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

by Victoria Spry

  The paramedic took my arm, and I felt the prick of a needle on my skin.

  ‘No!’ I yelled, snatching my arm away.

  ‘It’s just some morphine, to help you with the pain.’

  ‘No, no – no blood, no blood, Mummy says I can’t have blood,’ I shrieked hysterically. I thought he was attempting to give me a blood transfusion, and even in my delirious, life-threatening state, I knew better than to go against Jehovah; or, rather, to go against my mother. From when I was a tiny girl I had been punished for breaking the word of God – ‘You. Are. Evil. You have just gone and coloured. In. A. Bauble.’ – and I was desperate to avoid another beating. My throat was already burning from the petrol fumes; I didn’t want the additional pain of those unforgiving wooden sticks shoved down it by my unforgiving mum.

  The paramedic desisted in the end; he could see it was getting me more and more upset, and they needed me to stay calm. Eventually the firemen lifted me from the van, my skinny body no challenge to them as they rushed me to the emergency helicopter; my life in such jeopardy that its blades never stopped spinning as they spirited me inside. I was flown to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, where I fought another battle – a losing one this time – as the nurses cut my blood-sodden, too-small Donald Duck jumper from my body, so the surgeons could operate on me.

  ‘Don’t do that, please don’t do that!’ I cried, as their silver scissors sliced into the sweater. ‘Mum’s going to be so angry with me, please don’t do that!’

  They ignored me. I was rushed down the corridors, the overhead lights flashing bright, dark, bright, dark as they wheeled me into emergency theatre. There were voices all around me, pressing me for information. ‘What’s your name? Who was in the car with you? What’s your address? Where’s your mum? How do we contact your mum?’ I remember a big round light above my head … and then my world went black once more.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I was in the bedroom of the farmhouse. My hands were plunged into a bowl of warm soapy water and I rubbed at the navy sweater between my hands in increasing desperation.

  The bloodstains wouldn’t come out. It was Judith’s jumper, with flesh all down it, and I couldn’t get the blood out, no matter how hard I tried. It was still as I had last seen it, covered in blood and mangled skin, and matted with Judith’s long dark hair.

  Mummy was going to be so angry with me.

  Then I was in a depot, a big wide-open depot like the ones that Parcelforce use. There were red velvet bags all over the place, and red conveyor belts that carted items around the warehouse. I was sat in the middle of the depot, sat on this chair, my eyes wide as I looked at the body parts being carried along the conveyor belts. I looked down at the red velvet bag that my feet were being pushed into, and I fought so hard against it.

  Because I knew what was inside the bags: a liquid soup of flesh. The Parcelforce staff kept forcing my legs into this white flesh and blood, and it was gritty in between my bare toes, a thick, gritty, fleshy soup that threatened to submerge me.

  I screamed and screamed … and woke up.

  Beep, beep, beep. As I opened my eyes, I could see a light-grey, tiled ceiling; institutional-looking. Machines pulsed and bleated at my sides, and tubes snaked all around me. There were wires down my nose feeding me; catheters, cannulas and blood transfusions – oh no, oh no; drips stuffed full of cocktails of drugs, intended to stabilise me and keep my pain at bay. So many wires, all drowning out my teenage body, as my chest was pumped up and down mechanically by a ventilator; the machine breathing for me, keeping oxygen flowing through my lungs.

  I tried to move my head, but I couldn’t. I was pinned into place by a metal halo, its screws pressing against my skull and pelvis and all down my back, stopping me from moving one inch. It was like a massive cage that was screwed tightly into my skin. One leg was raised above me, in traction with a weight on the end, and I could feel a firm, unyielding brace around my neck. The tears from my nightmare coursed down my cheeks, but I couldn’t even lift a hand to wipe them away.

  I was in hospital. I didn’t really know it, but I had been close to death; the closest you can get without crossing over to the other side. Unbeknown to me, the doctors had had to resuscitate me and bring me back; thanks to their care my body had clung onto life. It had kept on fighting, through multiple operations, through a coma, but perhaps never more so than on the very first night they’d brought me in, after the crash. The night they told my mum I would die unless I had a blood transfusion, and she’d said doggedly and repeatedly that I was not to have it, no matter what.

