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

by Victoria Spry

  Because Mum rarely went into the brown room, though, it had become a bit of a sanctuary, so I dragged my beaten body in there and lay down, trying to let my muscles relax, trying to avoid putting pressure on anywhere that hurt – which was everywhere. I heard a strange noise in the doorway, and turned round, twisting my sore neck. My heart was beating fast in case it was Mum come to teach me another lesson.

  But it was Charlotte.

  She was crying. She came into the room and looked at my bruises with absolute horror. Charlotte was protected from so much of the violence, you see. She didn’t really see it, not the beatings themselves, and certainly not how regimented it was, day in and day out. Mum protected her from it; she wasn’t allowed to see. Yet those bruises were impossible to hide.

  A chest of drawers had been dumped in the brown room. An old-fashioned piece of furniture, with one of those three-sided mirrors on top, it gave me pretty much a 360-degree view of the bruises all over my body. I was in such a state.

  Truth be told, even I was shocked by the damage this time. Because usually Mum was careful not to let the bruises show, or she’d beat us on the feet so there’d be no visible evidence. This time, the spiky stick had desecrated my naked body. Everywhere I looked there was a bloody cut, or a sharp splinter studded in me, or blooms of purple and red: bruises already blossoming on my skin, dark roses for an innocent teen.

  Charlotte was very, very distressed. I felt terrible because she looked so sad. She came over to me and she crouched down and spoke to me in a whisper.

  ‘Right, that’s it. We’re going to tell someone what she’s been doing.’

  Charlotte left me for a second, and when she returned she had a red plastic camera in her hand. It was a Virgin Airways one, and I think she might have got it from when we went to Disneyland. She took photos of my battered body, as evidence, and then hid the camera back in her room.

  Charlotte’s reaction was in stark contrast to that of Judith. She couldn’t have cared less about any of us – apart from Charlotte and Adam, who, like Mum, she loved as favourites. Very, very occasionally, I had heard a row between her and Mum, when Judith threatened to go to social services. Every time, Mum would give us a beating as a result; one time she made me stand in the shed all night, where there was barely room to stand but plenty of rats to scare me witless. And she’d say it was my fault she was beating me, my fault she was falling out with her precious children; it was all because of me. I always seemed to be causing trouble, all of the time; I was such a naughty girl.

  More often, though, Judith was complicit in the abuse. She would happily come and stand on our necks while Mother beat us, practically reading the paper while Mum raised her stick again and again, and brought it down as she counted: ‘Eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three …’

  Then one day, not long after the horror of the branch beating, Judith took matters into her own hands. I was sitting with Adam on the bunk bed in Charlotte’s room, just playing, keeping him occupied, and something irritated her about the situation – I don’t even know what it was, anymore.

  She dragged me down off the bunk bed by my hair and along the landing. Judith was thirty-seven now, and my skinny, starved fourteen-year-old self was no match for her adult strength. I wouldn’t have fought back, though, even if I could; I knew my place.

  She’d just had a bath, and she pulled me into the steamy bathroom and shoved my head under the dirty water, just as Mum had done a thousand times before in her presence. As I thrashed and flailed she held me down. Once my body had wilted limply in her hands, she pulled me out, waiting until that very last, tipping-point moment – just as Mother had shown her. Then she threw me down the stairs. I tumbled all the way to the bottom, and landed in a breathless, gasping, but deathly quiet heap. Well trained as ever, you see.

  It was all done in anger, not calculating, like Mum’s violence so often was, but I thought it was a sign of things to come.

  Mummy’s little helper was now all grown up.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘That’s so pretty, Charlotte!’

  It was a few days later, and Charlotte was packing, showing us her clothes as she put them away in her little tweed case with ponies on it. She had been bought some new shoes and a dress and a sparkly handbag; its shiny sequins had caught my eye as they twinkled in the living room light. Alloma and I were watching as she packed her treasures away. We weren’t jealous or resentful, though; it was just the way life was. It was normal. She was our sister and we loved her, simple as that.

