AT THIS STAGE I WAS UNAWARE THAT COLIN WAS SEPARATED FROM HIS SECOND WIFE AND THAT HE HAD TWO CHILDREN BY HIS FIRST WIFE, TWO BOYS.
A couple of days went by before he called me. When I heard his voice, my heart almost missed a beat. ‘Hiya, it’s Colin here,’ he said. ‘Hope you’re OK. Hey, was this a wind-up the other night, you giving me your phone number?’
Without having planned it, I said, ‘To be honest, I was wondering if I could take you out for a drink sometime.’
‘Yes,’ he said, then, ‘Are you sure this isn’t a wind-up?’
‘No,’ I reassured him. ‘Look, if you want to take me for a drink sometime, then let me know.’
I still didn’t think he believed I was being serious.
Anyway, we ended up having a few drinks and I was really beginning to like him. As we got to know each other better, over drinks and meals, Colin introduced me to his friends and all the local pubs. Then, before long, people I knew myself were seeing us together.
As I began to trust Colin more, what had happened to me in my life just came out. He didn’t bat an eyelid, but he did say that he’d suspected all was not well when he saw me moping about the house when he was working for my mum. To be honest, I think it would have been obvious to a lot of people that my life had caved in.
‘Why don’t you move out?’ Colin suggested.
I still hadn’t revealed my age. I couldn’t very well say I was still a schoolgirl, so I told him that, as I hadn’t got the deposit for a house and I couldn’t afford to rent a place, I was just going to have to stay at my mum’s house until I could save up some money for a deposit.
It was the summer of 2001 and I was permanently excluded from school on 28 June, having turned 15 that April. Colin was 34. At that stage, we had more of a friendship than anything else. One night, when we’d been seeing each other for a couple of months, we were in the pub and I told him about my mum, about how I didn’t get on with her and the love/hate relationship we had.
That same evening, I plucked up the courage and told Colin about that bastard Huntley. Taken aback at my determination to get justice, he said, ‘You wouldn’t think you had been through that, to look at you.’
It was ten to six as we strolled towards the car, and I thought, I’ll be in for about seven. Not that I had to be in for then. We lingered around talking and wondering whether to go somewhere else for another drink. Then my phone started ringing.
I answered it and Mum’s unmistakable voice said, ‘It’s only me.’
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, and then, ‘Whereabouts are you?’
‘I’m in Cleethorpes,’ I told her.
At this she went mad and shouted, ‘Get your fucking arse home, now!’
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked defensively.
‘Just get home now,’ she barked.
As Colin was there, I summoned up my best behaviour and asked her, ‘Look, what is all this about? Just tell me.’
Colin heard both sides of the conversation because I was standing right next to him, so I said to him, ‘I’m not bullshitting, this is what she is like.’
Then Mum started going on about my biological father, David Baxter. Hayden had mentioned to me that he had seen our real dad and, curious, I’d asked what he was like.
‘Why don’t you come along and meet him?’ he said. I accepted his invitation.
At that time, Hayden wanted to go and live with his father, which is why Mum was on the phone to me now: she was under the impression that I was with David Baxter and that I wanted to live with him too.
She went on, ‘Get back home. I’m going to pack your bags and they’ll be in two bin bags out the front, in two minutes. So you better get home now.’
‘It’s going to take me ten minutes to get home,’ I said.
‘If you are not home in two minutes, your bags are going to be packed,’ she threatened.
Feeling abandoned, I tried to call her bluff by saying, ‘In that case, pack my bags then, but I’ve done nothing wrong. You’re shouting on about David Baxter.’
‘You want to live with David Baxter,’ she yelled.
‘No I don’t,’ I said guardedly.
‘Yes you do,’ she replied.
‘Well, even if I did, I don’t even know him,’ I countered.
‘If you ever come back to this house, I will fucking do this and I will fucking do that,’ she threatened me.
Colin was standing there listening and the bewilderment on his face told me what he was thinking. Apologetically, I said, ‘I told you what she was like from the start. I don’t want to go back there.’
