Punished

A mother’s cruelty

A daughter’s survival

A secret that couldn’t be told

Vanessa Steel

with Gill Paul

This is a work of non-fiction. In order to protect privacy,

some names and places have been changed.

Contents

Title Page Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Epilogue Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher

Prologue

I turned my key in the lock of Mum’s door and pushed, but it wouldn’t open. Something was stuck behind it, blocking it. I pushed harder but couldn’t shift the obstruction.

What’s she done now? I wondered. Is she deliberately trying to keep me out?

Then I looked through the letterbox and saw a beige- stockinged leg – her leg.

‘Mum!’ I yelled. ‘Mum, are you all right?’

Stupid question. Of course she wasn’t all right. I shouted at the top of my voice – ‘Help me!’ – and the next-door neighbour hurried out to see what was going on.

Stuttering with shock, I called for an ambulance and told the operator we’d probably need the fire brigade as well to break the door down. While we waited for them I sat on the step calling to Mum through the crack of the door but getting no response. Was that her breathing I could hear? I wasn’t sure. My heart was racing like crazy and so many thoughts flooded my head I felt dizzy.

No, she can’t die. Please don’t let her die!

I couldn’t help feeling guilty that I hadn’t been there when she needed me, even though I had been dropping in every day to do her washing and cleaning.

‘Hold on in there, Mum,’ I whispered through the door. ‘You can make it, I know you can.’

Tears filled my eyes as I heard a distinct, low-pitched moan. She was alive.

* * *

One of the ambulance men managed to get his arm through the crack and shift her so that they could get in without breaking the door down. They gave her oxygen and she regained a groggy kind of consciousness. I stood, useless, a huge lump in my throat and sadness engulfing me.

It was at that moment I realized that it was finally time to let loose all the dark childhood memories I had suppressed for decades. The woman lying crumpled on the floor and fighting for every breath had made my childhood a living hell. Now I knew I was in no way ready for her death, because while she was still alive I might be able to force her to answer the questions that had plagued me throughout my adult life.

What had I done to make her hate me so much that she did so many cruel things to me? Did she remember all the times she almost killed me? Why did she allow me to be a victim of terrible abuse? Why didn’t Dad or any other family member protect me from her? Why did I still feel a responsibility towards her and long for her to show me some affection, despite all that she had put me through?

As my mother was lifted into the ambulance, I knew that I didn’t have much time left to find out.

What crime had I committed? Why had she punished me, endlessly and thoroughly and with spite and cruelty, from the day I was born?

Chapter 1

Muriel Pittam was never really cut out to be a housewife and mother.

She was the second of Charles and Elsie Pittam’s four daughters, and judging from the photographs in the family albums, she was much prettier than her sisters. From the way she looks at the camera, you can tell that she knows she is cute and is challenging you to acknowledge it. The Pittams were not rich – Grandpa Pittam was a watch and clock repairer – but it’s obvious from the pictures of little Muriel in her pretty dresses and ballet tutus that she didn’t want for anything.

By the time she was in her twenties, Muriel Pittam was an absolute stunner, and she knew it. The photographs in the family album show her as a glamorous young blonde. In one picture she is leaning against a gate in a two-piece suit with a tightly belted waist and high-heeled shoes that must have taken her well over the six-foot mark. In another, she’s wearing a smart floral dress with a fitted bodice and flared skirt. There’s even one of her posed on a rock like a mermaid, wearing a bikini. Bikinis were only invented in 1947, the year after the A-bomb was tested on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Muriel must be wearing one of the first on the market.

All through my childhood, Mum often harked back to the glory days of her youth, when she worked as a seamstress and part-time model.

‘I used to make ball gowns, you know. Suits, day dresses, coats, wedding dresses, all of them hand sewn,’ she would say. ‘I worked for Isabel’s in Birmingham, where the fashionable ladies shopped. The wife of the head of Woolworths got her clothes there. And Arthur Askey’s wife. And I modelled. I had a perfect figure,’ she boasted. ‘Five foot eleven with a twenty-three-inch waist. My skin was flawless and photographers used to say I had the best profile they’d ever seen. There were photos of me modelling hats in the Daily Mirror.’

