Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (12 page)

When I came round, I was lying naked on the garage floor. I looked up and the beautiful angel was floating nearby and gazing sympathetically down at me. Pulses of pain shook my body all the way from my legs up to my chest and I could feel that I was sticky with blood between my legs. Grandpa wasn’t there any more but soon Grandma arrived carrying the tub.

‘Come on, then. Let’s get you cleaned up.’

‘You have to tell someone,’ the angel was saying. ‘This is not right. He’s injuring you. You need help.’

But the woman who should have been protecting me from this was calmly filing her nails in the garage doorway.

‘Get in the water,’ Mum snapped at me. ‘And hurry up. We haven’t got all day.’

Surely it must be wrong for Grandpa to hurt me so much that I passed out. But I felt that it was my fault somehow. I was a misfit, the black sheep of the family, the ugly duckling, and I needed to go through these ordeals to
gain acceptance. This is what I deserved for being dirty and unloveable. If I could only put up with the abuse for long enough, I hoped I would win their love one day. I just wished it didn’t hurt quite so much.

That was the first time that Grandpa raped me. He had, of course, been working up towards it ever since he had first started touching me, when I was only six years old. Now, at the age of eight and three-quarters, he seemed to think I was old enough to take him, and from then on he always finished our sessions by pushing his horrible thing inside me, even though it hurt me so much that I often fainted.

Over the next few months, Grandpa’s games became more and more perverted. He tied my arms behind my back, blindfolded me and penetrated me in every possible way. He beat me, kissed me and sometimes he held and stroked me like a lover.

‘This will make me love you, Vanessa,’ he assured me as he raped me over and over again. ‘I love you more every time we do it.’

I, on the other hand, grew to hate him with a fierce, white-hot hatred that I still carry around to this day. I don’t think I will ever get rid of it for the rest of my life.

I
saw less of Dad at Shernal Green than ever before. His commute to and from work took longer than it had from Bentley Heath so he stayed away during the week. He came home on Friday nights, only to leave again on Monday morning with a small bag of clothes. I asked Mum where he was during the week and she said, ‘With the other woman!’ and laughed wryly.

‘What other woman?’

‘Nosey parker.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘You’re too young to understand. It’s something for grown-ups.

Was she telling the truth? Was there really another woman? Or was it one of her snide, throwaway comments? I could never tell with her – she was such an accomplished game player that I couldn’t distinguish between her bluffs and her rare moments of honesty.

On Saturdays, I usually spent the day with Dad, helping him to tame the wilderness of the cottage’s huge garden. He dug up the weeds then rolled out long strips of pristine green turf on the bare, freshly dug soil. My job was to plant spring bulbs – snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and tulips.

While he was gardening, Dad would stop to chat with the people in the other cottages, especially Mrs Black, a large old lady whose flesh wobbled like blancmange as she walked. They often gave each other cuttings from plants and asked each other’s advice about insecticides and fertilizers and soil acidity.

While Dad got on well with everyone in the lane, Mum kept the neighbours at arm’s length, just nodding hello as she passed. One day, Mrs Black witnessed an incident that made relations between Mum and her decidedly more chilly. I was out throwing stones down into the well and had lifted the planks off the top for a better view. Mum crept up behind me. I half-turned as she drew near but wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way. She grabbed my arm and pushed me hard in the small of the back so that I fell forward over the wall. My shoulder joint wrenched backwards and I would have toppled down into the chasm if she hadn’t kept hold of my arm.

I screamed, of course, and seconds later Mrs Black came running out of her kitchen.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she shouted.

‘Oh hello,’ Mum said in her poshest voice. ‘How are you?’

Mrs Black bent over, out of breath from her run. ‘You nearly pushed the child down the well. I saw you,’ she panted.

‘I wouldn’t have let go,’ Mum soothed. ‘I was just trying to teach her a lesson about how dangerous it is to lean over wells. You’ve got no idea how mischievous she can be.’

Mrs Black peered at us through her glasses and frowned. ‘She could have slipped and she would never have
come out of there alive. That well is more than fifty feet deep. You really should be more careful.’

‘Thanks for your concern, I’m sure.’ Mum was snippy now. ‘But I think I know how to handle my own daughter.’

I tried to catch eyes with Mrs Black and convey an apology with my expression but I could tell she was horrified by Mum’s actions. She just said ‘Good day to you’, and turned to walk back to her kitchen. I hoped she would mention to Dad what she had seen but I don’t think she did. I suppose she didn’t want to get involved.

