The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [69]
If I was going to make contact, however, I was also going to have to give him the full story of why we had to leave and all the things that had been going on behind his back when we were living together. I knew from the one or two people that we had managed to talk to in the old area that he had got engaged and that Emma now had a half-brother. I wanted Paul to meet her again and to think about introducing her to his other child, but I didn’t know how to contact him.
Then Steve went for a lads’ night out and bumped into a bloke he used to go to school with who played football with Paul. When he found out they still played, he asked if he would give Paul his number. The bloke assured him he would and we waited for the call. When it didn’t come I was surprised, because I’d been sure Paul would call straightaway. Eventually the call did come and he told us the mutual friend had forgotten to give him the number. We met up and I told him the whole story. He was just as revolted and horrified as Steve had been, but I could almost see the pieces fitting into place in his head as he took my words in.
‘So all those times when I came home early and the chain was on the door … ‘ he said and I nodded, feeling sickened all over again to think of the things I was being forced to do every day of my life until we escaped.
Paul couldn’t have been more understanding or more supportive. He promised to do everything he could to help me in the trial.
Now that I was finding my courage, I made contact with my dad and my baby brother Jimmy as well. Dad was happily remarried and had a successful painting and decorating firm which gave him a comfortable life. We started to visit him, but always had to keep ourselves hidden if anyone else from his family came round in case word got back that we were in the area. My mum’s brother lived just over the road.
Dad was still living in blissful ignorance of the hell that I had been forced to live through after he left me. When I told him some of it I could see that he could hardly bear to listen, so I held back most of the details. It was then that he told me about how he used to get the dinner ladies at school to report back to him about how I was.
Even when I had explained everything to him he didn’t seem to be able to take it all in. ‘I can understand how he could do those things to you as a child,’ he said one day, ‘but how could you let him go on abusing you once you were a grown up with a baby of your own?’
I didn’t feel it was my responsibility to enlighten him any further. Perhaps it would have been kinder to have left him to live out his life in blissful ignorance about the whole thing anyway. He shook his head in disbelief when I told him some of the things Mum had done too.
‘She must have changed so much, Janey,’ he said. ‘I would never have married a woman like the one you’re describing.’
Meeting Jimmy again after so many years was a shock. I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t what I found. Jimmy’s life experience since we had been parted couldn’t have been more different from mine. He had been adopted by some kind people who had enough money to indulge his every whim. He was their only child and seemed to have no problems in his life, but still he wasn’t happy and was having difficulty adapting to adulthood. I found I had little patience with him, and Steve had even less. It was disappointing after I had been carrying his memory around in my heart for so many years. Perhaps I was hoping that we would still be soulmates, as we had been when we were tiny and as we had remained in my mind all the years since. Maybe Jimmy was so damaged by his early years that no amount of love and security could overcome it, or maybe there was a genetic inheritance that he just couldn’t shake off. Yet despite all that has happened over the years and the different paths that we have followed, I still love the man who was once