Young and gorgeous, Muriel Pittam had no problem attracting men. Over the years she often boasted to me about all the suitors she’d had and the marriage proposals she’d received and I’m sure it was all true. I saw at firsthand how she flirted with every man she came in contact with, from the plumber to her brothers-in-law. She obviously had the knack of twisting men round her little finger, with a shimmy of her slender hips and a coy smile. So when the youthful and less experienced Derrick Casey got within her sights – well, he didn’t stand a chance.

My father was engaged to a girl named Margery Wyatt when his elder sister Audrey brought home Muriel, her friend from the tennis club, for tea one day. The Caseys owned a very successful electro-plating business in Birmingham and Derrick already earned a good salary from it, so to Muriel’s eyes he must have seemed a good catch. The Caseys’ imposing house stood in several acres of grounds and they had a gardener and housekeeper to help run it. Thomas Casey was well connected as a prominent member of the local Conservative party and a leading figure in the Anglican Church. By contrast, the Pittams lived in a semi-detached house in a working-class area and had very little social life outside its four walls. It was obvious that Derrick was Muriel’s way out of a life as a seamstress and into a respectable and comfortable upper-middle-class life, so using her intelligence, her wiles and her physical charms, she set out to win his heart.

A lot of other men Dad’s age were called up to fight in the Second World War, but Derrick hadn’t been because he had a shattered kneecap after a cricket ball injury which left him with a permanent limp and unable to straighten his left leg. He still loved to play sports – golf, cricket, snooker – and he was also a great reader, particularly fond of Shakespeare and poetry. He looks unbearably young in photos of that time – plump-cheeked, dark-eyed, hair not yet receding but already wearing his customary shirt and tie in every shot. He’s the kind of man any young girl would have been proud to take home to their parents: upstanding and respectable, with a nice face without being conventionally handsome. Muriel’s fashion-model looks must have completely turned his head. In a matter of weeks, he broke off his engagement to Margery and asked Muriel to marry him instead, and she accepted straight away.

I remember once gazing at Mum’s engagement ring, a square-cut sapphire set in white gold and surrounded by little diamonds. I asked if I could try it on and she snapped, ‘No, you cannot. I had to work hard enough to get this ring and no one else is having it now.’

Who knows what kind of person Muriel pretended to be to enchant young Derrick Casey? The modelling shots she kept so carefully in the back of our albums show her statuesque and proud, her long neck and sculpted face a perfect foil for little pillbox hats with feathers on top, cartwheel straw hats or classic black toques. She’s slim as a gazelle but despite her beauty and elegance, she looks hard. You wouldn’t mess around with her.

No doubt she was sweetness itself in the run-up to her wedding and I suspect it was now that Muriel affected her act as a well-brought-up, church-going Christian girl. The Pittams weren’t religious at all, but the Caseys were staunch believers. It was important for Muriel to seem like the right sort of girl if she were going to be accepted as a member of the family and win Derrick’s affections. He was very devout, and often helped out at church fêtes and charitable events. No doubt Muriel seemed just as pious, although later, once she was safely married, she would dispense with formal religion and turn her own idea of God into a particularly dreadful weapon in her well-equipped arsenal.

Muriel and Derrick got married in 1941. The wedding photos are posed studio shots showing Mum with her hair swept up into a high style while she wears a dress of shimmering floor-length satin. She doesn’t smile in any of them but I can read a glint of triumph in her expression. She hadn’t just married into money; the Caseys were also very well connected socially. Now she could give up work and take her place in society as Mrs Derrick Casey, enjoying the dances and functions that they were invited to as a couple. The photos show her enjoying the fruits of her marriage: she’s never in the same outfit twice and the albums are full of pictures of my parents partying and socializing, relaxing on the beach, or standing in front of Dad’s brand new Ford motor car. Muriel, with her modelling background, is always camera-conscious, adopting a pose of some kind, with hair flicked back and lips pouting. They look like everyone’s idea of the glamour couple – young, attractive, well-off and in love.

