BBC’s new star: Dad’s prison shame that broke my heart
Luxury lifestyle of the £6.2m brothel keeper
THE past week has been a wonderful one. I was able to announce my new job, having kept the news to myself for many months. Come September I will be presenting the morning show on Radio 5 Live. On 5 Live Daily, I will be in the hot-seat from 10am to 1pm, Wednesday to Friday, grilling the great and good – and making some blistering radio in a slot previously held by broadcasting talents such as Victoria Derbyshire and Peter Allen.
It is a dream role and something I’ve been working towards for many years. However, it also marks the start of a more personal journey – as I will be returning to my home city of Manchester every week to present two of the programmes.
While I had a wonderful childhood in the North, this homecoming is tinged with a degree of sadness. For although Manchester is one of my favourite locations, it is also a place where many of my demons come to life; demons I am now trying to exorcise.
Nearly ten years ago, my world fell apart. I had just turned 23 and was walking to the nearest Tube station in London at the end of a long day on the business magazine where I cut my journalistic teeth. My phone rang and it was my then boyfriend, now husband. ‘Emma, I don’t know quite how to tell you this,’ he started, his voice faltering. ‘But you need to get on a train to Manchester now. Your dad is… is… going to prison. Tomorrow. I’m already on my way and have just spoken to your mum.’
The next ten minutes were a blur. I don’t remember saying anything on the phone, beyond a whimper of consent. I went very cold and was then suddenly encased in sweat. My legs wobbled on to the Tube for the short journey home to the tiny flat which I shared with my best friend. And then I fell to my knees, sobbing in the carriage, as other passengers looked on aghast at this twentysomething disintegrating before their eyes.
Somehow I managed to make it home before falling back down on to my knees with the confusion and pain of a child struck dumb.
My friend was suddenly there on the floor with me. And between sobs, she figured out that I needed a bag, packed it, and in what seemed like only minutes, I was on the train back to Manchester.
I knew my dad Ian was in trouble, but he had always made out it would never come to anything.
In fact, the last time I saw him was the weekend of my 23rd birthday, nine days earlier, when he mumbled something about ‘another court case’ and that he would see me after it. And that was classic Dad – his work, his problem. Nothing to do with me or anyone else.
I had a very traditional upbringing. My father was a local businessman, and for most of my life he worked in commercial property. Mum was a stay-at-home mother, and I was their only child.
But when I was a young teenager, a drastic change in Dad’s fortunes led to what I can now diagnose as a terrible decision on his behalf.
I was 14 when he became involved in the running of massage parlours in Manchester. I didn’t know about this change for some time, or even what massage parlours really were. I now know, of course, that they are part of the sex industry – but like any other teenager, I was wrapped up in my own world and soon preparing to leave home for university.
The first I learned that something was dreadfully wrong was at the start of my second year at university. I came back for the weekend and found the lock loose on the front door. After much questioning, and eye-avoiding from my mother, she revealed that they had been raided by the police that morning. Despite the fact that my father had been charged and then had a court case looming (his first), he kept everything to himself. Remarkably, his first case came and went without me being told, and I blithely enjoyed my time at university.
If I asked anything about the ‘situation’, as it became known, my father would always dismiss it by saying: ‘Don’t worry. It’s all in hand.’
But then he was rearrested in 2005, having been given what I now know was a suspended sentence the first time around, for the same crimes – namely living off immoral earnings. And this was the utter mess I came home to that cold February night three years later after he had entered a guilty plea for running several of these establishments, instead of having a trial as planned.
I could write more about how quickly both my mother and I had to play catch-up with lawyers I’d never met before, but this isn’t an article about my dad, his crimes and the dark world he inhabited for a short while.
This is my story – a personal piece about what happens when your life implodes at the precise moment it is meant to be starting; about that instant you realise your parents are human after all and the roles suddenly reverse. And while most people reading this will not be able to empathise with what happened to me exactly, many of you, I’m sure, will have some experience of a situation when all the lights seem to go out, at the same time, without any warning.
Telling my relatively new boss that I needed some time off was tough. Even tougher was when I had to tell him why, on the phone in a shaky voice I didn’t recognise.
Overnight I grew up – by about two decades. And a big part of the trauma was learning many things about my father’s businesses from the newspapers that I’d never known before. There were many untruths to unpick, too – but that’s another story.
However, there was not time for recovery. Immediately after Dad went to prison, we suddenly found out that my mother had also been charged and had an imminent court case to prepare for. And when I say we, I mean my stoic husband or – as he was then – my young university boyfriend, armed with an essential sense of humour and a bottle of brandy. At all times.
Our family home was in Mum’s name (as it had been for a long time before this situation), but as Dad was the one to pay the mortgage, she was tried for money-laundering. And while she was found innocent of the majority of charges, she was found guilty of some and handed a suspended sentence. At one particularly bleak and almost filmic moment, I stood outside the courtroom (I never went inside) alone while facing the nightmare prospect of having two parents behind bars at the same time.
