Yet my heart hurt even worse than my feet. I was remembering something my mother had told me. About how Judith and Rebekah were perfect, and how Charlotte was an absolute angel. And how it was only when I came along that things changed – that she changed. That it was me who had turned her like this.
My mind whirred with an unstoppable cinematic reel of the beating. Seeing Christopher’s little face crumple and cry out. Watching Alloma’s fiery green eyes widen in shock and hurt, and then go dull, losing their spark as the chair leg came down again and again on her feet. And knowing, with each cry, and every blow, that it was my fault. Not just for lying, or for not owning up – but because I had turned her. I had made Mummy the way she was.
I had never felt so guilty, or such a bad, bad girl.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Out of the car,’ Mummy said, and the three of us scurried out from the big minivan she now used to ferry us around. I lifted Adam, aged two, down from his car seat. ‘Charlotte, come with me.’
Mummy headed inside the farmhouse with Charlotte. The rest of us remained outside, in the sprawling grounds of the farm, where various outbuildings were dotted around the place. The one good thing about the farm was that, because it was so big, we could sometimes disappear from Mummy’s sight. We never got lost – partly because we’d be too scared not to be able to return on time when Mummy hollered for us, but mostly because we now knew the grounds inside out and backwards. We were frequently over at the farm now, staying for weeks or months at a time, as Mummy nursed John Drake in the final days of his life.
She had taken Charlotte inside because she was determined that she would be his favourite. Hadn’t he known her since she was just a young girl? Hadn’t he always treated her, with tractor rides and Mars bars hidden in the sandpit? Wasn’t she totally adorable? Mummy had a masterplan and never failed to show off her adopted daughter to him at every opportunity.
For the rest of us, being on the farm was a strange, chaotic existence. There was no bedroom for us three devil children, as we now were to her, lumped together in an unholy trinity of wickedness, so we simply slept on the floor. Mummy kept odd hours, and we would flit between the farmhouse and George Dowty, rootless creatures with no routine. I can remember being sat outside in the minivan until two or three in the morning, waiting for her to be ready to leave, and then driving back to George Dowty, where she’d demand we make her a bacon sandwich before she went to bed.
Alloma was always with us now. Shortly after the night of the Mop Fair, Mummy had withdrawn her from mainstream school, so she could be ‘educated’ at home with the rest of us. And with the farmhouse now taking up so much of our time, we stopped going so regularly to the Kingdom Hall. Mummy lost none of her religious fervour, though. When she beat us, she would often quote the scripture she was so fond of. She would still tell me I was sure to be killed at Armageddon; she would describe how the birds were going to come down and peck out my eyes.
My eyes were something Mummy now included in her punishment repertoire. She’d come up close to me and poke me right in the middle of my scared blue eyes. I’d close my eyelids as she stabbed at me with her finger, an involuntary reaction, but that would be wrong; that would be bad; that would be being disobedient.
She also took to pinching my windpipe, squeezing it between her forefinger and thumb. I’d struggle to breathe, and she’d say with disgust, ‘You’re such a weak-minded person! Breathe, calm down and breathe. You can breathe, you can breathe.’ Her mind games were worse than ever before.
Because, with three ‘bad’ children now at her disposal, she started to play us off against each other. Already I felt a bit of an outsider in our trio – Alloma and Christopher were natural brother and sister, after all, and their bond was watertight; at least, that was the way it seemed in the beginning. I didn’t resent their closeness, for two reasons. Firstly, someone as worthless as me didn’t deserve any kind of friendship. Honestly, that’s what I thought. Secondly, and more importantly, the way they were being treated was all my fault so of course I was on the outside.
It didn’t take long for Mummy to break us, and turn us all against each other. When you’re starving hungry, as we so often were, you will succumb to the pressure and dob in another child. To avoid a beating, you might accuse your sibling of being the guilty party in whatever crime she had created. If you were in Mother’s good books, you would do anything – anything at all – to stay in them, even if that meant betraying your brother. None of us is proud of it but we all did it, time and time again.
