Carol was angry about the missing file – angry for me. ‘You have a right to know this information,’ she said. She told me the file was supposed to say where I was from, and it was usually a book filled with pictures and all kinds of other details. Sweetly, she tried to make me one herself, belatedly, cobbled together with what information she could find, but all she could muster was a single sheet of paper. Still, it was better than nothing. It was more information than I’d ever had before.
More than my parents, though, I wanted to find my brother. I knew my parents had given me up, so I thought there was a chance they wouldn’t want to know me; I just wanted to contact them so they knew about the case, as I thought that was the right thing to do. But I had hopes for my brother, that blond boy who had written his notes and sent his photos so diligently for a couple of years. I had hopes he might want to be friends.
Finding my real family took a lot of patience. Carol had to find them, and then check they were happy to be approached by me, and then hurl the Molotov cocktail of my childhood into their front room. That knowledge, of them having to know, was hard for me as well: I felt instantly I was a disappointment, a nuisance, attached to this horrific case, which I’d been told would be splashed all across the papers, as sordid secrets are. I felt as if I was walking into their shining lives and stamping all over them with my muddy boots of grime and filth.
Nonetheless, my brother agreed to see me. We sent cards at first, and pictures back and forth. I told him I loved dogs, and I was thrilled when I saw he was wearing a T-shirt in one snapshot that said ‘Dog Rules’ on it. That was my big brother. It felt so surreal writing ‘with love from your sister’ at the end of the notes. He sent me a present from his holiday, a little blue stone heart necklace, which I loved, and I sent him back a slab of Thornton’s chocolate with a card on it, saying ‘to my dear brother’.
We met for the first time in a Pizza Hut in Cheltenham, maybe six weeks after our first letters were exchanged. I was sat there with Carol, waiting for him to arrive. And in walked this beautiful-looking lad, with piercing blue eyes. He was really tall and good-looking. Gosh, I thought. It seemed such a contrast to ugly old me.
His parents came with him. They were in their late forties: a nice middle-class family. His mum was really upset by the whole thing. She reached across the table to me when she arrived and said earnestly, ‘We wanted to adopt you too, Victoria.’
I thought it was just a throwaway comment; the kind of thing a polite woman would say. I didn’t realise they had genuinely tried to adopt me, not until much later, when I read my medical notes. It turned out that Mum had told people at the time that she didn’t want me to be moved to a new family – because it would have upset me. She made everybody believe I was better off staying with her. It’s sickening, really, but perhaps it’s best not to dwell on what might have been.
I stood up and hugged my brother when he walked in. We felt a bit awkward, but a big part of that awkwardness was my unfamiliar feeling that I finally belonged somewhere; that he was mine. Mine in a way that Adam never had been; mine in a way that Christopher and Alloma had had together, but I had never known. Growing up with Mum, I’d always thought, Torrie doesn’t belong anywhere; Torrie doesn’t deserve a family. But I looked at Tom and I thought, Wow, this is it then! I do belong somewhere, after all.
Carol had told him and his parents about the abuse. I still kept a lot back, though – it’s not the kind of thing you can bring up over a pizza. In fact, during our meal, I became more and more aware that Tom had had a normal life: a stable and loving, Christmas-and-birthdays kind of life. I grew quieter and quieter. How could I contribute to this conversation? I didn’t want to frighten him off.
I found my necessary silence very hard, and very upsetting. I felt I couldn’t just be myself; that I had to protect him. Even though he was my big brother, I felt I had to be the grown-up and keep him safe. I found it hard to talk about ‘normal’ things, because then I wasn’t being me. ‘Normal’ for me was punches and kicks and being drowned in the bath. It was all very confusing.
That meeting went better than the one I had with my parents, though. I had a lot of sympathy for them, at first. Come on, I was the girl who had spent years planning her own suicide, who even now was on antidepressants and secretly slicing up her stomach. I knew all too well what depression felt like. I didn’t blame them one bit for giving me up, none of this was their fault.
