Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (3 page)

E
very morning when we got up, Nigel and I would glance at each other nervously, sensing the atmosphere, trying to judge what kind of day it was going to be. Mondays were always bad because they were washdays when Mum had piles of laundry to do in an old twin-tub washing machine. She hated washdays and I frequently got beaten with the wooden tongs she used for lifting out the wet clothes. She seldom smacked me with her bare hands; I suppose she didn’t want to risk breaking a nail.

After her first interview with the Almighty, Mum began to go regularly into the dining room whenever she felt the need to talk to God. We never heard a noise, but I imagined her sitting in front of the picture of Jesus and his golden halo, her eyes tight shut and her hands pressed together as she prayed and communed with God. Whenever she went in, Nigel and I huddled together, petrified. God was
her
friend, she told us. He didn’t like little children, especially horrible, ugly ones like me.

When she found something out of place – maybe a piece of tissue on the bathroom floor, or a speck of dirt on the
carpet – she’d always demand to know who was responsible. Nigel and I would never tell on each other; we protected each other as far as we dared.

‘I’ll ask God,’ Mum would say. ‘He’ll tell me. Do you want me to go and do that? You know what will happen when I find out.’

God, it seemed, wanted every tiny infringement of Mum’s rules punished as severely as possible at all times and he wanted me to take the blame for everything that happened, whether it was my fault or not. I told myself that God must want me to be punished instead of Nigel because he was sick, but it was still a puzzle why God so often told Mum something that wasn’t true.

Once when she was in the dining room, I accidentally let out a nervous giggle and it came out much louder than it should have. Mum charged out and dragged me to the kitchen for a beating.

‘You disturbed God while I was talking to him and he’s very angry,’ she said, with a quiver of self-righteousness. ‘God said I have to punish you.’ And she started whacking me with the bean cane, which was now kept in the corner of the kitchen.

I always sobbed and cried with pain, telling her how sorry I was between gasps but nothing would make her stop. If anything, my tears and contrition fired her up even more, so that she sliced the cane even harder through the air. Nothing would mollify her.

While I was being punished, Nigel would do his best to protect me by shouting at Mum to stop, and afterwards he would comfort me, putting his arms round me to give me a hug if Mum wasn’t looking. I loved him to pieces. His presence obviously deterred Mum a bit – my punishments
got much worse in the year when he, aged five, had started school but I, aged four, was still at home.

The garden was slightly safer than the house, because Mum tended to be working indoors and left me to my own devices, so I spent a lot of time there, keeping out of her way. I remember one time she came out, though, and saw me collecting worms and dropping them into a jam jar I’d found.

‘What are you doing, you nasty girl?’ she demanded. She picked up a worm, yanked my head to one side and dangled the worm so that it was wriggling inside my ear. ‘He’s nibbling your ear, and he’s going to get stuck right inside your head. Can you feel him wriggling?’

I was petrified of the worm getting stuck and screamed and screamed for her to stop. Where were the neighbours? I suppose they must have been out that day, and maybe Mum knew it. She hated me talking to our next-door neighbour, Edna Crisp, over the fence and would call me indoors if she was in the garden hanging out her washing.

Edna saved my life one day, though. I had refused to eat some carrot that Mum had served for tea and she grabbed a bit and forced it into my mouth, pushing it back until it got stuck in my throat. I gasped in panic and managed to inhale the carrot and soon I was choking and coughing, scarlet in the face and unable to breathe. I’m not sure what happened next because I was in such a state, but I think Nigel ran next door to get Edna. She hurried into the room and thumped me on the back repeatedly until I coughed up the carrot, then she took me on her lap and hugged me as I cried and shivered in shock. Mum turned her back on us and started washing the supper dishes.

‘That could have been nasty,’ Edna said to my mother’s back, obviously surprised at the lack of reaction to my nearly choking to death.

‘She’s all right now, isn’t she? You were here. It’ll teach her to eat more carefully in future,’ said my mother.

‘Well – if you say so.’ Edna was clearly taken aback by the cool response the whole event had got from my supposedly loving mother. When she left, it was with a suspicious air and I had the feeling she would be watching carefully from now on.

Mother must have guessed that she’d given away something of her callous attitude towards me. Most of my punishments took place inside the house so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear anything untoward, but one sunny afternoon when I was four, Nigel and I were playing in the garden. He was pedalling his red tricycle with me standing in the trailer behind it and holding on to his shoulders. I called for him to stop when I saw a pretty butterfly fluttering around the roses. I’d loved butterflies ever since Dad had told me that my name was the name of a type of butterfly.

I found a jam jar lying in the soil and unscrewed the lid to find some bits and pieces of garden twine inside. I emptied them out. Just then, Nigel spotted a bumblebee alighting on a pink rose and we decided to try and catch it. Carefully we crept up on it, put the jar over the top then slammed the lid and twisted it shut. Neither of us had any idea that bees could hurt you. I looked at it buzzing furiously inside the jar and I remember thinking that it had a
friendly face, like a child. I wanted it to be my friend. We put the jar in the trailer of the tricycle and cycled off round the garden squealing with delight as we gave our new furry friend a ride.

