Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

Everybody was involved in it. You learned not to complain because there was no one you could complain to. When you got older you did it to the younger boys. It went on in all the boys’ homes. When I got older I was sent to other homes we were shifted around a lot and I met up with boys from other homes and they did it.’

      Jack said that he had never thought about his time in the orphanage at all. ‘I can’t remember much about that time. I don’t remember anything before I was eight. I know my mother used to have lodgers. One of them used to take me out to the woods. I can remember he used to buy me ice cream. Perhaps something happened then. I don’t remember.’ He spoke of the terrible guilt he felt now. Before, ‘I didn’t think about it. I thought the children would have forgotten it.’

      Joy said, ‘When Alice was a child I told her not to let anyone do anything to her that she didn’t want and to tell me, even if it was someone close, like an uncle. Alice reminded me of this. She said, “I couldn’t tell you, Mummy, because there was someone, and you were always telling us what a good father we had.’”

      Joy told me how, over the past ten years, Jack had suffered several sudden, violent illnesses, sometimes necessitating him being admitted to hospital. The doctors had explained these in terms of a virus, but now she wondered whether the illnesses were connected with all this. Now these things were being discussed, the illnesses had stopped.

      Some weeks later, when we were arranging the next appointment, she said that in the three weeks between this meeting and the last she had thought she might go mad. All the structures she had built to form the world she lived in had now been revealed as fictions which bore little relation to reality, and she was no longer sure of what reality was. In those weeks she had felt that she had to hold all her thoughts very carefully in her mind, otherwise everything would fall apart. Jack threatened every part of her being. She was trying to hold it all together by continuing to be the good, patient, understanding, calm, unaggressive person she had always been, and by maintaining her faith that there was something beyond this life which would offer reparation for her suffering. However, Jack threatened even this. He would shrug his shoulders and say flatly, ‘This is all there is and when you’re gone, you’re gone.’

      When we met three weeks later, Jack agreed that he needed people. ‘I don’t like being on my own,’ he said. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. ‘What’s happened has happened,’ he said, ‘and I can’t change it. I’m sorry it happened, but I can’t do anything about it. If Joy could accept that we could get on with thinking about the future. That’s what’s important, not the past.’

      Joy could not do that. She needed to think about what had happened, to reinterpret much of what she remembered of the past years, and to understand, no matter how painful that process of understanding was. ‘Jack just accepts things without thinking about them,’ she said. ‘He just takes what someone says or what he reads in the paper without working something out for himself.’

      The way Joy would sit quietly, thinking, worried Jack very much. He felt that she had withdrawn from him and that he was in danger. He could not put this feeling into words. Instead he thought about leaving himself. He said, ‘Would it be best if I left? She’d be better on her own, without me.’

      I said, ‘We can’t work out what’s best to do until we understand what happened and why it happened.’

      So Jack reluctantly agreed to talk some more about his past. He described how he had been conscripted into the air force and posted to the Far East where, in the absence of women, many of the men found sexual relief with one another. ‘That’s all it was, just relief,’ he explained.

      I asked whether he considered himself to be a homosexual - that is, having loving relationships with men as the most important relationships of his life.

      ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live with a man. I like women.’

      His last sexual experience with another man had been when he came out of the air force and was living in Wales. He had later moved to the Midlands, where he had met Joy. None of these sexual encounters had been with children.

      Joy said, ‘Jack’s always seen sex as something very surface. When the children were little and he was working very hard, I wouldn’t see him until late and we’d no sooner get in the bedroom than he’d want to. I couldn’t get him to understand I wasn’t like that. I needed time to be with him.’ It was no good if Joy offered simply to oblige him. He wanted every sexual encounter to be passionate and grand, in which he possessed Joy totally. Instant, total gratification.

      We went on to talk about their children. Jack was very proud of them. All of them, except Mark, had excelled academically, and Mark was now being successful in his own business. ‘I couldn’t ever believe I could have such bright kids,’ said Jack. ‘Right from the beginning they seemed older than me.’

      What did he mean, they’d always seemed older than him?

      Gradually we put together an answer to this question. When the children were tiny he did not see them very much as he was working so hard, but once they started at school he became aware of how bright they were and how much they knew. He could not discipline them, but only, in Joy’s words, ‘quarrel with them’. He felt inferior to them, and frightened of them. There was only one area of experience where he felt his knowledge was superior to theirs - sex - and so he thought he could teach them about this. All the time he could not see anything wrong in doing this. Of course, sometimes we teach children something because we feel that it is important that they know it, and other times we teach them something so we can demonstrate our superiority over them. Sometimes we need to demonstrate our superiority because we envy them.

      Joy had brought along letters from her daughters Jenny and Alice. Jenny was angry with Alice for speaking about the subject to Joy, causing Joy hurt. Jenny said she had spent years trying to forget ‘the experience’ and did not want to discuss the matter now. Jenny’s letter implied that something very unpleasant had happened. Jack said he could remember very little, but he insisted that whatever had happened was nothing more than when he was ‘fooling around with her’, playing the childish games Jenny had always enjoyed. He admitted he had touched her breasts. ‘I didn’t expose myself or ask her to touch me,’ he said. ‘It was her body I wanted to see.’ He was distraught with remorse. ‘I didn’t realize how much I had hurt her. I wouldn’t want to hurt her ever. I wish I could tell her how sorry I am and ask her to forgive me.’

      Jenny had always been extremely good as a child. Alice had been argumentative, and she and Jack had often clashed, but Jenny never argued with him. Jack was puzzled as to how Jenny could be so upset now about what had happened; as a teenager she had always been very friendly to him. She had won a scholarship to a boarding school of great repute, and he had often driven her to and from the school, several hundreds of miles away. Moreover, at home she would often go from bathroom to bedroom quite scantily clad. Why would she do this? I guessed that Jenny throughout her teens was trying to prove to herself that these painful events of her childhood had never happened or, if they had, that they had no untoward significance.

      As Jenny was coming for Christmas I suggested that Jack write her a letter, saying what he had just told me he wanted to say to her. We spent some time discussing this proposed letter. Jack was worried that if he did what I suggested giving Jenny the letter soon after she arrived home this might spoil Christmas, and the family’s ritual celebrations of Christmas were very important to Jenny (and to Jack). ‘She likes everything to be exactly the same every year,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it to her just before she leaves.’

      ‘That won’t give her time to discuss it with us if she wants to,’ said Joy. She went on, ‘We have to show the children that we are able to bear all this, because if we can’t bear it, then they’ll find it hard to bear what they have to bear.’

      When they came back to see me on New Year’s Eve they agreed that they had had a good Christmas. Jenny, Louise and Ray had come home, and there had been a family celebration. Jack had written the letter to Jenny, saying how sorry he was and asking for her forgiveness. He had put the letter on her bedside table on Boxing