Love Mummy, it said.
I went cold. Because I knew what those words really meant. They meant: I know where you are. I know what you’ve done. And I will get you.
You may win the battle, but I will win the war.
The police continued to build their case while my mum was out on bail. They raided the two houses in their search for evidence to support our story. Our neighbours reported that Mum had tried to clear up after I’d left – and the police found traces of big bonfires of stuff that she’d attempted to burn – but she was a hoarder, and she’d been beating us for decades, and there was no way one old woman could get rid of it all, especially now she was missing her army of mini-slaves. So they found my teeth that she’d knocked out; she kept them in a container. They found chair legs and door wedges and those long, spiky sticks, all marked with the tell-tale semi-circles of children’s teeth, with blood and saliva all the way down them, from where she’d shoved them in our throats. They found my notes with ‘Will you be my new mummy?’ written on them, from back when I was five.
They collected evidence from us, too. Us three demon children gave hours of interviews. I spoke almost begrudgingly in them, because telling the truth about what had happened went against every natural instinct I’d ever known. I’d spent my entire life trying to conceal it from people. I couldn’t look Victoria Martell in the eye, though that was partly because I could see the hurt in her eyes, and that hurt made me feel sad, like I’d brought this horror to her door and was personally responsible for her pain. I told her about Uncle Phil, too, but we both agreed my mother was the priority and that the case against her had to be prosecuted first.
Victoria didn’t write anything down. We gave the interviews in a special house where cameras were rigged in the walls, like on Big Brother; a special house where the police interviewed traumatised children in surroundings as normal as possible. I could tell which sections she found particularly relevant or important, though, and that was a strange thing about our story finally coming out. People paid attention to different bits; they placed greater or lesser importance on the various elements of our torture. For example, the officers and everyone else were particularly interested in the time when Christopher and I had been locked in the bedroom and starved. But for me that was just a very small thing, personally. I couldn’t understand why people kept emphasising that. I mean, it was awful, but there were a lot worse things than that – the drownings, the sticks, the hundreds of beatings on my poor bare feet. The bedroom was only a couple of months out of nearly twenty years of torture.
They took evidence from our bodies as well as our mouths. I had to go to Cheltenham police station and take my clothes off while a female chaperone photographed my scars. It was all very cold and clinical, and I felt like a piece of meat in a factory. I remember thinking, Why do I have to do this? Why do I keep having to go through horrible things all the time?
The answer was, of course, because it would prove what I was saying was true. The only good thing about those photos was that I knew each scar, each missing tooth and each mangled bit of my body revealed the truth.
Another time I had to go back to Frenchay Hospital to have the back of my throat photographed, so they could collect evidence to support our claim about Mother putting the sticks in our mouths. I arrived to find Christopher and Alloma in the waiting room outside; there to have their own pictures taken. They were with their real parents, all happy families, reunited at last; after Mother had been arrested, social services had told their parents about their children’s ‘change in circumstances’ and their parents had requested to see them; an initial meeting that had grown into regular visits and, eventually, a loving relationship. I told myself I was being selfish in feeling sad to see them together: That’s their mum and dad and you’ve got to be happy for them. But I felt like I didn’t know where I belonged, anymore. They had been my family, we’d been through so much together, but now they were moving on. I told myself I had to be positive for them. Just because you haven’t got parents doesn’t mean you can’t be pleased for them now that they’re with theirs.
I was called in for my photographs. It was a horrific experience: I had to sit in this dentist’s chair and lie back, while they put a lollipop stick in my mouth to hold down my tongue and keep it out of the way of the camera. That lolly stick reminded me so much of the other sticks, pressing relentlessly on my tongue; I was so scared, I was hyperventilating. I tried to rationalise that no one was there to hurt me, and that I had to do it for the evidence. That’s what they said to me: ‘You’ve got to do this because there is so much evidence there. You need this.’
The whole way through I thought of Mum. I remember asking DC Martell afterwards, ‘Did you see scars?’
And she said, ‘Yes, we did. We did, Victoria, we did.’
They had got what they needed.
I moved out of Ruth’s while the police investigation was going on. A council flat came up – coincidentally only a couple of doors down from Ruth’s mum, Jill – so Jill and I went to look at it. It was like an empty shell when I first walked in, and I had no idea how I was going to make it a home, let alone work out how to pay my bills. But the Witnesses at the Kingdom Hall rallied round: they gave me rugs to lay out on the bare floorboards, and my new friends helped me to paint it.
One of my really good friends now was a Witness called Jo, who had had the party where her mum had passed me a present through the car window, and Mother had gone so mad. Jo and I had become close now that I was free to make my own friends; she had such a big heart, and she was always giving me hugs. She was artistic, and she stencilled bright purple tulips with green stalks on the walls of my new cream kitchen, and helped me paint my bathroom turquoise, my living room pink, and my bedroom a soft lilac colour. Ruth gave me a second-hand TV with a video player in it as a housewarming present, so I could watch videos on it; rom-coms like Notting Hill, where everything ends happily ever after.
