I remember going into hospital to visit him. He was a poorly baby, born with a cleft palate, and the pregnancy can’t have been easy with his mother so ill. Mummy told us all that his parents were drug addicts and drug dealers and that the baby was born addicted to drugs: more lies that we swallowed down without question. Damon, understandably, became very scared of his real mum and dad. Mummy told him they were evil, and he was only three. He wouldn’t cuddle them anymore on his increasingly rare visits to see them; he would cling to Mummy instead, and she would smile above him, making eye contact with his real mother as if to say, ‘You see? Your children are better off with me.’
My first glimpse of Adam was of this tiny newborn in an incubator in the hospital. Naked, he had only a blanket over him, but the thing that struck me most were the tubes that snaked across him. He looked so vulnerable and frightened, his miniature hands and feet waving in the air and the tubes holding him in place, the machines they were connected to beeping mechanically all around him. I just wanted to pick him up and take care of him. From the word go I loved him; I thought he was amazing. I looked at his perfectly formed little body in the incubator, and all my love of dollies came to the fore. That’s a real one, I thought.
Later, back at George Dowty Drive, Mummy told us he was coming to live with us. And I remember her saying, ‘If you ever touch him, you’ve got to wash your hands because he’s such a poorly baby.’ Only a short time later, Judith came in with him in a baby carrier; he was dressed in a Babygro with a cream blanket on him. What a lamb.
Caring for Adam soon became my main job at home. And not just to keep an eye on him: I would change his nappies, bath him, put him to bed in a crib in Mummy’s room, sterilise his bottles, check the temperature of his milk and then feed him. His cleft palate meant milk often shot straight out of his nose and my heart would go out to him. My little six-year-old arms would cuddle him close and I’d tell him that I loved him.
For Mummy, the picture-perfect family had landed in her lap, and she was at pains to show the world how impeccable her mothering was. She made us all matching clothes to wear to the Kingdom Hall, like we were the von Trapps or the Waltons or something, all handmade on her sewing machine. I can remember standing in Charlotte’s room, ready to be measured up, Mummy’s cutting words as sharp as her scissors as she said, ‘You’ve got no figure. You’re not going to be very pretty at all when you grow up. You’ll never be able to wear nice clothes like Charlotte. A runner bean, that’s what you are – you’ll never be a proper woman.’
And she was right: I was like a runner bean; very, very thin with no bum or puppy fat on me whatsoever. Her starving punishments had seen to that. Yet, for once, her words didn’t really bother me; I was still an innocent and, especially in my life, what I looked like was the least of my worries.
Our visits to the Kingdom Hall now required us, more than ever, to perform to the best of our abilities – better, in fact. One week, Mummy became determined that we would all learn the song ‘Jesus Christ’s Death’ off by heart, so that when we went to the meetings at church, everybody could see her kids didn’t need a book; that our family was so devout and Mummy such a good mother that we all sang from the heart and from memory; that we were the best.
She made us all line up in the kitchen and sing it to her: a rehearsal to be the flawless Jehovah’s Witness children she had in her mind’s eye. Charlotte and Alloma picked the song up right away; I don’t remember Damon being there. But, hard as I tried, I just couldn’t get it. Maybe I was a bit thicker than the others – that was certainly what I thought at the time – or maybe the age difference played a part, or perhaps the fact that I used to shut down mentally whenever I tried to learn something new, frozen in fear, was the overwhelming factor. Whatever it was, those lyrics would not stay in my head.
‘Sing,’ Mummy commanded, her dark eyes watching us all closely.
Charlotte and Alloma started up the melody beside me, their high-pitched voices crooning out the words. I mouthed along beside them, desperately hoping she wouldn’t notice I hadn’t picked it up. Some hope.
‘Victoria, sing it on your own,’ she ordered.
Of course, I couldn’t do it, so she sent the others out and went to get a baked-bean tin from the cupboard. She smashed it into my mouth, over and over, and pounded me around the head with it, bludgeoning my ears. I stood there and took my punishment, tears rolling down my cheeks. I was so sad I had let her down; I was always such a disappointment to her, and it broke my heart.