As luck would have it, he was moving to Hull in the next three days because his family were there. ‘Feel free to come with me if you like,’ he offered. ‘Go and get your stuff from the house and give your mum your keys.’
I tried to stifle the alarm that must have been written on my face at the prospect of going home and saying, ‘I’m moving out today, even though I’m only 15.’
I couldn’t go back home and give my mum the keys because I didn’t have any of my own. And if I were to pack my clothes she would demand to know where I was going.
‘I’m not going back there,’ I told Colin. ‘I don’t care. She can throw out all my possessions.’
That night we stayed in a hotel and the next day we drove over to Hull, where I met Colin’s family. We ended up renting a house in Clyde Street. It was like the Bronx, but we couldn’t afford anywhere better.
Colin started working in a fish factory and I started working in a gift shop, pricing gifts. I was being paid £30 a day, cash in hand. Colin was on a weekly wage.
After a couple of weeks, we were starting to get into a routine, but during that time my mum had made no efforts to contact me.
Colin would pick me up from the shop after work, and one day when he turned up, quite out of character, he asked me coldly, ‘Is everything all right?’
I gave his steady eyes a searching gaze. I was looking for a telltale sign of what was wrong as I said, ‘Yes.’
‘What’s the matter?’ he probed. ‘You seem to be a bit quiet and a bit distant. Was it that meal we had last night? Was it no good?’
Lost in my thoughts about what he could be getting at, I replied touchily, ‘No, no, no, it was fine.’
When Colin’s brother came round to our house later that evening, he asked me, ‘How are you, all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I knew in that split second that something was going to come out about my age. Then Colin asked me, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’
‘No,’ I said, on my guard now.
‘Are you sure?’ he pressed.
‘Yes,’ I insisted.
Colin looked at me and asked again, ‘Are you sure you have got nothing that you want to say?’
I brazened it out once more, saying, ‘No, nothing whatsoever.’
Pain was etched across his face as he opened a newspaper and then put it down in front of me. The headline read: ‘Bring my daughter home, she is only 15’. Beneath it was a big picture of me when I was 12.
My mum wasn’t telling me to come home: she was asking for her daughter to be brought back home… to a home she had told me not to come back to.
She had checked her phone bill and seen that I had been calling Colin from the house. And it was equally clear to her that Colin had parted from his wife before he had met me. Somehow his wife knew that he was seeing somebody called Hailey. This much my mum had found out.
So this plea for me to be returned home that was plastered across the newspapers had already been put to the police. It turned out that they had advised my mum, ‘Don’t go to the press,’ but she had gone ahead and done just that.
I started crying and blubbered to Colin, ‘Look, I’m so sorry; I know I’ve landed you in a load of crap. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like this.’
‘Why did you lie to me?’ Colin croaked, a confused look on his face.
He couldn’t understand why I said that I was 19 when I was 15, but all I could say was: ‘All this crap that was going on at home was bad and then I got feelings for you.’
I’d known he felt the same but if I’d said, ‘Oh, by the way I’m only 15,’ he would have gone, ‘Ta, ta.’ Never in a month of Sundays would he have said, ‘Oh, OK.’
‘That’s why I never mentioned it,’ I told him.
My going missing as a minor caused a nationwide alert that I had been abducted. And, because it was big news, Colin’s solicitor called to find out if I was the missing Hailey and Colin confirmed that I was.
‘Listen, come in and see me,’ the solicitor said. We went to his office and he said, ‘What we need to do is this: I will come with you to the police station and you hand yourselves in and explain what has gone on and we will get things sorted out.’
I felt really bad and I was thinking, Why did I lie about my age? I knew that, if Colin had known I was only 15, he would have gone, ‘Right, nice meeting you, see you later,’ but of course he had no idea.
The solicitor told us that there was nothing that could be done that night. Instead, he advised us to go back home and said that we should come back to his office first thing in the morning and he would drive us to the police station in Grimsby.
He had already made the appointment and Colin’s sister-in-law had already called the police to confirm, ‘Colin is here with me and Hailey is with him. We are coming in tomorrow morning.’
When we arrived, there were about 50 uniformed officers standing outside the police station. Someone must have been selling tickets!