Only when we thought we could get away with it would we help one another: throwing Christopher a bit of bread if he was on starvation; bandaging each other up after a bloody beating; the others not telling when I wet the bed; sharing a look that said, ‘I understand.’ When it really mattered, we tried to be there for each other; but more often than not we were against each other: sometimes physically, always psychologically. Mummy would dress Christopher in girls’ clothing and we’d all stand round and point and laugh at him, the threat of a beating if we didn’t ever-present.
One afternoon, I was at George Dowty with Judith and Adam when the phone rang. Mummy didn’t like Adam to be around the farm too much at that time: John Drake was dying, and she didn’t want him in the unnaturally silent house, its sickly air pierced sporadically with the staccato sound of John’s hacking coughs. As my main job was to follow Adam wherever he went, I went with him to stay at George Dowty for a few weeks. In a sign of how close we were, Adam had even started to call me his ‘little mummy’.
The phone rang, and Judith answered it. It was Mother, ringing to let us know that John had finally died.
When the will was read, a short time later, it turned out he had left everything – the farmhouse, the grounds, the money in the bank – to Charlotte, which of course meant that it had fallen neatly into Mummy’s clutches. She had a brand-new dominion to call her own, and she wasted no time at all in asserting her authority.
The barn door slammed shut, and the three of us sat down in its pitch-black interior, hearing the click of the padlock on the outside as Mummy locked us in. It was bedtime, such as we knew it.
These days, we were often not allowed even to sleep inside the farmhouse, wrapped in a filthy blanket on the floor. Mummy was renovating the place, building an attic bedroom for herself and Adam, creating a vast playroom for him that would soon be chock-a-block with Lego and cars and games, as well as a princess bedroom for Charlotte, pretty in pink and more suited to a toddler’s taste than that of a soon-to-be-teenage young woman. Mummy abused Charlotte and Adam in a different way, keeping them young, babyish and totally dependent. As for us devil kids, she cut us loose into the night. With so many outbuildings to choose from, now she could easily make us sleep outside, in the cold and the dark – and with the rats.
I hated the rats. The barn was cavernous, and its high ceiling would echo with the noise of their scratchy little paws as they ran here and there in the dark. A rat’s smell is very distinct, and it used to frighten me to death when my nose picked up their tell-tale stench. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear them, and my heart would pound with fear. We kept chickens on the farm, and too many times to mention I had come across a half-eaten, half-dead chicken being gnawed by rats. I’d seen the destruction they could cause, too: the chicken’s bloody entrails staining the ground, the rats’ twitching little whiskers and sharp, sharp teeth. Vile creatures, they swarmed about the grounds and the outbuildings like something out of the Armageddon Mummy was always describing to us: a plague of rats.
The chickens weren’t the only new addition to our ever-expanding menagerie of animals. We’d always had cats at George Dowty, and a characterless terrier called Meggie, but our collection of ‘pets’ had since ballooned. Now, we kept rabbits and hamsters and guinea pigs; we also had a duck called Queenie, a snake called Sequin and a parrot named Oakie. Most of the animals lived in cages; we’d keep them in the kitchen at George Dowt
y, under the kitchen table, and the house was rank with their droppings. At the farm, we had taken on two pigs, too: Bessie and Bunty. Alloma cared for them, and I think in some ways she had a closer relationship with those pigs than she ever did with us. We all needed something to keep us sane. I had Adam, with his picture-perfect baby-blond locks and fat toddler arms, and I still had my dolly Katie, too: that beloved long-ago present from my nan.
Yet even that wasn’t sacrosanct to Mummy. Of course it wasn’t. One day at George Dowty – for we were still doing our flits between both properties, seemingly with no rhyme or reason – she grabbed Katie from my arms and flung her in the oven: punishment for me eating something I shouldn’t have. Katie went up in bright burning flames; I could only watch in horror as my friend was burned ‘alive’. Mummy – more to save the oven than Katie, I think – pulled her out again and ran the cold tap all over her blackened polka-dot clothes and her singed yellow plaits. She threw the sodden, smelly mess into the back garden and slammed the door shut.
