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

by Victoria Spry

  And then the day arrived that I’d been dreading ever since I returned home from hospital. I’d committed some misdemeanour, and Mother fixed me with a glare and told me to wheel myself out to the car. It was time for a nine-mile drive. Time to return to the farmhouse for a beating, and those horrid, horrid sticks down the back of my red-raw throat.

  I obediently followed her instructions and endured that sickening journey, watching the rural countryside flash by outside the window, while my brain saw only the green-curtained sitting room; the collection of sticks; my mother’s sweaty face, red with the effort of beating us.

  All too soon we arrived at the farmhouse. We piled out and I wheeled myself into the kitchen, my heart thudding in my chest, my throat already tightening in anticipation of the terror to come.

  Just before the crash, Mum had replaced the floor with a kind of marble granite. I wheeled myself across it, following her lead … and heard a dreadful screech, like nails down a blackboard. My wheels had scratched the posh new floor, badly, and – oh, my – my mum was spitting angry; she was very materialistic in that way, despite her religious passion. In a rage, she told me I was banned from coming inside; I was never to come inside again.

  Which meant I never, ever had to go into that room again.

  I burst into tears and I cried and cried and cried, saltwater pooling on my lap as the realisation hit me. I cried tears of pure relief, of thankfulness, of grim salt-tanged happiness.

  It was the one time I was grateful she had forced me to stay in the chair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘All aboard!’

  Our family was heading off on a months-long cruise; a cruise aboard the canal boat Mum had recently bought; either with compensation money or funds from John Drake – I’m not sure which. There were no two guesses as to what had inspired the purchase, though: the boat was called Charlotte.

  They were weird months aboard the boat. Nan and Granddad came with us, so to a degree there was freedom from pain. But Uncle Phil came too, and my new crippled state made me an even easier target, just at the time when my ripening body made him ask me more and more intrusive questions, about my periods and my increasing bra size.

  The others would get off the boat and he and I would be left behind. I’d be sitting in the wheelchair and he’d just come up behind me and wheel me into the bathroom and slide the door shut, locked, and that was it. He’d tell me to take my top off, and his eyes would drink in my adolescent boobs while his hand fisted at his cock urgently until he came all over the toilet, or the floor, and then he’d make me clean it up. Or he might grab at my chest with his big, dry, dirty paws while I looked down, looked down, not wanting to see his bloodshot eyes leering at me.

  I used to beg my mum to let me get off the boat with the others. But then, one time in Wales, Uncle Phil volunteered to take me. He wheeled me off, his large hands gripping the chair in excitement, and took me into a pub toilet. Once there he touched me, touched my bits all over, and then we came out and he gave me a little address book with pictures of dogs on it, as if to say sorry.

  After that, I didn’t want to get off the boat again. Mum would slap me and roar, ‘You’re so bloody ungrateful! He’ll get you off the boat and now you don’t want to know!’ But taking her wrath was better than being molested by Uncle Phil.

  Even though we all slept on the boat, it didn’t stop the abuse. If anything, he became ever more confident: he’d even sleep with his willy hanging out, pig that he was, loud, whisky-ridden snores shaking his big belly. Alloma and I shared a bed, and neither of us wanted to sleep in the outside spot, away from the wall, because then we were more accessible to Uncle Phil.

  Things hadn’t really changed between Alloma and me since the crash. Mum’s years of using ‘divide and conquer’, together with our very different personalities, meant we were never close. Mum keeping me in the wheelchair, even though I should have been able to walk, added another layer of secrecy that I couldn’t break; it was a secret that kept me bound to her and even more isolated from my siblings. Nevertheless, Alloma was my sister and I loved her, with all my heart. No matter what Mum did, or made us do to each other, all three of us demon siblings tried to remain a unit; we tried to cover each other’s backs when we thought we could get away with something; we wanted to protect each other. So I was on Alloma’s side one morning when, sometime after the canal trip, when I was sixteen and Alloma seventeen, Mum called us both to the van and bundled us inside for a trip to Bristol.

