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

by Victoria Spry

  My plan was to post them through my neighbours’ doors, through the letterboxes of the semi-detached red-brick houses along George Dowty Drive.

  But I never got the chance.

  I’d hidden them under a piece of loose carpet on the stairs, and Mummy found them. At first I didn’t know. In our early days together, her punishments would be performed in anger. She would lash out, striking me across the back of the head or across my feet with barely controlled rage, but she was starting to be calmer now. She found the envelopes, and she brooded, and mulled over my punishment. When she was ready, and only then, she came and found me. She was very calm. Chillingly calm. She picked me up by my blonde hair, picked me up until it was tearing at the roots, and then threw me back on the floor.

  ‘You sly, disloyal scumbag,’ she said, serenely. And I knew then she’d found the notes.

  She threw me into the kitchen, and then she started kicking me. In the head. In the stomach. In the back. In the face. My arms instinctively went up to protect myself, but she pulled them down roughly and kicked me twice as hard.

  ‘Stop trying to get one over on me,’ she said. ‘Stop retaliating. You’ve brought this on yourself so you can take your punishment. You autistic twit.’

  Kick. Kick. Kick.

  ‘Not even your biological parents wanted you. They couldn’t stand the sight of you, that’s why they gave you to me. “New mummy”? Don’t make me laugh. No one else would want you. If your own parents didn’t, no one else will.

  ‘Get up!’

  The abrupt cessation of her kicking threw me.

  ‘I said, get up!’

  She yanked me by the arm and dragged me over to the sink. Once again, her dirty fingers tangled in my hair and tugged it, driving my head backwards, while with her other hand she grabbed at the washing-up liquid always within easy reach at the sink.

  ‘Open your mouth.’

  She began to pour the bottle down me. I was gagging and choking, tears streaming down my face, bubbles foaming at my mouth. I heaved and retched, just waiting for that familiar sensation of the sick rising from my stomach, but she thrust her face into mine and screamed at me that, if I was sick, she’d do it all over again. I swallowed hard, the lemon, chemical taste all over my tongue making me gag, but I kept it down. Just.

  ‘It’s all in your head, this being sick. Stop being so weak-minded. It’s mind over matter. Now swallow the rest,’ she told me.

  She lifted the bottle to my lips and poured the rest of it down. I swallowed, and swallowed and swallowed. Then she threw the bottle in the sink, and threw me to the floor. Kick. Kick. Kick. This time she concentrated on my mouth. She kicked me in the mouth until she’d chipped a tooth and my lips were a bloody mash, sore and swollen and misshapen on my face.

  But she hadn’t finished yet. This was a bad punishment, for I had been a very, very bad girl. Daring to ask for help? Daring to suggest that I needed a new mummy? She was the best mummy for me, she was trying to help me; no one else would help me like she could. After all, as she told me over and over, ‘Whoever holds back his rod hates his son, but the one who loves him disciplines him diligently.’

  She commanded me to run up and down the stairs. I bowed my head and scuttled past her as I dragged my beaten, bloody body up and down, up and down. She stood in the hallway and watched me for a bit. My sisters were probably in their own rooms; in their own worlds. They never came out to see what was happening. It was normal in our lives that I would be disciplined; they’d have been more likely to stick their heads round their doors, with shocked expressions on their faces, if they heard Mummy being nice to me.

  ‘Faster,’ she said now. Then she turned and went into the living room, and put on the TV.

  It was naughty, I know, but once the TV had been on for a bit, its volume turned up loud, I sat down on the top of the stairs to rest. I felt so exhausted, I couldn’t carry on.

  Yet that wasn’t my biggest error. My biggest mistake was falling asleep. I woke to the sensation of falling, falling … falling down the stairs.

  ‘You are a sly and evil child,’ she told me coldly, as she threw me down. I landed in a heap, in a tangle of bruised and tender limbs, but it didn’t hurt as much as the beatings before. I counted myself lucky – for now.

  And then, for the rest of the night, she made me sit on the ‘invisible chair’ against the inside door of the living room, where she could see me, because she said she couldn’t trust me to do it alone.

