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

by Victoria Spry

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said at last.

  My brain disengaged. It wasn’t a conscious thing, what happened next, but my mouth opened and I heard myself saying, ‘She’s been hitting me.’

  Disbelief. Utter disbelief at myself.

  I saw the same emotion in Mark’s eyes: disbelief – just as Mother had said.

  And I thought: He doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t believe me.

  I opened my mouth to speak again. It was so important that I made him believe. ‘You know, it’s been going on for a while.’

  Still, those shining eyes looked shocked.

  ‘You know, I’m not making this up. It’s been going on for a long, long while.’

  Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. My brain caught up with my mouth – but it was too late. I’m going to get in trouble, I thought. I’ve betrayed her. Oh my God. I’ve betrayed my own mother. Guiltguiltguiltguiltguilt pounded through my veins, pulsing harder with every heartbeat. Traitortraitortraitor. You’re sly. You’re deceitful. You’re the scum of the earth.

  I could have cried.

  Mark found his voice. ‘Stay here,’ he instructed me. ‘I’m going to speak to the other elders, I will be right back.’

  I sat there, terrified. Absolutely terrified. I didn’t know what was going to happen next.

  Before too long, Mark returned. He was with Duncan. I was glad it was those two. Out of all of the Witnesses, I trusted them most. Both elders of the Kingdom Hall, they always took time to speak to Adam and me. Duncan was a wise man – older than Mark, in his forties – and what I liked about him was that, like me, he never spoke unnecessarily. When he did talk, there was a purpose behind it, and wisdom: he was a genuine, kind person. He had a gruff voice, but it was very gentle.

  He spoke to me gently now. ‘Mark’s told me what you’ve said, Torrie. Why don’t we go somewhere a little quieter and you can tell us all about it?’

  Duncan and Mark took me into a smaller room, away from everybody else. They kept Adam out, busy with cups of squash and biscuits in the main hall. And I talked. Once I’d said it, that first time, I thought, Well, there’s no going back now.

  It was terrifying, so terrifying, and surreal. For so long, I had had to pretend not only that everything was A-OK at home, but that I couldn’t properly communicate, autistic twit that I was. Now, I found my voice. I stared straight ahead and I told them in a plain, straightforward way exactly what was going on.

  I told them about Christopher and Alloma, too.

  I told them about the sticks.

  And as I spoke, I listened to my mother’s voice ranting in my head: ‘They’re not going to believe you! They’re not going to believe you!’

  I listened to that shriek, to that voice I’d heard for eighteen years … and I kept on telling. I was completely numb. Emotionally detached. It was almost as if I was reciting a shopping list, or telling them a mundane anecdote over a cooling cup of tea. I shed no tears. I was almost not quite with it, as my mother’s voice ranted and raved inside my head, and my eyes stayed fixed on Mark and Duncan, on their kind eyes, on their horrified faces.

  I remember Mark kept saying, ‘If you’re telling the truth …’

  I remember feeling quite indignant: Well, why would I lie? It felt unfair, that I had to convince them.

  But most of all, I felt so very, very cowardly; so disloyal. I felt like the worst human being in the world. Because I was betraying my mum – and not just her, but the whole family, too. What about my nan, whom I loved? What would this do to my poorly nan? How could I do this to my nan, to Adam, to MumMumMum…?

  I sat there thinking, You’ve made her like this. You’ve just got her into whopping great trouble as well. You are the scum of the earth.

  But still I kept on telling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I was in that room for about an hour, as it all came tumbling out. Afterwards, they hugged me, strong male arms around me, trying to communicate it was going to be OK.

  ‘How do you want us to deal with this?’ they asked me.

  I didn’t know what to say. It seemed inconceivable to leave her. I might have been a legal adult, eighteen years of age, but I didn’t feel like one: more like a nine-year-old, a five-year-old, even. For so long I’d been stripped of personality that I had no confidence in myself or my decisions whatsoever. Not a grain.

  ‘We will help you if you want us to,’ they said.

  And I thought: I want your help. I knew I had no other option – it was this way or no way. There was no other way. I nodded silently, not trusting myself to speak.