* * *

In 1949, Muriel’s success seemed complete. She was blessed with the arrival of a baby, my brother Nigel. In the family photographs, he is an angelic-looking little thing, with white-blond hair and a shy smile. Mum holds him on her knee, looking at him and smiling, her attitude relaxed.

It’s a different story in the pictures that follow. In those, she holds a plump, ruddy-skinned, scowling baby. She never looks at it and there’s an obvious look of disgust on her face. She resembles one of those people who secretly loathe babies and who try to hide their dismay after someone has plonked one down on their lap. She is angry, tightlipped and bored. The baby she is holding is me.

I arrived in 1950, the year after my brother, and it seems that right from the start, my mother was displeased with me. In my baby pictures, even the earliest ones, I appear nervous and uncomfortable. I’m not smiling in any of the photos, except one where I’m being cuddled by Nan Casey, Dad’s mother. I look wary and uncomfortable and often on the point of tears. What had happened to make me like that?

‘You were such a cry-baby,’ I remember Mum saying. ‘Nothing I did was ever good enough for you.’

* * *

Any young mother who has had two babies in quick succession might feel stressed and possibly resentful. In Mum’s case, she claimed she had given up her dreams of success as a top model in exchange for two wriggling, crying babies. Her previously bright and buzzing social life was abruptly stopped – no more carefree evenings dancing and drinking with friends when there were two young children needing babysitters. Her whole life was now dominated by her routine at home with us. It must suddenly have seemed as though she’d picked a very short straw.

But thousands of young mothers had the same experience as they adapted to their new lives caring for children and a home. They didn’t become what my mother became, and their children didn’t suffer what I was to endure at the hands of the woman who was supposed to love me best in the world. Something in my mother was so bitter and resentful that she became evil. It’s a strong word, but I can’t think of any other way to describe what she did.

The danger signs were there from the very earliest days, when Nigel and I were still very young.

My first serious injury occurred when I was eighteen months old. Mum had left me on a bed and I rolled off on to the floor, breaking my leg. That was the story, anyhow. But although I have no memory of what happened, I do remember our house. The bedrooms were thickly carpeted and the beds not high off the floor. I was a plump, well- padded little thing. Would a roll from a low bed on to a soft carpet have been enough to break my leg? There were no witnesses, so I’ll never know.

There was a witness to another incident, though. Aunt Audrey told me that she glanced into the bedroom one night when Nigel was just one year old to see Mum holding a pillow over his face as he thrashed and writhed around.

‘Muriel, what on earth are you doing?’ she cried, rushing in to pull the pillow away.

Mum gave her a sharp look. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way to get him to stop crying,’ she said. ‘You know how I can’t stand listening to them cry.’

‘But he’s just a baby! You could kill him!’

Audrey said that Nigel’s breathing was very shallow and there was a blue tinge to his lips. Muriel shrugged and didn’t seem to take it seriously. Needless to say, Audrey made sure she never left any of her own children alone with Mum from that point on.

These things occurred before I was old enough to have any conscious memories. Once I do begin to remember, from around the time I was two years old, then the nightmare begins.

Chapter 2

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.

Chapter 3

One 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.

Chapter 4

Every 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.

Chapter 5

While 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.

Chapter 6

There 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.

Chapter 7

There 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.

Chapter 8

I have a clear memory of my first day at St Peter’s primary school in Bentley Heath, aged five. Dad dropped me off at the classroom and gave me a kiss goodbye, telling me to ‘be a good girl’. I slunk inside, desperately trying to fade into the background and avoid being noticed. I had no social skills whatsoever. I didn’t know how to talk to other children, or how to play with them, and I used to hide from grown-ups I didn’t know. After a slow start, my speech was still less fluent than that of my contemporaries and I often had trouble expressing myself.

