And f*** you, you probably won’t believe me anyway.’ She was talking about her father – telling me that he had been sexually abusing her for the past five years. ‘I have to leave or he has to,’ she had written.

The following evening, I was in the living room when she burst in, flung a piece of paper at me and stormed out.

At bedtimewe kissed goodnight, but for the first time we parted with a coolness between us. She began making hurtful personal attacks on her father and me, something she had never done. But that day she was impervious to reasoned argument. Tamsin and I squabbled, like all mothers and daughters. That was when the first hint of discord arose. At 15, she was a weekly boarder at a specialist school for high-ability dyslexics.ĭo. Was at school, and I was looking forward to spending some time with Tamsin, who had just broken up for the holidays. It started out fine, that Tuesday in December 1996. But I never for a moment dreamt that we were extraordinary – until As a ship’s engineer, my husband Daniel worked away from home for up to four months at a time. In many ways, we were an ordinary family – mum, dad, two kids, a Volvo in the drive.