Carol tracked them down, and my dad wrote me a letter. That was so weird, holding a plain white piece of paper with my dad’s handwriting on it. I’d never seen that before; I’d never even seen a picture of them.
Carol had told them about the upcoming court case – and maybe that explained why it was such an awkward letter. There were no specifics in it. No ‘we love you to bits’ or ‘we’re proud of you’ or ‘we can’t believe you’re all grown up’. There was nothing much in it at all – just words on a piece of paper, nothing emotional.
Carol went round to theirs and took their picture for me. It was so odd, looking at it. My mum and dad, sat on a sofa, ordinary as steak-and-kidney pie, yet as magical as the fairies used to be to me. These were the people who had made me and put me on this earth. This was where I came from.
My mum was just in her fifties. She had thick, short brown hair, blue eyes, and the most beautiful skin. Dad was portly, with dark hair and brown eyes. The weirdest thing of all was that I could see myself in them, especially in my mum, in those blue eyes. Carol told me they’d had two other boys, after Tom and me, and they’d kept them; they hadn’t given them up.
We arranged a meeting, at Butler’s Cafe in Cheltenham. It was just the most bizarre feeling, waiting for them to arrive. In a way it was so unnatural, preparing to meet my parents for the first time at the age of twenty. My stomach was in knots, and I was frightened: frightened the court case would put them off, that they wouldn’t want to know me. Carol tried to reassure me. The time ticked on. They were ten minutes late, then twenty, then forty-five … and then I knew they weren’t coming. They had stood me up.
I said to Carol, ‘I forgive them for giving me up, I forgive them for all that. I am more angry at them for doing this. When they know that I am sat here, waiting for them, watching the seconds tick by.’
Carol rang them, and they murmured, not even that apologetically, ‘We couldn’t manage it, sorry, it’s a bit too much for us.’
She arranged another meeting, and then another, and they did the same thing again and again. I understood it was difficult for them, but it was difficult for me, too.
Carol finally got them to agree to a fourth meeting, this time at a meeting place that was just around the corner from their house. It was in a community centre-type place, in a room that she had arranged.
I was already sat in the corner when they arrived; corners of rooms were still my favourite places to be, where no one could hit me as they passed. For the same reason I lived in hoodie jumpers, the hoods pulled up over my blonde hair, offering thin cotton protection should anyone choose to wallop me on the head. Some habits die hard.
My parents came into the room, with my youngest natural brother tagging along with them. Carol had told me the older boy didn’t want anything to do with me; he said I wasn’t his family. I took that on the chin and tried to understand and be understanding, but it still hurt like hell. My littlest brother didn’t really acknowledge me; he went straight over to play with the toys that were laid out in the room. He was only seven, though, so I don’t blame him for that. It was extraordinary seeing him there. He had blond hair, too; he looked like me.
I stood up as Mum and Dad walked towards me. They froze in the doorway at the sight of me. Mum looked at me, nodded once, briefly, and then went to sit in the corner. My dad followed her. There were no cuddles or kisses, no tears of joy. No emotion at all, they just sat there. My mum barely uttered two words the whole time we were together, and that was hard, because it was her I really wanted to hear speak. She ha
dn’t written me a single letter so I had no sense at all of who she was.
They didn’t ask me anything, and I didn’t say much back to them. There didn’t seem to be the opportunity to ask them any questions, even though I was bursting with things I wanted to know. I didn’t feel I could warn them about the case, or even tell them that I understood why they had given me up, and that I blamed them for nothing. There was just my dad, talking about anything and nothing, and my mum sat there in silence. It wasn’t a meeting we repeated. There were to be no happy family reunions with my real parents for me.
My reunion with my mum’s mum – my gran – was lovely, though. She’d written me one letter before we met, on proper thick cream writing paper with beautiful handwriting. That made an impression. We met in Butler’s, with her turning up right on time. She was wearing a dark coat with a red scarf, and I remember when she kissed me her cheek was really cold because it was frosty outside. She hugged me and it was the weirdest feeling: This is my real gran hugging me.