Nigel had already been at St Peter’s for a year but he hadn’t talked about it much so I had no idea what to expect. One thing worried me in particular. I’d heard that you had to put your hand up if you wanted to go to the toilet and then wait for the teacher to give you permission. What if the teacher didn’t see me? Or I couldn’t hold it in long enough? I was petrified that I might wet myself at school and all the children and teachers would be able to see what a baby I was.

Of course, it happened frequently in the early days because I was too frightened to put my hand up and ask. Mum was incensed when she got a phone call from the school asking if she could drop off some spare pairs of pants for me to change into. I got a severe beating for that.

I was still quite a stocky child, with reddish chubby cheeks and light brown hair that I wore in bunches – certainly not cute or angelic-looking. I totally believed Mum when she told me that I was fat and ugly and no one would ever love me because I was unloveable. Rather than risk rejection by my peers, I kept well away; but still some cruel classmates would tease me from time to time, shouting ‘Wee-wee face, smelly girl, dirty girl!’

Nigel was more confident than me and had a little crowd of friends of his own, but we would always eat lunch together, and we’d walk to and from school together along a gully that led straight up to our back garden. Breaktimes in the playground were difficult and I stood on my own near the door back into the school. It was a kind of defence mechanism. I felt safer being near a door because it meant I could escape, although I hated having my back to the door because I had no idea who might be sneaking up on me.

I found the lessons hard that first year at school. It took me a long time to understand that letters formed words that you could read, and I had especial trouble understanding that some words that sounded the same could have more than one spelling and more than one meaning – for example, to, two and too. I grew to like sums, though. There was something satisfyingly controllable about numbers that appealed to me. I understood how they worked. They didn’t have different meanings and outcomes; two plus two was always four.

Probably part of my timidity at school was due to a fear of anyone finding out what a bad girl I was. Mum had impressed on me very strongly that I had to prevent teachers or other children seeing any cane marks or bruises on my skin when we got changed for PE, and if anyone commented on a cut or a bruise I was to say that I fell over playing in the garden. She drummed into me over and over again that if they found out how horrible I was at home then they would all hate me, and I really believed that was true. I was a hateful person. I tried not to be but I was. I yearned for love and friendship, to be able to join the games of skipping and the groups huddled giggling in the corner. But if I let anyone close, they might find out the secret about how evil I really was.

There was a positive side to being at school all day, though, in that I wasn’t spending so many hours in Mum’s company, so I didn’t get on her nerves quite as much. I think she got back some of her former social life and was able to meet friends once we were out of the house during the day. At any rate, I wasn’t getting punished so frequently and this made me hopeful that I could at last make her love me.

* * *

On Mother’s Day, just after my sixth birthday, we were embroidering tray cloths to take home as presents for our mums. Our sewing skills were very limited but I attacked mine with a determination to make it the most beautiful cloth ever so I could show Mum how much I loved her. Sewing was her great skill and surely she would be proud of me if I was good at it as well? A nice teacher saw the effort I was making and helped me with it, and the end result was very pretty. It said Happy Mother’s Day in the middle (the teacher did that bit) and there were little bows and flowers and kisses all around and curly decorative corners. I took it home that day, apprehensive but sure that Mum would be pleased with such a lovely present.

‘Mum, I made you something,’ I said as I handed it over.

She peered at it. ‘What kind of a mess is that?’ she demanded, pointing to a bit at the edge where I’d sucked the material, causing it to fray; the teacher had cut it at an angle to try to disguise it. ‘These stitches are all uneven,’ Mum continued, ‘and I don’t know why you chose those colours.’ She flipped up the lid of the kitchen wastebin and threw it in. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ she said. ‘What would I want with that?’