She looked at me when she’d finished. She’d properly lost her temper, enraged that I wasn’t picking it up, and she hadn’t controlled herself. I lowered my eyes, my lips throbbing and bloody; ears still ringing.
‘Now, what are we going to do about the meeting?’ she said, disappointment dripping from her words. ‘Your lips are going to be all swollen up; people are going to ask what’s going on.’
Nevertheless, we still went to church. Mummy always had some excuse, my autism being a favourite: it made me clumsy, she said, and I would lash out in illogical anger, driven by my condition, and hurt myself. Mummy could always explain anything to anyone.
She hadn’t given up on trying to get me officially diagnosed as autistic. A medical report from that time registered a concern that she might have been giving me Valium obtained from a neighbour – so she could take me to the doctor and pass off my drugged state as autism. But the doctors, to Mummy’s frustration, weren’t playing ball. No one followed up on the Valium allegation, though. Or, if they did, Mummy somehow managed to manipulate her way out of it, as usual.
And she certainly had social services wrapped round her little finger. She had performed the part of caring foster parent admirably – to them, to Alloma, Adam and Damon’s parents, and even to the children themselves. She may have occasionally punished the older two with a slipper on their backsides, or twisted their arms, but corporal punishment wasn’t a crime. My new siblings had no idea of the other punishments she had up her sleeve; not like I did. For months, then years, Mummy played her part, patient as the saints she so devoutly worshipped, just biding her time, and waiting … waiting … waiting.
By December 1993, her job was done. My siblings’ parents signed away their rights, and at last Mummy had legal parental responsibility for all five of us. And from that moment on, any involvement with social services ceased.
The picture-perfect family was well and truly under Mummy’s control – for good.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Adam was the apple of my mother’s eye. She had, if you recall, seen him born into this world – just as she had Charlotte. And, like my big sister before him, this lily-white child, untainted by any worldly filth, became a favourite. Mummy spoilt him rotten, and kept him close, having him sleep with her in her bed every night, giving him everything money could buy, and letting him get away with murder.
It was never Adam’s fault if he misbehaved. As his carer, it was mine. He never faced any consequences for his actions. If he threw something at my head, or smashed his toys, or broke a window with a violently hurled toy car, it was me who would receive a beating. ‘You are a child of Satan, you autistic twit,’ she would yell, ‘any other child would have caught the toy before it damaged anything.’
When I’d give him his bath at night, he would chuck buckets of water over the side. The more I told him not to do it, the more he did it. He could already sense, even as a toddler, that I wasn’t someone to be listened to. And he thought it was funny. So he kept on doing it, until the fawny carpet in the bathroom turned a black, manky colour, and the ceiling underneath the bathroom was all damp, the lights hanging off it.
Nonetheless, Adam and I became very, very close. I loved him with all my soul. I could see he had an honest, open heart, and it wasn’t his fault that Mummy was bringing him up to be a child-king, above the law, reigning above the rest of us in the household – all of us except Charlotte, who remained a favourite. I thought he was sweet-natured, an
d he and I would spend almost every minute of every day in each other’s company; Adam playing whatever he wanted to, and me looking after him.
We became even closer in 1994, when we both ended up sharing a ward in hospital. Adam was having an operation to fix his cleft palate, which Mummy attentively organised; a far cry from the days when she wouldn’t bother to attend my immunisation appointments when I was a baby. Adam was booked to go into hospital, and Mummy asked the doctors if they might take a look at my ears while they were at it. Not out of parental concern, of course, but because I’d recently suffered very bad hearing loss, and was bleeding from both ears; she was worried there might be hell to pay if it was anything serious or life-threatening. She told them Damon had kicked me in the head – ‘boys will be boys’ – when, really, it was her own boots that had done the damage; her boots, and the regular poundings around my head with the shiny silver baked-bean tin.
