Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (2 page)

I
was a very timid child, shy around strangers and prone to creeping into my favourite little hidey-holes behind the settee or round the corner of Dad’s shed in the garden. I’d take Scruffy, a yellow-furred teddy bear, or Rosie, my rag doll, with me and could sit still for hours on end hugging them, out of sight of any adults.

I’m told I was very slow to talk. At two I’d hardly uttered a word and even at three I couldn’t manage more than a few incoherent phrases, so that Mum and Dad were beginning to worry that I was retarded in some way. Toilet training was also very traumatic for me. The slightest upset or fear could cause me to have an accident, which always enraged Mum. I was supposed to ask her permission when I wanted to go to the bathroom but she didn’t always grant it straight away, saying she was trying to train me to have more control. Several times when I asked to go, she made me squat down in the kitchen, bladder bursting and cheeks getting hotter, tiny fists clenched with the effort of trying to hold it in – and then there’d be the warm release of urine soaking my pants, that ammonia smell and a little puddle on the linoleum floor. Afterwards
there was always the anger and the shouting, and my own sense of bewilderment at how I made her so cross.

The love of my life was Nigel, my big brother, much braver than me and always the ringleader in our games. He was a sweet-natured, affectionate child who had a bit of a temper when pushed. He never took it out on me, but injustice of any kind could make him see red. He wasn’t scared of things I was scared of, like dogs and noisy motorbikes and tradesmen who came to the door. I’d cower behind Mum’s skirt in the face of strangers, trying to avoid being noticed, while Nigel would stand his ground and ask questions like ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’ The roots of extreme shyness lie in a feeling that you are not quite good enough and you’re scared that other people will find out; I had that in spades as a toddler.

Nigel and I were solitary children, dependent on each other for company. I remember there were twins about our age living just up the road, but we were never allowed to play with them. We liked make-believe games, such as pretending that we were a king and queen going round the garden ruling over our subjects – in my case Scruffy and Rosie, and in Nigel’s his collection of wooden soldiers. Indoors, we would build little villages with houses and cars out of Bayko – a system of blocks and connecting rods somewhat like Meccano.

We rarely argued or fell out about anything. I remember one time I pushed him off his tricycle because he wasn’t sharing it with me, but that was exceptional. We agreed that we were going to get married when we were grown up, and then we would live together in a house of our own and be happy forever and ever.

Nigel and I rarely saw Dad during the week. I suppose he got home late from work when we were already in bed – and some nights, I know he didn’t get home at all. At weekends he’d be off playing cricket or golf at least part of the time. When he was there, though, I was Daddy’s little girl. He called me Lady Jane (Nigel was Little Boy Blue) and he carried me round the garden on his shoulders. We weren’t allowed out the front of the house – Mum didn’t like it – but while he was gardening out the back we’d follow him up and down as he mowed the lawn and persuade him to play chase or hide and seek with us.

He was a master of silly voices and we had to guess who each one was supposed to be. It might be Mickey Mouse or Little Weed from
Bill and Ben
, or any one of a number of cartoon characters. He was good at doing the animal noises in his rendition of ‘Old Macdonald’, and he was also very talented at whistling; the favourite tune I remember was ‘Blue Danube’.

We lived at number 39 Bentley Road, a large, stone-built, semi-detached house with bay windows and a big garden in a leafy, middle-class suburb of Birmingham. While my father looked after the outside, indoors was Mum’s domain, and it was kept spotless at all times. She would catch the dust as it fell, carefully lifting all her ornaments of pretty ladies in fancy hats from shelves and tables to make sure the surfaces were spick and span underneath. At the front of the house there was the immaculate dining room, whose bay windows overlooked the street. Nigel and I were only allowed in there on very rare occasions, but I remember a fold-up table in the bay with a chair by either side and a big picture of Jesus
surrounded by a glowing halo on the wall. I would come to fear this room and what went on in there when Mum locked herself in it.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms and the bathroom. My bedroom was in some respects a little girl’s dream, with curtains and a bedspread made from a beautiful fabric printed with tiny pink and red rosebuds, some open and some closed, surrounded by sweeps of green stalks and leaves. The detail was extraordinary; I can remember the pattern of whorls and curlicues to this day. There were pink flannelette sheets and a bedside table with a pink lamp, and the glass in the bay window was made up of little twinkling squares. Woe betide me if I ever got a fingerprint on that glass; I learned from a very early age that it was a huge mistake to touch it as I peered out to see what was going on in the road below.

