Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival.

by Victoria Spry

  She gave me a packed lunch to take with me, containing thickly pasted Marmite sandwiches. I hated thick Marmite sandwiches, but that was the way Mummy operated. It was like a game to her, like a war; it was a control thing. Mummy always had to be in control.

  Yet that September, for the first time, I thought I might be out of that control, just a little bit. I was still very quiet, and I was so frightened of her that I tried to do what she said. Nevertheless, I found that, at playtime, another little girl might come up to say hello to me, or a teacher might bend down and give me a kind word as I sat on a bench on my own. I might smile back at one of the other children, or dare to look up to watch a game going on between the older kids.

  Quite early on in the school term, I came home from school and Mummy was waiting for me.

  ‘Get upstairs,’ she told me. ‘Take your shoes and socks off.’

  I scurried to obey. We had a dirty green carpet on the stairs at George Dowty, and it didn’t quite reach the landing – there was a little strip of bare wood at the top, where she now directed me to stand. She sat on the stairs below me, my bare feet in front of her face.

  ‘Did you speak to anybody at school today?’ she asked me. Her voice was calm and inquisitive.

  I thought back to the little brown-haired girl who’d tried to involve me in a game that lunchtime. But Mummy hadn’t been at school – there was no way she could know about that.

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Nobody.’

  She looked up at me. ‘Don’t lie,’ she warned.

  ‘Nobody,’ I squeaked.

  ‘Liar!’ she roared. She raised her arm, and I saw she had a wooden chair leg in her hand. She brought it down on my toes, hard. I bit my tongue to keep from crying out, the pain almost shocking me into silence.

  ‘No liar will stand in my presence,’ she quoted from the Bible. She beat me again, tens of hard raps across my toes, until my nails swelled, red and bleeding. I looked down as the blood bubbled beneath them. Suddenly, I was glad to be standing on the wooden bit; there was always hell to pay if I ever got blood on the carpet.

  ‘Get downstairs, you liar. We’re going to wash your mouth out for telling such dirty lies.’

  I walked gingerly down to the kitchen, my feet throbbing with every step. She stood me by the sink and grabbed the washing-up liquid. ‘Head back,’ she ordered. I tilted my head back, but I kept my mouth firmly closed. ‘Mouth open,’ she ordered. When I stubbornly kept it closed, my body fighting against the punishment even as my mind succumbed, she pinched my nose until I had to open my mouth to gasp for air. In an instant, she had shoved the plastic bottle between my lips, the teat jamming hard against my teeth. She squeezed firmly and glutinous lemon liquid squirted to the back of my throat. I gagged.

  ‘Don’t be so weak-minded!’ she yelled at me. ‘Drink!’

  I had no choice but to swallow, and then swallow again. She glugged it down me, the whole bottle. When I threw up in the sink, she made me eat my own vomit, and threatened that, if I was sick again, she’d do the same thing again with a bottle of bleach.

  ‘Don’t you lie to me ever again,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got a magic eye; I can see what you’re doing. I’ve got a magic eye; I know exactly what you’re doing.’

  And every single day at school, she did. Somehow, she knew who I’d been with; if anybody had spoken to me. I never dared to speak to anyone ever again. As an adult, I’ve realised that she must have spied on me. As a child, I could only assume that what she told me was true: she had a magic eye, and she could see me at every minute of every hour of every day. She was an all-powerful, all-seeing being. I could never, ever get away from her gaze.

  The school term drew on. Soon there was a chill in the air, and the classrooms began to ring with the excited chatter of children anticipating Christmas, and the imminent visitation of someone called Santa Claus.

  As Jehovah’s Witnesses, we didn’t celebrate Christmas – or birthdays, for that matter. Several times Mummy had read me the riot act about the upcoming festivities. ‘You’re a Jehovah’s Witness, you’ve got to stand strong,’ she would say. ‘You’re only worthy if you don’t join in.’

