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After two decades apart, Charlie Cobb found herself at her estranged mother Josephine’s doorstep, driven by the urgency of her mother’s grave illness and a desire to mend their fractured relationship before it was irreparable.
Yet, upon entering the familiar yet distant environment, years of suppressed pain surged within Charlie, overwhelming her resolve.
Anticipating a return to the bitter exchanges that had torn them apart, Charlie braced herself as her mother began to speak.
Recalling the moment, Charlie shares, “I warned Mum not to start… I was fed up with the legacy of what her father did to me.”
Instead of the expected confusion or confrontation, Charlie witnessed a surprising reaction. “Mum just covered her mouth with her hands and collapsed. She immediately grasped what I was about to reveal,” Charlie recounts.
Tears streaming down her face, Charlie finally disclosed the agonising secret she had kept for 40 years. Her late grandfather Clive, a retired naval captain, had repeatedly raped her between the ages of five and 12.
‘Mum seemed genuinely shocked,’ says Charlie. ‘She called him a monster.’
As a horrified Josephine comforted her daughter, she then stunned Charlie by revealing her own deeply buried secret: Clive had abused her too.
‘He’d raped her as a child and – just like me – told her never to tell anyone,’ says Charlie. ‘We cried so much. We were devastated for each other.’
But if Josephine had experienced this torture herself, why then had she put her young daughter at risk, too? It’s a question that, understandably, has plagued Charlie.
After all, the attacks hadn’t happened during family visits; on account of her younger brother suffering serious congenital heart disease, Charlie’s parents had actually sent her to live with her maternal grandparents, who offered a comfortable life complete with private education and ‘anything she wanted’. The arrangement allowed them to focus on their son’s care.
‘I feel I’m back to me now. At 47, this is the best I’ve felt – like a huge weight has lifted. I have never felt more alive.’
Charlie’s grandfather Clive, a retired naval captain, raped her between the ages of five and 12. Sometimes he took her to another house where she was assaulted by two other men
‘I was initially furious Mum had sent me to live with him despite what he’d done to her,’ says Charlie, now 47, from Catherington, near Portsmouth. ‘I could have been spared what happened.
‘I would never have put my own child in that position. I asked her: “Why didn’t you say anything?” But she was so frail. Every time I broached the subject she would clutch her chest and I didn’t want to push it.’
In the end it was her mother’s sickening confession that triggered a turning point for Charlie. Not only did it spur her on to inform police, but she is now throwing off the shame that dogged her for so long to speak publicly. Her hope is that her story will help other young victims of abuse.
She is also campaigning for stricter ‘kinship care’ laws, alongside her MP Damian Hinds. The law dictates that children should be raised within their family network wherever possible, and these are often private, informal arrangements between parents and relatives such as grandparents or aunts and uncles. Had Charlie been put in foster care, her carers would have been subjected to safeguarding checks, but historically, there have been no such protective measures for those looked after by family members.
‘I didn’t exist in the system,’ she says. ‘To the outside world I was a child from a privileged, comfortable home. I’d fallen through the cracks.’
Talking from the Hampshire home she shares with husband Darren, 56, a financial adviser, and son Callum, 22, Charlie, now an HR adviser, says the roots of her ordeal began when she was two. That’s when her baby brother Ian, 17 months her junior, was diagnosed with the serious congenital heart condition known as Tetralogy of Fallot.
He required round-the-clock care so Charlie’s dad, Joe, a naval officer, and Josephine, a stay-at-home mum, moved from their home in Manchester to Portsmouth to be near Josephine’s parents for support.
Charlie was five when her parents sent her to live with her grandfather, Clive, then in his 60s, and grandmother, Valerie, in her 50s, two roads away.
‘That way they could focus on Ian and be assured I was still given attention,’ explains Charlie. ‘They desperately needed help.’
Her grandparents made sure a young Charlie wanted for nothing. She was sent to private school and even had a television in her bedroom. ‘If I wanted something, I got it,’ she says.
Charlie doesn’t remember the first time Clive came into her room at night to abuse her, she was so young. ‘A lot of it is hazy, and I have simply blocked it out’
Charlie with her grandfather and grandmother Valerie, a quietly naive stay-at-home mum, who had no idea what was happening
But there was little emotional warmth between her grandparents, she now realises. The three ate their meals separately and her grandparents had separate living rooms. ‘They didn’t go to bed together either. I was their world.’ So young at the time, Charlie doesn’t remember the first time Clive came into her room at night to abuse her. ‘A lot of it is hazy, and I have simply blocked it out,’ she says.
