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

by Victoria Spry

  And that desire to control extended to all areas of our lives – and I mean all. Mummy and I had long fought battles over my toilet habits, and her training technique from when I was small, of tying me to my potty until I ‘performed’, was one she was keen to reuse. Every morning, we had toilet inspections. We had to do a poo every day, on demand. Try pooing when you’ve been starved for three weeks, it’s quite a challenge.

  We had to sit there all day, straining, until we did it. Over time, I learned how to fake a poo, to make it look like I’d been. I might be able to squeeze a little bit out, with a couple of dark wees, and then I’d put some tissue and shampoo down there, mix it round until it looked half-convincing. I tried all sorts of things to get round it – because if you couldn’t go, if you really couldn’t go, Mummy had a trick up her sleeve to make you go.

  She’d drag me off the loo by my hair, and tut crossly at the lack of performance in the bowl.

  ‘Take your clothes off,’ she’d spit out. ‘Lie down on the floor.’

  She’d throw me into the kitchen, and the tiled floor was always cold against my naked, goose-pimpled skin. I’d lie on my back, waiting patiently while Mummy finished her preparations at the sink. When she turned round, she’d be holding a big, thick, plastic syringe, filled to the brim with washing-up liquid. She would give it a test squeeze – her nurse’s training coming to the fore – and a jet of gelatinous liquid would spurt out the top of the enormous teat. Always she used to remind us that she had been a nurse as she did it: ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  Mummy would then walk swiftly over to where I lay on the ground. She’d seize me by the ankles and yank my legs firmly up into the air. Then she’d stick the huge syringe up my backside and push the whole measure of washing-up liquid deep inside me. She would concentrate on the motion, her eyes clinical, not a trace of anything other than cool professionalism on her face.

  My belly would ache after that. Oh, it hurt so much. And she’d say, ‘You’re not to go to the toilet, you’ve got to wait.’

  I told you: it was all about control.

  I’d have to wait, and wait, and wait. My belly would be cramping hard, and I’d be squeezing my butt cheeks together, desperately trying not to let anything out until she said. I was punished if I did; I could only go once she’d said.

  After a while, she would let me on the toilet. I’d be in agony and sit there gingerly, my stomach fiercely cramping, until the release finally came. When it did, it was painful and messy and it hurt like hell.

  Our punishments were relentless, daily. Even on a ‘good’ day, when Mummy might be in high spirits and seemingly happy, I knew it would never last. And sure enough, sometime before the sun went down, the spell of her buoyant mood would be broken, and our real mummy would be revealed.

  Then one day came when she showed us a new trick; when she performed a ‘big reveal’ that left us all reeling. Five stars for the magician with the dyed black hair and the cold, cold eyes: none of us saw this one coming.

  We were at George Dowty. I can’t remember what had happened, now, what thing I had done wrong. I was about nine years old. And Mummy just snapped.

  ‘Get in the car,’ she said quietly. Mummy would still sometimes rant and rage at us, but more and more often these days she would be cool, and calm, and calculated. She was getting more confident, and it showed.

  I scurried out to the car and slid inside, as fast as I could. Mummy started up the car, and she drove off. I didn’t know where we were going. From my seat in the back, I could see her hands clenched around the steering wheel, her knuckles white and tense. We drove in deadly silence.

  That silence was terrifying. It felt like I was waiting for an explosion – an explosion that never came. Instead, the tension kept on festering; Mummy’s anger simmering, the dynamite getting drier and drier as we drove.

  We kept on driving. We drove out of Tewkesbury, heading north. We passed the waterpark. We drove through Bredon. We drove for nine miles, until we entered Eckington. We went past the post office and the village shop and the graveyard where they’d buried John Drake. And then, right at the end of the village, we swung swiftly off the main road and Mummy parked on the driveway of the farm, close by the gate so no one else could get in.

  Mummy turned off the engine, and there was silence, not even the thrum of the car’s motor to fill it.

  ‘Get out.’

