The Little Prisoner: How a childhood was stolen and a trust betrayed. Jane Elliott
my arms so hard I thought he would crush them and banging my legs on the hard edges.
‘Get your pyjamas on!’ he shouted and I obeyed, relieved to be out of the water and still alive.
I went downstairs to the front room on wobbly legs and when I saw Mum I burst into tears.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.
‘He tried to drown me,’ I replied.
He must have heard me and came charging into the room, screaming and shouting about how naughty I had been, how I had refused to have my hair washed and had made a fuss when the soap went into my eyes.
‘Oh, she never likes having her hair washed,’ Mum agreed. It was always easier for her to agree with him if she didn’t want to get a beating herself.
I was sent to bed with a smack for being so uncooperative.
Sometimes when I was in the bath Richard would put a ladder up the side of the house and look in the window, treating it as a joke. Mum would laugh, too, telling me I had to get over feeling shy about myself. Richard always managed to make it sound as though he was doing everything for my own good, as though everything that happened to me was my own fault.
When we were little we were only allowed to have baths on Sunday evenings and always had to share the water in order to keep the bills down. As I got bigger Richard started to let me have one during the week as well. Sometimes he would come down from having his own bath and tell me to have one in his water. He would always leave something that looked like semen floating on top of the water. The first time it happened I tried to get out of it by wetting my hair in the basin to look as if I’d had a bath, but he came upstairs to check on me. He opened the door and smirked at me as I climbed into his filthy water, no doubt knowing how disgusted I was. When I came downstairs afterwards I was quiet and ‘sulky’ so I got a good hiding and was sent back up to bed.
When I was seven I decided that I couldn’t face going home any more. The time had come to run away. I used to daydream about escaping all the time, but when it actually came to doing it things seemed to become more complicated. I was convinced at that stage that Richard could read my mind and that he would be able to tell what I was planning, which made me doubly anxious.
Sometimes he did seem to know things that I was sure I’d never told him. Only years later did I realize that they were things I’d told my mum and that she must have passed them on to him, betraying my confidence every time.
Other times he would trick confessions out of me. ‘I know you was mucking about at school today,’ he would tell me when I got home, ‘because the school board woman came round.’
I would rack my brain for the slightest thing I might have done which could have resulted in being reported like this. Filled with guilt as I always was, it wasn’t hard to find something and to convince myself that Richard truly did know everything. Believing it was hopeless to try to resist his powers, I would admit that I had been bad and he would then be free to punish me in whatever way he pleased. I doubt if I ever really did do anything very bad at school, apart perhaps from talking too much.
I had a friend at school called Lucy and had told her about my stepdad beating me and threatening to kill me. I hadn’t told her about any of the other stuff; that would have been too embarrassing. Lucy said she wanted to run away as well, although I don’t think she was having any particular problems at home, just fancied an adventure. I wasn’t trying to escape from school, because I really liked my teacher, but it seemed more sensible to us to go during the lunch hour, when we were less likely to be missed, than to wait until the end of the day.
‘I want to take my sister with us as well,’ Lucy told me as we were laying our escape plans. Her sister was in the infant school, which was next door to the junior school where we were in our first year.
‘How are we going to get her?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell her dinner lady that she has a dentist’s appointment,’ Lucy explained, apparently confident that this would work.
I waited in the bushes beside the playground while she disappeared into the infant school. I was so excited by the prospect of finally getting away that my heart was thumping.
A few minutes after going in Lucy reappeared and came running across the playground towards me.
‘The dinner lady didn’t believe me,’ she panted. ‘She went to check, so I had to run for it.’
‘We’ll have to go without your sister,’ I said, and she nodded her agreement.
We ran as fast as we could to get out of the area of the school, which wasn’t easy for me because I had such stupid shoes. Silly Git always went with me to buy my clothes and shoes and for some reason he wouldn’t let me go into the shop that sold sensible school shoes. He always made me buy high-heeled court shoes with pointed toes and then insisted on putting blakeys (those little metal tips) on the heels so that I would make a noise when I walked in them and everyone would turn round to look as I went clacking past on my skinny little legs. I suppose it must have turned him on or something, but I kept twisting my ankles because I wasn’t used to walking in heels. He didn’t care about details like that. Lucy was always really keen to borrow my shoes, believing them to be the height of sophistication. I would have been happy never to have seen them again as long as I lived.
By the time school was over we had managed to get a long way away and had reached a row of shops on a new estate.
‘I’m really hungry,’ I complained. ‘Have you got any money?’
‘I’ve only got five pence that my mum gave me for crisps,’ Lucy said dubiously. ‘That won’t get us far. We’ll have to nick something.’
I’d never stolen anything in my life and the thought of it filled me with horror. What if we were caught? They would be bound to take us home and that would give Richard the perfect excuse to beat me half to death. But hunger got the better of my fears and we went into a little supermarket to see what we could get. We must have been looking very suspicious, hanging around for too long, because the woman behind the till threw us out, by which time Lucy had managed to steal a cake but I had only managed to get a plastic Jif lemon, having panicked and grabbed the first thing that came to hand.
‘Can I try your shoes?’ Lucy asked as we sat munching on the cake in a nearby underpass.
I agreed happily, since my feet were hurting from walking so far in them. We changed socks at the same time, so that I could have her long ones with pictures of the Flintstones up the sides, and then continued on our way.
I was desperate for the toilet, but there was nowhere else to go other than beside the path. I was just getting down to business when a woman came round the corner with her kids. Unable to run away, I had to answer her questions about where our parents were and whether they knew we were there. I don’t suppose my answers were very convincing. She eventually went away, but I suspect she was planning to ring the police the moment she got to a phone.
We