One day Miss Nickerson showed me a magic trick: ‘Look, Louise,’ she said, sitting down next to me, smelling of perfume. ‘If you mix yellow and blue, you get…’ She showed me and, as if by magic, a new colour appeared. ‘Green!’ I said. Wow! It was absolutely fantastic.
Miss Nickerson said, ‘You are really good, Louise. Keep painting.’ I was so pleased, so happy, that I took my painting home to show Barbara and Ian.
‘You’ve got paint on your skirt,’ was all Barbara said. ‘What does th
at place think it’s doing creating more work for me to do?’
My painting lay brightly coloured on the kitchen table being completely ignored. When teatime came, I looked around the kitchen for my painting – if Barbara didn’t want it I would take it upstairs. When I asked she just said, ‘Oh, that, it’s in the dustbin, of course.’ She had already ripped it up and thrown it away.
Barbara seemed to resent me enjoying anything at all, especially school, so she would keep me home. But I wanted to go to school. I wanted to draw and paint with the nice Mrs Nickerson. But Barbara would tell me I was ill. I wasn’t, I was well. I found home horrible and scary. I had loved learning to make green with Miss Nickerson. I liked sitting on the blue carpet in the sun and picking a book off the shelf and leafing through it. I hadn’t learnt to read, I didn’t know my alphabet and I couldn’t write, but I loved drawing and splodging colourful paint onto fresh white paper. It was a joy. I wanted to go to school and I was upset when I couldn’t.
I wandered round the garden, kicking the leaves, picking up stones. Barbara’s eyes were nearly always on me somehow. I would wander about, looking at the clouds scudding by. I would go and see Sean and pass the time with him for a while, and then wander back in case Barbara noticed. Why couldn’t I go to school? It was nice. The grown-ups there were friendly. There was stuff to do, stuff to play with. I began to collect things. I found a little matchbox and put some dead flies inside it. I took the flies and put them in a row inside the box and then hid it in my bedside drawer. I liked seeing them in there, and I wondered if they’d come back to life.
I began to get curious about my body. And one day I also began to collect my own poo. I did a poo and caught it in my hand. It was warm and nice. I would play with it and look at it, and even touch it and squeeze it. It was a bit like clay. I put it on some toilet paper and got another matchbox and put the poo in it, squishing it in. Then I put the matchbox in my pocket and carried it around. I would also put it under my pillow at night, or in other hidey-holes. It was all mine. Then I had another idea, an even better idea. I took some poo, sneaked into Barbara’s bedroom, with my heart in my mouth, and squelched it under her bed. I wasn’t allowed in her bedroom, so I waited until she was at the bottom of the garden, and I squished the poo right up into the corners of her bed, under the mattress. You could hardly see it. It gave me pleasure somehow, and I wondered if it would smell. I imagined it smelling and Barbara not being able to figure out where it was coming from – and for some reason this made me feel happy again. I wanted her to feel upset. Also, I did the vacuuming in the house, so when the poo finally crumbled onto the floor, I got rid of it easily. No trace.
I also crept into the garage, where Ian kept his van at night, and I did a little steaming poo in the corner and then covered it over with stones. I’d watched the cats in the garden do this – poo and then cover it – so I did the same. He would never find it; he would never know. If he found it, he would think it was a cat, or even Topsy. Even if he did think it was me, he would never ‘kill’ me like Barbara; he wouldn’t do anything. I felt a huge sense pleasure in my secret poo game – for some reason it was my great comfort and joy.
5
Torture and Trauma
I hated having my hair washed, although I also hated being smelly. I didn’t have many baths or showers, so I often felt very grimy. However, anything physical that Barbara did with me or William was done with as much roughness as possible. My hair would be washed in the kitchen with Vosene, out of a big green bottle. Barbara would grab me by the arm and bend my head over roughly to check if I needed a wash. It was done brutally and silently, like I was a rag doll. She would pull my hair apart, yanking it from side to side, saying, ‘You filthy little bitch, come here. God, you’re a mess.’ Hair washing happened at the sink, and the water would either be freezing or boiling. She never asked if I was okay, and would never adjust the temperature even if I screamed. I’d just get a kick or a slap and be told to stay still if I didn’t want worse.