We ran the gauntlet of hate and managed to squeeze into the building. I walked in first and Colin followed. One of the policemen greeted us sarcastically, ‘Now then, Colin, your time’s up. We knew we would catch you one day.’
If only they had deployed half this mob against Huntley, things might have ended differently.
Anyway, Colin stood up for himself and said, ‘Nobody has caught me, mate. I’m handing myself in. I can explain what this is all about.’
Well, the good old social services that had blundered and let me down in the past had spotted the newspaper articles about me and come running. Where were they when I was all but dumped by everyone? So they were in on this one for the easy ride, reuniting a lost soul with her family.
I don’t particularly care how social services became involved. Who wants a load of lesbian Marxists chasing after them? I think they were called in by a police officer before our meeting. Anyway, they called my mum at home and after all her chasing about after me and all her crocodile tears she said cheekily to them, ‘Don’t bother sending her back here, because she has caused too much trouble.’
I was incensed and thinking, Yesterday you were pleading in the papers, ‘Bring my daughter home, I love my special daughter so much,’ and now that I am actually back in Grimsby, now I am here, you don’t want me back home.
Anyway, I ended up staying with the landlady of the Coach House, Mandy Addison, first at her mum’s house, which she was looking after while her mum was on holiday, and then at the pub. The night we returned to the pub we’d just had a pizza and a bottle of WKD, a Vodka-based drink, when it was bang, bang, bang at the door. Mandy’s boyfriend got up to answer it and I was shaking because I was already a bag of nerves.
It was a policeman, and he tested my patience to the limit when he said, ‘Excuse me, Hailey. Come over here. Sorry, you have to come with me, but you shouldn’t even be here. You’ve run away from home for the second time.’
My ears couldn’t believe what that callous woman, my mum, had done. She had lodged another complaint that I was a runaway and she wanted me back at home. Her Jekyll and Hyde character was beginning to piss me off, and the revs were off the clock, as Colin would say.
‘No, I haven’t run away!’ I protested. ‘I’ve been staying here for a week. I’m staying here now.’
But the policeman insisted, ‘No, you’re not. Your mum wants you home.’
Was I going loopy? I said, ‘Hang on a minute; she didn’t want me a week ago. I am not a rag doll that she can pick up when she wants me and put me down when she doesn’t.’
My pleas were falling on the deaf ears of the law, as the officer just said, ‘Yes, yes. Now get in that car, you’re coming home with me.’
Mandy stuck up for me by saying, ‘Now hang on, I have already spoken to Hailey’s mum and she was champion for her to stay.’
To this, the policeman responded bombastically, ‘No, she is not. She has said that Hailey has run away from home again.’
This was ludicrous, and all I can think is that my mum was jealous that someone else was having the pleasure of my company. She didn’t want David Baxter getting me, yet she threatened to chuck me out and said I should go and live with him.
Anyway, this policeman had a really shirty attitude and in the end he got me in his car. My mum had told the police to pick me up from the pub but she had also said they should take me to her brother’s house, so I had to direct him to my Uncle Kev’s place. Amazingly, she had the police doing her bidding as if they were her private army. I mean, if she had this much power now, what had gone wrong over the Huntley allegation? How come she hadn’t been able to get them moving then? I’ll tell you why: because she wanted her 15 minutes of fame, that’s why.
We arrived at Uncle Kev’s house around one in the morning, and I think he was aware I was coming. So there I was on his doorstep with my little rucksack.
At about nine o’clock the next morning, he said to me, ‘Leave your rucksack on, get this helmet on and your coat, and jump on the back of my bike.’
‘Why, where are we going?’ I wanted to know.
‘Just jump on,’ he said in a reassuring tone.
Then I realised what this was all about. He knew Colin’s sister-in-law, Michaela, was happy for me to stay with her because we had been talking about her earlier that morning.
‘Well, if that is where you want to be, then that is where you want to be,’ he said to me. Michaela hadn’t contacted Uncle Kev about the idea, nor had social services. He was acting on his own initiative.
‘What’s her address, by the way?’ he asked.
I gave it to him and he said, ‘Have you been on the back of a bike before?’