  ‘You’re not to go home and let her know we know this. OK? Can you do that, Victoria?’

  I nodded again, a little more strongly. After all, I had kept Mother’s secrets for eighteen years; I would keep this one for myself.

  I went and found Adam, and the two of us went home. It was so surreal. I don’t think it had sunk in even to me what had happened. I kept quiet as a mouse, but that wasn’t hard, or unusual; Mum never wanted to hear what I had to say, anyway. When I saw her, I felt numb. I was almost waiting for the moment when her magic eye would swivel in her head and pin me with a look as if to say, ‘I know what you did’ … but the moment never came.

  The house felt strange – and so did I: no triumphalism, no relief. I felt scared, anxious, depressed. I didn’t trust anybody; I didn’t trust that it was over.

  The elders had reassured me that they wouldn’t speak to Mum about it. In the room at the hall I’d told them all about the time I’d told Nan, and what had happened, and they promised me they wouldn’t confront Mum about it. My biggest fear was that Adam would pick up on something, but he seemed oblivious, noisily tearing about the house as usual, making demands in his imperious, little-king voice.

  Adam and I kept going to the meetings, for a week or so afterwards. Every time, I went straight out the back to speak to the elders; Jackie and Ruth would be in the main hall, making sure Adam was kept out of the way. I told them more about what had been going on. It wasn’t upsetting for me to describe what had happened – this was my life, after all, it was just normal to me – and so I was matter-of-fact about it as I recounted the torture of the past two decades, as off-hand as though I was outlining different types of cake on a coffee-shop menu. I could see they were horrified, though, and shocked. But I think they were also running over the facts in their heads, remembering all the times I’d appeared with bruises on my face, or even what I’d been like as a little girl at the Kingdom Hall – and my story was supported by those facts, by the plain, hard facts.

  ‘When do you want to leave?’ Duncan asked me, at the end of another session in the small room. ‘When’s a safe time for us to come and pick you up?’

  There was only one time I could think of: when Mum took Adam to his horse-riding class (yet another outward symbol of her perfect motherly care). Though she left the two of us alone more often these days, supremely confident there was not a chance I’d make a break for it, I would never have walked out on Adam, leaving him in the house alone. It had to be when Mum was with him; that was the only possible time.

  As it was coming up to Christmas, there was only one lesson left before the holidays. One chance to get away. Tuesday, 21 December 2004 was the only day I could leave my mum.

  The day before, Adam and I were at George Dowty as usual. Mum was away at the farmhouse, spending my disability benefits on her renovations that never seemed to finish. Knowing she’d be out, Duncan rang me on the house phone and told me to pack my things up and put them out in the back alley for him to collect. All the while I could hear Adam running his toy cars up and down the wooden bit at the top of the stairs, where Mum used to like beating my bare feet with a crowbar, back when I could walk. I whispered to Duncan that I would do as he said, my heart thumping in case Adam overheard. But the toy cars kept on driving without him missing a beat.

  What stuff I had was kept in black bin-liners in the kitchen. I threw some of my cloth
es into a black sack. Carefully, I packed the peach ‘Katie’ towel the nurses had given me at the hospital into another bag, thinking I could sleep one night without it: my last night in this house. Quietly, I opened up the ironing cupboard, where those long-ago photographs of my real brother were squirrelled away, and I put one photo of my blond-haired, blue-eyed sibling into one of the sacks. Then I crept outside and put the bags in the back alley, as instructed.

  It was a strange, strange day. As Adam and I played together, his happy, unknowing face smiling up at me, I thought, This is never going to happen again. I’m never going to be here with my little brother again. I felt so sad; there was no happiness. It was as if I was leaving him. I was his anchor and his stability, because Mum had never cared for him like I did. Even I could see her mad way of bringing him up was doing more harm than good, so I tried as much as I could to counterbalance it. Without me around, who knew what she would do? I felt like I was abandoning him – just like all the adults I’d ever known in my life had abandoned me. That was the hardest thing to cope with.

  ‘Where’s my dinner?’ Mum roared as she came through the front door, flinging a black sack onto the ground, where it joined all the other mess.

