My teacher groomed me – and my parents
Hayley McGregor was just 12 when her drama teacher began manipulating her, then her family. It took 20 years to understand she’d been abused, she tells Margarette Driscoll
If you had met Hayley McGregor five years ago, you’d have thought she had a near-perfect life: friends, a loving family and a career as an actress touring schools with theatre groups, and running the entertainment on cruise ships.
She had a string of short-term boyfriends, but for a carefree thirtysomething that seemed natural. What friends and colleagues did not know was that between casual flings she was binge-drinking.
“My greatest role as an actress was in my own life,” she says now. “You’d never know anything was amiss.”
In September 2012, she became obsessed by the story of Jeremy Forrest, the Eastbourne maths teacher who ran away to France with his 15-year-old pupil. The couple were found and Forrest brought back to the UK to face criminal charges. The following month, Operation Yewtree was set up to investigate allegations of historic sexual abuse, principally against Jimmy Savile.
“As I read more about these cases I found it harder to get up in the morning,” McGregor writes in her new book, Teacher’s Pet, an account of her own illicit affair with a schoolteacher.
“I found myself crying for no reason and snapping at people. At times, I’d get so worked up and emotional I found my chest tightening and my breath hard to catch.”
It was the beginning of a twoyear downward spiral. McGregor developed psoriasis, triggered by stress, and panic attacks. Her limbs felt like lead. A friend suggested that she was suffering from depression and persuaded her to see a counsellor.
“That was when the lights went on,” says McGregor. “Towards the end of the session I mentioned I’d had a relationship with my schoolteacher that started when I was 12 or 13 and that it might have affected me in some way. The counsellor said ‘Hayley, it’s affected you in every way’.”
The “love affair” with Andrew Willson, her drama master, began with hand-holding and whispered endearments but quickly progressed to being groped in his office and performing sex acts. On some occasions, they met outside school. One day he borrowed a friend’s house for the afternoon. She was then 14 and during all their trysts she continued to call him “Mr Willson” or “Sir”.
“I just wanted to please him. I didn’t know anything about sex,” she says. “I really thought he loved me. The counsellor asked if he was still teaching. Could he have done it again? My first reaction was ‘No! What we had was special…’ Then I saw the look on his face and I realised what a fool I sounded.”
In February last year, Willson was jailed for 20 months after pleading guilty to five counts of indecent assault against McGregor, who is now 36. His guilty pleas spared her the ordeal of being cross-examined in court, but meant he owned up to kissing her only twice and being intimate on three occasions. “That’s not how I remember it,” she says.
McGregor keeps being told by friends that she should be proud of having stood up to her former teacher. But the trauma has left her drained.
“It’s flipped my life 360 degrees,” she says. “I’ve been an actress for 20 years, but I don’t want to be one now. My career only started because he cast me as the lead in school shows: did I deserve that or was he just using it to get to me? My whole life feels tainted.”
When Willson arrived at Fearns High School in Bacup, Lancashire, in the mid-Nineties, McGregor had just started in Year Eight. She was shy and unsure of herself but had a flair for theatre. He was 25 and married, with a disabled son.
Willson was unlike any teacher McGregor had encountered: gregarious, tactile, flirtatious. He reminded her of Mark Owen, her favourite member of the boy band Take That. Outside of class he had an agent, acting jobs, and played in a rock band. He seemed impossibly glamorous. McGregor was by no means the only girl with a crush on him, but she was the one he singled out for praise.
“Brilliant, Hayley,” she remembers him saying time and again. “Right everyone, just stop for a minute and watch Hayley.”
He was similarly effusive at parents’ evening. McGregor had mentioned her father Neil, a fireman, supported Leeds United. Willson greeted the family by saying “Your daughter is brilliant! Now, about Leeds…”
They were soon going to football matches together. As a trusted friend, Willson was allowed to drive McGregor home after rehearsals, giving him an excuse to be with her alone.
Incredibly, this grooming of her parents went on even after Willson suddenly left the school and moved to Northamptonshire. He had been McGregor’s teacher for about two years by that point, but didn’t tell her he was leaving. Shattered, she learnt the news from her father, but had to pretend everything was normal.
Shortly after, the family went to see Leeds play at Wembley to celebrate her 15th birthday and, on the way back, Willson invited them to stay at his new family home. McGregor was given a makeshift bed downstairs. Her former teacher crept into the room at dawn and had full sex with her for the first time, as her parents slept upstairs.
“When I think of it now, the audacity, the risk-taking, it just seems incredible,” she says. “But I was totally carried away, I believed he wanted me, that he missed me every minute, and that he couldn’t be with me until his son was at school.”
The intensity of the relationship waned after McGregor left home aged 19. But Willson’s friendship with her parents endured and they still met at family events. He would always contrive to see her alone, even if just for a few minutes, for a passionate kiss or grope.
Her unsuspecting mother and father even asked him to perform at a surprise party for McGregor’s 21st birthday. He later did the same at Neil’s 50th, “so he’s right there in our family videos”.
On that occasion, when she was 29, McGregor spurned his advances. But it wasn’t until she saw the counsellor in 2014 that she faced up to what had happened. People sometimes wonder why it takes the victims of historic abuse so long to come forward. McGregor says that, had she not suffered a “full-on breakdown”, she would probably never have said a word. Even after realising her relationship with Willson was “wrong in every way”, she was reluctant to go to the police, knowing she would have to tell her devastated parents.
“We’re only just starting to come back from it. They feel so betrayed,” she says. “I also feel massive guilt towards his family. What happened isn’t their fault.”
McGregor has been supported through the ordeal by her boyfriend, Leroy. But the emotional impact of her experience lingers. “Sometimes I feel glad it’s all out in the open,” she adds. “At other times I feel like I’ve ruined the lives of everyone around me.”
Teacher’s Pet by Hayley McGregor is published by Ebury. To order a copy for £6.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
‘I just wanted to please him. I knew nothing about sex. I thought he loved me’