She told me lots about when I was a baby. That’s how I know I lay in my cot all day, without anyone to care for me. She said she would come round and have to change me or put a clean Babygro on me. Seeing me left alone like that really upset her, but, when she found out my parents had allowed me to be adopted, she was even more cross. I think she felt they hadn’t pushed themselves; that they just did what they wanted to at the time, with no thought of the future.
She told me about the rest of our family, too: I had relatives in Scotland. I just found that so fascinating. I was so used to not being part of a family, and not belonging, that it was really surreal to think that somewhere, on a genealogical map, ancestral lines linked little old me to relatives north of the border.
I didn’t see my gran often, but she’d write to me a fair amount. I treasured those letters on her trademark thick cream paper, as well as my brother’s hastily scribbled cards, which arrived from time to time. My family … the strangest thing.
Our reunion came at a particularly good time because, in that spring of 2006, I stopped seeing Adam and Christopher regularly. They no longer came to the Witness meetings – I think their new foster parents decided it wasn’t healthy, or perhaps the boys themselves decided not to attend anymore. For me it was one more tie cut loose.
And still the court case didn’t come to trial. Mum was delaying it as much as possible, of course: chopping and changing her legal team and using other tactics so the dates had to be put back, again and again. I’d get myself psyched up for the case, and then Victoria Martell would phone and say it had once more been delayed. That was so hard. I was living my life in a state of constant anxiety while we waited for it to come to trial, it was like a dark cloud hanging over me – because I was the one putting my neck on the line. Mum had manipulated so many people, and not one person had stopped her, not until I had spoken out. So I knew who was going to be in for it if she got off. It was really frightening. No wonder I was still having vivid nightmares, and wetting the bed nearly every night. The only good news was that, finally, she was arrested for witness intimidation, and remanded into custody until the case came to court. At that I felt a huge sense of relief, knowing I wasn’t going to see her car outside my flat again, or come home to any more coded messages. I felt I could breathe.
Later on in 2006, I had to quit my hairdressing course. It required me to stand for long periods at a time, and my hips just weren’t up to the job, pins or no pins. In the September I switched to a childcare course, Level 2 again, and got on really well with that. I even achieved distinctions in some of my work, something I was amazed at.
I enjoyed the course. They said I was really good with the children; all my years of looking after Adam, and loving my dollies, finally paying off. I was always happy being with the children; I felt safer with them than with adults. I liked nurturing them and making them laugh. As part of the course I even performed a puppet show for them, with puppets I had made by hand: three Billy Goats Gruff and a bridge and a troll.
And then, that autumn, Victoria Martell phoned again. This time, she said the judge had put his foot down: Mum couldn’t move the trial anymore. In the spring of 2007, more than two years since I had escaped her clutches, Eunice Spry would be in the dock, whether she liked it or not.
I felt a shiver run down my spine.
‘Who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge?’ I had made the troll roar out.
Three little demon Billy Goats Gruff were about to get their day in court.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning, OK, Victoria?’ DC Martell said to me on the phone. I thanked her and hung up. Just one more night until I faced my mother in court.
I was a bag of nerves. Already, the trial had not started well. Just two days into the court case, in March 2007, the police had phoned me to say, ‘You need to sit down. Your granddad’s died.’
My poor nan, I thought. And then: The pressure of the trial has killed him. Can you imagine dying like that, with your daughter facing trial? It was just as Mum had always said: I’d destroyed this family. And then, God help me, I thought, Mum’s going to get away with it now because her lawyer will use this to get her off, like a sob story. And then I felt guilty even for thinking that.
The closer the trial had come, the more and more convinced I became that Mum was going to get off. DC Martell would say to me, ‘Trust me, Victoria.’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m trying, but I’m sorry, I don’t. I really want to, but Mum has always got away with it before. What’s different this time?’