‘No,’ I replied hesitantly.
‘Well, don’t tell anybody we’ve done this,’ he chuckled, adding, ‘I would rather take you myself and know that you are safe rather than thinking that you will hitchhike or get the bus.’
Uncle Kev was a special constable, like my stepfather, and I was thinking, Not only are you a copper, but also you’re my uncle. You’re supposed to be saying, ‘No, you will stay here.’
When we got to Michaela’s house he came in with me to confirm that she was happy for me to stay there. She told him yes and that I would have her daughter’s bedroom as she was moving out.
Later that day, Michaela rang social services and informed them, ‘I’ve got Hailey here with me. She’s happy for me to look after her and her uncle’s happy for me to look after her.’
Social services said, ‘She has got rights at 15, believe it or not, so she can stay where she wants to be, basically.’
I settled in, had my tea that night and then there was an ominous but familiar knock, knock, knock… There was a copper at the door again!
Pretty pissed off with it all, I yelled, ‘Yes!’
‘We’re just coming to check that the property is all right and that you’re safe here,’ he said.
With that, he got on his radio and said, ‘Yes, I’ve got her here now. She is coming with me.’
‘Have you not got anything better to do? I stormed. ‘You can see that I am safe, I am being looked after. I am happier than I have ever been. Tell me, what problems am I causing? On Monday I am going to enrol at the college, and then when I am 16 I will carry on my relationship with Colin, if that is what he wants.’
This copper wouldn’t listen. ‘No, come with me, come with me,’ he insisted.
Wearily I said, ‘Right. OK then.’
As we walked out of the house, Michaela made a bit of fuss, saying, ‘I’ve rung social services.’
It turned out that I was being taken back to the Coach House. It was all part of a plan that became clear the next day, a Sunday, when, bizarrely, David Baxter, my biological father, phoned the pub to make arrangements to pick me up, along with all my stuff.
I just can’t, for the life of me, think how the police could apply so much effort and resources into rag-dolling me about from pillar to post. Anyway, the person my mum had been so fearful I’d end up living with was the very one I was going to be staying with now. And it was all because, for some reason, she had now involved him. To me, David Baxter was a complete stranger. I think I had only seen him once, when I was about 11. And that was for about ten minutes.
I felt in a worse position going with him than living in a halfway house. When he arrived at the pub he pompously announced, ‘Young lady, get in this car. I am your father.’
I said, ‘Listen, mate, let’s get on the right foot here. Anybody can be a sperm donor, and anybody can put sperm into a cup and get somebody pregnant.’
Taken aback, he said warily, ‘Right.’
I continued, ‘And in my life, that’s what you are. You weren’t there for me to change my nappies, to take me out to the park, to take me fishing, swimming, anything like that. You were just not there and you never made any attempt.’
‘Yes, I did. Yes, I did,’ he defended himself pathetically.
I angrily retorted, ‘No, you didn’t, because you knew where I lived and you could have just banged on the door – “Right, Hailey. Hi, I’m your father” – instead of coming to collect me now, but you never did. You just totally blanked me.’
Visibly shaking, he responded feebly, ‘I’ve got six other kids and to all these different women.’
I kept calling him ‘Dave’ or ‘David’. He was miffed by this and said, ‘I’m your father, young lady. I am not David, I am your dad.’
‘No! That is where you are wrong,’ I told him. ‘Yes, by law I am your daughter. But you are not my dad. I’ve got “Edwards” as my name. I was not happy there and I certainly am not going to be happy here.’
We arrived at his house and he said to me, ‘This is my wife Anita, this is my son Daniel, and Anita’s just had a baby called Emma.’
I just didn’t want to know him. No, you have done nothing for me, I thought. I don’t need you in my life, you are a stranger. At one point I was curious to see the plant that produced the seed I had grown from, to see what he looked like, but that was it.
The next morning he held his hand out and said, ‘There’s your pound.’
I should have remembered what my mum told me about strangers and, most of all, taking money from strangers. ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.
Frostily, he barked instructions at me like a pantomime baddie. ‘You walk down the road, you jump on the bus and then, when you finish college, you get off the bus and you come home.’
