The Little Prisoner (2 page)

I do remember being in care with my little brother Jimmy. I must have been about three when we were taken away from home and he would have been about eighteen months younger, so still little more than a baby. I loved Jimmy more than anything in the world. My dad tells me that when he used to come and take us out of the children’s home for a pub lunch or some such outing, I would act like a little mother to Jimmy, feeding him and fussing over him. I don’t recall the outings, but I do recall how much I adored Jimmy.

The main things I remember about the children’s home were the brown vitamin tablets they used to dispense to us each morning in little purple cups, and being made to eat Brussels sprouts and hating every damp mouthful as they gradually grew colder and more inedible on my plate.

There was one woman working there who used to single me out from the evening line-up, after we had all been given our glasses of milk, and take me somewhere private, putting her finger to her lips as if we had a secret from the rest of the world. Then she would sit me down and comb my long hair, spending ages curling it and making me feel beautiful and special for a few minutes each day. (My hair was so dark and fine that people were always asking me if I was Indian or Pakistani.) When she’d finished her work the woman would give me a hand mirror to hold up in front of me so I could see the back of my head in the mirror on the wall and admire her handiwork. It seemed like a magic mirror to me.

Most of the information I picked up later about those early years and why we were taken away from home came to me because Mum was always happy to talk about me to other people as if I wasn’t there. I’d be sitting quietly in the corner of the room, waiting for an instruction as to my next duty, while she would be holding forth to some neighbour or other. Every so often she would remember I was there and remind me, ‘Don’t you ever let him know I told you that.’ My stepfather didn’t like anyone to talk about the past.

When I was in my mid-twenties I tracked Dad down and he’s told me a few things, but I don’t like to keep asking him questions. It seems that Dad had a bit of a drinking problem, which Mum made worse by playing around with other blokes and generally giving him a hard time. He had already left us before we were taken into care and Mum had started going out with Richard, or ‘Silly Git’, as I prefer to think of him. He might even have been living with us by then, although he would have been very young, no more than sixteen or seventeen. He’s only fourteen years older than me.

Jimmy and I were sent to a couple of different foster homes, one of which I think must have been quite nice, since I can’t remember much about it. The second one wasn’t so good. They seemed like evil people to me, but perhaps they were just very strict in a way I wasn’t used to. We were never allowed to whisper to each other, or speak unless we were spoken to, and when they caught me whispering to Jimmy one time they stuck a piece of tape over my mouth which had been holding together a pair of newly bought socks. I had to sit at the top of the stairs with the tape over my mouth all night while everyone else in the house went to bed.

Even though I wasn’t having a good time in the foster family, I still never wanted to go back home, but I wouldn’t have been able to explain to anyone why not.

‘I’m really looking forward to coming home,’ I would tell Mum when I saw her, but I absolutely wasn’t.

When we went back home for visits there was an atmosphere in the house that made me frightened, although nothing bad actually happened in those few hours. I would sit very quietly, not wanting to make the new man of the house angry, but Jimmy had no such inhibitions and from the moment we were dropped off he would scream with what sounded like terror. I could tell it made Richard angry and that frightened me even more, but nothing I could do would calm Jimmy down until the social workers came to take us back. We would just sit together on the sofa for the whole visit with him screaming and me trying to comfort him. Richard’s anger and our mother’s desperation would swell to what felt like dangerous proportions as they waited for the ordeal of the visit to be over.

Jimmy had a large scar right around his forehead, which has stayed with him into adulthood. I was always told that he got it from falling against the coffee table before we were taken into care. I accepted the story at the time, but thinking back now, it’s an awfully big scar to get from bumping into a table. He was only tiny, so it wasn’t as if he had far to fall, or much weight behind him. I wonder now if something more serious happened to him and that was why we were taken into care and why he was always so terrified to go back home. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know now because Jimmy was too little to remember.

Someone told me that we were taken into care because we were being generally neglected, that we had vivid, sore ‘potty rings’ from where we had been left too long on our pots, but everyone seems to be vague about the details.

Before we went into care we’d lived in a flat, but by the time my memories start to kick in Mum and Richard had moved to a council house. Maybe that was how they managed to convince the authorities that they were fit to have me back. They’d also had a baby boy of their own, called Pete, which must have made them look like a more normal family, like people who had mended their ways, matured and accepted their responsibilities. Richard was, after all, still a teenager, but there might have been a case for believing that he had now grown up enough to be put in charge of children.

I sometimes wonder whether Mum and Richard would have taken me back if I’d made as much fuss as Jimmy. Now I wish I’d given it a go, since Jimmy ended up being adopted by kind people, but at the time it seemed too dangerous to make Richard angry and I preferred to remain docile and well-behaved in his presence. Years later I discovered that they had told the authorities they ‘only wanted the girl’. I couldn’t believe it, but Jimmy’s files later confirmed it. Jimmy had read the files himself and felt deeply rejected, even when I assured him that he’d had the luckiest escape of his life.