An outside observer looking at the room might have mistaken it for a seldom-used guest bedroom rather than a little girl’s room because there were no dolls, toys, pictures, books or teddies in sight. I was never allowed to bring Scruffy or Rosie up to bed with me. Bedrooms were for sleeping not playing, according to Mum, and upstairs was out of bounds during the day, except for permitted trips to the bathroom.

At the rear of the ground floor was a family room with large patio windows looking out on to the garden and a marble-effect tiled open fireplace. There was regency-striped wallpaper, a patterned carpet and a brown leather Chesterfield settee and matching chairs – all considered very chic in the early 1950s. You would never see any toys in evidence in that room – or anywhere else in the house for that matter. Nigel and I had very few toys and they had
to be kept tidily out of sight in the family-room toy box if we wanted to avoid them being confiscated.

In my pre-school years I idolized my beautiful, glamorous mother. I thought that she was the most gorgeous woman in the world, with her perfect hair, red lips, rouged cheeks, long varnished nails and stylish outfits, always surrounded by a cloud of lily-of-the-valley scent. I liked watching her straightening the seams of her stockings, or reapplying the lipstick that she wore constantly, even in the house when there was no one else there except us kids.

‘Mummy pretty’ was one of my first phrases, but I was always aware that it wasn’t true of me.

‘You’re a very ugly child,’ Mum would tell me, pinching my cheeks. ‘No amount of makeup would camouflage that ugly mug. There’s not a lot we can do about it.’

I became obsessed with wanting to be pretty because I thought this would make Mummy love me and stop her being cross with me all the time. I’d gaze in the mirror, willing a different face to look back at me, but it never did.

One day when I was three I found Mum’s pot of rouge lying out in the bathroom. I managed to prise off the lid and put a couple of spots of it on my cheeks. I looked in the mirror and liked the effect, so I ran downstairs in great excitement to show her.

‘Look, Mummy, I’m pretty!’

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted, pulling me to her and rubbing hard at my cheeks with a dishtowel. ‘How dare you touch my makeup!’

I stood, horrified. I had honestly thought Mummy would laugh and would be pleased with me. How could it have gone so badly wrong?

‘You’re going to have to learn not to meddle with things that aren’t yours.’

I shrieked as she grabbed my hair and pulled me down the hall to the cupboard under the stairs, where the vacuum cleaner and other cleaning materials were kept. It had a sloping ceiling and shelves on one wall that served as a kind of pantry with lots of jars and tins and bottles. There was a bolt on the outside of the door and no light inside.

‘There’s a spider’s web in the corner.’ Mum pointed out. ‘I’m going to lock you in here for a while to keep you out of mischief, but you’d better stay very, very quiet and very still or the spiders are going to get you.’

I was shoved inside and the door slammed and bolted. I could just make out a thin outline of the light round the door through the musty darkness. I gulped back my sobs, trembling with fear, and felt that familiar trickle between my legs as I wet myself. I didn’t dare sit down or reach out my hands to touch the wall or make any movement or noise. I could barely breathe. I genuinely thought the spiders were going to eat me. How could I know otherwise?

Soon I became hysterical, banging and kicking the door as hard as I could and screaming at the top of my voice. I heard Mum’s footsteps come clicking down the hall. She opened the door and I reached up my arms to be lifted, hoping for a comforting hug, but instead she hit me across the head with a sharp admonition to ‘shut up!’ Then she slammed and bolted the door again. I was shocked into
silence. My legs trembled and an occasional sob escaped me but otherwise I stood quietly, alert for the feel of a spider’s creepy feet on my skin or a nibble from their fangs. More than the physical fear, though, I felt the terror of being abandoned by the person who was supposed to take care of me. I was only three and I was bereft of adult protection.

