Woman comes out after four marriages, life 'in a cage'

Updated

"This story has to be told." Raped from the age of seven, and forced to marry a paedophile, 68-year-old lesbian woman Helen Tompkin-Puzey is finally free.

Helen Tompkin-Puzey looks at a photo of her 28-year-old self, hanging on her lounge room wall.

"That young woman there, she was very down-trodden, very much afraid of everything," she says.

Growing up in a lower middle-class family in Sheffield, England, Helen knew she was gay from the age of four.

She had a girlfriend at school until the age of 13, when her family moved to Australia.

"We were known as the little dykes," she says.

In the classroom, she daydreamed of a fantasy land where she was safe and warm and surrounded by love.

In her home, she was part of a living nightmare.

"In the old days the cure for being a lesbian was to put you in bed with a man," she says.

"I was a lesbian, and my mother was brought up Catholic in a Catholic orphanage in England, and to her that was the most terrible thing on Earth.

"I was seven years old when she put me in bed with a man.

A bed was made up in the dark attic.

When she was fast asleep, an unknown man would crawl into her bed and rape her.

If she cried out, his hand covered her mouth.

"Night, after night, after night, somebody I don't know, I can't see," she says.

"And things are happening that I don't know anything about."

It was never talked about with her family, but she knew it was something she was never to speak of.

The only time in her life Helen has experienced true love was when she was 14. She had a teenage romance with a girl from the Melbourne factory where she worked.

"She was beautiful. God did I fall for that girl."

Married to a paedophile

But as soon as Helen turned 16, she says, her mother married her off to a 28-year-old man that the family had only recently met.

"I didn't choose to be with that man," she says.

"Her idea was to marry me off to the first taker."

She gave birth to seven of his children in seven years, two of whom died as babies.

During that time, she says her husband would beat her, rape her, encourage some of the children to mistreat her, and deny the family food.

One time he held her down and pulled her teeth out with pliers.

Helen's world fell apart when she later found out he was a child abuser.

"He was an extremely brutal man.

"I found out later he was a paedophile. I had him arrested, he went to jail.

"If I'd have got a hold of him, I'd have killed him."

A long life in prison

While Helen says her husband served time in jail, she remained trapped in a wall-less prison.

She married, and then married again, and then married again, deeply burying her homosexuality.

Her second marriage was in her late 20s, with a man in his 60s.

They were friends.

He helped her and the kids when they had no place to go, and she cared for him when he got sick.

She says when they got married, he became possessive and paranoid.

"If I wasn't there, smack in the face," she says.

"He became a dictator. And then he bashed the kids.

"I left a couple of times, but where can you go with five children? You're trapped again."

This became a pattern in Helen's life.

She says she became conditioned to be a victim, as if she had a sign on her forehead, alerting abusers to an easy target.

"I did what I was told," she says.

"I learnt the hard way that a man's fist is a lot harder than a woman's face.

"I'd been forced into having sex with somebody since I was seven years old.

"I was never taught that I could say no, it's easier to go with the flow."

She found her last husband with the help of her son, who began trawling the lonely hearts section of a newspaper for her.

"He said 'I think you're lonely'.

"He decides to pick out the perfect husband for me, and I'm still not game to tell him that I'm gay.

A few years ago after Helen's last husband left her, she tried to track down the only true love of her life — her teenage girlfriend.

She was no longer alive, but she managed to speak with her sister.

It was a heartbreaking conversation, that still brings Helen to tears.

"She'd also been forced to marry a man," Helen says.

"Her sister told me that one of her last conversations was about me.

"It was 'if only, Helen was the love of my life'."

Given up on love, but fighting for the future

Last year at the age of 67, Helen finally came out with the help of Goulburn Valley Pride, a local country Victorian support group which has had 260 members over the past decade.

"I felt relief, absolute freedom.

"I felt like somebody had taken the cage away. It felt like I'd been in a cage forever.

"I've never ever felt my name fitted."

Helen has given up on ever finding love.

She's unwell, and rarely ventures away from the comfort of her tiny Mooroopna home.

A devout Christian, now confident in her own skin, Helen says her focus now is speaking to younger people in the LGBTI community.

"I get a lot of satisfaction if I can help them," she says.

"Even if it's just a shoulder to cry on."

Helen's soul may finally be free.

But after four unhappy marriages where she was either used or abused, and following decades of hiding her true self, Helen Tompkin-Puzey will not rest until marriage equality is recognised in Australia.

"I'm fighting now for tomorrow land, when everybody's equal."

Topics: lgbt, marriage, child-abuse, domestic-violence, mooroopna-3629

First posted