1
Counting and Corners
One, two, three, four. I’m staring hard at the ceiling, following a long crack in the paint up to the small plastic lightshade. One, two, three, four cracks on the ceiling. I keep counting. I do this all the time. I do this every night, especially while I’m waiting. I do this whenever things are going on, like they are right now. One, two, three four: edges of the door frame, corners of the room. My eyes run along the lines: counting, counting, counting, counting. I am in a tiny dark box room. A plywood partition runs down the centre. One, two, three, four. I know they are in the other half of the room, but I can’t see anything, only hear. It happens every night – well, it’s only about six o’clock, so it’s not properly night, but it is bedtime. No messing. Light comes in through the cracks between the thin pulled curtains. Navy blue. I’m not allowed to sit up and look, so I flatten myself down. Really flat. Hardly breathing. I’m supposed to go to sleep. The bed feels lumpy. I close my eyes tightly. All I can see are orange swirls behind my eyes, purple and blue colours, weird shapes. The shapes are scary but they are also interesting: I follow them, opening and closing my eyes, experimenting. Counting to four at the same time as I blink.
Suddenly I hear the sound of rough material being pulled. She’s holding him down. There’s a grunt and a whimper. A thick white material strap is fixed to the side of the bed on hooks. I can hear him sobbing quietly behind the partition as she straps him down to the bed in her nightly ritual. I hear her tying and clicking things. I hold my breath. I tighten my body, flattening it even further on the bed, trying to disappear. She is spitting venom at him, and I hear: ‘Be quiet, you little bastard.’
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. ‘Stop whining, will you, or I’ll give you something to whine about.’ I work my fingers under the thin blanket. I’m cold. I’m always cold. I’m hungry, too. Always hungry. My stomach makes strange growling noises and I try to flatten it down, holding my breath harder, scared she’ll hear. I work my fingers harder: pressing thumb to index, to middle, to ring, to little: one, two, three, four.
Thwack! There’s the sound of a large woman’s hand on young bare skin. ‘I’m not changing you now, you little bastard, I’ve enough work to do.’ I hold my breath now, counting faster. William is whimpering very quietly. I know he will be lying in wet clothes now and I’m sure I can smell that stinky sharp odour that wafts around our room at night despite the cold. I’m scared of what comes next and my heart starts to thump. It feels like it’s jumping in my chest. When she’s done with one, she usually moves on to the next: me. I hold my breath, flatten my body, work my fingers. Please no, please no. I look at the flowery patterns on the wallpaper: faded blue flowers, all tightly packed together in repeating swirls. They make me dizzy. I count one, two, three, four flowers, in little groups of four, with tight little leaves. One, two, three, four. Suddenly a dark shape appears around the partition end – there’s a gap between it and the door and I gulp in air as I tense.
‘What are you still doing awake, you little bitch?’ She moves towards me, and I make out tight, grey wavy hair in the gloom; a sharp nose, beady eyes, a pursed mouth. There’s a whiff of vinegar and coal tar soap. She scares me stiff. I’m not breathing, not moving. I’m a board. She’s like the demented wicked queen in that film. For a moment I freeze. I’m expecting the hand across the face, and I don’t want one. I can hear William moaning next door still, and I know it winds her up. So I’m good. Very good. I blink at her over the top of the thin, rough grey blanket and try to look angelic and appealing. Trying to be small. I can’t speak. I’m too scared. I stay still, hardly breathing, flatter by the minute: disappearing into the lumpy mattress. Or so I hope.
Suddenly she is looming over me, thin and beaky, like a pecking bird – her nasty breath on my face, intense and terrifying. There’s something in her huge hand. I look at her bushy eyebrows; white and brown spiky slugs. ‘Sit up!’ she barks, yanking me upright. Suddenly her hand is at my mouth, trying to push something in – it’s like a large green jelly bean. She forces it into my mouth: ‘Swallow.’ I can’t. I feel a big dry finger push something through my lips. I half choke. ‘C’mon, swallow.’ Her other hand goes into her floral pinny pocket and produces a brown bottle – I recognise the cough medicine. She rips the top off. ‘Drink. Wash it down.’