  I’d heard the nurses talking about it, in my haze of waking-dreaming-sleeping-hurting, while I lay motionless, my brain neither here nor there nor anywhere. The doctors had had to go to court to overrule her, I’d heard, in order to save my life. And that was why the rich red blood now hung beside my bed, dripping slowly into my veins, every drop a bright red mark against Jehovah.

  Even after I’d had the transfusion, it had been touch and go whether I would make it. They’d told Mum that – they said I was probably going to die – and they suggested she might want to sit with me for my final hours on earth.

  Of course she didn’t. She went to be with her golden boy, her Adam. It was a stranger who held my hand that night, some random nurse, and was there to see in with me that first morning-after; who was the first to know that – against the odds – I had made it through the night. I was fourteen years old, and my mother hated me so much that she couldn’t even bring herself to encourage me to live. Nevertheless, I’d hung on, my body fighting alone, week after week.

  I’d been in a coma, but now it was time to wake up. I listened dully to the machines that told me I had survived, feeling shocked and traumatised.

  Before too long, two nurses came in to move me. It turned out this was a regular thing; they came in every half hour to move me about so I didn’t get bed sores and eventually removed the neck brace, though the cage stayed in place. They bustled around me, grunting with the effort of shifting my weight. The steroid drugs I was on, combined with the physical trauma of the multiple operations I’d had while I’d been unconscious, meant my body had ballooned to twice its usual size. I didn’t look skinny and starved anymore.

  They were gentle as they moved me; had I been able to look down, I would have seen that my stomach gaped open: a surgical wound that was covered over with medical wrap, but not sutured, as the surgeons still needed to do much, much more work on my mangled insides.

  Perhaps it was just as well I was pinned in place. I don’t think my brain could have coped with seeing my own insides spread open before me.

  ‘You sleep again now,’ the nurses said kindly as they finished adjusting my position. ‘You concentrate on getting well. We’ll just go and let your mummy know you’ve woken up …’

  When I came round from the next nightmare, or the one after that, or the one after that, she was standing there, watching me scream.

  ‘Shut up!’ she shouted at me.

  My terrified shriek cut off in my throat. There was silence.

  ‘How’s Adam?’ I asked, after a long pause, wanting to know that more than anything, more even than how I was.

  ‘Fine,’ she said crossly. And he was: he’d broken both his legs badly and injured his elbow, but he was otherwise A-OK. She wouldn’t have told me herself, but the nurses had let slip that he’d been asking for me. She’d have been angry about that; him asking for me over her, over Judith, over Charlotte. My sisters …

  ‘How are Judith and Charlotte?’ I asked, innocently. I didn’t know they were dead. Even though I’d seen what I’d seen, no one had told me they had died in the crash. Whenever I’d asked after them, the nurses had shushed and soothed me, under doctor’s orders to keep their fate a secret, lest the shock made my already precarious condition weaker still.

  I guess I didn’t want to believe what my own eyes had told me, either. In fact, I was regularly hallucinating that I could see them both, alive
and unharmed, going swimming by the nurses’ desk in the high-dependency unit, where I’d been moved after being discharged from intensive care.

  Mum’s eyes narrowed at my question and she rushed to my bed and stared down into my own eyes, her anger seeming red hot. I stared back at her in confusion, pinned to the bed by my metal cage.

  ‘They’re dead, you stupid cow!’ she spat out viciously.

  ‘But how can they be dead? Where have they gone?’ Slow as usual, the autistic twit had failed to grasp the situation, strung out on drugs and shock and blind denial.

  Mum gripped the bars on the side of my bed with white knuckles. ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ she told me, ‘you saw them die. You were there, you saw it all.

  ‘In fact, you probably made it happen.’

  Usually, her blameful words would have cut me as deep as a surgeon’s scalpel – yet her tongue seemed to have lost its power to unsettle me; for the moment, at least. I was more concerned about what she was saying. My sisters were dead? It didn’t seem real.

