Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (4 page)

T
here was one place where I learned about love as a child, and that was at my Nan and Granddad Casey’s, Dad’s parents. Nan Casey was a big-boned woman with dark, waved hair and smiling eyes. She had a soft gentle voice and a face that was full of compassion and humour. I was usually taken to visit her every second weekend and she’d throw open the front door and run down the path to sweep me up in a huge hug, crying ‘My baby! My baby!’ She didn’t seem to get on very well with Mum, and Nigel and I were often left there with her while Mum and Dad went off somewhere else.

We’d have such fun those weekends. Nothing was too much trouble and a huge fuss was made of us. Nan and Granddad were very well-off and lived in a big house with large gardens in Rugeley, Staffordshire. I liked to sit in the kitchen helping Nan to bake. We made fairy cakes and decorated them with coloured sprinkles, or pastry figures with currants for eyes. She had a black Aga cooker that always seemed to have a kettle billowing steam on top, and the room was very warm and cosy. In the centre was an old table with a pretty cloth covered in hand- 
embroidered daisies in lots of different pastel shades. I loved that cloth.

Nan took me for walks in the afternoons and we picked wild flowers, especially our favourite cowslips. As I carried them home in my sweaty little hands, she’d say ‘Careful not to hold them too tightly or they’ll wilt and die.’

When we got home, we would lay them carefully in her old flower press and tighten the screws on either side of the frame. We had quite a collection of pressed wildflowers that we stuck in a scrapbook. Nan drew daisies round them and my job was to colour them in. Frequently, after our walks I would fall asleep in the rocking chair beside the Aga, having happy dreams of flowers and cakes and pretty things.

‘I love playing with you two,’ Nan told Nigel and me. ‘It makes me feel young again.’

She had toys in her house: rag dolls, a spinning top and a jack-in-the-box that I loved with a passion. She taught me how to play hopscotch, chalking the squares on her garden path and hopping along them herself. She was a great story-teller, never needing a book to come up with exciting tales of adventures and fairies and princesses, all of them with happy endings. I sat in her comfortable lap in the rocking chair, rocking to and fro, as she told us different stories every time.

Granddad Casey was a tall man with a very deep voice. He wore glasses and when he was pretending to be serious, he would slide them down his nose and peer over the top at me. We had a lovely, jokey relationship when I was younger. He could always make me squeal with laughter and Nan would pretend to be stern and say to him, ‘Stop making that child squeal!’ and he would wink at me and
put his finger to my lips. ‘Shush, Lady Jane, we’ll get into trouble with Nan,’ he’d say; then he’d proceed to make me squeal with laughter all over again.

Granddad’s pride and joy was his collection of forty-odd racing pigeons that he kept in a coop out in the garden. They were soft and grey and gentle and I loved the throaty cooing noise they made. Granddad used to let me help to tag them. You put the bands through a time clock that punched the time on them, then the band went round the pigeon’s leg so that you could tell where it came from and what time it had set out.

The gardens at Rugeley had lots of separate lawns, paths, flower and vegetable borders, the pigeon coop, and plenty of low hedges, making it an ideal place for hide and seek. There was a fishpond in the garden – about six feet square with a concrete border – and it was full of big orange goldfish. Granddad taught me how to lean over and tap the surface of the water gently so that the fish came up for a nibble, thinking that your finger was a tasty fly.

There was a gardener to look after the grounds, and Nan had a housekeeper to help indoors, although she did all the cooking herself. Every autumn we had a special job to do when the apples and pears fell from the trees in the orchard. Nigel and I would collect them and put them carefully in huge baskets. In the kitchen we would perch on the edge of the table and remove all the stalks, while a local girl peeled, cored and chopped the fruit, and Nan would stew them on the stove before bottling them in big glass jars.

The bottled fruits were kept downstairs in the cellar, which was reached via a door that led off the kitchen. I always wanted to go down there but Nan said it wasn’t a
suitable place for little girls in pretty dresses. She was careful to tie an apron round my neck when we were bottling the fruit or baking so my clothes didn’t get dirty. I think she was wary on my behalf because she had seen firsthand the kind of trouble I got into with Mum if I got my clothes dirty.