  Alloma and Mum had been rowing a lot lately. They had always rowed, of course, because Alloma was feisty, but things had been very bad in recent times. I didn’t see a lot of it because of being banned from the farmhouse: I was always outside in my wheelchair, or in one of the unheated outbuildings. Now, from my perspective as an adult, I think maybe Alloma was finally getting too much for Mum to handle. Perhaps Mum was finding it harder to control her now she was growing up, and that feisty spirit was no longer encased in a little girl’s body, but in a very nearly fully grown one – albeit one that had been weakened by years of beatings and starvation. Whatever the catalyst, the trip to Bristol wasn’t just a random day out.

  Mum was planning to abandon Alloma – and she was making me her accomplice.

  I never thought she would go through with it. For a start, wouldn’t Alloma tell? Wouldn’t she rush straight to the nearest police station and spill the beans about the beatings, and the sticks, and everything else we had gone through? My mother was a woman who loved control, and to orchestrate an unpredictable situation like this seemed very out of character. But I think Mother reckoned she had done her work well in the ten or so years Alloma had been with us. I think she was convinced Alloma wouldn’t dare tell; she wouldn’t know how.

  Arriving at a youth hostel in the middle of the noisy city sometime in 2002, we all got out to have a look around, and Mum paid for just a couple of nights in advance. She didn’t leave Alloma any other money. In fact, she patted her down before we left, just to check she hadn’t stolen anything from the farmhouse.

  Then she made me search her, too. And that was just the most awful thing: I was so frightened for Alloma, so scared she was being left behind. I was scared for me, too, if I’m being completely honest – I didn’t want to be without her. She was the only girl besides me now, my only sister, and she was one of the ‘grown-ups’ in our strange sibling set-up. What would it be like without her there?

  I couldn’t look at her as my hands patted down her orange anorak, double-checking she hadn’t secreted anything away to help her in her life on the ‘outside’. She was clean; she’d taken nothing. And I felt like I should protect her, help her, but I didn’t know how – and so I did nothing. Nothing but run my hands down her sides, and rifle my fingers through her pockets. It makes me feel sick to say that.

  Mum watched with satisfaction as I searched her, as though she was trying to destroy any relationship between us and was proud of her years of handiwork. I didn’t cry as I did it, even though my heart was breaking. I’d learned not to show any emotion: it just gave oxygen to what my mother was doing, and she needed no encouragement.

  Once it was clear Alloma had only the clothes she was standing up in, Mum put me in the van and then jumped into the driver’s seat. She drove off without a backwards glance, leaving her teenage daughter alone on the doorstep of the hostel. I tried to watch my sister for as long as possible, until she faded from my sight, and I sent a silent prayer towards her.

  I hope you say something, Alloma, I thought, I hope you can get us out of here.

  I was sick with worry for my sister, day and night. Her leaving didn’t make me want to leave; I found my mum’s abandonment of her frightening. My mind ran wild with all the different varieties of trouble she could get herself into, as a vulnerable young woman alone in a big city. It was just terrifying. And of course I couldn’t ask Mum about her, or how she was doing. Alloma was now an outcast to the family; her name was mud – it couldn’t
even be mentioned.

  Time passed. With it, so too did my hopes that we might be rescued. It took me a long while to come to terms with the fact that Alloma was out but nobody had come to save us: it made me feel sad, like she didn’t care about us. It didn’t mean I didn’t still love her, and of course I had no comprehension of the battles she herself was fighting. In fact, I thought in the end maybe one of the awful scenarios I’d imagined in my head had happened, and that was why she hadn’t said anything. Ultimately, though, I think ‘protect Mum’ mode kicked in, that and ‘protect Alloma’ mode: she did what she had to do in order to survive. She said nothing.

