I Just Wanted to Be Loved: A boy eager to please. The man who destroyed his childhood. The love that overcame it.

By Stuart Howarth

The author of the bestselling Please Daddy No reveals more harrowing experiences of his neglected childhood.

Having survived the terrible abuse at the hands of his stepfather, Stuart has to reach within himself again to live through the degradation of prison. He is released back into the world without any support or counselling from the authorities.

The child abuse and numerous court cases had almost destroyed him, and Stuart became reliant on drugs and alcohol. With his life spiralling out of control, Stuart attempts suicide a number of times. The last try leaving the doctors that resuscitated him incredulous he had survived.

At the point of no-return, Stuart was sent to an hospital in the Scottish highlands to fight the demons that assailed him and rebuild his life. This is the remarkable story of his fight to be his own man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Feb 27, 2009
• ISBN: 9780007319565

Stuart Howarth

Stuart lives in Manchester with his wife.

Book preview

Chapter One

GROWING UP IN

ASHTON-UNDER-LYNE

Idon't remember a time before Dad came to live with us although I was three when he moved in. He was a colourful, larger-than-life character who worked as a dustbin man in the smarter areas of Ashton-under-Lyne, and on his rounds he would pick up all sorts of cast-off items to bring home. We were proud to be the first family in the street to have a television, even though it only worked intermittently when you banged the sides, the first to have a washing machine, and the only ones to have a PVC sofa and ornaments and paintings on the walls.

All the neighbours used to come round to admire our newest possessions, do their laundry in our machine and drink beer and smoke in the sitting room, but there was an undercurrent of jealousy as well. There was definitely a feeling that we thought we were a bit above ourselves, which didn't go down well. I got bullied by some local boys, who used to play tricks on me like getting me to swallow a spoonful of margarine by pretending it was ice cream.

I had two big sisters: Christina, who was two years older than me, and Shirley, who was a year older than her. Poor old Shirl the Whirl, as I called her, was born with spina bifida that meant she was confined to a wheelchair, paralysed and without feeling from the waist down. She also had hydrocephalus, or fluid on the brain, and epilepsy and a hunchback, and she was always having to go into hospital for operations and coming back covered in bandages. There was nothing wrong with her mind, though. I loved Shirley because she was the one who looked out for me when she could and tried to make sure I was OK. Christina was tougher and more independent when we were little.

Mum had been married to a man called George Heywood whom she'd met when she was just sixteen, but he turned out to be a drinker and a womanizer. He couldn't handle the pressure of having a disabled child so he soon disappeared from the scene. It must have been really tough for Mum being on her own with no money and with kids to raise, so when David Howarth came along with his jet-black hair and moustache and his ready charm, she was easily swept off her feet.

‘David is your real dad,’ she whispered to me, ‘and George was the girls. But don't tell them or they'll be jealous that you're the only one whose real dad lives with us. Let's keep it to ourselves.’

None of the other kids in our street had their real dad living with them, although there might be stepdads or boyfriends in the house. I was chuffed to bits that I had my real dad and, what's more, he had a proper job and he brought home lots of presents for us. I used to be his favourite, and that made me feel very special. I hero-worshipped him and strove to do whatever I could to please him, although I was always a bit scared of him as well.

Dad had a smallholding, which we called ‘the Pen’, where he kept pigs, chickens, geese and ducks. His father lived in one of the sheds up there, amongst heaps of scrap from the dustbin rounds, an old rusting car we kids used to play in and litter strewn everywhere. It was up there that Dad started his campaign to ‘make a man of me’, as he put it. He'd make me collect the eggs from the hens, although their flapping wings terrified me, and he'd put ferrets down my trousers, where they scratched and wriggled. I was especially scared of the big black boar and the sows that snuffled around in the mud, but I was learning to keep this from Dad because if he sensed I was scared of something he would push me right into it as part of his campaign to toughen me up.

If I annoyed him I'd get a cuff round the ear or a pinch on my legs, but nothing prepared me for the day he laid into me on a beach in Wales when we were on holiday. I was only four years old but the event sticks vividly in my memory. I'd wandered off from the family, and when Dad caught up with me he punched me repeatedly, forcing my face down into the sand and screaming abuse at me. I couldn't breathe and struggled wildly in panic.

