David Tait, a former investment banker, told the harrowing story of the abuse he was subjected to as a child and lamented the fact that he had no one to turn to for support.
Mr Tait, who was in the Island this week to deliver a fundraising speech on behalf of NSPCC Jersey to staff at HSBC Jersey, said that he was abused by several men, including his father, and that his ‘tremendous need to find someone to blame’ in later life led to his own ‘abject callousness’ and, ultimately, the breakdown of his first marriage.
He believes that the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his father led to his mother’s suicide.
Mr Tait explained that he and his family came to the UK from South Africa in the early 1970s, when he was ten, and that he had a job outside school time in a tearoom owned by a family friend close to his home in Deptford.
‘One day I was stacking shelves when a large box of Fry’s Chocolate Creams fell to the floor. I picked up one of the bars and put it in the waistband of my shorts. The owner of the shop saw me do it and told me to put it back,’ he said. ‘As I turned, I felt an enormous blow to the right-hand side of my face. I fell forward and as I lay on the ground my clothing, my shirt and my shorts, were ripped from me.
‘I felt an enormous weight as he lay on me and then the most excruciating pain. I was ten years old and I had been raped.’
Afterwards, he was told to clean himself up in a small toilet cubicle and remained silent due to the threat the man made to tell his father he was a thief.
Mr Tait, who has scaled Mount Everest five times to raise money for the NSPCC and was awarded an MBE for his fundraising efforts, added that throughout that summer he had to ‘endure the attentions of that man and his friends’.
‘Every single day I had to clean myself in that small cubicle that smelled of lavender. To this day, I loathe the smell of lavender.’
His parents moved away from the area but returned to visit over the Christmas period, when he was attacked by the tearoom owner again. He said that even after he left Deptford the abuse did not stop, as his father began to sexually abuse him.
‘In our new house my father started to visit me in the evenings, until he was discovered by my mother,’ he said.
‘I tell my story to warn of monsters and offer an escape to those for whom this particular warning may have come to late.
‘Every violated and raped child knows that monsters really do exist.’