  That December, there was a whole school assembly about Christmas. The teachers shepherded us all into the hall, and I followed meekly. If nothing else, Mummy had certainly taught me to obey adults and to do as I was told. So I joined in the assembly, and I even coloured in a Christmas bauble when we did festive arts and crafts in the afternoon.

  As soon as I came out of school, clutching my Christmas decoration, I knew that what I’d done was wrong. Mummy’s eyes … She was so angry. And I knew what was coming when I got home.

  She flung me inside as soon as the front door was open, and I sailed across the hallway, just like my rag doll, Katie. Then she beat me around the floor, each blow emphasising her words: ‘You. Are. Evil. The Jehovah God disapproves of anything to do with Christmas. You have just gone and coloured. In. A. Bauble.’ She was absolutely livid.

  So livid, in fact, that five days before Christmas 1990, records show that she withdrew me from Overbury to be educated at home.

  No one was going to teach me a lesson better than her.

  For some reason, though, I did go back to mainstream education, at least for a time. I changed schools to Northway Infant School in Tewkesbury, and Mummy’s instructions about speaking to no one and keeping my gaze down were reissued. Not that I really needed to be told, anymore.

  Unbeknown to me, Northway polished up her magic eye for her even more, because there was a Co-op car park that backed onto the playground there. Mummy used to park there every day and watch me. I didn’t know she was there, all I knew was that she always knew exactly what I’d been up to.

  Mummy was still keeping up the starvation punishments. At school, I found the temptation of the other children’s lunchboxes too great, and I started pinching food from them because I was so hungry. Mummy, of course, got called in. And I was punished not only for stealing fruit, but also because I’d made her look bad as a parent; I’d humiliated her. For Mummy, who always strived to appear better than any other mother, any other family, this was an unforgivable sin.

  She told me I was to come home for my lunch from now on but one lunchtime, when I got back to George Dowty Drive, there was no one there: she’d forgotten about me. I sat on the doorstep for a while, waiting, unsure if I’d be in trouble if she came home for me and found I wasn’t there. Eventually, I ran down to my nan’s, but she was out, too. I headed back to school in the end, quite late, and innocently explained, ‘Mummy’s not in.’ They asked me if I’d had lunch, so I said no, and they gave me a school dinner.

  I was kicked around the hallway floor for that. ‘How dare you tell people I’m a bad parent!’ she ranted. My lips ballooned as her boots collided with my face. She kept me home from school the next day, and on any other days when the bruises were too obvious. She was a clever woman, my mummy; she always knew how far she could go.

  One morning, we were late for school. As usual, it was my fault: I had wet the bed. I was always wetting the bed, plagued by nightmares about Satan coming to get me. He would come down the driveway and through the hall and up onto the landing, coming to snatch me and take me out the window. Every time there was a thunderstorm, I thought Armageddon had arrived. And, especially as I grew older, Mummy would show me horror films where people died, one after the other in bloody, violent scenes, and she’d say, ‘Go and make sure you pray to God because you’ve been really naughty today and you might not be here in the morning.’ On this particular morning, Mummy marched me down to school with the sopping-wet, urine-soaked sheet, and she held it up in front of my entire class.

  ‘This is why we’re late. This is what this dirty child has done,’ she announced.

  I hung my head in shame and humiliation – but I had only myself to blame. Mummy had been trying to stop me from wetting the bed for as long as I could remember. As with all of my development, I was slow to learn. Slow to
be potty-trained, despite the fact that she would tie me to my potty all day; despite all her best efforts in that field. If ever I had an accident, she would rub my face in the wee on the floor and then wipe my wet knickers all over my face and shove them in my mouth. I’d have to sit there with my soaking knickers in my mouth, as a punishment.

  As I got older, and the bed-wetting continued, she’d make me drink her wee in retribution for my crime. She’d pee in the toilet, a dark, dark wee, and then summon me over to drink it. She’d get a cup and I’d have to dip it in the loo and then swallow it down. And I’d gag and I’d cry, and I’d spit it out, but the more I spat it out, the more she’d say it had to be done, there were no two ways about it.

