Review by Bill Kirton
Some of my friends have said of this book
that they want to read it but, knowing the pain and horrors it chronicles, need
to get themselves into the right frame of mind to do so. Others have admitted
that they doubt whether they’ll actually get round to it. They should and must
– for several reasons.
It’s an autobiographical story, written
under a pseudonym, which reveals how a 3 year old was subjected to gross sexual
abuses at the behest of her own mother, and forced to continue servicing
visitors to the house until eventually, at the age of eleven, she ran away.
Thereafter, life on the streets proved equally stressful, threatening to
confirm all the negatives she felt about how people behave.
Perhaps that crude synopsis has made you
join the ‘I’m not sure I could read this – it’s too horrible’ camp. If it has,
it’s deprived you of an astonishing experience. Because this is a page turner
and, bizarrely, a sort of celebration. I know that’s a cliché beloved of Amazon
reviewers, but here it’s a fact. The story is relentlessly riveting. There’s
tension, hidden (and not so hidden) forces at work, powerful characters, and
observations of social interaction that are penetrating insights into what
lurks behind the facades of sunny, happy-go-lucky Australia, where families
picnic in the sun and glory in sights such as the fabulous Sydney Harbour
Bridge.
The abuse inflicted on the infant
Sassy-Girl (let’s use the street name she earned) was not at the hands of social
low-lifes, but ‘respectable’ middle class professionals. When she eventually
rebels and runs away, she has to find places to sleep, clothes to wear, ways to
get food, and simultaneously avoid the pressure from pimps to recruit her into
their stable. She experiences some kindnesses but her whole life seems to have
been a denial that trust is possible between humans. When groups of girls at
the zoo mock her for the clothes she’s wearing, she asks ‘why do people do
those things? What was it that gave those girls the right to make fun of
something they didn't understand?’ adding that ‘It would take a very long time to
discover how common that trait was in humans’.
It would have been so easy (in theory) to
succumb to prostitution to earn her keep, but the abuse she suffered makes her
determined never to allow her body to be used again. As she says ‘I knew my
soul would die anyway if I made a conscious decision to sell the child's body
in which it was housed. I wasn’t being brave, or strong. I simply knew that all
of me would survive – or another me would. What point would there be living
without my soul and my spirit?’
An author’s note at the beginning speaks of
the compulsion Danson had to write this, the promise she’d made to someone to
do so, but she also admits that it’s taken longer to get round to it than she
thought it would. And that’s part of the spell this narrative weaves. We’re
getting the intimate day to day experiences of a 12 year old – the encounters,
the threats, the violence, the alienation – but they’re all being recounted by
the mature woman she survived to become.
And the narrator herself is aware of this,
of course. This is a woman who knows how to write, how to use language,
sometimes simply, always directly, to engage the reader, a woman who has come
to know that friendships and trust are possible, and yet who’s re-entering the
mind of her pre-teen self and reliving those years, with their innocence and
ignorance. Because Sassy-Girl is uneducated (in formal terms). She thinks
everyone speaks Australian (except Americans, whom she’s seen on TV and who
speak American). ‘If someone had told me we all spoke English,’ she says, ‘I
would have been even more confused.
At times, the mature narrator lends her
voice to the girl. When she makes her way to the War Memorial, for example, she
says she ‘spent the rest of the night in the company of the spirits of people
who had died in a nightmare as well’. And there’s an awareness of the power of
simplicity in sentences such as ‘I wanted to laugh and mean it’, or ‘It
reminded me of the way I cried, back when I still could.’
But these aren’t intended to be criticisms.
The moment Sassy-Girl suspects she’s feeling self-pity, she forces herself out
of it. She’s a survivor and, despite all the torments she’s endured in these
early years, what remains is an affirmation of her spirit, a confidence that,
despite the enormous forces ranged against her, she won’t be a loser. It’s a
compelling read, a reminder of the deepest evils of which we’re capable, but
also a celebration of our ability to overcome.
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