At this, I burst into tears. I was in so much shock and disbelief; I didn’t feel an inch of pride, just this weird, debilitating mix of guilt and stunned astonishment.
‘Sweetheart,’ she said kindly. ‘You’ve got to go home. Have you had any counselling?’
I shook my head. No, I hadn’t received any counselling. No counselling when I came out, and no counselling was being offered now, either, to help me get over it.
‘There’s a counsellor here,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go up and have a little chat before you go home? Go and have a chat and see if she can help.’
So I made my way up to the counsellor’s office, where she was sat behind her desk. I think she thought I was going to tell her I was pregnant, or had been caught shoplifting, or some other typical teenage dilemma.
I started to tell her, and of course she recognised the case straight away. And she said gently, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. It’s just too big. It’s so bad there’s nothing I can do. Maybe your doctor can help you.’
I made my way home in a bubble of shock, chased by journalists the whole way. They’d snuck into the college, they’d loitered in the loos and the lifts, and now they were waiting for me around every corner, proffering contracts, business cards, scribbled notes of appeal in my direction.
‘How does it feel to have won?’ they shouted.
Won? I thought to myself. What do you mean, won? I just feel safe.
‘Why did you stay with her for so long?’ they screamed.
That was another thing that made me feel guilty, like I’d been really stupid to put up with her for all those years.
They didn’t seem to understand that I’d been scared.
I had to hole myself up in my flat, because I couldn’t walk down the street without being stalked. Before too long, I had to quit my college course. I agreed to one press conference – encouraged by the police PR team, who said, if I did it, the press would leave me alone – and Christopher and I faced a room heaving with reporters, as microphones were thrust into our faces (Alloma had gone back to Bristol so she wasn’t there). I didn’t renounce my anonymity, so the media weren’t allowed to photograph me, but it was still an incredibly intimidating environment. And agreeing to the conference, I soon found out, didn’t make them leave me alone in any way, shape or form. Give them an inch and they’ll try to take a mile. Nonetheless, I turned every single media offer down; I didn’t feel ready to share my story any more than I had already done.
My siblings were in a different place, though. They talked to the press: a choice they made, and I didn’t resent it. I’d seen them tortured, made to do so many awful things against their will that to see them choose to stand up and be counted, to make their own decisions, to tell their story with courage, was something that, in many ways, made me proud.
In a perfect world, the day we all left Mum we should each have been able to do what we needed in order to heal, independent of the others. But we don’t live in a perfect world. Regrettably, my siblings’ courage prompted the cut-throat media to make my position ten times worse.
‘You’ve got to stand united with your brother and sister!’ the reporters would call through my letterbox. ‘You’re letting them down. You don’t want to let them down, do you?’ And then: ‘Oh, you think you’re better than them, do you? Snob!’ And then: ‘You’re the whistleblower. We want to hear it from you!’ And then: ‘You can help other people with your story. Don’t you want to help other people?’
When my mother was sentenced, on 16 April 2007, the pressure intensified again. I’d wanted to see her sentenced, but once more I was advised against it. I hadn’t seen her since the day I’d left George Dowty Drive, and I think it would have helped me to be able to see her again, to see her sent down. I might even have found the strength to look her in the eye.
It was reported that the judge, Simon Darwall-Smith, told Mum in his summing-up that it was the worst case he had come across in forty years in the justice system. He commented: ‘It’s difficult for anyone to understand how any human being could have even contemplated what you did, let alone with the regularity and premeditation you employed. I could not fail to notice that during the five and a half weeks of the trial you showed no emotion, even when the jury returned their guilty verdicts.’
Mum was found guilty of twenty-six charges in total, including unlawful wounding, cruelty to a person under sixteen, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, perverting the course of justice and witness intimidation. It sounds so dry when you say it like that. It doesn’t quite summon up the screaming agony of being beaten on your bare feet, or the caustic flavour of the washing-up liquid down your throat, or the sheer terror of being held beneath the bathwater.
