A woman has revealed how her stepmother abused her for years while her father didn’t stop her or do anything.
Suz Evasdaughter was born in January 1952 to Arthur and his wife, Betty.
Suz, who also has an older brother Arthur and a younger sibling Nicky, lost her mother to breast cancer when she was just six.
Suz lived in a North Yorkshire village with her family and was very happy and secure before losing her mother at six.
Initially, the doctor dismissed her mother’s cancer as mastitis and the family moved to Huddersfield so her father could get a better job.
Suz said: “When Nicky was two, Mam stopped being able to pick me up, or play games. A different doctor confirmed it was cancer, advanced, and she was put on a course of radium and radical surgery. But it was too late.”
As Betty was unable to take care of her kids, they were sent to a children’s home.
After her mother’s death, Suz lived with a foster family while her two brothers lived with their father.
When she was seven, she returned to Huddersfield to live with her family.
She said: “It was supposed to be the dream we would all share as a family. I remember looking in all the rooms just in case Mam was hiding somewhere. Mams weren’t supposed to die, I hadn’t understood any of it.”
Suz grew up looking after her father and her two brothers. She says she knew it was sexist but there was no one to look after them.
She said: “We had a strong family bond. The only thing that bothered me back then was being sent to the secondary modern, despite being bright enough for the Grammar like my older brother. Dad was old-fashioned and my future prospects were limited because I was a girl.”
Things got bad when Suz’s father married a religious woman named Muriel in 1965 when Suz was 13.
Muriel immediately insisted the kids call her “Mum” and started controlling them from day one.
On their wedding night, Suz was left alone on the street while her brother stayed at their friends’ house.
A man tried to force himself upon her that night.
Muriel banned Suz from wearing skirts, forced her to wear old-fashioned clothes, ripped her pop posters from the wall, and even tore up photos of her mother.
Muriel said: ‘You can’t live in the past’ and Suz’s father Arthur agreed.
Muriel did her best to split up the family and when Muriel and Arthur had a baby, Edward, things became worse.
Suz said: “There were two families in the house. Muriel, Dad and Edward sat on one side of the table, eating nice food, while us three “leftover kids” sat on the other side with workhouse-style gruel like a blob of grey porridge or oxtail slurry.”
Muriel would say they had school dinners and were too expensive to feed and the kids were also not allowed new shoes.
Once Muriel punched Suz in the face for using chalk on the neighbor’s paving stone.
That’s when she decided to leave home at 15. Suz started working as a chambermaid at a Yorkshire hotel but things were not easy there as well.
Suz said: “The hotel owner was a peeping Tom pervert, he made us strip to underwear while he applied scent so we ‘smelled nice’. It was still better than life at home, but I desperately missed my siblings.”
She went on to work as a mother’s help, in a nursery and when she was 18, she got into nursing school in Keele.
When she was 20, her siblings, who also had had enough of their stepmom, came to stay with Suz.
She said: “Nicky and Arthur came to stay at my London bedsit and we had a little party. We drank cocktails and talked all night squeezed onto a double bed. We mended the bond that Muriel had shattered.”
She went on to study philosophy at the London School of Economics and became a trainee at Ford Motor Company.
Suz also re-trained as an art therapist and worked as a school Ofsted inspector boss.
She has now written a book about the abuse she experienced at the hands of her stepmother in her childhood.
Talking about the horrific experience, she says: “Now, as an adult, I see how Dad too was responsible for this cruelty. But I needed to believe he loved me or I couldn’t have carried on.”
“Despite all my achievements, Muriel’s behaviour still haunted me. I was shocked she didn’t even tell me when my father died in 1990. Writing my life story was part of a healing process, as was becoming a mother myself. I am proof that you really can set yourself free of your past.”
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