LLP-305 Daddy's Little Girls by Jewel Breckenridge

Published 1972 by Tiburon House Publishing Company, Inc.


Foreword


Indifference is probably the most damaging emotion, or lack of emotion,
anyone can allow to exist. Who was it who said, "Love me or hate me, but
for God's sake don't ignore me!" And the most destructive of all types
of indifference is parental indifference. That this can have a profound
effect for the worse on an individual is just now being realized by
psychologists who are probing our nation's steadily increasing crime
rate. So many of the kids who turn to lives of crime have an inadequate
home life; one parent, usually the father, is often missing, while the
remaining parent may actually be unconcerned by the child's problems or,
just as important, may seem indifferent because of the need to be absent
from the home for work or other reasons. Whatever the reasons, an
ignored child becomes mischievous, doing more and more outrageous things
in an attempt to gain attention from the parents he thinks have scorned
him.

In Daddy's Little Girls we have just such a child in Ellen Johnston. And
with the typical fascination of the adolescent girl-child for the man of
the house, Ellen concentrates all her whiles on her father. That she is
more intelligent and precocious than most children only serves to make
her games more intricate and to widen the circle of her conquests from
her own boyfriend to her father, then to her older sister and her
sister's boyfriend.

Why does she succeed, we may wonder. Only because the entire family
atmosphere is one of indifference with the fears and self-doubts that
that brings. Roger Johnston is a man rapidly approaching middle age,
faced with a job that runs itself, a wife who has grown away from him
and daughters who no longer need their mother, much less him. His wife
Cynthia, bored with their marriage and feeling rejected by their
daughters, has deliberately pulled herself out of the family life to
create her own world. The girls, too, have withdrawn, thus completing
the vicious circle -- and who can say whether it is because they sense
their parents' boredom or merely because like all teenagers they are
beginning to cut the strings that bind them.

This is a universal problem, and though we cannot recommend incest as a
universal solution, we do present this book to show how one family made
a spectacular come back.
The Publishers Sausalito, California November, 1972


Chapter 1


She was, after all, only a child.

As she walked down the arrow-straight road from the school bus towards
home, her head barely cleared the taller hedges and her blonde hair
tossed at her shoulders, one of which was slightly raised from the
effort of carrying her schoolbooks. She had a light, inoffensive manner
of staring through every gate and through every window which looked
inviting as she stepped along. The quickness of her glance seemed right
for her pert walk, her smallish, lean frame, her age -- but this quick
gaze was dictated also by the quickness of her mind and temperament.


End of Page 1. See llp-305.txt for full story.