When I was small I stood on the horrible blue stool that she bent me over to punish me in the larder, and later I just stood by the sink on a kitchen chair or on tiptoe. She would pour a jug of water over my head and then pour on the Vosene, smelling of strong tar, which would go in my eyes and sting terribly (‘Don’t fuss!’), while she scrubbed and scrubbed, digging her fingers in hard. I would cry and she would hit me with her rolled-up newspaper, or even a wooden pole that she kept in the larder, to shut me up. To finish, she would pour vinegar over my hair and it would go into the cuts on my head that she’d made with her fingernails while washing, and I would shriek.
‘Shut up, you silly bitch, it makes your hair shiny.’
After the hair came the neck scrub. A coarse flannel and carbolic soap was scrubbed on my neck until my skin was scarlet. ‘Stand still,’ she’d bark, and she would crick my neck to one side and then the other and poke in my ears with a matchstick with a bit of cotton wool wrapped round the end as a cheap cotton bud. Out would come wax and she would snarl, ‘You dirty little thing, full of oil and grease; you must be a Jew.’
I hadn’t then learnt what a Jew was but it was obviously a bad thing. Sometimes she’d poke so deep it would hurt and the matchstick would come out covered in blood and I would scream, so I’d get whacked and whacked with the newspaper until I eventually stopped. Then I counted, counted, counted, and waited for it all to end.
Everything Barbara did with us or to us was painful, humiliating or scary. She had an air gun, and was quite obsessed with it. I had no idea why she had it but it was kept in a kitchen cupboard. Kevin also had an air gun, and he would shoot at squirrels and birds, to Barbara’s delight. Sometimes she would set up paper targets on the lawn – little squares of paper on bamboo sticks with round black rings on them – or a person shape drawn on it in black with a bull’s-eye centre. Or she’d put old tin cans along a wall. Barbara and Kevin would stand, legs astride, and shoot at the targets, looking like two toy soldiers on the lawn.
One day William and I were in the garden, hovering around the chicken run, while Barbara and Kevin were doing their target practice, when suddenly I heard William shout, ‘Run, run!’
I looked up to see Barbara aiming her gun straight at us. She started shooting at us, at me, and I screamed. William and I ran as fast as our little legs could take us, still screaming, to the orchard with Barbara following after us, shooting. I could hear the pellets pinging off the tree trunks. I was petrified and we ran to take cover behind Sean’s caravan. I was shaking like a leaf. Sean was on his step, smoking.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked gently. Both William and I were panting and sobbing, but were even more terrified of giving the game away. We just stood, shivering and shaking, hiding behind Sean’s caravan until we felt things were safe. Sean kept asking what was wrong, but I was scared that if I told him what she was doing that she would come and shoot him to shut him up, too, so I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t bear for Sean to die; he was our only place of safety, our only friend.
However, the shooting game was not over now she had the taste for it. From then on Barbara would jump out – especially in the garden, which had been my lovely safe place of escape until then – with a gun, and pretend to shoot me point blank in the head. She would pull the trigger and I would scream while she would laugh. It was really the only time I ever saw her do a full belly laugh. Terrifying us really seemed to give her great pleasure. She would ‘pretend’ to shoot me or William as part of her regular game to keep us silent and obedient. I was terrified she might actually do it one day, especially when she got that scary look in her eyes and her nose and face became hard and pointy.
