This story is in two separate parts, which reflects the two phases of my daughter’s life ~ the latter of which was the one we were mostly together.
Back in the early 80’s, for some reason I found myself dating LM, again more for the sex than any relationship or love aspect. I still hadn’t matured enough for that and had learnt little from the lessons I’d already had. Everyone I knew, both friends and family, told me they’d seen her with a lot of other men from the first time we got together, but as usual this stubborn twat wouldn’t listen. When she fell pregnant I should have distanced myself, but through a combination of my decent upbringing pushing me to ‘do the right thing’ and pressure from her family, who had their connections with London’s gangland scene, we got engaged. We rarely went anywhere together ~ it was purely a sex thing, but there was the possibility that once the child was born, things might change, or so I thought.
So, I managed to get a 100% mortgage on a three bedroom terraced house about five minutes walk away from her family home and began to do it up. It needed completely renovating and central heating installed ... it was a mess. But with some help from family and friends I soon managed to get it into a reasonable condition. It wouldn’t be ready in time, but hopefully it wouldn’t be long before the two of them could move in.
As the day approached, I left plenty of details of where I’d be, so one of her family could call in time for me to get to the hospital. But it didn’t go that way. None of her family bothered to tell me until hours after the child was born. I wasn’t welcomed by her family, in spite of everything I was trying to do for her. At one point my mother joined me visiting them in the hospital, and when my mum (who definitely didn’t believe the child was mine) offered LM some money to get something for the baby, LM and her family simply laughed in her face. Yet, she was still christened with my surname.
When she got out of hospital, I showed her how the house was progressing, but her only comments were she didn’t like the colour my father had decorated the kitchen and there was no way she was ever moving in there with me. I hardly saw either of them after that, apart from when I took money round for the little ’un. The father ~ who ran the family with an iron fist ~ died and the female family members, who had suffered most under his influence, basically went totally doolally with their new found freedom.
One day, when I was in the pub, the particularly large and nasty uncle paid me a visit to inform me they were all moving down to the South West and they didn’t want me around. He said he knew it wasn’t worth warning or threatening me, so he said if I did try to find them, he’d pour petrol through the letter box of my parents’ flat and set fire to it. I knew he’d do it, and that there was only one door in and out of that flat, so I had to let them go.
Eventually, everyone convinced me the child couldn’t be mine for various reasons, but mainly because she had been sleeping round with several men when she fell pregnant, and that they were all so money-grabbing, they wouldn’t turn down a chance to make some out of me if there were any chance of it. The one thing I did say to everyone was that if the child did turn out to be mine, she’d come looking for me when she was old enough.
Although I had no way of knowing their address, or even the exact town they were living in, it didn’t stop me spending many years holidaying in Devon and Cornwall, always passing through the places I thought they might be, in the desperate hope of seeing them as I drove through. Ridiculous, I know, but you never know how your heart works.
Fast forward to 2003. Marriage over, back from Greece, working in the pub trade over (for the time being), back in Kettering and trying to get back on my feet again. My mother received a letter with another inside, plus a note asking to pass the latter to me. In spite of her feelings, and somehow knowing it must have something to do with K, she passed it on to me. It came from an offshoot of Friends Reunited (I think it was called Families Reunited, or something similar) and it was a note from K. She was now 17 and her aunts had finally cast doubt on her mother’s assertions that her father never wanted anything to do with her, and now she wanted to know the truth.
We exchanged a few letters after that, but I still wasn’t sure if this was legitimate or whether it was something concocted by her mother in order to elicit some money out of me after all these years. However, I agreed to meet her ~ but on ground where I knew I’d be able to do a runner if necessary. Through previous acquaintances, I was very familiar with the layout of Glastonbury, which was only a short distance from where she lived. I arranged to meet her by the bus stop on the edge of the Abbey car park. I parked a short way down the road, having got there long before the appointed time, and waited behind the bus shelter, so I could see anyone coming but had several routes I could depart through should the need arise.
But it didn’t come to that. I watched as a car stopped in the middle of the road, preparing to pull into the car park, that had two young lads in front and a small face in the back, staring out of the window. I immediately knew that not only was this K, but also that she must be my daughter, as the poor lass had the famous ‘Everitt nose’ which I doubt she could have inherited from anyone else in Kettering but myself.
We spoke for a while, then, when she knew she was safe, she sent her two friends away, thanking them. I drove her to Burnham-on-Sea then Weston-super-Mare, which were not too far away and places she enjoyed visiting. We talked for hours, telling each other stories of our lives, but not really touching too much on the issue of why I’d not been there while she was growing up.
Eventually, though, the conversation got round to that and she said the reasons I had given ~ both then and in my previous letters ~ matched very closely what her aunts (none of whom I’d seen since) had finally deemed to tell her. It finally got too late to be out and I took her home. But before we parted, I took a photo of her, which I still carry in my wallet to this day.
