Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (16 page)

T
hat summer, when Janie was not quite a year old, I made a huge mistake by letting her off the leash while we were out for a walk. I didn’t realize that she could be on heat so young. The encounter with one of the farm dogs only took seconds but soon after she was walking round with a huge, swollen belly. I felt very guilty because Dad told me that she was really too young to be carrying babies.

About fourteen weeks later, I woke early when I heard a high-pitched yelping sound coming from downstairs. I rushed down to the kitchen in my dressing gown and found Janie lying on her side on the floor, giving birth. One tiny pup, all covered in blood and mucus, had already slithered out and Janie was licking it clean. It wriggled, eyes closed, like a skinned rabbit, only a few inches long. I could tell Janie was exhausted but as I watched a contraction seized her body and another pup slid out squirming.

I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t dare wake Mum to ask, so I shut the kitchen door and got some warm water to help wash the pups as they arrived. Janie looked up at me and I was sure she was grateful. It felt as though
we understood and trusted each other at that moment – a genuine communion between human and animal. I brought her water bowl over but she was too tired to lift her head to drink. The first pups managed to latch on to her nipples, and then there was another contraction as the third pup arrived. All in all, six came out, the last one much smaller than the rest. I looked at the clock. It was still only seven in the morning, an hour before I had to leave for school.

Auntie Pat was staying again and while she was there I usually got myself up and made my own breakfast because she and Mum liked to sleep off their hangovers. I worried about leaving the pups on their own, though. Could I pretend to be sick and stay off school? That would never work. Mum made me go to school with raging temperatures and hacking coughs. She wouldn’t dream of letting me have a day off.

I cleaned up all the mess on the floor around Janie and tidied her bed to make it as comfortable as I could. The pups were wriggling around her belly, trying to find a nipple, yapping in high squeaky tones and clambering over each other – feet in ears, heads in bottoms, mouths chewing legs. Janie lay in a state of blissful exhaustion, occasionally lifting her head to lick one or to drag it back towards her if it was wandering too near the edge of the bed.

I was dressed and ready for school when Mum appeared in the kitchen, red-eyed and slow. ‘Look, Janie’s had her pups. Aren’t they cute?’

She didn’t even look at them. ‘You’d better hurry up. Don’t be late for school.’

‘Mum, please will you look after them for me? Don’t let anything happen to them?’ I had visions of Auntie Pat
staggering and falling on top of them, or even being deliberately cruel. She was without scruples as far as I could see.

‘Go to school,’ she snapped, filling the kettle. ‘And come straight home afterwards. No dawdling around.’

She didn’t need to ask this. As soon as the bell rang at four o’clock, I grabbed my schoolbag and ran full pelt down the lanes, only stopping when the stitch in my side stabbed too powerfully or my lungs just couldn’t take in any more oxygen. I was home in record time and ran straight into the kitchen, where Janie was more alert now, tending her pups like the proudest mother in the world. I picked one up and stroked its belly and it yelped with excitement and tried to gnaw my hand. Janie seemed to trust me because she looked on unalarmed as I played with her babies. Mum and Auntie Pat were in the sitting room so I took a huge risk and stole a slice of cold meat from the fridge and fed it to Janie. She needed to get her strength back. Janie gulped it back, just as the sitting room door opened.

‘Time to deal with our little problem,’ Mum announced, and I looked up, wondering what she meant. ‘Can you fetch the big blue bucket from the pigsty and fill it with water?’

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘Never you mind. Just do it. Bring it to the back door.’

My mind was turning over the possibilities as I filled the bucket. Did she want me to scrub the back step? Wash the windows? What did she mean about our ‘little problem’?

I heaved the full bucket to the back door and Mum appeared carrying a dark green shopping bag. Yapping sounds were coming from the top of it.

‘Is that the puppies?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘What are you doing with them?’