The doctors inspected me, and agreed to operate on my ‘cauliflower ear’. I didn’t say a word to anyone during my stay in hospital, nor in any of the doctor’s appointments. Mother had trained me well. She was always telling me to look down whenever we saw doctors, to support her claims that I had autism, and threatening to beat me if I didn’t obey. She did all the talking for me, and the Mummy they met was a creature I had never before encountered, who had a funny purr in her voice as she cooed over me and faked concern, and who stretched her thin lips into something approximating a smile.
Back home after the operations, life continued. Alloma was still going to school, and I would sometimes watch her from the window, as she attended a local primary school whose playground backed onto George Dowty Drive. I wondered what it was like, and I could even have asked her, had I the confidence, for she and I were increasingly thrown into each other’s company these days. She had been banished from Charlotte’s bedroom for some misdemeanour or other, probably talking back, and so Damon, Alloma and I now shared a room, a tiny room, which had only a single cheap chipboard bunk bed in it; so one of us always slept on the floor, beneath a dirty duvet. It was more like a cupboard than a room – Mummy had put up a fake wall to create it, so there was nothing in there but the bed and the bedding. I called it the brown room, and it was dark and cold and small. There were no toys in the brown room; but then, Mummy had said we didn’t deserve toys.
Alloma was in her bad books more and more often these days, or so it seemed. It was usually because she dared to challenge Mummy’s authority with that vibrant, sparky self-assurance she had. I couldn’t understand it. Mummy would tell her to do something, and she would speak up and say no; or Mummy would tell her not to do something, but Alloma would do it anyway. That was just her: she had a fighting spirit. And Mummy would smack her to discipline her, or pull her lips down hard over her teeth, so that her teeth would cut into the tender gums and make them bleed. I couldn’t comprehend why she would talk back – it meant she was going to get hurt twice as much, and I couldn’t fathom why she’d want to get herself hurt.
I myself never thought about speaking up. I’d been brought up to have no opinions, no options; no character. I thought I was a nobody, and that whatever anyone else said was right, and I’d best go along with it; I knew no other way. And watching Alloma, feisty and determined, trying to stand up for herself but being beaten all the same … Well, that showed me with crystal clarity that there was no way of winning. Best to keep your head down, and get on with it.
One afternoon at George Dowty, I was doing just that, getting on with my chores and feeding the cats. I lined up the bowls for the five of them, and they wound around my legs, velvety and soft. I got a clean fork from the drawer and spiked the cat food from the tins into the bowls, and then bent down to pop them on the floor. The cats started to eat.
Wallop! Mummy’s hand smacked the back of my head as I crouched on the floor next to the cats. I cowered, firmly keeping my hands to my sides, in case she saw them move and accused me of ‘fighting back’.
‘You never use your brains, do you?’ she shrieked. ‘Why have you used a clean fork to feed the cats? You should have used a dirty one from the dishwasher. That’s it! You’re too thick, you don’t deserve to be fed. No food for six weeks.’
I was used to that, of course. So I went about my days as usual: chores and looking after Adam, and then the torture of watching everybody else eat dinner while I was banned from consuming anything. Everybody would be told I had been naughty and wasn’t allowed any tea, and I would hang my head in shame. I would watch Mummy eat, her mouth opening wide as she shovelled in a forkful of spaghetti Bolognese, the white pasta flicking against her lips and the meaty red juices spilling down her chin. I would watch her and I would visualise myself eating each mouthful, trying to imagine the texture of the mince on my tongue, and the slippery snakes of the spaghetti … My mouth would fill with saliva, and I’d swallow down the empty spit.
I’d go about my usual survival techniques, too: sneaking a knobby of bread here and there, stealing a tin of tuna, or something frozen from the freezer. I got so good at slurping out corner yoghurts from their packs, learning how to peel back the packaging just so, so it didn’t look like it had been opened, that Mummy used to complain to the shop – rather than me – about the missing yoghurt.
And then, one afternoon when I’d been banished to Charlotte’s room, I hit the jackpot. I found several boxes of chocolates piled up among the toys. Very naughtily, I ate a whole tray of the chocolates. A whole tray. And then, being the sly child I was, I put the empty layer at the bottom of the box, and the full, untouched layer on the top, to make it look as if I hadn’t eaten them.
