There was a strong sense of loyalty in my family. My parents didn’t socialise because of my mother’s obsessive compulsive behaviour and the household was a tight unit. We stuck together, my parents, my brothers and I. We didn’t need anyone else.

My mother didn’t talk about her feelings. I know she loved us, but she didn’t show affection, there were no kisses, no cuddles. It wasn’t the obsessive behaviour – although she wouldn’t let us touch things in the house – and she was interested in what we were doing, she just didn’t show her warmth in a physical way. My brothers and I turned to our father for that kind of attention.

He was fabulous, funny, quick-witted, he was always coming up with rhymes, poems and songs, he was tactile, he played games, did roly-polys, threw us around. My brothers had a good relationship with him though I think I was always the favourite.

I was 8 when my father first touched me and I told my mother straight away. Her reaction was “No, he didn’t, nothing happened”. My dad’s reaction was to say, “Julia, why are you making up stories?” So from then on it became a secret. I knew I wouldn’t be believed if I tried to tell people, I knew my father would deny it and that I would get into trouble. I didn’t want to be ostracised from my family so I said nothing for two years. I didn’t know the words to describe what he was doing anyway, all I knew was that he was touching me and that I felt uncomfortable.

When I was 10 I saw a TV programme about sexual abuse and I thought, “This is serious, it shouldn’t be happening”. I told a friend, she told her mother who got the authorities involved but my mother couldn’t handle anybody stepping in from the outside, breaking up the family that she’d created, and she put a lot of pressure on me to retract my allegation. She called me at my grandmother’s where I was staying; I’d never heard her so upset. She was crying, begging me to tell her that it wasn’t true so that Dad could come home. At the age of 10, it seemed the easiest option. Either she genuinely didn’t believe me and thought I was attention-seeking, or she didn’t want to face what was happening.

As I got older and the abuse continued, it felt more and more uncomfortable and I became very confused. At the beginning it had just been another game that Dad and I played. At times I’d initiate him coming into my room, so I later felt a lot of guilt for that. I thought if I’d said no from the beginning then it wouldn’t still be happening and I battled with that every night. I blamed myself and started to hate myself. I took on the responsibility because I couldn’t hate my father – he was the only person I loved who had shown me the same love back. The only way I could cope was to separate him into two people. When he was touching me I switched off and I didn’t relate that person to the daddy who played games in the house. The idea of losing my family was too much to bear so it was easier to keep the secret.

There were times when I told people but my mother always encouraged me to retract. It was a form of emotional blackmail – if I wanted Dad to carry on living with us, I had to admit I’d been lying. I felt that I had no control over what was happening.

The secret dominated all aspects of my life. At school it destroyed my ability to relate to my peers because they’d talk about kissing boys and I knew far more than they did but couldn’t talk about it. I felt alienated from everybody and was trying desperately to be normal so I’d seek attention. I’d be the class clown, do anything to make people accept me.

It wasn’t until I was 13 that I said no to my father. By then he had tried to rape me. Nothing happened again though he persisted in asking for years and tried offering me money. It was always jokey, not transactional, but I always worked and made sure he could never use cash as a lure.

As a teenager I was off the rails. I started drinking at 15, I became promiscuous. I had no self-respect. But I was lucky – when I was 16 I met Jon, who would become my husband, and he had no interest in trying to get me straight into bed, he wanted to get to know me. This was alien to me because I didn’t know who I was.

Jon knew about the abuse and was sympathetic, but our relationship was strained because whenever things became difficult my instinct was to run to my parents’ house. That was my sanctuary, which was bizarre because everything I hated and wanted to escape from was there, yet I still felt this pull to go back. That was my normality, however much I knew it was distorted, and I had this longing for security and to return to what I knew. It was difficult to accept that I had to break away but slowly I came to understand that I couldn’t move forward with my new family unless I faced what had happened. As Jon often reminded me, now that we had daughters there was a child-protection issue with regard to my father, and we needed to put our children first.

I married when I was 21 and a few months later my father phoned and said that he didn’t want me to take the blame for what had happened. It was the first time he had acknowledged the abuse. It was so sudden that I didn’t know how to react. We spent the next year wondering what to do. We knew it wasn’t in my head, it wasn’t false memories, or any of the things that I’d started thinking. So many people had said I was a liar, a trouble-maker, an attention-seeker that you start to believe it. I realised that we needed evidence, so we bought recording equipment and I phoned him and created the same conversation.

As a result he was prosecuted and is now serving a prison sentence. I hoped my mother would understand that I needed to safeguard my children and that she would stick by me, but that didn’t materialise – she didn’t watch the court hearing and when my father is released he’ll go back to her: nothing has changed. I have no contact with her and although that is my choice it does hurt. You can’t switch off love for your parents and I still love both of them.

Daddy’s Little Girl by Julia Latchem-Smith, Headline, £12.99

Do you live with a family secret?

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