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shortly after I returned from the home. He was singing and laughing. All of his family were there: his two brothers and his sister, my granny and various other faces that I can't place so long after the event , and they had all come to meet me. I felt so proud, so loved and, in this memory, my Dad seems truly happy.
     
When I look back on this time – the sweet shops, the trips to the wishing well, the times alone with him – I think I can see my Dad as he could have been, as he would have been, as he wasn't allowed to be. I know that his relationship with Helen was fraught, and I understand that what goes on between two people can never really be understood by outsiders. But I know some other things too. What went on and what happened to me as a result of him choosing to live with and marry that woman stole my childhood from me and, to this day, has repercussions on my identity and being.
     
He didn't protect me. He didn't take me to safety, away from her. He ignored and minimised what was happening. He closed his eyes tightly against the evil that would be wreaked on me for years and years. Evil that wouldn't leave just because Helen did.
     
Evil which has left me with a question that I still want to scream at him: Do you know what you did, Daddy? Do you know what you did?
     

Chapter Five

     

H OME
IF I AM TO TRY AND understand my father's role in all of this, I have to go back to the beginning. And the beginning is painful for me. I had hope. I thought I was going to a family – my family – who would love me and protect me.
     
My initial reaction at seeing my new home is etched on my memory, even though I was so young. I'd been living in that large rambling children's home since I was a baby, but here I was being taken 'home' to a one-bedroom basement flat in a tenement block. Everything was so small. There was the one tiny bedroom, a bathroom and a living room with a bed recess at one end and a scullery at the other. The flat would have been big enough for a young married couple alone, but it was nowhere near spacious enough for a family of four – and it certainly wasn't the size required for the family of seven it would house within the next couple of years.
     
The living room itself doubled as a bedroom for my Dad and Helen. It had a double bed in the recess, where they slept, and in front of the post-war tiled fireplace sat a three-piece suite in darkred embossed leatherette fabric. On the dark wooden sideboard against one wall was a black-and-white television, the same television I watched as Winston Churchill's funeral was broadcast. There were two drawers in this sideboard that were full of cutlery. In the two cupboards below, cereal and biscuits and other foods jostled for space. I recall the smell of this cupboard more than any other because it was where the food was; food I was to be deprived of so often, for so long. In the window space, there was a table with chairs, which looked out on to the communal back garden, or back green as we called it.
     
Everything was cramped and claustrophobic compared to the vast rooms at the Barnardo's home. There was nearly always a coal fire lit as that was what heated the water by means of a back boiler. It soon became my job to clear the fireplace of ashes, and to roll and twist newspapers ready for the next lighting. Sitting in the hearth was a brass fireside companion set, complete with tongs and pokers. That would become another instrument of torture once Helen got going.
     
The one bedroom was used as the kids' room. When I arrived it already had a set of wooden bunk beds and a cot. There was a large window opposite the door and a fireplace to the side of it, over which hung a picture of Jesus whose eyes would follow every move of anyone in that room – or so it seemed to me. Under the window was a small chest of drawers and that was about it. This room, like all the other rooms in the house, was very neat but cramped. I suppose that I might have seen