Using the rest of the compensation money, I paid for a year of rent in advance – so when I moved in, in the spring of 2008, I felt debt-free and ready for anything.
But, as it turned out, I wasn’t quite ready for anything after all. Not by a long shot.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
It all started off beautifully. I moved in on a bright spring day, into a semi-detached house on a nice estate in Tewkesbury, with open fields and rolling countryside just around the corner. The house had two bedrooms and a garden, actual stairs, and even a conservatory. It was a proper family home, so I decided to expand my little family to celebrate. Ollie and I welcomed the irrepressible Milly into our band of troopers, a chunky chocolate-brown Labrador with big brown jelly-bean eyes. She had the most amazing character: she was a real clown, a very cheeky dog. You couldn’t even cuddle her that much because she would just make you laugh. She and Ollie loved each other to bits and would chase each other round and round the garden.
The dogs were a joy in my life. My stoma bag, old faithful Colin, was causing me a lot of problems at that time, and I was really quite poorly, vomiting a lot and having to increase the dosage of the painkillers I was on. The injuries I’d sustained in the crash, in particular from the seatbelt jamming tight across my torso, had played havoc with my gut and resulted in a hernia in my stomach lining, which caused acid to rise up my throat again and again, making me ill. Although still working at the nursery, I was in constant pain. I dragged myself into work regardless because I didn’t want to be pitied – and I didn’t want to give up on this ‘normal’ life I’d worked so hard for, which I’d somehow managed to secure for myself.
On many days I couldn’t eat, because it put too much pressure on my stomach. I grew skinnier and skinnier. Ollie was like a shadow; he’d follow me everywhere and sleep outside the bathroom as I lay on the tiled floor, trying to feel well. I’d limp out to the fields with them both and sit on this old bit of farm machinery while the dogs got their exercise, and it did me so much good to see them. Milly would sit with her back to me and keep guard while Ollie ran off, as though they were tag-teaming who was ‘on duty’ to look after me, and Milly did the shifts outside while Ollie shadowed me in the house.
I don’t know what I’d have done without them. What was strange about this time was that, now I’d ‘made it’, now I’d done it – up on my feet, my battles won, Mum in jail and me living in a lovely home with my lovely dogs – now was the time when I suddenly started thinking about what had happened to me. It was as if I hadn’t had time to really consider it before. There had always been another mountain to climb: walking again, my stomach operations, then the court case, the sentencing, getting out of Gloucester … But now that everything was settled – now I had my happy ever after – now was when the truth of what had happened hit me across the back of the head like one of my mum’s old baked-bean tins.
I started having nightmares about my mum coming to find me. All the time I would hear her voice in my head, telling me I was worthless. I began wetting the bed again, every night. Although I was desperately trying to fit into society, my mind refused to cooperate. It was as if my head was a washing machine, crammed full of the dirty linen of my memories, stuffed so full, in fact, that it couldn’t turn round anymore and just got jammed. The only thing that eased the pain was looking into my dogs’ clear, understanding eyes. But I couldn’t do that day in and day out, especially not when I was working.
I went to my doctor for help – I had a new one now, a really good GP called Jeremy – and he referred me to mental-health services. But again and again, I’d go through all the rigmarole you have to in order to get seen, and then there’d be no real help at the end of it. I knew my little brothers – whom I didn’t see anymore, sadly, though we were sporadically in touch by text message – had had counselling given to them when Mum was arrested, because they were minors, but in all this time I’d never had any meaningful professional support. Trying to deal with it on my own was overwhelming. It was as if what had happened was a splinter inside me. For many years now it had been festering, with no counselling to eke it from my skin, and finally that thorn beneath the surface was showing its ugly head, riddled with noxious infection.
Now I was back in Tewkesbury, my friends rallied round. The women at the Kingdom Hall were so concerned about my weight loss that they organised a rota to leave suppers on my doorstep. I started talking to Jo and Jackie about the depression I was feeling, and I told them more about what I had gone through as a child. And then, one night, I started talking to them about Uncle Phil and I just couldn’t stop.
I hadn’t ever really talked about it before and it opened up a whole new world of pain for me. I probably hated him even more than I hated Mum.
The world of Jehovah’s Witnesses is small. I’m certain Jo and Jackie wouldn’t have betrayed my trust, so perhaps it was his own guilty conscience that prompted it – but Phil started attending our weekly meetings. I think he was worried about what I’d said, or might say in the future, and he’d decided to keep his enemies close.
I hated seeing him, sitting across the aisle from me in the hall. That face … He’d had a stroke since I’d last seen him, but when I saw him sitting there I still felt fear. It wasn’t fear of what he could do; it was seeing that face and knowing what that face had done to me. I’d cry with the other Witnesses and say that I couldn’t come to the meetings anymore, it was too much, but they’d say to me in reply, ‘No, you should come, Victoria. You can leave it to God, He will sort it out; have faith in God.’