  We were all going on holiday: a trip to Pontins, for a long weekend. Mum and Judith, us five kids, Nan and Granddad, and Uncle Phil. A couple of Mum’s Jehovah’s Witness friends were coming, too.

  Things didn’t start off too well, though: it was raining when we arrived. I took Adam off to a playbarn and watched him run about like he owned the place in his Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, laughing his head off wildly. Adam had a very loud, raucous, dominating laugh, with a slight edge of hysteria to it. Growing up in our household, I guess that’s none too surprising.

  He didn’t play well with other children; he didn’t know how to share. In our home, he was a mini-king, with us three demon kids slaves catering to his every whim. And so, in Adam’s eyes, through no fault of his own, every toy belonged to him alone.

  By the time he’d finished playing, we were able to check into our chalets. It was heavenly being away. I was on a pull-out bed, and the smell of the nice, crisp, clean bedding was like aromatherapy for my soul. So comfy and cosy in our tidy, neat chalet, I never wanted to go home.

  Having the others around meant that there were no beatings on holiday: a blessed relief. Charlotte and Adam were given money to go on go-karts and other activities on the Pontins site, but we weren’t – well, apart from one ‘treat’. Uncle Phil paid for me and Alloma to go on a special bike with him: it had a big bench seat that all three of us could squeeze on together. We couldn’t say no, thank you very much, we’d rather not – that would have been showing disrespect to Mother’s family.

  Uncle Phil lifted us up onto the seat with his big, dry hands. He positioned himself between us, and then he draped his stinking arms casually around his two best girls. I remember looking at his face beside me on the bike, and that alone was enough to put the fear of God into me: he looked pleased as punch. He pulled us close to him with his grimy paws, rubbing his fingers up and down our arms, and grinning widely at the camera as someone took a snapshot.

  Weston-super-Mare has a sandy beach that we traipsed along on that long weekend, and we were allowed to go on it. But it wasn’t complete freedom: salt-rippled wind in our hair and all our troubles blown away. I was on high alert in case I said something wrong, or walked the wrong way. Always, I was on my guard. Mother liked to tally up beatings to carry out when we got home, so you had to be on your best behaviour constantly. Yet we were away from the filth of George Dowty and the horror of the farmhouse, and we knew we weren’t to be beaten for at least seventy-two hours. Good times all round.

  Too soon, the Monday morning dawned, and it was time to head on home. Typically, it was a blazing hot September day now that the vacation was coming to an end, and sunshine warmed our skin as we milled in the car park, sorting out the travel arrangements. It was decided that Charlotte, Adam and I would travel home in Judith’s blue Rascal van: the three favourites all together, plus Adam’s ‘nanny’ along for the ride.

  ‘Torrie, come and have a look in the gift shop before you go,’ Nan said. She swept us inside, determined to spoil us. Adam was bought every character toy there was going, and my lovely nanny bought me two dollies. Two dollies! They had red coats and I thought they were wonderful. I may have been fourteen, but I was still so young. To my mind, dollies were the best thing in the world.

  Nan treated me to a bag of sweeties, too. Even better than that, Mother saw and said I could have them for the journey. Guilt-free sweeties! Had I died and gone to heaven?

  We all got into
the blue van. I looked at Adam, bouncing manically on the seat beside me, and I realised we were missing something. I looked quietly around at all the adults, wondering if they would spot it, but no one spoke up. It had to be me.

  ‘Where’s Adam’s car seat?’ I chirruped from the back. I rarely said anything at all, so it took a lot of courage for me to speak up, especially given how wary I now was of Judith. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Judith replied, ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ but, with Mother’s permission, I hefted it out of her car and put it in Judith’s, and got on with the laborious task of untangling the straps, which were all twisted up.

  The car park was full of hollered goodbyes and the noise of car doors slamming. Mother leaned her head out of her car window, the muted faces of Christopher and Alloma visible behind her on the back seat, their expressions grim. We all knew what awaited us when we got home.

  ‘Don’t be late,’ she warned Judith, eyes flashing. ‘We’ll all have dinner at Nan’s house. See you later – see you at home!’

  And she rolled up the window and set off, leaving us behind.