At last, after an interminable period, Mum opened the door and yanked me out again. ‘How many spiders did you count? Did they bite your toes?’ There was a malicious glint of pleasure in her eyes as I shivered with fear, longing in vain for a kind word.

This is the first real punishment I remember Mum inflicting on me. Far from being a one-off, confinement in the spider cupboard became an almost daily occurrence. Young children don’t have much of a sense of time but I know that sometimes it was broad daylight when I was thrown in there and dark when I came out. I frequently missed meals and had to push my fists into my stomach to combat the rumblings of hunger. If he was feeling brave, Nigel would come and whisper to me through the crack of the door: ‘It’s all right, Nessa, I’m here – don’t be scared.’ But as soon as Mum heard him he would be dragged away.

It was hard to predict the crimes for which I would be locked in the cupboard. Picking flowers, scribbling in my
Noddy
book, spilling a little talcum powder on the bathroom rug, squealing, asking for a drink, not finishing my supper – any of these could result in a period in captivity.

Nigel and I had the natural liveliness you’d expect of any toddlers and we could be naughty with the best of them. One day we shook the petals off the rose bushes and laid them out all over the garden path in wavy patterns.
Mum went absolutely berserk when she saw them because, she said, we had ‘stolen’ Dad’s flowers.

Another time a painter had left a ladder leaning against the wall at the back of the house and Nigel and I decided to climb it to see how high we could get. He went first and had almost reached the bedroom window when he fell to the ground below and his screams brought Mum rushing out. I remember that I was the one who was punished for that escapade, despite the fact that he was older and had been the ringleader.

‘I’m going to give you away to the ragamuffin man next time he comes,’ she’d taunt, a prospect I found very scary, although I didn’t have a clue what a ragamuffin man was.

‘No, Mummy, please,’ I’d beg tearfully, but she would maintain that next time he came she was definitely going to hand me over.

There were some mornings when Mum woke up in a foul mood with the world and couldn’t stand the sight of me so I’d be locked in the cupboard from breakfast onwards. My only respite was at weekends when Dad was around, or on the two mornings a week when Mrs Plant, our cleaner, came over.

Mrs Plant was a lovely, dark-haired lady with a lively imagination. She would lift me up to sit beside the sink while she washed dishes or peeled potatoes and made up lots of stories to tell me. She couldn’t understand why I started crying when she told me about Little Miss Muffet who sat on a tuffet. I was too young and too inarticulate to be able to put into words the chronic fear of spiders that
had taken hold of me, so that even a mention of one in a nursery rhyme was distressing.

I wonder if she ever suspected what was going on in that household when she wasn’t around. Once, when she was cleaning the cupboard under the stairs, I said to her, ‘That’s my place for when I’m naughty.’

She looked aghast and turned to Mum, who had emerged from the kitchen.

‘What an imagination the child has!’ Mum smirked. ‘Have you ever heard the like?’

‘Mummy put me there,’ I protested.

She raised her eyebrows at Mrs Plant and winked. ‘Was that in one of your story-books, darling?’ she asked me.

Mrs Plant looked relieved and went back to work, obviously content with Mum’s explanation. I was to learn that this would always happen when I tried to tell other adults the truth about what went on in our house. Mum was the mistress of keeping up appearances and from the outside, we looked like a typical, middle-class family: two happily married, prosperous parents and their well-turned-out son and daughter. Neighbours in Bentley Road undoubtedly saw us as completely normal, if a little insular.

What they didn’t realize was that our father increasingly spent as much time as he could out of the house, leaving us at the mercy of a mother whose resentment of her two young children was growing, and with it, her desire to punish them.

O
ne sunny afternoon when I was outside with Nigel in the garden, something terrifying happened. One moment we were playing happily, and the next he fell down and started rolling around on the patio. At first I thought it was a silly game and giggled, but then I saw that his face looked twisted and he was jerking and throwing his arms about in a very odd way.

