By Chris Lloyd
Northern Echo
July 14, 2010
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/features/8271220.Abuse_victim___s_life_sentence/
More than two decades later, memories of the abuse Mark Dixon experienced from a priest are still vivid. Chris Lloyd explains the man's anguish in the first of two articles.
IT'S just so vivid, says Mark Dixon. "It's there. It will never, ever leave my mind."
He's sitting on his low sofa in his house in Darlington, his six-month-old son paddling across the carpet in a babywalker, his wife pottering in the kitchen, his cat snoozing contentedly in the sun by the back door.
In Mark's mind's eye, though, he is re-running the graphic detail from 25 years ago when he was aged only ten and he was abused by a Roman Catholic priest.
In a bath in Seaham.
In a tent at Lourdes.
In a campervan on Holy Island.
In a bedroom of a former convent.
"He used to blame it on sleepwalking," says Mark, as the images play. "He got into the bed, put his arm round me, took my pyjama bottoms down, got hold of my hand and got me to start to masturbate him, while he tried to masturbate me. I used to pull my hand away, but he would forcibly take it back."
The detail continues… On more than 30 occasions, he was abused by Father David Taylor, who served in several parishes in the North-East during his 31-year career, until he was exposed at a court hearing last year as a cynical, predatory paedophile.
Taylor, 60, is expected to be released later this year after spending 20 months in prison for indecently assaulting Mark and two other boys in the Eighties.
But Mark, 38, is under a life sentence.
Not only was he abused by the youth chaplain of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocese, but he feels profoundly let down by the church in whose care he found himself at the most tender of ages.
He was born in Gateshead, but his natural mother was unable to cope. He was taken in by a Catholic agency which found him devout adoptive parents, Margaret and Alan Dixon.
They brought him up in Newton Aycliffe and then in Coundon, where he caught the eye of Taylor.
"I thought he was great," says Mark. "Everybody loved him in the parish. The Coundon priest was poorly, so he came over to cover. He had so much energy, and as soon as mass was finished he would take off his collar, put on an open-necked shirt and jeans, and say that he was approachable. He opened our church fairs.
Once he even got Kathy Secker, the news reader on the TV, to turn up at our garden fete and that was like 'wow'."
Taylor was ordained in 1977. He served in Walker, Newcastle, and from 1982 to 1986 was the diocese youth co-ordinator based at the former Sisters of Mercy convent in Seaham, about 25 miles up the A1 from Coundon.
"Looking back, I can see what he was doing,"
says Mark. "Father Taylor – I still call him that even though he's not a priest any more – started coming round our house more and more, befriending the family. He ran a youth club at Seaham. It was meant for 16-year-olds and over, but he said 'bring Mark over, I'm sure he will enjoy it'.
"I was ten. I thought it was fun.
"Eventually he said 'Why doesn't Mark stay over during a weekend'. The first few times there was a large group of youths staying in dormitories. I wasn't on my own.
"That summer, after I'd known him about three months, he said a few were stopping over, but when I got there there was just me and him.
"On the Friday night, he showed me where I would be sleeping in the dormitory, my bed, my space, and then, because I was ten, I was used to having a bath at night. And he got into the bath with me.
"That's the way it all started."
MARK'S a good talker. He's been through the events numerous times with the police, solicitors and his wife, Lisa. And, of course, the images keep re-running in his head.
"I didn't know what to say to my parents," he continues. "I would ring home and say everything was OK. Father Taylor kept saying this is fine, this is normal, this is part of growing up in the church, this is our little secret. At ten, I didn't know any different, and I didn't say anything to anybody.
"I was going to huge church events attended by lots of other people, but this priest was showing me this much attention. I felt like I was special."
Taylor was showering attention upon Mark, taking him for weekend breaks to Seahouses and Holy Island.
"I must have gone away with him in his campervan a dozen times," says Mark. "There were two beds in it, but because there was no heating, he said we should use each other's body heat to keep warm.
"He had planned it meticulously. At the trial, the prosecution solicitor said there was a pattern: he took boys away on his own to Holy Island where it was quiet and discreet and no one would question a priest."
Mark's parents, who adopted one other Catholic child, certainly didn't.
And no one would question a priest taking a boy to Lourdes in the south of France, a place of pilgrimage for five million Catholics every year.
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| YOUNG VICTIM Mark Dixon, in the Eighties, was an altar boy, a boy who was taken advantge of by a priest and abused on numerous occasions |
A North-East Catholic website still tells how a party of young pilgrims from the diocese has been going annually since 1973. It says that "Fr David Taylor was a great friend and mentor to hundreds of our members from the time he was Diocesan Youth Chaplain based in Seaham Harbour in 1981…especially as chaplain on 11 pilgrimages to Lourdes".
Mark says: "My dad was unemployed at the time and Fr Taylor turned up out of the blue the week before and said 'Have you got any plans for the holidays?' My dad said 'No, it'll just be daytrips', and he said 'I'd like to take him to Lourdes'.
"We said we can't afford it. He said he'd pay.
I didn't have a passport, so he paid for that as well. It was my first time abroad, and he came to pick me up.
"I wanted to go because I knew how important Lourdes was to the church, and thought it would be a fantastic trip. I was relieved there were 50 or 60 other people going, so I thought I'd be all right. But he slept in the same tent as me and it went on in that tent.
"I was 11. I was thinking it was wrong, but that he must have chosen me for a reason. I was praying at Lourdes 'Please let this stop'."
It only stopped when Mark was 13 and attending Newton Aycliffe Athletics Club. He showed promise as a sprinter, and his coaches told him he needed to devote himself to practice.
It was a dilemma for the young lad. He was the only altar boy at St Joseph's Church in Coundon, and there was kudos for his parish in him attending diocesan events. Yet he was increasingly uncomfortable with Taylor's behaviour.
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| VIVID MEMORIES: Mark Dixon, now 38 |
"The transition into athletics took me away,"
says Mark. "Father Taylor rang the house quite a lot asking if I wanted to come over to Seaham, and my dad says now that I made all the excuses in the world not to go.
"I think it was the last time I went over that I told him that my coach thought I could be really good at athletics.
"Father Taylor said 'We have had a special friendship, we will always be special friends, get in touch and come over whenever you want'."
Mark never did.
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