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

by Victoria Spry

  It was Belinda who persuaded me to have my teeth fixed again. I was so self-conscious about my smile; I used to try to stretch my top lip over my teeth to hide the gaps, but it meant I couldn’t smile properly. Belinda took me to the dentist so they could give me a brand-new, full-mouthed smile.

  It was a tough experience. Can you imagine? Being lowered back in the dentist’s chair, completely at his mercy, while he asked me to open my mouth wide and then poked around inside; my tongue sensitive to every prod and touch; my mind racing with recollections of my mother’s spiky sticks. Belinda held my hand throughout, as the tears flowed freely down my cheeks, but it was worth it. I walked out of that dental surgery with a great big smile, beaming from cheek to cheek in a way I never had before.

  And there was so much more to smile about, these days. Not least my beloved Berry, my beautiful girl. The two of us went for walks every day. She really was an exceptional dog. And she grew up in Belroyd: I saw her change from a mad little puppy into a responsible, protective adult dog. She looked after me; she kept me sane. Berry would hang back on our walks to pad alongside me as I struggled at a slow pace, hampered by the painful pins in my hips; her smiling face, looking up at me, seemed to say, ‘You’re not alone, I’m here.’ I would take my camera out on our walks so I could capture her joy at life and her delicious doggy face, and I took so many shots that I ended up setting up a Facebook page in her name, so I could put the images online. That led to me making new friends via the website, with lots of equally enthusiastic dog lovers.

  Faye told me my pictures were really good – so often and so fervently that, eventually, she persuaded me to enrol on a photography course at the local college. I liked being behind the camera, showcasing others’ beauty, yet creating something myself.

  For Berry’s third birthday, in the spring of 2013, I arranged for the two of us to have our picture taken by a professional photographer, as a record of how far we’d come. The photographer – as everyone always was – was struck by my gorgeous girl’s face, and he asked if he could enter Berry in a national dog-portrait competition, for the prettiest face. I said yes, but didn’t think any more of it – so you could have knocked me down when we found out she had won. There was even an article about it in the local paper, and I read it and thought, That’s my girl. I was so proud of her.

  While still at Belroyd, I got another dog. Although Berry had flourished with the one-to-one attention, I noticed she became lonely once I started college and was out during the day. Faye got permission for me to have another dog, and I knew that two was my limit. I will never have four dogs again: it was too many, and I can see that now.

  I went to the Forest of Dean to pick up Noah, a black Labrador rescue dog, from a puppy farm that had been raided by the RSPCA. He was sat in the corner of a dark shed when I first saw him, shaking like a leaf. The RSPCA man placed him in my arms and I said, ‘I’m having him, I’m taking him.’ I wanted to get a rescue dog because I knew how grateful I had been when other people had rescued Ollie and Milly and Alfie for me, and I wanted to give something back.

  Belinda gave me updates on my lost family, something I was grateful for. They all went to separate homes, where they were happy. Alfie went to a gardener; Ollie to an old lady who had an enormous garden; and Milly to a young couple, where they wrote that she had her own ‘personal trainer’, something that made me laugh so hard. That was so Milly – always a little madam, she would have loved that.

  I never thought about trying to get them back. They were settled now, and so was I. Nevertheless, I will always, always love them.

  Noah took time to adjust to his new home. I can remember rolling a ball towards him at Belroyd House, and he would back up into the corner of the room at the approaching toy, really frightened. He reminded me of myself, in a way – how I used to back up into my corner cubbyhole in Mum’s kitchen, hoping not to be hit. As with all scared creatures, patience and love were what saw him through. Berry and I slowly convinced him he was safe now, and he began to trust us.

  Berry loved him – she was like a bossy big sister, showing him the way – and what I loved was that Noah’s arrival heralded a different dynamic in her. She let go of some of the adult responsibility she’d assumed when we first moved into Belroyd, and she had some fun. The two of them would race across the fields and tag each other, and Noah’s name seemed to me even more apt. I’d named him Noah because, after the catastrophe of the great flood, Noah survives and everything is calm and back to normal. After the drama of the past few years, I wanted that serenity in my own life, too.