It was a huge blow but the little defiant core in me was not going to give up on something I’d worked so hard at. As soon as Mum left the kitchen, I sneaked that tray cloth out of the bin and hid it in my knickers. I was nervous as I ate tea, knowing that I would get into trouble if she found out. If Mum decided to cane me for anything and I had to pull my pants down, she’d see straight away. Fortunately she didn’t cane me that day and as I got undressed at bedtime I managed to sneak the tray cloth into a secret hiding place in my bedroom. There was a gap underneath my wardrobe at a point where the shelves came down, hidden behind a little plinth. I put the tray cloth in there and next time Dad took me to Nan Casey’s I brought it along and presented it to her instead.

‘Vanessa, it’s beautiful. I can’t believe you did such a lovely piece of work as this. Are you sure it’s for me? Thank you so much, darling.’ She covered me with hugs and kisses as any normal mother might have done.

* * *

The Caseys were great animal lovers, who kept two dogs – a red setter called Rusty and a dachshund called Fritz. I’d been begging Dad to let me have a pet but Mum had vetoed it, saying she would be the one who would have to clear up after it. Towards the end of my first year at school, though, Dad came home one night saying he had a surprise for me, and he produced a cute little white bunny rabbit with a twitchy nose and dark, sensitive eyes. I loved it on sight. It was the best present I’d ever had.

‘I’m going to build a hutch in the garden,’ Dad explained, ‘and it will be your responsibility to keep it clean, and to bring out food and fresh water every day. Do you think you can manage that?’

‘Yes, yes!’ I cried.

‘What are you going to call him?’ he asked.

I thought for a moment and said ‘Whirly.’ I’ve got no idea why – it was just a word that came into my head, but Whirly he became.

I was assiduous at looking after Whirly. Dad brought me bags of straw and sawdust and rabbit food every weekend and Mrs Plant would let me have carrot tops and vegetable peelings to feed him. I would sit for hours on end talking to Whirly, stroking and playing with him, telling him all about my life. I felt calm and content out there by the rabbit hutch. It was one of the few places in my life where I did.

Chapter 9

By the age of six I had come to accept the fact that I heard voices in my head. I found them comforting now, in contrast to the terror they had inspired when I first heard them in my bedroom at night. The eyes had become shadowy faces that danced on darkened walls, in and out of the curtains. They began to appear in the daytime as well. Sometimes they urged me to be rebellious, like the time I told Grandma Pittam I didn’t like her, but most of the time they seemed to give me good advice and help me to stay out of trouble.

‘Keep out of your Mum’s way,’ they would say, or ‘Pick up that block from the carpet before she sees it’, or ‘Don’t argue back – it will only make things worse.’

I told Dad about the voices one time and he seemed very concerned about it. ‘You should tell them to go away,’ he advised.

‘Why do the voices always talk to me when Mummy’s going to be cruel?’ I asked in all innocence.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked sharply, and I remembered that it had been a huge mistake to tell tales on Mum in the past.

I said, ‘Sometimes Mummy’s not very nice to me when you’re not there. Can’t you stay at home? Please, Daddy.’

He frowned and explained that he had to go to work to pay the bills. ‘But I’m sure Mummy’s only cross when you’ve been naughty. You just have to try harder to be a good girl, Lady Jane.’

Mum hated it if I mentioned the voices in my head to her. One night before I went to bed she took some small pieces of cotton wool and forced them inside my ears as far as they would go. ‘That should stop your stupid voices,’ she snapped. She claimed that sometimes I got a distant, glazed look on my face as though I was seeing something or listening to someone far far away, and it drove her to distraction.

When I told Nan Casey about the voices, I got quite a different response.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she told me. ‘There is nothing to fear.’ Then she said something that to me at the time seemed very strange. ‘Your biggest threat is the people who are on this earth, not those who aren’t. They can’t hurt you.’

It was the first inkling I got that the voices came from real people who weren’t on this earth, but the idea didn’t scare me as much as it might have because I knew that, nine times out of ten, they were on my side, trying to protect me. Most were kind and caring, but they usually all had different opinions so it could be hard to decide which ones to trust.