She was sentenced to fourteen years in jail.
My friends responded to the sentence with delight. Ruth and Jo kept telling me, ‘You’ll be grown up then, Torrie. She won’t matter to you by then.’ And I thought they were right; I thought I was safe for fourteen years. I felt as if the judge was like one of those fairground machines they have, the ones that pick up cheap-looking toys with metal-fingered grabbers: at long last somebody had picked her up and put her away – and I could go and live my life.
A few weeks after the verdict, Duncan and Jackie came with me to a Kingdom Hall in Gloucester – to Mum’s childhood Kingdom Hall. I was there to be interviewed by a panel of elders: a formal occasion. Because even though Mum had been found guilty by a court of law, God was above all that. Mum wouldn’t be 100 per cent guilty in the eyes of many Jehovah’s Witnesses unless she’d been disfellowshipped from the faith. And that was why I was being cross-examined one more time.
I answered all their questions, for a couple of hours. They took their job seriously: there was a sense of ‘you might not be telling the truth, so let’s go through this one more time and see what God has to say about it all’. Then we all went back to Tewkesbury to await this second verdict.
It was strange for me at my local Kingdom Hall after the legal trial was over. While many Witnesses had been supportive of the court case, others had not. I understood it, to a degree: they didn’t want to think that this had been going on under their noses, for all those years, so it was easier to call me a liar than to look into their own hearts and see if they could have helped us. It was easier to spit at me in the street, tell me they didn’t believe me, and they wouldn’t unless she was proven guilty …
Well, there was a lot of humble pie being washed down by the cups of coffee in the Kingdom Hall these days, that was all I could say.
One Thursday evening, a few weeks after I’d been in Gloucester, the elders stood up for the announcements section, which always comes halfway through the night. And they said to the gathered congregation, ‘We’ve got to announce that Eunice Spry has now been disfellowshipped from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.’
They didn’t make a fuss about it; enough of a fuss had been made already. But hearing that in the Kingdom Hall – in the hall where she had literally labelled me an evil child, where she had held so many people in her power, intimidating them until they looked away, and didn’t once come to our aid – hearing that was so powerful.
Freedom. Justice. Truth.
And I thought, It’s over. It is done.
PART THREE
A LEAP OF FAITH
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Hello, there. I bet you’re surprised to see me still here. But, yes, there is a ‘part three’ to my story. I know most books like this end on that last line, don’t they? Ding dong, the witch is, if not quite dead, then at least banged up, so we can all live happily ever after.
But real life doesn’t work that way, it’s not as open and shut as that. All those headlines you see in the paper, proclaiming justice has been done for victims, so now we can all rest easy in our beds – well, you never hear what happens next, after the media circus has packed up and gone home, and the justice system has run its course, and those at the heart of the story have to
pick up their lives and move on. You never hear what happens to them afterwards.
This is what happened to me.
When I think of my life immediately after the sentencing and disfellowshipping, it’s best summed up by a golden, furry snout and a black wet nose: Ollie, my very own dog.
Ollie arrived with me one magical late spring afternoon at my flat. A couple of Witness friends from Hereford had got him for me; the housing association had agreed to move me to a ground-floor flat, so I could get a dog, and I was a week away from moving when my Ollie arrived.
Originally, I was going to get a female dog and call her Belle, after my heroine in Beauty and the Beast, but it was a boy who bounded into my flat, a porky little boy who had been rescued from a puppy farm in Wales: a five-month-old golden Labrador I thought was lovely from the moment I saw him.
I loved having someone to care for again. That very first night I gave him a bath and he was in a bit of a state from his rescue: fleas jumped from his fur coat into the water as I hosed him down. I took him to the vets the next morning – he was a big heffalump of a dog, but I carried him all the way down to the surgery myself, clutching him tightly in my arms.
Before he came, I’d often wondered, Why am I here? What am I supposed to do with myself? But now I knew – I was here to love Ollie. That’s what he taught me: how to love, without any of the complications I’d felt about my nan, or my siblings, or my mum. He taught me how to love, simple as that.
