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

  ‘What are you doing to that child?’ Sandy spoke up at last, the sole voice in a room full of witnesses.

  ‘She’s been diagnosed as autistic,’ Mummy lied, so confidently, not letting her grip slip for a moment. ‘This is what you have to do with them, squeeze them tight.’

  I didn’t say a word, but in my head I was willing Sandy to be quiet. Please, don’t, I thought, because she’ll hurt me; hurt me even more than she was already doing. Because any time anyone questioned her – not that it happened very often – it would be all my fault for getting her into trouble.

  But, the thing was, hardly anyone did question her – for my mother was an intimidating woman, hard-faced and hard to please. She was manipulative, adept at playing whatever role suited the situation, whether aggressive or put-upon or sweet and innocent. And so, even though – unbeknown to me – my playgroup (which I’d attended only eight times before Mummy withdrew me from the class) had expressed concerns about my mother’s ‘harsh approach’ to me, and the doctors had said she wasn’t a suitable foster mother for me, and the medical reports said I never smiled, and health visitors were banned from the house, and even though I was spotted with an unexplained bruise on my face … despite all of this, just after my fourth birthday, in January 1990, the official panel approved Mummy’s application to adopt me, and the bureaucratic machinery started whirring to have me assigned permanently to her care.

  Had I known about it, I wouldn’t have had much of an argument against it. Mummy had told me all about my real parents: how my daddy was a murderer and my mummy was a psychopath and a drug addict – and how they never wanted me. (All of it was lies, but I didn’t know that then.)

  So where else would I go? Who else could possibly want a naughty, dirty, devil child like me?

  ‘Torrie, come and play with me!’ Charlotte called to me from the garden. It had been snowing outside, and the window in the kitchen showed a scene of perfect frosting all across the lawn.

  I hesitated on the doorstep. It was freezing outside, and I didn’t have any warm clothes or gloves, or a scarf to keep me toasty. Charlotte, in comparison, was bundled up like a Michelin man in layer upon layer of pink wool.

  ‘Torrie, now!’ she yelled.

  In our house, whatever Charlotte wanted, she got. She was adored by everybody – including me. She was my sister, my sometime playmate; the girl I followed around, always desperately hoping that in so doing I would learn her secret. I looked up to her. After all, Charlotte always got it right; she was always in Mummy’s good books. Maybe, if I could learn to be like her, I’d get it right, too.

  ‘Come and play outside!’

  I ran out to join her, on command. And we played together in the snow, two little girls messing about building snowmen and making snow angels. Charlotte was in charge of the game, and ordered me about, but I was used to that. She was bossy and domineering, but the only time I got to play was when she asked me to, so I did as she told me. Even though I always had to be the baddie to her angelic heroine, some playtime was better than none.

  Before too long, though, the cold snow we were playing with had rubbed my bare hands red and raw, and I started crying because my fingers were so cold. I didn’t want to play anymore.

  ‘Mummy!’ Charlotte stood stock-still in the garden, her imperious voice carrying into the house and bringing our mother rushing to her aid. ‘Mummy, Torrie’s not playing with me, she’s not playing with me!’

  Mummy seized me by the arm and dragged me inside, into the kitchen. I stared up at her in confusion – why wasn’t she making me stay in the garden?

  I soon found out. She opened the door to the big freezer, and thrust my hands into the ice box. ‘Stay there,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you cold fingers.’

  And I did as she told me. As a little one, you don’t fight back. I had been naughty, I hadn’t played with Charlotte – I was a bad girl.

  I knew this was the truth because the evidence was all around me, impossible to ignore. I saw how Judith and Charlotte were treated by Mummy: lavished with gifts, sprinkled with smiles and hugs and affection. Who was the odd one out? Me. It was my fault. So I meekly accepted that I didn’t deserve her love. I always tried to be good enough, hoping, maybe this time … but I never was. And so, that afternoon, when Mummy took my shoes and socks off and told me to run around the snowy garden barefoot, I did exactly as she said.