I was astounded by his flagrant lack of compassion as I asked, ‘Where’s the bus stop? How do I get there? Is it just one bus I need to get on? I mean, it’s Burton upon Trent, it’s like a big place. I don’t know anybody.’
I set off and I was just about to get on this bus with ‘College’ displayed on the front. Which college, though? The fare was 80 pence and, as the driver didn’t believe I was of school age, he classed me as an adult. ‘No, I’m not, I’m off to the college,’ I protested.
The power-crazed driver said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t believe you. I’m going to charge you the full amount.’
I had 20 pence to my name. What was I going to get with 20 pence? I couldn’t even afford the return fare.
During the day, he rang me. ‘Now then, young lady, how are you?’
I gave him the same coldness back that he had earlier shown me. ‘Oh, I’m great. Thanks for your generosity.’
He responded with mock-innocence, ‘What do you mean?’
I stated the obvious. ‘It cost me 80 pence on the bus to get here.’
‘Right, don’t worry about it. I’ll pick you up after college, right?’
So I rang Colin with the 20-pence piece that I had and found out that he was working back at the fish factory in Hull. We were just chatting and then it all came out. I told him I was unhappy and he said, ‘Just stick it out. Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine. How’s he treating you?’
‘Like shit.’
‘Oh.’
‘I think a dog would get better treatment than me,’ I said, and did an impression of David Baxter: ‘Oi, get up here, young lady’ and ‘Do this.’ ‘I’m more like a skivvy to him, you know. I know what the future will hold for me here – I’ll be looking after his kids whenever he wants to go out. I’ll be like a prized possession on a Friday night with his workmates going, “This is my daughter,” and “There you are, Hailey, have a Coke.” Yeah, great.’
I remember when I first landed at David Baxter’s house, for the first three or four days he gave me forty cigarettes a day. And then, on top of that, every time he would have a cigarette he would say to me, ‘Here you are, do you want one?’
He smoked what seemed like three cigarettes every ten minutes and I was thinking, Go for it, fine by me. At the end of each day I had smoked the forty fags plus maybe ten more that he had dished out. Fine. But this went on for those three or four days only. After that I wasn’t given any at all and I had to ask, ‘Please, do you mind if I pinch a cigarette off you?’
‘No,’ came his terse reply.
Not amused, I asked, ‘Why not?’
Self-importantly he said, ‘Because, my way of teaching, you will learn a lesson.’
‘What lesson is that then?’ I said mockingly.
Seeing how he behaved, I could see where Mum had got her Jekyll and Hyde character: she was a mirror image of David Baxter. In an effort to piss me off and make me sick of smoking, he was trying aversion therapy on me. He tried, unsuccessfully, to psychologically break me. When I questioned him about why he wouldn’t give me any cigarettes after his own version of Pavlov’s dogs, the words he used were: ‘I was hoping it would make you sick and you wouldn’t want to smoke any more.’
After feeding me more than forty cigarettes a day for three or four days, he expected me to no longer need them. Backwards thinking, I say. But I bragged cheekily, ‘It would take more than forty fags to make me sick. Bloody hell, you know that was a bit of a childish thing to do, wasn’t it?’ And I warned him, ‘Listen, mate, Mum has tried it. She has been there, she has worn the T-shirt and I show her enough respect that I will not smoke in front of her.’
On my first Saturday there, I told him, ‘I am off out.’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked in his obnoxious way.
I said, ‘I’m off to Leeds with some friends from college who’ve got a car to do a bit of shopping.’
It was a cock and bull story. I had saved up a few 20-pence pieces from the change left over from the bus money, and I went to the pub and called Colin at the house we used to live in together. I told him I was going to Leeds for the day. But then I set off for his place, to give him a big surprise. Luckily, some friends of mine from college were going that way and gave me lift.
When I turned up on his doorstep he threw his arms up in despair. I was still 15 and his bail conditions meant he had to stay away from me. ‘Oh, Hailey, we can’t,’ he implored me. ‘You know, we’re going to get into a load of trouble. Look, just try and stick it out until you are 16 and then you can do whatever you want.’