  Freedom. Judith drove to the seafront, and we stopped. It was a gloriously sunny day, and the heat of it beat down on the blue Rascal van. I was hot in my Donald Duck jumper and navy trousers. The jumper was too small for me, but at least the fact that the sleeves stopped halfway down my arms meant my bare skin was free to breathe in the summer air. It must have been worse for Judith: she was wearing a navy jumper and navy leggings, her long black hair down around her shoulders, and I remember thinking she must have been roasting.

  As we pulled up at the seafront, Judith asked if anyone needed the loo. I didn’t, but she and Adam got out and went for a walk along the promenade and to change his nappy.

  Charlotte and I stayed behind in the van; Charlotte in the front passenger seat and me in the back. We had the radio playing worldly pop music, and the sun was shining, and we weren’t to see Mother again for a couple of hours, and I had two new dollies and some sweeties … and I was happy.

  As the music played, I fiddled with Adam’s car-seat straps, still all tangled up. It was a lion car seat: the straps had ‘paws’ on to protect his chest, and there was a cushion under his head. I kept plugging away at untangling the straps, even as Adam hopped back in the car and settled in his seat, swinging his little legs, which were clad in a pair of vivid yellow dungarees as bright as the sun.

  Judith pulled out into the traffic. It was about 11.30 a.m., and if we were going to make it back in time to meet Mother, we had to get on with our journey sharpish. Charlotte turned the radio off and slipped in a tape that Judith had lying in the van. It was The Corrs, and I remember her singing along with their Irish accents in her high-pitched voice. She was wearing her favourite jumper, a lime-green sweater with ‘Papaya’ written across the front, her hair was up in a ponytail, and she looked so young and joyful: sweet sixteen.

  We came down the slip road onto the motorway, just as I had finally untangled Adam’s straps. I flattened the cushions behind his head, making him comfortable.

  The traffic was at a standstill. Uh, oh. We were going to be in trouble with Mother if we were late. We craned our necks, but we couldn’t see what had caused the problem. Judith pulled up neatly behind a red car, sandwiching it between ourselves and an enormous Lidl lorry, and joined the stationary traffic.

  I clicked Adam’s straps together, safe and sound, and then settled back into my own seat, my new dollies and Katie sitting by my side. I looked out the window at the green fir trees bordering the road, enjoying the sunshine and the music and the unfamiliar liberty.

  Then there was this almighty screech and a bang – and my world turned upside-down.

  Forever.

  PART TWO

  SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  No one was making any noise. There was just a whoosh, whoosh sound, over and over again. Every breath I took hurt. It burned the inside of my nose: raw, raw. Overpowering petrol fumes dirtied each atom of air that entered into my aching lungs, so strong I could taste them.

  I opened my eyes.

  Judith was right in front of me, inches away from my face. How…? I had been sitting behind her in the car, yet now I was lying above her, suspended from the ceiling: hanging from the seatbelt that had saved my life. My leg stretched awkwardly behind me, jammed into the radiator of the 24-tonne truck that had just smashed into the back of us.

  I could see a mass of flesh, my sister’s dark hair all mangled in it. Her body was imprinted with glass, all over, little blue flecks of paint mixed in with it. Her face was studded with so much it looked like a mosaic, a mosaic of glass. I could see her eyes, staring wide in front of her, frozen.

  There was blood running from her nose, from her ears, from her head, from … everywhere. Blood was pouring everywhere. She was in all these dark clothes and yet there was this bright red blood coming out, unstoppable, glowing neon against her navy sweater. Her body was completely distorted, bones sticking out of her arms and legs, the steering wheel embedded in her chest, her guts everywhere. Her clothes had ripped and she had no dignity; you could see her breasts hanging out. And there, in the footwell, were her feet, still solidly encased in her shoes: severed from the rest of what was left of her.

  I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t move my neck; I couldn’t turn it.

  I didn’t realise it was because I had broken it.

  Whoosh, whoosh. That sound was the cars on the other side of the motorway, I realised. I moved my eyes, trying to see outside the car, flicking them nervously to the side.