  But she and Mum remained in touch, unbeknown to me, and one day Mum mentioned her name again, for the first time in a year or so, with a very odd smile on her face. She told me Alloma was going to have a baby. And she said to me with glee, ‘Your sister’s not going to be able to feed the baby and look after her properly. I’m going to buy her some new baby clothes, and I’ll give them to her when I see her. And then we’ll see where we are.’ She went off to the posh baby shop in Tewkesbury, the Orange Pig, to get some presents – presents that were intended to communicate to Alloma, just as Mum had told Alloma’s own mother all those years ago, that she was better able to look after the child, that she could give her all these lovely clothes and many more opportunities besides, and wouldn’t it make things easier if Mum just helped her out here and there…?

  I’m sure Alloma wouldn’t have fallen for it in a million years, but it still chilled me to the bone to hear Mum talking about my sister’s baby in that way. In the end, something awful happened, which distracted Mum’s attention from her potential new recruit.

  I remember her coming home from Nanny’s house one day. She pushed my wheelchair up against the wall, my head slamming back into it, and then held me in place, her fingers round my neck. Without ceremony, she said bluntly, ‘Nanny’s got cancer. And it’s probably your fault because you made me fight with her, and you’ve made her ill. Ever since you walked into this house, you’ve been nothing but trouble. We used to be such a happy house. You’ve come into it and destroyed our lives.’

  I believed every word she said, my guilt growing tenfold as I realised I had poisoned the one person I had ever truly loved.

  It was horrible going round to see Nanny; she looked so frightened. I was so worried about her; I wanted to help but I didn’t know what I could do, because Mum controlled everything. I couldn’t even try to show her my support in my eyes because Mum would pick up on that and beat me later.

  Nanny was very sick; she had chemo- and radiotherapy and was in Gloucester Hospital a lot. My granddad was still struggling along in his own wheelchair, struggling even more with my nan being so ill, and so in the end my brother Christopher was sent to stay with them, to care for them both.

  In truth, I think Mum was pleased to be rid of him. Like his sister before him, he was getting a bit out of control now, this fifteen-year-old boy who was just starting to stand up for himself. If she said, ‘Don’t do x, y or z’ to Chris, these days he would do it, regardless of the consequences. It was best for him to be out of the way.

  Best for him and her, maybe – but definitely not for me: for with both my siblings gone, all my mother’s rage fell on me. For more than a decade she’d had three demon children to vent her anger on. Now, there was only a so-called cripple girl in a wheelchair, and I took the full brunt of her fury – as well as having responsibility for all the chores, and thus even more opportunity to mess up and incur her wrath. Cooking, caring for the animals, looking after Adam: I had to do it all, and on impossible schedules, too. We had seven cages at George Dowty; rabbits and hamsters and guinea pigs, dogs and cats, the snake and the parrot, a goose and a duck, and rat infestations everywhere you looked. I had to do everything, in my wheelchair, without using my thin, spindly legs to walk a single step.

  My legs were the only thin things about me these days. For some reason, Mother had stopped the starvation punishments. And so, stuck in my wheelchair all day, every day, with no hope of exercise and not a whisper of physiotherapy, relying on a cocktail of pills that made my weight balloon, I grew fatter and fatter – until the charity-shop clothes I pulled over my greasy head and used to cover up Colin were a size eighteen. I was a fat cripple girl, but my larger size was no deterrent to my mother, who would still fling me to the floor as though I was a rag doll when she was displeased. She’d kick me out of the chair and I literally just became her punchbag because she had nobody else. I was taking it all on my own; it was a very lonely place to be.

  Adam was no help either. Sometimes, out of desperation or hope, I’m not sure which, I would bravely try to walk in the kitchen when she wasn’t looking, or I’d slip the metal feet pieces off my chair, so I could put my feet flat on the ground and pad them up and down. But Adam had found a little spyhole spot on the stairs, from where he could see into the kitchen, and sometimes, depending on what mood he was in, he would tell on me.

  Mum would go absolutely mad. ‘You’re building up the muscles in your legs!’ she’d cry in a rage. She knew there was no medical reason why I couldn’t walk, so she wanted the muscles in my legs to waste away – so much so that there would eventually be proof as to why I could never walk again. She’d snatch up the heavy metal foot pieces and slam them into my shins, over and over. Oh God, that pain. Right on the bone. Bruises and cuts would blossom beneath my dirty tracksuit bottoms.