‘Nigel?’ I tried to get his attention by pushing his shoulder but his writhing knocked me over on to my bottom. He was making an odd moaning sound as well and I got scared and called Mum. ‘Mummy, Nigel’s hurt!’

She came running out of the kitchen and when she saw Nigel, she exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, not again!’ She picked him up and carried him indoors to the sitting room.

I followed, very alarmed. ‘Is he all right? What’s the matter?’

She ignored me, kneeling on the floor beside him and doing something funny to his mouth.

‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’ I persisted.

‘Just shut up and go back out to the garden,’ she snapped. I obeyed, scared enough of her by now that I
didn’t take any risks when she used that sharp tone of voice.

A few hours later, Nigel seemed better again, though he was pale and tired.

When I next saw Daddy, I told him what I’d witnessed and he listened gravely, then explained to me: ‘Your brother has an illness called epilepsy. Sometimes it makes him get funny turns called fits that make him roll around on the ground like you saw. If that ever happens again, you just have to run and get Mummy or me or any other grown-up so they can look after him.’

‘Will he get better?’ I asked.

He looked sad. ‘The doctors are trying to find some medicine that will help him. It’s nothing for you to worry about.’

I was still three and Nigel was four when his diagnosis was confirmed, and the fits started happening quite frequently. It must have been a huge strain on Mum, who had to make sure his airway was clear, that he wasn’t choking on his tongue, and that there was nothing nearby he could hurt himself on as he flailed around. It always made her very grumpy with me when he had a fit, and more than once she told me it was my fault, that I had made him ill. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, but I felt guilty all the same.

On top of looking after us and keeping up with the housework, Mum had started dress-making for private clients. She worked on a treadle-operated Singer sewing machine in the corner of the family room, sitting there for hours
on end with her foot pumping up and down as she guided fabric smoothly under the needle. I would have loved to watch as she hand-sewed tiny pearls on elaborate wedding dresses or ran contrasting piping round the lapels of jackets, but it seemed to irritate her if I hung around nearby and she’d jab me with the pins or needles she was holding.

She made many of her own clothes and ours as well. I had exquisite, hand-smocked dresses and little matching coats, but I didn’t feel any excitement when Mum announced she was making a new garment for me because while she did the fitting, she would tie my legs to the metal supports around the machine table, next to the treadle, and she’d jab me like a pincushion as she turned up the hem or adjusted the armpit darts.

‘See what it’s like when a pin goes into you?’ she’d say. ‘It hurts, doesn’t it? That’s what your life is going to be like – full of hurt and pain. It hurts me just to look at you.’

Sore as the pin-pricks were, her words were more devastating to me. I adored her and yearned desperately for her to love me and not be angry. She just seemed to get more and more irritated with me, especially after Nigel’s illness was diagnosed. He couldn’t be punished any more for fear of bringing on a fit, so I bore the brunt of her frustration.

One day we were having breakfast when Mum spotted a solitary cornflake on the kitchen floor. In a terrifying voice, she demanded, ‘Who dropped that? Own up right now!’

Nigel and I looked at each other. We genuinely didn’t know which of us was responsible. What three-and four-year-olds would?

‘Tell me or it will be worse for you,’ she shouted, making us gulp with fear. We said nothing, but bowed our heads. ‘All right,’ she snapped, grabbing me by the arm and wrenching me to my feet. ‘I want you to stand right here.’ She grabbed Nigel and lined him up beside me. ‘Don’t move a muscle.’

She reached round and got her Mrs Beeton cookery book from the shelf and placed it on the floor, lined up with our feet. ‘I will be able to tell if you move because you won’t be in line with the book any more. No talking, no moving, while I go and ask God who was responsible for dropping that cornflake.’

She stormed out of the room and into the dining room, slamming the door shut behind her. Nigel and I stayed where we were, staring down at the floor. What was Mum doing in the dining room all on her own? Perhaps we reached out our fingers to hold hands, or maybe we were too scared that first time. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere. My throat was dry and my heart was beating hard in my chest. What was going to happen next? I racked my brains to think if it had been me who dropped the cornflake but I really had no idea. Time seemed to stand still as we waited for the verdict.

