Punished

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.’