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

by Victoria Spry

  The male officer with DC Martell checked the way was clear for us and then ushered me out of the car into the underground car park, and then inside. My stomach was an aviary of butterflies, darting up to my throat and back. The police escorted me into a side room and told me that I would be waiting there until the court was ready for me to give evidence. Sandy was still on the stand.

  I was so pleased to be able to have my friends there with me. Jo and Jackie joined me in the room for the long wait, as well as Carol, the adoption mediator, to whom I’d grown close. They had brought me gifts on this strange, unsettling day. Jo presented me with a flowery gift bag packed full of presents, and she said, ‘All the things in here, they remind me of you.’ I pulled out a fridge magnet with the slogan: ‘The most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen’. Jo said I was always smiling, no matter what. She gave me a cushion with the motto: ‘I can do anything if I’ve got the right pair of shoes on’. That was a bit of a private joke, because I really struggled to find shoes: my feet had been so destroyed by my mum’s beatings, and by years of running around the farmhouse gravel barefoot, that I found it very difficult even to wear shoes at times. I also pulled out a bottle of perfume, called Beautiful, and there were even more things in there, each of them with a thoughtful, personal message behind it. Overwhelmed by her generosity, I gave her a long hug. She was such a kind friend.

  Carol had brought me a stuffed toy giraffe. She said to me, ‘I was going to get you a lion, because lions are very, very brave – just like you. But the lion didn’t look cute enough, so I got you the giraffe instead.’

  I lightened everyone’s mood then by saying, ‘Well, I suppose I have stuck my neck out.’ And we all laughed.

  And Jackie? Ah, Jackie. This lovely woman, who had so bravely asked Mum about the bruises when no one else would; who had helped me so much and often made me laugh until I cried – well, she never did what anybody expected. That’s why she was so much fun to spend time with. She’d brought egg sandwiches, made with eggs from her very own range of chickens. Mothering me so kindly, as always.

  But I found I couldn’t eat a thing.

  The court officers came in and asked me if I wanted to review my evidence. ‘No, thank you,’ I said, almost offended. I didn’t need to run through my evidence: I knew what the truth was.

  After a couple of hours in the poky, windowless side room, they came to collect me for court. Jo, Jackie and Carol all gave me a hug, and then I left them behind, and followed the court officer down the corridors and up the stairs. I was left outside the courtroom in a long glass corridor, while the officer went to check they were ready for me. I was proud of myself for not limping.

  Walking wasn’t what was really on my mind, though. What I really wanted to do was run – run as far away as possible. Because I was the first child to have spoken up, I was child A: the first to give evidence. I found that very, very scary: sticking my head above the parapet again. In the end, though, it was the thought of my siblings, of children B and C, Alloma and Christopher, that drove me on.

  You’ve got a responsibility here, I thought, you’ve got a brother and a sister who need you. You’ve got to go in there and show them it’s OK, even if it’s not OK. This is your family: you’ve got to do it for them. Be strong for them.

  I was always better at doing things for others than for me.

  The court door opened, and I was ushered inside. My eyes searched everywhere for Mum; I was terrified about being in the same room as her again. People had told me she wouldn’t be able to hurt me, but they didn’t understand. I wasn’t frightened that she was going to leap up and hit me. It was the mental control I was afraid of; seeing those eyes again, and what those eyes might make me do, or feel.

  But I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then I remembered Victoria Martell saying that Mum would always be behind a screen so we couldn’t see her, and vice versa, and that she’d be taken out of the courtroom when I was walking in and out. That reassured me. I remember trying to make sure I looked strong and confident in my black skirt and my red top as I walked across the courtroom. Even though I wasn’t feeling confident, I knew it was critical to come across well to the jury. They had to believe I was telling the truth. So I was steady on my feet as I went up the two little steps to enter a small, carpeted box: the stand.

  I was sworn in, and my trial – in every sense of the word – began.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ‘I’m going to ask you about your childhood now. Is that OK?’

  Our barrister, the lawyer working for the prosecution, stood up first. He asked me questions – the same questions the police had asked me, and Mark and Duncan, back when I had first told. I stared at the jury, and I told the truth.

  The whole time I was giving evidence, I focused on one man and one woman in the jury. They looked nice and normal, in contrast to the eccentricities elsewhere in the court: the grey wigs and red robes of the main court players. The woman had shoulder-length brown hair and wore a turquoise scarf; the man was quite thin and tall, and had short, greyish hair. They were sitting next to each other, and it was the woman I mostly looked at when I spoke. She looked infuriated; she looked shocked; she looked like she cared.

  Cough. Cough. Cough.

  That was my mum, from behind her screen, making her presence felt as I gave my evidence. In the end the judge told her that, if she wasn’t quiet, he’d have to send her out. She was quiet then; the whole court was. While I was speaking up – speaking out – you could have heard a pin drop.

  I gave evidence for two days. Talking to our barrister was bearable, but I found it very difficult when my mum’s lawyer came to question me. He was shorter than our lawyer, with dark hair, and I found him a very odd job. I couldn’t grasp how he could stand there and defend her; how he could stand there and try to make out I was lying. The thing I found most exhausting, and humiliating, about the trial was trying to prove myself, to prove that I was telling the truth. Not only had I endured the abuse, but I then had to go through that. It was awful.

