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

by Victoria Spry

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My prison was above the kitchen, which meant I could hear the almighty row that kicked off as Becky stormed downstairs to have it out with Mum. She had only come by to get some of her stuff – she wasn’t expecting to find a skeletal child chained up in a bedroom. All hell broke loose, and I could hear screaming and arguing. Becky was threatening to go to social services.

  At that, I thought, Oh, crap, I’ve got Mummy in trouble! I’ve got her into trouble and she’s going to go off on one. And I’ve made her and Becky fight and she’s going to punish me for that too … I felt sick to the very pit of my stomach.

  The sash windows in the bedroom rattled as Becky stormed out of the house and slammed the door. Moments later, I heard Mummy at the doorway of the bedroom. She quickly came in and untied me and took the blindfold off. I was waiting for the punch, for the slap across the head, the poke in the eye … but it never came. It never came. It was the first argument anyone had ever had with her about me where my mum didn’t take it out on me afterwards.

  It was the only time she didn’t take it out on me.

  Within half an hour of Becky storming out of the house, I was downstairs in the kitchen. Mummy gave me a new outfit to wear. A multi-coloured tracksuit, it hung off my skinny frame, baggy and big. It felt strange to be wearing clothes again, after so many months in the nude; it took me a long time to warm up.

  I was wary as Mummy sat me down at the kitchen table. She made me some scrambled eggs on toast, my first proper food in months. I looked at her steadily for a long time when she encouraged me to eat it, wondering what the trick was. Eventually, the smell was too tempting to resist, and I wolfed it down.

  Of course, I threw it straight back up again; my body in shock. Yet Mummy didn’t get angry at me; she didn’t have a go at me; she didn’t force me to eat my own vomit, which was really odd.

  After that, she sat down next to me. She looked me in the eye, very seriously, and pronounced, as though from a pulpit: ‘You’re forgiven now. You can turn over a new leaf and we’ll forget everything that happened.’

  Then she went through with me what I was to say if anybody asked me what she did to me. She made me say it over and over until she was happy. I knew exactly the way it went; I’d long been an expert in ‘protect Mum’ mode. Punishments included no pudding, no magazine, no penny sweets or pocket money. No mention was to be made of the blindfold, or the starvation, or my face in the wee.

  And for a short while after that she was nice to me, very nice. Social services never came; later, I learned that Becky had thought long and hard about going to them, but in the end she’d decided there was no point in telling, because Mum always managed to persuade the authorities that she was God’s gift to parenting. So she’d be in the clear – and we’d all be in the doghouse with her, for bringing shame on the family.

  So she didn’t tell, and Mum was nice; so nice that it was all very novel for a bit.

  But I knew, all along, that it would never last. I always knew – and I was right.

  ‘Woof, woof, woof, woof!’

  The sound of yapping puppies filled the air, and I thought I might just have died and gone to heaven. Mum had decided Charlotte was to be given a brand-new puppy, all her own, and the whole gang of us had been shepherded along for the ride, so Mother could show off her picture-perfect family at this scene of great generosity.

  The puppies were black Labradors, and they were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. I had long loved dogs, but the dog we had at home, the terrier Meggie, I found grumpy and miserable. She never used to show much character, and we never bonded. But these pups … oh my! They tumbled over each other in the pen, little black balls of fur. I just wanted to go and cuddle them.

  Naturally, I wasn’t allowed to. Mum made me stand at the gate while Charlotte went into the pen to choose one. This was Charlotte’s treat, not mine.

  On the way back, Mum, Adam and Charlotte discussed the issue of the name.

  ‘What shall we call him?’ Mum asked her two favourites with a sickly smile, delighted to be spoiling them, her long black ponytail flicking over her shoulder as she turned to gaze at her much-adored children.

  Adam, sitting next to me in his car seat, where I was tasked as usual with looking after him, pointed at the sky and shouted, ‘Aeroplane!’ with all the enthusiasm a five-year-old can muster for a type of transport.

  Mum considered his suggestion, and then she said, ‘We can’t call him aeroplane – but what about Jet? Because he’s jet black, and it’s like jumbo jet, which is an aeroplane.’