Once when we visited, I was wearing an exquisite outfit that Mum had made for me. It was a dress in an eggshell blue colour with white spots on it, and a matching coat that was lined in the dress fabric. It had a little velvet collar and I absolutely adored it. Granddad took me for a walk down to the farm to collect some eggs and as I picked one up it slipped from my grasp. I tried to catch it and the shell broke, splattering egg down the front of my coat.

I was nervous as we walked back to the house because I knew Mum was there.

‘Don’t worry,’ Granddad assured me. ‘We’ll sponge that off good as new.’

But when she saw the mess, Mum went wild. She snatched the coat from me, grabbed a pair of sharp scissors that were hanging on a hook on the kitchen wall and proceeded to cut it into tiny pieces.

‘See what I’m doing? See what you’ve made me do?’ Mum’s voice rose as she became more furious. The velvet collar fell to the floor in shreds as I watched in horror. ‘You’re a dirty, messy girl who doesn’t deserve to have anything nice!’

Nan and Granddad tried to stop her. ‘Muriel, she’s only a child. Accidents happen,’ they remonstrated, but she was in a frenzy, not listening to anyone. I stood and sobbed, upset that yet again Mummy was cross with me, and Nan pulled me on to her knee for a hug, whispering, ‘It’s all
right, don’t worry. You’ll get another coat even nicer than that one.’

Mum didn’t often lose her temper to this extent in front of Nan and Granddad but there was another occasion when Granddad saw her wrench the spinning top from me and hurl it across the room. I suspect they knew that she was volatile and it must have been hard for them to send me back home with her again, but what could they do? It was not the done thing to interfere with the way somebody brought up their children. But Nan could see how terrified I was of my mother and how much I hated my life at home. As the time to leave approached, I’d get more and more miserable. When it actually was time, I’d be filled with dread and beg my grandmother to hide me in the cellar, but of course she couldn’t. I didn’t tell her about all the punishments I suffered at home – the bean cane, the spider cupboard, the bee stings – because I assumed these were all normal things that happened to little girls who were naughty. Nevertheless, I’m sure she could sense that my fear was in no way normal.

I was very secure in Nan Casey’s love for me, and maybe this gave me some of the resources I needed to survive the treatment I experienced in the rest of my life. She was a traditional grandmother and Nigel and I were the only grandchildren she had to fuss over, because Aunt Audrey had emigrated to Canada by this time and Dad’s brother Graham and youngest sister Gilly hadn’t yet had children. I felt very protected by Nan when I was at Rugeley, the way all young children should feel.

If we were staying the weekend at Nan’s, she took us to Sunday school. Once I was chatting to her as we walked home together.

‘Today we learnt a hymn called “Jesus Loves the Little Children”,’ I said.

‘Did you, sweetheart? That sounds nice.’

‘But Jesus doesn’t love me.’

Nan looked at me, frowning. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘God doesn’t love me, so Jesus doesn’t love me either,’ I said, confident of my childish logic. ‘God doesn’t love me because I’m ugly and fat and naughty.’

Nan looked horrified. ‘Vanessa, God loves all his children equally and you are a very, very special child. Never forget that.’

‘But God tells Mummy I’ve done horrible things and that I need to be punished,’ I told her. ‘He doesn’t like me at all.’

‘What do you mean she punishes you? What does she do?’

‘I can’t tell you or God will be cross with me.’

She shook her head vehemently. ‘Oh my baby, that’s not God. That’s definitely not God. God doesn’t get cross with little children. You must tell me any time if you are upset about something and I’ll sort it out for you. Will you promise to do that?’

I don’t remember being reassured by this conversation. If anything, I felt even more confused. Nan couldn’t explain it to me properly because she didn’t know the truth about what happened at home and I never told her anything like the whole story. I was too scared – of God, and of Mum.

One day I was at Nan and Granddad Casey’s house – I could not have been more than about four years old –
enjoying the rare sensation of safety that I felt in their home. Mum was there but Dad must have been off playing cricket or golf. It was a sunny day and I wandered out into the garden to play. I crouched down by the fishpond to watch the fish gliding to and fro, big fish and little fish. I bent over to tickle the top of the water, as Granddad had showed me, and sure enough the fish came over to nibble my fingers, thinking they were food. I liked the nice sucking feeling.