Nor did she understand, of course, that Clive was raping her. ‘I can only tell you about the pain. He was always on top of me. Afterwards, I hurt a lot. I used to take days to heal.’
But Clive convinced Charlie what happened was for Ian’s good. ‘He would tell me what I was doing was important. That he was looking after me, and me being there was helping my mum and dad get my brother better. He knew my brother meant everything to me.’
As a defenceless child who simply longed to see her family back together, Charlie had no reason to distrust him. ‘You don’t question it.’
She is sure her grandmother, a quietly naive stay-at-home mum, had no idea what was happening.
While her dad picked her up from school every day, he tended to keep her ‘hidden’ from her mother, who had turned to alcohol to cope with the enormity of caring for their desperately ill son: ‘She was drinking all the time and Dad didn’t want me to see that. She was like a stranger to me.’
Meanwhile, Clive lavished Charlie with both attention and gifts, buying her treats like shoes and stickers. ‘I was told I was amazing and beautiful. I wasn’t getting that from my parents, so he fed a need, and I became dependent on him. I would feel so confused, because obviously I loved him.’
He raped her every week. ‘It was so often, all of the time, they all merge into one experience. I’d be too petrified to speak.’ She put a blanket over her head as he assaulted her and became scared of the dark. ‘Even now, I have to have a light on to feel safe,’ she says quietly.
But that wasn’t the worst of her grandfather’s depravity. Sometimes he took her to another house in Portsmouth where she was assaulted by two other men. ‘I remember being in the house with no clothes on. And I remember hurting.’
She became withdrawn, explaining sadly: ‘I had no personality at all during those years.’ The fear of something happening to her brother kept her compliant, though.
Charlie became withdrawn, saying ‘I had no personality at all during those years’
Now happily married, Charlie is a foster mother to 15 and, having overcome breast cancer, has made the finals of Miss Great Britain’s Classic Division, for over 40s, for the third time this year
When Charlie was around seven, her brother was put in hospital. Convinced it was somehow her fault – Clive had, after all, said that the abuse he meted out was their way of helping to make Ian better – she told her grandfather she would tell a nurse that Ian’s illness was down to her.
In response, he ripped the head off her teddy bear – a chilling reminder of his threats that she should never tell a soul what he did to her at night. She recalls: ‘Naturally, I was inconsolable.’
Meanwhile Charlie only saw Ian, who was at a special needs school, every few months. ‘Dad would bring him to the house or to the park or I’d help take him swimming,’ says Charlie. ‘I would ache to see him.’
By the start of secondary school, it dawned on Charlie that what was happening to her was gravely wrong. Before she could do anything about it, Clive was diagnosed with leukaemia when she was 12. When treatment failed, he was admitted to hospital and Charlie remembers holding his hand, and being asked to say goodbye: ‘He said he was sorry and that he loved me.’
After Clive’s death, she felt a complex mix of relief and grief. As ‘a cry for help’, she started drinking and taking drugs such as cannabis, amphetamines and ecstasy in her early teens.
Lonely and confused, she had only her grandmother for company. She didn’t see her mother for months at a time, and didn’t know how to tell her father she was struggling.
‘By this point I was a disappointment… and Ian’s health was deteriorating.’
After enduring so much pain already in her short life, she suffered unbearable grief at 17, when Ian died. ‘The guilt was dreadful – I still thought it must be something I’d done. And I had loved him so much.’
She stopped taking drugs, but she continued drinking and embarked on a period of casual sex. Then in 2001, aged 22, she met her future husband Darren. Introduced by her grandmother, it was suggested he might help her sort her finances. ‘He was kind, calm, and reassuring,’ she smiles.
Darren was also the only person she’d been intimate with sober. ‘For the first few months, I couldn’t even look at him – I had to put a pillow over my face when we made love. I said I found sex difficult. He thought it was odd but was incredibly patient with me.’
Baby Callum was born in 2003. Motherhood was a turning point for Charlie, not only giving her a sense of purpose and curtailing her drinking but making her question her own childhood for the first time.
Charlie is campaigning for stricter kinship care laws, alongside her MP Damian Hinds
‘I’d look at Callum and think, how could my little body have coped?’ Witnessing his fear during a thunderstorm in the night, it sunk in how scared she must have been as a child separated from her parents. ‘The realisation of what had happened to me started to hit home.’