  We all got out. Charlotte and Adam ran off to play.

  ‘Inside.’

  I walked through the back door, an old-fashioned white door with a metal handle. The cold hit me immediately. It was always cold at the farm, and John Drake’s fusty, old-man smell still lingered. Through the washer room, through the kitchen with its red stone floor, and then we turned right. Mummy led the way, and I followed. I knew I had to follow.

  Mummy stopped outside the living room.

  ‘Get in.’

  I went too slowly for her, and she kicked me in the small of my back, forcing me inside. She followed me in and went straight to the thick green curtains that hung at the sash windows, pulling them round. The daylight vanished, and the room went very dark – but not before I’d seen her collection of sticks, lined up against the big Welsh dresser that dominated the room.

  ‘Take your shoes and socks off.’

  I bent down to obey, leaning on the sofa.

  ‘Get off the sofa, get off it!’

  She pushed me, and I fell.

  ‘Faster.’

  I couldn’t drag out the removal of my shoes and socks any longer than I did. All too soon, I was standing before her with my little feet bare and vulnerable.

  ‘Lie down.’

  I lay on my back, as Mummy looked up and down her collection of sticks, selecting her weapon. Because of the renovations, she had an array to choose from – there were bits of wood all over the house: some narrow and reedy; others thick, like a cricket bat.

  When she was ready, she turned back with her chosen stick in her hand: a thin spindle. She patted it into her own palm, sizing it up, feeling its weight and girth.

  ‘I’m going to beat you on your feet one hundred times. If you scream, I’ll start over. Remember, feet don’t bruise. Nobody will be able to tell what I’ve been doing.’

  She lifted my legs up without further ado, and held my trouser legs around the ankle, keeping my feet exposed and still. Then she brought the stick down violently on the soles of my feet.

  I tried not to scream, I really did. But the pain was so intense, the thin stick like a solid whip against my tender flesh, that a scream tore through my throat and out into the darkened room, again and again as she beat me harder.

  Abruptly, Mummy stopped her steady counting and stared down at me.

  I had screamed before during punishments, especially the feet beatings. I would cry, beg her to stop, shriek because I was in so much pain. Because, of all the punishments, this was the one I tried desperately to fight against. I hated it; it was so, so painful. Mummy always saw my screams and wriggles as trying to get one over on her; she took it personally. She was beating me with the best of intentions, and for me to fight back only emphasised what a naughty child I was. Sometimes she would get Judith to stand on my windpipe to shut me up.

  Now, she had a different idea.

  Mummy went calmly back to the collection of sticks. She picked out a second one and came back to me. I looked up at her warily.

  And then she tried to jam the stick down my throat.

  My lips and teeth automatically gritted together, trying to keep her out. She stabbed at my mouth, over and over, as I desperately tried to keep it closed. But just as she had when she’d force-fed me as a baby, her metal spoon making my months-old gums bleed, Mummy always got what she wanted. Her angry thrusts with the stick pounded at my mouth, smashing my teeth out, just breaking through any barriers my body tried to erect. I choked and spluttered, but she didn’t stop pushing until the stick was all the way down the back of my throat. Now I was quiet.<
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  I couldn’t swallow; I could barely breathe. I could feel the stick’s sharp edge all the way down, and I could taste it on my tongue. It tasted like wood, and there was a gushing taste of blood, too: a raw, metallic, iron tang. My mouth kept filling with saliva and I wanted it to stop because it just kept coming and I’d have to swallow, but the more I tried to swallow the more it hurt, hurt, hurt. Tears streamed down my cheeks, but I had no means to cry aloud. I was so distressed, but not a whisper of sound passed my lips. It was deathly quiet in the living room at the farm.

  Mummy nodded, satisfied. And then she went back to the beating.

  ‘One, two, three …’

  If I moved, in any way, she would start again. So, in the end, I lay there and took it. In a way, it was better with the stick down my throat – because it forced me not to scream, which meant the beating was over faster. Without it, I know she would have gone on and on and on; but with the stick, there was a kind of freedom. The way I describe it is that I kind of gave up at that point. There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t do anything.