Later, I snuck outside and found her, discarded on the lawn in a heap of wet ashes. She half-smiled up at me with what was left of her face, a friend to the last, and I washed off the burn marks as best I could, dried her off and took her back inside. The world might have abandoned us children, but I was determined never to abandon anyone I loved. I knew only too well how it felt to be alone.
The world did show a passing interest, though, from time to time. My nan would sometimes stop by the farm, though only ever on tightly controlled visits Mummy had scheduled, and Mummy’s ‘home schooling’ also required some inspections – inspections for which she received plenty of warning, so she had more than enough time to prepare. My mother was a master of deception; she had a degree in manipulation. Her plan was to dazzle the inspector as soon as she walked through the door – and it worked.
We would be kept busy for weeks beforehand on the subterfuge: not on actual schoolwork, but in tidying up the filthy rooms, in hanging up geography maps on the walls, and in displaying model boats and other hallmarks of what my mother termed ‘alternative education’. The biggest effort, though, was put into drilling us kids on what she called ‘protect Mum’ mode. What do you do if you get asked about your life?
First and foremost, we were to avoid eye contact and look at the floor. But then, at other times, she wanted us to look at her because, if we didn’t, they might suspect something. Sometimes she’d say, ‘Be convincing, look people in the eye.’ The instructions were confusing, and I was forever thinking, Am I going to get this wrong? Am I going to mess this up?
Most importantly, if ever we might be asked about punishments, we would have to say something like she only ever smacked us on the bottom, and only if we’d been very bad indeed. Or that we weren’t given pudding after dinner, or weren’t allowed our weekly magazine, or penny sweets. Mummy was clever: if we were never punished, according to our well-rehearsed answers, then that would also look off. She had the whole thing down to a fine art.
In the inspector would come. And Mummy would wow her from the instant she came inside – so much so that the inspector almost didn’t bother looking through the exercise books. Nothing she said or did during her ‘inspection’ peeled back the thin veneer of a faked home-school set-up. We sat no exams; we studied no curriculum, yet the inspector didn’t seem at all perturbed by any of that. Instead, she and Mummy would chat away, nineteen to the dozen. You could almost see the strings on the puppet the inspector became as Mummy manipulated her this way and that. It was an utter failure. This wasn’t an inspection, it was a masterclass in the magician’s art of misdirection, and Mummy was full of special stagecraft and razzamatazz – year after year after year. I would be looking at the floor, acting the part of the autistic child that I had played for so long. I had this voice inside me and I wanted to talk, but I couldn’t.
The inspector would nod and smile and ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ and wave us all goodbye, and we, perfect children – those of us not pretending to be autistic, at least – would wave back with grins pasted tightly on our faces, straining to smile as hard as we could, so that Mother didn’t beat us later. We were always unnaturally well behaved in public; people would remark on how we were good as gold, and Mother would smile, a prim, prideful smile, as if she knew our excellent manners were entirely down to her.
That’s something I can’t take away from her: we certainly had good manners. We were too terrified not to.
Only if our hungry bellies forced us to would we show her up in public. I remember she would sometimes take Judith and Charlotte to dancing lessons at Eckington village hall, and the three of us demon children would be exiled to the kitchen, not permitted to join in the fun. There was a big box of biscuits in that kitchen, and temptation proved too much for us starving kids. We took some of them – only a few at a time, to avoid arousing suspicion – and we thought we’d got away with it, week after week.
We hadn’t. One of the staff took Mother aside one evening: they had noticed the biscuits were going missing, and they had identified the culprits as her kids. You can imagine how that went down.
No one wondered why we might have stolen the biscuits in the first place – but just in case anyone did, in a clever twist all of my mother’s own making, she took only Christopher and Alloma to apologise to the caretaker of the hall. Taking all three of us, she said, would make it look like something was wrong at home, as if we might have a reason for stealing. Taking just two looked like greedy, guilty foster kids, leading each other astray. It would lead any restless suspicions astray, too.
