No Going Home, page 1
Also by Toni Maguire
Don’t Tell Mummy
When Daddy Comes Home
Helpless
Nobody Came
Don’t You Love Your Daddy?
Can’t Anyone Help Me?
Pretty Maids All In A Row
They Stole My Innocence
Did You Ever Love Me?
Daddy’s Little Girl
Silent Child
Please Protect Us
First published in the UK by John Blake Publishing
An imprint of Bonnier Books UK
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Paperback: 978-1-789-465-19-8
eBook: 978-1-789-465-20-4
Audiobook: 978-1-789-465-66-2
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.
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Copyright © Toni Maguire and Daisy Jones, 2022
Toni Maguire and Daisy Jones have asserted their moral right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of non-fiction, based on the life, experiences and recollections of Daisy Jones. Certain details in this story, including names and locations, have been changed to protect the identity and privacy of the authors, their family and those mentioned.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
John Blake Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
To my children, who grew up with me
Contents
Author’s Note from Toni Maguire
Part One: My Happy Years
Part Two: My Brother and I
Part Three: The Stepfather
Part Four: Tommy
Part Five: Alone
Part Six: Escape
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note from Toni Maguire
When I first received a message on my laptop from Daisy, it only took a few seconds for me to be gripped by her story. Unlike other lives I have written about, her early years were happy ones. Which, in a way, proves that the quote from Aristotle, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,’ or in this case, ‘a bright and well-adjusted young woman’, has a lot of truth to it.
In Part One of Daisy’s story, I show her happy years in the UK and how important they were. It was that time that gave her the strength to overcome the years that were far from the safe and secure ones of her early life. The second part of her story shows her touching relationship with her older disabled brother Tommy, a boy who was unable to either speak or walk, yet had an incredible amount of courage. As Daisy says, he refused to allow his disabilities to define him. I found their bond extremely moving, for when Daisy was a tiny child she was able to communicate with him using the sign language that he had invented.
I so enjoyed Daisy telling me some of the stories her mother told her about her teenage years. The music festivals in huge fields she and Daisy’s dad went to, where up-and-coming rock singers entertained thousands of teenagers who turned up. Carefree teenagers who came to see their favourite bands while they danced until the early hours – it took me back to when I was one!
It is in Part Three, titled ‘The Step-Father’, that Daisy’s life changes, and not for the better. Yet, to begin with, when she is barely nine, she manages to cope with extraordinary calmness. It is her brother she worries about much more than her own life.
As for the rest of her story, I don’t want to spoil it by giving away too much.
In books that I write, I do try and cover certain themes and make certain points. In No Going Home, telling Daisy’s story, I wanted to show to readers who are parents the long-time harm that watching porn does to children. It’s a central part of Daisy’s story and the experiences she is forced to participate in, and it’s accessible on nearly all devices. You will see in this book how it has affected people, and I strongly believe that more needs to be done to block these sites for children.
I hope you enjoy reading about Daisy’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Toni Maguire, January 2022
There is another story linked to the one I’m going to tell you. It’s about ‘the boy’. I call him that for it was the name his stepfather gave him. He, I have also given no name to. I might have heard it, but I’ve erased it from my mind. For he doesn’t deserve to have one. And even if he once had parents who gave him a name, in my wildest imagination I cannot picture him being christened in a church so I shall just call him ‘the man’.
The boy cannot remember what life was like before his mother moved into the building the man owned. Miles away from the nearest town, with only a long, rutted path just wide enough for a truck to drive on, to connect them to the main road. With the thick undergrowth and woods on either side of it, few passers-by would have thought anyone lived there. Nor would they have been able to see the sweeping fields behind the building. In some, grazing cattle munched comfortably away, while others were planted with the man’s crops. It was not corn or wheat that he grew, but leafy green marijuana plants. The boy was not to know what made his father’s crop different from the other farmers’, a mile or so away. But then when he was still little, he had no way of understanding that the house, infested with mice and spiders, was one that even the poorest families would not have agreed to live in. Outside the back door was a small hut that housed nothing more than an old, battered tin bath. It was there that the boy and his two younger siblings had their weekly bath. Without running water in the hut, it took a good many buckets, which had to be carried from the house, to fill it. Not that there was a proper kitchen inside; just several rooms, where in one a tap gave water and a camping stove was used to cook on.
The first sounds that stayed in the boy’s head were not bird-song, nor the doleful echo of the cows mooing when they were led into the truck, but the screams of the woman he knew was his mother.