‘Do you want me to tell your mum that you have spoilt the fucking holiday?’ he hissed. ‘Do you?’

It wasn't the pain of his blows; it was the ferocity of the attack and the shock of the betrayal. I thought I was his much-loved son, but here he was saying, ‘Get up, you little cunt, and stop fucking crying.’ It was a devastating moment.

He warned me not to say anything to Mum – ‘Put a smile on yer fucking face’ – and when I obeyed, he knew he had me where he wanted me. From then on, he would get away with increasing levels of violence and brutality and I would lie to everyone about where all the bruises and welts came from. I told teachers at school I'd been messing around climbing trees or that I'd fallen downstairs. I don't think Mum ever asked. I had been a bad boy and I deserved it, I thought. I just had to do better in future.

But from then on, no matter how hard I tried I always seemed to get things wrong and make Dad angry. The list of misdemeanours got longer all the time: I wasn't supposed to scratch my head, pick my nails, touch any of Dad's things, leave a mess anywhere, get dirt on my clothes or eat my crusts when Dad wanted them. Every infraction of the rules earned me a beating, and as well as using his hands he began to use a belt, a heavy brass crocodile, or any household objects that came to hand. Mum got a full-time job so she wasn't around to witness the violence, and I never dared to tell her about it. As I could hear when I lay in bed at night, she was experiencing it as well.

I couldn't tell Mum, and I was too scared to tell Christina or Shirley. What could they do? I just had to try harder not to make him cross in the first place.

‘You know you're a naughty boy, don't you?’ he'd whisper. ‘I'm doing this for your own good. If anyone finds out how naughty you are, you'll be sent away to a children's home.’

And then when I was about five he started to come up and visit me in my bed. He lay down beside me and stroked me, then held my hand against him and moved it back and forth, over and over, until I felt a hot liquid that I thought in my naivety was pee. After that he would force me to masturbate him or take his penis in my mouth almost every day. ‘You dirty little bastard!’ he'd cry as he came all over me. At least it was better than getting beaten, and usually he was nice to me for a while afterwards. Sometimes he'd run me a warm bath or make me something nice to eat.

Dad used to inspect my underwear regularly to see if it was clean, and when I got worms he'd be the one to apply the cream to my bottom, pushing into me roughly with his fingers. Before long he couldn't resist penetrating me anally. It felt as though I was being ripped apart and I screamed out loud. Even though he wasn't as rough as before, the pain was horrible and relentless. I stared at the pattern on the wallpaper, counting the repetitions, gritting my teeth and waiting for it to be over.

After being abused, I felt broken, sad and very lonely. I was permanently bruised, always bleeding from my rectum, constantly on edge when he was in the house, but no one seemed to notice. They all had their own problems. He used to take Christina and Shirley to bed with him every afternoon for a ‘nap’ when they got in from school, while I was sent out to play. One time I saw him lying on top of Shirley when I went to the toilet in the middle of the night, but I was too scared to say anything.

As I got older, the punishments got worse. I'd be locked naked down in the cold, damp cellar, fed my dinner out of the dogs' bowls or my head would be held under water until I thrashed around in panic, afraid he was going to kill me. And he could have done. He had a 12-bore shotgun that he used to control the rats up at the Pen and one day he made me sit down on his bed, loaded a cartridge into the gun and forced the barrel into my mouth.

‘I'm going to kill you now,’ he said.

I shook and sobbed in pure terror, my nose and eyes streaming as the barrel made me gag. I truly believed I was going to die that day. He could have taken my life, accidentally or deliberately, at any time. He had the power.

I was eight when he and Mum had a daughter, Clare. Maybe this would make him calm down, I thought. But we soon found out that Clare had Down's Syndrome and hydrocephalus and it wasn't long before Dad was hurting her as well. I saw him throw her down the stairs once when she was only six months old, and he used to threaten that he'd hold her fingers in the fire while I was away at school. I'd rush home panting with exertion every lunch hour just to peer in the window and check she was OK.

It didn't occur to me that we might get help if we told someone what was going on. It occurred to Christina, though. In 1979, when I was eleven, she told Mum that Dad had been having sex with her and Shirley. Mum threw him out and, when he wouldn't stay away from us, she called the police. At the ensuing trial, he was sentenced to two years in prison for molesting the girls.

