HELLO! I have decided to go on with this story after so many months of not knowing what to do with it... and now I do... its to do with the Sara exploring the house and going through her own childhood/teenhood... POV chapters are all by Saraand I am begging you to comment on this story...good or bad...what i can improve on... ANYTHING!

Thank you to Nick55, MC NEW YORK and House-of-insanity for reviewing and thank you Emerson Drain, house-of-insanity , MC New York, ShipperAlert, nick55 andshania1277 for doingthealert thingy... you guys made me smile...

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My childhood was just one long scream.

My mother, Laura, was a small and delicate woman. She was beautiful and I thought she looked like a film star. She very quiet and ladylike and was religious without being boring. She was adorable in every sense and worked day and night to keep the house in order. Her only concern was for her children and she had a lot to be concerned about.

To the outside world, my father, Oliver presented an image of respectability. He was a handsome man, well-built at fifteen stone. He dresses immaculately in a nice suit, snow-white shirt and black polished shoes that shined so much that you could use them as a mirror. He would go to mass every day. To the people around the bay, he was a high pillar of the small community. But inside out small three-bedroom home, he became a cruel and violent man who gave his family a life or mental and physical abuse.

He was always up at the crack of dawn, working from seven in the morning until six at night and I don't remember him ever missing a day's work. The B&B had been closed down when I was six but I can't remember the reason why. My brothers, Adam and Nick, and I would often help with the work. After he had finished work, he would come home to eat his dinner before heading out to the local bar.

At first when the door closed behind him, we would all feel relieved that he was gone but that was quickly replaced by the fear of what he would to us when he got home. There was no pattern to his behaviour, so we never knew what to expect. He could be alright for a while but then something would set him off and would endure weeks and months of cruelty.

He regularly beat my brothers with his belt. The buckle would cut in to their legs and the flesh wounds often turned septic. He put Adam's hands in the crack of the kitchen door and pressed it with his foot until he passed out with the pain.

One night when he was in a particularly bad mood he held my hand in pan of hot grease. The pain was unbearable. I closed my eyes and screamed so he threw me out of the kitchen and made me sit on a wooden orange box while he ate his dinner. I shook all over from the pain in my hand and I could see the skin starting to peel away. The cold made me shiver which made the pain even worse. He made me sit there for hours and would not allow my mother to let me in, even though she pleaded with him. I could hear her begging him but he just sat and ate his dinner as if nothing happened. I cried until there were no more tears. I was so lonely and so sad and my heart and body was aching and I wished I could die so he could never hurt me again.

When I was about four, one day my mother gave me a wicker box. It was sitting in the back kitchen when my father came in from work and he started shouting at me, for what I didn't know. I punched me and I fell awkwardly over the box and I felt a terrible pain in my hip. Of course, my father took no notice of cries and carried on thumping and when he was finished I was in agony and could barely walk. After a few days of this, I couldn't get out of bed and my father finally aloud for my mother to call the doctor. On seeing me, Dr Metcalfe immediately made my mother take me to hospital, where x-rays revealed that I had a hairline fracture to my hip. I was in hospital or a week and had to go about on crutches. My mother came to visit me as often as she could and my father even made it once, not to say sorry but to make a big show of saying in front of the doctors and nurses that I never looked where I was going, how I was always falling over myself. Once I got home, life continued as before.

It is very hard to describe what it is like to live in constant fear of you father. He reminded me of the horrible monster in 'Jack and the Beanstalk'. I was not only hurt physically but I also felt unwanted and humiliate, as if I was a stranger in my own home. My hurt as added to by the fact I could not understand why he was doing this to me.

He never said sorry or showed any love or affection. But I hoped that someday he would change and give me a hug and a kiss like my mother did. It never happened. I used to lie in my bed and prey that he would wake up the next morning and suddenly love me.

