Anne's Song by Anne Nolan

about the sexual act. Certainly, we never discussed masturbation. We simply had no knowledge of it – ironic when I realised later that I'd been involved in exactly that without really being aware of it. I never, ever said a word to Jacqui about what my dad had been doing, but, over those weeks and months chatting to my new schoolfriend, there was a dawning realisation in my mind that his fondling of me was sexual. And totally wrong.
    As that knowledge strengthened, I felt a mixture of horror that it had happened in the first place, shame that I had allowed it to happen (albeit innocently) and anger that my own father had done that to me. The more I understood the full implications of his actions, the more this swirl of emotions intensified. There was also the sad acknowledgement that the father I'd known when I was nine and we were all living in Dublin no longer existed. He'd been destroyed and it was his fault alone. Our relationship had gone beyond the point of no return.
    Jacqui was always there for me. She knew what my dad was like, without ever being aware of the fact that he'd been sexually abusing me. I'd always be complaining about him. There'd be some sort of club activity alter school and I'd tell Jacqui I couldn't come to it because my father wouldn't let me. Or she'd ask me to go to the cinema and, nine times out of ten, he'd say that I couldn't.
    I think now that he wanted to keep me as his little girl. He wouldn't allow me to wear tights to school, for instance. He insisted I continue to wear socks. We'd sometimes have parties at school in the evening, but I was never allowed to stay out later than nine o'clock, and, because I always had to leave early, Jacqui started getting friendlier with a girl called Joan. I didn't blame her, but that didn't stop me minding. I liked Joan, too, and a girl called Patsy, but Jacqui was my best friend.
    It was Jacqui who gave me my first bra. My mother was of that generation too embarrassed to talk about how your body changed when you hit puberty. A lot of mothers back then were like that. A friend of mine thought she was bleeding to death when her periods started. No one had told her what to expect. We did have some sort of guidance at school about menstruation but, even so, I had no idea how to cope when it happened to me soon after I started secondary school. I asked my mother and she handed me an old stocking and a pad. I was meant to thread the stocking through the loops of the pad and then tie it round my waist. It took me years to get the hang of tampons, not least because I was too shy to ask for help.
    Years later, when Jacqui was living in Wigan with her husband, she came to see us perform in a club there. She was pregnant with her first baby. My father announced her from the stage.
    'Look at her,' he said, 'that's Anne's best friend. Before the mark of the cradle's off her backside, she's pregnant.'
    Jacqui, quite rightly, was really upset. 'What do you mean?' she said. 'I've been married two years.'
    My father's attitude to sex seemed to be that it was all right for him wherever and with whoever he chose, but it was something to be derided in young women.
    When I think of my father now, part of me just feels dead, part of me still feels real anger. One of the saddest legacies of being sexually abused is the ball and chain of guilt you drag around after yourself for ever afterwards. There might be some satisfaction, I suppose, if 1 were somehow able to explain to him the effect of what he did to me, but, in the end, I suspect it would have offered scant comfort. Those things happened.
    I refuse to feel bitterness, a wasted emotion that does no more than eat you up, and I can't write him off as a monster, even if some of his actions could only be described as monstrous, but neither can I lightly brush aside the way he exploited my innocence for his own perverted gratification. Sadly, some children suffer far worse sexual abuse than I ever knew, but there is no league