  Mum’s barrister was always trying to catch me out.

  ‘Your mum does love you, doesn’t she, Victoria?’ he would say.

  I would hesitate at that. ‘I don’t actually know if she does or not. But if she does love me, she has a very strange way of showing it.’

  ‘She does love you,’ he would say, ‘because she took you to Disneyland.’

  I’d replied to that question somewhat defiantly: ‘I’d much rather have had a cuddle than go to America!’ I snapped back at him. His line of questioning had made me so mad, slinging out this statement, as if to say, Well, if you’ve seen Mickey Mouse then you’ve had a perfect childhood. Didn’t he know what my mother was like, how she had striven to appear so perfect, but only ever on the outside?

  Another time he said, ‘You weren’t made to stand up all night in the shed at George Dowty, were you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I was. I did.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but the shed was too full of junk for that.’

  But then later, when painting a picture of Mum’s happy-go-lucky household, he told me that we’d played in the shed. I couldn’t help myself: I answered back. I was so frustrated that, after all we’d been through, we weren’t being listened to. All my frustration bubbled up inside me and I said: ‘Well, if it’s too full of junk, sir, how could I possibly play in there?’

  The judge interrupted me at that point and told me off, albeit gently. ‘Can you please not answer back?’ he said. ‘We have to ask the questions.’

  Only once in the whole two days did I break down while giving evidence. I was telling them about an incident with Alloma, shortly before she was abandoned, when Mum had been kicking her around the kitchen floor. As I recalled it, I burst into tears – because there’s nothing worse than watching someone be hurt whom you can’t help. I’d just remembered her desperate screams, and it brought floods of tears to my eyes and staccato hiccups to my wavering voice. The judge sent me
out to compose myself, but I wasn’t allowed to go back to my friends.

  There was one other exchange I remember with my mum’s barrister, just towards the end of his cross-examination. He was trying to paint Mum as a perfect mother again.

  ‘Your mum loved you so much,’ he told me, ‘that after the car crash, she bought you a canal boat, didn’t she? Because she thought you were disabled and you couldn’t walk.’

  ‘No,’ I said, concisely, following the judge’s advice.

  ‘It was a disabled canal boat,’ he said, his eyes on me.

  ‘It was definitely not for me.’

  ‘That’s not the way it was. She got that for you.’

  ‘No, it was for my granddad. Because he was disabled.’

  He tutted in disbelief: ‘Come, how’s your granddad going to enjoy it? He was old. That boat was for you.’

  I fixed him with a glare of my own. ‘The only reason she bought that boat,’ I said, ‘was because it was called Charlotte.’

  She hadn’t told him the name, I could see that; he shook his head and he just stopped dead. ‘No further questions,’ he said suddenly.

  Our lawyer stood up again, for the final question before I was dismissed. ‘Victoria,’ he said, ‘I have never seen you so angry and determined. Please explain to me why you feel so angry.’

  I paused, my thoughts whirling in my head, trying to pick one out to explain this jumble of emotions. ‘Because she’s over there,’ I said at last, nodding at the screen, behind which my mother sat. ‘She’s over there, and she knows what she’s done.’

  And then I added, ‘I still love her, but she needs to get some help.’

  The trial continued, but for me it was over. I wasn’t allowed to watch my siblings give evidence, even though I wanted to. I’d only ever heard Mum’s voice telling me what was what, and I think it would have helped me to hear other sides of the story. I wanted to do it for me and my future, but I wasn’t allowed, so as usual I just did what I was told.

  Once I’d come off the stand, I went to the bathroom at the courthouse to splash some water on my face. A woman came up to me there, in the toilets, and proffered her business card. She said, ‘I know we’re not supposed to do this, but I’m from the –’ and she named a very respectable mainstream newspaper that should have known better. ‘We’ll pay you for your story; we’ll pay you to drop your anonymity: we want to get the first exclusive on the case.’

  It was so overwhelming – I just wanted to go home. DC Martell got me in the car and we snuck out the back way to avoid the media. I saw the photographers and reporters milled by the court steps, a sea of bustling figures and camera flashes, and I was told they were all waiting there for me, which was incredibly stressful.

  I don’t remember getting home that night, but I do recall waking up the next morning, finding myself lying on the sofa in my pale pink lounge. A noise had woken me up. A funny noise, like the letterbox was repeatedly flapping with missives coming through the door – but I rarely got mail, and the postman only came once a day.

  I ventured into the hallway, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Stacks of letters had been posted through the box, and still more were coming through, even as I stared in horror at the mounting papers. They were all from reporters, telling me they’d pay more than the next newspaper, and I really must sell my story. When I peeked out the kitchen window, I saw the car park was jammed full of journalists. My phone rang, and it was Victoria Martell, passing me on to the police PR woman, who told me she was getting requests in from broadcasters, and did I want to go on national TV once the verdict was in?

