by Jane Elliott
He was always thinking of new night-time rituals for us, particularly if Mum was out of the house, as he knew the boys would never dare to disturb us.
‘Stand on the bed,’ he ordered me when I was still very tiny. ‘Take your clothes off. Turn round.’
When I was standing, naked, with my back towards him he would turn as well, so we were back to back, then put his arms back round me and stretch my body across his back, making my spine crunch painfully. Afterwards I would be paralysed for a few moments, unable to move because of the pain.
As I got older and too heavy to hoist onto his back, he would pour lotion on both of our naked bodies, rub it around and then lie me on top of him, sliding me up and down, rubbing his penis on my vagina. He would then swap so he was on top, but he never penetrated me.
Another game he enjoyed would be making me strip naked in the living room and kneel. I would have to hold my arms out straight and he would place the Encyclopaedia Britannica on them. The book had come into the house from a salesman who had called one afternoon while we were all out the front washing the car. Usually anyone who came to the door like that was told to piss off, but for some reason this man caught their attention. Maybe Richard was in a particularly good mood, or maybe the salesman uttered the magic word ‘free’. I watched open-mouthed as Richard bantered with him, wondering what angle he was about to work. The man was offering some sort of deal that meant that if they signed up they would receive a couple of free volumes or something. Richard convinced him that he should leave the free volumes anyway and maybe they would sign up later. When the man came back later, of course he was told to piss off. I don’t remember anyone in the family ever actually looking inside the books.
Now they were a new means of torture. As my arms began to shake, Richard would add another volume and then he would balance his brown glass Britvic pub ashtray on top. If my arms dropped at all, the ashtray would slide off and he would kick me in the back or the head, shouting at me like a sergeant major to keep my arms up. The agony was intense and when my arms would shake with the strain it would make him even angrier. He seemed to enjoy that sort of torture almost as much as the sexual ones.
When my real life became unbearable I used to retreat inside my head into a fantasy world. Sometimes I would imagine that I was Cinderella, slaving away for my evil stepfather rather than my evil stepmother, and that one day my Fairy Godmother would come and I would be taken to the ball to meet Prince Charming, who would whisk me away from home and marry me. If I could convince myself, even for a few minutes, that there was going to be a happy ending to my story, then I could keep going.
At other times I began to think I was Jesus and I had come back down to Earth to suffer some more in order to save people, just like he did in the Bible. If there was some point to my suffering, then it was easier to bear.
Many years later, when I told these fantasies to a psychologist, he said he thought they might have been what kept me sane through those years, life rafts which allowed me to believe that things would be better one day and that all the suffering wasn’t for nothing.
When I was at senior school a girl called Tanya came back to the school after being taken away because of being bullied. I happened to be outside the head of year’s study on the morning she arrived. I’d been caught smoking, which happened frequently and which the head of year had given up trying to do anything about, as he knew my parents encouraged me. Tanya was sitting beside me.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got to come back,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get into any other school.’
At that moment a group of the girls who had been bullying her came past, making threatening sucking noises with their teeth, and I could see she was really frightened. We were both called into the head of year’s study together. ‘Right, Jane,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put Tanya in your class and you’ve got to look after her.’ From that moment we became inseparable.
Right away I could see that we were going to have to face down the gang that was bullying Tanya. She was even frightened to go into the toilets because she knew they would follow her in and give her a hard time.
‘I’ll wait till I get home,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You go to the toilet when you want to. I’ll come in with you.’
Sure enough, they followed us in and started mixing it. I think my experiences with Silly Git had made me especially sensitive to bullying. I just couldn’t stand it. There was another girl in the year below us who was a bit of a pitiful figure, always smelling of wee and covered in nits. She used to be bullied so much she would have fits and I started sitting next to her on the bus so that I could protect her, but I would have to get off a few stops before her and the moment the bus pulled away I would see them all jumping on her. I really hated having to leave her with them every day.
Anyway, the gang never bothered Tanya again once I’d made it clear that if they did they would be bothering me as well. I daresay they were wary of me, aware that I came from a family that was known for its violence. The training in aggression that Richard and Mum had given me had actually come in useful for once. I think being well liked by everyone helped too, as no one had any reason to fall out with me.
Tanya and I used to do everything together and she would come to our house to knock for me in the mornings so we could walk to school together. Sometimes Silly Git would give her a hard time when he found her in the house, swinging her round by her ponytail until her feet came off the floor, for instance, which was something he used to do all the time to me, pretending it was all just fun. Another time she arrived proudly wearing a big new clip in her hair and he simply snatched it off her head, dropped it on the floor and stamped on it.
‘You don’t have to knock for me,’ I told her after one of these incidents, ‘just wait on the corner till I come out.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t care.’