I was desperate too, about living with my father. ‘I can’t,’ I said. With that, my phone rang (worst luck for me at this moment, although my phone was out of credit, it could accept incoming calls) and it was Baxter screaming obscenities down the line at me. ‘Get home now!’ he yelled.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked as smugly as I could.
‘You’re going wrong. I am not happy with you, young lady,’ he said.
I took great delight in saying, ‘Well, tell me what it is and we will resolve the problem.’
‘Get home now!’ he blasted back.
‘I can’t, I’m on my way to Leeds,’ I lied.
‘You can’t be on your way to Leeds. Get home now,’ he said, flying off the handle again. He knew that I had kept in touch with Colin and guessed correctly that I had gone to see him.
‘No,’ I shouted.
The snake had got himself all in a lather. ‘I have looked through your diary and I know the house number in the street that you used to live in. I also know that you’ve been phoning Colin.’
I was furious that he had looked at my diary and I spat, ‘There’s nothing like respect around here, is there?’
Childishly, he said, ‘I am not telling you what you have done wrong, but get home now.’
‘No, just leave me to it and I will be home later on,’ I said defiantly.
I was planning on going back about five o’clock that afternoon, after being with Colin.
For all his airs and graces of calling me ‘young lady’, Baxter went on swearing down the phone at me and telling me to get back at once. I switched the phone off. ‘I’m not having anyone talking to me like that,’ I said to Colin. ‘I may be only 15, but that is shit the way he is talking to me.’
Colin tried to calm me down. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ he said.
But I was still raging. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. I’ve done something wrong and, if I have done it, fine, I will admit it and go, “Fine, sorry.” There is nothing more I can do but say sorry.’
He soothed, ‘Turn your phone back on and answer it and find out what the frigging hell is going on.’
As I switched my phone back on, it started ringing and, when I answered, Baxter said, ‘Right, young lady, come home tonight. We will sit down, I’ll buy you some White Lightning cider and a pizza and we’ll talk about it.’
‘Talk about what?’ I asked. ‘Tell me now, because there’s nothing that is more annoying than trying to wind me up by saying that I have done something wrong and then trying to entice me to come back. Just tell me what I have done wrong.’
His true colours came out when he reached the end of his tether. ‘You get home now or you’ll end up back at your mother’s, if I have my way.’
Colin’s face was a picture of sadness as he said, ‘You can’t stay here because I am going to get into shit. I really want to help you but I can’t.’
I thought, You’re the one that I want to be with and people can see that, but they are not letting me. My feelings for Colin had been growing stronger and he cared a lot about me.
I wasn’t going to go back to Baxter’s. Instead, I went to Michaela’s house and stayed there for a while. Colin had little to do with this, and Michaela rang social services and said, ‘I’m just calling to let you know that Hailey is with me.’
I knew Colin and his family, and they respected me. This was the family that I wanted to be with. I knew that I would be looked after properly there. But nobody would let me do that.
By this time, Christmas wasn’t far off and my mum rang and told me disdainfully, ‘Hailey, I’m not having you staying away from me near Christmas. I’m not having any of my kids going without Christmas presents. If you and Colin want to come round, I don’t care if Colin comes. Come round for Christmas dinner, that’s fine, and then go back and do whatever you want to do. I’m not having any of my kids going without any Christmas presents.’
Well, to me Christmas comes but once a year. What about the other 364 days of the year?
‘I don’t want any presents,’ I told her. ‘No, no, no. I’m not falling into that one.’
I didn’t feel like giving presents, or going there and having them say, ‘There’s your Christmas present.’
Then Michaela told me, ‘I don’t want anything coming back on us. I’m going to talk to social services again.’
‘OK,’ I said.
After the social workers had been round to talk to Michaela, they said they would be back in a week’s time. True to their word, they returned, and they said, ‘Right, you’re going back to your mum’s.’