The dining room door burst open. Mum came dashing out and back to us.

‘You evil child!’ She grabbed my hair and pulled my head back. ‘God says it was you and that I have to teach you a lesson.’ I started crying and she pushed me away in disgust. ‘Snivelling brat. Just you wait.’

She went out the back door and returned a few seconds later holding one of the canes Dad used to train his runner beans around in the vegetable patch.

‘Pull down your pants,’ she ordered.

‘N…n…n…o, please,’ I sobbed.

She grabbed me and pulled my pants down herself, then pushed me so that I was bent over a kitchen chair.

‘Mummy, don’t! Stop!’ I heard Nigel yell, but she ignored him. I felt a sharp thwack on my bottom as the cane came down and I screamed at the top of my voice and tried to wriggle away. Mum placed one hand on the small of my back to stop me escaping as she administered blow after stinging blow to my bottom.

My normal fear response set in and I wet myself, making her beat me with increased vigour.

‘You dirty, disgusting child! Why should I clean up after a brat like you?’

She stopped beating me, grabbed my hair again and forced me to the floor where she rubbed my nose in the puddle of urine, backwards and forwards, as some people do when trying to house-train a dog. I was gasping and gulping, finding it hard to breathe as my nose was squashed against the floor. I could vaguely hear Nigel still calling her to stop in the background, sounding hysterical, and then I think I passed out.

When I woke up I was outside on the patio and Nigel was leaning over me whispering, ‘Wake up, Nessa, wake up.’

My bottom and nose were so sore that I started to cry. Nigel tried to get me to stand up but Mum saw him out the window and came charging out, bean cane in hand.

‘Go to your room!’ she ordered Nigel.

‘No, you have to leave Nessa alone,’ he yelled. Then he picked up a small stone and threw it at her.

She was absolutely livid. ‘Look what you’ve done, you devil child,’ she told me. ‘You’re making your brother evil as well.’

She pushed Nigel out of the way and whacked the backs of my legs with the bean cane. Nigel started to scream and then he collapsed on the grass, jerking and writhing with an epileptic fit.

‘Help Nigel,’ I pleaded with Mum as she continued to hit me with the cane. ‘God, please help me!’

‘How dare you talk to God!’ Mum screamed at me. ‘God is not your friend. He won’t listen to you. I’m the only one who talks to God, do you understand?’

She threw down the cane, lifted Nigel in her arms and carried him into the family room to rest on the settee. I crawled up to the French windows to look in, and she glared out at me. Once she had settled Nigel and he’d stopped fitting, she came out to where I sat whimpering with fear.

‘You will never drop anything on the floor again. You will never talk to God directly again. And you will stop this disgusting habit of wetting yourself, so help me …’ She shook me by the shoulders then pushed me away harshly so I banged my head on the cold stone patio.

I was sent to my room and I wet myself again with fear and distress. Dad came up to see me when he got home and found me lying snivelling in urine-soaked sheets. He sniffed the air and realized what had happened.

‘Lady Jane, you have to stop wetting yourself,’ he said sadly. ‘You’re nearly four, old enough to know better. Poor Mummy has to do lots and lots of extra washing because of you.’

I tried to explain that I wet myself because I was scared of Mummy but I don’t know how much sense it made to him. I probably wasn’t expressing myself very clearly at such a young age.

‘Why is Mummy always cross with me?’ I asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders and looked worried for a moment, then said, ‘It’s because you keep wetting yourself. Just try not to do it and everything will be fine. Try to be a good girl.’

Why didn’t Dad see what was happening and try to protect me? I kept hoping he would step in and tell her to stop, but my parents seemed to have a classic 1950s marriage where childcare was her domain and wage-earning was his. Mum ruled the roost at home and Dad generally toed the line, trying to keep everyone happy and avoid conflict. I adored my father, but I soon learned that my mother would always be believed over me. Her stories sounded so reasonable and so plausible that I almost believed them myself. I began to think that I really was a stupidly clumsy child who kept having accidents and being naughty. I was the black sheep, the cause of all the trouble, although I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong.