'The story of a weird world I was warned never to tell'
PENGUIN
Pauline Dakin's childhood in Canada in the 1970s was full of secrets, disruption and unpleasant surprises. She wasn't allowed to talk about her family life with anyone - and it wasn't until she was 23 that she discovered why.
There was always something unusual about Pauline Dakin's family.
"My brother and I would say, 'What do you think is wrong with our family? Why are we so weird?' But that was the mystery that just didn't get answered."
Pauline's parents, Warren and Ruth, had separated when she was five, the summer before she started school. Warren, a successful businessman, was a heavy drinker who could become violent and a point came when Ruth just couldn't take it any more.
When Pauline was seven, Ruth took the children on a holiday to Winnipeg, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from their home in Vancouver. But when they arrived Ruth told them they were never going back.
"There was no opportunity to say goodbye, it was just this abrupt, severing of relationships," Pauline says.
When she asked her mother why she had done this, there was never a good explanation.
"She would only say, 'I'm sorry, I can't tell you, when you're older I will tell you.'"
The same thing happened again four years later - this time the family moved to New Brunswick, on Canada's eastern coast.
Apart from this, life was quite normal for Pauline's family - they'd start again and build a new life in a new town. But below the surface Pauline was confused, anxious and falling into depression.
"I knew something bad was happening," she says. "I didn't know what it was, but there was always a sense of something dire that was unspoken."
By the time Pauline was 11 she'd attended six different schools in nearly as many years and had lost touch with her dad.
But another man had come into the family's life, a church minister called Stan Sears. Pauline's mother had met Stan at a support group for the families of alcoholics - Stan was a counsellor there and Ruth had gone to him when she was struggling with Warren's drinking and preparing to leave him.
Both times that Pauline's family had disappeared Stan's family had moved in lockstep with them.
"So whatever had been going on they were part of, I knew that," Pauline says.
Once in New Brunswick, they put down roots. By 1988, at the age of 23, Pauline had graduated from university and was working on a local newspaper in the city of Saint John, when her mother telephoned with an unexpected proposal.
"She said, 'OK, I'm ready to explain all of these strange things that have happened throughout your life.'"
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