My grandmother, like most Saint Helena women would either plait my hair or put it up in curls with ringlets and pretty bows. She loved doing my hair. When she was done she would stand back and look admiringly and tell me how pretty I was.
I would love her praising me and I would feel so proud of myself. On the other hand my Grandfather Fred always said that he hated me. He would always say how much he hated me and said that I made his blood boil with hatred.
He didn’t like me giggling, laughing or talking to my grandmother. Maybe that is why I didn’t tell my grandmother that there were two older young men attacking me. One was 17 years old and the other was 18 to 19 years old. They were doing those awful evil things to me. If I could I would have told her everything, I wish I did.
One of them, the oldest one would sit and hide in the bushes and grab me as I walked by. I can see it as if it was yesterday. There was a large black concrete water tank at the back of our house that I would collect water from. Just past the tank there was a hollow. The man would grab me and drag me into the hollow then he would forcibly drag me like a ragdoll deep into the flex bushes.
I never could escape his clutches, I was so frightened that I might die and my grandmother would not be able to find me. I would scream as loud as I could but no one ever heard me. Of course I was around 11 to 12 years old and I now know that there were young people in their houses. His sister was in my class at school and he knew how old I was.
The other rapist was younger then him but not by much. I stopped collecting firewood further into the woods when he first started attacking. I tried to collect closer to his mother’s cowshed so that my screams would be heard but that did never deterred him. We were just children on tap, never ending supply of children to have their ways with. They did what ever they wanted to do and they never stopped.
Eventually, I moved away because my grandmother died. My life consisted of being loved and praised by my grandmother and hated by my grandfather.
While those two young men would drive me and hurt me whenever they wanted to complete torture for five years I often wondered what they were like as fathers. Did they look at their 11-year-old daughters and think of me.
I would always look at my daughters when they were 17 years old and think that thank God that my daughters are not treated to the evil that I was treated to.