Thankfully that didn’t happen. But prison visits to my father soon did. Nothing quite prepares you for your first time in the notorious Strangeways, where my father, despite being a white-collar criminal, existed for six months of his two-anda-half-year sentence.
My mother couldn’t face the first visit, but my boyfriend and I gritted our teeth, fulfilling our grim duty.
All I can remember now are vigorous searches, sniffer dogs and a tense waiting room, filled with mothers and screaming young children. Then I spotted Dad – unshaven and with tears in his eyes – sitting at a bolted-down table in a large hall, wearing a prisonissued shirt.
I was angry. My God I was. Angry at him. Angry at the world. For a long time, during these visits to Strangeways and the ones that followed in other prisons, normal conversations with my father simply didn’t happen. Instead, we just barked at each other about everything.
And while I felt deeply embarrassed, and huge shame washed over me as his story hit the newspapers – the very industry I was now working in – I made a big decision. I decided to try to thrive. While that might sound contrite and straight out of the pages of a self-help book, it’s true. The sins of the father are not the sins of the child. This wasn’t my mess and I had a choice – either let it break me into tiny ashamed pieces, or use my anger to fuel my passion for life, love and my work.
By choosing the latter and not wallowing in a tempting state of self-pity, I picked up where I had left off in London – but with an extra sense of urgency.
Throughout my career, colleagues and friends have often remarked to me that I seem to be in a hurry: ‘What’s the rush, Emma? You’re only young,’ they would say, as I dreamt of launching new sections at the newspaper where I worked, or when I took on the graveyard shift at LBC in an attempt to kick-start a career in radio at the same time as my day job.
But I’d changed. Irrevocably. And surprisingly for the better. By seeing a side of life very few people get to experience, I developed an empathy and humility beyond my years. And I wanted to hear and tell other people’s stories more than ever – now I had a greater understanding of the human condition far from the chocolate-box existence I’d grown up in.
My first documentary for BBC Radio 4 explored whether we had a ‘right to be forgotten’ after a new piece of EU legislation tried to tackle the issue of news ‘living for ever’ – or remaining available – in the digital age.
Meeting individuals with terrible stories either about them, or their families, I listened intently to their pain; about their inability to move on – never sharing my own anguish – but asking all the right questions.
The issue is a particularly difficult
My life was imploding… all the lights had gone out
one for prisoners who have served their time but then can’t find employment due to their online identity being dominated by news stories of their crimes.
This is just a symptom of one of the biggest untackled issues our society faces: the lack of proper rehabilitation for offenders.
But I also soon learned of an even lesser-known societal problem – the unspoken pain and stigma felt by people related to those in prison – the wives, husbands, mothers, fathers and children left behind, who have no one to talk to.
Once, when researching a story about youngsters in care, somebody working for Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, told me that the largest group of under-supported young people in Britain were the offspring of prisoners. They are too ashamed to tell anyone that their parent is locked up.
While thankfully I was not a child when my father went to prison, I was young all the same, and it is a life sentence I carry. Anyone related to someone who’s been in this position will feel the same but rarely speak of it.
The load has got lighter over the years but this is still very difficult for me to talk about. In fact, this is the first time I have done so publicly. And while this is the most exposing story I’ve ever committed to paper, I knew if I didn’t write it, someone else would, especially as I begin a new primetime radio show.
It’s fair to say that I’m still traumatised by what happened and have become an old soul before my time.
Only in the past year did I feel I could start to turn my experience into something positive. That’s when I signed up to volunteer for Pact – a nationwide charity which provides practical and emotional support to the children and families of prisoners.
I also feel ready to be completely honest with my radio listeners.
After all, radio is a very personal medium. You are in people’s ears, kitchens and bedrooms – one to one. I learned my trade at the coalface of hard-hitting phone-ins on my previous LBC show.
Listeners, buoyed by the facelessness of radio, would call with their deepest, darkest fears, problems and thoughts, especially as night fell. And my wells of empathy and sympathy were ready – as well as tough love where required.
WHAT I’ve learned from my unique family situation is to reserve judgment on others where at all possible. We’ve all got baggage. Some of it is of our making; some of it we’ve inherited. But I’ve also learned this: while we may not have the right for sins of the past to be forgotten in the digital age, we do have a right to be forgiven – something we’re still pretty awful at as a society.
It’s been a long, horribly bumpy road and, of course, there isn’t a day I don’t wish away what my dad did – but I have forgiven him. It’s taken me a long time to let myself have a good relationship with him again. We must live in a world where it is possible to genuinely move on and yet we don’t. In so many ways.
When I announced my new programme last week, I stated that I wanted to create a show ‘where people share strong views and have conversations on air that would normally happen in private’.
It’s only by blowing the cobwebs through our darkest fears that the light can shine through. Those are the conversations radio was built for and some of the ones I plan on facilitating back in my home town come September. Do join me.
The fee for this article has been donated to Pact, a charity that provides practical and emotional support to prisoners’ children and families. Find out more about its work at prisonadvice.org.uk.
Sins of the father are not the sins of the child