What Daddy Did Read Online Free PDF

the place as cosy, had I been in the heart of a loving family. What 'could have been' may be a silly game to play, but sometimes it's hard to prevent yourself falling into that trap.
     
The rooms I have already described had their horrors, but the bathroom in this first house was to become my most dreaded room. It wasn't even appealing to begin with – it had a high ceiling and an old-fashioned deep cast-iron bath with a Victorian toilet and cistern complete with pull chain. I was soon to get to know every crack on every wall in this room, every embossed swirl on the frosted glass door, as I was made to stand in there for hours on end, starving, shaking and freezing with cold.
     
Food was to become a big issue for me as a child. I was soon regularly deprived of it by Helen, as one of her means of exerting control over me. It will come as no surprise, then, that I have really strong memories of the times I was actually fed. In those early days I remember the food Helen gave me. Breakfast would be a bowl of cornflakes with a cup of tea and some toast. Lunch would be something like soup with a pudding, perhaps rice or jam. Tea, as we called it, could be anything from mince and tatties to cold meat and chips, to my dreaded and most hated meal of all – tripe and onions.
     
Helen didn't just stop giving me food all of a sudden. It happened gradually. She would make me miss out on a meal for being naughty (in her eyes), which eventually led to me not knowing when I would next be fed. In fact, this was a pattern with my stepmother, as the abuse she was leading up to began in the same fashion. To start with, I would be told off for things I did – such as playing with toys that belonged to her son, speaking when not spoken to, taking a biscuit before being offered – and many other things she would just decide were bad from one day to the next.
     
There was, however, one type of behaviour so abhorrent to Helen that she placed it above all of my other so-called transgressions – and that was wetting the bed. Memories come flooding back to me sometimes when I least expect them to, and often they are things I've buried. One striking recollection I have is the terrible telling-off I would get for not going to the toilet in the middle of the night.
     
I did have a problem with this while I was in the children's home, and I remember the way it was dealt with there. On a Saturday all of the children would be gathered in the main room. They would sit down in little seats which had been placed in rows before a large table. Behind this table sat two or three members of staff who would hand out pocket money and sweets (usually homemade tablet) to each child. We would traipse up, say 'thank you' and return to our seats clutching our little stash. However, the children who had been naughty, for one reason or another, would be singled out, their crimes would be revealed and they would forfeit either their pocket money or their sweets – or both, depending on the severity of the crime. Wetting the bed was one of these crimes, as I knew full well. I remember the sheer embarrassment of sitting there and having my name called out, and then going without the trip to the shops to spend my money or without the only sweet treat of the week.
     
As the years went by and I worked in children's homes as an adult, I encountered many youngsters who wet their beds, and I gained more insight into the problem. There are so many reasons why a child may suffer from this very common complaint, including lack of control over bladder function, sleep apnoea and stress. What I experienced in the children's home in the 1960s was due to ignorance rather than cruelty – but this can't be said of Helen's attitude and punishment.
     
When I first went to stay with her and my Daddy, she would just change the sheets and my pyjamas if I had an 'accident', then get me up to go to the toilet during the night. But I kept wetting the bed and this made Helen angrier and