One evening we were due to go down to a fair together. Tanya came to knock for me at the time I’d told her, but Richard deliberately kept me hanging around for an extra hour and a half doing my chores, so she had to wait. It was a long walk to the fair and I was told I had to be back in early, so we had hardly any time there. Tanya was really fed up about it and asked me why Richard acted so weirdly all the time. We had become so close by then that I decided I could tell her the truth. She was the first person I’d told since Hayley. She was obviously shocked, but didn’t get silly about it and I was glad that I had decided to take her into my confidence.
A few days later Mum had gone out unexpectedly and Richard had decided to make me do him a favour in the front room after school. He was just getting into his stride when there was a knock on the front door.
‘That fucking cunt Tanya’s at the door,’ he said after peeking through the curtains. ‘I’ll get rid of her.’
He went out into the hall and I heard him going to the door and opening it.
‘She ain’t fucking here,’ he snarled.
‘Oh, right,’ I heard Tanya say, ‘so where is she?’
‘She’s buying a toothbrush over the Parade.’
He slammed the door shut and came back into the front room. ‘If you do it good,’ he said, ‘you can go out and find her afterwards.’
I found Tanya a little while later sitting in the churchyard near the Parade.
‘You’ve just come from there, haven’t you?’ she said, nodding back towards the house. ‘I knew you weren’t over the Parade, that’s why I’ve been sitting here. He didn’t even have the decency to do his flies up.’
I could just imagine how horrible she must have felt as she sat amongst the graves, knowing that he was doing that to her friend.
Chapter Five
I was quite a late developer, very skinny and undeveloped, and I didn’t have my first period until I was fourteen. I remember the moment exactly because I was round at Granddad’s, cleaning his stairs, when it came. I rushed home to find Mum and bumped stra
ight into Richard.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.
‘I need to talk to Mum,’ I said, trying to get past, unable to bring myself to discuss anything so personal with him.
‘What do you want to talk to her about?’ he wanted to know. I was never allowed to talk to Mum until I’d told him what it was about. I guess he was always wary I might let one of our secrets slip out.
‘It’s girls’ stuff,’ I said, hoping he would get the message and back off.
‘Oh right,’ he said, not only immediately seeming to grasp what I was on about but also seeming to be incredibly concerned. ‘Get in there then, young lady,’ he said, pushing me towards the living room as he yelled for Mum to come.
They laid me down on the sofa and the boys were sent to get pillows to prop up my head and my legs. ‘Go get her some Doctor White’s,’ Mum said and Richard went scurrying off to the shops. ‘You’re a lady now,’ they kept saying, insisting that I didn’t exert myself in any way.
They gave me a few days off school while I continued ‘becoming a lady’ and I thought it was a pretty good scam. Had I realized how terrible my periods were going to be in the coming months, sometimes lasting for three weeks at a time with one week intervals in between, I might not have been so keen. The pampering wore off pretty quickly too. My periods also worked against me as they gave Mum and Richard more reasons to keep me off school.
I loved going to school because it meant that for a few hours each day I could do and say whatever I wanted and I wouldn’t have to pay any gruesome penalties. I revelled in my freedom and was always the class clown, known by pupils and teachers alike for my loud honking laugh and high spirits. The teachers never seemed to mind my behaviour because, unlike many of the children in that school, I was never rude and was always co-operative. I just bubbled over with the joy of escaping the house. Everyone, staff and pupils alike, always seemed to like me, which puzzled me. If I was the despicable creature that my stepdad kept telling me I was, how come no one else could see it?
Knowing that I was liked at school improved my spirits still further when I was there and made dragging myself home at the end of each day even more of an ordeal.
In the beginning I did alright, top of the class sometimes, but as I got older and I was expected to do homework and put in the extra hours, I started to fall behind. I daresay in other schools my lack of academic results would have counted against me, but in an area like ours the teachers were happy just to have someone cheerful and enthusiastic in the classroom. They knew that I was doing my best, but that I had difficulties at home.
I must have been different from most abused children, which is probably why none of the authorities picked up on my problem. Normally they’re on the lookout for children who are withdrawn and having difficulty within their peer group, as well as for the obvious signs of bruising and other marks. Many years later Hayley told me that I did always seem to have to wear long sleeves because of bruises on my arms, but I wasn’t particularly aware of that. Most of the tortures my stepfather inflicted on me left no visible marks — the scars were all inside my head — and if ever I was badly marked I was kept off school until I had healed.
There was, however, one occasion during my first year in the juniors when my eye had turned completely bloodshot and I was called into the headmaster’s office to talk about it. When I got there I found there were some social workers waiting to see me. They must have known something else was going on because the teacher asked, ‘Did your father say he was going to kill you?’
I opened my mouth to say ‘yes’ but at that moment Silly Git burst into the room, sweating as if he had run all the way from the house. I guess they must have been legally bound to let him know or something.
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘He only says things like that when he’s joking, like everyone does.’
‘Does he hit you?’ they asked me.
‘No’ came out of my mouth, although inside my head I was screaming, ‘Yes!’