  But I could still feel. The pain was so overwhelming that I couldn’t function. I don’t remember staring at the ceiling, or her, or at my demon siblings lined up, watching the beating from the sidelines as she had commanded them to. I was in so much pain that my eyes rolled loosely in my head, crying tears without me making a sound, my body in silent agony, willing it to stop.

  Eventually, as with all things, it did. She slung my ruined feet to the floor, grabbed hold of the stick down my throat and roughly yanked it out. It tore at the soft tissue in my throat as she did so, and blood and saliva came out in long wet strings attached to the stick. It came out solidly, a thick wooden rope in my throat, and I gagged on it as she pulled. She flung it carelessly in the corner, ready for the next time.

  ‘Get up!’

  I dragged myself up, and put the weight on my feet, walking gingerly on the edges of them to try to lessen the pain. My feet might not have bruised, but they were bloody sore to stand on.

  ‘Walk properly, you autistic twit.’

  Then she made me watch, as she performed the same punishment on my brother and sister. She could only beat one of us at a time. Like they had done before me, I just stood there and watched, my throat raw with pain as I tried to swallow down saliva, and guilt.

  Somehow, it was even worse seeing somebody else get beaten than being hurt myself. I wanted to save them – but I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do to save them. As an adult, that’s the worst thing I have to live with. For I never even tried to pull her off them. It seemed impossible, somehow: she seemed too strong and untouchable, her power too great.

  ‘Get out of my sight.’

  We were dismissed. I limped out of the living room and back to the kitchen, trying to walk normally. As I reached the stone floor, its cool surface was like a balm on my battered soles. But we weren’t allowed to stay in the kitchen; as usual, we were banished to the outdoors, with no shoes on. The gravel pierced my tender feet, making me wince and cry again.

  ‘Little Mummy!’

  Adam came running up but he stopped short, looking at my wet face, my bloodied mouth; my shattered teeth. He burst into tears.

  I bent down and picked him up. ‘There, there,’ I murmured. ‘It’s OK.’ I smiled at him – keeping my ravaged lips closed so my broken teeth didn’t scare him. And then I held him close in my arms, each of his sobbing cries catching at my heart and making it even harder for me than it already was. But, with great effort, I stopped my tears and I whispered to him, ‘It’s all OK. Little Mummy is just fine.’

  Well, what else could I say?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The beatings at the farm were a regular occurrence after that. Sometimes they were daily, sometimes twice a week. Sometimes they were twice a day – she might yank you back in if you didn’t walk out the room properly after the first one. The tally of strokes at each beating would add up, especially if we weren’t at the farm when some misdemeanour occurred. ‘That’s a hundred and fifty strokes now,’ she’d say. ‘That’s two hundred.’ She’d make a mental note, and the punishment would hang over us like a guillotine.

  I always hoped she might forget about it, but she never did. If she said we were to be punished later, it was only a matter of time before those green curtains would be pulled round and the sticks jammed down our throats. It was only a matter of time before she’d tell us to get in the car, and we’d drive the nine miles to hell. We used to long for there to be mail at the farm, because she’d check the post when we pulled up: anything to delay her, to hold back the unbearable pain for a few minutes more.

  We became connoisseurs of torture. Mummy had a favourite stick to beat us with and, by chance, it happened to be my favourite, too. It was a broad one she used. It was a horror if she shoved it down your throat, as its width would leave splinters studded down your gullet, but if she used it to beat your feet, its broad flat surface was less painful, less intense, than some of the thinner sticks. I was always, shall I say, happier when she beat me with that stick.

  Meanwhile, her other punishments hadn’t stopped. We were still starved for weeks on end, and disciplined for stealing food. Our mouths were still washed out with washing-up liquid or bleach, or whatever cleaning product was to hand. We still had to stay awake all night, running up and down the stairs. We were still drowned in the bath.