  ‘I-I can’t believe they’re dead,’ I ventured.

  ‘You should know better than anyone they’re dead – you’ve killed them,’ my mother spat at me. Her eyes were cold. ‘You see the devil looks after his own.’

  She told me bluntly the funerals had already happened, that their bodies were buried in the ground. That somehow made their fate even harder to adjust to. I might have seen them die … but I never had a chance to say goodbye. It was as if I’d been in a time capsule, and the whole world had changed while I’d been sleeping.

  ‘Did you wrap them in quilts?’ I asked her, urgently. I was thinking, If they’ve been buried, they’re going to be cold. I went on and on about it. ‘I’m worried they’ll be cold.’

  Mum pinched my windpipe hard between her thumb and forefinger, until my breath failed and the machines around me beeped faster in time with my speeding heart rate.

  ‘They’re not cold, they’re dead,’ she told me again. ‘You’ve killed them.’

  Her words finally sank into my dazzled brain, and I thought: She didn’t need to do that. Because as soon as I started to accept that they had gone, my first thought was: What could I have done to stop my sisters dying?

  You should have done something, I told myself, over and over. You should have jumped out of the car and you could have ended up dead but they’d still be alive. You should have sat in the front instead of Charlotte – even though demon children were banned from the front seats. You should have gone to the toilet at the seafront, then none of this would ever have happened.

  I didn’t need my mother to tell me I was guilty for wrecking everybody’s lives. Hadn’t I been doing that from the very beginning?

  All that had changed was that I could now add murder to my long list of crimes. I had blood on my hands, and my mother was never, ever going to forget it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘I’m afraid it’s time, Victoria. Let’s take a look at Colin.’

  That was Bev, one of the nurses. She was lovely; all the nurses were. Colin, however, was not: he was my colostomy bag.

  Because I was not quite so lucky as Adam in the crash: I had suffered severe internal injuries that couldn’t just be patched up with a quick fix. I had to have so many operations on my internal organs that still the surgeons didn’t close the gaping wound in my torso: they kept my stomach open, covered over with its bit of medical wrap, so they could go in again and again to make adjustments to my insides.

  Among my injuries was a ruptured rectum, which meant I couldn’t go to the loo in the normal way. One morning, I had woken up to find the nurses cleaning out a smelly, brown-smeared plastic bag that, I saw to my horror, was attached to my stomach. It was just horrible, lying there on my tummy like something from a terror movie Mum had made us watch. Bev had tried to make up a funny name for it – thus, Colin – to help me come to terms with it. Best of all, she told me that the doctors were confident that, when I was a bit better, the colostomy could be reversed, and I could live without the stoma bag in the future.

  It was something to cling onto, as I tried to adjust to my other injuries: my broken neck, which they had had to operate on through my voicebox; my broken leg, now missing most of its cartilage. I caught MRSA in hospital, and then pneumonia, from lying on my back day in and day out inside my metal cage, and they put me on a ventilator to breathe for me again.

  I was in hospital for months. Months and months. Eventually they moved me to the children’s ward, to a room right opposite the nurses’ station. They called my room ‘the goldfish bowl’ because its walls were made of glass, so the nurses could be alert to any sudden change in my condition. My mother loved that room. She used to say, ‘They can see everything you’re doing … and so can I.’ But when had she ever not been watching my every move?

  The truth was, however, that I wasn’t doing much of anything at all. Ridden with guilt about killing my sisters, I stared at the ceiling day after day, imprisoned in my metal cage and in the torture of my thoughts, and I wished I could die, too. My thoughts were impossible to escape. I would see my sisters’ bloody bodies in my mind’s eye constantly, and I would feel repulsed that I’d been hanging above them, two lifeless corpses, for almost an hour while the firemen tried to cut me out of the van. And then I’d cry because I’d think, They were your sisters, you shouldn’t feel repulsed by them, and I’d feel so guilty. I couldn’t talk to the nurses, I didn’t have any friends, and my siblings were infrequent visitors under Mother’s thumb; in fact, Alloma and Christopher were staying with some other, kind Witnesses at that time, while Mother kept her daily vigil at Adam’s bedside. Nan and Granddad visited just once – Granddad was in a wheelchair now, and suffering from Parkinson’s, so it was very difficult for them to make the journey – but Nan wasn’t the woman I remembered when she came. She was distressed, stricken by grief, and she didn’t know what to say to me.