Every night, he slept across my chest, with his head on my pillow. He was daft as a brush, and he was my best mate. Just a week after he arrived, I moved into my new, ground-floor flat, a clean, cream-walled place, where I had new carpets put in; I even bought some new furniture. I bought my first ever bedframe, a proper blond-wood frame to put my mattress on, and I hung a princess net over the top of it and scattered it with fairy lights and clip-on butterflies. And I ordered a brand-new wardrobe from Ikea. Oh, I thought that wardrobe was something else! It had compartments for all my different types of clothes, and was a world away from grubby black bin-liners lying on the kitchen floor.
I hoped life was going to be OK now. Everyone was telling me, ‘It’s over. It’s finished. Move on and be happy.’ I wanted so much to be happy – even though I didn’t really know who I was, or what would, in fact, make me happy.
I found it difficult having no professional support. It was as if I’d been dropped like a hot potato after the court case, offered no guidance or help. As far as the authorities were concerned, I was, after all, an adult: twenty-one years of age, and surely able to support myself and go out and live my life. What help could I possibly need now my mum was safely in jail? For decades, I might have had her telling me I was stupid, and useless, and evil. She might have made me look in the mirror and say it, until I knew it was true. But now people said to me, ‘Don’t be so silly, of course that isn’t true! Put it all behind you and move on.’
I knew what they were saying was right, but the message didn’t really reach me inside, in my heart and mind. After all, I had no mother, no family, no guidance to help me; I had to find my own way. In my childhood, I’d become a chameleon, adapting to survive. Now, I had to do the same again. What did other people do? They got houses; they bought wardrobes. I did the same. And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll be happy. I’m going to give it my best shot. By popular demand, that’s what I’ve got to do. Everything’s going to be A-OK now.’
In truth, Ollie was a huge help in that. I loved having a companion and taking him for walks. He gave me a reason to get out of the flat every day, and with his funny little character he gave me a reason to smile, too. It was a long time since I’d smiled. Throughout the trial, and the two years running up to it, I’d found it hard to enjoy anything: food, a book, a rom-com movie. I wasn’t living, just existing. I’d been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, and I was still battling with various health problems, and knocking back my cocktails of pills. Yet Ollie really helped with the depression: his smell, his cuddles, his softness; those big floppy velvet ears. I loved him so much. And it was his love, in the end, that made me stop cutting myself and have a bit of self-belief. If he believed in me, maybe I could, too.
I tried not to think about Mum anymore. I had to think about the future – which might explain, perhaps, why I decided not to prosecute Uncle Phil for his abuse. That, and the fact that I didn’t feel I had the emotional strength to survive another trial: more giving of evidence, more cross-examination from insensitive, intrusive lawyers. The police rang me and gave me a choice as to whether or not to prosecute him, because I’d told them all about what he’d done when I’d told them about Mum, and I said no, I couldn’t. No, thank you. I couldn’t go through it all again.
On Friday, 20 July 2007, it started to rain. Heavily, relentlessly. I woke up at three o’clock in the morning to hear screams coming from the caravan park across the way; they were hurriedly evacuating the residents in the face of the rising water. There was a helicopter flying above my flat, its blades beating the air: it was searching for a young man who had gone missing in the fast-swelling river (he later died). That Friday was the night that signalled the coming of the Gloucestershire Floods, the county’s worst-ever peacetime emergency and a truly devastating natural disaster.
It was a disaster for my new flat, too. The water started to come up through the floor, while Ollie and I sat on the bed, me clinging to his soft blond fur. All the lights had gone off; the electricity was gone. It was a bit like the stories of Armageddon that my mum used to shout about in my face, blackheads greasy on her nose, as she described the end of days and how I was going to suffer.
And, oh, I did suffer. The flat was swimming in water: dirty sewage all over my new carpets, and my pretty bed, and my magical wardrobe. It was so traumatic to build a home and then, literally months later, to see it swept away.