  The invisible chair is a torture position. I don’t know how Mummy knew about it – she often read books about the Nazi regime and serial killers, so perhaps she discovered it in one of those. I had to stand with my back against the wall, my feet a short distance in front of it, and slide down the wall until my thighs were parallel with the floor. Within minutes, my muscles started to burn. My feet slipped from the sweat collecting on my soles. But of course moving wasn’t allowed; she’d hit me if I moved.

  I stayed there for the rest of the night, just as she commanded.

  ‘You stay there so I can watch you,’ she said, ‘watch you with my magic eye.’

  My mother was all-powerful, all-seeing. And this life was all I knew.

  I never tried to get a new mummy after that.

  I wasn’t sure there was much left of me to mother.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In the distance, I could hear the strains of a folk band playing, the music carrying in the still night air to where I stood on a plastic mat inside my mother’s caravan. Every now and again, the dark room was lit by the beams of revellers’ torches as they made their way back to their tents at the folk festival, their happy voices chiming with those of the singers.

  Mummy and Judith regularly attended folk festivals, and barn dances. Always Mummy would brag about how nobody else could dance quite like her. Sometimes, they would leave me behind with my nan when they went camping, but it was a regular hobby, and frequently I would find myself climbing up the steps to the caravan, entering its narrow, thin frame and trying to make myself as unobtrusive as possible.

  Unfortunately, my sleeping body didn’t realise I wanted to remain inconspicuous. I was a snorer; a loud, throaty snorer, whose adenoidal rattle would sound even louder in the small confines of the caravan. And so, when night fell, a familiar scene would play out.

  ‘Mummy, Torrie’s snoring, I can’t get to sleep,’ Charlotte would whine, and I’d wake to find my mum’s fingers pinching my nose. She’d drag me out of bed and force me to stand awake, all night, on a clear plastic mat. My legs would ache, my calves would burn, but if I cheated, and leaned against the rickety wall of the caravan to take some of the pressure off my exhausted limbs, Mummy would snap from beneath her duvet in her warm bed, ‘Get up, I can feel you leaning! Get up or I’m coming over there …’

  In the daytime, I was dead on my feet, so fatigued from staying awake all night that I’d be falling asleep, and Judith would say, ‘Oh God, get her out of my sight, lazy child! Put her to bed.’ Mummy would let me climb into bed, and then she’d stand over me, watching.

  ‘If you’re not asleep within one minute,’ she’d say, ‘you can get back up and stand because you’re obviously not tired enough.’

  I’d squeeze my eyes shut, and will myself to go to sleep, go to sleep. But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself to fall unconscious, my brain was all too aware of her standing over me, and my body seemed to get tenser and tenser rather than more relaxed.

  ‘You naughty girl,’ she’d say, when sixty sluggish seconds had passed without me dropping off. ‘I told you to go to sleep and you didn’t. Now you can get back up and stand.’

  And I would swing my little legs round and obediently go and stand on the mat, my bare feet cold and frozen, my legs already protesting at the long night ahead. Yet the most painful thing of all was my heart: for once again I had been naughty, and disobeyed my mother. She had told me to go to sleep, and I didn’t. Just like she always said, I was a very, very naughty g
irl, and knowing that made me hang my head in shame.

  Back at George Dowty Drive, Mummy was fixated on my sleeping. I snored there, too, and I would keep Charlotte awake. That simply wouldn’t do. Mummy would strip my clothes off and make me stand all night – sometimes outside in the shed, which was full of junk, or just outside her bedroom doorway, where she could keep an eye on me. She’d fall asleep, and I’d stand there on the green carpet of the landing, listening to the house settle in the darkness, hearing her snores as she slept, and imagining Satan coming to get me, hiding behind every stack of junk that littered the house.

  I was so tired. I did chores all day: caring for Meggie the terrier and our five cats, doing the laundry, learning how to cook spaghetti Bolognese just the way Mummy liked it. And I was hungry. My tummy rumbles would join in the lullaby of her snores and, much as I tried to fight against it, I always found I couldn’t: as I stood on the landing, I’d feel my head lolling … and snapping back up; lolling … and snapping back up again.

  Eventually, I’d slump to the floor, onto the green carpet that stank and was filthy, and nestle my little body between the piles of stuff. My eyes would close; and I let them, in the end. I knew what was coming if she saw me asleep, but I was so tired I just didn’t care.