I know better than to resist. She often gives me her ‘special’ medicine. I don’t like it; I hate the taste, and it makes me feel weird, but I have no choice. My mouth fills with the gloopy pungent pink stuff and I gag. The pill gets lodged; it’s like swallowing a pebble. Finally I manage to swallow it by staying calm and counting – fast: one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. She doesn’t know I’m doing this, but her piercing eyes are on me and she is impatiently screwing the lid back on the bottle. I have to be good and keep calm.
‘Lie down, you little bitch.’
I slide down thankfully. I can still hear William, although he’s just murmuring now, behind the partition in his sodden smelly pyjamas.
Yank! I suddenly feel the white material strap going across my chest. Yank! She tightens it hard. Click. It’s like an iron bar across me. I can’t move. I can hardly breathe now, it’s so tight, but I know better than to complain. If I want to pee I won’t be able to get up, and I’ll just have to do it in my old stripy pyjamas and then spend the night lying in wet. I’m beginning to feel a sort of cotton wool feeling in my head and mouth as she moves towards the door of our room.
‘Now, I don’t want to hear a peep of out you,’ she spits towards me with eagle intensity. ‘Or you – d’y’hear?’ she snaps at William, who is now silent finally. I start counting again, looking at the blurry flowers on the wall. My fingers are trapped by my sides, going numb. I’m pinned to the bed. A strange heaviness comes over me and I’m soon totally gone, sucked into swirling, sickly blackness.
This is my life. It has been my life for as long as I can remember. I’m about three or four years old (I don’t know exactly when my birthday is, as we never celebrate it. I’m told I was born in 1967, probably in June – it was called the summer of love.) I live in a place called Oxford, in a pleasant-looking house with a garden on the edge of town, near where they make cars, with an orchard out the back. It sounds lovely. In fact, from the outside, it looks lovely – neat and tidy with a little gravel drive. You would never know from looking at the outside what horrible things go on inside. It looks just like the other houses – ordinary, homely and suburban. Yet behind the neat net curtains the life going on in that house – my life – is absolute hell. William’s life is also hell. Actually, his is worse. It’s been hell for as long as I can remember.
My ‘mother’ is called Barbara. She is not my ‘real’ mother, as I was adopted in 1968. Barbara says I w
as fostered by her and Ian (her husband) when I was just six weeks old. She tells me my real mother threw me away, so she kindly took me in and I should be very grateful. She already had my adopted brother, William, who was also unwanted. ‘Mum’ tells us we are both very lucky to be with them, the Taylors, as most people wouldn’t take in scruffy unwanted children like us. She tells us we have chips on our shoulders, like all thrown away children. I look at my shoulders sometimes, trying to see the chips – does she mean potato chips? I am confused. Often. But I know better than to answer back or question anything because Barbara, or ‘Mum’, is not to be crossed. Ever. She rules our house with an iron fist in an iron glove.
Ian, or ‘Dad’, as we call him, is a quiet, shy man and is like a shadow in the background who says and does very little. He seems to obey Barbara totally. We are big trouble. A lot of work. We make her life hell. She tells us this over and over. Of course, what we don’t know at the time, and are not to know until a lot later, is that when the Taylors took me in they were already under investigation by the authorities for child cruelty to William, who had been there for two years.
Barbara liked to apply tough discipline. Very tough. William often had black bruises on his face and body, and cuts and weals on his arms, legs and back. It seems that several neighbours reported this to the local authority, but in 1968 there was a shortage of places for children like us. And there were lots of unwanted children. I just thought it was normal to be whacked, slapped and kicked. But we knew we were lucky that Barbara and Ian had found it in their hearts to take in such unwanted, unattractive and unloveable children as us.
Ian worked as an engineer in a local firm, and was good with his hands. However, he didn’t have many words and he seldom stood up to Barbara, although the house belonged to his family and he’d actually lived there all his life. Apparently Ian wasn’t the marrying kind, was nearly forty, and his family worried about him still being single. When a friend said they knew just the woman for him – Barbara – he was pushed into courting her.