  ‘If you move, you’ll get warm,’ she told me, with perfect logic, as she slammed shut the back door and went to join Charlotte and Judith in the living room, where they were catching up on Mummy’s beloved soap operas.

  So I picked up my poor cold feet, and I ran, and ran, and ran, trying to find some energy from somewhere to keep on running through the winter night, trying to ignore the gnawing hunger inside me.

  I was always hungry. Mummy told me you had to starve a cold – and I always had a cold. So I was always starving. I’m not talking a missed meal here or there, I’m talking for weeks on end, no food.

  Of course, you can’t survive that long without sneaking mouthfuls here and there, stealing the end of the bread or a snatched prize from the lowest cupboards in the kitchen, which were all I could reach. So, as well as being autistic, and lazy, I was also a thief.

  I told you I was bad.

  To be fair to Mummy, she tried to make the punishment fit the crime. If she caught me stealing food, she would tell me all about how, in Islamic countries, thieves would be punished by having their hands cut off. Yet even Mummy, despite her talents at manipulation, might have been hard-pressed to explain how a four-year-old lost a hand – and so she devised her own take on it.

  If she caught me stealing food, she would summon me to the kitchen and turn on the hotplate. While it heated up, she would lecture me.

  ‘In Arabia, they chop your finger off if you steal food,’ she told me. ‘They chop them off one at a time. Then they chop your hand off and eventually they cut off your arm. If you’re going to keep stealing food, this is where this is going to go.’

  In time – time enough for me to realise what she was planning – the hotplate was ready, glowing bright red for danger. Mummy took my hand and separated out my index finger from all the rest. With clinical precision, she pressed it firmly against the red-hot cooker and held it there.

  Pulsating pain rocked through my body. Instinctively, I wrestled my hand out of her grasp and away from the searing heat that burned and burned and burned.

  ‘Right,’ Mummy said, ‘you’re going to have it held there for a minute now. Stop misbehaving!’

  Mummy didn’t understand that I’d moved because I was in pain; she thought I was deliberately going against her, being rebellious, not towing the line. She seized my finger and shoved it against the glowing hob.

  Once again, I couldn’t help but pull away.

  Mummy looked at me with disgust and disappointment. ‘Two minutes,’ she said, unequivocally. If you went against her punishments, she’d always double the drill.

  She took my hand for a third time, and pressed my finger to the searing heat.

  ‘One, two, three …’ she began to count.

  The hotplate wasn’t the only punishment for stealing food. She starved me so often, and I resorted to theft so frequently, that she would lash out with whatever was to hand. She pummelled me in the face with a baked-bean tin. She would make me throw up whatever I had eaten, so she could see the half-digested evidence in my sick. And then she would point to the clump of stale bread or whatever it was I’d managed to steal, and she’d say, ‘You want to eat that, do you, madam? You want to eat that? Well, you get and eat that.’ And I would gag and gag, and she would tell me I was weak-minded for gagging on my own sick. I would be crying and retching, and she’d say it was mind over matter: that I was weak, weak, weak.

  One afternoon, though, she came up with a new plan that was different to all the rest. Mummy had locked me in Charlotte’s bedroom as a punishment, a couple of days into a starvation sentence o
f three weeks. I can’t remember what I’d done wrong; it could have been anything, or nothing. I sat on the floor, staring up at the beautiful dappled rocking horse that Charlotte loved to play on, which I was never permitted to ride. My eyes drank in the toys piled high in the room. Dolls were my favourite. I had a big heart and I loved the idea of swaddling a baby doll in a blanket and kissing her and hugging her and loving her to bits. But I wasn’t allowed to play with any of the toys. Sometimes, Mummy would present both me and Charlotte with elaborately wrapped gifts. We’d open them up, and Charlotte would be allowed to play with hers, but mine would be confiscated. Maybe one day I could earn it back, Mummy told me, if I was good.

  My tummy rumbled, but my head was too full of hunger to focus on the forbidden treasures inside the bedroom. I listened carefully. The house was still and quiet. Maybe, just maybe, if Mummy had forgotten to lock the door, I could tiptoe downstairs and find something to eat.

