Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One: Bad Girl

  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

  Part Two: Something’s Got to Give

  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

  Part Three: A Leap of Faith

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  Thank You for Reading …

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  As a child, Victoria Spry was brutally beaten, neglected and starved by the woman she called Mummy.

  To the outside world Eunice Spry was a devoted parent, but behind closed doors she was an evil tyrant. Instead of protecting, loving and caring for Victoria, she forced bleach and urine down her throat, knocked out her teeth, tied her up naked and made her live in squalor. It took eighteen years of heartache and despair before she found the courage to expose her mum.

  Tortured is Victoria’s gripping story of survival.

  About the Author

  From the age of one, Victoria Spry was abused by her adoptive mother, Eunice Spry. The abuse lasted eighteen years. In spite of the horrors she suffered, brave Victoria, who is now 28 years old, has miraculously flourished. She has taught herself to read and write, she has gone to college and she is now engaged to the love of her life. Victoria tries to lead a normal life and likes to spend time with her precious dogs.

  For Ollie and Alfie and Milly

  You will always have a place in my heart

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of Victoria Spry. In some limited cases names of people/places/dates sequences of the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I was less than a year old, Eunice Spry became my foster mother. When I was five, she adopted me, and became my legal parent. For eighteen years, I called her Mum. That is why, in this book, I still use that name.

  Some people have criticised me for using the word instead of Eunice, now that everybody knows what she has done. Believe me, I know she doesn’t deserve the title. I know she hasn’t been one inch a good mother.

  But some habits are hard to break.

  She was just the only mum I ever knew.

  PROLOGUE

  I want you to close your eyes and imagine. Imagine a world where everything is not how it seems. Where toys are not for playing with. Where perfect parents are anything but. Where asking someone for help is just about the most dangerous thing you can do.

  Imagine a world where the metallic bang of your mum unpacking tins of baked beans signals not your supper, but a weapon ready for wielding. Imagine a world where your mother brandishing a stick is not some make-believe game of pirates or spies, but something far, far darker. Imagine a world where the unmistakable sound of a bath tap running won’t lead to a fun playtime, a child’s laughter gurgling amidst the brightly coloured rubber ducks. Instead, you should listen out for the gurgle of a child’s throat as she is held beneath the water’s surface, time and time again, until she learns to feign death to make them stop.

  Welcome to my world.

  PART ONE

  BAD GIRL

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’

  My hand shot back from the shiny silver can. My eyes dropped straight to the floor. I was only three years old, but already I knew to look down, look down, look down.

  From beneath my lashes, I could see the tin cans all lined up on our red-tiled kitchen floor, like regimental soldiers: some tall, some short, some squat, and each in an identical silver uniform. Scattered around them were their labels. I had been peeling them off, one by one. Not out of naughtiness; perhaps curiosity. Perhaps because I wasn’t allowed to play with any of the toys in the house, so I found my own distractions. The coloured labels, whether bearing the bright turquoise livery of Heinz baked beans, or the smiling face of a cat or dog, appealed to me somehow.

  Sitting on the floor, I could feel Mummy’s eyes boring into my back.

  ‘Now I’m not going to know what’s in what can,’ she said crossly.

  I dared to dart a glance up at her. My mother, Eunice Spry, was a short woman, but she towered above me now, her gaunt, drawn face blazing with anger, dark eyes piercing and cold. Suddenly, her hand whipped out and I felt a hard blow to the back of my head. I looked down again, quick as I could, my skull throbbing with pain. I didn’t cry out.

  I never did, anymore.

  ‘Pick a can,’ she commanded, in her thick Gloucestershire accent.

  Confused, but knowing better than to question her, I reached out and picked up the one nearest to me. It felt heavy in my little hand. She snatched it from me and marched over to the kitchen table to open it.

  ‘Sit in that chair. You are going to eat whatever’s in this can. Eat it all up!’

  The grinding noise of the tin opener filled the kitchen as its metal teeth bit into the lid. Silently, I walked over to the chair and, with difficulty, tried to clamber up onto its high wicker seat. Mummy grew impatient with my efforts. She came across and yanked my arm, pulling me high up in the air and then shoving me into the hard seat.

  I sniffed and wiped my hand across my runny nose. I had a cold, again. I always had a cold. That was another thing Mummy was always complaining about; something else I could never do right. She would make me stand to attention while she tilted my head back and poured Olbas oil down my nose, holding me firmly when I tried to squirm away from the overpowering scent, every trickle of it stinging my senses. Somehow, even the whole bottle of oil poured down it only made my nose stream more.

  Mummy pushed the open can in front of me. ‘Eat it!’ she ordered.

  I peered inside. Jellied chunks of brown meat glistened, and a stench of cat food reached my poorly nostrils. Even the smell was enough to make me retch.