No one thought to ask if anything similar had happened to me. After all, I was a boy and they all knew that I worshipped my dad. I was his only son, his special one.

Chapter Two

TRYING TO MAKE A LIFE

FOR MYSELF

With Dad gone, I cast myself in the role of ‘man of the house’ and started worrying about how I could take care of Mum and my sisters. I nicked food from the local Presto store, sold some of the junk Dad had brought home at second-hand shops, and I even joined a church choir because they paid you £2 to turn up every Sunday. Our house began to fall apart around us so I decided to set fire to it to try and get the insurance money for Mum, but my plan backfired when the council decided to take Shirley into a special-needs home instead of rehousing her with us. We got a new council house but I really missed her when she wasn't there every day.

After Dad got out of prison, he went to live with his sister Doris in Wales. I didn't want him to come and live with us again but I wanted my male role model back – someone I could look up to, who would protect me and teach me how to be a man – so I decided to go down and visit him there. He looked just the same as before and he was being perfectly nice to me, but one night from my bedroom I overheard a conversation between him and Auntie Doris in which she said, ‘I thought he knew he wasn't your lad?’

Straight away I hurried down to confront him about this, but he denied it. ‘Of course I'm yer dad,’ he said. ‘Don't be daft.’

I was confused, and left the next day without feeling I'd got the answers I wanted from him. And then he met a new woman who had three kids of her own. They had another son together, and Dad and I lost touch. He didn't make any effort to keep up with me, and I felt excluded by his new ‘family’. I also felt pushed out at home with Mum because when I was fifteen she got a new boyfriend called Trevor who usurped my ‘man of the house’ role.

I left school at sixteen and did a few different jobs before training as a steeplejack. I went out with a couple of girls but I was really messed up and hated the way other boys talked about girls as slags and whores or bought pornographic magazines. It felt wrong and dirty to me. I had this dream of having an intimate, loving relationship with a girl but no idea how I could achieve such a thing. The only person I was close to was Shirley, who I visited whenever I could.

At the age of eighteen I met a girl called Angela, a gentle girl with lovely long, dark hair. I pushed all memories of my childhood to the back of my mind and did my best to form a good relationship with her. When she announced she was pregnant, I said straight away that I would marry her and I vowed that I would look after her and our little boy, Matthew, who was born in 1989.

I loved him to pieces, but inside I was full of self-hatred and drinking heavily every night to drown out all the childhood memories and flashbacks that ran through my head like an illegal porn film, frame by frame. I looked at my son's little body as he lay in the bath and I was terrified that someone would abuse him one day. Questions would haunt me until I wasn't even sure if it was all right for me to be in the bathroom with him. Was even that wrong? Dad used to abuse me in the bathroom sometimes. I hadn't had a role model for fatherhood that I wanted to copy but I didn't know how else to be.

The following year, my world fell apart when Shirley died. She was left unsupervised in a bath, had an epileptic fit and drowned. All the feelings I'd been trying to repress exploded out of me in a torrent. I felt angry with the staff at the home, with God, the universe and everyone who had ever crossed me.

All my coping mechanisms broke down and the childhood memories came flooding out like torrents of water raging through a ruptured dam. I got into fights, drank even more than before and started arguing fiercely with Angela as well. In the midst of all this she announced she was pregnant again, but I felt no joy at the news – only increased stress.

I was a workaholic, choosing jobs that took me away from home a lot, and I started to doubt our whole relationship. How could Angela possibly love me? I was a disgusting, bad person. The pressure built inside me until one day I came home and told her I didn't want to be married to her any more. She was desperately upset, in an advanced state of pregnancy, and she just couldn't understand what was going on and why I was cracking up. I'd told her bits and pieces about my childhood but nothing like the whole story.

Our daughter Rebecca was born while we were living apart, and six months later I reached rock bottom and tried to throw myself under a train. I spent three days in hospital, where a psychiatrist suggested that I should get counselling, but nothing was ever done about it.

With my next girlfriend Lorraine I was even more messed up. I tried to kill myself twice while I was with her, the first time by attaching a pipe to my car exhaust and trailing it back through a window as I sat in the garage, the second by slashing my wrists when we were up in Edinburgh for Hogmanay. She tried her best to get through to me, to reassure me that she loved me and wanted to help, but by this stage I had discovered cocaine, and it fuelled the rage I was feeling.