  ‘It’s ready, Mother,’ I said, my eyes rooted to the bag. It was one of mine, I knew it; Duncan must have missed one. But I couldn’t worry about that now.

  After dinner and the clearing up, I prepared Mum’s hot water bottle for her, ready for bed, as was our nightly routine. It was a more difficult task than you might think: the low height of my wheelchair made it hard for me to reach the kitchen surfaces, so pressing out the air from the scalding-hot bottle was tricky to do. I struggled with it, boiling water spitting in my face. And I didn’t do it well enough. I posted the bottle through the slats of the stairs as she made her way up, so she could pick it up as she went, and then I heard her shout at me from her bedroom.

  ‘You stupid, silly autistic twit!’ she roared. ‘My hot water bottle is full of too much air rather than hot water. You do realise, you stupid bitch, that I’m now going to wake up in the night, and I’m going to wake up cold. Well, you can sit up all night, can’t you, so, when I need my hot water replacing, you can be awake.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ I replied obediently, as I had always done for eighteen years. She turned out the lights, and the house was plunged into darkness.

  I sat in my wheelchair in the hallway, waiting for her to wake up. It was cold. My legs started tingling; I got pins and needles really badly in the backs of my legs if I sat still in the chair for too long, the blood supply cut off. Eventually, they went numb. And still I sat in the hallway, in the cold and in the dark, knowing this was my last night at George Dowty.

  My brain wouldn’t take it in. I knew only this place; this place, and the farmhouse. Everywhere I looked there was a memory. Mum pushing me in the wheelchair down the hallway, so my head would smack into the wall. The stairs I’d been thrown down so many times; the blank patch on the wall at the bottom where her favourite mirror used to be. The worn bit of carpet where, night after night, I’d sat on the invisible chair; the living room door where she trapped my fingers, over and over. This was my home.

  In the end, Mum never woke up at all during that long, dark night. In the morning she came down to where I was still sitting in my chair, and kicked me hard in the shins. She had the hot water bottle in her hand, and she unscrewed the lid and poured the water all round me, as punishment. Then she clouted me round the head with the bottle, its stiff, hard neck a useful weapon, until my ears were all red and throbbing.

  ‘Get out of my sight,’ she told me with disgust.

  And so I got on with the morning chores. First, I got Adam dressed, helping my twelve-year-old brother to pull on his skin-tight jodhpurs and his riding socks. I placed Mum’s handbag by the door, ready for her. And then I paused. The other thing Duncan had said to me on the phone was that I should take some ID with me. Well, I didn’t have any ID, but I did know that my mother had a bank card in my name in her wallet. She’d set up an account for me at Barclays, into which my disability payments went; an account to which she had sole access. A bank card was a formal bit of ID; it was all I could think of to take. Quickly, before I changed my mind, I slipped it out of her wallet and tucked the purse back inside her bag. Then I parked my chair in the hallway, ready to wave them off to class.

  It was hard not being able to say goodbye to Adam. I told him to have a nice time, lightly, trying not to let my emotions show, or cloud my judgement. Then my heart sank.

  ‘Come on, Jet!’ my mother cried.

  I wasn’t expecting that. She didn’t always take the dog with her. I stroked him on his back as he went out the door. Thank you, Jet, I thought. I felt so sad that I didn’t get to say goodbye, to give him one last cuddle, friend to friend.

  And then they were gone. Duncan and Jackie weren’t due to pick me up until mid-morning, at about 11 o’clock. I busied myself with my usual chores, looking after all the animals and cleaning out their cages, until I was interrupted by the ringing phone.

  ‘Hello?’ I said quietly.

  ‘You silly bitch,’ my mother said.

  My heart started pounding.

  ‘Where’s the card? The card’s not here,’ she said. ‘I’m at the petrol station in Pershore, and the card’s not here. You stupid bitch! I told you to get everything ready for me.’

  I couldn’t even think fast enough to stutter out an excuse.

  ‘You autistic twit,’ she muttered with venom. And then: ‘I’m coming back.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I got straight on the phone to Duncan. ‘She’s coming back!’ I cried. The petrol station was only a twenty-minute drive away.