In the background I heard a door opening and soft footsteps coming down the stairs but I was too engrossed to turn around. Next thing there was a huge shove on my back and I toppled headfirst into the water and it closed above my head. I remember the shock of the cold wetness, and struggling to get my head above the surface, but it was too deep for me to touch the bottom. Seemingly I was floating face down when Nan happened to look out the kitchen window and screamed to Granddad: ‘Thomas! The baby! Get my baby out!’

Granddad came running full tilt through the garden, jumped into the pond and yanked me out by the back of my dress. He wasn’t sure if I was still breathing at first, and then I began to gasp and splutter for air. He carried me into the kitchen where Nan grabbed me for a big hug. Then she said, ‘We’ve got to get her out of these wet things or she’ll catch her death of cold.’ There was a fluffy towel warming by the side of the Aga and she gave my hair a rub and started to unbutton the back of my dress.

‘Stop!’ Mum said, hurrying into the kitchen. ‘Let me do that.’

She grabbed the towel and pulled me away from Nan to the corner of the kitchen. I think she might have been
worried about any marks Nan might notice on my little body if she was allowed to undress me herself. I was shivering compulsively now.

‘I’ll get some spare clothes,’ Nan said and left the room.

Mum stripped my wet clothes off and began to rub me roughly with the towel. ‘You stupid girl, you’re always so clumsy. Look – you’ve ruined your dress. It’ll never be the same again.’

‘But you pushed me, Mummy,’ I said.

Granddad was heating some milk on the Aga and he glanced over sharply at this.

‘Don’t be silly.’ Mum laughed, her eyes glinting fiercely at me. ‘Of course I didn’t push you. I was in the house the whole time. You must just have lost your balance.’

Nan came in with a change of clothes and I was dressed in them, then Nan sat me on her lap in the rocking chair, hugging me and saying, ‘My baby, my poor baby’ as I drank my milk. Granddad got the spinning top and set it spinning across the red tiled floor. Mum sat at the table, bored, examining her nails and glancing at the clock to see how long it would be before Dad picked us up again.

I felt safe again, in warm dry clothes, hugged tightly by Nan Casey. But I also knew that my mother had pushed me into the pond, even if she had managed to fool Granddad with her story.

She must hate me very much, I thought. I must try and make her love me. I must be a better girl.

But it was impossible to please her, no matter how hard I tried.

T
here could not have been more of a contrast between Dad’s loving, kind parents and Mum’s parents, Charles and Elsie Pittam. From a very young age I would seize up with dread when we set out to visit them for the afternoon, a lump constricting my throat and a knot twisting my stomach. They lived in Yardley Wood, a bus ride away, and Mum would take us on our own. Dad never came along.

‘I see you’ve brought the brats,’ Grandma Pittam would say as she opened the front door and glared down at Nigel and me. She had tightly curled grey hair, an unsmiling face and wore smart, tidy clothes in shades of grey, brown and black. I remember her as formal, upright and colourless.

The house was gloomy and austere, situated up a slight embankment. As you walked in the front door there was a musty smell, like gas. Huge pieces of dark furniture seemed to tower over us oppressively. There was a grandfather clock in the hall that chimed every quarter of an hour and I can’t say why exactly but I was always scared of that clock. The face seemed to have eyes that followed
you around, and I always imagined that when it chimed a hand was going to come out of the casing and grab hold of me. The walls were covered in photographs of very old people – more eyes to watch over us – and every surface seemed to be cluttered with ornaments of little old men with gnarled faces and wizened hands.

‘You know where to go. Sit down and be quiet,’ Grandma would tell Nigel and me, and we’d troop into the front room to sit on the big, scratchy horsehair sofa, our feet sticking outwards, careful not to let our shoes touch the seat. Here we could smell the strong scent of Grandpa’s pipe tobacco and it used to catch the back of my throat and make me cough.

There were no toys in that house. Nigel and I were supposed to sit quietly, waiting while Mum chatted to her mother. I overheard snippets of conversation that referred to us sometimes. One in particular stuck in my head, although it made no sense to me at all.

‘If God had wanted you to have children, he would have given them to you,’ Grandma said. It was very obvious she didn’t like us and didn’t want us to be there, but I didn’t know why.