Soon after that incident, on a Saturday morning, I went out to Whirly’s hutch to feed him and I found him lying stiff and cold in his bed. ‘Dad!’ I shrieked and he came running from the kitchen. We lifted him up but he was floppy and definitely dead.

‘Poor old Whirly,’ Dad sympathized. ‘He must have caught a virus or something. We’ll make a nice grave for him and you can decorate it with flowers.’

‘But I want Whirly back! He was my only friend in the world.’ I was distraught. It seemed every human being I loved was taken away from me somehow and now my pet rabbit was gone as well. I might have a guardian angel who came to me in those awful moments when Grandpa was playing his games with me, but I couldn’t hug her, or take solace in the warmth of her body. Whirly’s fur had absorbed more of my tears than I could count.

After breakfast, Dad dug the grave and we put Whirly in a cardboard box with some carrots and straw and lowered him into it, while I sobbed my heart out.

‘OK, Lady Jane? I have to go out now but when I come back I’ll bring a special surprise for you.’ He gave me a hug. ‘Just you wait.’

He was gone for a couple of hours and when he came back he was carrying a little squirming thing in his big hands. I couldn’t see at first what it was. ‘Here you go!’ He held it out, and I gasped with delight. It was a little black and white collie puppy with a twitching black nose and eager, pleading eyes.

‘I’m going to call her Janie,’ I said, kissing her soft fur. ‘Thank you so much, Dad.’

He had bought her a little bed to go in the kitchen, a supply of dog food and he gave me a book from the library explaining how to train puppies. I was nervous about showing her to Mum, but in fact she seemed to like Janie from the start, reaching out to give her a stroke and showing me a corner of the kitchen where I could place her bed.

It was strange watching Mum being affectionate towards my new puppy; it was a side of her I’d never seen before and it made me wish, briefly, that she could be like that with me. But mostly I’d given up hope of her ever being nice to me. My main goal was to somehow track down my real mother one day, in the hope that she would let me go to live with her instead.

I loved Dad to pieces but I no longer believed that he would ever protect me from Mum. There had been too many occasions when he’d taken her word rather than mine. Since we’d moved to Shernal Green, I could sense that he and Mum weren’t getting on very well. She’d stopped being so girly and flirtatious with him, replacing it with a cool politeness, and I often felt that he was just playing the happy families act with us over weekend meals.

‘I married the wrong man,’ Mum told me around this time. ‘Lots of men would have killed to marry me, one in particular, and I made a mistake when I chose your dad.’

Once, as we worked in the garden, I asked Dad if everything was all right, and he said yes, of course, it was fine. ‘I’ve got a lot of business worries right now,’ he said. ‘But aren’t we lucky we’ve got this beautiful new house to live in?’

He was pretending, so I pretended to him as well: school was OK, I said, and yes, I was making friends. And I never mentioned to him what was happening to me when Mum and I went to the Pittams’ house on Saturday afternoons. It was a terrible secret that I kept to myself. I could not bear to think about it and shut it out of my mind as much as I could. Even the voices didn’t speak about it when it wasn’t happening.

Once the decorative work around the cottage was finished, Mum’s mood deteriorated and she redirected her energy to making my life a misery. A new stick was placed in the utility room just off the kitchen and Mum began talking to God again and beating me for misdemeanours as ‘He’ directed. I’m sure she was bored. She had no sewing work to do any more, so she spent her days keeping up with the housework, playing with Janie, knitting, or painting watercolours of flowers, a new hobby she had taken up. She didn’t have a car so she was very isolated during the week when Dad was away. Public transport was a rare, infrequent commodity round Shernal Green. Dad drove her to Droitwich to do the shopping every Saturday morning and
he sat in the car reading the paper while she got everything she needed. I usually stayed with him, reading my book, or sometimes he bought me a comic.

As I got older and bigger, Mum’s temper flare-ups became more vicious. While she always stopped short of injuring me to the point where she would have had to call an ambulance, she seemed to get more out of control each time and I was never sure that she wouldn’t actually kill me. Sometimes I could tell when an explosion was coming – if she broke a nail or ripped her stockings, for example – but other times it came out of the blue. I think punishing me provided a temporary relief from the tedium of her life and the frustrations of her marriage. It was just the two of us now – there were no neighbours close enough to hear, no Nigel and no Dad, most of the time. All her rage and pent-up despair came rolling out of her, expressing itself in a wild violence towards me. Barely a day went by when I didn’t get beaten and my backside and thighs were permanently bruised and raw. After beating me, as I lay whimpering and groaning with the pain, she would sit down, light a cigarette and sigh. She always seemed calmer, as if something fighting inside her had been resolved.