I was rehoused in Gloucester, almost within the shadow of my mum’s former Kingdom Hall. Gloucester was the last place I wanted to go: it was so far away from my friends, whose support I still relied on, and I felt particularly uncomfortable moving to Mum’s old neck of the woods, where I felt people were more likely to disbelieve what had happened; where I’d perhaps find my harshest critics. But beggars can’t be choosers, and the floods had made beggars of an awful lot of people.
I moved into my new flat on a Friday night, just as it was getting dark. Club music pounded from the bars on the street, as young people careered about, clutching bottles of booze that smelled off-puttingly of Uncle Phil. They were yelling and swearing and shouting at each other. It was a huge culture shock. I had grown up on the farm, and within the confines of George Dowty; my flats after my escape had been in little Tewkesbury (population: 10,704), just minutes from my friends’ homes. Now, I was in the big city, with all the noise and dirt and faceless neighbours that implies.
I remember sitting in my new flat that evening, with what belongings I had managed to salvage dumped around me in the living room, and crying – not because of what had happened to me, but because I’d been moved to a flat with no garden for Ollie, and I felt like such a useless mother, because he had nowhere he could go for a wee.
Ollie didn’t mind, though. He followed me about, his big brown eyes full of love and trust and good humour, and he didn’t even bark when our upstairs neighbours started having a blazing row, every word of which I could hear as the walls in our block were paper-thin. When the pubs kicked out, drunks wandered past and knocked on my windows. Rat-a-tat-tat! We know you’re in there!
I cried myself to sleep for the first week. There was no help available to me. The council was inundated with requests for assistance at that time, and, because I had a roof over my head, I wasn’t a priority. My friends couldn’t support me as they were so far away – they told me to go to the Gloucester Kingdom Hall and make new contacts there. ‘Trust in God,’ they said serenely.
In the end, I realised there was only one person who
could help me … and that person was me. I had to help myself. You need to get a job, and you need to save up, and you need to get yourself back to Tewkesbury in a privately rented flat, I told myself firmly.
I recalled a place in Cheltenham where I had worked during a placement on my childcare course: a day nursery where I’d been very happy. I phoned the owner up and she called me in for an interview. ‘You’re really good with the kids and the parents hold you in high regard,’ she told me. ‘You’ve got the job.’ And so I worked as a nursery practitioner, looking after three-year-olds on what the nursery called the ‘juggler’s floor’ (every floor, each with its own age group, was named after a different circus act).
I enjoyed my work. If I saw a child who was a bit quieter than the others, I would make an effort to spend a bit more time with them to make sure they knew they were special, too. Yet I managed to strike a balance in my concern. I knew not every parent was like my mum, and, just because I’d been beaten at home, it didn’t mean every grazed knee I saw was evidence of abuse. That balance was self-taught, and I trusted my instincts. In truth, I found the staff room a trickier place; the casual break-time conversations were for me a bit like that meal with my brother Tom at Pizza Hut: a weird kind of endurance test, or a pantomime in which I had to pretend to be somebody else, simply because I didn’t know how to have a ‘normal’ chat with people. So much of my normality was so extreme.
My contact with Tom had sadly subsided in the past few months. I think the media coverage of the case took its toll; once it all came out, and not just the sanitised version Carol had told him. I believe it was just a bit too much, and our letters dried up.
It was an exhausting time for me. I was up at 5 a.m. every day to take Ollie for a walk and to drop him at his dog-sitter’s, and then I’d catch the 6.30 a.m. bus to Cheltenham and do a full day’s work at the nursery. I wouldn’t get home until gone eight in the evening. Meanwhile, I saved every penny I could; my only expenses were food and Ollie’s sitter. During those intense few months, doing all I could to get out of my horrid flat, on that scary street, I also received a small payment from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, which I could use for a deposit on a rented flat. Within six months, I’d pulled myself off the scrapheap I felt I’d been thrown on, and I was able to move back to Tewkesbury, under my own steam. I was so proud of myself.
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 22