They Stole My Innocence
Page 22
It appeared that the home had thought this was a good option. Their opinion had been sought.
If Morag Jordan had told them about the rape and that I was most probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, my treatment might have been very different. I might have been offered psychotherapy, which is used for PTSD. And if that had happened perhaps now my memories would be clearer. But she hadn’t.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Once I was considered able to look after myself, the children’s department found accommodation for me at Camelot, a girls’ hostel. It was run by a couple who were the complete opposite to the staff at Haut de la Garenne. Warm and caring, their main aim was to ensure that the girls who lived with them were safe and happy. I stepped over their threshold into normality. They knew, of course, that I had been in the psychiatric hospital. But after my first day, when they gave me tea and cake, then told me that if I ever needed to talk their door would always be open, it was never mentioned.
Soon after I moved into Camelot, I found a job working at Summerland Knitwear Factory. I was one of the women responsible for sewing pockets onto cardigans. I silently thanked Sister Xavier, who had painstakingly taught me how to sew tiny little stitches. Because of her patience, I was praised for being neat and fast. The women I worked alongside were friendly and a couple of them were about the same age as me. To begin with I was terrified that they would find out about my time in the hospital and what I had done to be put in there. Gradually that fear faded as I realised that, as far as a girl of seventeen is concerned, people are interested in her present and future, not her past.
I was asked about boyfriends and quizzed about why I hadn’t got one. They followed this with the comment that always made me cringe inside: ‘A pretty girl like you’ or, worse, ‘A pretty little thing like you’. The shock treatment might have taken the clarity from some of my memories and muddled others, but it had not removed the feeling those words gave me.
It was a friend from work who, within a year of my arriving at Camelot, introduced me to the man who would become my husband. A new Portuguese restaurant had opened, she told me, and suggested I join her and her boyfriend for a meal. My surprise date was already in the restaurant when we arrived and my first impression of him wasn’t a good one. Dark-haired and olive-skinned, he was good looking but, I thought indignantly, he certainly knew it. And, besides, as I had told my friend repeatedly, I didn’t want a boyfriend. In faltering English – he had arrived In Jersey from Portugal only recently – he offered to walk me home. I refused. Would I like to go out with them after the meal for a drink? he asked. ‘I don’t drink,’ I told him. He offered again to walk me home. I refused. When I left the restaurant I neither wanted nor expected to see him again.
A few weeks later, he found out where I lived. ‘No,’ I said, each time he asked me to walk with him, go for a drink, or join him and some friends for a meal. I even turned down invitations to the cinema.
It was three months before I said yes to the cinema and a meal. It was very hard for me to trust a man, but gradually I learnt to, and before I was twenty-one, I was a wife and a mother, and I was happy. Eight months later I opened the door to the police.
My mother had died. Alcohol had finally won. She had choked to death on her vomit. When I went to the chapel of rest, I thought how peaceful she looked. Death had smoothed out the lines of sadness and disappointment. I said my goodbyes to her there, rather than at the funeral, when, for Alfie’s sake, I was trying to hold back my tears.
My life after that was relatively uneventful. For ten years my husband and I worked at whatever was offered. Farm work, cleaning, there was nothing I was too proud to turn a hand to. Life went by and my memories of Haut de la Garenne faded. I tried my best to be a good mother to my son. I encouraged him to do well at school: education, I told him, is important.
When I was thirty-two I had another child, a daughter. I hadn’t expected to have any more but she came along and she was beautiful. Life was hard, but there were a great many wonderful elements to it. I didn’t drink until 2007, the year when the police contacted me, turning my life and my family’s upside down.
Over the year when I and others who had been abused were interviewed, I felt that the scabs on old wounds were being picked at for no good reason. I was convinced, as others were, that the police doubted much of what they were told. This belief was reinforced when, after only a few punishments were handed out to some of the tormentors, it appeared that the case was closed. To dredge up the memories of what had happened in Haut de la Garenne and see the scepticism on the faces of those interviewing me caused my depression to resurface. With it came the need to escape with the aid of alcohol.
Five years after the case had faded from the public eye, but not from our tortured minds, the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry reopened it. Over two hundred people gave evidence and finally had the opportunity to tell their stories without mocking smirks of disbelief.
The State of Jersey agreed that each of us who had lost their childhood deserved financial compensation. Various amounts were awarded, enough to give some of us a fresh start. Even more importantly, it gave us the dignity of finally being believed.
The adult me has learnt to count her blessings. The past, I have told myself, should never be allowed to win. It is the present and the future that are important. My two children, who I’m so proud of, have given me more support than I could ever have asked for. Even though it was not easy for me to help them with homework, for I never really mastered reading, both of them did well at school. My son, who is trilingual, went to a Spanish university, where he studied to be a priest, and my daughter has a good career in front of her. Thanks to the nuns, who taught me that everyone is special in their own way, the confidence that had been taken away from me returned.
We all still live in Jersey and, yes, memories are triggered not only by the sight of the dark grey buildings of Haut de la Garenne and St Saviour’s Hospital, but by the faces of those who are lost. It is in the witching hours that my nightmares return. But in the daytime I look at the beauty of the island, see my family and friends and feel some degree of contentment.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473529441
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Copyright © Madeleine Vibert and Toni Maguire 2016
Madeleine Vibert and Toni Maguire have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in French by City Editions in 2015
This edition published by Ebury Press in 2016
www.eburypublishing.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785033513
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