  It didn’t stop me wetting the bed. Instead, I had more nightmares than ever, and on more and more mornings I woke up with a sinking feeling at that tell-tale cool dampness on the backs of my legs. Mummy would rant and rave, and call me an attention-seeker. And one Sunday, she had had quite enough.

  We got dressed for church as usual. Judith and Charlotte were done up to the nines, in smart frocks scattered with bows, and even pretty bonnets tied around their smiling faces. They looked like a double act: two Little Bo Peeps. I struggled into my charity-shop clothes, which were dirty and ragged, and always too small or too big – usually too big, for the starvation punishments had made me into a scrawny little girl, skin and bone within a hand-me-down coat.

  When we were ready, Mummy made me turn around and pinned a handwritten sign on my back. And then, together, we walked to the Kingdom Hall. We came in late, and sat towards the back. Sandy was in the row behind me. I sat quietly, with my head down, and she could see each word on the sign writ large and clear.

  This child is evil. She’s an attention-seeker. Do not look at her or talk to her.

  For Sandy it was the final straw: she rang social services. Something, she thought, had to be done about this woman.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Social services rang Sandy back, two weeks later. They said they had investigated, but felt there was no problem, before adding: ‘What do you expect us to do? We’re short on foster mothers.’

  I can remember social services coming round to call on Mummy and me – not because of Sandy, necessarily; they came quite frequently. A social worker would come and knock on the door of George Dowty Drive, as I sat inside in the cold kitchen, listening to the exchange on the doorstep of the house; or they would phone, and I’d hear my mother’s end of the conversation. Each time they came I dreaded it, because Mummy would say I had caused trouble in bringing them to her door, and she would beat me for it.

  It was never convenient for the social workers to call in. ‘I’m on holiday that week,’ Mummy would say, brooking no argument, if they phoned in advance to schedule a visit. Or, ‘No, I’m sorry, now is not a good time. You’ll have to come back later,’ if they turned up on the doorstep unannounced. She’d say it with the door open only a sliver, not showing them anything of our world.

  Of course, ‘later’ was never good either, for one reason or another. I’d sit listening to these exchanges, with bruises all over my body, and I’d wonder why they weren’t coming in … but I knew why, really: my mother. My mother and her manipulation. They were intimidated and they were subtly influenced. Nobody could wrap social workers round her finger better than my foster mum.

  Yet she wouldn’t be my foster mum for much longer. Her application to adopt me was gaining pace. There was a severe setback to her plans in December 1991, though, when my social worker suddenly told Mum that she would not support the adoption due to ‘concerns’ she held about Mum’s care of me – and instead instigated a six-month assessment of my care.

  But this was my mother they were dealing with. She simply refused – once again – to see the social worker to allow the assessment to be carried out. I also found out, much later, that social services were late in delivering their file on me to the judge overseeing the adoption process; they simply didn’t get the file in on time.

  And so, just one month after that official concern was raised, my adoption was formally approved. Eunice Spry was now my legal mother – and I was on my own.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  The clock sounded loud in the hot, mustard-coloured Volvo. Alone, I sat in the car, watching the farm outside the window, where families had come to pick their own fruit for simple summer suppers. I could see them smiling and laughing as they milled about the open barn, where the farmer, John Drake, weighed their produce and bade them a good day. We were in Eckington, at a thirteen-acre farm near the border of Worcestershire, a nine-mile drive from George Dowty. Looking at the families happily dashing about in the fresh summer air, it felt a lot further away than that.

  Mummy and Charlotte had gone to pick some strawberries, but I’d been left behind in the sealed car. I sweated in the sunshine. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Suddenly, I heard the suction of the car door as it opened: Mummy had returned. She had a funny expression on her face. I was soon to learn that she had made a new friend in John Drake.

  After that, we started going over to the farm quite regularly, Charlotte, Mummy and me. Mummy would go over and cook supper for John. He was a much older man, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and he was unmarried and lived all alone in this great big farmhouse, on all these acres of land, with all this money in the bank. Mummy went straight through that door and wormed her way inside.