We met again a few times after that ~ once I stayed a couple of nights at her boyfriend’s flat and another time we went away for the weekend, in a family room, so I knew she was safe, but had her own privacy. She was a young woman, after all, and I had to make sure everything was done correctly.
She told me about what it was like growing up ~ she had to look after her three half-brothers, as her mother was rarely around, and when she was, she was usually drunk. K ended up being more of a mother to them than their real one was. Her mother spent most of her time in the pub, either working or drinking when she was off shift, and the rest of her time was taken up with shagging anyone who’d spend a few quid buying her a few drinks. And all this time, she had a husband at home (who K said was not brilliant at the fatherly job, but at least he’d never done her any harm, and had, at times, been good to her), who she said knew about the affairs, but didn’t seem to bother about it.
She said it was often she’d come home from school with her two younger siblings only to find her mother shagging some bloke on the living room floor, so she’d have to usher the kids into the kitchen and feed them.
There were many other things that happened to her while she was growing up, but she didn’t go into them until much later.
Eventually, she could hack it no more, and asked if she could move in with me in Kettering. I said she was old enough to make her own mind up, and two of her aunts were living in the town now, so it’s not as if she would be without other contacts. So I went down to Somerset to pick her up. She stayed with me in the two-bedroom flat I’d recently moved into for quite a while, getting some part time work in a local bar, after I had introduced her to many of my acquaintances who frequented that end of the town.
Then she received a message from her mother saying she had cancer and needed K to return to help her look after the kids. Although dubious, I didn’t question the matter and she went down there. But it was only a short time before she discovered her mother had lied ~ there was no cancer, she just wanted K back to make her life a bit easier again. So, around Christmas/New Year, she called begging me to pick her up and take her ‘home’. I dutifully obliged, and that was the last time she went down there to see her mother.
She managed to get herself a job at the local JobCentre, which she enjoyed immensely ~ not bad for someone who didn’t manage to complete her own schooling. But she never managed to keep hold of any job for too long ~ something always happened to spoil it ... perhaps another trait she picked up from me!
She started dating one chap regularly, CU, and fell pregnant by him. She moved into his place and soon after my first grandson, OU, was born. Right up until the actual delivery, she wanted her Dad in the room with her. Unfortunately their marriage didn’t last long. He was not a bad person ... I think they just weren’t properly suited. She remained a great mother, even if she did go off the rails a bit after the relationship ended.
But before that could take too much of a hold, she met the man who became the love of her life, SF. His well-grounded presence steadied her and soon afterwards they were married. After this along came her second son, GTF, followed by ENGF in 2016, her little girl.
My Mum died in 2015, but before she left us she had finally accepted K as one of the family, enjoying her company and that of her two grandsons, both of whom she loved to see whenever K got the time to take them to see her ... which was as often as she could. That made me happier than any of them could ever understand.
Although we saw much less of each other during her first marriage and while she began her life with SF, we still spoke at least once a day on the phone ... often for hours at a time!
In the Spring of 2018, the five of them moved to a new rented house in a town just outside Kettering, where the schools were much better than those OU had been attending. It was promised as a long-term let, but after only a few months, the owners said they wanted to sell up and said they would be ending their tenancy after the original six months were up. There was nowhere else in the town that was large and cheap enough for them to afford, so they ended up in one that was too big and barely manageable on SF’s income (he is a very hard worker, but in a poorly paid profession). K wasn’t really working at that time, other than being a full-time Mum. They didn’t want to leave the town, as they had just forked out for school uniforms for both of the boys.
That June I had started working for the housing charity, plus the flat I was living in was about to experience a lot of noise as a new property was being built behind it, so I suggested moving in with them. The house had three reception rooms, two of which would be large enough for one to be a living room and the other to be half bedroom and half office. This would save me some money on bills, but would contribute enough to their budget to make the property affordable. So, after talking it through with them, I moved in.
It felt strange at first, but we all got on well with each other and the kids enjoyed having me around. I didn’t always eat with them, due to my IBS, but we worked things out to suit us all. And it wasn’t always perfect, but we sorted out any problems between us and made sure it worked.
She was a fantastic mother to the kids and a great friend to many others ~ some of whom were to become more than just good friends. She wanted her kids to have the upbringing she had missed out on, and was determined to give them that no matter what happened. She was also the life and soul of any party. Rooms used to light up when she came in. She was an excellent cook, who loved to experiment. Everyone loved to come round for one of her Sunday lunches, which contained more ingredients than I’d generally eat in a week!
But, after a while I got to see another side of her that hadn’t emerged before. When she first came to live with me, she said I had saved her from an early death due to her binge drinking, which had been spurred on by the influence of her mother, who used to take her out drinking with her from the age of 14. She had given up the shots and shorts a long while before, but I didn’t realise just how much wine she was going through. I think even SF helped her to cover it up, as she was embarrassed about it, but was unable to cut down.