Of course, Nigel and I were young and found it hard to sit still for long. We’d start to fidget and one of us would giggle and Grandma would come charging through to tell us off. Children should be seen and not heard in that house. At teatime, she always served salmon and cucumber sandwiches cut into triangles. The slightest infraction of table manners was punished by a sharp rap on the knuckles with a bread knife. We would be told off for running, bumping into furniture, dropping crumbs, or virtually everything that two lively young children got up to. She
seemed to have eyes in the back of her head and always caught us for any minor misdemeanours, even if we’d thought she wasn’t watching.

Some days when we arrived, she wouldn’t even let us in the house. ‘I’m in no mood for you today,’ she’d say. ‘You’ll have to stay out in the garden.’

Other times, when we were getting on her nerves, she’d send us to wait in the garage. It was always cold there and the wind blew dead leaves under the door and into corners. There were strange, toxic smells from the old pots of paint and tins of creosote that lay around, and the shelves were stacked with tools and ladders. Ancient broken toys were scattered around the garage, presumably relics of Mum’s childhood. A painted metal rocking horse stood to one side – it makes me shudder to think of it. Its tail and mane were matted and rough to the touch. When I climbed on to it to ride, it made an awful squeaking noise, like a creaky old gate, that used to grate on the nerves and make my teeth feel funny. There seemed something evil about that rocking horse, a kind of malignant look in its eyes.

If we’d been sent out to the garage for being naughty we wouldn’t be allowed to have any tea, but Grandma would quite often come out and wave the plate of sandwiches and maybe even tiny cakes under our noses so we could see what we were missing.

‘These are only for
good
children,’ she’d say. ‘You’re too naughty to have any.’ Then she would take the plate away again, shutting the garage door behind her as she went up the step into the kitchen. Nigel and I called her ‘Nasty Nanny’ and talked about how we wished we could go and see Nan Casey instead.

Grandpa Pittam was a big man with white, slightly curly hair and a rugged face. He wore a monocle and scratchy, tweedy clothes. He was a watch-and clockmaker by profession and there was always a fob watch on a chain pinned to his waistcoat. I hated the way he used to bounce me on his knee and kiss me on the lips and I hated the smell of stale tobacco that lingered in a cloud around him. He had a loud, raspy voice and he’d pretend to be jovial with us, but his smile would never reach his eyes.

Grandpa Pittam had an aviary full of blue, green and yellow budgerigars in the back garden. Sometimes he’d take Nigel and me out to look at them but unlike the visits to Granddad Casey’s racing pigeons, we hated being on our own out there with him. He’d make me go inside the aviary where all the birds fluttered round my head, making me scream. I was frightened their claws would get caught in my hair, or that they’d peck me as they darted around twitching and blinking, but Grandpa just laughed at my distress.

I never felt comfortable when he lifted me on to his lap and bounced me up and down, but Mum said ‘Be nice to your grandfather. He loves you very much.’

I’d say, ‘But I want to sit on the floor’ and she’d say, ‘Do what your grandfather wants.’

She was very affectionate with him, often kissing his cheek and being flirtatious and giggly, the same way she was with Dad when he got home from work. He’d pat her bottom and tell her to behave herself, which just made her giggle more.

Grandpa’s eyes were deeply set in his head and he used to look at me in a strange sort of a way, as though he was seeing someone else and not me. Was it just my
imagination? I got the impression sometimes that he was quite sad and lonely, but I didn’t feel sympathy. He was far too creepy for that.

On the whole, I tried to behave my very best when we visited Grandma and Grandpa Pittam but I hated going there. One day, when Mum was getting us ready to go over there, I said out loud: ‘I don’t want to go to Grandma Pittam’s. I want to go to Nan Casey’s.’

‘You’ll go where you’re told and like it. Now hold your tongue.’ She accompanied this with a hard smack round the head. A bitter little seed of rebellion was planted inside me.

As we travelled there on the bus, a voice whispered in my head that I should tell Grandma Pittam that I didn’t like her. She had to know. I could ask her why she was so nasty to me. Was it because she didn’t like little girls, or because I was sometimes naughty? Or was it because I wasn’t pretty? I was nervous but convinced myself that it was right for me to speak my mind.