When her grandmother died in May 2010 she felt ‘release’, she says: ‘The last connection I had to my grandfather was gone.’
Only then did Charlie start telling Darren – who she married that September – about her childhood. It was the first time she had confided in anyone and dredging up the past, a process that took years, was both liberating and depressing. ‘He listened and took me to counselling.’
By this time, she had lost contact with her father, who stayed with her mother despite her drinking. ‘I didn’t understand why he put up with it.’ He died of Alzheimer’s in 2014.
In 2016, group therapy at a rape crisis centre with other survivors of sexual abuse proved pivotal. ‘We were sharing similar risky behaviours. I was slowly starting to feel this wasn’t my fault,’ says Charlie, who had by then begun her career in HR. ‘All these things I’d done had been by-products of what had happened to me.’
The same year, she saw an advert for fostering. It was at the time that the extent of television presenter Jimmy Savile’s horrific abuse of children in care was unfolding.
‘I was angry,’ says Charlie. ‘I thought I could look after children better than those in the stories that were emerging.’ She and Darren soon took in their first foster child and Charlie has now been a foster mother to 15 children.
Two years later, at 39, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. During her fourth round of chemotherapy, she saw another TV advert, this time for the Truth Project. Part of the government’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, the project invited survivors of historical sexual abuse to tell their story. In an incredible act of courage, Charlie spoke to the panel of social workers from her hospital bed via a video link.
‘I remember being out of breath, and they kept saying, “We can stop”. But I thought: “I have to tell you this. I have to get my story out.”’
Charlie’s was one of around 6,000 stories heard. ‘Telling it gave me confidence but also fuelled an anger, because I realised how many other children had been let down,’ she says.
In January 2024, aged 45, in remission and having recently had breast reconstruction surgery, she read an article on beauty pageants for over 40s. In addition to fashion rounds, contestants in Miss Great Britain Classic Division had to tell judges how, if successful, they hoped to use the platform to make an impact. ‘I had a vision to raise awareness of children who had been through abuse.’
She entered and made the finals in 2024, and again last year, her self-esteem building as she became more confident discussing her childhood. ‘I felt accepted.’
That in turn helped give her the strength to approach her mother last May, after a neighbour texted her to say Josephine was ill; she was struggling to walk, was hard of hearing and noticeably frail.
Charlie had avoided all contact despite only living ten miles apart and, by this point, Josephine had been sober for around a decade. ‘But she was so frail,’ says Charlie, through tears.
Josephine told her daughter that she was six when her father first got into bed with her and ‘put his hand over her mouth and raped her’. ‘That went on regularly, after that point,’ she added.
Charlie again felt fury that her mother had put her in harm’s way, but then she realised Josephine had been manipulated too. ‘I knew how dependent I was on him, so I could only imagine what she felt like. She had this monster telling her it would be all right.’
After spending a couple of days together, such was Charlie’s understanding and forgiveness that she moved Josephine into her family home: ‘It was the right thing to do. She needed care. We both needed time together.’ Last autumn, Charlie finally found the strength to report what had happened to Hampshire Police via an online form, naming the two other men her grandfather had taken her to. A decision her mother fully supported.
Within 24 hours a police officer called her. One of the men was known to police as part of Operation Amberstone, an inquiry into historic sexual abuse, and had served time in prison for sexual offences. ‘The officer had no doubt I was telling the truth.’
Police were prepared to try to prosecute, but her abuser was 83 and ill, and Charlie decided the trauma of reliving her ordeal in court wasn’t worth it. ‘That person is never going to serve a sentence. For me, being believed lifts the sentence I’ve been given. Being vindicated made me feel I have a platform to help others.’
Josephine died of diabetic complications in January this year, aged 83.
‘I told her I loved her,’ Charlie says. ‘I wished we’d had more time together.
‘For a long time, I thought she had abandoned me, but I see clearly now that she was a victim, too.’
Charlie has made the finals of Miss Great Britain Classic for a third time this year, sponsored by her fostering agency, TheraParent Fostering. She hopes she can tell her story to a wider audience on stage to help others ‘shed the shame’.
She concludes with the conviction: ‘My grandfather was a monster and what happened wasn’t my fault. I feel I’m back to me now.
‘At 47, this is the best I’ve felt – as if a huge weight has lifted. I have never felt more alive.’
Additional reporting: Matthew Barbour
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, the NSPCC helpline can be reached on 0808 800 5000.