* * *

It was Nan Casey who noticed that my hearing was deteriorating, to the extent that I sometimes couldn’t hear someone who was speaking across the room from me. At school I often failed to understand the teacher’s instructions and I was too shy to put my hand up to ask for them to be repeated, so I’d get into trouble for not doing the work correctly.

I hadn’t been to a doctor before that I could remember, although I suppose I must have seen one when my leg was broken at eighteen months. Nan Casey nagged and nagged Mum to get my hearing checked until at last she agreed. We went to a GP first, who shone a light in my ears and tutted. Using a pair of tweezers he reached in and extracted a small, hardened wad of cotton wool.

‘Really, Mrs Casey,’ he said. ‘She shouldn’t be putting things in her ears. It can cause a lot of damage.’

‘Honestly,’ Mum remonstrated with me. ‘How many times have I told you not to do that?’

‘But …’ I began, but her glare warned me to shut up.

The doctor looked at my throat next and remarked that my tonsils were very inflamed and that he would refer me to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Mum was not best pleased but there was nothing she could do about it. They’d have been suspicious if she hadn’t taken me for the ENT appointment. The specialist I saw decided straight away that I needed an operation to remove my tonsils and adenoids, and that this would improve my hearing.

When the day came Mum took me into hospital, and I remember walking down the long, dim corridors that smelled of antiseptic. I had no idea what we were doing there and felt very intimidated. In the ward there were rows of narrow iron beds covered in starched white cotton sheets. A nurse in a pristine blue and white uniform and a big cap that was pinned at the back showed us to the bed I would occupy for the next three or four days. Mum watched over me as I got undressed and pulled on a hospital gown then clambered between the sheets. The ward seemed very noisy, with clanking trolleys and metal instruments over the buzz of voices. I could smell boiled cabbage, my least favourite food, which must have been served at lunch that day. It seemed like a bad omen.

I looked up at Mum in terror, desperately seeking reassurance, but instead she folded my clothes into the locker and said ‘I’ll be off, then.’ She left without giving me a kiss, a hug or a kind word. I thought I was being left there for good, that she would never come back, and part of me wished this were the case. Other children had their parents sitting by their bedsides, telling them stories, playing cards, or letting them colour in with crayons. I felt very alone. The nurses were perfectly kind but they were always in a hurry with too much to do.

I have vivid memories of being wheeled down a corridor to the operating theatre and being lifted from the trolley on to a bed. A man in a white coat put a black rubber mask over my nose and mouth and told me to count backwards from ten to one. The sweet smell of gas got stronger and I think I only made it to eight before I conked out.

When I opened my eyes, the light was very bright. I felt thirsty and my throat felt as though it was full of broken glass. I asked a passing nurse if I could have a drink and she said no, that I was to go back to sleep again, but she would bring me something nice later on.

At teatime, when they brought the meals round, I was given jelly and ice cream – a huge treat. Mum never served puddings at home. I’d only had jelly and ice cream a couple of times before at Nan Casey’s house. It hurt to swallow but I could let the ice cream melt in my mouth and trickle down my inflamed throat in a cool stream.

Evening visiting time came and I could see that every other child on the ward had a visitor except me. During my entire stay, neither Mum nor Dad came to visit me. I guessed that Dad must be too busy with work but I still scanned the groups of parents entering the ward as visiting hour began, hoping against hope that he might be there. I didn’t have any books or toys with me but the nurses brought me some picture books to look at.

A few nurses asked where my parents were. Did they live very far away? And I felt embarrassed saying, ‘No, Bentley Heath’, as though I should be apologizing for their non-appearance.

On the day I was discharged I was told to dress myself. Mum and Dad couldn’t pick me up, they’d told the hospital, so I was sent home in an ambulance, which was quite exciting – although I was disappointed they didn’t turn on the siren. Back home, the ambulance man walked me to the front door, which was opened by Mrs Plant, the cleaner.