Despite my friends’ best efforts, though, the new flat didn’t quite feel like happy ever after. For a start I really struggled with having to look after me – just me. After years of running round after Mum and Adam and the animals, I found it very hard not having somebody else to care for; I felt selfish, and I found being alone horrible. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself. I didn’t even know who I was as a person, and all of a sudden I had to find out what I wanted to do in life; but with my future so uncertain, and Mum’s case still ongoing, I couldn’t make any choices, even if I’d known what I wanted to do.
I didn’t feel safe, either. I told the police about my mother’s card at the hospital, and warned them she would come after me.
‘No, no, no,’ they said, ‘she wouldn’t be so stupid as to do that.’
She did, of course. She started leaving pictures of Jet outside my flat, with bloodstains all over the photos, marking his black doggy face bright red. I came home to find bunches of dried dead flowers on my doorstep: the desecrated remains of yellow freesias and pink, pink roses. She knew nobody else would know what they were, but I knew: dead flowers from my sisters’ graves, dead flowers for the dead.
And then, one Tuesday, as I made my way out of the flat to attend a meeting at the Kingdom Hall, the day I’d been dreading came.
Mum’s white Volvo was parked outside my flat.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The car was empty. She could have been anywhere, waiting for me, watching and waiting. I took a photo of it from my kitchen window, because the police said they needed evidence to do anything about her continual harassment, and I phoned Jill to come and help. It was a relief when she said she recognised the car, too: confirmation that it wasn’t just in my head.
The police arrested Mum, and released her – and then she went after my brother. I got a letter later that year, though, saying they weren’t going to prosecute her for witness intimidation. It didn’t make me feel safe at all.
I started having nightmares: violent, scary nightm
ares about my mum coming to find me, and about the old abuse. Her chanting, counting face, and the slam of the stick on my feet, and not being able to scream because my mouth was jammed full of hard, stabbing wood, pressing down on my tongue. I’d wake up in the night, in my new clean lilac bedroom, with that familiar feeling of a cold clamminess around my thighs. At least my mother wasn’t around anymore to beat me for wetting the bed.
I went to my doctor, and he prescribed me antidepressants. I also tried to get some counselling, and was referred to a group who specifically helped survivors of child abuse, but they told me I couldn’t receive counselling until after the court case was over, because I had to look like a victim for the trial. I’m telling you now that not everyone I saw was professional. It was such a severe case of abuse, it had gone on for so long and so many different agencies had failed to spot it, that lots of professionals, rather than helping me to come to terms with what had happened, instead took the opportunity to quiz me on how she’d got away with it for so many years, their eyes bright with academic interest.
At least I still got to see Adam, but it was with mixed feelings. It was usually at the Jehovah’s Witness meetings, and also in attendance was my nan. She’d sit on one side of the hall and I’d sit on the other, and it messed with my head. We wouldn’t talk to each other, and what hurt the most was Nan’s studied indifference. I knew, in my heart, that it wasn’t her fault, and that she did love me, really; my mum had just manipulated her. And not only for the past two decades, but even after I’d left; she had told my nan that I’d stolen that bank card, and she said I’d stolen all of her money. Even though it was my account, and I took the card for ID, not cash, in Mum’s head it was her money, and she’d genuinely been robbed. So when the police had come to Nan’s to take Christopher into care, and they told Nan that Mum had been arrested, she’d shrieked, ‘It’s that autistic twit’s fault! She’s stolen all of Eunice’s money and driven her mad!’ She still blamed me now.
No one could handle Mum’s manipulation, least of all her own mother.
The pressure started to get to me. I didn’t want to go to the meetings anymore, I was finding it too much, but my friends would say, ‘Trust in God, God will get you through it.’ It was as if my life was suspended, waiting for the court case. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat; the weight dropped off me. I felt guilty for betraying my mum, because I still loved her, despite what she’d done. You can’t just turn off love like a tap. So my love still flowed like dirty water, drenching me in my disloyalty each and every day.
I felt like I didn’t deserve any of my newfound freedom – the new dentures I eventually got to fill in the gaps in my teeth; the new haircut I had done, where the hairdresser asked me if my last haircut had been done by a drunken boyfriend, because of the chunks of hair missing from my head; the new flat; the new clothes; the new me. Who was I, anyway? I simply didn’t know.
There was only thing I knew of that would make me feel like me again, I thought. Late one night, in the flat on my own, I smashed a glass in my pretty tulip-covered kitchen. I pulled up my top, and I sliced the clear translucent shard along my belly.
Blood followed the line of the glass, pure and simple: my old friend.
There I was. There was Torrie.
I watched the blood shine red in the kitchen lights.
The self-harming gave me a release: a release from the confusion. Even though I liked people being nice to me, it felt so strange, and so undeserved. Whereas, I thought I did deserve to be hurt. If no one else was going to do it, why shouldn’t I?
I kept my new scars hidden, under my jumper. After all, I was an old hand at that; it came as naturally to me as blinking. I tried to get on with my life. The simplest things were a challenge. I remember the first time I went shopping in Superdrug: I didn’t take a basket, but blatantly put my toiletries in my own bag before going to the till. I just didn’t know how things worked; I had to learn as I went along.