Even at such a young age I knew that my mother had a hard and sad life. She was a kind and caring, gentle woman whose husband gave her nothing but grief and abuse. She was so frightened of him that she would start to shake whenever Adam or I told her that he was coming up the road. Some nights, in sheer terror, she hid in a big old wardrobe and slept there until morning. She tried desperately to shield us from him but there was nothing she could do and our suffering broke her heart. She wouldn't dare stand up to him.

My father wanted complete control over our lives and one way to do this was to keep us all hungry. When he left to go to work in the morning, he would lay out two slices of bread, two eggs and one tea bag. It was meant to feed me, my brother and my mother all day. My mother ate very little and she divided the food between her children. Her health was never strong and she became weaker after giving birth to another stillborn when I was two. There had been three stillborn babies in total; one before Adam, then came Nick, a set of twins died, then there was me. No doubt due to the stress and her poor diet, she was always tired and sick.

When I was four years old, I was walking to the beach, something I did every day so I could meet my brother from school, two boys, much older than me began to lift up skirt and touch my body. They told me it was a game. I did not know what was happening to me but I knew it made me feel very uncomfortable. I did not tell anyone because I was afraid of them.

Soon the games became rougher and I was abused almost on a daily basis. The things they did to me, made me feel dirty and I didn't know why. I was sicken by their creeping hands and came to dread the sight of them. I could not seem to escape their horrible mauling of my tiny body. They would warn me that if I told anyone what they were doing, I would be taken away from my mom and put in a home and never be let out.

Between this and my father's beatings I became a very nervous child and was easily upset. I wouldn't go out and play, walk down the street and began to hate going to school because I felt different to the other girls. I found it impossible to make any friends. I wanted to curl up in to a ball, pull the covers over my head and never wake up. But when I did go to bed, I was usually unable to sleep.

There was nothing beautiful about the world I lived in. What was there, I wanted to shut out. I did not understand why it was happening to me but I knew I was being punished, as my father often told that I had the devil in me and I would end up in hell. At Sunday school, the priests and nuns told us if we were good, then angels would take us to heaven when we died. But in the tradition of religion, fear was installed and they made sure we knew about all sin and warned us whatever pain we suffered on this earth, it was a grain of sand compared to the vast beach of eternal suffering that waited for us in hell if we did not do penance for our sins. I was terrified of ending up in a place where my poor little body would be burnt in the devil's flames and I couldn't understand why I had to be punished, as deep down I knew I was a good girl.

I started to refuse to go to school, as my life was becoming unbearable and I kept having fits of crying and spells of bad temper, and so my mother took me to see Dr. Metcalfe. I remember him asking me questions about home life that I couldn't answer. I was terrified my father would find out and then punish me. I could tell Dr. Metcalfe about the boys either, as I didn't want to be parted from my mother and live in a strange house, so I was rude and told him to shut up and stop asking me questions. He asked me what was upsetting me and why I was being defensive. I stared at the floor, a habit I still have as an adult whenever I want to keep my silence. The doctor had no idea what was going on in my life and my mother didn't know about the boys. How could I tell her what the boys were doing? The doctor told my mother that I was delicate and underweight and needed a good nutrition to build me up. She didn't tell him this wouldn't happen because my father rationed the food.

I became a very difficult child as my behaviour deteriorated, according to the teachers, when in reality I was just reacting to the horrible things that were being done to me. I was wrapped in chains of fear and terror. I was a child and I didn't have to words to express what I was feeling, so I would lash out in anger. I began to hate everything I loved. My whole world was being turned upside down. Instead of love, I got beaten and punished, and my body was tortured by the cruel boys. I was confused, frightened and isolated.

I had little support from my brothers, but I understood why as we were all fighting our own battles and trying to escape from our father's wrath. It was like survival of the fittest. Whenever father called for us we would fight over who got to him first, as whoever got there last would endure the worst of his temper. I was the smallest and the weakest so I became the regular target of his fury. However much my mother loved me, she was unable to protect me. A child should look forward to every day with its possibilities for excitement and new adventure but I began to dread every waking moment.


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