Hurting me was the only thing that could make her feel better.

I
n December 1958, when we’d been in the cottage for about five months, I was bringing Mum a box of eggs from the fridge while she cooked supper and I accidentally dropped them. I don’t know why – they just slipped from my grasp. A tight band of fear constricted my chest as I bent down to see if any of them had survived unbroken.

Suddenly Mum grabbed me by the hair, twisting her fingers deep into the roots so she had a good grip, and she lifted my face till it was inches from hers, hissing: ‘You ugly, stupid brat. Do you think we’re made of money? I’m fed up to the back teeth with your clumsiness.’

She battered my head against the kitchen wall again and again, using each crash to punctuate her invective. ‘You’re the bane’ – crash – ‘of my life.’ – crash – ‘Without you I’d be’ – crash – ‘working in the fashion industry’ – crash – ‘and going out with my friends to parties’ – crash – ‘instead of which’ – crash – ‘I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere’ – crash – ‘with an ugly brat’ – crash – ‘who does her best to wind me up.’

She let go of my hair and I fell to the floor, stunned.

‘Is this it?’ I wondered. ‘Is she going to kill me this time?’ I considered trying to make a run for it and get across the lane to Mrs Black’s but I was too dizzy to stand up.

‘I don’t want you in my house,’ Mum screamed. ‘Get out!’ She pointed at the back door. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you won’t come back till morning.’

Although the days were unseasonably sunny, there was a sharp frost in the air when the sun went down and the nights were bitterly cold. I had no time to grab a coat or jacket. I was just wearing a pair of crimplene trousers, a thin sweater and a hand-knitted cardigan.

I stood outside the kitchen door for a while, hoping that Mum would relent at some stage, but she made her own supper and took it on a tray through to the sitting room to watch our newly acquired television set. My head was thumping and my eyes couldn’t seem to focus properly; everything looked blurred. I was worried that Mum might have damaged something in my head with all the blows. I drank some water from the water butt but it made me feel nauseous, so I sat down on the back step and rested my head on my knees, holding my aching temples between my hands.

A couple of hours later Mum came back into the kitchen. She glanced out and saw me sitting there and I looked up pleadingly, but her face was expressionless. She turned and walked away, switching the kitchen light off behind her. She put off all the lights on the ground floor and then I saw her bedroom light come on. I was shivering with cold in my bones, and sickened by the dull, pulsing pain in my head.

I tried the kitchen door again but it was firmly locked. The front door was locked as well. I walked round the
house checking to see if any windows were open a crack but there were none I could have climbed through. Half an hour later Mum’s light went out and the cottage was in complete blackness. There was only a sliver of moon that night so the darkness was almost absolute. I couldn’t see any flicker of light over at Mrs Black’s cottage. The only thing I could think of was to go into the pigsty, where I had sheltered the day Nigel was taken away to school.

Dad now kept the lawnmower and some of his gardening tools in the pigsty, so I made myself a space between them and lay down, wrapping the cardigan around me as tightly as I could. Outside an owl hooted and although I’d heard that owl before from inside the house, it was scary to think that the only thing separating me from its sharp beak and claws was a tin roof and a picket fence.

‘Go to sleep, Vanessa,’ a spirit voice said. ‘We’ll look after you. You’re safe here.’

I nodded off but was wakened some time later by a snuffling noise and a sense that there was something nearby, just on the other side of the fence. The creature sounded as though it was digging at the soil beneath the fence, trying to make its way inside.

‘Go away,’ I said loudly, my voice shaking with fear. The snuffling and digging stopped. ‘Get out of here!’ I yelled and I heard the creature pattering away. I crept over to the doorway to look out and saw two white streaks waddling off into the undergrowth. They were badgers, slightly bigger and rounder than Janie.

It took me ages to get back to sleep after that. I knew that badgers wouldn’t do me any harm, but what other wild animals might be out there? Wolves? Snakes? Wild cats? I racked my brains to think of potential dangers. In
reality, the greatest danger I faced was hypothermia. I was so cold that I had lost feeling in my arms and legs and it was difficult to move them; they felt numb and heavy, as if they didn’t belong to me. My head still pounded with a dull, regular pulse in the temples and another, deeper ache right at the back of my eyes. I felt nauseous, but not the kind of nausea that would be helped by actually being sick. I curled up on the ground again, trying to stay alert for unusual noises.