The one who cuddled him when the man was not around.
The one who told him to hide when the man returned home.
The one he loved.
I’m sure that once, before he came to live in the man’s house, the boy must have had a few good memories of being tucked up in bed and sitting on his mother’s knee for a cuddle. But once they moved in with the man, those memories were replaced with ones that only belong to our nightmares. The boy’s first memory, the one he has never managed to erase, is the picture of the florid-faced man towering over his mother, bellowing drunkenly with rage. That night the boy had done what she had told him to do: hidden under the table as soon as he heard the truck’s engine and stayed there until she knew just what his mood was. For the boy was only four, far too small to have the man’s meaty fists connect with his small, vulnerable body. His young bones could break, while hers were stronger.
There were times when the man returned with good humour written on his face, a brace of bloodied rabbits he had shot slung over his shoulder and a bottle of whiskey held aloft for him and his wife to drink. Then the boy knew it was safe to crawl out of his hiding place and wait for the man to ruffle hishair and call him ‘my boy’. On those nights, which his mother must surely have prayed for each day, his two siblings – one a toddler, the other still a baby – were allowed to sleep peaceably.
His mother’s job was to skin and gut the rabbits, light up the camping stove and prepare vegetables and herbs to be added to the pot. The moment the scent of cooking meat filled the room, she would join her husband in sipping a shot of the whiskey.
The boy’s mouth would water at the thought of the meal he was going to be given before he went to bed. For there could be days when the man was away and the only food in the house was the vegetables his mother grew in the dark soil at the back of the house. He had heard her asking the man to allow her to keep chickens for then there would be eggs for the children. His response was to laugh in her face before telling her that any chickens would be killed by the foxes living in the woods even before an egg was laid.
It was those times, when the man returned with money in his pocket and fresh food he had caught, that were the good ones. But on the night engraved in the boy’s mind, within seconds of the door being opened and slammed shut, he heard the bellows of rage and knew the man was looking for any excuse to hit his wife. Cowering in the darkness under the table, he tried to close his eyes. He did not want to see the man’s huge fists smashing into the woman he called Mum.
The only word coming out of the man’s mouth he could understand was ‘dirty’. The boy could not stop himself from seeing his mother being dragged by her hair from the room, hands raised to her head to try and protect it.
Just before that door too was closed the man turned. ‘I can see you,’ he said, looking towards the table. ‘Now you know what happens if you don’t o
The boy stayed where he was, hands over his ears, head between hunched-up knees, trying to shut out the screams and sobs ricocheting off the walls of the ramshackle house.
That was the day when an unwelcome guest named Fear climbed up into the boy’s head.
It was not an easy guest to evict.
That took a long time.
Part One
My Happy Years
1
My name is Daisy. This is my story. Though our personal stories are not ours alone, are they? For small children have no say in the direction their lives take. Even before they have learnt to walk and talk, they are trained to obey the demands of those charged with their care. For most of us, those demands are necessary ones as they help us grow and learn, establishing boundaries along the way. But for others, it takes the years between babyhood and becoming a teenager to realise just how wrong those demands have been. As it was for me, my early years where I had a wonderful family were happy ones. I felt loved and secure, I never thought all that was going to change; that there would be two big upheavals in my life that would rip away both my feelings of security and my happiness. But there are acts of fate that no one can foresee . . . such as a mother wishing to move to the other side of the world.
‘Better jobs and better weather,’ she kept telling her husband, a man who did not wish to leave his family or his friends.
Had he not been so in love with Mum, we would never have left everything so familiar and dear to us. And then my mother would not have met the man calling himself The Bushwacker.
Which is why I say this is not just my story.
Part of it is Mum’s, who with her long brown hair, large eyes of a deeper shade of brown and her petite figure, was what most men would describe as ‘stunning’. Floating around in her boho-style brightly coloured clothes, she appeared to drift through life without a care. Whatever problems came her way, she always found an adoring male to look after her and protect her.
Five years before I came into the world, Mum gave birth to my wonderful, mischievous, plucky brother. He is someone I want to introduce you to. His name is Tommy and as you will come to see, he was an exceptional person.
Tommy’s father, my mother used to tell us, took off the moment she told him she was pregnant. ‘He wasn’t very nice’ was about all she said about him. Maybe that’s how she felt then, for when for reasons I will explain later, she did have some contact with him, she told me just the opposite. But then that’s Mum; her stories change with her moods. I’m still not sure what really happened.