In fact, one night I was awoken by a creaking in our room. It must have been the middle of the night, as I was usually out for the count for the first part of the night due to the special medicine she gave me. When I came to, I was conscious of a big dark shadow over me – Barbara. In her hand, forced against my temple, was a cold,
hard object: the gun. I froze with absolute fear. I was tied down as usual, and I began to struggle against the strap, this way and that. Was she going to kill me? Right this minute? The gun moved closer to the side of my head and pressed into my flesh.
Barbara whispered, ‘Bang! You’re dead,’ and clicked the trigger. I held my breath and closed my eyes, searching for the golden swirls and purple colours that I could see when I scrunched my eyes up. Was I dead yet? I wasn’t breathing or moving and all was suddenly quiet. Maybe I was dead now. I slowly opened my eyes and she was gone – just like that. I spent the rest of the night wide awake, tied down, counting, counting, counting, lying in a cold, sodden bed, as I had peed myself in sheer animal fear.
Apart from terrifying us daily, and hurting us physically, Barbara was also keen on humiliating us as much as possible, making both of us wear horrible clothes. She would dress me in her horrible old hand-me-down frocks, which were truly hideous. Brown old-lady dresses with orange and yellow flowers, made out of polyester, or even a pale-blue housecoat like cleaners and housewives wore. All my school friends were wearing lovely flowing dresses, cheesecloth shirts and bell-bottom trousers with pretty T-shirts and beads. I looked like a frumpy old lady in second-hand, cut-down clothes and shoes. I wore old smelly anoraks and nasty yellowing cardigans. A shopping trip for me was a visit to the local charity shop, where I would get something very cheap to wear. I also didn’t have proper boots or warm shoes in winter. Barbara got me sandals one winter and I froze. I walked to school and back in these shoes and developed horrible chilblains – big red sores all over my feet, which hurt like hell.
Around October time she would say to me, ‘This is the chilblain time of the year,’ and would put butter on my feet, and two pairs of socks. She would then put a hot-water bottle on them at night and they hurt terribly; they were itchy, swollen and sore. As a consequence, I would have to wear her maroon old-lady slippers to school. My feet were so bloated and wrapped up I could hardly walk. I was humiliated and bullied: ‘What has the Evil One done to you now?’ Or, ‘She’s really ugly and you’re really ugly – look at your ugly feet.’
Barbara would keep me off school for weeks at a time, telling them I had flu when it was actually the chilblains crippling me. When I put proper shoes on I screamed with pain. It was horrendous, and meanwhile my feet were getting worse and worse. Then one day, when I was off from school with either the ‘flu’ or the ‘chilblains’, Barbara made me walk with her and the dog to the local Co-op. It was agony but I was desperate to get out of the house, so I didn’t mind. I hobbled along and into the shop, trailing behind her. I had on two pairs of socks, as always, and my feet hurt like hell. I was wearing the usual maroon slippers and I felt terribly aware of people staring at me – I must have looked a real sight for a child.
Next stop was the chemist. We went in and the chemist said, ‘Oh, dear, not feeling well today?’ to me. Before I could say anything, Barbara piped up, ‘Yes, she’s got the flu. I’m keeping her off to stop her being infectious.’
I knew this was rubbish, but I played along. I hung back and looked longingly at the things that were on a carousel of products: lovely coloured hairbands and clips. I was never allowed to grow my hair, and I was dying to have a long, swishy ponytail with pretty things in it. I wanted to look like the girl on the BBC test card, with a hairband. Just then I noticed another woman at the counter asking the chemist about the treatment for chilblains, as she had them herself and said she was in awful pain. I was dreaming about having a mauve comb and wide white hairband when I heard Barbara turn to the woman and say, ‘Oh, the best thing for chilblains is fresh air. You need to keep your feet cold, stand on a cold floor and let your feet breathe.’
I was amazed and shocked. This was the complete opposite of what Barbara told me all the time. She told me I had to keep my feet very warm, and even heat them up. The woman said to her, ‘Yes, I’ve heard they can really spread if you keep your feet too hot and have changes of temperature from hot to cold.’