Barbara was also a late starter, and had been a nanny to a local well-to-do family (although she had been brought up in a real old-fashioned workhouse and a convent in London). She had a big family from whom she was now largely estranged. As Ian’s family had felt it was time for him to ‘settle down’, being almost middle-aged and still living at home, he thought, Why not? After all, Barbara was seemingly good with children and a housekeeper to boot. It seemed to make sense and was very convenient all round. Once married, in 1960, they decided to try for a child themselves but soon gave up. Either Barbara was too old (she too was nearing forty) or Ian wasn’t that interested in having a family – or wasn’t quite sure of himself with women.
Whatever, they soon settled into a kind of regular married life. Barbara then started fostering ‘unwanted’ children to boost their meagre income and to put into practice the no-nonsense nannying skills she had learnt working for middle-class families earlier in her life. She was paid a fairly good weekly amount per child, which was important to Barbara, as she felt she needed to earn her own money. But she was definitely no jolly Mary Poppins, coming herself from the school of hard knocks.
Interestingly, while the newly married couple tried (a bit faint-heartedly) for their own child, Barbara was bored, needed some cash, and decided to do some local childcare. At first she took in a couple of neighbours’ children after school for tea for an hour or two. Then she befriended a recently widowed man, Sid, who lived at the end of the road. Barbara had walked her dog regularly with Sid’s late wife, Minnie, who had died very suddenly from breast cancer. Sid and Minnie had a six-year-old son, Kevin, and the problem was that Sid was a long-distance lorry driver, not only going off all over the UK, but also to the Continent. His round trips could take up to a week, or even two or three, and Sid was wedded to life on the road. He had no other relatives, and had considered putting Kevin into care.
Barbara came to a casual arrangement with Sid that she and Ian would take Kevin in as a paying guest while his father was on the road. Barbara liked having a project and tried hard to be a proper mum to Kevin, who was very upset at recently losing his own mother, and angry at his dad for being away most of the time. She also wanted to impress Ian that she could be a good mother while they tried for their own baby.
Barbara’s own start in life had been tough, and she hadn’t had good parenting, but she wanted to help Kevin settle in (and she wanted her own cash). After a while it became clear that when Sid came back from a trip he was always exhausted and needed to sleep. Then, in less than forty-eight hours, he would go off again, and gradually Kevin just slipped into being a permanent member of the Taylor household. Ian just accepted it and got on with his job; he did anything to keep Barbara quiet. When she wanted something she had to have it – and Ian just wanted to keep the peace.
The deal was that Sid would pass Barbara a wedge of cash when he came back from his trips, so Kevin moved into the spare room. After nearly a year, Barbara felt she had got the hang of Kevin – she treated him as well as possible, as if he were her own – and then thought she could up her income by fostering more children with the local authority. At the time there was a glut of unwanted children on the council’s books, due to it being the ‘swinging sixties’, so Barbara and Ian took in little William. To the local authority, Barbara just pretended Kevin was theirs; it was easier that way, and nobody checked. Sid was largely out of the picture by then, and only popped in ‘like an uncle’ from time to time when he was back. His visits were always brief, and always upset Kevin, who would get very angry afterwards. He gradually stopped popping in and Kevin was fully absorbed into the Taylors.
When William arrived he was a very troubled child, as he had already been handed round several different pairs of foster parents, some of whom had been too tough. He was two, and Barbara found him challenging from the start. She felt William needed a lot of disciplining (unlike her attitude towards Kevin, which was far softer). She took all her bottled-up anger and frustration out on him, while being ultra-understanding with Kevin, who was often quite provocative. Then, less than a year later, Barbara and Ian were allowed to add me, Louise, a little baby, to her growing family of unwanteds.
Her own baby never appeared, and Barbara was bitter by then that she was probably too old to have a child herself. But she developed an unhealthy split attitude towards her strange brood: she felt sorry for Kevin, and treated him like a little prince; but thought she had to be tough towards William and me, as we were proper unwanteds. Kevin had lost his mum but we were cast-offs. She seemed to worship Kevin, who was a muscly, tough little six-year-old, a bit of a lad. But she mistrusted William and me and disliked us from the start, calling us ‘scum’.