I still don’t know where she was when my older brother was born. All I’ve ever been told was that when Tommy was barely more than a few days old, he contracted Meningococcal disease, an infection of the protective membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Watching him fight for his tiny life through the glass partitioning of ICU would have been traumatic for our mother, though maybe not as traumatic as when she was told that the inflammation on the brain could leave permanent mental or physical damage, maybe even both. I should think she just about went to pieces then and the waiting must have been terrible; watching for signs that would support her worst nightmares. These nightmares were confirmed eighteen months later when the doctors finally diagnosed Meningococcal disease induced Rett syndrome. Now not only would Tommy be unable to walk, several months later, they told our mother that he would never be able to communicate orally. The best he would be able to do was express his needs with a few grunting sounds.
I don’t know exactly when it was arranged for him to learn to use what he and I called his ‘talking machine’. To begin with it sounded really weird, but after a while I became used to it as did all Dad’s family. My brother was so excited the first time he managed to crack a joke and we all laughed.
For Tommy, his condition was always going to be some-thing that he refused to let define him. He also made up his own sign language, which I learnt to understand from my earliest days. I think I mastered his language of grunts and signs long before I spoke English and having this secret language made us even closer than most siblings. And when my brother was older, he fell in love with computers. They too became a way for him to communicate. Amazing with only one working arm, just how fast he could get his feelings and thoughts down on that screen.
So, as I tell my story and repeat some of our conversations here, there were many ways we had invented to have them. To me, Tommy spoke with clarity and depth, which is why he does within these pages. But for our mother, being a single parent with a disabled child, life was even harder. Her mother and sisters, wanting a life in the sun, had moved to Australia. Doubtless she would have followed them had she not been pregnant. When she received letters from her siblings telling her of the numerous job opportunities that offered twice the amount she would receive in the UK, the glorious climate where the sun shone nearly all year round, she came to believe that life was just great out there. Photographs accompanied the letters showing white beaches under a blue sky, as did pictures of her sun-kissed sisters, partying in the beach bars with bronzed surfer boys. ‘You would love it here,’ was the message on each one.
I’m sure well before she became pregnant with me, Mum simply yearned to join her family there but, much as she missed them, she cared for her son’s wellbeing more. He needed his regular hospital visits, which helped with his special care. So, what did she decide to do? When Tommy was little more than a toddler, she looked up an old boyfriend from her teenage years. They had been a couple as far back as when they were in the same senior school.
Mum loved telling all about those times when she and Dad were together. According to her, they had been deeply in love right up until when she decided to leave the town they had grown up in. Not that she has ever given me an explanation as to what went wrong between them. Maybe it was simply because she just felt too young to settle down. I guess the wider world’s promise of excitement once she entered it was just too seductive for her to ignore. Maybe she asked Dad to go with her to Australia and being content to stay where he was, he refused. Whatever the reason, it’s never been a question I felt I could ask.
I do know that Tommy was still very young when our parents met up again. He can’t remember much about that time, but he did have a few memories of the wedding. For it hadn’t taken Dad long not only to propose, but also to state that he wanted to adopt Tommy and help bring him up as though he was his own son. A promise, which as my brother said, he has more than kept to. Dad loved both of us, we never had any doubt about that.
‘I was so happy,’ Tommy told me, ‘when they both sat down with me and explained that they were getting married and that Dad was really going to be my father. I might have been little then, but I already loved him. All I could think of was that Mum and I were going to stay with him. And,’ he added with a grin, ‘there was a bit of a bonus – he was strong enough to carry me up the stairs and in and out of the bath. I had got too big for Mum to do that easily.’
‘And what was the wedding like?’
‘Full of people with big smiles, Mum looking pretty, and Dad? Well, he never stopped beaming.’
‘So what happened then?’ I asked, for what little girl doesn’t want to hear about a wedding?
‘Well, there was a party after the minister had said they were man and wife. Loads of speeches, really good cake and then music for them to dance to. Everyone made a fuss of me as usual. There I was, hardly taller than Dad’s knee, dragging myself along on that little walker I had then – made it easy for them to pat my head.
‘Nan and Grandad took me back to their house so that Mum and Dad could have a couple of days of holiday together. It was after the wedding that Dad told me he was now legally my father. And then what happened just when we were having a good time? Why, you came along! All cries and snivels. And let’s not talk about nappy changing! That was really ugly. I asked them to send you back, you know?’
‘You didn’t?!’
