Helpless: The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and exploited by the neighbour she trusted
Neglected by her careless parents, Marianne turned to her neighbour, the one person that she thought she could trust….Eight year old Marianne, the eldest of five children, was neglected by her slovenly mother and her violent alcoholic father. Uncared for and unkempt she was rejected at school by her peers and scarcely tolerated by her teachers. Only one person gave her the affection she craved; a neighbour who seeing the vulnerable child knew she was easy prey for his perverted desires.‘Little Lady’ he called her over the few months he groomed her. Less than twelve months later she was caught in a trap of fear - if she talked she would be punished. With no one to turn to she kept ‘their secret’. At thirteen she fell pregnant.Still too frightened to speak out she refused to tell the social workers who the father was. Without family support the teenager gave birth to a daughter in the unmarried mother's home.Six weeks later the baby she had already grown to love was taken away for adoption. Marianne returned home, but the neighbour's abuse continued and a year later she was pregnant again.This time her father literally tried to beat the baby out of her but she failed to miscarry. Scared for her life and that of her baby's she ran away from home carrying only a plastic bag stuffed with her few possessions.Marianne who still missed her first child desperately struggled to keep her second daughter. Two months after the birth she realized that for the baby's sake she would have to hand her over for adoption.Helpless is Marianne’s heartbreaking story as told the bestselling author of Don’t Tell Mummy.
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Marianne Marsh
with Toni Maguire
Helpless
The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and
exploited by the neighbour she trusted
The man had been looking for a little girl like me even before I was born.
A special little girl, he told me; one who needed love.
He widened his social circle to include young married couples, watched as they became parents and smiled with an inward sly delight when asked to be a godfather.
‘He’s so good with the young ones,’ his friends said.
He married when I was still the baby he had never met and considered his own small daughter for his needs. But his wife had grown to know his soul. She kept her children safe.
Unobserved, he watched me walking down country lanes as I went backwards and forwards to school. Saw my marks of neglect and knew then that I was the one; the one he had been waiting for.
He started frequenting the pub my father drank in and made himself known to him.
Listened to his tale of woe – low wages and small mouths to feed – and recommended him for a job that came with a decent-sized house.
It was no problem, he told my father; a pleasure to help.
People said he was such a fine man, his wife a lucky woman, and how fortunate my parents were to have met him.
He was everyone’s friend; the one who remembered wives’ birthdays and brought their children presents.
He was the trusted visitor, the favourite uncle.
He always kept sweets in the glove compartment of his car.
I was seven when I first met him, that man; the one who called me his little lady.
Years have passed since he and I last spoke. But still those memories are imprinted on my mind as clearly as though everything that happened happened just yesterday.
Contents
‘Tell us a story,’ my children used to say to me.
‘Where do you want me to begin?’ I would ask as I picked up a well-thumbed favourite book.
‘At the beginning, of course, Mum,’ and dutifully I would turn to page one.
‘Once upon a time …,’ I would start.
But when that story is my own and I have more years behind than in front of me the question is: where should I start?
The tale that I try to keep locked away in the recesses of my mind; that haunts my dreams – that started when I was seven.
My real story, though, started when I was conceived, or maybe even before, but it was not until I sat in my kitchen holding a piece of foolscap paper, with its small neat handwriting covering both sides, that I accepted the time had finally come to confront my past.
But where do I start? I asked myself.
At the beginning, Marianne, my inner voice replied. Your beginning, for you have to remember the years that came before to understand everything that happened.
So that is what I have done.
On every one of my birthdays, during the time I lived at home, before even a card had been opened or a present received, my mother told me how it had rained on the day I was born.
Not just showers, she always said, but great gushes of water that lashed the house and turned the country lanes into muddy paths.
The gutters, which my father never thought to empty of their dead leaves, overflowed. Rainwater streamed down the side of the house and then gushed noisily into already over-burdened drains. Over the years the outside walls had become stained a deep moss green and the blocked gutters had caused large patches of damp and mould to grow on the bedroom walls.
It was the early hours of the morning, before even the farmer’s cockerels had welcomed in the day, when I decided to enter the world. My mother had woken to stabbing pains and a damp nightdress and knew I was about to appear. Suddenly she was terrified.
She shook my father awake and he, grumbling at my inconsideration, hastily pulled on his clothes, tucked his trousers into thick boots, placed his bicycle clips over his ankles and rushed out of the house in search of the local midwife.
My mother heard the words ‘woman’s business’ and ‘no place for a man’ floating in the air behind him before the front door slammed and she was alone with only her pain and fear for company.
In what seemed like hours, but was in fact less than twenty minutes she always eventually admitted, the midwife was standing at the foot of her bed.