  But I knew I would have to eat it. What I ate, when I ate and how I ate was something Mummy had controlled from the moment I’d been handed to her on her doorstep, at the age of ten months
, borne into the sanctuary of a foster mother’s home after my birth parents couldn’t cope. Throughout my early babyhood, I was later told, I lay ignored in my cot; never played with, barely fed or clothed, just lying on my back in a dirty nappy: placid, quiet, resigned to the fact that no one ever came.

  As an adult, I don’t blame them for giving me up. It was obvious they couldn’t cope with me or my older brother, Tom, and so we were taken into care. Tom went off to another family – a family who also wanted to adopt me.

  But that didn’t happen. Instead, I went to Eunice.

  ‘Eat it!’ she hissed at me.

  I picked up the fork she had thrown down on the table. My tiny fingers fumbled on the cutlery, but I was careful not to drop it – I didn’t want Mummy to feed me. Though I didn’t have a clear memory of it, some part of me instinctively recalled her force-feeding me when I was eighteen months old, the sharp metal spoon prising between my closed gums, blood streaming down my face. She used to pin me to the floor and shove the spoon inside.

  ‘Get on with it, you autistic twit!’

  I lowered my head and thrust the fork into the meat.

  I wasn’t autistic, but no one, not even the doctors, could convince Mummy otherwise. According to her, I was an autistic twit, a backward child; the most stupid girl she had ever come across. Mummy had two natural grown-up daughters, Judith and Rebekah, from her first marriage, and they were both bright as buttons. They had learned to read at the age of two. They had attended private girls’ schools, spoke several languages, rode horses and played musical instruments. When I’d landed on her doorstep in December 1986, sometime after Mummy’s second marriage had ended – she took the name Spry from that husband, but little else, and as he was never mentioned at home I only found out about him much later – I was withdrawn and solemn, and I didn’t know how to work my little arms and legs because I’d never been encouraged to crawl or sit or play. Yet Mummy had instantly thought that God had sent her a devil child who simply refused to meet her high expectations. She was convinced I was autistic. Though social services had warned her that my development would be delayed because of my poor care, and the doctors pronounced me perfectly normal, she wasn’t having any of it. She insisted on tests, diagnoses; she said I was stubborn and refused to learn. And when she beat me, she said that she was doing it to beat some sense into me.

  I lifted the first forkful to my mouth. I retched again, but I forced it down. It was cold and slimy on my tongue, the jelly slippery and wet. It tasted vile. I managed a second mouthful, conscious that Mummy was watching me. With her dyed black hair pulled back in her usual tight ponytail, her expression was clear to see. She looked satisfied, somehow – and righteous. She believed in what she was doing; she believed she was absolutely right.

  And I did, too. For I had been naughty; I was a bad girl.

  I deserved to be punished.

  Knowing this didn’t make the punishment any easier to take, though. I forced another forkful of cat food into my mouth, fighting against the gag that convulsed my throat. Tears streamed down my cheeks, but I didn’t make a sound, other than the rattle of my retching. In my three years on this planet, I might have been slow to learn how to build a tower of bricks, or how to walk on my own two feet, but one thing I had nailed was the art of crying in complete silence.

  From another room in the house I could hear music playing. My five-year-old sister, Charlotte, was probably watching a Disney film. Charlotte was Mummy’s adopted daughter. Unlike me, who came to her tainted and damaged, Charlotte had been in Mummy’s care since birth. Mummy had in fact seen her born, and immediately coddled her in blankets and love, sweeping her back to our home at 24 George Dowty Drive to be cosseted and cuddled and spoilt rotten. Charlotte was a favourite. She had toys to play with and pretty dresses and her own room with Paddington Bear wallpaper and a bunk bed that Mummy had specially made for her.

  Charlotte never had to eat cat food.

  I couldn’t help what happened next. As I swallowed down another mouthful, the vomit rose up the back of my throat and through my nose and spewed all over the kitchen table. I hiccoughed, the sick mixing on my face with my salty tears, my blonde hair stringy with it. Mummy and I both surveyed the mess.

  ‘You are such a naughty child. No wonder Rebekah left. My beautiful Becky left because you were such a stubborn, naughty girl, from the moment you arrived. You’ve wrecked everybody’s lives and you’re still doing it, aren’t you?’

  It was my fault Becky had left our family – Mummy had told me many times. Just before I had arrived on Mummy’s doorstep, her youngest natural daughter had gone to university, and at the same time she had written to the church we all attended, saying she could no longer come to the Jehovah’s Witness meetings anymore. She was still in touch with us, she even popped in from time to time when she visited from university, but I had turned her worldly and that meant she was going to die when Armageddon came. And of all the things Mummy told me I did wrong, every day, that was perhaps the one I felt most guilty about. Every day I lived with that guilt. Not only had I driven Becky out of our home, but I had damned her, too: she wouldn’t join us at the resurrection.