I left Lorraine just as I had left all the women I'd gone out with up to that point, because I was scared that if I didn't then she would leave me and I knew I couldn't bear that. I'd never told anyone about my dad and everything he had done to me. I was too ashamed, as if it was my fault in some way, and I just couldn't face all the trauma it would bring to the surface if I talked about it. Then in February 2000 I found a woman who seemed as though she would make all the difference: someone who I thought could fix me and make me able to live with myself again.

Chapter Three

FALLING APART

Imet Tracey when I called in at the sunbed shop in Ashton-under-Lyne where she worked. I've always been insecure about my appearance, with my big, squashed nose and sticky-out ears, but I feel a bit better when I've got a tan, as if it will stop people noticing all the rest. Straight away I was attracted to this petite brunette with a perfect slim figure and lovely big eyes. She had a presence about her, very ladylike and with a quiet confidence. You can tell, looking at Tracey, that she's a good person.

I didn't think there was any chance that a woman like her would ever be interested in a scrote like me. I'd never had much confidence when it came to women, but I'd always had the ability to make people laugh so I started joking around with the girls in the salon. I'd developed a joker persona at school because I reasoned that if I could make the other kids laugh then there was less chance that they would want to hurt me. I had a red patch on my nose where it had been broken in a fight some years earlier and I asked Tracey how I could tan the rest of my face to match.

‘Why don't you put one of these over it?’ she suggested, and handed me a ‘winky’ – a little stick-on patch that's used to cover your eyes in the tanning booth.

Once I was inside, I called back, ‘My winky's not big enough. Have you got anything bigger?’ and all the girls cracked up laughing.

After that day, I couldn't get Tracey out of my mind. I started driving past the salon in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, or making extra appointments just to see her. My tan was coming along well because of it. The relationship I'd been in for the last few months had broken down irretrievably and I felt very lonely. Was there any chance that Tracey was free? Surely a gorgeous girl like her would have a boyfriend already?

One day at the salon, Tracey's friend Nicky mentioned that they were all going to a nightclub called Smokie's at the weekend and she hinted that it might be a good idea if I came along because, according to her, Tracey was quite keen on me. At first I thought they might be messing me around, but I decided to make sure I was there just in case.

It wasn't all plain sailing when I walked in. I spotted the girls as I made my way over to the crowded bar area, said ‘Hello, how are you?’ then we all sat down on some sofas. I sat by Tracey's friend first, scared of humiliating myself by making an obvious move too soon, so she got the impression it was her friend I liked. She then had a dance with a friend of mine, during which I was squirming with jealousy. Finally, Tracey came back and I said, ‘Are you talking to me now?’ and she grinned.

We went off to one side of the club to sit on our own and just talked for the rest of the evening. She told me she was in a relationship that wasn't working out. I lit a cigarette at one point and she grabbed it and stubbed it out, saying it was a filthy habit. I thought ‘Stroppy cow!’, but I liked it. She obviously had a bit of spirit to her. By the end of the evening we'd agreed to meet again somewhere not as noisy and I said I would phone her at the shop.

Thursday, 2 March 2000 was our first proper date. I was nervous as hell and it took me ages to get ready because I wanted to make the right impression. I kept trying on different shirts and walking backwards and forwards in front of the mirror, talking to myself. If Tracey could have seen me I'm sure she would have called me an ‘old tart’.

We drove over to Bradford and spent the day just walking round, holding hands and talking. She was obviously a very caring person so when she noticed the slash marks on my arms, I told her the truth – that I'd cut my arms with a razor while I was up in Edinburgh for Hogmanay when everything got too much for me. That led to me telling her about being abused as a child, and my sister Shirley dying, and all the bad stuff that had happened in my life. It just poured out. Tracey listened in a sympathetic, non-judgemental way, asking a few questions and saying all the right things, which is not easy because I can be very touchy if someone is insensitive or clumsy.

By the end of the day, I had made up my mind that Tracey was the woman I wanted to be with and, amazingly, it seemed as though she wanted to be with me as well. We just ‘clicked’ in a way that felt very natural and real.

I went back to my mum's place above the pub she ran – the Hawthorn Inn, in Oldham – and waited to hear from Tracey.

It wasn't straightforward for her because she had two sons,