Yet it was getting harder and harder for me to have faith in God – not least because, that same spring, Mum had her appeal heard. She had two years knocked off her sentence; now she would serve only twelve years for two decades of torture. As I understand it, the basis of her appeal was that other parents, who had also been convicted of abuse but in cases where their children had died, had received lesser sentences. Her lawyer argued that she deserved to serve less time because we weren’t actually dead. So because she’d always managed to find that sweet spot in the drowning punishments, before we were too far gone to be brought back; because she’d always thrown us a scrap of mouldy bread before we starved to death; because she was too damn sadistic to let us die; it was like, oh, OK, that’s not so bad then. And her sentence was reduced.
I was finding it more and more difficult to cope with the pressure. Out one sunny afternoon in Tewkesbury, I walked past Alison’s Bookshop and saw my own face staring back at me through the window. My siblings had published books about their experiences with Mother, and on one of the covers was a picture of my sandpapered face, my cheeks bloody with scabs that had stretched painfully as I’d beamed at the camera, smiling out from my strange ‘normality’; the same smile I’d given the nurses in Frenchay Hospital, when I was trying to be a good girl, always trying to please. My eyes had been blacked out in the photo to conceal my identity, as I was still anonymous to the media, but of course I knew it was me. I burst into tears in the street. My siblings hadn’t come to me and said, ‘I’m doing a book, is that OK?’ No one had told me the books were coming out, or asked permission to use that picture. It just broke my heart.
Then Phil upped his game: he started sitting outside my house. He would come and find me when I was taking the dogs out for a walk; chillingly, I think he must have watched me and worked out my routine. He didn’t talk to me. It was intimidation, pure and simple: I know where you are. Don’t you dare say anything, Torrie … He’d just sit in his car and stare.
People started telling me stories about him. He was still an alcoholic, of course, and they would tell me how they had seen him go into Morrisons and buy a whole bottle of alcohol, down it in his car and then drive home. He would leer at the female staff until they were banned from serving him because he was harassing them so much.
Those stories triggered a lot of deep upset. His drink-driving disgusted me – I’d have nightmares that he was going to kill people,
just as my sisters had been killed – but it was his slimy, whisky-breathed, sheer sense of entitlement to slobber over any woman or girl he wanted that made me feel sick to my stomach. I’d go home and cry after I heard the stories, feeling such a failure – because I should have said something, I should have taken him to court. I felt I was letting others suffer simply because I was too cowardly to take him on. I was angry with myself and yet I also knew what a horrendous, exhausting journey it had been taking Mum to trial, and I just couldn’t go through it all again. The pain ate me up inside … until there was nothing left.
In 2008, I tried to kill myself.
Not once. Not twice. But too many times to mention.
I used pills. Well, I had enough going around, didn’t I? And not just the various ones I was taking for my stomach and my hips and my pain, but I would throw in some classic favourites like Paracetamol and Nurofen, too: the lemonade mixers to the more exotic ingredients in my extensive drugs cabinet. I was in and out of hospital that whole summer, crying to Jeremy, my GP, on the phone, trying to find a way through it.
The one bright light on the horizon was that the doctors had finally said they thought it was time to reverse my colostomy. The operation was scheduled for January 2009 – eight years after it should have been done, if Mother hadn’t stopped them. It was weird trying to imagine a world without Colin.
I had to face up to a different world before that, though. A world that I had never known.
A world without God.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
‘But I’m just not sure if He’s there,’ I remember saying to an elder at the Kingdom Hall in the autumn of 2008.
I wanted desperately to believe in what they were telling me: to believe in an all-powerful, all-forgiving God, who would make everything all right. I, more than anyone, needed a deity to wave His magic wand and restore my soul. I really, really wanted to believe.
‘You need to pray to Him to let Him tell you He’s here,’ I remember them saying. But that confused me, because the scriptures also said that if I prayed to God but I didn’t believe, then He wouldn’t answer me.
It was hard enough already attending the meetings and seeing Phil across the way, but to then be told that I had to ignore him and ‘trust in God’ … Well, God isn’t helping me at night when I wake up screaming from another nightmare, my legs sodden with my own urine, I thought angrily.
I began to feel anger towards the Witnesses, too – anger towards my friends. It felt as if my feelings were being belittled and undermined, simply because they believed that all this, all the horror I’d been through, was somehow part of God’s plan. I started to think, How can you put so much pressure on someone who’s been through so much? That man sitting over there touched me with his filthy, dry hands and he makes me feel sick and I’m just to ignore that?
Then I’d feel guilty, and as if I was doing it wrong. Autistic twit. I’d look along the line of worshippers at my friends – at Jo and Jackie and Ruth singing their hearts out in song, and Duncan and Mark reading from the Bible – and I could see they all felt it, felt God’s grace or something; but I felt nothing. Not only did I not believe, I didn’t feel anything. And I started to think that I was being disloyal to them, because I was going along pretending that I believed – pretending we were literally all singing from the same hymn sheet – when my heart wasn’t in it. Thoughts whirled around my head: Am I staying in the Truth because I believe it, 100 per cent, and this is how I want to live my future? Or am I doing it because it’s an easier option to stay, because all my friends are here?
In the end, I loved my friends so much I wanted to be honest with them.
