Please Let It Stop Read Free

While the other girls were figuring out how to talk to boys and doing the usualteenage experiments with black nail polish and violent blue eyeshadow, I was living in a vacuum, away from it all. So I really don’t understand how I figured out that Mum was having an affair with John, but I did.
    One day my father came home from work and saw Mum and John having sex in our swimming pool. Apparently, he went back to work without saying anything. Most men faced with the realisation that their wife is making love to their best friend could be expected to react rather more visibly and even violently – but that didn’t happen, perhaps because Dad realised it may have given him an opportunity to end the marriage.
    What did happen after the swimming-pool episode is that Dad seemed to accept it; and from then on the four of them continued to meet up – except now Mum slept with John and Dad slept with John’s wife, Sue. It was like some horrendous, cheap suburban fantasy. My father has since explained: ‘I was in a loveless marriage but I didn’t want to leave you girls. I was suddenly offered the opportunity to sleep with John’s wife who was very young and attractive. I realised my wife had no intention of stopping the affair with John so it seemed to me to be the best of all options. I just went along with the situation.’
    John would go into my parents’ bedroom with Mum and Sue would sleep with Dad in the spare bedroom. As for me, well, I just got on with things as best I could. My upbringing had ensured that I was both introverted andconditioned not to question things. Vanessa was too young to know what was going on so we just went to our room and played as if nothing was happening. It was just the way things were.
    The swapping continued for quite some time but, not surprisingly, it didn’t work out happily ever after. For Dad and Sue it was always going to be a compromise situation. Sue was young and the relationship fizzled out. Not long after Dad started an affair with his father’s secretary, Denise. This wasn’t to last either. Dad was now deeply unhappy and it was inevitable that my parents would split up. He was very upset at having to leave us and conversations with him in recent years have revealed that he carried a lot of guilt with him. Much later, when he discovered that he had left us in the same house as a man who was to violate us in the worst possible way, it tore him apart.
    I was absolutely devastated by the split. My schooling was affected and I had to stay down a year, putting me behind the others of my age which really hurt because I knew I wasn’t stupid. In fact, it was around this time I began to take a huge interest in word puzzles of all kinds; not just completing them but making them up as well. I was so good at devising puzzles that my dad offered me the princely sum of 50p a puzzle to design them for the crossword magazines he was now producing which had titles like
Letter Fit
and
Easy Crosswords
. My father’s move into publishing came as a progression from the book and magazine shops that he ranwith his brother Ralph; creating magazines seemed a natural extension to selling them. I took my responsibility very seriously and particularly excelled at ‘Find a Word’, where you have to make a number of words out of one word or subject. I still love crosswords and puzzles, and feel obliged to issue the warning that I am a highly competitive, demonic Scrabble player.
    The puzzles were a way of extricating myself, at least mentally, from the pain and confusion at home. I even worked on them during lessons because I wanted to earn money and be independent; it was a big incentive. It was also around this time that I finally found some friends at school. There was Michelle Yarrow, Beverley Dalton and Karen Carter. At the time I was probably closest to Karen, who always struck me as very grown-up so I looked up to her, and we both drooled over Donny Osmond and David Cassidy! Karen and the other