  So that’s what was agreed.

  Of course, Charlotte didn’t house-train the puppy, or do any of the work that Jet brought into the house. All that fell to Alloma, and sometimes to me. Alloma would sleep under the kitchen table with him, and I was a bit jealous of how close they were. Because I loved that dog from the moment I saw him. He was like a magnet for me; I was just drawn to him. When I looked at Jet, somehow all my troubles seemed to fade. There wasn’t much that took my pain away, but he did. He was so gentle around us and so soft and sweet, a very loving dog. For us demon children, he was a blessing in so many ways.

  As he got older, he used to bark when Mum hit us – I can remember him barking in the hallway of George Dowty. She’d lash out and hit him for protecting us, and he’d yelp and cower against the stairs. He ended up with a big bump on his nose.

  Of course, this being my mother’s household, Jet’s arrival wasn’t an entirely joyful experience. As Alloma house-trained him, Mother would frequently rub her face in the dog’s faeces until he learned not to defecate in the house; she did the same to me if ever I was supposed to be looking after him, smearing stinky poo all over my skin and up my nose. Once, when he was in my care, he chewed the back door, as puppies will. He chewed it so much there was a chunk of wood hanging off. And she picked up that length of wood and she beat me with it; she kept shoving it in my mouth, saying, ‘You want to chew it? You want to chew it? Go on then, you chew it!’ She was scraping it in my mouth, smacking me in the mouth, and then she just kicked me, flung the wood at me and walked off, the brief, intense storm over – for now.

  On the whole, though, it was amazing to have someone else in the family, especially someone who would give his love so freely, coming across to you as you sat, broken, on the kitchen floor, nudging his black furry head under your arm and giving your hand a lick with a wet pink tongue. I loved having Jet around – he was the best family I’d ever known.

  My birth family was on my mind, too, as it happened, as my siblings and I had discovered something very unexpected in the stash of stuff at George Dowty Drive. Mum had piles of stuff everywhere at George Dowty: money, paperwork, photographs. We once found a provocative photograph of her in a bikini, which was very unexpected, given how against anything ‘worldly’ she was. She was much skinnier in the picture than the size-fourteen Mum we knew: we could see her ribs. Mum was always on fad diets, trying to control her weight – perhaps she was trying to recapture this lost body. We also found wedding pictures, and discovered for the first time that she’d been married twice. Any time we came across something that we considered a jackpot of information, we put it back exactly as we’d found it, and never let on that we’d seen it.

  For me, the most powerful discovery was a pile of letters and photographs that were addressed to me. They were letters from my real big brother, Tom; letters I’d never been shown. Every year, it turned out, he’d sent me a card and a picture of himself – or, at least, he did until they petered out, which was understandable as he never received a reply. Mum had never let me see them, but she’d squirrelled them away in the ironing cupboard – a cupboard full of ironing that never got done – and we found them there.

  In the photographs my brother had piercing blue eyes and very blond hair. He looked handsome, I thought; nothing like me, who was such an ugly girl. He looked happy. He seemed like an impossible dream, and the fact that he was ta
boo, and that I could never, ever speak about him, only emphasised that slightly unreal quality I felt when I looked at the snapshots: my big brother. He was no more accessible to me than the soap stars Mum watched on the telly every night.

  Our strange life went on, a constant stream of chores and punishments. When I was twelve, Mum took us all to Disneyland. I think it was another staging of the perfect family life, and Alloma and I were punished for not smiling hard enough in the pictures of us standing next to Mickey Mouse. Our trip coincided with Hurricane Georges, and Mother revelled in the Armageddon-like atmosphere as we evacuated our holiday home. She grilled us on who to call if something happened to us in the imminent emergency, and we all had to recite Becky’s telephone number back at her. As usual, I couldn’t get it, and she beat me for that; so much for a holiday. Then we came back to George Dowty and the farmhouse: to the incessant medication, the beatings and the sticks, the never-ending violence.