  Mummy looked in disgust at the vomit on the table before fixing me with a glare. ‘You eat that sick up right now,’ she said.

  I wanted to shake my head. I wanted to scream and shout. But I had fought this battle before. So, instead, I lowered my head to the table and I lapped up my vomit, over and over again, doing just as I was told. Trying desperately to get in her good books. Trying hard to be a good girl.

  And that’s my first memory of living with my mum; my first memory, full stop. The cat food, and the sick, and her cold, commanding eyes, watching my every move.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rat-a-tat-tat!

  Judith banged on our neighbours’ front door. We saw a curtain twitch, but no one came to answer her knock. With her lips curved into a thin, tight smile, Judith grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me back down the path and along to the next house.

  We were on ministry for the church, going from door to door in our local neighbourhood, trying to encourage others to come into the Truth. It was a bitterly cold day, and my hands were bright red. I had no gloves, no hat. Shivering in my navy-blue coat, I rubbed my freezing fist against the constant trickle of snot coming out of my nose. My legs ached. I was still very little, and we had been walking for hours.

  ‘Judith, why didn’t you bring the pushchair?’

  That was Sandy, who worshipped at the church with us. She had ginger hair and kind eyes, though I wasn’t allowed to look at them. Look down, look down, that’s what Mummy always said.

  ‘She’s lazy, she needs the exercise,’ Judith snapped.

  Judith was very close to Mummy. In her mid-twenties, she still lived at home. She loved her little sister Charlotte, but I knew I was an inconvenience to her. If I was sat quietly at the bottom of the stairs, she’d push me roughly out of the way. She was always rough with me – just as she was, now, as she bent down with a tissue to wipe my streaming nostrils. I squealed in pain as her fingers crushed my nose.

  ‘How can you say she’s lazy? Victoria’s just a little girl,’ Sandy protested.

  ‘Mummy says she’s lazy, and Mummy’s always right,’ Judith replied, serenely. ‘She makes her walk up and down the stairs each night because she’s lazy. And laziness is against Jehovah. “The lazy person has his cravings, yet he has nothing, but the diligent one will be fully satisfied.”’ She echoed Mummy in quoting scripture, and God’s word, of course, was the last on the matter.

  Mummy was always quoting scripture at me. She would push her face into mine and yell until she ran out of breath. I could see her right up close: her big, greasy nose with blackheads all over it; her sallow, dirty skin. She had yellow teeth and bad breath and her angry words would be accompanied by a noxious puff of air as she yelled about the ‘rod of discipline’: ‘Do not hold back discipline. If you strike him with the rod, he w
ill not die.’

  Mummy was determined that we would be the perfect Jehovah’s Witnesses, as a family. So we all had to study the Watchtower and rehearse the answers we might give in the weekly study groups at church. If ever I didn’t pronounce a word properly, I was smacked in the mouth until my lips ballooned up like two fat sausages. The study groups themselves, which took place at different members’ homes, were very intense – for me, at least. Mummy used to watch me like a hawk in case I got an answer wrong, which I often did because I was so nervous. I’d be punished for that later, at home: thrown into the living room, where the green curtains were always closed against the world, and beaten on the floor, while she stood on my throat to make sure no one heard me scream.

  I think Charlotte quite enjoyed the meetings, though. After the Bible study, which she’d spend snuggled up close to Mummy on the sofa, there would be squash and biscuits for the children. I wasn’t allowed squash, though; Mummy said I didn’t deserve it.

  One night, we were at a study group with Sandy. Though you were supposed to stick to the same group, Mummy didn’t. We were always going to different groups – perhaps so that no one got too close. I was sitting on the floor and Sandy smiled down at me, catching my blue eyes with her kind ones. I quickly looked down … but it was too late; Mummy had seen. I felt her strong, scrawny hand come down heavily upon my shoulder, her fingernails blackened with dirt pressing hard against my coat. She squeezed: a warning.

  Mummy had already had a clash with Sandy at the Kingdom Hall, our place of worship. When I was a very little girl, too young for me to remember, Sandy had smiled at me in my pushchair. Mummy had snatched up a blanket and draped it over my chair so that no such smiles would reach me, and my world was only dark. She had her eye on Sandy; she thought she was trouble.

  It was very hot in the room, but Mummy wouldn’t let me take my coat off. She had beaten me the day before, and I had bruises all down my arm. I grew hotter and hotter and redder and redder in the face. I wasn’t allowed a drink, and I wasn’t allowed to look at anyone. Suddenly, Mummy picked me up and started squeezing me tight. I went even redder as the air was crushed out of me. Mummy was a thin woman, but she was physically strong, and she used every sinew of muscle to crush me to her. Tears pricked my eyes and rolled silently down my cheeks.