Hello, my name is Nicola. I visited your site, read the stories there and would like to share with you all that happened to me. I am 18 years old now, and wouldn't call myself a survivor. I feel what happened every day even though it's not nearly so bad as what I've read has happened to others, both here and on other sites. I have only recently broken my silence and told my boyfriend a rough outline of what happened in my past. I want to write here what I am unable to tell him - the detail.

One of my earliest memories is that of abuse. I can't tell you when it started, what age I was, but I can't remember a time when it wasn't happening. I was abused by my father. My parents had been married for ten years before they had any children, they never wanted any, especially my mother. There are only two of us, I am the eldest, and the only girl, and she got pregnant with me by accident at the age of thirty. She got pregnant again with my brother soon after I was born and resented us both, but me especially, for keeping her away from her career, and tied to the house. She's never been a bad mother, but has never been there for me when I needed her. She has always, from when I was very young, been immune to my feelings and uninterested in my life. And so I, in turn, stopped sharing these things with her a long time ago. She and my brother are very alike in temperament and have always got on, they go places together and talk all the time, even now. I was more like my father - quieter, more patient. And I spent a lot of time with him. He would come up to my bedroom every night and tuck me in to bed. It was then that my first memory of abuse occured. He had touched me before, when he got me out of the bath, when I had nightmares and went to his bed, when he got me dressed, whenever he had the opportunity. But when I was six he converted the attic bedroom for me in our house, installed me up there with two doors and a creaky flight of stairs between me and the rest of the house. The first night there, he climbed into bed with me. He took my hands in his and made me touch him. He'd never done that before, to my knowledge. That was as far as it went that first night but I was so confused and afraid I remember it well. Every night after that it would happen, he'd pull up my nightie, move my legs around to his satisfaction, guide my hands to him, and move them up and down. He'd say that noone would believe me if I told anyone, that my mother would have a breakdown and I would be sent away to a home for bad children for making it up. And I believed him. I was a lonely child anyway, and I don't think it would have occured to me to tell, and it certainly didn't after that. So it carried on, and it got worse. I was seven years old when he first raped me. It wasn't at bedtime, my mother had taken my brother swimming and left us in the house, he was home from work, and he took me up to my bedroom, to 'play'. He still had his suit on and he sat on the floor of my room with me for awile, playing with my toys. Then he told me to get on the bed, and he took off my clothes, then his pants. He told me that I'd enjoy this, it was a different sort of game, and he wanted to make me happy. He touched himself for a awhile whilst just looking at me and then he climbed onto me and pushed his way inside me. I remember how much it hurt, and I remember feeling bad because I was meant to be having fun. I knew, though, I knew that it was wrong, and that it hurt, and that I didn't - I DIDN'T want him to do it. I tried to tell him, I asked him to stop that first time but he couldn't handle it and put his hand over my mouth until he had finished. Then he told me to get dressed, put my toys away and come down for supper. Like it was normal. And I accepted it as normal.

But I laid in my bed every night dreading the sound of a footfall on the stairs. I could never sleep until I heard both my mother and father go to bed and I hadn't had a visit. But that didn't happen often. It was ritual, routine, part of my childhood. Get home from school, play, teatime, bath, rape, bed. I'd cry sometimes, afterwards. But soon it got so I had no tears left, and I'd just huddle there, sore and aching, hating myself for letting this happen, for wanting this to happen. I actually believed I wanted him to do that, he told me I did so many times.

By the time I was ten I'd run away frequently, often just for the night, I'd lie to my mother and spend the night in the local park. But when I got back it just got worse. My mother wouldn't speak to me, froze me out, and my father would introduce new things in the form of punishment. He'd force me to give him oral sex, I really objected to that, but he'd hold my head there until I thought I was going to pass out. It carried on until I was eleven when my mother left my father, and us, and went to live thirty miles away. Then I was her replacement - in every way. I looked after my brother, the house, cooked the meals, and slept in his bed. With only a nine year old in the house to stop him I could count on his advances up to three times a day. I had no friends, I couldn't relate. They were just starting to giggle about boys, thought I was weird.

It all ended when my Dad left us kids so he could move in with another woman - literally just left one night, leaving us in the house, thus forcing my mother to move back to look after us. I was thirteen at this point. I haven't seen my father since, noone in my family knows what happened for all those years. I threw myself into my schoolwork, got good marks, never stopped working because then I'd have time to think. But I couldn't do it forever. I had nightmares, felt like I was worthless, had nobody, had nothing. I couldn't block out the memories and I'd lay in bed reliving it over and over.

When I was fourteen, I went to stay with my cousin for the summer. She was a lot older than me and she took me to parties and for nights out and I started to meet people. But one night after having too much to drink -remember I was only fourteen. Anyway I ended up in bed with this boy and we had sex. I didn't know I had the right to say no, and it wasn't his fault, he didn't know I didn't want what was happening, I just lay there. But the effects were awful, it really hurt me, it brought everything back, and I haven't really got over it yet.

I still feel that I can't say no, I still feel what happened every day, the wounds are still raw and it hurts. I still self harm and I still hurt and I'm trying so hard to bury it all in the past where it belongs. I still feel dirty, still feel sullied, marked, tainted by this. I'm unlovable, and unnatural, and i've done so much wrong.... I know all this and I accept all this but still, I can't forget all this. I don't know what I've achieved by writing this but I hope someone somewhere gets some good from reading it. Thankyou for the time it has taken, all of you. I hope maybe I can add a happy ending someday.

Thankyou for putting this on your site, I don't know if it's the right type of thing, but it's the truth.

Nicola