I wish I could have said goodbye in person, but even then I knew myself well enough to know that I would never be able to withstand their loving attempts to persuade me to stay. So I wrote a letter. I sat down and I wrote a letter to them all one chilly autumn day, thanking them for everything they had done for me, saying I would defend them to my death, that just because I was leaving didn’t mean I wasn’t so very grateful for their help … but I was leaving. It was a very distressing letter to write – because, in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, if you renounce your religion, you are renouncing every single person in the faith, too. If you’re disassociated, you can’t have anything to do with each other anymore.
Every friend I had was a Witness. In my eyes, it is one of the most courageous things I’ve ever done, walking away from them. I knew, if I left, that I would have no friends, no help, no human support. But I thought, You’ve got to be true to yourself. For so long Mum had made me do things I didn’t want to; she had controlled me like a puppet or a limp rag doll; she had done whatever she wanted to me. But now I understood: I have choices. And I was choosing to leave.
It was heart-breaking going. I loved my friends so much – I still love them, in fact; there are some people there I will always love – but I had to do it for me. I didn’t believe anymore, and I’d spent too much of my life already living a lie. I wasn’t going to do it for one more day.
I sealed the envelope and I posted my long letter through the box at the Kingdom Hall. Then I went home and waited for the knock on the door. It came – of course it came. Elders I didn’t even know that well came round and offered to do Bible studies with me, to help me through my loss of faith. Friends came to persuade me to come back. Witnesses of all varieties knocked, and knocked, and knocked, until I stopped answering the door or even going out. The mental strength it took to resist them was exhausting. But I did it.
The dogs helped enormously. Ollie and Milly … and Alfie. A new addition to my new life. He was a rescue dog, like Ollie – like me, to a degree. Alfie was hard work to begin with: he didn’t like men and would bark if anyone came to the door, and he was wary of cuddles for a long time, until he learned how to trust. He was a gorgeous black Lab – I now had one of each colour – and he was a handsome boy, about five months old when he came to us. Ollie and Milly welcomed him in and didn’t bat an eyelid at their new brother. I might have had no family to speak of – my real gran had also stopped writing around this time, and I had no contact with any of my siblings – but they were my family. They were all I needed. More than any humans had ever done, they accepted me for who I was, and that love was more healing than all the drugs under the sun.
It was odd spending my first Christmas on this earth as a non-Jehovah’s Witness. I had a very, very sweet neighbour, Emma, who was quite poorly herself, but when she heard my story, she invited me round for a Christmas celebration, a few days before she went away for the holidays. I took great pleasure in wrapping a gift for her, curling the ribbon around it; so much so that she said, when I gave it to her, ‘How can I open that? It’s a work of art!’
She gave me presents, too: a lovely silver charm bracelet that nestled in a black velvet box, and a little Eeyore, the size of my thumb. It felt really naughty and strange to take them from her, as if accepting forbidden fruit. I was very grateful to her for those gifts.
I spent my first Christmas Day on my own, wandering the streets like the Little Match Girl, smelling other people’s Christmas dinners and watching kids out on their brand-new bikes, happy and buzzing. I felt lonely, but it wasn’t long before Emma returned, in the New Year, and she had an even more special surprise for me.
On Sunday, 4 January 2009, I celebrated my first-ever birthday at the age of twenty-three.
Emma invited me round for tea that evening. Her partner was out, so it was just the two of us. I was so excited, because I knew that birthdays were specific days to celebrate people: so this was Torrie’s day, and Torrie had never, ever had a day to celebrate her before. Emma made tuna steaks and chips, and she baked pink cupcakes and stuck a candle on one of them for me. That was the first time I’d ever had a cake with a candle on it and made a wish. So strung out on enthusiasm, I can’t even remember now what I wished for.
Four days later, I went into hospital for the closure of my colostomy. It was good
bye, Colin, and hello, brand-new me. It was a major operation. Because I had eight years’ worth of scar tissue in my abdomen, as well as other complications from the crash and various operations, they couldn’t do keyhole surgery on me, so I was opened all the way up. I remember coming round and it was really very painful, even with the strong doses of morphine I was on.
I had no one to visit me in hospital. Emma was pretty much housebound, and we weren’t close enough friends for me to be able to ask that of her anyway. Without the Witnesses in my life anymore, I had no one. At visiting hours, everyone else would have their loved ones come in, and I’d be sat on my own. That was hard. I felt so very, very alone.
I had the dogs to go home to, but I wasn’t really well enough to look after them, so my dog-sitter took them for me, so they were cared for. She left one behind, Alfie, so that I wasn’t too lonely, and she would come in every day to take him out. He’d always run straight back to the house as soon as she let him off the lead, because he wanted to be with me. I loved those dogs, and the feeling was mutual. They became even more important to me after the operation, because I had to stop work, and they literally became my world.
Time passed. I have a clear memory of looking in the mirror a short while after the operation, after my wounds had healed. I was standing in the spare bedroom, in just my bra and knickers, and it was the first time I’d ever seen my adult body without the stoma bag attached. I hadn’t ever noticed my body as a body in that way before and so I was almost caught by surprise. I was in the middle of getting dressed, but I stopped stock-still and I thought, I’m a young woman. How did that happen?
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 23