My father paid me pounds 5,000 not to see him again

A writer reveals how her father wanted nothing to do with her once he had remarried

ONE achingly bright and optimistic October morning three years after my parents' divorce, I received a message from my father. I was told to go to a foreign bank in the Holloway Road where I would find something waiting for me.

Intrigued, I went along and asked to speak to the manager. He was expecting me and - saying I had a very generous dad - presented me with a cheque for pounds 5,000. Quite a packet in those days, back in the Seventies.

As I was then in my early twenties and had just bought my first flat, the money was very welcome. I called my father to thank him. He assured me that it was nothing "weird" - even though my pops and his piles of cash were rarely easily parted - and that he would do the same for my siblings when they bought property. So that, it seemed, was most satisfactory.

Everyone's a winner, baby, I hummed merrily as I planned how to spend my windfall. Little did I know that I was never to see my father again.

Admittedly, our relationship hadn't been a strong one ever since 12 years earlier, at the age of nine, I had decided I didn't like my dad. The oldest of his three children, I was the first to catch the insensitive side of his character.

Frankly, I was just sick of worrying myself to the point of deep queasiness every night after school, wondering if he would find fault and send me to my room. Somehow the hollow canned laughter of The Benny Hill Show or Love Thy Neighbour drifting up the stairs only served to magnify my own sense of confusion and loneliness as I sat trapped in my Donny Osmondfestooned bedroom.

Eventually, I stopped talking to my father. I valiantly ignored him for almost six months. That was the first time I beat him at his own game of lovelessness. I got very good at it over the ensuing years.

Although dad was never violent in the manner of, say, Evil Trevor from EastEnders, violence, was nevertheless, always a very real presence in our house.

Initially, it was mostly just torment. Apart from repeatedly kicking our beloved cat Woody (named after a Bay City Roller), my father, a Greek Cypriot, would typically promise rewards which never materialised or, when I had dressed for the annual school disco, suddenly did not allow me to go - that sort of thing, usually accompanied by much illogical, purple-faced ranting.

He was a powerfully built man, with Tony Sopranotype good looks, flash with his cash and - like the TV Mafia boss - charming to the outside world but beastly to live with and full of sexual jealousies. In a word, scary.

IWAS far too strong to go off the rails but so wanted to escape. I planned to run away from our home in east London, but I loved my mum. Anyway, I was given to understand it involved sleeping in small cardboard boxes - and I didn't fancy that.

So, instead, I immersed myself in delicious fantasies that would occupy me for hours. These mostly involved Woody from The Bay City Rollers bursting into my house, sometimes with a cheeky young David Essex to lend a hand, and punching my dad on the nose before whisking me off to live a life of popstarry splendour. I often added to the dream that I would one day become a journalist or a TV chat-show host and expose my father's cruelty, publicly bringing shame on him and showing him who was boss now.

There were real escapes to friends' houses every now and then. My nicest times were at my best friend Debra's house. I loved it there: it was so normal. I marvelled at the ease and closeness between her and her father, Alf. I used secretly to watch him and pretend for a few lovely moments that he was my dad.

As we all grew older and more able to fight for our rights, and my father could no longer control us with just the threat of violence, things really began heating up in the Kadis household.

We were virtuosi at self-preservation by then, and my sisters and I rather hoped we could either drive him out or perhaps - with luck - point him in the direction of an early death.

Our efforts were sort of substandard Beano comic tomfoolery and mainly designed to keep our spirits up. It's what miserable kids do.

We tried the old rollerskate-at-the-top-ofthestairs chestnut, tacks on the driveway etc. We even tried to give him a heart attack by whistling - not as silly as it sounds. He was grossly overweight by this stage (he seemed to be stockpiling cholesterol for England), and the thing that made him most irate was whistling. We whistled through the entire 1982 World Cup.

One evening, when I was 19, I came home to find my dad drinking whisky (alas, not from the bottle with the laxative in it) and feeling sorry for himself. My mum was divorcing him and had borrowed enough money to put a deposit down on another house nearby. And, somewhat unfathomably, as far as my father was concerned it was entirely my fault. Never mind, we were to be freed and I whooped inwardly with joy.

The day we left was a happy one. My mother and sisters and I piled into a taxi for the journey to our new home and gleefully waved goodbye to dad, who posed stricken against the front door.

My sisters laughed - probably nerves, I thought, though to this day they insist it was pleasure. Even Woody the cat was getting a last laugh. As he sat on my sister's lap she picked up his paw and waved it sarcastically out of the window. Bye bye.

That's when I changed. I no longer feared my dad. I suddenly saw this man, who had wielded power over us for 20 years, for what he was: a comical, lost, pathetically short bloke with nothing but his money to keep him company, too cowardly to be alone and too weak to make amends. So I did The Big Thing. I made the effort to keep in touch - something none of my sisters did.

I thought it was what he wanted. Oddly, though, he did his grieving and remarrying at warp speed and had two children (with a much younger woman) in quick succession - boys this time, far more in keeping with his ideal family picture. He got a new home just up the road and a new wife who smiled at him hopefully (but not for long, I'll wager).

I split the family photos and gave him half but, disconcertingly, he didn't seem that grateful or interested. I found that I was being invited over less frequently and each time the atmosphere was chillier until, finally, I got the call about the bank in Holloway.

Soon after, he moved abroad with his new family, leaving no forwarding address. I should have known it was coming. The last birthday card he sent me contained a pounds 20 note and was sentimentally signed "From Mr Kadis".

When the penny finally dropped I wondered why he had, in effect, paid me not to see him again. Was it the failed homicide attempts?

Was it the whistling?

Did he still blame me for the divorce?

No. I believe it was because I spoilt the look of the new family picture. I was part of the old picture and he was pretending to be someone else now.

More importantly, I reminded him of who he really was. I reminded him of what he had done. So, with a tidy sum, he assuaged his guilt and I was silenced: paid off like a faithful old worker who was no longer good for the company's new image.

Applying his warped logic, we were both richer - he morally and I financially.

ACTUALLY, I am relatively scarfree, mostly down to having a good mother.

A friend recently said that my experience had been a bit like public school - character building, though one could have done without the pain and humiliation. My recovery was swift. In the event I much preferred having pounds 5,000 to my father, and it was well spent on psychotherapy and a fridgefreezer. And - although I never married a Bay City Roller - I did get to write my expos.

Copyright 2002
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