  I remember him as a gruff but quite kind-hearted man. There was a sandpit outside the big barn and he used to hide Mars bars in there for us kids. Of course, if ever I found the chocolate, Mummy would snatch it off me and say, ‘That’s not for you, that’s for Charlotte.’ And Charlotte, not knowing any better, would toss her dark hair over her plump shoulders and giggle as she reached for the treat. She was allowed to go for a ride on the tractor with John Drake, but I wasn’t. But I didn’t resent it, I accepted it: I sincerely believed that when Mummy said I didn’t deserve it, every word was true.

  The farmhouse was a very old, red-brick Victorian house that was just off the main road. Though the farm was set in rolling countryside, the house itself was just at the edge of the village, opposite a playgroup and another house; it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. Very tall, with five bedrooms, it had old-fashioned sash windows that would rattle in the wind. It had an old man’s smell, and was always very cold, as there was no heating.

  The kitchen was the only warm room, as John Drake kept his cream Raeburn lit with glowing coals. He’d sit beside it in the evenings with his newspaper, and he had a traditional butter dish that he kept on the kitchen table. We’d come in, Mummy would cook him a meal, and I’d watch his little Jack Russell dog as it lay on the red stone kitchen floor beside him.

  I loved dogs. We had a little terrier called Meggie, a yappy little thing, but I never warmed to her for some reason. Other dogs, though, I simply adored. I loved the way they’d meet my eyes when I looked down, and never seemed to judge. My favourites of all were Labradors. What I wanted, more than anything in the world, was a Labrador dog of my own.

  One evening, as I watched John begin to tuck into his supper, my hungry, growling belly spoke through me. ‘Mummy, I’m hungry,’ I said, almost before I knew that I’d opened my mouth.

  John Drake tried to give me something to eat.

  ‘No, no,’ interjected Mummy. ‘She’s not to have it.’

  ‘Come on now, she’s only little,’ he protested.

  ‘No,’ Mummy said firmly. ‘She is not to have it.’

  John looked into those cold, insistent eyes of hers, and he found himself sitting back in his seat and relenting. A hacking cough, a symptom of his cancer, wracked his ravaged lungs as he let the issue lie.

  When we got back to George Dowty Drive that night, Mummy grabbed me by the hair and smacked my head against the door.

  ‘What are you doing, asking strangers for food?’ she hissed at me. ‘You are such a rude little girl.’

  B
eing so young, I didn’t know it was bad etiquette to ask for something to eat in another person’s house. As usual, she didn’t like the fact that I had made her look bad, like a bad parent. She’d hated being put on the spot and shown up. Looks were very important to Mummy. Not physical looks – she never wore make-up, that was worldly, and she never looked clean or smart – but it was so important to her to be seen to be the best: the best Jehovah’s Witness; the best mother, raising her charming, adopted daughter and this awkward, autistic child. What a giving woman she was.

  As Jehovah’s Witnesses, we rarely had parties, as birthdays were never celebrated, but I remember a girl at the Kingdom Hall having a children’s party once when we were small. Her name was Jo. She was a few years older than Charlotte and me, and she had black curly hair; she was very pretty. Charlotte and I were both invited to the party, and Charlotte went in and played while I was left outside in the car. Jo’s mummy, Ann, came out and passed me a present through the window. I thanked her numbly, knowing that Mummy was going to go mad. And she did. She went mad at Ann, she went mad at me, and the other Witnesses looked at her aghast. People knew she was odd and they knew she was batty, but she was such a forthright, intimidating, righteous woman that somehow no one ever confronted her. Not the Witnesses, not social services, not the doctors, not even the school.

  I can’t think what possessed me, because I had never been anything but obedient, and I truly believed Mummy was doing as she did with the best of intentions – to try to make me good. Nevertheless, one day I decided to take matters into my own hands. In my time at school, I had learned to hold a pen and form my letters. It was a very basic scrawl, but I could write in big, babyish script. And I used my newfound skill to ask for help. I collected some envelopes from the hoard of stuff stacked up in every room in George Dowty, and I wrote on them, in painstaking letters.

  Will you be my new mummy?