  I crept to the door and listened again. Silence. I tried the handle, and the door swung wide. After scampering down the stairs as quickly as I could, I snatched the end of the bread – what Mummy called the ‘knobby’ – from the bread bin, and ran back upstairs, my mouth aching to taste it. I crammed it in, my little hand tearing off strips at a time, and stuffing them into my mouth.

  It wasn’t long before Mummy discovered my crime. She came slowly up the stairs to Charlotte’s room. I could hear each of her footsteps on each tread of the stairs, and I knew she would be coming for me. I stood up straight, and tried to look innocent.

  The door opened. ‘Where’s the knobby?’ she asked me, calm as you like.

  ‘I don’t have it, Mummy,’ I said.

  ‘Mother,’ she instructed me coldly, ‘I’ve told you before: “mummy” is common. You call me Mother.’

  ‘I don’t have it, Mother,’ I said again, obediently.

  In a flash, she grabbed me and slung me to the floor. I started to scream, but that was no good in a place like George Dowty Drive, where neat red-brick houses sat on a suburban street. Someone might hear me.

  ‘Judith!’ she called. My sister came rushing in. I tried to run, but Mummy grabbed me and flung me into the corner like I was a rag doll. I was four years old, and no match for her.

  ‘Judith, stand on her throat, stop her screaming,’ Mummy commanded. Judith, as everyone always did when it came to Mummy’s demands, did exactly as she was told. She pinned me to the floor and pressed her foot, solid in its sturdy green boot, against my windpipe. The scream gurgled and died in my throat.

  Mummy whipped my legs up, so I was lying on my back with my feet in the air. She vanished for a moment, and then she returned with a length of wood. Judith did carpentry – one of her many talents – so there were always bits of wood lying about the house. In fact, there were bits of everything lying about the house: Mummy was a hoarder, and the place was overflowing with stuff, piled high in every room against the curtains that were always drawn.

  ‘I used to be a nurse,’ Mummy told me now, chillingly, ‘and I learned something in my time on the wards. Do you know what I learned?’

  I tried to shake my head, but Judith’s big foot on my neck stopped me from moving.

  ‘I learned that feet don’t bruise. So if I hit you there, nobody will be able to tell what I’ve been doing. Nobody will be able to see. No one will ever find out what’s going on.’

  I stared up at her in mute horror. And then she held my little bare feet still, and she brought the wood down firmly upon them.

  ‘Do not hold back discipline. If you strike him with the rod, he will not die,’ she intoned.

  Pain rocked through me: dull, numbing, throbbing pain that travelled from the soles of my feet to my brain and back again. I tried to cry out, but Judith’s foot kept the scream locked inside. Her foot shoved my head to one side so my cheek was pressed into the carpet, and I couldn’t breathe, which made me panic deep inside. Mummy brought the wood down on me again, and again, and again. It was the worst punishment she had ever given me. It was the first time she beat me on my feet.

  It wouldn’t be the last.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I sat by the window, and tears streamed down my face. But I wasn’t crying because of a beating, or because I was cold, or hungry.

  I was crying because I missed my mummy.

  She had taken Charlotte to Disneyland – without me, of course. I wasn’t the kind of child who deserved to be taken to America to meet Mickey Mouse. And after all, being autistic, how could I possibly enjoy or appreciate the experience?

  Every day that she was away, I sat by the window in Nanny’s house, and I cried for my mummy to come home.

  ‘Come on, now, Torrie,’ my nan said to me, and I turned from the window to see her coming towards me with a brand-new dolly in her arms.

  I loved my nanny. Spending time with her was the only bright spot in my life. She had a big heart, and she was kind and simple, nothing like her daughter. She and my granddad lived ten doors down from us in George Dowty Drive, in a humble red-brick bungalow. As soon as you walked through the door, it smelled of Nanny. That was the best smell in the world, a fragrance of fresh laundry and apple pie: clean and homely and warm.