I got myself on a basic maths and English course, but I didn’t enjoy learning. I may not have picked up much from Mum’s ‘lessons’, but the one thing emblazoned in my mind was that I would be beaten if I got something wrong, and so I found it very hard to unfreeze the bit of my brain that had to pick things up. I’d panic, and think, The teacher is going to go apeshit if I don’t get this right. For a long while after I left Mum, I still believed I was autistic, too. After all, I had an official diagnosis from Great Portland Street, and it was what I’d been told for nineteen years.
In September 2005, I managed to get myself on a basic hairdressing course. I decided to choose hairdressing because I remembered how much I used to like brushing out Mum’s hair, back when I was a kid and we used to spend those weirdly peaceful evenings together with me as her mini-beautician. The pleasure might have come in part from her being unable to stand up and hit me, a pleasure derived from feeling safe, but it was pleasure nonetheless, and it was about the only thing I could think of that I knew I enjoyed doing. But getting on the course proved a bit of a rigmarole in itself.
‘What qualifications have you got?’ the administrator at the college asked me, looking quizzically at the nineteen-year-old woman before her.
‘I haven’t got any.’
‘You must have something,’ she insisted, ‘even bad grades.’
‘Nothing, sorry,’ I apologised, dropping my gaze in shame.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked, with palpable curiosity.
If only you knew …
Eventually, the college allowed me on a preparation-level course, aimed at youths who had played truant a lot at school. That was a scary experience: sharing a room with lots of confident teenagers who were swearing and mouthing off, with no respect for education or a desire to learn. They moaned so much about the course that it frustrated me to be around them. You don’t know how easy you have it, I thought, don’t throw this education back in people’s faces. You don’t know how lucky you are. They were also the most ballsy teenagers I’d ever met in my very sheltered life; I stayed apart from them, and kept myself to myself.
I can remember clearly the first time I mastered a French plait on the course. One of our teachers was quite strict, and I couldn’t pick the style up under her tutelage. I recall thinking, Mum was right: I am thick. But then another tutor came over, with a different approach, and within two goes, I’d got it: it looked beautiful, and I felt very proud of myself.
Six months into my course, the teachers called me into their office. My first thought was that I was in trouble – any time anyone called my name I thought I’d done something terribly wrong – but they sat me down and said, ‘We think you’re very good at what you do and we’d like to move you up to the Level 2 course.’
I felt a strange pride in myself. I remember going home and telling Jo, ‘You’ve got to have grades to get on that course!’ I’d spent my life thinking I was the most stupid girl on the planet, but here were educated people telling me I could handle this higher-level course. I barely dared to believe it. Not bad for an autistic twit.
All through this time I was going in and out of hospital: the surgeons were making adjustments to Colin, or examining the impact of the pins in my hips, which had been inserted to help with my walking, or conducting various other operations and investigations. For four years, after a car crash in which I’d so nearly died, my mother had restricted my access to healthcare that I desperately needed, and it was going to take a long, long time for me to be well. Each new development led to further complications. I could walk again – but my hips were now too weak. Colin was adjusted – but the surgical scar from my latest op would then become infected. I was still taking my cocktail of daily pills, too: antidepressants for my mental pain, and morphine for my physical. It was hard to keep going with the course with all this going on, but I battled on and I did it.
And then, into this brave new world of mine, with its shifting tectonic plates of self-disgust and self-esteem, came a brand new kind of earthqua
ke.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Victoria Martell sat me down one day and said, ‘Victoria, I think you ought to be aware, whenever your case comes to court, it will be national news. You’ve got to be prepared.’
I didn’t even know what the word ‘national’ meant. She explained that the story would be in every newspaper, and she also told me, in one of our chats, that my birth parents were local. And I suddenly thought, My real parents are going to see this story.
I wondered how that might make them feel: Spry was a distinctive name, so it was very likely they would know it was me who was the little girl involved. If they find out they’ve given up their daughter to someone like that, it’s going to be heartbreaking for them, I thought.
I was curious about my parents. For twenty years I’d not been allowed to dream, or even think, about them. But, since I’d got out, I’d found out that what Mum had told me – about them being murderers and drug addicts – was completely untrue. In fact, even more than that, I found out that they had tried to stay in touch with me when I was a baby. Countless times Mum had turned them away on the doorstep of George Dowty, telling them firmly, ‘She’s my child now.’
Without the threat of the imminent media coverage, I’m not sure I’d have had the courage to find them, not so soon after leaving Mum, at least, but the ticking clock of the court case spurred me on.
I went to social services, and they agreed to help me track them down. The mediator’s name was Carol: a lovely, beautiful woman with short, coppery highlighted hair. I liked her from the moment I met her. She’d been adopted herself, so she understood. She had dogs, too – two Labradors, Sam and Ellie – and I immediately bonded with her over that.
The most difficult thing was getting the search started. Carol asked me to give her my adoption file, so she could begin work on my behalf, but Mum had never given me any such file; I’d never even seen one in the stacks of stuff at George Dowty. Perhaps she threw it out or burned it, just as she’d got rid of all of Christopher and Alloma’s childhood photos, so they wouldn’t remember where they came from.
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 19