Deliver Me From Evil (16 page)

Eunice said nothing more, but scraped the oats off the side and put them into a saucepan, poo and all. She then poured in some water, and stirred.

‘I’ll make your breakfast for you.’

I looked on horrified as she stirred the gooey mix on the stove. Her back was to me as I stood behind her in the kitchen and I tried to think of all the different things I could do to escape. I could faint, run out of the room, take it and then bin it or throw it over the hedge, as I had done with the rest of Sarahs cake vomit. Eunice continued stirring very calmly. As ever, she was a woman on a mission. When the ‘porridge’ was cooked, she spooned a large, steaming helping into a bowl. It was a bigger portion than she would usually allow me for breakfast. This was obviously a special ‘treat’.

‘Sit down.’

I sat down slowly at the table.

She handed me a spoon. ‘Eat it.’

When I didn’t move, Eunice pushed the spoon into the bowl and brought out a stinking, heaped spoonful and waved it in front of my mouth. The smell wafted up my nose and I felt my stomach churn. She pushed the spoon against my closed lips. ‘Open wide.’

I knew better than to try to resist, so I opened my mouth and took the vile mixture, wanting to retch at the first mouthful. It tasted like the soles of my wellingtons after I’d cleaned out the chicken shed. My gorge rose and I could see a glint in Eunice’s eyes – her satisfaction would be complete if I threw up there and then.

I blanked out, using my technique of turning myself off at the emotional mains and I ate the whole lot. I could tell Eunice was waiting for me to give up, so she could administer my next beating, but I was determined to show her what I was made of.

‘Have you held it down?’

She was watching me like a hawk, hoping against hope that I would spew. Again, this was a battle of wills and I was not going to be beaten. She wanted to hurt me, but I was not going to give her the satisfaction of thinking I cared. I had stood up to her before and starved for days, now I could eat this. I would win.

‘Yeah,’ was all I could manage through a constricted throat. I just had to stop myself thinking about those rat or mice droppings mingled in with the oats, which were now sitting, like a smouldering rock, in my stomach.

She was disappointed, clearly, that I was managing to keep down her vile concoction. Eunice liked nothing more than to reduce me to jelly and I was not going to comply. Something in me needed to show her that I was her match. She didn’t quite know how to handle the situation now that I hadn’t crumbled.

‘Well, you do that again and you’ll get it again.’

I have to hold it down now. Just blank yourself out.

Eunice started tidying up and I feigned as much nonchalance as I could muster while my stomach heaved. I stood up and pushed back my chair, the kitchen table reeling in front of me. I could still feel my gorge rising, but I swallowed hard as saliva filled my mouth and kept my face as blank as I could. I moved towards the door, slowly, and walked a few steps across the yard, trying to be as cool as a cucumber.

Once out of her sight, I ran like the clappers down the field. When a May bug flew into my hair it brought me back to myself, and now that I was beyond the kitchen and Eunice’s evil gaze I could allow my feelings back into my body and brain. I was more scared of the May bug than I was of the ghastly porridgy mess that was sloshing around in my guts. Finally at the edge of the field I threw up the entire contents of my poisoned stomach. What a relief. There was some minor satisfaction in having triumphed over Eunice and having ruined her quest to reduce me to a blubbering wreck I chalked one up to me in the increasingly tough war of wills between us.

The Home Tutor Inspector would still pay us occasional visits, but there would always be a written warning, so we’d be driven back to George Dowty Drive, all scrubbed up and the house would be hurriedly tidied. Eunice would buy some new books, as usual, and we would pose, as if we were working away merrily every day, happily fed by a loving ‘mummy’. Afterwards we’d be whisked back to our enslaved drudgery at the farm, which got grimmer and grimmer by the month.

The farmhouse must have looked so odd from the outside, with the curtains permanently drawn and five unnaturally quiet children moping about, dressed in rags, three of them seemingly half-starved. I remember the local vicar came round and dared to ring the doorbell once and my little heart scampered with hope as I silently prayed,
‘Please, please, save us.’
But Eunice only opened the front door a tiny crack and told him, in no uncertain terms, ‘We’re all Jehovah’s Witnesses here,’ sending him firmly away with a giant flea in his ear. As far as I know, he never returned but he did write to social services.

I heard at the trial that somebody had even told social services about our washing-up liquid treatment – goodness knows how that had got out – and still no one rescued us.

CHAPTER 14:

I had now started to ‘develop’ into a young woman, but Eunice had not provided me with any sex education whatsoever as part of her so-called ‘home tutoring’ service. As I was never allowed to read novels, magazines, newspapers or watch educational TV, I had no means of finding things out for myself. If anything, we had been given an immense amount of misinformation, and a lot of fear about sex, bodies and relationships.

Although I looked after the chickens and helped to breed them, I still didn’t understand much about reproduction. I remember thinking that the cockerel must mount the hen and somehow squirt juice into her neck I had picked up the term ‘mount’ from Eunice, without understanding the reality of what the chickens got up to in the back of the shed. Even at eleven going on twelve, I was still confused about how the hen’s egg got fertilized, as I knew nothing at all about human reproduction. So kissing, petting, pregnancy – all of those – were completely foreign territory. Even when I came across sex – in all its various forms – as I got older, I still didn’t know what to expect. But while I was very ignorant indeed, I was obviously curious, like any normal, growing child.

