In smoggy 1960s Yorkshire, a world away from the psychedelics of London, Mo arrives at the dingy building in Dewsbury where she is going to be a temp. She is not welcomed, instead she is ridiculed – a fat stupid girl running about like a frightened mouse. Merv though, the charismatic co-Director of the company, sees something in her he wants and takes her aside to be his PA. He uses his power and smooth transatlantic charm to shape her to his needs, letting her into his high flying world where there is glamour she has only seen in black and white on the TV, and showing her off against the hair-sprayed, stiletto heeled PAs of big companies. But he also shapes her with his brutality and so Mo must learn how to be right when it matters, to second guess his moods, and to survive without friend or family to turn to because in 1971, she is the one who is wrong.
Fat Mo has been a long time in the making, fifty years in fact, but events in America lifted a curtain and women began talking. The shame is that it took celebrities to do this, not the children of Rotherham and Rochdale who nobody believed. But then that’s been the pattern – power is relative and if you are the powerless one in your particular world, you are vulnerable to exploitation by men* who seem to have something to offer. They will certainly have plenty to take, and silence may be your only option when speaking out brings contempt and retribution.
This is what happened to Mo. It’s a story of grooming, of how from small beginnings someone can be manipulated into believing their abuser is their friend, their lover, their provider of wonderful things. Mo is reeled in by the attention, the access to a glamorous lifestyle her background could never have offered, and then she is held there like a moth in room with just one light bulb. But there are other things holding her; the shame that stops her telling her family, the rules of society that make it her fault whatever Merv does, and fear. Fear because being right about what Merv approves of is her best bet for staying safe, and because being right is impossible as he is the sole arbiter of what that is and it’s never the same.
With a Foreword by Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes, past president of the British Psychological Society, Fat Mo is a story of small people; the one with no voice who is alone and living in fear, the ones who know something and say nothing, and the one whose own fears may be responsible for everyone else’s.
My hope is that readers will gain from Mo’s story some insight into grooming; the subtlety of it, the relentless manoeuvring, rewarding, undermining, gas lighting, and threats that leave a victim helpless and trapped. It happens to clever people, famous people, vulnerable people, lost and hopeless people. It happened to me.
Fat Mo is available from Lulu where all proceeds will go to Respond, a charity working with people who have learning disabilities and who know very well what sexual exploitation means when everyone turns a blind eye.
Reviews invited. Contact me for details.
- Not exclusively men but overwhelmingly so, and although men and boys are also victims, it is mostly women and girls who find themselves in these appalling relationships. Safeline is a website supporting male victims; the Survivors Trust supports any victim of sexual violence. Respond is exclusively for people with learning/intellectual disabilities.
I don’t have to launch my books, they just slip their moorings at dead of night and sneak off. This one, ostensibly by the elusive P Spencer Beck, made its escape yesterday. Described by one reader, who may or may not be a friend and who may or may not have been referring to letting it get loose at all, as ‘sheer lunacy’, this is a work of non-fiction. Little diary snippets reliant on the single perspective and grossly biased memory of the one observer so most likely of dubious veracity. Not exactly fake news, more hake news, i.e a bit fishy and likely to go off quite quickly if you think you recognise yourself. To check whether or not you might be able to sue, assuming you’re willing to own up to whatever you think you’re described as doing, it’s 
A wasp drops onto the pond, flails about a bit in an unequal struggle with the surface tension and, GLOMP! A fish snaps it up and disappears. Then – Splash! Thrash! PWARGH! Wasp floats to the surface, not so lively but still kicking. Another fish eyes it up. GLOMP! Then PWARGH! And back comes the wasp, this time with distinctly critical vital signs. Fish Number Three approaches, gets a bead on its profile and GLOMP! Fish disappears. I wait. No regurgitation; this wasp is being recycled. To recycle a wasp, it’s smart to be Third Fish.
I have found that poetry describes itself in terms of both feet and meters, thereby flouting European Directives on measurement, which may still be a hanging offence in parts of Scotland
There are days when, having polished off your last borrowed book and even cast a worryingly enthusiastic glance over Alan Titchmarsh’s column in Radio Times, there’s no other way of avoiding the stack of unopened Scientific Americans than checking out the Parish magazine
After an unenthusiastic flurry of activity, job descriptions are submitted to a central panel for the purpose of matching them to particular pay bands. Equal pay for equal value – a fine and admirable principle. Well yes, just so long as your job description is not being analysed by a psychotic software package keen to wreak revenge for unspecified wrongs perpetrated on its mother – in my case a Commodore 64 upon which I once wrote a programme that scrolled bugger bugger bugger on a loop like a set of vindictive credits.
I have occasionally been accused, by the terminally unwise it has to be said, of showing a preference for the sci fi fantasy world of Star Trek over twenty-first century reality. You know reality: that’s where the cat throws up over your foot just as you sit down to eat and the gift you ordered on line for fast delivery is sitting in a DHL depot, fifty miles further away than the shop you didn’t have time to go to in the first place, because you weren’t in when they called
The local Parish newsletter arrived last week and there, among the notifications about malfunctioning streetlights, an incidence of malicious roundabout furniture knocking-over and the news that we came second (out of three) in the South East in Bloom (Rural Villages) competition, was the alarming revelation that we have a Disaster Committee.
Breaking in a strange vehicle (or vice versa) is for me a rather prolonged and edgy affair. Not only are the wipers invariably positioned where the full beam headlights used to be, thereby prompting an episode of energetic windscreen washing when trying to send a message about courtesy to some oik in a beat up Cortina with speakers the size of Kent on the back shelf, but all manner of other instruments have generally been transposed to novel and entertaining locations.