I always find it strange how I don't really remember much of my brother being around when I was a little girl. Of course, he was, but because I seem to have blocked out so much from my early childhood; I have been left with only snippets of memories from when we were both very young.

Jason is two years younger than I am, and we have different biological fathers. Our mum had a brief relationship with his dad, and an even briefer marriage to him. I think that my own father still being very much in the picture, kind of cramped their marital style.

I have no memories of Jason's father. None whatsoever. But I do remember Jason being the cutest and the chubbiest little brother that his often sad sister could have ever had.

He had the brightest and the brownest eyes, framed with dark girl-like lashes. He also had tufts of golden brown hair, that curled behind both of his ears, and his nose, was just the smallest and the cutest that I'd ever seen. Jason was the sweetest little thing. I remember that. I just don't remember much else.

They say that memories can fade. I think that mine never really got the chance to ever shine.

Until the age of nine, most of my memories were of the dull and bad kind. Yet sometimes, such precious sometimes; light shards of happiness would shine through the shadows of my darkened memories—I remember us playing in the back garden, seeing whether any of us were brave enough to enter the cold and unlit coal shed. I remember us learning how to ride bikes that didn't even belong to us. I remember us swinging on an old tyre that was attached to a tree somewhere in woods near to our home. I remember us racing one another to fill up our boxes with cut grass and hedge clippings, and both getting stung by wasps—those are some of the few childhood moments that I can still freshly remember today.

The one and only time that vividly sticks in my mind of becoming properly aware of my brother—was when I first began being molested.

I'm not sure how old I was when it first began, maybe three or four?

The man, who at every opportunity would have his hand down my knickers, was the Bulgarian lodger of a feisty old lady who lived in the ground floor maisonette opposite to ours. Ada Woodcock always looked old. With straggly long grey hair that was always harshly tied back and her heavily wrinkled face, she perpetually looked to be about one hundred years old.

She looked like a hag.

Sounded like a hag.

Was feared like a hag.

But Ada Woodcock, had a big heart.

We lived on a housing estate, where all the misfits, weirdos and the misunderstood were clumped closely together. And the weirdos liked to prowl. I can't tell you the amount of times that my mother would wake me and my brother up in the middle of the night, to then drag us across the road to the safety of Ada Woodcock's.

No one messed with Ada. If they did, she would literally chase them away with the poker that she used to stoke up her coal fire with.

And the woman never seemed to sleep. She would stay up all night long, drinking Woodpecker Cider, chain smoking and talking to her Budgies.

So Ada, was like a super hero hag.

Nothing scared her.

No one frightened her.

When my mother thought she was taking us into the arms of safety, she wasn't. Or at least, not for me.

Ivan was also old. Not as old as Ada, but I remember that he was still old. His English was very broken, so I often found it hard to properly understand him. So one day, when he took my hand and began muttering very bad English under his breath while he took me into the kitchen, I had no idea what he was about to do.

"Sweets, for you...yes?" He had asked me, nodding over and over with a smile that spanned his overly eager face.

I know I had looked at the bag of sweets that he was hovering just in front of my face, and those sweets had me excitingly soon nodding.

With that innocently given nod, Ivan thought he now had his perverse permission to quickly stick his hand down into my knickers. It lasted mere moments. After his fingers being somewhere that they never should have been, he promptly gave me the sweets with the same sickening broad smile. "Sshhh! Our secret...yes?"

Again, I had nodded.

I had no real understanding of what had just taken place.

And being so young, I never knew how to even question it.

After that day, Ivan would molest me wherever and whenever he could. Sometimes, he would steal sneaky sick seconds doing it in the hallway, or if he was really lucky, wrongful minutes in his bedroom or the bathroom.

With his hand squeezing my innocence, it was those times when I would think of my brother. Wondering whether the same thing was happening to him. That would be my first real recollection of my protectiveness for Jason. I made sure that I shared any sweets I was ever given with him, so he never had to be a part of something that he shouldn't ever be a part of.

Every time Ivan had his vile hand down my knickers, I kept wondering why he had to do it. I knew I didn't like it, but I was too young to ever tell him that. I didn't even understand what he was doing, so how could I ever question what he was doing?

He would touch me.

Tell me to keep it a secret.

Then give me my small bag of sweets.

That's how it was.

The more times he did it, the less I knew what to do about it.

At such a young age, I was already having to learn how to emotionally and physically protect myself. Not just from my unpredictable mum and my uncommitted father, and not just the Catholic school and its cruelness there, not even the weirdos and the prowlers who all lived nearby...I was also trying to protect myself from an elderly predator.

"Come on, Mary Rose, we're going over to Ada's for dinner." My little heart just sank at those words. On that particular day, my heart just dropped at the thought of having to see Ivan again.

So before we went, I neatly folded up layers and layers of some toilet tissue, and put it down inside my knickers.

I don't really know why I had done that.

I just remember doing it.

Now when I think back to that confusing time, I think my five year old self was trying to protect my innocence. I think the toilet roll was being used to physically block Ivan's hand from touching that innocence.

Unfortunately, it didn't work.

If it wasn't bad enough that the toilet roll didn't ever save me, worst was yet to come.