For Kevin, nothing was too much trouble. He was cock of the roost when I came on the scene: he always got what he wanted, when he wanted it. In fact, he had the run of the house, being given the biggest bedroom after the master bedroom, with loads of toys and new clothes, paid for by Sid, who seemed relieved to get the lad off his hands. Ian, however, did not seem very interested in Kevin, and spent a lot of time at work or in his shed or watching TV – he generally kept himself apart from things. He definitely wasn’t cut out for parenthood. He was like a ghostly shadow in our house. Sometimes it felt like Barbara was married to Kevin rather than Ian.
Another strange thing: our kitchen had padlocks on the cupboards, with a big chain through them, but Kevin had a key and he could unlock and eat food whenever he wanted to. Not like me or William. We had to eat what we were given, when we were given it. Kevin would go into the ‘best’ front room (which we weren’t allowed into) with its magnolia walls and dark, red velvet curtains, and watch TV, eating cereal out of a bowl. Sometimes two bowls, full to the brim. But we weren’t allowed to do that. William and I would peek in through the crack in the door, starving hungry and jealous, watching Kevin silently, holding our breath. We would look at each other and nod – sometimes holding hands. We always ha
d to be quiet in case we got into trouble. I knew this from a very early age. As early as I could remember I had to be silent. Be good. Be quiet. Disappear into the cracks in the walls, the lino, the floorboards. Behave. Behave. Behave. But Kevin could be loud, raucous, noisy, galumphing, even violent, and that was fine. He could kick a ball around in the back garden or shout or stomp about and Barbara was fine with that. She’d even laugh. She’d look at him fondly, like she was thinking, My boy – although he wasn’t ‘her boy,’ but she sort of pretended like he was. She never said ‘my girl’ or ‘my boy’ to me and William – it was always ‘little bitch’ or ‘little bastard’. It also wasn’t fair he had new clothes (ours were second hand); he went to school (we often didn’t). He didn’t have to do chores (we did loads of housework). If he was her prince, we were her paupers.
Barbara was always nice to him, as she wanted to keep in with Sid, who handed over the cash, but horrible to us, who didn’t have a parent between us to keep a check on things. She didn’t hit Kevin or say rude words to him. She would stroke his hair, smile at him. Sometimes they would cuddle or even play-fight or wrestle on the carpet. They would laugh and roll about together on the floor. We would stand back in the doorway and watch. If she saw us, she’d snap, ‘What are you looking at, you little bastards?’ and we’d quietly slink away.
Barbara often seemed very nice to people outside of the house – people she met on the street or who came to the door, like the postman – and when she turned on the charm she was altogether unrecognisable, but to William and me she was harsh all the time. If I was out at the shop I would hear her telling a story about someone who did something terrible to a child and she would shake her head and tut-tut. I would stand there and think, But you do that to me. You treat us like that. But I knew better than to say anything. She would hold me hard, with her scrawny fingers digging into my shoulder or wrapped round my arm so tight there would be red fingermarks afterwards. So I would stand there, silently counting: one, two, three, four, pressing my fingers together. Both William and I knew better than to say anything – it wasn’t our place to speak. We would look at each other and wink because we knew she was horrible; it was our secret.
Another strange thing I remember from my earliest days with the Taylors is learning to sit on my potty. I must have been about two or three and, as I peed, I felt this terrible burning on my bottom, like it was on fire; as the water rose up and touched me it burned my private bits. I screamed out and tried to stand up. Barbara appeared and pushed me back down on the potty: ‘Stay there, you stupid bitch.’ Tears were streaming down my face as my thighs and bottom and where I weed were burning with unbelievable pain. I would fear doing a big wee or poo, which made the water rise up. I would tense up, but still she pressed me down on the pink plastic potty, a fierce, grim look on her face: ‘Don’t you dare move.’ Afterwards I’d have large blisters that turned into red sores everywhere, which were painful and running. I would have to sit on the potty for ages, blistered and burning, but after a while I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t be allowed. In any case, there wasn’t any point.