Daddy's Little Earner Read Online Free PDF Page B

were aroundat the time, or from reading my social services records. Itwas always hard for Terry and me to piece together exactlywhat happened around the time she disappeared becauseMum and Dad had such different views on it.
    I do remember her coming back one time after oneof her absences, although I still can’t picture her face. To celebrate our reunion we all went to the pictures as afamily, the four of us together. (I guess Chris and Glenwere back at home in their room as usual.) I still can’tactually visualize her being there, but I remember theevent because as we came out of the cinema I got lost. Imust have run on ahead in my excitement and taken awrong turning. I don’t think I was gone for that long, butwhen Dad found me he was really angry with me forinconveniencing him. When Mum finally left home hewould tell me that I was the reason she had gone; that itwas because I had got lost and been a nuisance to her thatday after the cinema trip that she had decided she couldn’t take any more. He was very good at making outeverything that went wrong in his life was someone else’sfault. I believed him because he was my dad so he mustbe right and because I already knew that I was a bad girl;he told me so all the time and had convinced me totally.So for years I believed it was all my fault that our motherhad gone and that she no longer wanted to have anythingto do with any of us.
    I think each time Mum came back to Dad after one ofher bids for freedom, she hoped that he would have beenshocked into changing his ways, but each time he wouldstart putting her down again, hitting her, nagging andbullying her to go back on the game again.
    ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘there’s one of your punters. Whydon’t you do just one more?’
    If she didn’t respond to the cajoling then he wouldresort to violence. Nothing made him lose his tempermore thoroughly than one of us refusing to do as we weretold. Mum must have realized that as long as she was withhim nothing was ever going to change, she was alwaysgoing to have to do whatever he decided for her, that shewould always be selling herself just to keep him in drinkingand betting money. So she made up her mind to disappearonce and for all.
    One day in 1973 Mum sneaked home from the shoefactory in her lunch hour, when she knew Dad would besafely settled in the pub, and packed her case. Terry and Iwere probably sitting outside whichever pub Dad wasdrinking in. It didn’t matter because she wasn’t planningto take any of us with her this time. I suppose she knewthat if she had children in tow Dad would be able to traceher through social services and make her go back to him.She wanted to vanish off the face of the earth. The psychiatrist’swarnings about being married to ‘a very dangerousman’ must have been ringing in her ears as shehurried from the house for the last time with her few possessionshastily packed, slamming the door behind her.Chris and Glen would have been able to hear her movementsfrom behind their bedroom door but by that stagethey must have been so weak from hunger that theywouldn’t have had the strength to cry out to her. Therewould have been no point anyway.
    At first she went to a male friend and asked him to puther up. Initially he promised to care for her until she sortedherself out, but it wasn’t long before she realized he wasgoing to want to pimp for her just like Dad and she knewher only chance was to leave Norwich for ever and startafresh somewhere else, somewhere where no one knewabout her past. When you’re known to be a prostitute andall the people you socialize with belong to the same world,it’s almost impossible to change anything as long as youstay in the same town; you have to make a clean break.Carrying the suitcase that contained all the possessions shehad left in the world she walked out to the ring road onthe edge of town and hitched a lift with a lorry driver.
    ‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.
    ‘Blakeney,’ he