A man accused of using a young girl as a “sex object” when he was an adolescent yesterday told a jury that nothing improper ever happened.

Supermarket butchery worker Richard Smith, 22, who is accused of raping the girl when she was aged between eight and ten, claimed that her allegations were untrue and said he “hadn’t the foggiest” why she should say such things.

The prosecution alleges Smith raped and abused the girl in bedrooms and the living room at his home when he was 12 to 14 and told the girl it was their “secret”.

Prosecutor Simon Phillips has claimed Smith threatened to spray an aerosol can in the girl’s mouth if she did not comply with his sexual demands.

She kept the secret until she was 15 and then told a boy of her own age and her mother.

The police were alerted in December 2008.

Smith, who has pleaded not guilty to five charges of rape and one of indecency with a child, told Bradford Crown Court yesterday he had no idea what the police were talking about when they put the allegations to him.

He told officers it had not happened and suggested the girl was telling lies.

He denied to the jury taking advantage of her for sex, threatening to spray her if she did not do as she was told, or having sex with her in the living room or the bedrooms.

Smith, of Bracken Bank Avenue, Ingrow, Keighley, denied suggestions by Mr Phillips that he had control of the girl and said the sex “did not happen once”.

Further questioned by Mr Phillips, Smith, who works at Morrisons in Keighley, said: “I don’t know what she’s got to gain from making the allegations – attention?”

Mr Phillips said: “She said what she got out of it was closure for what you had done to her in her childhood.”

Smith replied: “I haven’t done anything in her childhood.”

He told his barrister, Jeremy Lindsay: “I didn’t do any of those things.”

The trial continues.