‘Oh you poor dear,’ she said, throwing her arms around me. ‘What a rough time you’ve had. Come on in and you can lie on the sofa and tell me all about it.’

She was so sweet to me that morning that it almost upset me more, because the contrast was so great between her and my mother. If the hospital stay did nothing else, it gave me a glimpse into how other families lived, and the fact that mine was quite different from other people. This was something I would continue to ponder in the coming years, without having the power to do anything about it.

In my head, the voices were murmuring and I could make out what some of them were saying. They were wondering where my father was and when my mother would be home. I lay and listened to them and wondered what it all meant.

Chapter 10

During the school holidays, we were under Mum’s feet again and I could tell she was irked by this. She’d got used to having a bit of freedom from us kids but it had been taken away from her for the next few weeks. She was still working as a dressmaker and often had to travel into Birmingham by train to buy fabric or haberdashery, so over the holidays she would have to take us with her. Usually she left Nigel and me to play at Dad’s office in the electroplating business, where Granddad Casey, Uncle Graham and Dad all made a fuss of us. I remember the sulphurous, rotten-egg smell of the place, which must have been a by-product of one of the processes there. Among other things, they electro-plated nibs for old-fashioned pens and Dad used to give me lots of extra ones to keep. Granddad kept a spinning top there as well as at home and we would play with that, or they gave us pens and paper to do drawings, or we were allowed to make long chains with paperclips.

This was infinitely preferable to being dragged round the shops with Mum. She never actually let me come into shops with her. Instead I would be given strict instructions to stand outside the door without moving and wait for her to come out again. They were usually fabric shops and she said I might touch the rolls of fabric with my sticky fingers and get her into trouble. I remember being very scared on these occasions, with so many strange adults milling around, and sometimes she seemed to take hours.

During the Easter holidays after my sixth birthday, I got a huge fright on the journey into town. Nigel wasn’t with us because he was playing at a friend’s house. Mum and I got on the train at Bentley Heath as usual. I was being as good as possible but I could sense she was in a testy mood. I’d already had a clip round the ear for dawdling as we walked to the station. We got on board and sat down in a carriage of our own. Soon after the train started moving Mum got up, saying ‘Back in a moment. Stay right there.’

I sat neatly as I’d been told, with my hands on my lap, feet swinging back and forwards without reaching the ground. I looked out the window then glanced back at the corridor to see if Mum was returning. There was no sign of her. The train pulled into the next station and more people got on but still Mum didn’t come back. I was so little and everyone else was so big. With mounting anxiety I got up and went to look up and down the corridor, but there was no sign of her. What if she forgot all about me and got off the train without me?

I began to hear voices in my head. ‘You’re lost, Vanessa, what are you going to do?’ ‘Tell someone where you live,’ came another voice. I could remember our address – 39 Bentley Road – so I decided that if Mum didn’t come back I would have to approach a guard at Birmingham Station and tell him I was lost. The voices continued, sometimes a mass of whispers like a breeze blowing through the leaves on a poplar tree, so indistinct I couldn’t make out the words, then one voice would get through: ‘Don’t worry’, or ‘You’re lost’, or ‘It’ll be OK’. I had no idea who or what they were but I was getting used to hearing whispers in my head, usually when I was upset about something, and they didn’t scare me any more.

The journey took around 45 minutes and by the time the train pulled into Birmingham New Street, where it terminated, I was tearful and shaking. I realized that I didn’t have a ticket and the guard might shout at me for being on the train without one, as we’d seen happening to a boy some weeks earlier. I waited until all the other passengers had got off then I climbed down the steps on to the platform and looked around for a guard I could talk to. I’d just identified one and was nervously walking up to him when all of a sudden Mum appeared and grabbed me by the arm, her fingers digging in and bruising me.

‘There you are! How dare you go wandering off when I told you to stay still!’

My eyes full of tears, I looked up at her face and I could see that far from being angry, she thought the whole thing was a huge joke.

‘I thought you’d forgotten about me,’ I said, the tears spilling over.