  Even though the starvation punishments had stopped, and the stick beatings, and even the drownings because I never went upstairs, Mother still had plenty of tricks up her sleeve. She loved to strangle me in the chair. The wheelchair was about the same width as the hallway in George Dowty, and she’d grab me by the neck and push me, and me and the chair would roll back down the hall, the walls flashing past on either side of me, and she’d ram me into the wall and my head would smash with a loud crack against it. She’d put both her hands around my throat and choke me. If the hot food I’d cooked was not to her liking, she’d throw it in my face. She’d use the sandpaper, and the beaded whip, and the living room door, and her hands and feet and fists. She liked to stab her car keys into my skull and twist them into my scalp. I was just the right height for that, seated in my chair.

  She still loved to play with my mind, too. One day she asked me, as though proffering a gift on a silver platter, ‘Would you like to see your real mum and dad?’

  I made the mistake of being honest. ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  She slapped me hard across the head. ‘That’s the wrong answer,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m your mother. I’m your mother!’

  I just ducked my head and took it. Unlike my brother and sister, I never once stood up to her. Over the years, I had become a chameleon, adapting to survive, and so, to try to avoid being hit – even though it rarely worked – I went along with whatever she said, scared out of my wits. By now, I couldn’t even stand up on my own two feet without her striking me, so I hadn’t a hope in hell of finding any other kind of strength.

  At night, she and Adam would go upstairs to their room. Adam was twelve now, but they still shared a bed. His voice might have been breaking, but Mother tried desperately not to break the spell of his childhood. He couldn’t tie his own shoelaces; he didn’t know how to read. She kept him as young as she possibly could – it was all about control.

  They’d go upstairs, and I’d be left downstairs in the dark, in my chair. She’d call Jet up to her and he’d obediently lollop up the stairs and lie down beside her bed. But then, once her snores reverberated around the house, he’d sneak back downstairs to me, to where I’d be lying on the hallway floor, covered over with a stinky, filthy old duvet. He’d come and lie by me and I’d hug him for warmth, but inside my heart would still be cold.

  For the depression I’d felt in the hospital had never lifted, not in all these years. Why would it? I was still a murderer; still the scum of the earth. And now I was a demon child with not even any other demon chil
dren to be beaten alongside. I missed Alloma and Christopher; I missed them desperately.

  Night after night I lay in the dark, hugging Jet, and I thought about his leads hanging up by the back door in the kitchen, next to the coats. And I thought how easy it would be to slip one of those leads around my fat neck, throw the other end up to the light fitting in the kitchen … and end all this. How very, very easy.

  And it was so very, very tempting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Please can we go, Mother, please, please, please, please, please!’

  Adam’s loud, whiny voice begged my mum to allow him to attend a Jehovah’s Witness meeting on his own – well, with his nanny/chaperone too, of course. She would never have let him have complete independence.

  What Adam wanted, Adam always got.

  And so the two of us found ourselves out one afternoon – out without Mother – in the spring of 2004, with Adam pushing my wheelchair to the bus stop for our first taste of freedom. We had to get a bus to the Kingdom Hall. It was only a short journey – maybe ten to fifteen minutes – but it was a hugely daunting prospect for two teenagers who had never been schooled. I had just turned eighteen, but I had no clue how to read the bus timetable, or sort out our money for the fare. Mum was no help at all; she’d just say, ‘You’re eighteen, you’re an adult, you should know how.’ But I’d never been shown, I’d never had any money of my own, and it was tough to figure it out. I felt a real sense of achievement when we got on the right blue, orange and white bus, and the driver gave me the tickets and my change, and we arrived safe and sound at the hall, having navigated the confusing maze of streets with signs that I could barely read.

  Adam and I went to the meetings every week. When we got home, Mum would have returned from her renovations at the farmhouse to grill us as usual. ‘What did you say? What did they say? Who did you see? How long were you there? Tell me exactly what happened.’