What was I thinking? I might have been eight years old, but I was still as foolish as ever. A mummy with a magic eye was never going to fall for that trick and, sure enough, before too long, she discovered the missing chocolates. It was October 1994, and it was the night of the Mop Fair.
The Mop Fair was always a big excitement in our house – in the whole town of Tewkesbury, in fact. It was a two-day festival with funfair rides and traditional games, and stallholders selling all kinds of wares. We had gone to it even before the others came, and I had happy memories of being out of the house, enjoying the pretty lights and the nice smells. The fair was that very night, and we were all looking forward to the occasion.
‘Victoria, Harriet, Christopher!’ my mother called, and Alloma and Damon and I came running.
For that was another thing Mummy had done, since the picture-perfect family became her own: she had actually changed Alloma and Damon’s names. She was wiping the slate clean, trying to remove all traces of the life they had known before. She was just like, ‘We’ll change that name,’ as though the children were dogs, animals. She’d done it to me, too, though of course I was too young at the time to remember. My real parents named me Sarah when I was born, but when I came to Mother, she called me Victoria, and that is the only name I’ve ever known. Damon, as he was, uses the name Christopher now, so I’m going to use that name for him from now on. Alloma was always ‘Harriet’ to me growing up, but she prefers Alloma, so I’ll stick to that for her.
Alloma, Christopher and I came running in and lined up for Mother, three little soldiers reporting for duty. Mummy had a thick wooden chair leg in her hand.
‘Take your shoes and socks off,’ she told us all, and we hurried to obey. Christopher and Alloma hadn’t been asked to do this before, but they knew by now that when Mother told you to do something, you didn’t do it at your peril. They were quicker than me at slipping off their shoes and peeling off their socks. Perhaps I tarried because I knew what was coming next: Mummy and I had danced these steps a hundred times before.
Once we all had bare feet and were lined up neatly in front of her again, Mummy started her interrogation.
She questioned me first. ‘Did you do it? Did you eat the chocolates?’
And, knowing I would be punished whatever I said, I lied. I’m ashamed to say I lied. ‘No, Mother,’ I said quietly
, ‘it wasn’t me.’
Mummy fixed me with a glare, with those eyes that always seemed to penetrate right through to my dishonest soul, and then she calmly brought the heavy wooden chair leg down upon my toes. There was a dull thumping sound as the weapon connected with my flesh. I screamed; I couldn’t help it, but I tried my hardest to keep it a quiet one.
Then she moved along the line. And this might sound naïve, it might sound foolish, but I swear, I didn’t know what was going to happen, I truly didn’t. She had never before hurt my brother and sister too badly, and I honestly didn’t think she was going to do so this time.
But I was wrong.
‘Did you do it?’ she asked my sister.
‘No, Mother,’ said Alloma, telling the truth.
And Mummy brought the chair leg down upon her feet, and the blood started welling beneath her toenails.
‘Did you do it?’ she asked Christopher.
‘No, Mother,’ replied my little brother, who was then only five years old.
His feet, too, were pounded with the wooden stick. Again and again.
I know I should have owned up; I know I should have done. I know, I know. But I was scared stiff, and in shock, and the beating was so painful that all my thoughts went on trying to stand up straight, so she didn’t beat me more for shirking the punishment, and on trying to keep my screams locked in, so silence would reign on the suburban street.
I will never, ever forgive myself for not speaking up.
For it was my fault they were beaten, that first, awful time, and that is something I will have to take to my grave.
Afterwards, she made us squeeze our bloody, swollen feet back into our shoes, and we still all went to the fair. I could barely walk, each step sending painful shockwaves up my spine. Alloma and Christopher limped along beside me as Mummy paraded us around the fair. And we followed Adam and Charlotte as they went on all the rides, and ate candyfloss pink as Charlotte’s pretty dress, and we bit our tongues to keep from crying out with the pain.
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 6