  As it happened, I became a big sister myself again at that time – when Adam and I were reunited. Ant and I ran into him on the street one day; one Saturday afternoon when we were out walking the dogs. Adam was then about twenty years old, with long, scruffy hair.

  It was strange for me, seeing him so grown up, but in many other ways he was still very young. He still had that loud, nervous laugh he’d always had. He didn’t have a job when we met; he’d gone to a mainstream school after we were rescued, but when you start your education at the age of thirteen, when you can’t tie your own shoelaces and you’ve been taught to think you’re better than all the other kids, well, ‘being on the back foot’ doesn’t really cover it.

  He put his arm around me when he saw me and gave me a soft little punch to the shoulder. ‘All right, kidder,’ he said, with genuine affection. He still had that good heart I’d always seen in him, and he and Ant really clicked, sharing a similar sense of humour.

  After that first meeting, he’d often call round to Belroyd House to see me. I’d take his shirt and wash it for him, and give him a meal from time to time. I was glad we were in touch again.

  We didn’t ever talk about Mum; it was too much. But we didn’t need to say anything: we both knew the truth. I looked him in the eye and I saw his pain and his sadness and his soul, and we both knew. Flying horses wouldn’t stop me from loving him.

  In July 2013, the time came for me to leave Belroyd. Faye helped me find a new place, but I organised the move all by myself. I thanked her for everything she had done for me, but she said, ‘No, thank you. We don’t have that many successes, Victoria. You and Berry made it a joy to come to work.’

  Belinda and Lauren helped me paint my new home. It had a garden for the dogs, and we painted the lounge a lovely duck-egg blue and my bedroom was princess pink. Belinda treated me to a pair of new curtains for my room – beautiful pale-pink curtains with big roses on them. It’s crazy when you think about it: my curtains are a gift from the woman who took my dogs away from me. Funny how life works out.

  Ant didn’t move in with me, not at first. I told him he had to get a job, so we were both pulling our weight: a team, the two of us against the world. One month later, he came back and he’d got himself sorted, got himself a good job, and I could see, from the off, that he was instantly a happier human being.

  The two happy human beings closed their front door, shutting themselves inside their snug new home. And I thought, Life begins right here. Right now.

  The letter landed on the wooden floorboards in our hallway with not a blast of fanfare or ceremony, just a silken whisper of paper on wood. I picked it up with the rest of the mail and took it through to the kitchen, telling Noah and Berry to calm down as they twisted with excitement and affection around my legs.

  Dear Ms Spry, we are writing to let you know that your mother, Eunice Spry, is scheduled for imminent release …

  It was February 2014. My mother had been due to serve twelve years in jail from 2007. They were letting her out five years early. She had served just seven years for what she did to me – and to Alloma and Christopher. Seven measly years for trying to destroy three children’s lives.

  The early release wasn’t because she had been rehabilitated. In fact, she never once confessed her guilt, or owned up to what she did. My liaison contact, Penny, told me Mum could, in fact, have been let out even earlier had she chosen to apolo
gise and admit she was wrong. She never had. So that wasn’t why she was being released ‘early’. The sad fact is, pretty much all prisoners are. The British Government’s own Sentencing Council website says, ‘For sentences of a year or more, an offender will serve half their sentence in prison and serve the rest of the sentence in the community on licence.’ It’s standard protocol. If a judge says fourteen years, it only ever means seven on the inside.

  Penny came round to my house to talk to me about it all on a wintry February day, following up on her letter. We both sat on my big grey sofa, one at either end, and Berry waited attentively by my side as we both watched Penny get her papers out of her bag, running her fingers through her short grey hair as she prepared to discuss my mother’s case.

  ‘As you know,’ she began, ‘Eunice will be released in July. At the minute, the plans are to move her to Worcestershire.’

  My jaw nearly hit the floor: Worcestershire was only a short distance away. Not only had everyone told me that she would be jailed for twelve years, they’d also said, when she did get out, I’d never have to see her again; that never, in a million years, would they allow Mother to be close by me again. Now, she was going to be moved just down the road!

  I gave Berry a stroke along her soft brown back, and I took strength from her. ‘What do you mean, Worcester?’ I asked Penny, looking her straight in the eye.

  ‘She’s done her time, Victoria,’ she told me firmly. She was sympathetic but it was clear she felt there was nothing more she could do. ‘Now, we need to keep this very quiet about her release, because she could be in danger of being harmed. Whatever you do, don’t talk to your brother about this.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because if he goes to the media, there could be a problem.’

  Christopher had done TV and press interviews after the trial, as well as writing his autobiography. I guess his confidence in talking to the media had been noted by the powers-that-be.

  ‘What kind of problem?’ I asked, stroking Berry over and over.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if the people in her new area get wind of what she’s done, they will put pressure on the council not to home her there, and that will make things very difficult indeed.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said. ‘Do the people who are rehoming her know that I was nearly dead two years ago? Do they know that I nearly died? And that I’m only down the road from Worcestershire and that, you know, I might not be able to cope with her being there?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that matters,’ she said smoothly. ‘The release meetings are only about Eunice: her safety and her rehabilitation; making sure she won’t reoffend and harm the public.’

  She might not harm the public, I thought, but what about her victims? But Penny didn’t have anything else to say; she packed up her papers and left.

  For days on end, I thought, Is that what I do then? Just keep quiet, tell no one, be a good little girl? It was messing with my head. Am I letting Mum win by being bothered by her at all? Or am I not protecting my own back by doing what I’m told?

  I tried to speak to people about it – I wanted to talk to the people who had the responsibility of rehoming her, to look them in the eye and make them understand. I’d seen my mother manipulate people for twenty years, and I knew how easily she could convince them that what she wanted was what they wanted. I wanted to warn them to be on their guard.

  But no one would give me any names. No one would let me attend any meetings. Everyone told me only one thing: I had to move on.

  ‘This is all about Eunice now. She’s out of prison, she’s done her time,’ they would say.

  ‘But you’re letting her out when she’s not sorry!’

  It was that, more than anything, that made me worry. If she admitted she was guilty, I wouldn’t have given her headspace, but if she wasn’t sorry then she still thought she was right – and, therefore, that I was wrong. And I knew what Mum did to people when she thought they were in the wrong. I had to take my concerns seriously. How could I move on when she hadn’t? But no one would listen.

  ‘She’s banned from Gloucestershire,’ the authorities told me. ‘You should count yourself lucky, to have that. We don’t normally do that even for murderers. It will be a condition of her release: she won’t be able to step foot in Gloucestershire.’

  ‘And you think she’s going to listen to you? You think she’s not going to cross the border? She’s never listened to anyone but herself.’

  Someone actually told me I should go to karate lessons, to get some strength and martial arts awareness. One of the police officers – someone who had actually worked on my case – told me, ‘When I got married, my husband told me I needed to stop going on about my ex not paying maintenance. I think you need to stop going on about Eunice.’

  I couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re comparing Mum to your old boyfriend?’

  ‘Move on, move on’, that was their mantra. And all the while I was thinking, I have moved on, that’s exactly what I have done. But this could jeopardise everything.

  I managed to get a multi-agency meeting convened, attended by some of the official departments who had helped me when I was drinking. But the meeting was about me, about how they could support me and help me cope, rather than about my mother. Here was an idea: how about they moved her away from me so I didn’t have to ‘cope’? Why can’t I just live my life, instead of simply having to survive? I wondered. I was tired of fighting all the time.

  At the meeting I said: ‘I don’t want to see her, I’m frightened about seeing her. I’m fighting never to see those eyes again. I don’t want to see her face ever again.’