I also heard Mum boasting that our family had slipped a bribe to someone in the local authority to allow me home and that two senior people had resigned when they heard that I was being returned to ‘that hell-hole’, as it was described in some report. My missing files would make interesting reading, but it isn’t really important what happened in those first few years, because the real horrors were only just about to begin.

One of the scenes that has always remained clear in my head was saying goodbye to Jimmy on the doorstep of the foster home. He was crying and I wanted to as well, but didn’t dare to show my feelings to anyone. Someone had told me that Jimmy would be coming back home as well in a couple of weeks, but I didn’t believe it. I think I must have overheard something that told me they were lying. I knew they were going to separate us and it broke my heart. I’d hated it at the foster home, but at least I’d had Jimmy with me. Now I was going to be moved to somewhere else where I felt bad things would be happening and I wouldn’t even have him to cuddle and talk to.

I still didn’t tell Mum any of these thoughts; I just told her that I couldn’t wait to get home. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Little children only want to please their parents if they can.

From the moment Jimmy and I were parted I used to try to communicate with him telepathically whenever I was on my own. I had a birthmark on my arm which I convinced myself looked like the letter ‘J’, so I would stare at it and try to talk to Jimmy in my mind, telling him to be a good boy and assuring him that I would come to see him soon, asking him what sort of day he had had and telling him all about mine. I never did see him again until we had both grown up and grown apart, but at the time it comforted me a little to think I was still connected to him.

After Pete, Mum and Richard had three more boys, one almost every year, but none of them could take Jimmy’s place in my heart. I had to keep this quiet because I was never allowed to talk about him again. It was as if he had never existed in our lives. We had a lot of secrets like that. I was never allowed to tell anyone that Richard was my stepfather, not my real father, although anyone living in the neighbourhood must have known. My four halfbrothers never realized that I wasn’t their full sister until I was in my late twenties and the court case brought everything to light. I was never allowed to have any contact with any of my relations on my father’s side; it was as if they didn’t exist. I have no memory of my grandparents on that side at all. It was as if Richard wanted to keep control of exactly what information was allowed.

My dad tells me that he tried to come and visit me in the house a few times, but was met with such violence and abuse that he decided it would be safer for me if he stayed away and allowed things to calm down. That seemed like the last of my potential allies gone, although I later discovered he had tried to keep an eye on what was happening to me in other ways.

One day a photograph of Jimmy fell out from behind another picture in an album.

‘Who’s that? Who’s that? Who’s that?’ one of my little brothers asked.

Richard immediately became angry, throwing the picture in the bin and making it clear that there were to be no more questions about the little boy in the photograph. Jimmy was no longer part of our family.

Any house we lived in inevitably became a gleaming domestic fortress. I guess that another reason why Mum and Richard were able to convince the authorities that they would be good parents to me now, was that they kept their home spotlessly clean and totally secure. My stepfather was obsessed with decorating; there was never a day when he wasn’t redoing one room or another with new flock wallpaper, the sort you see inside old-fashioned pubs, or applying another coat of paint, or putting up pine cladding or building fake brick fireplaces. I even used to cover my school-books in the offcuts from old rolls of his flock wallpaper.

Our privacy was everything to him. Net curtains covered the windows during the day and would be reinforced by expensive thick lined velvet curtains as soon as the light outside started to fade. God knows where they got the money to buy them, but they ordered them from catalogues. There could never be a chink left in our armour, anything that would allow prying eyes the slightest opportunity to see inside our private lives. Outside the houses would be gates, high fences and even higher conifers. Locks and bolts would ensure that no one, not even members of the family, could get in and out easily. Richard’s control over his domain was total. Our houses were always the ‘nicest’ in the area.

All of us did housework all the time. Not a speck of dust or dirt ever escaped Richard’s eagle eye. If a bit of fluff came off one of our socks onto the carpet we were immediately screamed at to pick it up, so we would pad around in slippers to be on the safe side. Visitors could never believe that anyone could keep a house with children in so clean and tidy. Every kitchen cupboard would have to be emptied and wiped down every day, every item of furniture moved and cleaned and replaced, even the cooker and the fridge. Ledges above doors and windows that would normally be out of sight and out of mind were wiped down every single day. We sparkled and shone like an army barracks ruled over by a sergeant major prone to terrifying rages. The stairs had to be brushed by hand each morning and Mum would then vacuum them three or four times more during the course of the day.

The garden received just as much attention, the edges of the lawn having to be trimmed with scissors.

But doing housework was a way of keeping busy and out of Richard’s way in case he was in one of his moods.