  I couldn’t even talk to a counsellor – Mum put paid to that. ‘My family don’t get depressed,’ she told my consultant, brooking no argument. ‘We’re strong.’

  My body didn’t seem to listen to my mental anguish, though. Slowly, though it took many months, I began to recover. That made Mum very, very angry. She would rant and rave at me: ‘My two beautiful daughters have died while scum like you still grace this earth!’ She would tell me I should have died in the crash. One day she flung two pretty hair clips at me, yellow and pink flowers adorning their sides, and she told me I could keep them. I accepted them meekly, with shock, as an unexpected get-well gift – perhaps staged for the nurses’ benefit – but then she leaned in close to me. ‘Becky bought these for your funeral,’ she said. ‘They were bought for you for when you died. You were supposed to be buried in them.’

  I couldn’t look at them after that; I put them in a drawer by the bed, and I kept the drawer shut tight.

  The nurses, with whom I tried to be happy and chatty, the good-as-gold child always trying to please, noticed that I fell silent whenever my mother was in the room, fear of her overriding everything else. It was in complete contrast to how I was the rest of the time, as I tried to reassure them as they cared for me. The nurses had the tough job of washing saline solution around the pins that held my cage in place; metal pins that had rubbed my skin raw. It was an excruciating process, but I had learned a long, long time ago not to cry when I was being hurt, so I put up with the pain as the salt went into my wounds. I would paste a smile on my face and even joke with them, trying not to make them feel so bad about hurting me: ‘Don’t worry, Bev,’ I’d say, from the inside of my metal cage, ‘I’m a bit like the Millennium Dome.’

  Eventually, though, the difference in my behaviour was so marked that, as so many other professionals had done before them, they raised it innocently with my mother. ‘Victoria doesn’t ever talk when you’re in the room, Eunice – she’s really chatty when you’re not around.’

  Then Mum would pull the blinds around my bed and she’d tell me,
with an ever-present threat in her voice and her fingers round my windpipe, ‘You autistic twit! You’re supposed to be autistic. Autistic people don’t communicate.’ She would remind me, at every opportunity: ‘You’ve done this. You do realise your beloved grandparents will never get to see their first-born granddaughter ever again.’

  And my burden of guilt would grow heavier still, as I added Nan and Granddad’s grief to my own.

  The only bright thing about the many painful months of my recuperation was that I saw very little of my mother. She was never by my bedside; she was always with Adam. But it wasn’t any kind of freedom. I was dealing with life-threatening, life-changing injuries, shock and grief, and a depression that was sucking at my soul. I’d had no confidence or character anyway – that had been beaten out of me long ago – and the depression seemed to fill me up like a shadow creature eating away at my empty insides. I looked out on the world through the same two blue eyes I’d always had, but if anyone looked through them at me, they would have seen there was nothing left inside. Nothing but guilt, and fear of Mother’s terrifying threats, which I knew she would carry out as soon as she had me back at home. The sticks down the throat, the beatings …

  People sometimes ask me why I never spoke up in hospital, but it never crossed my mind. It wasn’t even to do with being scared of Mum, not really. The truth was, I thought I was doing all this to her: I was an evil child. The biggest and most important job in my childhood was to protect her and stop her from getting into trouble, and yet I’d done all this; I’d killed her precious daughters. That was all I could see.

  It was while I was in hospital that I experienced a rite of passage that, in most young girls’ lives, is a source of some pride and happiness, or at least a milestone that they will remember as the moment they grew up. Lying within my metal cage one day, as the nurses came in to move me, they paused as they drew the covers back and then said, ‘Oh, you must have got your period. We’ll clean that up.’