I must have dozed off because when I awoke it was morning. A mist hovered over the grass outside and low sunlight sparkled on the frost. I clung on to the fence and hauled myself to my feet, then stumbled stiffly across the grass to the kitchen door. Mum was inside, sipping a cup of tea at the table. Tentatively I tried the door handle and found it was unlocked now.

Mum regarded me calmly. ‘Have a good night, did you? You’re filthy. You’d better take your clothes off and have a wash at the water butt before you come into my house.’

‘I’m freezing,’ I told her, my jaw so stiff with cold that I could barely speak.

‘Wash first, then you can come in.’

There was no point in arguing. I stripped off my clothes, turned on the tap under the water butt and splashed my skin, washing my grimy face and hands carefully.

Mum came to the door to supervise. ‘You’ll have to wash your hair. It’s caked with mud. Here.’ She reached over to the sink and handed me a bottle of washing-up liquid to use as shampoo.

She lit a cigarette and stood with one hand on her hip, watching, as I bent double to rinse my hair under the tap. I
was shuddering convulsively. The cold water intensified my headache. It felt as though my skull had shrunk and was pressing against my brain. My fingers were too numb to rub effectively but I did my best, knowing it would be far worse if she decided to help me.

When I had finished, Mum threw me an old kitchen towel, the one I used for drying Janie after we’d been out for a walk together in the rain.

‘Don’t dare drip on my kitchen floor,’ she barked. ‘Hurry up now or you’ll be late for school.’

I’ve got no idea how I got through that school day. I hugged the radiators at breaktime, trying to get some warmth back into my bones. I must have been very pale and I felt dazed and unwell but none of the teachers noticed. My stomach was gurgling loudly, which made some of my classmates giggle during morning lessons, but then I wolfed down my school lunch so quickly that I felt sick all over again.

When I got home that afternoon, I could tell Mum was pleased with herself. ‘It’s much more peaceful in the house at night without you moping around, muttering away about your stupid voices when you should be asleep.’ She shoved a plate of supper into my hands. ‘There you go. Why not take this outside to eat? If you’re going to behave like an animal, I might as well treat you like one.’

From then on for the next four years, I was forced to spend at least one night a week in the pigsty and many of my meals were eaten outdoors. If I tried to resist, as I often did as I got older, she manhandled me out of the
door and bolted it behind me. After a while, I came to accept the situation as almost normal.

The spirits kept me company and made me feel less scared out there. There was a little girl with one arm who became a particular friend. She taught me how to play games like ‘I Spy’, and she told me little jokes to try and make me laugh.

My guardian angel was motherly towards me, giving me advice. ‘Bring an old coat outdoors and leave it here so you can keep warm,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t worry about that noise. It’s a fox looking for food but he can’t get through the fence.’

Sometimes I saw the old spirit woman who had been on the porch the day we arrived at Shernal Green but she just looked at me sadly, without speaking. Between them, the spirits kept me sane on those cold and lonely nights, and I felt they were protecting me in their own way.

As my guardian angel had advised, I brought out an extra sweater, an old coat and a blanket to hide in the pigsty. I also stockpiled a pack of biscuits, some sweets and a bottle of juice for my nights outdoors. One Saturday Dad spotted my provisions when he was getting his spade out.

‘Is that your secret hiding place, Lady Jane?’ he grinned. ‘Don’t worry – I won’t disturb it. Your secret’s safe with me.’

I looked up at him and decided to tell him the truth, but without any real hope that he would believe me.

‘Mum makes me spend the night out here sometimes,’ I told him, my voice flat and expressionless.

He looked annoyed. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Of course she doesn’t. Why on earth do you say these things? It just makes everyone cross with you.’

I didn’t say any more. He was so convinced I was a liar that there was no point in arguing. I felt sad that he didn’t know me better or question why I would make up a bizarre story like that. He didn’t want to see problems so he didn’t.

I must have had a fairly robust constitution because I survived my nights outdoors without succumbing to serious illness, although I did get one distressing health condition. The skin on my arms, chest and scalp developed thick, red patches with silvery flakes of dead skin on top. They itched infuriatingly then bled when I scratched them.

It was Nan Casey who diagnosed the problem on one of my increasingly rare visits to her house. ‘You poor wee thing,’ she sympathized. ‘It’s psoriasis. It must be really uncomfortable.’

She got some lotion from the chemists and applied it to all the angry, irritable patches, but as soon as I got back to Shernal Green Mum threw the lotion in the bin. She didn’t care about the maddening discomfort I suffered – in fact, she enjoyed it.

And she was about to get a partner in crime, who enjoyed seeing me suffer just as much as she did.