  Then I saw Charlotte. Still in her lime-green sweater, worn so many times in that sweet-sixteen summer, she had blood coming out of her ears and her nose. And her eyes.

  What I did next was instinctive. ‘Wake up!’ I yelled at them, my throat rasping hoarsely against the burn of the petrol fumes, which seemed to be getting stronger. ‘Wake up, wake up, wake up!’

  I screamed at Judith, over and over … but she didn’t wake up. My brain wouldn’t absorb what my eyes were telling me. It was starting to hit me that they were poorly, but I didn’t think they were dead. I began to panic. I screamed at Judith to wake up, and then I screamed at Charlotte to do the same, but neither of them did; neither of them did. And then I screamed for Adam.

  Silence. Nothing but the whoosh, whoosh of the cars on the other carriageway, and in the far distance the sound of sirens. I called him again, but there was no answer.

  Nothing.

  And then, as I hollered his name, my baby brother’s name, there came the most bloodcurdling scream I had ever heard, in all my years of hearing children cry out in abject pain, in horror. Adam sounded so desperate and frightened, I just wanted to go and save him.

  ‘I’m coming to get you,’ I told him firmly, in my best reassuring ‘little mummy’ voice. ‘You’re being so brave. I’m coming to get you, Adam.’

  I thought he was behind me, still on the back seat, but his world had turned upside-down, too. His car seat had been shunted right up into the ceiling of the vehicle by the impact of the crash. The seatbelt had snapped, but that lion bucket chair had protected him nonetheless. He’d flown right over the top of Charlotte and had landed by her feet. He was ahead of me, but I didn’t know that. I started struggling to get back to him, pulling at my leg, but it wouldn’t budge; stuck fast in the radiator of the lorry behind. Yet nothing else mattered to me but to get to him. I fought even harder to free my leg.

  ‘You’ve got to keep still; you really must be still,’ said a voice to the side of me.

  I tried to look in its direction, but I couldn’t move my neck. I became aware that a big man was holding my little hand in his large palms. He was standing outside the van, reaching in to me. On the other side of the vehicle, I heard a sweet female voice talking to Adam, telling him to stay awake and that he was being really brave.

  I started to lose consciousness again. The man who was holding my hand
was saying, ‘I promise you’re going to be absolutely fine.’ I tried to focus on his words, but it was too hard. ‘You’re being really brave, sweetheart,’ he told me kindly, as my brain ebbed out into blackness.

  My last, dying thought was: That is the nicest anyone has ever spoken to me in my whole entire life.

  It was later, but I was still trapped in the car. Green blankets had been placed over Judith and Charlotte. From my fixed position, suspended above them, watching through my eyes that I couldn’t avert, I could see dark ruby blood seeping through the green. I wanted to look away, but the paramedics who had taken over from the kind man kept telling me to keep my eyes open. I tried to focus on the Lidl van in front instead, the back of it marked by those horizontal lines that kept going wobbly as my vision blurred.

  The red car that had been in front of us when we pulled up wasn’t there anymore. Its driver had happened to stop on a slight angle, so when the blue Rascal van rammed into him, his car had shot out to the side, out of danger. The driver, I later discovered, broke only his elbow.

  With the red car gone, there was nothing to stop our blue van: nothing but the vast wall of the massive Lidl lorry, all 38 tonnes of it. We went right into it, under it, and it crushed the van. Crushed it to a third of its original length.

  ‘Adam, it’s going to be OK,’ I slurred. I was losing a lot of blood; it was pumping out of me with every heartbeat. I could hear the doctors debating whether or not they should amputate my trapped leg at the roadside, but my brain didn’t really register it. My focus was on Adam; he was my little boy and nobody loved him like I did. I kept on talking to him, trying to reassure him, as a screeching noise rent the air and firemen began cutting into the metal of the van. They were trying to get us out.

  Well, to get me out – because Adam was long gone, airlifted to hospital. They had told me that, but my brain wasn’t taking anything in, so I kept on talking to him, trying to chat to him above the sound of tearing metal and the constant, jolly ringtone of Judith’s mobile phone. Someone was calling – I know who – but Judith wasn’t picking up.