Richard told them all to fuck off, dragged me out of my chair and took me straight home, giving me a good hiding for getting the social workers involved in our family business.
I never heard anything from any of the others. I guess they were happy to take my answers at face value.
Although the authorities probably had no reason to believe that I was being abused in the way I was, they certainly knew that my parents were difficult, violent and abusive. The teachers knew that on Mondays I wouldn’t be coming in to school because I would be picking up their social security cheques. All the people in our area who had trouble making their money last would be queuing up at the post office at the same time, the line sometimes reaching round several blocks. Even if you got there at 7.30 in the morning, you might not actually reach the counter until lunchtime, as two people tried to deal with the never-ending tide of people. There was no way Mum and Richard were going to be waiting that long in a queue themselves, so I would be sent instead. I wasn’t the only kid in the area being given that responsibility.
Whenever there was a problem at home that meant Mum was out a lot, like the months Les spent in hospital for his burns or when she went into hospital herself to have her kidney out and other operations, or to have another baby, I would be absent from school for weeks on end, shut up in the house doing chores for Silly Git, and I would never be allowed to do any catching up on the work I’d missed.
The teachers knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the homework they set me either because my parents believed that my time at home should be dedicated to the family and not to schoolwork. They probably assumed that meant I was sitting around watching television all evening rather than working like a slave scrubbing out the house and looking after the boys. They didn’t make a fuss over it — Mum had told them clearly that not only did I not do homework, I didn’t do detentions either, and they had enough problems in their working lives without picking fights with her and Richard, so they just encouraged me whenever they had the chance. When I passed a few GCSEs they all went out of their way to tell me how proud they were of me. I was surprised, because I knew I could have done much better if I’d only been allowed to study, and I was grateful to them for their kindness.
Studying of any kind was seen as a sign of snobbishness in our house. If you were found reading a book it was assumed you were putting on airs and graces and trying to prove that you were better than your parents, so none of us did it. When the school said that my brother Pete was exceptionally bright and should be put forward for a scholarship to a nearby private school, Richard said no. His excuse was he didn’t want his son going to ‘a school for gay boys’, but I guess he felt it would lessen his control over Pete and take him into an environment where he would be out of his depth.
I don’t know whether the school staff made any effort to persuade the authorities to intervene on my behalf with my family, and since my files have gone missing I am never likely to find out, but I do know there was nothing they could have done themselves without running the risk of being intimidated and even attacked in their own classrooms or on the way in or out of school. Their hearts must have sunk every time they saw another child arrive at the school with our surname, knowing it would mean being abused and shouted at during parents’ evenings. In the end they managed to get Richard banned from the junior school for his aggressive behaviour, although I can’t imagine how they enforced the ban.
If I had only known that the kindly dinner lady who always asked me how I was as I queued up for my meals was actually asking on behalf of my dad, I might have been able to get a message back to him, telling him that things were going badly and asking him to come and get me. As it was, I just thought she was a nice lady and that my dad had disowned me. The dinner lady would have seen a loud cheerful girl, eating hearty meals despite her skinny frame. There would have been no reason for her to tell Dad anything other than that I looked fine and that he didn’t need to worry.
Richard must have liked the l
ook of me in a school uniform. I assume that was why he made me wear the stupid high-heeled court shoes when I was in junior school, and he made his tastes even more obvious as I grew older. When I was a teenager and Mum was out of the house, he would have me put on my PE skirt, long socks and top, put my hair up and slap on some make-up. He would then lie on the bed and masturbate as I walked around the room, bending over and opening drawers so he could see my knickers. I would then have to climb onto the bed and finish him off.
Chapter Six
Mum and Silly Git basically saw education as an imposition that their children needed to shake off as quickly as possible, and even before it was legal for me to leave school they told me I needed to go out and earn a living in order to pay my way around the house.
It started out with work experience organized by the school and when the teachers asked me what I wanted to do, I said I would like to do something with small children. Although it had been too much at times, I’d enjoyed looking after my brothers when they were little, particularly Les, who had been more my baby than Mum’s really. Whenever I was at home he was always with me. Even if I went out to be with a friend or up to my room, I always had to take him with me. It wasn’t his fault — Mum and Richard just didn’t want the bother of having to look after him themselves — but it annoyed my friends to always have him tagging along.
Les ended up spoilt, though, because even though they didn’t want to look after him, Mum and Richard let him have his own way all the time. If he wanted to have something of mine I had to let him, otherwise he would scream and they would intervene on his behalf and I lose whatever it was forever. He was even allowed to call Mum a ‘fat slag’ and Silly Git would just laugh and encourage him.
When Les was a baby and I was eleven, it was my job to get up to him if he cried in the night and I had to take him into bed with me to keep him quiet. I was so frightened of doing it wrong that on the nights when he slept through I would wake up in a dazed state and think I’d lost him because he wasn’t in the bed with me. I would be crawling around the floor on my hands and knees in the dark trying to find him before I woke up enough to remember he wasn’t there.