  At my nan’s house, I was allowed to play with dollies. Nanny even bought some for me: every couple of weeks, she would collect her pension and go down to the post office and buy these porcelain dolls in outfits from around the world, and she would show me them. They lived in a suitcase on top of her wardrobe, and every time I visited she would show me them, hoping one day my mum would let me have them, that one day I’d be deemed good enough to enjoy the treat. My nanny knew that Mummy was strict with me, so she knew better than to let me keep the collection myself. She didn’t give me the dolls to take home. Every time I played with them, she would give me a secret wink and whisper, ‘Don’t tell your mum.’

  Nanny didn’t know what was going on, not really. She didn’t know the severity of it. She knew her daughter had strong beliefs and that she was strict, and she would sometimes even call her on it; she stood up for me. Charlotte never had to do chores, and my nan would say, ‘Why is it always Victoria who’s got to do all the chores? It’s not fair, she’s two years younger. Why can’t you let Charlotte do some jobs?’

  My mum would make some excuse, or tell Nan I had been naughty and was being punished, or get into a blazing row with her about it. When we got home, I would be beaten for causing tension in the family; for turning her own mother against her.

  My granddad, like his wife, was lovely, too. He could be quite stern, but he used to lift me up onto his lap and call me his little ducky. He’d take the lid off his hip flask and jokingly dare me to smell it. I’d screw my nose up at the unappealing whiff that emanated from the silver flask and he’d laugh, a proper laugh that shook me on his lap as he cuddled me.

  Mummy hated the fact that her father loved the little girl she so despised. And even worse was the fact they seemed to prefer me to Charlotte – or, at least, that Charlotte wasn’t held up as the angel child Mummy knew her to be. For Charlotte had been raised to believe she was special, and that she was to have everything she wanted, so she was often demanding and bossy, which didn’t endear her to my grandparents, though they had such big hearts they loved her just the same.

  When Mummy saw me on Granddad’s lap, she would pull me off and say, ‘No, she doesn’t deserve that.’ She would order me to go and sit in the corner. ‘Turn around and look at the wall.’

  And Nan, bless her, would speak up for me and say, ‘She hasn’t done anything! Eunice, you’re too hard on her.’

  And another row, and another beating, would ensue.

  But Mummy wasn’t here right now. And my nanny had a very special treat for me.

  ‘This is for you, Torrie,’ she said, handing me the dolly. I barely dared reach out and touch it, but I trusted Nan. I looked up at her with my blue eyes round with wonderment, and she nodded at me reassuringly. So I took the dolly in my hand
s and stared down at her, drinking in every detail.

  It wasn’t a porcelain doll like those in the collection I could never keep. This was a rag dolly, soft and squishy. She had long yellow wool plaits, and a polka-dot pink top and skirt. I loved her the instant I set eyes on her.

  ‘What are you going to call her?’ Nanny asked.

  I didn’t hesitate. ‘Katie,’ I said. That was my nanny’s name.

  ‘I’ve made you this for her, too,’ said Nanny, and she handed me a knitted doll’s blanket made up of white and peach squares. No one had ever given me such a lovely present before. I carefully wrapped the blanket round Katie and hugged her to my chest.

  ‘Thank you, Nanny,’ I said, and she gave me a kiss on the top of my head.

  From that night on, I slept with Katie by my side. I knew better than to let Mummy know what she meant to me. I learned how to hide her, under the stairs or twisted up in the bedding, and I tried not to show that she meant anything to me.

  Mummy noticed the new addition to our family, of course. Those eyes missed nothing. When I told her that I’d named her after Nanny, she snapped at me disparagingly, ‘God, you’re so thick, you autistic twit! Why is it you’ve got to repeat names you’ve already heard, why can’t you think of your own?’

  I bowed my head and said nothing, as usual. Soon, though, I would have a chance to think on my own. That September, I was starting school.

  Overbury School is a picture-perfect village school, set in a Cotswold-stone building on the southern slopes of Bredon Hill in Gloucestershire. In September 1990, Mummy marched me into my new classroom with strict instructions to speak to no one. The other children were worldly, she told me, and the Bible taught that ‘bad associations spoil useful habits’.