We arrived at Yardley Wood and Mum pressed the front door chime. Grandma opened the door and gave Mum a kiss on the cheek, saying, ‘Hello, dear, I’ve just put the kettle on.’ Then she looked down at us. ‘I’m in no mood for children today so you two can play quietly in the garden. You’re not coming in.’

The bitter seed in me burst out and I told her: ‘I don’t like you. You’re not a nice lady. I hate coming to your house and I wish we were going to Nan Casey’s because she’s kind and she plays with us.’ Once I’d started the words just came tumbling out.

Grandma’s eyes widened and she looked at Mum in horror. Mum grabbed me by the hair and snapped, ‘You
ungrateful brat! Apologize to your grandmother at once. Tell her you’re sorry for being unkind.’

‘I won’t,’ I said defiantly. ‘I meant it all.’ In my naive, four-year-old way, I’d somehow imagined that Grandma might be nicer to me if I told her how I felt. Now I understood that it would only make everything a lot worse.

‘We can’t let her get away with this, Muriel,’ Grandma said.

Nigel was sent to sit on the sofa; then Grandma dragged me into the hall, crying and pleading while Mum went to find something to beat me with. She came back with an old paint-covered stick from the garage and started to whip me with it. I struggled to avoid the blows that rained down on my arms, legs and body and Mum got more and more cross as the stick never seemed to land where she wanted it to. I screamed and screamed as each stroke stung my skin, begging her to stop.

‘P-p-please Mummy, no. I’m sorry. Please stop.’

And then, as usual, I wet myself in sheer fright and there was a telltale puddle on the hall carpet. As soon as it happened, I started to pray silently, ‘Please don’t let her notice’, but she soon did. She stopped beating me and yanked me up by the hair.

I looked pleadingly at the ugly expression on her face, too terrified to utter a word.

‘You’re a dirty, filthy child, still wetting yourself like a baby when you’re four years old. You disgust me. I’m ashamed to call you my daughter.’ She dropped the stick and started slapping me hard round the face – right, left, right, left – until my cheeks were on fire. ‘I’m not going to stop until you apologize to your Grandma for what you said, and for wetting her carpet.’

Despite the fact that I was petrified when Mum got into a frenzied attack like this, I stuck to my guns. ‘But it’s true that I don’t like her and I don’t want to come here.’

There was an almighty whack that made me see stars and I let out a deafening scream. I tried to look up into Mum’s eyes, begging for mercy, but saw only a cruel, cold glee.

A banging and crashing noise was coming from the kitchen and Mum dragged me down the hall to see what was going on. Grandma had pulled out an old corrugated tin tub that she kept under the sink and had filled it with cold water.

‘We need to clean up the little *****,’ she said to Mum, using a word I didn’t understand but that sounded ugly. ‘Get her clothes off.’

I didn’t struggle as their rough fingers stripped off my dress, then my vest, pants and socks. I was gulping back sobs, partially dazed by all the blows to my head, and I had no idea what was coming next. Mum lifted me up and lowered me down into the icy water. As soon as my feet touched the surface, I struggled to get away, so Grandma joined in and they both pushed me down until I was shuddering in ice-cold water that came up to waist height.

Grandma pulled out a brittle old scrubbing brush and a bar of antiseptic-smelling pink soap from under the sink. ‘This is what I use for cleaning the dirtiest laundry when it needs a really good scrub,’ she said. She rubbed the soap on the bristles to raise a lather and then she started to scrub the skin of my back, chest, legs and arms, rubbing with such vigour that I was soon red-raw and sore all over. She rubbed suds into my eyes, nose and mouth, and I just
sobbed and sobbed without stopping, feeling completely without hope.

When she’d finished, she yanked me out, rubbed me down roughly with a towel and then marched me across to the door that led to the garage. I was pushed headlong, still stark naked, and the door slammed behind me. The rocking horse’s eyes looked at me mournfully.

I crouched down on the floor hugging myself and shivering, every inch of me stinging and sore. I started to rock back and forwards on my heels. There were whispering voices in my head but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I felt cold and scared and vulnerable and utterly, utterly alone. I now knew that I wasn’t safe in Grandma’s house and that I couldn’t risk rebelling again because she obviously hated me as much as Mum did.