The squeals soon brought Mum out from the kitchen, demanding to know what was going on.

‘We’ve got a new friend,’ I said nervously, suddenly unsure of myself. I picked up the jar to show her.

‘You cruel, horrible child,’ she hissed, and dragged me by the arm to the path along the side of the kitchen. ‘I’m very angry with you for doing something so cruel. God is angry and the bee is going to be angry with you as well. Just you wait and see.’

She unscrewed the lid of the jar and pressed the opening against my thigh. ‘Don’t move,’ she instructed. ‘You’ll make the bee even more angry.’ She tapped the bottom of the jar until the bee fell on to my skin, where I felt it crawling around, buzzing away. Suddenly there was a sharp jab that made me scream, and a throbbing pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

‘The bee’s going to die now,’ Mum told me, ‘and it’s all your fault. You killed him.’

She dragged me, sobbing uncontrollably, to the cupboard under the stairs and locked me in. ‘I’m going to get more bees to keep stinging you until you learn not to be cruel to poor defenceless creatures,’ she told me.

As I stood in the dark, scratching my sting in a futile attempt to relieve the pain, I felt desperately sad. Was it really my fault the bee had died?

That night Dad got home early and came up to tuck me into bed. I said to him ‘Mummy hurt me with a bee and made me cry’, but he didn’t believe me.

‘Your Mum says the bee stung you because you made it angry by shutting it in a jar. You have to be careful with bees, Lady Jane.’

‘But she did it!’ I protested.

He said, ‘If Mummy was angry with you today, it must have been because you’d done something naughty.’

I remember clearly how devastated I was that he didn’t believe me when I was telling the truth. I had thought I was ‘Daddy’s little girl’ but he was taking Mum’s side instead of mine. Children have an innate sense of justice and I felt strongly how unfair this was. It also meant I was powerless against my mother’s rage. I was a lot more vulnerable if I couldn’t get my Dad to take me seriously.

I suppose he went downstairs and told Mum about our conversation because the next morning she was livid.

‘How dare you tell tales to your father! You’re a devil child and I’m going to have to keep teaching you lesson after lesson until you learn to behave better.’

Straight after breakfast she went out to the garden with a jam jar and hunted around until she found another bee. I tried to run away and hide behind the sofa but she caught me and dragged me out. Knowing what was going to happen, this time I struggled like mad to get away from the bee in the jar but she held me in a grip of iron until it had delivered its sting. Once again, I was locked in the spider cupboard for the day as the poison raised another red, angry lump on my leg and the horrible, throbbing pain made me scream and cry. I clawed and clawed at the stings until the whole area was raw.

This happened a few more times, each occasion bringing me a fresh sting on my chubby thighs and a painful red lump afterwards. I knew better than to tell Dad, though. That’s one lesson I had learned. Mum had told him I was an unusually clumsy child, always tripping over and bumping into things, and he never seemed to question if I had a black eye or bruises on my arms and legs. He didn’t bath me so he never saw the sting marks under my dress, or the stripes from the cane on my bottom. Mum was in charge of our baths and I grew to fear hair-washing nights twice a week when she took great glee in getting soap in my eyes. If Nigel had already got out, she held my head under water as she rinsed off the shampoo until I was left gasping for breath and very scared.

She brushed my teeth roughly then it was straight to bed with the door shut. If Dad was home, he’d come up to tuck me in but more often than not I got into bed on my own. I wasn’t allowed to bring Scruffy or Rosie with me – they stayed downstairs. I would say the prayers I’d been taught by rote – thank you for a good day, keep me safe in the night, bless my grandmas and grandpas – then lie in the dark with the counterpane pulled up to my nose, praying that tomorrow Mummy would be happy and love me.

W
hile Mum was punishing me, I felt very scared, and sad, and determined to try harder not to put a foot wrong.

‘Please love me,’ I’d plead with her. ‘Why don’t you love me?’

‘You would have to make me love you, and you haven’t. You’re not a loveable girl.’

She loved Nigel, though. He was her Little Boy Blue with his white-blond hair, and she always dressed him in powder blue when he was little. He got clips round the ear and raps on the knuckles, like me, but he was never beaten with the bean cane or locked in the spider cupboard. Whenever Mum went into the dining room to ask God who had been naughty, it was always me. I could tell quite clearly as a four-year-old that God didn’t love me at all and I didn’t know what I could do about it.

Sometimes I wondered if Mum loved Nigel because of his illness. Did she refrain from beating him with the cane in case it brought on an epileptic fit? Would she love me if I became ill? But no. When I caught measles, I was put to bed upstairs and left there on my own with no food and
just a glass of water to drink. No doctor was called. I was left to get better by myself over the coming week.