Eunice never took us to the doctor or dentist. Even when I got pecked by a chicken and the cut got infected, she didn’t bother taking me to the doctor. If it was a real emergency and she had to take us for treatment, she made sure she did all the talking for us. We were never allowed to offer an opinion and were threatened before we went in. I guess she was scared we’d give the game away. No dentist ever picked up on the fact that Sarah’s bashed-in front teeth were due to Eunice’s maltreatment. She’d had to go to the dentist several times and must have looked shut-down, skinny and strange. But it seemed to me that doctors and dentists always believed the adults rather than the children, or didn’t really use their eyes or intuition in any way.

On one particular occasion we were all at the dentist because Thomas had a toothache. I went to the loo and found blood in my pants. I was terrified. What was going on? What on earth had happened?

Eunice was sitting in the waiting room, flicking through a women’s magazine (I’m not sure this was allowed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses). Robert was sitting next to her, playing with a toy and Charlotte was sitting on her other side. I looked at Eunice, who carried on reading. I stood in front of her and whispered, hoping no one else would hear, ‘I’m dying, I’ve started bleeding – something’s wrong.’

Eunice continued to read for a moment. Then she folded the magazine and looked up at me, expressionless. I was scared, and the other kids were listening, so it was embarrassing, too.

‘You will start bleeding. It’s your age. It’ll happen every month, like clockwork’

Every month from now on? But why?
I had no idea. Was it an illness?

Robert had lost interest in the toy and had wandered over to look at the fish tank, so I took his seat next to Eunice. She had gone back to looking at the magazine, obviously thinking the conversation was over.

‘Why?’

Eunice looked up at me, clearly bored by the whole business. ‘Inside you’ve got a womb and it’s expelling badness from your body. You’ve got bad blood, and your womb expels that evil blood from you to cleanse your soul.’

Ah, of course. That made complete sense. I felt a bit shocked that I would have to live with this from now on. I must be reallybad inside and I imagined this pit of bloody badness oozing out of me into my knickers every month, like a disease.

Eunice turned away again and went back to reading, satisfied she’d explained everything to me clearly.

I didn’t question her explanation. How could I? I’d been brainwashed for over five years to believe the worst of myself all the time. So my menstruation was yet another sign of how evil and bad I was. It definitely all made sense. Nevertheless the whole business took a bit of getting used to, especially as I got no ‘motherly’ sympathy when I got my monthly tummy cramps.

My body was beginning to change, too, as I began to grow hair under my armpits and ‘down there’, my hair got greasier and my breasts began to develop. Again, there was no gentle guidance or help in understanding what was happening to me. There was no going out to buy my first bra with my mum. I had a ropy, old, greyish-white hand-me-down from a charity shop, which was way too big. As usual, I was made to feel I just wasn’t worth any fuss.

Although we almost never had visitors to the farmhouse Eunice did have an old friend – I’m going to call him Kevin, although that’s not his real name – who popped in very occasionally for a cup of tea. She told us to call him ‘Uncle’ although he wasn’t related. I don’t know where she knew him from but he was quite a rough type. He was a very odd-looking guy and uncomfortably physical, always insisting that we sat on his lap. Or rather, me, to whom he had taken a particular fancy.

Kevin seemed very interested in my developing body. I would sit on his lap and he would put his arms around me. Then he would put his hands on my legs and move them up my thighs. One day, he put his hands on my crotch and began to rub me, which felt very peculiar and I didn’t know what I should do. I couldn’t run away as he held me tightly there, on his lap. I just sat there, passively, as he rubbed me between the legs, breathing heavily. I was really embarrassed, and also confused, because I didn’t understand what exactly was going on.

On another occasion, he started asking me strange questions. ‘How are you down there? Are you hairy or bald?’

I didn’t know how to answer him, it felt so rude and personal, but I felt I had to obey, so I said, ‘I’ve got some hair.’

Kevin then became very interested and started leering at me, saying, ‘You know, you’re a very attractive girl,’ which freaked me out. I fought to get off his lap and, after quite a struggle, I did. However, every time he visited he was always hanging around me, trying to touch my body, especially my private parts, and I absolutely hated it.

Another time when he dropped in unexpectedly, Kevin got me on his lap again and was rubbing me ‘down there’. Then he told me to touch his trousers in the crotch area. He said, ‘Go on, touch it’. But I didn’t want to. It didn’t feel right at all to do what he wanted. The way he was looking at me made me feel very uncomfortable, as all the while he tried to rub me between my legs. He then said, ‘I’ll give you a quid if you touch it.’ By ‘it’ I sort of guessed he meant his thing, as I’d seen my foster brother naked and knew men were different ‘down there’. I had an idea of what he was getting at, although I didn’t really know anything about sex then. I wouldn’t have known about men getting erections or ejaculation.

I didn’t feel right about what was going on between us but I suppose, on some strange level, Kevin provided human contact, some kind of touch and warped affection, even though it made me feel like I wanted to curl up into a ball of embarrassment and shame. Anyway, I didn’t know who I could tell about it, or if anyone could stop him. I certainly didn’t think of telling Eunice because I was always in the wrong, before I’d even tried to explain something. She would blame me, tell me I had led him on.

So every time Kevin dropped in he would make a beeline straight for me, and keep trying to get me on his lap to touch me whenever he could. What’s more, it got worse and worse the older and more developed I became.

Kevin’s behaviour wasn’t the only thing that confused me about sex. Eunice had continued to show us horrible things on video or TV, like
The Birds,
when she wanted to ‘teach us a lesson’. Around this time she forced me to watch an episode of
Bad Girls
– a late-night drama series on TV for adults about women in prison. I hadn’t watched it before, or anything like it, and didn’t know the characters or the storyline. Anyway, the one episode Eunice made me watch showed a gang of women prisoners basically raping another woman in the prison. It was horrendous. I saw her being beaten up as they called her names and pulled her hair and boobs.