  No, I did not. I was in so much pain, I was so overwhelmed, I was so confused by my wild mix of feelings, that the one thing I definitely did not want to do was talk to the world about what had happened. It had been hard enough telling the lawyer in the courtroom; the last thing I wanted was to go over it all again, or have my face splashed across the papers. I felt traumatised, not triumphant; battered, not brave.

  I stuck a handwritten note up on my door, using my still-childish handwriting to carefully craft the shapes of the letters. ‘Please,’ it said, ‘I’m really upset right now. Can you please leave me alone?’

  But it didn’t stop them.

  The case continued. Mum gave her defence. ‘I sweated blood for these children,’ she said during the trial. ‘I’ve worked nonstop. I love them; I still love them. Anyone who met these three children would say they’ve grown up to be fine respectable adults. That’s what I aimed to do and that’s what I think I did to them.’ She said the only physical punishment she had ever given us was ‘a smack on the bottom’.

  As for her defence regarding the masses of scars on our bodies … we were naughty foster kids and had put the sticks down each other’s throats; it was nothing to do with her. DC Martell later told me that her defence became almost laughable in the end, because her answers were so ridiculous.

  I wasn’t allowed in court, so I didn’t see how the evidence was stacking up: not only from the three of us, and Sandy, but also from the dentist’s and doctor’s appointments we’d attended over the years, from the DNA-sodden sticks they’d retrieved from the farmhouse – and even from my sister Becky. She testified about the bedroom scene she’d found when she walked in on me, and perhaps this was the most powerful evidence of all. For this wasn’t a ‘naughty foster kid telling lies’ – this was Mum’s own, natural daughter, and she was saying it was all true.

  But I didn’t know all that, not at the time. From my perspective, it was pretty much my word against Mum’s, and I knew how that had gone down in the past. I had nightmares she was going to go free; every night I wet the bed in abject fear. Fear of Mum, fear of going to jail myself, fear of what would happen next. I started to think I would be better off dead.

  My friends tried to keep me focused on the positive. Jo was sweet as always, and one Friday afternoon in mid-March she invited me round for tea. I liked going to Jo’s – she lived in a very characterful little place, with big beams and a rustic feel, and she always had flowers everywhere. It was a peaceful place to be. And peace was what I needed just then: the case had closed and the jury had gone out to deliberate their verdict. I’d been told that we probably wouldn’t hear anything until after the weekend. I felt like climbing the wood-beamed walls.

  But then my mobile started ringing. It was Victoria Martell, and she had just four words for me.

  ‘She’s been proven guilty.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I felt grief-stricken. I collapsed to the floor, to my knees; and that was where Jo found me, tears streaming down my face.

  I’ve just put my mum in prison.

  Jo pulled me up into her arms and wrapped me in a big hug. She gave me a kiss and she said, ‘Well done, I’m so proud of you.’ Then she led me to the sofa, and we sat there, trying to let it sink in, both of us crying, while mad thoughts flew around my head.

  I felt guilty – for so many reasons: because I loved her; because I’d betrayed her. Because she’d told me, long ago, that I had turned her this way – so really, all of this, this whole thing, all of it was my fault.

  That was a lot to feel guilty about.

  When I said I loved her, people would shush me. ‘It’s misplaced loyalties,’ they’d say. But that felt like they were dismissing my feelings, telling me I was wrong, and thick with it. You autistic twit. I couldn’t help the way I felt – I had loved her for decades, for twenty-one years now – and she was, for better or worse, the only mum I’d ever known.

  Victoria Martell’s words rang in my ears, like sombre church bells, tolling in the cool spring air: ‘She’s been proven guilty.’ I just couldn’t believe it. I’d never, ever thought it would happen. I’d never dared to dream. I thought about DC Martell, how someone had once told me that you’d have to get up very early in the morning to get past her, and I was suddenly glad that she’d been our lead investigator. I don’t think we’d have done as well with the case with anoth
er officer. Those reserved eyes of hers had seen straight through Mum, and made a judgement, in a way that no one had ever been able to do before her.

  I didn’t phone my siblings after the verdict. We’d kept our distance, during the trial, not wanting to jeopardise the evidence, and I didn’t feel the urge to ring them now. It felt intensely personal somehow. We’d all gone on our own journeys to get to this place, and I’d been with Mum since I was a baby. It was a lot to get my head round.

  The verdict still hadn’t sunk in by the time Tuesday morning came round and I returned to my childcare course at college. I remember walking into our classroom and the tables were filled with newspapers, and each and every one had my mum’s picture on it. There were pages and pages about the case inside the papers, all spread out across the tables. Even though Victoria Martell had told me that the case would make the national news, I could never have comprehended the magnitude of the coverage.

  Each picture sent another sucker punch of guilt slamming into my stomach. It was so strange, our story being out there. Until the trial had happened, I’d been told to keep quiet about it, so as not to endanger the case – and that was just fine; that was kind of what Mum had always told me anyway, that we weren’t to tell anyone about what went on in our home – but this … her secrets were now spread out for all the world to see. It was such a contrast to our insular family, to the way we’d grown up. My brain couldn’t quite cope with it.

  My teacher came out and told my fellow students to put the papers away. She called me into her office.

  ‘Are you OK, Victoria?’ she asked me.