In a powerful autobiography, Jenny Tomlin, the mother of actress Martine McCutcheon, describes a childhood marred by her father's horrific abuse. She tells Sarah Foster how this has only made her stronger.

"MY first memories are of waking to the dull thud of my mother being thrown against the wall in the next room, and to the sound of my father's voice raging at her. As I listened to the thumps, whimpers and roars just a few feet away I lay in my bed silent and terrified, curled into a ball with the covers pulled high to try to block it all out."

This is how Jenny Tomlin begins to relate the experience of her childhood in her autobiography, Behind Closed Doors. From the opening pages, it emerges as an account of shocking neglect and exploitation, of crippling fear and abuse by a tyrannous father. In short, it describes a childhood that no-one should have to endure - and as an adult, Jenny is acutely conscious of this.

Speaking to me from her home in northern France, she now has every reason to be happy, with a loving husband, famous actress Martine McCutcheon as a daughter and her dream of being an author fulfilled. But while her book has become a bestseller, it took a while for her to make her story heard. "I wrote the initial manuscript ten years ago and I sent it out to publishers but I think they didn't feel the public was ready for it. It was still a very taboo subject," she says.

Certainly, a lot of what she writes makes uncomfortable reading. Born into grinding poverty in 1950s East End London, her early life was characterised by misery. Jenny Ponting, as she was then, and her four siblings survived on hardly any food in a chaotic household over which their mother Lilian had no control. The beatings inflicted by her father Ronald were unpredictable and indiscriminate, often involving the children.

Jenny recalls an instance of him making her strip before he tortured her. "I had put a cup down on his newspaper, leaving a wet ring there. Dad was incandescent with rage. He made me take my clothes off, slapped me on my back, bottom and stomach, then stood me on a chair, naked and freezing, and left me there.

"I needed the toilet, and after a while I began to wet myself. When Dad saw he exploded with rage and began punching, poking and hitting me, swearing at the top of his voice and calling me a 'f*cking little c*nt'. He made me stand there for the rest of the evening," she writes.

As well as the beatings, Jenny, now 49, and her sisters suffered regular sexual abuse. She remembers what her father did to her in vivid detail. "He would take me in under the bedcovers and make me take off my knickers and vest, rubbing me with his large, rough hands or pulling me against him. At the same time he would tell me to hold his penis and rub it. I did not like the feel of this big, hard thing, I was not sure what it was, but I knew it was part of him and I hated touching it."

In one of the book's most disturbing passages, she recounts how her parents once took her to their friends' house to sell her body for a film. On Jenny's arrival, the friends' daughter explained: "They're making a film and you and me are the stars. Your dad's gonna f*ck me, and my dad's gonna f*ck you." Jenny watched in horror as her father raped the girl while the two mothers filmed the scene. Fortunately, the police arrived before she suffered the same fate, but the incident hardened her will. "I knew I was never going to let them do that to me, ever," she writes.

What made life impossible was her mother's weakness in not standing up to her father. While this is the book's only example of Lilian colluding in the sexual abuse, she clearly turned a blind eye to much of it. Looking back, Jenny can't forgive her for this. "At first I was very sorry for her - she was always very much a victim - but there were also fundamental stages throughout my childhood when she should have stepped in and protected me and she didn't, and I think that's every parent's responsibility," she says.

When her father was finally arrested for his crimes, her mother committed what Jenny saw as the ultimate act of betrayal. Liberated from subjugation and amid her children's sordid revelations, she went as far as starting divorce proceedings - but at the last moment, changed her mind, allowing Ronald back home to continue his despicable acts.

On this occasion, as on many others, the authorities failed to protect Jenny and her siblings. At one point, an NSPCC inspector was directed to visit them, but when Jenny, frustrated by his blinkered approach, hatched a plan to tell him the truth, it only backfired. "I walked with him to the door, where I said as quietly as I could, 'Can I talk to you?' Missing the signs completely, he took my hand and let me straight back into the living room where he said cheerfully, 'Jenny has got something she'd like to talk about'," she writes.

Yet throughout the dark times there were glimmers of light. Jenny found happiness through her aunt, her friends and later her first boyfriend, and drew strength from her sisters and brothers. Gradually she learned that however much life tested her, she was tough enough to cope - a message she hopes the book conveys. "I hope that it's not just a harrowing story but that it's also inspirational. I think that once you're an adult and you've survived a terrible period you're determined to fight on and make something of yourself," she says.

While it hasn't been easy, she's certainly done this, gaining O and A-levels and working hard to give her own children, Martine, 28, and 14-year-old LJ what she never had. She's proud of Martine's fame but says: "To me, she's just my daughter. She's always been there for me and treated me to lovely things and taken me to lovely places and that's fabulous for me." Being a published author is the icing on the cake. "I keep pinching myself. I used to clean toilets and work behind a bar to bring in extra money and now I can sit down at a computer and do the thing I love - it's pretty fabulous," says Jenny.

As an ambassador for Barnardo's, she's keen to raise awareness of child abuse, which she believes is as prevalent as ever. She fears that children are still suffering in silence, without adequate support and encouragement to come forward and tell the truth. "I think there's got to be some other way to make these children feel safe enough to approach somebody - perhaps a counsellor at school. If I was a child now and I was being abused, I wouldn't pick up the phone," admits Jenny.

Her greatest ambition is to convert the French farmhouse she has bought into a holiday home for disadvantaged youngsters, "to give something back" for her success. "That's my ultimate dream and if you haven't got dreams, you might as well give up," she says.

* Behind Closed Doors by Jenny Tomlin (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99).