  One evening, in the middle of the night, I woke from a deep, deep slumber in the doorway to find myself being dragged across the landing by my hair. Mummy booted me viciously off the top of the stairs – for disobeying her orders to stay awake. I tumbled all the way down, a tangle of limbs. She did this punishment often, and so violently that picture frames would come flying off the wall where I smashed into them.

  But this time was different. This time, I rolled into a big, full-length mirror at the foot of the stairs.

  It shattered all over me, a broken kaleidoscope of silver knives that sliced into my naked flesh and scattered over my hair like confetti. I lay stunned, not daring to move for fear of being cut further, deeper, harder.

  Mummy looked aghast from the top of the stairs, and then rushed down to me. She flung me into the hallway, kicking me around the hall until my mouth was swollen and bloodied.

  ‘That was my favourite mirror!’ she shrieked. ‘You autistic twit, you have broken my favourite mirror! Most children would have stopped themselves falling right to the bottom of the stairs, but oh no –’ and here she kicked me harder ‘– you’re not normal. You autistic twit. Other children would have stopped themselves falling.’

  My ‘autism’ was to blame for a lot of things I got wrong. As Judith had revealed to Sandy, when she told her about my mum’s punishment for me being lazy – and I knew I was a lazy child, for I would often yawn throughout the day – another of my daily tasks was to run up and down the hallway or the stairs of our house. One afternoon, Mummy told me I wasn’t doing it right.

  ‘Run down the hallway properly,’ she screamed, ‘the entire hallway. Don’t stop.’

  And so I ran, all the way down the hallway – and I didn’t stop, just as she’d said. I ran through the glass door at the end and I kept on running down the road; the broken glass having cut my skin to shreds, my face, legs and arms oozing bright scarlet.

  ‘You autistic twit,’ she hissed at me, after she’d run down the road to catch me. The disappointment was heavy in her deep voice. ‘Only autistic children would do that – because they take things very literally.’

  She couldn’t see I did it because I wanted to please her so very badly. I wanted to do anything she said, if it would spare me a beating; I hated getting beaten.

  Running up and down the stairs soon became a nightly occurrence. I had fallen asleep in the doorway of her bedroom one too many times, and so she decided I needed something to occupy me through the long hours of the dark night. She said she couldn’t trust me to stand up all night; I was a sly child, an evil child, a liar and a thief.

  And this sly child, I’m ashamed to say, proved her pronouncements right once more. To begin with I would follow the punishment, my feet pounding up and down the stairs, relentlessly, my legs dragging with tiredness and hunger. I would hear her fall asleep, and my brain would buzz with the usual frightened question: ‘Is she asleep or is she only pretending to be asleep?’ Because I’d been caught out that way before.

  In time, once I was almost sure, as sure as I could be, that she was truly asleep, I would sit at the bottom of the stairs and bang my fists on them to make it sound like I was still running. It was naughty – so naughty, I knew – but I simply didn’t have the energy to keep on running, not for the hours and hours and hours ahead. So I’d sit, and I’d bang, throughout the night, even while she was snoring – because she might just have been playing make-believe. If I heard her stir, the banging at least gave me a chance to get up and run, run, run once more.

  I was so tired; it was perhaps just as well that Mummy had withdrawn me from school for good, to be ‘home schooled’. There was no way I’d have been able to stay awake in class, or focus on learning how to read and write any better than I already could. I was now in her care for home schooling permanently, as was Charlotte. My world shrank to the red-brick walls of George Dowty Drive, and I no longer had any contact with anyone outside the family, outside of the Kingdom Hall.

  To begin with, Mummy did go through phases of teaching us. She’d summon us to the living room, and try to teach me maths and English. Maths was the worst. Mummy always said, ‘Intellectual people can do maths,’ and she was determined that I would get it right. It was torturous: she would throw these great long divisions at me that I’d have to calculate and then multiply and do this, that and the other with and it was all just going over my head; I couldn’t get it. And she’d kick me around that stupid head of mine, kick me hard in my ears and nose and mouth, and then say, ‘Sorry, but you’ve made me do this; I’ve had to beat some sense into you.’