  Of course, those acts of violence did have consequences. She might hit my brother with a piece of lead piping so hard that his gaping head wound wouldn’t stop bleeding, and she’d have to take him to hospital, with a story of how he came off his bike. I went to the doctor’s several times with blood streaming from my ears, a result of my ‘brother’ kicking me in the head. Then there were my teeth. She was so fond of jamming sticks into my mouth, forcing them through the slim resistance I put up, so fond of hitting me in the face with a baked-bean can or her boot, that my teeth were always breaking, shattering in the face of her unremitting strength. So, she had to take me to the dentist every now and again, and get them fixed.

  My medical notes say that I went to the dentist at least four times with lost or broken teeth. I remember having them replaced at least double that, fake caps covering the stumps along my gums: all that was left after my mother had smashed out my natural teeth.

  And what a mother she seemed as she escorted me into the dentist’s room, her hand gripping my arm, her mouth doing all the talking, while my eyes were glued firmly to the floor as her threats rang through my head: look down, look down, or else …

  ‘Yes, she’s autistic,’ she’d sigh, her voice heavy with the burden, yet her world-weary half-smile somehow lifted her above the trauma, like a beatific saint, ‘very, very autistic. And it makes her clumsy, you know? She is always falling over, falling over drainpipes and whatnot. I’ve got to really look after her. It’s so hard to keep your eye on them all the time, though, isn’t it?’

  The dentist would suck it up, cap my teeth for the dozenth time, and then we’d go home.

  On one of our visits, my mum was, as usual, doing all the talking for me. And perhaps because I was now a bit older, or perhaps because the penny had finally dropped that my frequent visits were somewhat suspicious, the dentist sensed something was up. He contrived to get me on my own.

  ‘Mrs Spry, if you could just step out of the room, I need to take an X-ray of Victoria’s mouth.’

  My mum’s eyes narrowed; her senses were always on high alert for anyone suspicious of our set-up. Her mouth pinched into a tight, disapproving pucker and she said sharply, ‘You’ve taken an X-ray with me in here before.’

  There was a beat as she and the dentist looked at each other, and then my mum kicked off. ‘How dare you ask me to leave my child!’ she raved, every inch the indignant mother, perhaps even a protective one, saving me from the clutches of a professional predator. We stormed out of his office and we never went back again – and that was how it worked with everything. If anybody ever came to the point where they were questioning anything, which only rarely happened, she moved us on, she got us out, so nobody could dig any deeper. She switched our address from George Dowty to the farmhouse and back again, so nobody kept track of us. She changed doctors and dentists, over and over; that was her tactic.

  We went home after the dentist’s that day, and she was in a foul mood. That was my fault, of course. It was my fault because she was only doing all this because I was such a bad child, and now I was getting her into trouble. That was how I lived my life, getting Mum into trouble, even though I never meant to.

  The saddest thing of all was that, even if the dentist had succeeded in his plan, even if he had got me on my own, if Mother had somehow allowed him five minutes alone with me, time enough for him to sit me down and look me in the eye, and to ask me, in all seriousness and with a caring voice, if everything was OK, and did I need any help – even if all that had happened, I still wouldn’t have said anything.

  I was even better trained than Jet when it came to protecting my mother.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Here’s one I made earlier.’

  The voice of the Blue Peter presenter rang out in the house at George Dowty. I ducked my head, trying to see the TV screen from my vantage point at the top of the stairs, peering through the bannisters at the elaborate construction covered all over in brightly coloured sticky-back plastic.

  I wasn’t supposed to be watching TV, of course; I was meant to be folding Adam’s clothes, but Mum was out, she’d nipped down the road to my nan’s, and I was taking advantage. She was usually a couple of hours at least when she went to see Nan. Nearer the time she was due home we’d taken to posting someone on lookout, so we all had warning as she sauntered up the street, her black ponytail flicking back and forth, and time to get into position. Jet, cheeky thing, would have gotten up into her green wing chair while she was gone, and we’d all yell, ‘Quick, Jet, get off the chair!’ And Oakie the parrot would squawk the same phrase back at us, and there’d be thirty seconds of panic and noise, but, by the time her key turned in the lock, order would have been restored and we’d all be in whatever position she’d commanded when she left.

