The Little Prisoner: How a childhood was stolen and a trust betrayed. Jane Elliott
The following evening Mum went out to have a cup of tea with a friend across the road, leaving me with Richard.
‘You’re smoking, aren’t you?’ he said as soon as we were alone.
‘No.’ I wondered what was coming next.
‘You are,’ he said, overruling my protests. ‘Here’s a fag. You either smoke it or you eat it, unless you tell me the truth.’
I took the cigarette, lit it up and smoked it in front of him.
‘Inhale it properly,’ he ordered. ‘I ain’t wasting my money buying you fucking fags if you ain’t gonna smoke them properly.’
Once I’d proved to his satisfaction that I was able to smoke properly he gave me a pack of ten, which I took straight up to my bedroom. By the time Mum came back across the road I was leaning out of my bedroom window puffing away happily.
‘Alright, Mum?’ I said cheerfully.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, obviously horrified at the thought of what would happen if Richard saw me.
‘I smoke now. It’s alright, Dad says I can.’
I guess it didn’t bother them because they worked out that if I was a smoker they would soon be able to cadge cigarettes off me when they ran short.
To start with Richard offered me a choice: I could have money for sweets each day or I could have fags. I chose the fags and for the next few mornings there would be a pack of ten waiting for me in a brass horsecart on the mantelpiece. It soon dwindled down to one or two loose ones, which I would use to refill my packet.
There was an awful lot of brass around the house – horse brasses on the wall, brass ornaments on every surface – all of which had to be polished regularly. Mum and Richard did have two big heavy brass soldiers as well, but he got rid of them because Mum kept using them to defend herself when he attacked her.
‘You’re gonna fucking kill me!’ he’d protest whenever she laid into him while fighting back.
As well as cleaning the house from top to bottom several times every day, we had to clean all our boots and shoes, and it had to be done properly, melting the polish into the leather in front of the fire before brushing it in. Everything had to be spotless and shiny, right down to the toilet seat, which was polished so often it was hard not to slide off it. Richard would insist that I made my bed with hospital corners that were exactly ninety degrees. I had no idea what ninety degrees meant, but he still warned me he would be checking them. If ever I complained to Mum, he would tell her he was just joking and that I was a stupid cow to take him seriously, but when we were alone he was deadly serious. If I did anything wrong I would be hit or have to pay a penance.
Every little task that he set me I did to the very best of my ability, but it was never enough. If anything, it seemed that the more I tried to please him, the further he wanted to push me, just to show that he could, just to inflict pain, just to show me that I was only allowed to live because he chose not to kill me.
The idea of hurting me must have been playing on his mind all the time, the urge to prove his power over me too delicious to resist. One of his favourite tortures, which started almost as soon as I came home from care, was to suffocate me in bed with my pillow, or with one he brought into the bedroom with him, pressing it down onto my face so hard that I was sure he was sitting on it with all his weight, although he was probably just using his hands. He was very strong when he was excited or angry.
The first few times it happened I was unable to stop myself from screaming as I fought for breath, but I soon learnt that that made it worse because it used what little air there was in my lungs and nobody could hear through the pillow anyway. I would thrash around in my panic, trying to escape, but there was no hope of that happening until he was ready to release me.
When he finally lifted the pillow he would squeeze my face painfully. ‘I fucking hate you,’ he would say, his face almost touching mine. ‘Everyone fucking hates you.’ He would then slap me a few times and press the pillow down again.
The only time he would let me get some air was when he thought I was about to pass out. He would check this by lifting my arm and letting it drop, so I learnt to go limp earlier, but he soon cottoned on to that and became angrier still.
I would usually become so frightened under those pillows that I would wet myself, which made him even more incensed, and he would push my face into it like a puppy, rubbing the wet sheet roughly against my skin to teach me a lesson. He’d tell Mum I’d wet the bed, which was why he was angry with me, so she would shout at me too. Sometimes, if she had been out, he would tell her he’d given me a drink which I’d spilled down myself, which would explain why I was in different pyjamas when she came home. That would give him another reason to hit me and shout angrily, and then he would do it all again.
Because the suffocating happened nearly every night I tried different tricks to try to make it better. I would lie on my side when I heard him coming up the stairs, because I found I could breathe more easily that way, and then I decided I could get more air through the mattress than through the pillow, so I would lie on my front, sometimes putting the pillow over my head in readiness for the attack. Richard realized what I was doing quite soon and would put another pillow under my face so that there was no escape. The only thing I could do was stay as still as possible and take shallow breaths. Instinctively I worked out that if I lay quite still it would make it less exciting for him and he was more likely to become bored. I half-hoped that he would succeed in killing me, but he was too cunning for that, always pulling back at the last minute.
It was worse when Mum went out, but sometimes he would even do it when she was downstairs. But there were some tortures, or ‘games’ as he preferred to call them, which he was happy to inflict on me whoever was around. There were ‘thumb jobs’, for instance, which entailed him bending my thumb down as far as he could until I was crying out from the pain. That was one he would do for laughs. Another was to make me spread my fingers out on a wooden surface and he would stab a sharp kitchen knife down in between them at faster and faster speeds to show how accurate and fast his reflexes were. Once he carried this further by throwing a paint scraper at my feet so that it sliced between my toes, pinning them to the floor.
If Mum was in the house he might leave me alone after the suffocation game, but if she was out it would just be the start of his night’s entertainment.
‘Come out here,’ he would say once he was bored with the pillow trick, and I would obediently make my way out into the hallway, knowing what was coming.
The ritual was more or less the same each time for many years. He would strip his clothes off and bend over the top few stairs.
‘Lick my arse,’ he would instruct me and I would reluctantly make my way up to him. I would start by licking his cheeks, hoping he would let me get away with that. That was bad enough, but I always knew it wouldn’t be enough for him.
‘Lick the hole!’ he would snarl at me angrily, and I would have to do it, however sick and humiliated it made me feel. Then he would make me push my finger into it as hard as I could. I guess my finger wasn’t big enough to reach wherever he wanted me to reach, though, because then