One night I was trying to sleep when my attention was caught by a movement by the window. I looked over and saw that round the top of the curtains were some white shapes. They were moving about, dancing along the top of the curtain rod. I blinked hard and as they became clearer, I realized they were little eyes, children’s eyes. Petrified, I gripped the cover tightly round me but I couldn’t stop looking at them. There was no sound at first but, as I watched, more appeared until there were four or five pairs of eyes, all looking at me, and then I began to hear a whispering noise like the sound of very small voices. This was too much. I screamed in terror, convinced they were God’s people coming to get me because of all the naughty things I had done. What would they do to me? I had no idea. I was relieved to hear Mum’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

‘Mum,’ I sobbed, sitting up in bed. ‘There are eyes in the curtains and I can hear voices!’

I wanted her to comfort me, to give me a hug and tell me everything was fine, but instead she raised her hand and gave me a hard slap across the face. She pushed me back down on the bed.

‘Moaning brat, there’s nothing in the room. Go to sleep now. If I hear another word from you I’ll be back. You’ll be sorry if you make me climb these stairs again.’

She turned the light off and slammed the door, and a minute later there were the eyes and the whispers again. I
began to whimper in fear and slid further down under the covers to try and get away from them. Mum must have heard my whimpers – maybe she was listening outside – because suddenly the door burst open and the light was switched on. She whisked the covers off me and dragged me out of bed by the hair. My legs hit the floor with a thud and, as she yanked me across the hall, I wet myself in sheer fright.

‘You disgusting, ugly, repulsive child,’ she screamed, totally infuriated now.

Nigel came out of his room, rubbing his eyes.

‘Get back to bed,’ she screamed.

He tried to grab hold of me and Mum pushed him away so roughly that he fell and cracked his head against the spindles of the banister. He started to cry and then to scream, and I suppose she was worried that he might have a fit because she shoved me away, telling me to go to bed, and went to pick him up.

I climbed into bed but my nightdress was sopping wet, which made me feel cold, and I was shaking with sobs as well. Gradually I calmed myself down, keeping my eyes tight shut, a picture of Mum’s ugly expression in my head. Anger transformed her beautiful face into something quite hateful.

I must have nodded off to sleep but I was woken by a hand over my mouth.

‘Now it’s time to deal with you, madam.’ She pulled the covers back and felt the dampness of the sheet. ‘You think I haven’t got enough to do without washing your disgusting sheets and pants and clothes all the time. Do you?’

She yanked me out of bed and over to the stairs, hitting me across the head all the way. She dragged me down the
stairs, opened the door of the spider cupboard and shoved me hard on the back, bolting the door behind me.

‘Mummy, please don’t. I’ll be a good girl now and I’ll go straight to sleep.’

‘It’s too late. You had your chance,’ she gloated.

And then, for once, a streak of defiance came through. ‘You cow! I hate you!’ I called, then bit my lip, regretting it almost immediately.

The bolt slid back but not because she was letting me go back to bed. I felt a sharp, stinging pain as she hit me hard across the body with the bean cane, again and again, in a frenzied attack. I started screaming at the top of my voice so she grabbed a yellow duster from the cupboard shelf and forced it into my mouth. It smelled sickly, of lavender furniture polish. She threw me down on to the hall floor and continued hitting and hitting me all over as I twisted and tried to escape. She was like a woman possessed, all the frustrations of her curtailed life being channelled into sheer fury with me.

At last she stopped beating me and threw me back in the cupboard, where I collapsed on the floor. She slammed the door, pulling the bolt across.

‘Vanessa,’ she whispered viciously through the crack. ‘Be careful of the big hairy spiders. They’re going to crawl all over you in the night and nibble away at you. They’ll start at your toes and work their way up. You can’t come out till morning now.’

I lay in a heap on the red tiled floor, every part of my body raw and stinging from the caning, the taste of furniture polish in my mouth, the smell of urine coming strongly from my cold, wet, nightdress, and I sobbed and sobbed. I hated her that night. I wanted to run away and
live anywhere in the world except there with her. I shook with cold, and fear, and pain, and the sheer injustice of it all. True to her word, Mum left me there till morning.

That night was the first time I saw eyes and heard voices in my bedroom, but it was soon happening every night when I went to bed. I had learned my lesson, though, and didn’t make any noise that would bring Mum up to my room. As I became accustomed to them, I felt less scared. After all, they never hurt me. And I couldn’t face the terror of spending another night in the spider cupboard.

Where was Dad that night? Why didn’t he come home? Was it because he hadn’t come home that Mum was in such a foul temper? I had no way of knowing. If I ever asked where he was, Mum would say ‘Working to keep you’, or ‘Out with Granddad’, or ‘At a meeting’.

I didn’t have contact with any other children so I didn’t realize it was unusual for daddies to be away all week. When he got back on Friday nights, I was so overjoyed to see him that I just threw myself into playing and jumping on top of him and begging him to do his silly voices, putting the hurts and cares of the week behind me for a short while. I could revel in his affection and forget for a while what a bad, naughty, disgusting girl I was, and how much Mummy hated me.