‘I’m going to teach you an important lesson today,’ Mum said calmly. ‘It was your fault that Janie got pregnant because you let her off the leash when you shouldn’t have done. Now you have to deal with the consequences. What did you think we were going to do? We’ve got a dog already. We can’t take on another six.’

‘I’ll find good homes for them.’ I hadn’t yet worked out what she intended but I was panicking. ‘I’ll ask around at school. I’ll put a notice on the board. I could put an ad in the local paper.’

‘I’m afraid not. It would take too long and I’d have to put up with them pissing and crapping all over my house in the meantime. It’s not going to happen. It’s your responsibility to put them out of their misery by drowning them.’

‘No!’ I wailed. ‘Mum, no, please. Don’t make me. You can’t do this.’ I became hysterical and Mum slapped me hard across the face then lifted the first puppy from the shopping bag and held it out to me. I took it from her because I could tell she was hurting it the way she was squeezing it round the middle, making it yelp. I cupped it in my hands and stroked its soft head with a finger, blinded by tears.

Mum put the shopping bag on the ground, grabbed my arm so tightly that her fingernails were digging into my flesh, and then forced my hand, holding the puppy, down into the freezing water in the blue bucket. My fingers relaxed and the puppy struggled clear, yelping with fright as it tried desperately to swim to safety. Mum grabbed my wrists this time and forced both of my hands down on the puppy’s head so that it was trapped underwater.

I was screaming, ‘No! Stop! Let go! Mum, please don’t,’ but to no avail. The little legs kicked frantically as the pup fought as hard as it could for life. Then it stopped kicking and went limp and I knew that it was dead.

Mum released her grip on my hands, lifted the body out of the water and threw it on the grass. She reached into the shopping bag and handed me the next puppy. I kissed its little face and it licked me on the lips, before Mum grabbed my wrists and forced me to hold it underwater until it stopped struggling. I was sobbing so hard my chest ached and I could hardly see for tears. I began to pray, in my head, for the souls of these little pups, who were only twelve hours old. I couldn’t fight Mum – she was much stronger than me – but I made sure that I kissed each pup gently before Mum grabbed my wrists and forced me to murder it.

When the last one lay lifeless on the pile on the grass, Mum grabbed the back of my hair. ‘I think you should see what it feels like,’ she said; then she forced my head down into the bucket and held it underwater. I didn’t struggle at first. I felt complete hopelessness. I was ready to die at that moment – in fact, I wanted to. After a minute or so, a biological survival instinct set in and I fought to lift my head, but she held me down with incredible strength. Time telescoped. I’ve got no idea how long I was underwater but it felt interminable. Suddenly she let go and I lifted my head to take a great gasp of air, and realized with despair that I was still alive.

‘Now bury them,’ Mum ordered. ‘I don’t want to see them again. I hope you’ve learned your lesson from this and won’t let Janie off the lead any more. If she gets pregnant again, it will be her we drown next time.’

I prayed to God the whole time as I dug a communal grave for the puppies down at the wilder end of the garden, near the hollyhocks. ‘Please bless their souls and welcome them to Heaven,’ I prayed. ‘Please let Nan Casey look after them.’ I worried that they hadn’t been christened, but surely that wouldn’t matter for dogs? I laid them side by side, all cuddled up to each other, then I picked some wildflowers and scattered them on top. I felt as though I would die of grief when it was time to start pouring spadefuls of soil back on top of them. Even though I was sure they were no longer breathing, I worried that they might wake up in the dark, cold earth, and be unable to get out.

Just when I was at my lowest point, my guardian angel appeared over the hollyhocks and spoke to me kindly. ‘Don’t worry, Vanessa, they didn’t suffer. The Lord has welcomed them to His kingdom and their souls are saved.’

‘I killed them,’ I told her. ‘I’m a murderess.’

‘You were not to blame,’ she said, and reached out a hand towards me as she shimmered faintly in the dusk.

I made a cross by tying two sticks together with a long blade of grass and I sprinkled more daisies and buttercups on top of the little mound, then I sat keeping vigil, unwilling to leave them on their own.

‘Supper’s ready!’ Mum called from the kitchen door. ‘It’s getting cold.’

With leaden limbs, I walked back into the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was that Janie wasn’t in her basket.

‘Where’s she gone? Where’s Janie?’ I cried, panicking that she had been drowned as well.

Mum looked amused. ‘Keep your hair on. She’s around somewhere.’

I found Janie out in the hall searching frantically for her babies. She sniffed in every corner, pushed her nose under each piece of furniture, walked round every single room then started back at the beginning again. For days she kept looking, long into the night. Several times I picked her up and looked her in the eyes and tried to explain and apologize, but as soon as I put her down she would start looking again. I felt horrible, sickening, overwhelming guilt. I was a murderess. I had killed six of God’s creatures.

The following Saturday, I told Dad about it but he didn’t seem to understand my grief.

‘It was the most practical solution, Lady Jane. Maybe Mum shouldn’t have made you watch, but if you consider yourself an animal lover, you have to do cruel things sometimes in order to be kind in the long run.’

‘She made me do it, Dad. I had to drown them myself.’

He frowned. ‘Well, I expect she thought it was for the best.’

In my heart I closed a door and moved just a little bit further away from him. Although I adored my father, I knew that he had let me down badly over the years. He had been given so many chances to open his eyes and see the truth but somehow, he couldn’t do it. Even when I’d been badly injured by my mother, he had allowed it to continue by pretending to himself that it was nothing to do with him and that my mother could not be as bad as she seemed. When I’d truly needed help, he’d given it to me, but only up to a point. He wasn’t prepared to stand up
to her. In an awful way, he had to choose between the two of us – and he chose her.

But this was one of the times when I saw that my father was in the wrong. He wasn’t just fooling himself. I knew that what I had been forced to do to those puppies hadn’t been right. If only Dad was around a little more often he would see what life was like for me, living in an isolated cottage with a woman who hated me so bitterly that it seemed she would stop at nothing to make me suffer. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that one day I would find my real mother and she would love me and look after me and she wouldn’t let anyone treat me cruelly ever again.

M
ost of the spirits I encountered around Shernal Green were friendly, but one night I came across one who wasn’t. It was foggy outside and I crept downstairs in the middle of the night to get a drink of water. There was a peculiar, bluish light coming through the windows into the hall, caused by the effects of moonlight on the fog. I shivered a little, sensing something in the dark by the banisters, and next thing I knew I was being shaken violently.

I screamed as hard as I could and kept screaming. The shaking only continued for maybe twenty seconds but it felt a lot longer, then I crumpled like a rag doll on the floor. I knew I had encountered a malign spirit. The Clown whispered to me that it had been trying to get inside me but couldn’t. I lay shaking on the hall floor. Up above I heard Mum’s footsteps. She came charging down the stairs, clip-clopping in her high-heeled slippers.

‘What on earth happened? Did you fall?’

I took a deep breath and tried to get up. ‘It was an evil spirit,’ I told her. ‘It attacked me.’

I suppose I wasn’t expecting sympathy but what happened next still came as a shock. Mum lifted her hand
and slapped me full force around the head. As I stood, stunned, she slapped me again.

‘Your bloody spirits! I’ve had it up to here with your weird mumblings and eccentric behaviour.’ She slapped me again. ‘I will not put up with this any longer.’ Another slap. ‘Do you hear me?’ She hit me so hard this time that I lost my balance and fell, cracking my head on the banister. I lay there dazed, barely conscious. ‘I’m going to have a word with your father. I think you are genuinely mad and we should get you committed to a mental hospital where you can be with your own kind of people. I don’t want you in my house any more.’

She clattered back up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door self-righteously. I lay there for a long time, feeling very giddy, then I made my way through to the kitchen where I placed a cool, damp cloth over my head where it had hit the banister. I could feel the familiar throbbing headache starting so I did something very daring. I knew Mum kept a pack of aspirins in her handbag so I crept into the sitting room, opened her bag and stole one, aware that I would be in big trouble if she found out. When I’d swallowed it and drunk some water, I crawled back upstairs to bed.

Mum must have spoken to Dad the very next day because he came to pick me up from school. I liked being in the car with him. I felt safe and comfortable there, but I wasn’t entirely happy about what he had to say.

‘Your mum thinks you have a mental illness and that’s what is making you see all these spirits. I think it’s not so serious, that you’re lonely and these are your imaginary friends.’ He glanced across to see how I would respond to this but I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about how
Mum had got Nigel put away in a special school when his behaviour got too much for her, and I was sure that’s what she was planning to do with me now.

‘At any rate, we’ve decided you should talk to a doctor who specializes in the mind. A psychiatrist, that is. You can explain to him what’s going on in your head and maybe he’ll be able to help you get better.’

I rubbed my nose, which was suddenly itchy. ‘I don’t want to get better, Dad. I love talking to spirits.’

‘You’re nearly twelve. Soon you’ll be a teenager. You need to make friends and go out and start communicating with people your own age again. This has gone on for too long.’

‘It’s only three years since Nan Casey passed over,’ I whispered.

Dad sighed. ‘But you weren’t very sociable before that. I think these spirits of yours prevent you making friends in the real world.’

‘I don’t want to make friends. I want to be a nun and take a vow of silence so I can live in a convent forever and no one will bother me.’ The Sunday school teacher had found me a couple of other books about nuns and the more I read, the more I was attracted to the idea. To have an excuse for a solitary life seemed perfect to me. I also liked the thought of wearing a veil so that no one could grab my hair and yank it at the roots. The suggestion seemed to make Dad very angry though.

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. You’re not going to be a nun. The sooner we get you to a psychiatrist, the better.’

I turned to look out of the car window. I didn’t like the sound of this at all. Still, I supposed that if I were sent to a
mental institution, at least it would get me away from home. That had to be a bonus.

On the day of my appointment with the psychiatrist, Mum and Dad drove me to Powick hospital, a big, old, redbrick building on the other side of Worcester, where they specialized in mental illness. I felt very apprehensive in the car on the way there because I knew they were trying to take away my communication with the spirit world. I also knew I wasn’t going to lie about it. The Clown had explained to me that I should never deny my gift, no matter how hard it was to tell the truth.

We were directed to a waiting room with curved wooden chairs on metal legs. There was a pungent, institutional smell. I looked round shyly at the other occupants, wondering what they were doing there. There was a dark-haired woman who was hugging herself and staring at the ground, and her aura was one of deep sadness. An elderly man kept pacing up and down, turning with military precision when he reached one side of the room and retracing his steps back to the other. Mum and Dad were called in to talk to my psychiatrist first and while they were away, the pacing man hissed at me, ‘The bombs are coming!’

I sat, picking at the skin beside my fingernails and trying not to meet anyone’s eye. I heard the tinkle of a bell and some child spirits came to visit me. ‘Refuse to talk to him,’ one suggested. ‘Stick your fingers in your ears so you can’t hear what he says.’ Another disagreed. ‘He won’t do you any harm. You might as well cooperate or you’ll get into trouble.’

At last Mum and Dad emerged. ‘Your turn now, Lady Jane,’ Dad said and he led me to the door of a consulting room and gestured for me to enter. ‘This is Dr Armstrong. Just answer all his questions and we’ll see you outside in half an hour.’

I saw an old man with neatly combed grey hair and thick glasses sitting behind a big wooden desk with a blotter on top. He nodded that I should sit down in the chair opposite him. Over his shoulder there was a shadowy figure of a very old woman floating a few inches off the floor, but he didn’t seem to be aware of her.

‘Hello, Vanessa. How are you feeling today?’ he asked. His voice was stern and I didn’t like the way he peered down his nose at me.

‘Fine,’ I mumbled.

‘Can you tell me what age you are?’

‘Eleven and three-quarters.’

He wrote something down on the pad in front of him. ‘Do you know why your parents have brought you here today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you tell me why you think that is?’

‘They don’t like it when I talk to spirits.’

He nodded. ‘Tell me about those spirits. Who are they, and how do you talk to them?’

‘Just in my head. All kinds of spirits.’ At that point, the woman behind him introduced herself and told me she was his mother. She said to ask him about her engagement ring.

‘Can you give me an example?’ he was asking, so I told him what I’d just heard, that his mother was standing behind him and wanted to know about her ring. He looked
startled and turned quickly but of course he couldn’t see anything there.

‘How clearly do you see people?’ he asked.

‘Sometimes I just see their heads and sometimes it’s the whole body. Some are quite fuzzy and others are very clear but they’re always hovering just off the floor.’

‘What does my mother look like?’ he asked, so I described the way her hair was rolled into a bun and she had a mole on her left cheek and she stooped slightly. He frowned and made more notes on his pad.

His mother had faded away now so I examined the room instead. It was dark and gloomy with big heavy drapes at the windows and books piled everywhere. You could see imprints on the shag-pile carpet where people had walked. There was a leather chair with studs in it like drawing pins and I concentrated on counting them.

Suddenly Dr Armstrong hit the desk with a ruler and I jumped. ‘You’re not paying attention, Vanessa. I asked if you want to get well again and stop seeing these spirits.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to stop. I like spirits better than I like people.’

‘How are you ever going to fit in the world when you are doing this very strange thing? Don’t you want to have a normal happy life with a husband and children?’

‘No. I want to be a nun.’

‘Are you Catholic?’ he asked, looking at his notes in surprise.

‘No.’

‘Nuns have to be Catholic,’ he told me and I reddened, because I hadn’t even known that. He began telling me about the monastic lifestyle, painting a grim picture of early mornings getting up in the dark and washing in
freezing cold water, the same food day in day out, and constant praying wearing out your knees.

‘Do you still want to be a nun?’ Dr Armstrong finished.

‘Yes I do,’ I said stubbornly. What else was there to be, after all? I would just become a Catholic, if that was what I had to do.

‘I wonder if you are just feeling upset about your grandmother dying and that is making you shy away from the world.’

I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk to him about Nan – it was none of his business how badly I was missing her – so I consciously blocked his words. I tuned into the spirit world instead and listened to the cacophony of voices of spirits who had a connection with this hospital.

As the session progressed, I could see his aura reddening and could sense that he was losing patience with me. At the same time, I became more and more uncooperative, giving the briefest answers I thought I could get away with. Finally, he called Mum and Dad back into the room and told them that he would need to see me again, that he couldn’t rule out psychiatric illness at this stage but that he suspected I was just stubborn and wanted to be a martyr.

‘That’s what I’ve said all along,’ Mum claimed. I didn’t point out that she was the one who had said I was mentally ill.

In the car on the way home, both Mum and Dad nagged at me, saying I had to give up these imaginary conversations. If I heard voices in future, I was to ignore them. It was time for me to grow up, they said. In return, I said as little as possible.

I saw that psychiatrist on and off over the next two years but I didn’t give him any more information than he’d had at the first appointment and I could sense he found our sessions boring. Finally he discharged me, giving Mum and Dad the advice that they should just let me be a martyr if I wanted to be.

‘Why not let her try monastic life?’ he suggested. ‘She’ll soon grow tired of it.’

‘Over my dead body,’ Dad growled, but I didn’t listen.

My plans to become a nun were the only thing that kept me sane during that dark period and I spent many hours daydreaming about the simplicity of the life I would lead, protected behind the monastery walls, surrounded by kind, older women who grew vegetables and fed wild animals. I wanted to be one of them more than anything. I just had to find a way.