Walker Caryn - Tell me youre sorry, daddy: two scared little girls. one abusive father. one survived against all odds to tell their story

Dear Jenny

This is going to be hard. I wont pretend anything other than that I am trying to put together the story of our lives and I know there will be times when I wont even be sure that Im doing the right thing. Im surrounded by files and notes and records, but Im also surrounded by ghosts and memories and heartache. I wont get through this without a lot of tears, but I know, no matter how many I shed, they will never bring you back; they will never make up for what was done to you.

But I watched them. I watched them for years, Jenny. I saw what they did to you, how they made you hate yourself, made you think you were worthless. I knew our dad abused you and I knew our mother made you feel as if you were nothing. I was just a little girl, just the little sister and it was happening to me too. I saw it all, Jenny, and I lived it all. For so long I was helpless unable to act, unable to get myself out of it, and at the mercy of people who should have done something to break up our toxic family.

There was nothing I could do, Jenny

until I could do something.

What they all forgot was that little sisters grow up. Scared girls, abused daughters, watchful siblings they grow up. And they never forget. I made a promise to you and its time for me to keep that promise. Ill make them pay. Ill make them pay for what they did to you, Jenny. There will be a price for me too, I know that, but I dont care. After all, it can never be as steep as the one you paid.

So, Ill try to write it my story, your story, our story but who knows where this will take us? I am uncovering things all the time. The folders and bits of paper that make up our lives, the parts that were recorded by other people. They didnt know the half of it. Its time for me to put it all together, and to do justice to your memory.

There will be horrors here, but it all comes from a place of love. My love for you: the big sister who isnt here to help me through this; the big sister I will always remember. There are so many like us, an army of the broken and the abused; we exist in numbers that would shock the world if anyone paid attention to the lives of horror so many children experience; but we have a strength inside, a core of steel that makes us survive and makes us soar above it all once we finally realise it was never our fault. None of this was your fault, Jenny; none of this was my fault. We asked for none of it, and we each had to get through it in the best way we could. Our endings may have been different, but we are bound for ever, and I want the world to know your name. To acknowledge that you mattered.

Some people say that our stories are written in the stars, others that we make our own fortune. Im not sure what to believe, because part of me feels that we were doomed from the moment we were born, but part of me thinks that you can always fight, you can always try to make the life you deserve, even when the universe has seemingly done all it possibly can to stop that from happening. Which one was it for us, Jenny? Thats what Im trying to work out. The only thing that is certain is my love for you and my belief that we all deserve a chance to break free from the lottery of our birth. I love you, Jenny and Ill need your love to get me through this. Ill be back to share our story with you. Ill be back to take your hand as we go through this together.

Are you ready? This is where our once upon a time begins

Your little sister, Caryn xx

1970

M um had a life before she met Dad. Everyone does, of course, but sometimes it doesnt matter. Some people plod along through life, some people manage to stay within the lines; my mother wasnt some people. It hadnt been a spectacular life she didnt have an amazing career or a talent that stopped people in their tracks but there was a history there, a back story, which would impact on everything that happened to me and my sister.

Mum was born into a very normal family. Her father, Bert, had been in the Navy, and her mother, Ivy, had her own seamstress shop. They were good, solid people. They had a neat, tidy house that was always clean as a new pin. They were upstanding neighbours, working-class, decent, respectable and reliable. They believed you should never get into debt, and that hard work was its own reward. They were the type of people who have been the backbone of this country for years. But times were changing, and those changes would be beyond anything they could ever have imagined.

Ivy and Bert had two little boys called Philip and Peter, and a girl called Jeanette. They were happy, settled, straightforward and they also had Mum. Born a few years after World War Two had ended, their first child, she should have been the apple of their eye. Instead, as Nanny Ivy would later tell me, Our Lesley was born bad.

The older I got, the more I heard these things. Lesley was a naughty child from the get-go, Nanny would say with a sigh. She came home from school on her first day with a big grin on her face. I hoped theyd been able to tame her and she would be happy with the structure of being at school, but no she was delighted with herself that shed been in trouble from the moment she got there and made the teachers life a misery. Nanny had a saying she often used about Mum She was on the clock from day one. It did seem that Mum just enjoyed being naughty, and while as a child she might have been no more than infuriating to others, she took it into her teenage years and beyond, where it went well into the realms of danger and upset.

Nanny always said that Mum seemed happy when she reported that the teachers were at the end of their tether or that shed got into trouble yet again. She loved attention and didnt care how she got it.

It wasnt only outside home that she caused friction. Auntie Jeanette was epileptic and, as such, probably did command a bit of extra attention from Nanny Ivy rightly so but Mum acted out against this and, when they were children, was caught pushing her vulnerable little sister downstairs on more than one occasion. When challenged, she would either just deny things even when it was perfectly obvious that she was the guilty party or smile. Both responses infuriated Nanny Ivy and, even years later, she would always mention Mums nasty streak.

That girl has a side to her that no one realises, she would say. Shed start a fight in an empty room, and she cares for no one but herself.

Im getting ahead of myself here but family histories are funny things. They start before you come into the picture, before anyone has even thought of you, but it all matters; it all affects how youll be and how your story will turn out. There are foundations laid, there are tendencies that are nurtured or denied, there are slights that people carry with them forever, and there are tales that get passed down from generation to generation. I read something once that said we all have a particular role to play in any given relationship; and its not as simple as just being wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend. Its more about how people expect us to act within those roles, and the behaviour we bring to each relationship. I think many of us feel that keenly, and we often fall into a trap of being less than true to ourselves in some relationships or friendships, as the other party expects us to be the friend who never complains, or the partner who always reacts, or the person who is a martyr. When we finally recognise that, we can move out of unhealthy behaviours and start to be our authentic self; but my sense of Mum, from the many stories Ive been told, as well as witnessing her behaviour at first hand for years, is that she was never one to bow down to other peoples expectations and she always did what she wanted; and she broke her parents hearts in the process.