  ‘Stay right where you are, we’re on our way,’ he said, in his gruff voice.

  I sat by the front door, my heartbeat loud in my ears. There was no time to think about leaving the house for the last time; all I could think was that I had to get out before she came home. As soon as I saw their navy-blue estate car come roaring down the hill, I opened the front door and sat waiting. Duncan and Jackie both leapt out to get me. They lifted my chair and me up and down the step, I slid quickly into the back seat and they folded up the wheelchair and slammed the car doors. Duncan drove off, foot floored against the accelerator, engine squealing. There was no sign of Mum.

  We had done it.

  They took me round the corner to Ruth and Mark’s, where it had been agreed I would stay. Duncan pulled up at their apartment block, and we rode the lift together to their flat.

  As soon as Ruth opened the door, she embraced me in a big hug, her thick, dark hair like a soft cloud around my nose. She was a very maternal woman, an Irish mummy of a little three-year-old girl called Megan, and she had plenty of love to go around. She’d been expecting me, of course, and there were tea and biscuits laid out on the coffee table in their living room.

  What I wasn’t expecting was to see my clothes everywhere. Duncan had dropped my black sacks off at Ruth’s the day before and she’d gone through them all and washed my clothes and underpants, and they were all hanging up around the flat to dry, my knickers on the radiator where anyone could see them, and I felt mortified. I was very distressed to think she’d gone through my private things. She was only being kind, but it felt like an invasion of sorts, like nothing was sacred.

  We all sat down and had a cup of tea, and ate sweet, sugar-coated Nice biscuits with the warm brew. Mark was at work, but Megan was dancing round us, happy as Larry. It was very surreal. We were all waiting for the aftermath, for the bomb to go off when Mum got home and pieced two and two together. They all wanted to protect me, but I was eighteen and there was only so much they could do. Ruth told me she had phoned the NSPCC about me, back when she’d first been worried about the bruises, but because I was legally an adult, they told her they couldn’t step in. No one was sure what would happen next.

  Duncan and Jackie left after their tea. Ruth said to me gen
tly, ‘Shall we get you in the bath?’

  I must have been very dirty, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. After all, there was nowhere I could have a bath at home, so I never did. She gave me a black swimsuit to put on, and she sat with me as I lowered myself carefully into the steaming, fragrant water.

  ‘I’ve got you these,’ she said, and she showed me some shampoo and conditioner, and a new toothbrush and a flannel. I thought they were amazing – I’d never had anything like that of my own before.

  Ruth offered to wash my hair, but I didn’t want her to. I didn’t mean to be rude; it was all just so overwhelming. I was eighteen, and I’d just left home, where my own mum didn’t even bother with me, but now people were washing my things and wanting to wash me and I was very, very confused by their kindness and their interest in me. I didn’t quite trust it.

  Ruth was fine with my response, though. She told me to wash my hair at least twice, and then put on the conditioner, and she left me alone in the bathroom.

  I rubbed the shampoo into my hair, its fruity smell so alien. My insides felt sick with worry and concern. For years and years my mum had got away with what she’d done, no one had ever stood up to her. From a tiny age, I had watched her walk all over people and get her way, but now, somehow, some crazy how, it was me who was sticking my head above the parapet, and saying it was wrong, and that I’d had enough. Me. This person who wasn’t at all confident, who had no self-worth, no identity, who had not a single clue who the ‘me’ inside me was … this person was the one who’d actually done this. It was on my shoulders and that was absolutely terrifying. I was waiting for the earthquake to strike me dead, and it was so scary.

  I was worried about Adam, too. I knew what it had been like for me when the others had gone: she had to have somebody to take her anger out on. He had always been a favourite, so he should be OK, but you never knew … All these thoughts were whirling round my head. It was killing me to know I’d walked out on him. I should have been there to look after him, I thought, I was the only sane one there to care for him. He used to call me his little mummy, but I’ve abandoned him when I was supposed to protect him. I’m his big sister, and I’ve let him down. I’ve let him down.