Sarah was 9 years old; I was 37. In one of the early Probation group-sessions, we men offenders were asked to recollect an example from our real lives where our offending proclivities – our paedophilia, basically, for most of us – felt to be a ‘problem’ for us. That is to say, it impinged on our ability to function, putting us at risk of possible criminal acts or simply disturbed us on some level. And how did we cope with it? A successful example only was required, so they weren’t asking any of us to divulge the secrets of our actual offences to each other. What ‘strategy’ did we use? To answer this, we could pick from the Sound Six as they were called – such as ‘walk away from it’, or ‘distract yourself’ – or we could provide an original one of our own.

For me this exercise was easy: my then best friend’s step-daughter, Sarah, and I guess the strategy I had used came under their term of ‘surfing the sensation’. I felt the nomenclature of this was a little unfortunate, suggestive as it was of some spectacular indulgence. It could almost describe the entire damn experience of wanking off to child abuse images, but it was meant to mean nothing of the sort. What it was supposed to mean was merely getting some kind of thought or feeling, but then just allowing yourself to run with it – although not overstepping the mark in any tangible way into any recognized criminal offence – until it burned itself out naturally or the circumstance went away. Well, the latter was definitely it for me, in this case.

“Can I hold your hand?” she asked, as we walked along a park track.

“Of course,” I said, in simple gentle adult fashion. I was surprised how warm her hand felt on such a cold day. Moreover, I could not deny to myself how I liked the sensation, and the way we could quite conveniently achieve the hold despite the size-difference. I felt protective, but I felt sensual. Oh dear. I guess that was a ‘problem’, though I was happy to enjoy it at the time.

The occasion was an outing with my wife and Neil, said best friend, and his then-wife and family. He had two step-daughters, one of which was Sarah but the other, Zoe, did not interest me at all. Not because, at 7, she was too young necessarily, but because I just didn’t find her good-looking. Sarah was a different matter: just a touch short for her age, which was in keeping with her mother’s somewhat square and dumpy frame, and she had a cute and kind of intense little face, framed by straggly shoulder-length brown hair which had no concept of style to it whatsoever. I liked that. You could see the way her body would go, as is so often the case, but at her age this transposed into just a normal pleasant skinniness but a latent hint of the adult bum-shape which for the likes of me was an arousing thing. This was made worse – or better, depending on point of view – by the fact of her wearing tight little black leggings.

I knew that I should not even have been noticing such a thing – although there is no crime in it – so right away this was the first aspect which had to be ‘surfed’. It was far more holistic than this, though. It so often was. I mean, I didn’t tend to just get titillated in a superficial way by some obvious physical aspect of them, although that happened and it was often a ‘starting point’. It was the whole of them – their personality and individuality and even the circumstance of the sighting and whether I knew them or not – which I appreciated and caused them to be endeared to me even more deeply. As for Sarah, of course a large part of it was that I knew her to some extent, and moreover was privy to a good deal of her backstory. This was interesting and moving to me, in a way that made me care but lust at the same time.

She had serious behavioural and developmental problems. Her biological dad had died when she was only two (cancer), thereby she’d have had some memory of him which must have damn affected her. More than this, though, it transpired that there was a history of mental illness (schizophrenia, albeit not the worst kind) in the family on her mother’s side. Her mother herself appeared to have avoided it, although I found her a bit abrupt and opinionated, and far too talkative. Sarah was talkative too, but this came across as sweet and in fact very smart. Behind closed doors, with Neil and her mum, she was not sweet; she was, I was told, very tantrum-prone and could be pretty damn hurtful in the things she said to them. This would include the obvious ‘You’re not my dad, so get lost,’ or simply, ‘I hate you both!’.

Yet she was politeness itself with me. More than this, she actually ventured conversation in a way that exceeded the maturity of your average 9-year-old – I knew this as a fact from my teaching career – and demonstrated a genuine desire to get to know you. There was nothing inappropriate in this, such as untoward knowledge of adult things, I hasten to add. And it was, inevitably, mixed up with normal childish types of conversation. She just came across as a child with loads of potential, which was backed up by her good school results at times. Unfortunately, she also came across as a child with insecurities and challenges, and I could only imagine how this was the tip of the iceberg to what she displayed at home. Neil often confided in me that he was at the end of his tether with it, to the extent he was on anti-depressants.

This was understandable to me – quite apart from the basic burden of having to raise another man’s child, which I can’t understand anybody wanting (no disrespect to those who do this, though, and do it well, but I’d want to ‘hand her back’ kind of thing at the end of the day) – but he also relayed to me the alarming self-care issues Sarah had. The most striking of these was an inability, or unwillingness, to wipe her bum properly to the extent she sometimes got water-infections because of the crap encroaching to her little vulval slit. He often had to clean her himself, which he said disturbed him greatly on account of her age. Obviously, de-shitting a toddler is a different kettle of fish to doing it for a 9-year-old. For me, I’m sure it would have cured me of whatever fantasies I was having, at least temporarily. Neil was a good guy, and there’s no suggestion he had any in the first place, I hasten to add.