She said it was her ‘coping mechanism’, though she wouldn’t go into what she was coping with, and became very defensive when I tried to nag her about it. However, I still thought she had it under control, and a few bottles of wine couldn’t do her much harm, so I didn’t press it too much for fear of causing a rift between us. It wasn’t until much later that I finally sussed just how much she was drinking.
When we had first met, she asked if I wanted to know about what had happened to her while she was growing up. My response was to say that it wasn’t important, but I’d listen to anything she wanted to tell me. Unfortunately, she took this to mean that I wasn’t interested, which wasn’t the case ~ I just didn’t want her to feel she had to tell me everything. I wish now that I had pressed her about it …
She eventually opened up about the reasons for her drinking ~ she was trying to counter the mental health issues she had suffered since being abused as a child. Her mother used to take her to be babysat by a ‘friend’ who lived nearby. This friend systematically sexually abused her from an early age, and in spite of her telling both parents when she was old enough to realise what was happening to her was wrong, they still chose to disbelieve her.
Finally her chance came to have this creature arrested for the abuse she had suffered. Police in the area arrested, then bailed him, while they built a case around K’s testimony and that of others. But by the time they had enough to charge him, he suffered a massive heart attack and died ~ before they could take him to court. Instead of making her feel some relief, she felt it had robbed her of the chance to lay her demons to rest ~ she had been cheated out of her closure. Now there wasn’t even someone towards whom she could vent her anger ~ in her mind, he’d got off scott free. She did receive a small amount of compensation, but it was nothing life changing ... either in a material or emotional sense.
She spent a week at a ‘retreat’, hoping to learn how to deal with her demons and keep her emotions in control, but it did little good. It was obvious her health was suffering. SF moved her double bed into their living room, so she could rest during the day. She did manage to take on a cook’s job at a local care home, but they screwed her over by not paying her properly, so that didn’t last long.
Although she had spoken at length with SF about her past, she had not opened up to me about the level of abuse she had suffered ~ mainly because of the previous misunderstanding, and also because she thought I might head straight down to Somerset to top a few people, starting with her mother.
When she did sit down and tell me about it, I was in tears. Apparently this abuse had started at the age of only six, and had continued until she was around 14 years old. I’m not going to state everything she told me in case it upsets any of my family who might read this (particularly her children). All I can say is that it’s very lucky he was dead, because I would have happily ensured he died over a long period of time, in agonising pain.
In December 2021 she spent a short time in hospital having tests done, before they released her to go home. When she came out her attitude was different. She was no longer hiding how much she was drinking. Both SF and myself tried to get her to cut down, but I think she knew it was too late for that. When he wouldn’t fetch any wine for her, she’d order it through a delivery company. There was nothing we could do. That Christmas Day she was too ill to make the special dinner she had planned, and SF and myself had to muddle our way through it. We managed in the end, but it was nothing like she could have done. She joined us for a short while, but was hardly eating by that time.
In January 2022, one evening she was rushed into hospital, and after a few days in intensive care, she passed away. All her internal organs were shot to pieces through the alcohol. I believe that after the December appointment, she knew she had little time left and just didn’t know how to cope. None of us got the chance to say goodbye to her properly. It was like the light of our world had been extinguished.
It was her stated wish that the mother, step-father and siblings should not be allowed to attend her funeral, and we kept to that, despite their half-hearted protestations. The ‘mother’ had never even bothered to come up and see her grandchildren ~ nor did she ever send them birthday or Christmas presents ... not even a card. To K they no longer existed ~ and we keep that going as well. They will never know them.
It was the treatment her mother allowed others to mete on her from the age of six that ultimately killed her. The same mother who used to take her out drinking at 14 years old ~ dolled-up like an adult ~ in order for her to pick up men easier. This vile creature is still alive, which shows there is no justice in this world whatsoever. This same creature that told her daughter I wasn’t her father ... who lied about why I wasn’t there when she was growing up.
I’m still living there, helping SF the best I can with raising the kids ~ helping to continue the work she had started, to give them the chances in life she never had. She chose well with SF ~ he is the most amazing father I have ever come across, and the kids adore him. They, too, are fantastic. They have dealt with the loss of their mother in different ways ~ they all have their own little idiosyncrasies and defined character traits. To them, their mother is still with them ... looking down, keeping an eye on them. Their love for her hasn’t diminished in the slightest, and we’ll never taint that memory.
As I’ve said, this isn’t K’s full story, as there is much I don’t want to commit to type. I want people’s memories of her to remain untainted. All I can say is that the love she was shown by myself, her husband, her children and her friends was still not enough to remove the memories, the pain and the stigma of what she suffered. But none of us will ever forget her and we will never stop loving her.