  Charlotte and Adam were the ones watching TV – watching it properly, I mean, not just squinting through the bannisters. Charlotte would have put it on for Adam, because her tastes in popular culture, these days, had changed: she was now into boy bands like 911 and Boyzone. She hid her interest from Mum, of course – pop music was worldly, and Mum would have hated the idea of her little princess growing up. But Charlotte and Alloma both liked boys and music these days, even if it wasn’t allowed. They were proper teenagers, sixteen and fifteen years of age, and it had finally started to show.

  As usual, I was behind the times, slow to change and slow at picking anything up, even my burgeoning adolescence. I was fourteen, but I was still a complete innocent, into my dollies and my dogs, and more interested in caring for Adam than in catching the eye of any romantic love interest. I didn’t even really know what love was. The only man paying me any attention was Uncle Phil, his dry alcoholic’s hands still taking any opportunity to touch me, when he could get me alone. He loved asking me about my boob size, too, not that I had anything to write home about yet, and he’d quiz me on whether I’d started my period. I hadn’t; I didn’t even know what he meant.

  Mum’s beady eyes, missing nothing, had started to notice Alloma’s curiosity in boys, however – and how her foster daughter had begun to appreciate the skinniness the starvation punishments caused, as her young woman’s body emerged and her tiny waist only served to emphasise her bust. Mum took to forcing her to eat huge blocks of white lard – sometimes raw, sometimes melted in a pan in a coagulant mess – and to hacking off her striking gypsy curls in an attempt to make her ugly. It didn’t work as far as I was concerned. I always thought Alloma was beautiful, just like Princess Jasmine from Aladdin.

  I heard a funny noise, but my brain failed to compute what it was. Too late, I saw the front door swing wide and Mum enter the hallway, in a black mood. She must have had a row with Nan, I thought, and she’s come back early! Quick as a flash, I stood up and ran into Charlotte’s bedroom, still with its Paddington wallpaper on the wall, and started folding Adam’s clothes.

  They were silly clothes. Honestly, they really were. Mum dressed him like an eccentric Georgian page boy or something, with puffed cropped trousers, dickie bow-ties, knee-high socks
and waistcoats. She ordered him ridiculous outfits from posh French catalogues, get-ups that came with coordinating accoutrements like epaulettes and elongated ties. And she kept Adam’s hair long, curling over his shoulders; its baby blondness, now he was seven, long since turned to the traditional family black. He looked very girlish, and over-groomed, his fat bottom wiggling about in these smart, old-fashioned breeches. His bottom was always fat, because Adam was still in nappies. Mother wanted to keep him a baby, untouched by any worldliness, not even knowing how to use the loo.

  I frantically sorted and folded, sorted and folded. And then my heart dipped: I came across an outfit that had a matching tie, but the tie was nowhere to be seen. Mum would go absolutely doolally if I couldn’t find that tie, but George Dowty was such a mess I knew I didn’t stand a chance – not in the half a minute I had before she came to check on my ‘work’.

  As expected, I failed the inspection. Mum told me to strip naked and lie on the bed, where I’d just folded up all the clothes. She went downstairs while I followed her orders; went downstairs and out into the garden, where she selected a branch to beat me with, a spiky stick full of jagged edges. And then she beat me black and blue, reminding me in a forced whisper to be quiet. ‘Shut up, the neighbours are going to hear!’ I knew already, of course, from the fourteen years I’d spent in this place, that you weren’t to scream at George Dowty. So I pressed my face down into the pillow on the bed, and made only muffled whimpers as the stick cut and whipped and bruised me, all over my body.

  It was better that way. My theory was: if I made a noise, I’d get it twice as bad. Far better just to suck it up and stay silent.

  When she was done, she went downstairs and chucked the stick outside. I crawled along the landing to the brown room and collapsed on the floor. The brown room wasn’t really any kind of bedroom anymore: my mother’s hoarding had touched here, too, and our old bunk bed was full of junk, overflowing with it. We generally slept on the hallway floor now, when we were at that house, covered over with a filthy duvet if we were lucky.