lie and she always knew when I wasn’t telling the truth. A succession of relations came to the house to see my new sister and they all said the same thing: ‘You must be so relieved that she hasn’t got the brittle bones!’
No-one took much notice of me except to say ‘And what do you think of your baby sister?’ It was a stupid question and I never knew how to reply. I wondered why my sister’s bones were different from mine and why everyone was glad she hadn’t got them. It puzzled and worried me and I realised for the first time in my life that there was something about me that was different from other children. Certainly, Jean didn’t look anything like me; she was a big, blue-eyed baby with a fuzz of white-blonde hair. I was very dark and my eyes were brown. Also, I noticed, my father appeared to be very taken with her and when people admired her he seemed to puff up with pride.
My mother was so busy looking after the baby that I was left to entertain myself for much of the time. I wasn’t able to stop thinking about my encounter with the bad man and I began to be afraid of things which had never bothered me before. The dark, for instance, frightened me now and I hated it when my light was switched off at bedtime. The folds of the curtains assumed monstrous shapes, as did my dressing-gown hanging on the bedpost. Shadows flitted across the walls in the form of fearsome images and I dared not imagine what horrors lurked under my bed. One night, a great head like a dragon’s, with bared teeth and menacing eyes, terrified me so much that I was sick under my bedclothes. If I closed my eyes I would see snakes writhing in tangled knots or monsters with huge fangs and claws. I had nightmares from which I would wake in terror; I could never remember them but I knew they were about frightful, unspeakably loathsome and hideous things.
I was now very wary of men and I would do my best to avoid any physical contact with them. I developed an aversion to masculine odours, that peculiar mixture of soap, sweat and tobacco, with which I associated all the adult males of my acquaintance. I became so anxious and withdrawn that my mother had to take me to the doctor; he examined me and asked me if there was anything worrying me at school and I replied, truthfully, that there wasn’t. He told my mother that he could find nothing wrong with me and I was probably a little anxious because I not yet come to terms with the fact that I had a new sister and was no longer the privileged only child. It would be all right, he assured her, once I had adapted to my new situation.
I think my mother was finding it hard to cope with a new baby and a troublesome older child because, for some reason, she kept me away from school. It must have been for quite some while because a schools’ inspector knocked on the door one day and she was, I could tell, very much taken aback.
‘She’s got worms,’ lied my mother, ‘so I had to keep her home.’
The next morning, I was packed off to school. With hindsight, I think that the reason she’d kept me at home for so long was that she simply couldn’t get up early enough in the morning to get me ready. She had always been foul-tempered in the morning and having a new baby to cope with obviously made it worse. Meanwhile, my nightmares continued, my fear of the dark grew worse and I became even more withdrawn and anxious.
One night, I awoke as usual from some disturbing dream but when I opened my eyes, instead of blackness, I saw that my room was illuminated by a faint light. It seemed to be coming from behind me, on my right. I lay very still, not turning my head, and a pleasant feeling of calm washed over me. Although I couldn’t hear anything, I felt as though a voice was speaking to me, in my head. It spoke to me kindly, in a tone of gentle reproof, telling me that it was wrong to allow the monsters and all the other bad things to frighten me. The voice comforted me and I closed my eyes; this time, instead of the unpleasant things that normally projected themselves on to my eyelids, I saw nothing: all was blankness. Suddenly, to my amazement, floating before my eyes were dancing, female figures, each wearing a dress of a different colour. They drifted past, swaying and gliding, in their myriads. I had never imagined that such beautiful colours existed! So many shades of blue, red, green, yellow, violet and orange! I was entranced and I felt as though I had been transported to some wonderful, magical place. After a while, I fell into an untroubled sleep.
When I awoke the following night, instead of dancers to entertain me, I saw trains. But what trains! They were not like the grimy, black, commonplace London trains I was used to. These were altogether in a different class: they were magnificent. Some were painted bright red, some brilliant blue and some dark green and they were so highly polished that they gleamed like glass. Some of them were even modified with elegant streamlining, like those I had seen in pictures. A vast and intricate network of tracks stretched before me, converging into a single vanishing point on the distant horizon. There were deep tunnels and towering viaducts, stations, signal boxes, water towers; and it was all so real that nothing would have convinced me that it was only my imagination.
After a while, I ceased to be a mere spectator of these marvellous nightly pageants and became instead a participant. Every night would bring a different adventure and I used to look forward to bedtime. I cannot say how long these waking dreams lasted: it could have been weeks or months. Gradually, they faded away and although I tried, I couldn’t recapture them. Finally, they vanished and, like all the monsters who had tormented me, disappeared for ever.
My mother, I think, began to feel sorry for neglecting me. During the afternoons she was usually in a better temper and one day she offered to make some clothes for my favourite doll by cutting up an old jumper. She chatted to me pleasantly as she cut and sewed; this was one of those all-too-rare occasions when I found myself warming towards her. If only she could be as nice as that all the time! When she had finished, my doll looked very elegant and I couldn’t wait to show her off to my cousins.
‘Won’t they be jealous!’ I exclaimed, beaming with delight and full of childish gratitude. l yearned for these precious times when she was like other childrens’ mothers


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