Life went on; an endless, chaotic life of shifting between George Dowty and the farmhouse. Mummy would spend the evenings watching her soaps in her high-backed green wing chair in the living room at home. She would sit back and put her feet up and watch the video recordings of her programmes – videos we children would have to tape for her, and God forbid if we missed the first five minutes, or included the adverts, or the machine packed up …
As she’d watch, us three would often have to sit on the ‘invisible chair’ inside the living room, our legs burning with mind-numbing pain. Mummy had a wooden ruler with a bit of leather or string on it, like a strap, and she’d swing it round and round on her index finger as she watched TV. If our feet slipped, which they often did, soaked in sweat from the torturous effort of maintaining the position, she would lash out with the ruler and hit us hard. And then she’d start swinging it again, round and round and round. I could never take my eyes off that ruler, even as my legs were on fire and my eyes watered with the pain.
That green chair was the setting for another scene from our childhoods, too – a peaceful one, strangely at odds with the rest of our interaction with our mother. She would lie back and put her feet out on a low stool, and we’d gather round like a SWAT team of miniature beauticians. We’d have to pick the dead skin off her feet, or brush out her long, greasy hair.
I enjoyed those quiet, peaceable evenings, my small fingers grooming my mother. For if she was off her feet, if we were hard at work picking the calloused, dead skin from her heels, and cleaning neatly between her toes, that meant she couldn’t get up and hurt us. If I was standing behind her, brushing out her hair, I felt safe. There was no chance of her sneaking up on me and lashing out when she was lying back with her eyes closed, enjoying the attentions of her little slaves. So I wouldn’t grimace at the feel of her dirty hair on my fingers. Instead, I counted myself lucky.
And that was our life: trying to please this woman, who could never, ever be pleased. We thought that life was pretty bad already. We had no idea that it was about to get much, much worse.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Here you go, children. Sweeties for you all!’
Nanny held out her hands full of treasures and all of us children selected some penny sweets from her palms. I smiled up at her and she tousled my blonde hair.
‘Right, let me get on with this washing-up. You run off and play, now.’
Nanny had popped round to see us, on her way to the Coop. Mummy was out, away on the farm somewhere, or perhaps at Morrisons, where she often went to meet a Jehovah’s Witness friend for long lunches. Sometimes she would take us with her, and leave us in the parked car outside for hours as she went in to natter, the van positioned so she could watch it from her table in the supermarket café. But today she had left us at home.
It was lovely when Nanny came round. The washing-up was, of course, our job, but Nanny would bustle in and tidy up if she was going past. I don’t know what she thought of her daughter’s home, riddled as it was with animal droppings and towering stacks of useless stuff, but, whenever she got the chance, she would pop round and try to make things clean and tidy for us all. It was so nice to have a grown-up come in and take the hard work off us kids for a bit.
Her generosity with the sweets, however, presented us demon children with a dilemma: to eat or not to eat? That was the question. It was a gamble that had painful consequences if we got it wrong. If Nanny didn’t mention the treats to Mummy, we were home free. But if she happened to say, off the cuff, ‘Oh, I gave them all some sweets,’ there would be a raging row if we’d eaten them and couldn’t produce them on demand. Mummy would go doolally.
‘You sly, thieving liars!’ she would yell. We’d be kicked downstairs, or made to drink washing-up liquid and then eat our sick, or sit on the invisible chair – because we knew we weren’t allowed sweets, they were only for Adam and Charlotte, so it was the height of naughtiness to have scoffed them down with wanton abandon, knowing full well we didn’t deserve them.
Next, she would interrogate us about Nanny’s visit. What she’d said, what we’d said, what happened when, what happened next: each second of the visit had to be accounted for; not a single line of conversation missed. Mummy wanted to know everything that had gone on. She was a complete control freak.
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 7