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kids and I realised that I actually enjoyed working with bairns. What’s more, I was good at it. Maybe, I thought to myself, I can go to college and get a qualification that will allow me to earn a living doing something worthwhile and which I like doing. But then my world fell apart. Again.

Three
     

The Thing About Hope
     
     
    O n my sixteenth birthday Dad sent a message to me: ‘You little bastard – I’ll kill you.’
    And you know what? Those six little words meant the world to me: not because of what he actually said, but because of what the words meant. And because of how and where my lovely Dad came up with them.
    I’d been sitting in a little room at Middlesbrough Crown Court for four days. My Dad was on trial: someone had finally got round to doing something about his repeated sexual abuse of me from the age of three. I’d spoken to the police and to lawyers off and on throughout my years in Care, but Dad had denied everything. To hear his side of the story he’d never laid a finger on me – even though I’d been a really difficult child – and he’d even taken me into his home when Mum couldn’t cope with me any more. And of course he hadn’t abused me; he wasn’t one of those bastard paedophiles.
    And so nothing was done. When it’s the word of a respectable local businessman against that of a young girl so troubled that she had been kicked out by her mum and eventually taken into Care, guess who comes out on top?
    But while I was at Riverside something happened to make the police and lawyers take me more seriously. They never told me what it was – the legal rules which govern evidence to be given in court meant that if they had done, whatever I said afterwards might not be admissible in court. I did pick up whispers and rumours about another girl he was suspected of abusing: maybe the simple fact of there being another potential victim prodded the legal system into taking account. Whatever the cause, Dad was arrested and charged with sexually abusing me throughout my childhood.
    And what do you think went through my mind?
    I think – and this is an educated guess – that your answer to that question depends on whether or not you yourself have been abused. Those of you lucky enough never to have endured the pain of sexual assaults by your own father will probably think that I was happy – pleased that at last that Dad was being made to account for what he’d done, and also that (if convicted) other children might be protected from him.
    But those of you who have been in the same dark, desperate place as me; those of you who have known the complex mixture of emotions – betrayal and loyalty, loathing and yearning – will know that it’s rarely as straightforward as that. Of course I was glad that Dad was going to be tried. I’d lain awake enough nights, dreaming of the day when I got to face him in court and tell him – not to mention the people looking on, the people who should have protected me in the first place – how much he had hurt me. I knew, in those adolescent fantasies, that I would stand there strong and tall, an angry woman demanding justice – not just for herself but for all the other abused children who had suffered at the hands of their parents.
    Yeah, right.
    Because however pleased I was, however much I felt believed and, yes, relieved, he was still my dad. He was a bastard – frankly he was a complete and utter swine – but he was still my dad. And that meant he was my bastard, my swine. And I was going to bring him down. Weird as it sounds, I felt guilty.
    On 26 January 1992 the case came to court – Middlesbrough court, the same court that, as I later discovered, had heard the first cases in the Cleveland child abuse crisis back in the 1980s and then turned its back on the children. It felt very strange to know that after such a long time, the 12 men and women sitting in the jury box would decide whether Dad was a brutal abuser or I was a shameless liar.
    It