Paper Bag
“It affected the whole of my life, I went right off the rails afterwards, I never went back to reading Jackie comics. All stopped. I just drowned in drink and drugs and being suicidal. I feel destroyed. I never told my mum and she’s dead now, it’s the one thing that really upsets me. She’d seen, you know, what became of me.“
Extract from a BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour 2014. Interview with a survivor of sexual abuse at the age of 14 by Jimmy Saville, she maintained the silence of her abuse for over 40 years.
This interview ignited uneasy memories for me of childhood in the 1960s. Paper Bag explores the struggle of withholding a secret trauma long term.