  Adam wasn’t immune to what was going on; of course he wasn’t. Mummy kept him and Charlotte sheltered from the worst of the beatings, but she so regularly punched me in the face or pinched my windpipe or kicked me in the shins that he couldn’t help but see some of the violence. And, bless him, he, of all of us, would stand up to her. He would stand behind her as she hit me, screaming his little blond head off, begging her to stop, almost hysterical as he yelled at her not to hurt me. ‘Mother, leave her alone, leave her alone!’ he’d cry.

  She would pause in the beating for a moment to call Charlotte in and get her to take Adam out of the room … and then she’d continue, harder than before. I think it infuriated her that Adam loved me, when she wanted everyone to hate me, but, as I was the person he spent the most time with, it was almost inevitable that, as a young child at least, he would care for me a bit.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes when he first stood up for me, brave as anything. Other than my nan, he was the first person who had ever defended me, and Nan never saw the physical violence, so he really was the only one who’d had the courage to stand up to her when she was throwing her fists and using me as a punchbag. I loved him all the more for it. He had a good heart, little Adam, and I will never forget that.

  He was also a very boisterous little boy, however; a complete handful. Like all small children, he learned from the world around him, and our world was a violent, physically aggressive one. He was forever throwing his toys, or whatever came to hand, including food tins – all of which would cut our heads open, because he’d throw them at us. And because Mummy never said no to him, he became impossible to deal with, hyper and demanding and spoilt. I knew it wasn’t his fault, but it was still difficult. I can remember having to play with him in the dark at the farmhouse – because Adam had absolutely demanded that the lights be turned off. And all of us would be sitting there in the dark, just because he had decreed it. It was madness.

  Mummy decided to take medical action to address the issue. She’d heard of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and its accompanying drug, Ritalin, and she had it in her head that maybe this would sort out both Adam and Christopher, whom she thought played up very badly, though to my mind he was nothing like the bright spark who’d first arrived at George Dowty all those years ago, and certainly nowhere near as badly behaved as Adam. She brooded, too, on my ‘autism’, and on how she had never quite managed to get that magic diagnosis.

  And so one day, one hot summer day in July 1997, when I was eleven, I found myself getting on a train with Mummy a
nd heading east of Tewkesbury – heading to the dazzling lights of London, and the hallowed road of Great Portland Street, where private doctors were ten a penny, albeit with rather more expensive fees.

  Mummy marched me from the Tube to our scheduled appointment with the private doctor. I felt scared being out of Tewkesbury. Everything was so unfamiliar, so noisy and loud. The train and the Tube seemed so complicated. Having only attended school for a very short while, my world revolved around the redbrick walls of the house at George Dowty, the rural setting of the farmhouse, the occasional homeliness of my nanny’s house, and the interior of my mum’s parked car. To get on a train and travel across the country, to a place where the buildings were packed tightly together and towered over my head, where people pushed and shoved and car horns beeped in irritation, was to be transported to a different world. Mummy had already threatened me and told me that I had to keep my head down and not make eye contact, and I had no trouble at all obeying her.

  When we got to the doctor’s, it was a serene oasis in the raging storm of the city. Mummy registered our presence with the receptionist and handed over a sheet of paper, to be passed to the doctor. It was an account of my ‘medical history’ that she had written herself, and it was on this – together with the forthcoming personal examination – that the doctor would base her diagnosis.

  In time, we were called in to our appointment. Mummy rose and kept her hand on my arm as we walked in, a ‘reassuring’ presence. She stayed to watch as the doctor put me through my paces.

  I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the carpet. All the while I could hear Mummy’s words in my mind: ‘If you don’t look at the floor, you will get your head knocked off. If you look up so much as half an inch, you know what’s coming as soon as we get home.’

  The doctor tried to engage me. She ran some tests, she tried to talk to me, she carried out her high-brow assessment. I kept my eyes on the floor, and I thought, I’ve only got to lift my head and I’m dead when I get back.