My evidence had been delayed in the schedule, which was also unsettling. It had been delayed because another witness had come forward: a woman called Sandy, who remembered me from when I was young. I didn’t really remember her, so that was confusing in itself. What has she said? I wondered. What did she see?
It was a Tuesday night, so after Victoria’s call I got myself ready to head out to my Bible study meeting at the Kingdom Hall. I really wish I hadn’t gone. Now the trial was on its feet, everybody wanted to know what I was going to say, and exactly what my evidence against my mother was. It was hard putting them off, especially one woman in particular, who was a good friend of my mum’s and extremely nosy. I found her interest very intimidating.
My friends sat behind with me after the meeting, trying to reassure me about giving evidence, telling me that I was doing the right thing. Even though DC Martell had explained it to me, I was still very confused by the justice system. I was convinced – absolutely convinced – that if Mum was found not guilty, then I was going to go to prison. Because if the jury didn’t believe my evidence, that meant I was lying; and liars had to be punished, I knew that all too well. I was petrified.
Jo and her husband Stuart took me home and dropped me off. I remember that night clearly: I didn’t sleep a wink. I was very sick instead, all through the small hours, throwing up vomit until my stomach ached with empty acid; my clammy hands on the bright turquoise walls trying to root me in reality.
All too soon, dawn filtered through the curtains. I washed my face, barely able to look at myself in the mirror. I chose my outfit carefully. I’d thought really deeply about what I was going to wear, because Mum had never seen me walk as a young woman. Also, I wanted to impress the jury; they had to see that I was telling the truth.
I pulled on the long black skirt I’d picked out, and slipped on my high-heeled, black Clarks court shoes. Over my head went a white vest top, over the M&S bra that Ruth had helped me buy when I first got out, and then I tied a red wrap top over the vest, fastening its long, looping ties around my skinny waist. It wasn’t a new outfit; it was one I’d worn before, and people had told me I looked nice in it, so I’d decided to wear it for the trial. I felt almost confident in it, the red a vibrant colour to try to lift my spirits.
The phone rang, piercing the stagnant air of the flat. It was Jo, calling to tell me that they’d see me at the courthouse. ‘You’re going to be absolutely
fine,’ she said. She asked if she could watch me give evidence from the gallery, when the time came.
It was hard for me, but I said, ‘No, thanks, I’d rather you didn’t.’ I felt bad for saying that – I felt bad for ever saying what I wanted – but there was something inside me that thought, If you’re going to do this, you’ve got to do it for you. I didn’t want anybody else giving me the strength to go through with it, I wanted it to come from within me.
I heard DC Martell’s horn beep outside my flat, and I made my way downstairs with a heavy heart.
‘Good morning, Victoria, how are you?’ she said sunnily, as I slipped into the back seat of her unmarked police car. Her upbeat words jarred with me. Please can you stop tarting this up, I thought, this is really scary. But I knew she was only being polite, and trying to put me at my ease.
It was a forty-five-minute drive to the courthouse in Bristol. Always Bristol: where Mum and I had abandoned Alloma; where I’d convalesced after the car crash; where we’d seen the driver of the lorry sentenced. It was even the same courthouse we were returning to: the same modern, spacious building I’d visited when I was fifteen, when the driver had been sent down for killing my sisters, and I’d thought it should have been me in the dock. How different things were now.
I was completely wrapped up in my thoughts. She’s going to get away with it, she’s going to get away with it, rang through my head with every heartbeat. The nearer we got, the scarier it was. It reminded me of driving to the farm.
DC Martell had secured permission for us to use the back entrance to avoid the media scrum at the front. Even though she had warned me there would be media interest in my case, I was still shocked by the massed journalists and broadcasters I saw there, all scurrying about on the front steps, like ants advancing on a particularly delectable sweet treat. I was grateful not to have to walk through them, but even seeing the national press en masse wasn’t as daunting as the experience I was about to face.
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 20