Punished

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.