I didn’t kick or scream. I said to them, ‘Look, I bet my bottom dollar, put a million quid on it that we get there and she will say, “No, you have caused too much pain and heartache to my family.”’ I knew this because she had already spoken to David Baxter while I was staying at his place and she had told him, ‘I want our Hailey back because I want to get her a little flat or a little house, but I am not having her back here because she has caused too much upset in the family.’
I told the social workers, ‘Well, if my mum was saying that to him and then telling the press, “Oh, I want my daughter back,” then telling you that she doesn’t want me back, she should make up her bloody mind.’
This is what she had told them. She was crying wolf and up to her old tricks. What was behind her behaviour, I think, was that she was trying to make my life damn uncomfortable.
I still kept in contact with her regularly, and told her, ‘I’m safe, don’t worry about me, I’m safe.’
Each time she would say, ‘Right, fine.’ She was talking to me with a little respect by now. But Ben, Adam and Hayden were still calling me ‘bitch’ and ‘you little tart’ and saying, ‘You’re a whore for running off with a 34-year-old man.’
And there were threats to Colin, like, ‘I’m going to kick his face in when I see him.’
‘Hang on a minute, he isn’t the one that has done wrong here,’ I would say.
I will admit, I shouldn’t have lied to Colin about my age, but, if I hadn’t gone through all the crap that I’d been through with my mum and dad, I would have had no reason to leave them. When I was living with them I had the latest TV and the latest computer and PlayStation, in my bedroom, a massive bedroom all to myself, with a double bed and anything that I wanted for the room. Materially, I wanted for nothing.
But, when it came to hugs and kisses or being taken for a day out, I was emotionally starved. ‘Sorry, too busy,’ they would say. I explained this to Mum and she said, ‘You were always the belle of the house and you could have it.’
I said, ‘No. That’s not the case. I went without so that your little blue-eyed boys could have everything that they wanted.’
I remember something happening when I was 15 that shows how little love and respect I was shown. I think I had about £2 and I wanted to go to the shop and buy a magazine.
‘No, you’re not going,’ Dad barked at me.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I said so.’
Not letting the matter rest, I argued, ‘The shop is only across the road, you can stand there and watch me, because I’m not going anywhere. I’ll come back.’
‘No, you are not. No, you are not, right?’ he said. Here was another weak man wanting to dominate me.
We were doing up the house and a guy called Andy was hanging some doors for my mum. One of them was leaning against the wall and I was standing with my back to it, and my friend Harriet was standing at the other side of the room.
‘For God’s sake, Dad,’ I raged. ‘I’m off across the road to the shop. I’m not being rude, but I’m off to the shop. Don’t you tell me what you are going to do.’
Whether he believed I was going to the shop or not, I didn’t have a clue. We got into this big argument about me going to the shop. I was saying yes and he was saying no. He started screaming and shouting and giving me a lecture. That’s when he lost a grip on his sanity and whacked me across my face. This man has hands like shovels and it was full pelt. Harriet and Andy were really shocked at what they witnessed.
I started crying and then I went quiet. I went up to my bedroom and put on a CD that he didn’t like: Eminem’s album with all the swearing.
My adrenalin was surging. I was angry. I don’t believe in a woman hitting a man or a man hitting a woman. You want to treat me like a bitch and you think that I am such a naughty little cow, I’ll show you what one is, I thought. I had my windows open with the stereo on full blast, thinking, I don’t care.
I stood there brushing my hair, getting ready to go out. My dad came into my bedroom. He had calmed down and he was thinking, Andy has just seen me smack my daughter in the face.
But then he shouted, ‘Turn that shit off.’
I stood my ground and replied, ‘No. You think I’m a naughty little sod and you can smack me in the face… then go for it. But I’m going to be a horrible little cow now. Then at least you’ve got a reason to smack me in the face.’
He was going on and on and on and I just lost it. ‘Get out of my room,’ I shouted, and chucked the hairbrush at him. When I was scared I used to shout and scream. I soon learned after the Huntley assault to use my vocal cords. I was scared now, and there was no other way that I could express my feelings apart from shouting, because my dad was a big man with a loud voice and built like you know what.
Harriet came upstairs and I said, ‘Now can you see why I hate being here, because it’s like this near enough every other day.’