‘If only I could,’ she said spitefully. ‘If only I could.’

She had obviously left me on my own just to give me a fright, and it certainly worked.

The guard came over to us. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

‘I don’t suppose you’d like a little girl?’ Mum said. ‘You can have this one, but I warn you that she’s very naughty. Maybe you can send her to work in the coal mines.’

‘She’s got pretty blue eyes.’ The guard looked down at me sympathetically.

‘Nonsense. Look at her! She’s ugly as sin!’ Mum marched off with me trailing in her wake, trying to grab hold of the fashionable swing coat she was wearing. I begged her to lift me up, scared of losing her again, but she ignored me. A tearful, snotty little girl trying to cling on to her favourite coat must have wound her up no end.

* * *

I wonder if she might have liked a pretty, sociable daughter she could show off to strangers like a fashion accessory, or if she would have preferred not to have had kids at all? All mothers have their days when the kids drive them crazy, with whining and being clingy and getting in the way. However, for some reason my very existence seemed to drive Mum crazy. She just couldn’t bear me being around. At least once a week, usually more, God would tell her about some crime I had committed and I would be beaten and locked in the spider cupboard until bedtime.

* * *

When Nigel and I had been out at school all day, mealtimes became a flashpoint, an opportunity for Mum to take out the frustrations of her day. She played a despicable trick one night when I’d just finished eating a stew she’d made for dinner.

‘Did you enjoy that?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said warily.

‘Was it delicious? One of your favourite meals ever?’

‘Em, yes.’

‘That’s interesting.’ Mum’s eyes glinted. ‘Do you realize you’ve just been eating Whirly? I made a rabbit stew.’

Nigel reacted first, spitting out the last bite in his mouth. ‘Ewwwuuh, that’s disgusting.’

I jumped to my feet to run out into the back garden but Mum extended a hand to stop me. ‘What do you say?’

‘Please may I leave the table?’ I mumbled, and she gave permission. I rushed straight out to the rabbit hutch and was devastated to find it empty. There was just a hollow in the straw where Whirly had been sleeping when I looked in on him that morning. The stew rose in my throat and I retched violently, and began to cry. Mum came out to watch, and Nigel followed close behind.

‘How could you?’ I demanded through my tears.

‘You silly girl. It was only a stupid rabbit.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that, Mum. It’s wrong. That was Nessa’s rabbit, not yours,’ Nigel complained.

‘Shut up! I’m fed up with both of you. Get out of my sight. Go to your beds now.’

I lay in bed wide-awake, thinking of the bits of Whirly in my stomach and feeling utterly sickened. I remembered his twitchy nose and trusting eyes and the way he liked his head being stroked and I burst into a fresh wave of crying. I hoped against hope that Dad would come home that night so that I could tell him – he had bought Whirly for me after all – but he didn’t appear. I hardly got a wink of sleep and crawled out of bed the next morning weighed down by grief.

I was sitting at the breakfast table unable to swallow a morsel of my cereal when Nigel burst in the back door looking excited. ‘Nessa, guess what? Whirly’s back. Come and see.’

We ran out to the hutch and sure enough, there he was, nose twitching, looking up to see if I had brought any carrot tops.

Mum was laughing her head off when we trooped back indoors. ‘Got you!’ she crowed. ‘You should have seen your face when you thought you’d eaten him. That was hilarious!’

She was triumphant after each malicious victory of this kind. Far from infuriating her in the way I used to as a pre-schooler, I got the impression that she couldn’t wait for me to get home from school so she could inflict her next sadistic punishment on me. Caning didn’t give her the same satisfaction because although it still hurt, it didn’t inspire the abject terror in me that it used to when I was younger. When she locked me in the spider cupboard now, I knew that the spiders weren’t going to eat me up. I could just sit quietly, listening to the voices in my head while thinking my own thoughts. It took more ingenuity on Mum’s part to make me cry.

But her next punishment would be the worst one she had ever inflicted on me.

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