  My English lessons weren’t much better.

  ‘Describe your sister Charlotte.’

  ‘Um, she’s pretty.’

  ‘Describe her dress.’

  ‘Er, it’s pretty.’

  That wasn’t good enough for a six-year-old child – certainly not a six-year-old child in my mother’s care. My lack of imagination and description would provoke a violent attack: ‘You’re so autistic and thick, if Hitler was around he’d have killed you off!’ She’d rant and rave and lash out – but the more she shouted, the less I found I was able to learn. It was like my brain iced over, and I became an impenetrable frozen fortress, where none of her words, whether helpful or hurtful, could reach me in our ‘classroom’.

  ‘You are so thick; you are such a thick child. Look at Charlotte, she’s getting it. Look at Judith and Becky, they went to private schools, they excelled. But you, you autistic twit, you can’t think of a single word other than “pretty”?’ Her hand lashed out and hit me round the back of the head. ‘You are so stupid!’

  I knew she was right. The evidence was right there before me: in Charlotte’s bright eyes and nodding head, always being praised; in Judith’s accomplishments as a carpenter; even in Becky’s absence, away at university and building her own, independent life. I never measured up to any of them, I never picked things up quickly enough; I was always too slow. I was convinced I was on the scrapheap, not even second-best.

  Mummy loved to hit me round the back of the head; she did it often, just because. My absolute favourite place at George Dowty was a little cubbyhole in the kitchen, where the big breezeblock bricks of the walls would fence me in and keep me safe, as I stood tucked down between the kitchen table and the door, our big industrial oven hanging over my head as additional security. The kitchen was half-renovated, so the bricks were cold and exposed, but I felt safer there than anywhere else. With my back to the oven, there was no way Mummy could come up behind me and whack me on the skull, which she frequently did as she was passing by me in other parts of the house.

  I spent a lot of my time, once the attempts at lessons ended, standing in that cubbyhole
. Or I’d be ordered to sit at the top of the stairs; or in Charlotte’s room, as long as I didn’t play with the toys. Anywhere that was out of the way. With my nose still streaming, day after day, Mummy would tell me I was a weakling for having a cold and that I couldn’t take part in whatever the others were doing. So I’d sit and listen to their loving voices from wherever I’d been banished, as Mummy chatted fondly to Charlotte, or let her play with her toys downstairs; the happy sound of Charlotte’s laughter only serving to emphasise how very bad I was in comparison. Mummy only seemed to bother with me when she was beating me – or when she might sit me in front of the mirror, my hair tangled round her wrist so she could use my own head as a weapon, and question me as to who I was.

  ‘What are you?’ she would say.

  ‘An autistic twit,’ I’d respond automatically, ‘a sly bitch. I’m backwards. I’m thick. I’m evil.’

  Even though I was parroting her own words back at her, often I’d get it wrong … somehow. When I did, she would jerk her hair-tangled hand forwards, roughly, so my forehead would smack into the mirror with a solid clunk. ‘What are you?’ she’d say again. I’d stare at my reflection, but I wouldn’t see big blue eyes and bright blonde hair and a little six-year-old face.

  I’d see the scum of the earth.

  One day, in my timeless, never-changing world, something did change. One of my teeth – one that Mummy had not knocked out with her kicking feet – started to wobble in my mouth. I wobbled it and wobbled it, experiencing the queer sensation of its looseness in my mouth, a looseness that was entirely natural. And the looser it got, the more and more excited I became.

  Because I knew: when you lost a tooth, you got a visit from the fairies.

  And I loved fairies. I was a girlie little girl – full of love for Katie and my nanny’s dollies, besotted with the pretty dresses and hair clips Charlotte wore – and the idea of magical creatures who fluttered about on silver-tipped wings and were elfin-faced and good-hearted and wore dresses made from morning dew and spring flowers was just about the most exciting thing I’d ever heard of. Charlotte, being two years older than me, had received many visits from the tooth fairy, and I’d watched with wonder as she squealed in delight at the gifts and money that magically appeared beneath her pillow whenever she lost a tooth. I believed in fairies to my very soul, and the idea that I too might now receive a visit from them sent my finger straight to my mouth to wobble, wobble, wobble my tooth from its bearings.