‘Do you want my honest opinion?’ she said, because she was sensible.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I would leave. I wouldn’t put up with that,’ she told me.
By this time Dad had left the room and gone downstairs. When I went down he had gone out. Andy was hanging the doors and he asked, ‘Crikey, are you all right?’
I told him, ‘Nobody messes with me, you see. What goes around comes around.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘One day he’ll be old,’ I said. ‘I mean, when he’s a little frail 70-year-old man. He’ll be going to the betting shop and some young thug as big as he was will land one on him. Then I’ll have the upper hand. I don’t need to go around hitting people to get my way.’
Andy asked me, ‘Do you want a fag?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said gratefully.
So we had a fag and that was that. Nothing more was mentioned about it. When Mum found out, unlike when my dad had first hit me years earlier, she gave her usual couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s reply: ‘Well, you shouldn’t be messing about, you shouldn’t be winding people up then, Hailey.’
I had become used to her and how she displaced the blame from the two of them to me. The truth was that I felt displaced by the needs of my brothers. I felt like the black sheep. Of course, the boys were like, ‘I will protect you, Mum. Nobody will touch you, Mum, and if David Baxter comes round I will cave his head in.’ Big mouths but nothing in their trousers to compensate when it came to action. They could talk the talk but not walk the walk.
Anyway, going back to the social services, when they came round the second time they said, ‘We’re going back to your mum’s.’
I warned, ‘Fine, have it your way, but she won’t have me back.’
She may have made it crystal clear to social services that she wanted me back, and whinged on at the press and to the whole world, ‘I want my daughter back.’ But I knew differently.
These social workers, a man and a woman, seemed pretty clueless to me. They were like, ‘Well, we understand it, Hailey, because, you know, you keep running away from home.’
‘Excuse me, I didn’t run away from home,’ I corrected them.
No wonder they cock things up and end up in the newspapers because of their incompetence. It was like the blind leading the blind. Social services were really no use to me and didn’t pay any attention to my personal welfare. They just wanted my case off their books. I was just a 15-year-old girl out there, all alone.
Anyway, I ended up being taken to this house and I was left outside in the car and the idiot social workers said to me, ‘We’re going to lock the doors.’
I protested, ‘No, you’re not locking me in this car. You trust me that I am not going to do a runner. Here I am in a strange place, it’s one o’clock in the morning and I don’t know where I am. I’m not going to be running off anywhere, mate, because I don’t know where I’m going.’
The male social worker moaned, ‘Oh, Hailey, don’t be so silly.’
‘No, I think you are being pathetic locking me in this car,’ I told him. ‘If you want me to come with you, then I will come with you, but don’t go locking me in any frigging car.’
Defeated, he replied, ‘Right, OK, have it your way.’
I sat there and when they came back they confirmed what I’d predicted. ‘We’ve made a call to your mum,’ they said. ‘She has said that she doesn’t want you back. She doesn’t want you because you have hurt the family and she has got to put her kids first.’
She had told them, ‘No! I am not having her back. She does what she wants. I have washed my hands of her now.’
‘Right, fine. She can have it her way,’ I said.
After this, they took me to an orphanage in Queen’s Parade, in Cleethorpes. They rolled up there and said inappropriately, ‘Here’s Hailey’s report. She is a runaway.’
Social services in this country have a lot to answer for. I resented this tag and spat, ‘I am not a runaway. My mum kicked me out of that house and said to me, “Don’t bother coming back to this house, right?”’
So here I was, classified as a runaway. In reality, I was a tearaway. I have been let down on more than one account by more than one agency. I’ve been let down across the board.
I wish, looking back at how things have turned out between Colin and me, that my mum, who made such a fuss about our being together, had made half the fuss about what Huntley did to me. Yet nothing was done about that. The man that did hurt me and the man that did cause me so much damage and pain wasn’t punished. But the man that was bringing me happiness and that I felt safe and secure with – Colin – has had all the flack.
So there I was, unwanted by my parents, dumped in this care home in the middle of the night. I had gone from being ‘the belle of the house’, as my mum claimed, to being a sexually abused outcast… damaged goods. Thanks, Mum.