  ‘You’ve got to move on, she’s done her time now,’ I was told.

  ‘But when is my time done?’ I asked. ‘When will it stop for me? I’m not asking for much, I’m not asking for a million pounds and a mansion. I’m asking you, please, to say she can’t come to Worcestershire, for her to be rehomed in a place where I won’t bump into her. She wants to come here for a specific reason. Please put her at the other end of the country.’

  ‘Victoria, you do realise you can’t have everything you want,’ they’d say.

  ‘I know that,’ I’d reply, with bitter comprehension. ‘I didn’t have everything I needed for nineteen years.’

  That meeting couldn’t help with the central issue, of course. Even though there were official departments in attendance, I knew all too well that one hand of the government body didn’t talk to the other. ‘It’s not our area,’ they would say. It was just like when I was a kid, and the dentists who saw me with my teeth smashed out didn’t talk to the doctors who examined my sandpapered skin, and they in turn didn’t talk to the teachers who saw my mum humiliate me, or the education inspectors who came round to observe our non-existent home schooling – and no one spoke to the social workers who had registered grave concerns about my adoption. No one was communicating; nothing had changed.

  My nightmares started again, as did the bed-wetting. I heard from liaison officers – people who later told me that they shouldn’t have said anything; that I wasn’t supposed to know – that Mum had started paying people to do jobs for her on the outside. A scrap of information here, a titbit of knowledge there … I heard she was intrigued by the fact that I hadn’t told my story, when my siblings had. Knowing Mum, she thought there was some wiggle room there, potential for manipulation. She was unrepentant, she was unashamed; she hadn’t participated in any rehabilitation. Prison hadn’t broken her. She was still my same old mother, playing her sick games once again. And I was so, so worried.

  In a way, I have my drinking to thank for what happened next. Because, in the end, I thought to myself, I have fought so very, very hard to get back on my feet. You have to fight for this, Torrie: you have to fight for this life you have made for yourself. You cannot back down this time. You didn’t go through all that just for her to mess up your life again. You need to finish this, once and for all.

 
I decided I would start a petition, arguing for my mother not to be rehomed near me, seeking for her county ban to be extended so she could come nowhere near me. It was a very challenging thing to do, because it turned out you practically needed a law degree to be able to word the petition in the correct way that was needed. My body might have been covered in countless scars from my mother’s beatings, but those qualifications wouldn’t help me here.

  I was so grateful when I found help from a man online, Chris Wittwer, who dedicates his time to helping victims of abuse, and he did it all for me. I even cried when he sent it through. I had to write a statement to go with it, and I wrote how everyone had said, at the time of the trial, that it was the worst case they’d ever come across. If this was true, I argued, then how, in the next breath, could they all be telling me to just move on?

  Alloma and Christopher added their names to the petition in support, so we could stand united, but it wasn’t something they felt impassioned to campaign about in a major way. With her usual feisty flair, Alloma would say to me: ‘Why are you letting her destroy your life? I’m not scared of the old witch.’

  With the petition wording sorted, I pondered how I could make a real impact with it. A blank petition floating out in cyberspace wasn’t going to get my mother rehomed elsewhere, I needed to get people behind it, to ask them to lend their voices to my campaign. I remembered what Penny had told me on my sofa: ‘If Christopher goes to the media, there could be a problem.’

  Her words gave me an idea.

  It took me a couple of months to reach a decision. I fretted: was I doing the right thing? Would it upset people? Would I be penalised for this? I was genuinely frightened. Then I thought, Right, you’re just going to have to close your eyes, pinch your nose and take a leap of faith – and hope it works out.

  When Lauren had packed up my house for me, back before I’d moved into Belroyd, one thing she’d kept for me were the files and files of letters that the journalists had sent me, straight after the trial. I looked at them, in that May of 2014, and I thought: Can I play them at their own game? I’d been so proud not to give my name away to the media when I’d been under so much pressure to do it, immediately after the trial. But now, I wanted to.