The first of the three fathers that Nicky Loutit remembers is Robert Kee. He had been a fighter pilot and prisoner of war, and later became a writer, broadcaster and member of the “famous five” who founded TV-am. He was handsome, charismatic and angry.
Aged two-and-a-half, Nicky was put in a children’s home by her mother, Janetta, who is now 95. “She said to me recently that she knew I didn’t like that home, but she was so mad about Robert that she put me there for my own protection,” says Nicky. “She felt she was saving me. I remember crying and crying and crying. Still now, it makes me cry. If I’d talked about it 10 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have cried.” Getting older, says Nicky, now 73, she “feels more tender”.
Nicky is a painter who has produced a unique and haunting memoir, in pictures and words, of her extraordinary childhood. It reveals a trio of fathers who were highly regarded figures in public, but who, in private, variously inflicted on her mental, physical or sexual abuse.
An image from Nicky Loutit’s book New Year’s Day Is Black.
Derek called her Knickers. “Oh, God, he was ghastly. I never liked him. He was quite happy to pay for me to go to school, he wanted to please my mother, but he didn’t care a fiddle about me.” He would test Nicky on maths and delight in her failures. She often confuses her numbers, even now.
When she was nine, the one reliable man in her childhood helped to reunite father and daughter. James MacGibbon was a publisher and friend of Nicky’s father Kenneth; Nicky played with James’s son, Robert, and adored them both. James, Robert and her father planned to sail across the Channel and on to Paris together and James, thoughtfully, suggested they invite Nicky along.
The MacGibbons slept in a separate cabin and didn’t know. They were appalled when Nicky told them 30 years later.
Boarding school was a release. “I felt saved by boarding school. I loved it but had to slightly pretend that I didn’t, because my mother and her bohemian friends were scornful of school,” she says. She was beaten by a maths teacher and then found friendship with one particular teacher. “He was wonderful, very inspiring,” she says. “He loved me and I was very important to him.” He took her on little excursions in his car and read Under Milk Wood and the Bible. He continued lessons in his bedroom, where several pupils joined him in bed. As his favourite, Nicky had to put her head on his chest. “Looking back, it was sexual, but it wasn’t overtly sexual like my father’s abuse,” says Nicky.
One day, she was swimming with other pupils, naked, in the lily pond in the school grounds (which, bizarrely, they were allowed to do). She had reached puberty and her friends were envious of her breasts, but he saw that she had “got too big” and “I wasn’t this sweet little girl snuggled up to him”. He ended their special relationship. “It was devastating. His rejection was like everything in my childhood. It wasn’t said, so I couldn’t reply, ‘Please don’t.’ It just happened. Suddenly, I was never invited into his room again.” She recalls his next favourite: a younger, skinnier pupil. “It was terrible,” she says.