Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.. Jane Smith
I had just woken up and was crossing the narrow landing at the top of the stairs when Mum came out of her bedroom. For some children, home is the only place they feel safe. For others, it’s the one place they know they aren’t. So when Mum took a step towards me, I felt the muscles in my body tense as I instinctively leaned away from her.
I was four years old, and I’d known since I was old enough to understand anything that I didn’t have to have done something wrong – or, at least, nothing I was aware of – for my mum to be angry with me. On this particular morning, however, instead of shouting at me and slapping me or pulling my hair, she just stood in the doorway of her bedroom and smiled.
It wasn’t a nice smile, the way I’d seen other mums smile at their kids when they came to pick them up from school. It was more like a nasty sneer, as if she knew something bad that I didn’t know and was relishing the prospect of telling me what it was. She didn’t say anything though, as I hovered on the landing, trying to decide whether my own anxious, tentative smile would annoy or appease her. She waited for me to take two hesitant steps down the stairs and then she pushed me.
‘Oh dear, grab the handrail,’ Mum called. But the concern in her voice was exaggerated and insincere, and she laughed out loud when I stumbled and fell, smacking my head into the wall at the bottom of the stairs.
I was still lying on the worn carpet in the hallway, shocked and disorientated, when Dad ran out of the living room and crouched down beside me.
‘Jesus Christ, Maggie,’ he shouted at Mum, who was standing smirking halfway down the stairs. ‘What happened? And what’s so funny? She’s hurt herself.’
‘Well, don’t blame me.’ Mum put her hands on her hips and glared angrily at us both. ‘It’s not my fault she’s clumsy and stupid. She tripped.’
For a moment I was forgotten as they shouted and swore at each other. So I sat up, touched the painful bump on the side of my head very gently with my fingertips, then examined the red mark on my elbow that I knew would soon develop into a bruise. It felt as though someone was pounding on the inside of my skull with something very heavy, and as the sound of my parents’ angry voices filled the air above me, I could feel tears stinging my eyes. But I was determined not to cry.
‘What happened, Zo?’ Dad put his hands under my arms and lifted me to my feet.
‘I told you, she tripped. Didn’t you?’ Mum was smiling the nasty smile again, although less broadly this time, maybe because she didn’t want Dad to see it as he guided me into the living room, where he sat me down in her chair saying, ‘I’ll get you some juice. That’ll make you feel better.’
It was rare for anyone to be kind to me at home, and although the memory of it makes me sad when I think about it today, I was too scared at the time to appreciate Dad’s concern for me, because I knew that as soon as he’d gone to work, Mum would find a way of making me pay for his attention.
I think Dad knew about some of the things she did to me, which was why he sometimes got angry with her, like he did that day. He certainly wasn’t aware of all of them though, as she was careful to hide her treatment of me, particularly when I was very young, and I didn’t ever say anything because I knew that if I did, my parents would shout and maybe fight with each other for a while, then Dad would go out and I’d be left alone with Mum.
So that time when she pushed me down the stairs is one of only very few occasions I can remember when Dad stood up for me. And although he did sometimes say nice things to me when I was a little girl, Mum always seemed to be standing behind him whenever he did, looking at me over his shoulder with a spiteful expression on her face that said quite clearly, ‘Just you wait until he’s gone to work.’
Some of the very few good memories I have of my early childhood are of standing at the front door waving to my dad as he left the house in the mornings. The happy feeling was always short-lived, however, and it would disappear as soon as the door closed, because I knew that, for the next few hours, it would just be Mum and me.
I loved both my parents when I was a little girl. Although my mum treated me very badly and I was afraid of her, I thought it was my fault she didn’t seem to love me and I desperately wanted her affection. With my dad it was different, and despite the fact that he very rarely actually did anything nice for me, he sometimes stood up for me, didn’t hit me and wasn’t nasty to me the way Mum was. So I really did love him, in the years before I learned to be frightened of him too.
I can’t recall one single instance of Mum ever being nice to me. She had only two sides to her when it came to her dealings with me – stern or nasty – and she could be very violent. In fact, the only time she ever touched me when I was a little girl was when she was pulling my hair or slapping, pinching, punching or kicking me, beating me with her fists or hitting me with the heel of her shoe, a book or, on one occasion, a baking tray. She didn’t ever hug me, or put her hands on me for any other reason except in anger. And it seemed that she was always angry with me, however hard I tried not to do anything that might irritate or antagonise her. It wasn’t until much later that I realised I didn’t really do anything to justify her cruel mind-games and vicious physical attacks. To my mum, I was simply a scapegoat, someone to blame for all the problems she had, many of which must have resulted from her own damaging childhood, although I didn’t find out about that until much later, when it was almost too late for me to be able to understand and accept the truth, which was that I had never really been the problem at all.
She would sometimes throw things at Dad too, or smash ornaments when they were fighting. But she never did to him – or to my brothers – any of the vicious things she did to me, I suppose for the same reason most bullies don’t pick fights with people who can fight back.
Fortunately, when I was alone in the house with her before I started going to nursery, when Dad was at work and my older brothers were at school, she spent almost all day every day in the kitchen. I don’t know whether she was already drinking at that time, but I think she probably was. So maybe that’s what she was doing in there while I was in the living room, trapped at a distance from her by the baby gate that blocked the doorway.
It was during that period of my childhood that Mum started refusing me access to the potty, and later to the toilet. I don’t know if she did it out of spite, to humiliate me, or if it was simply another way of exercising control over me. The baby gate was just a piece of wood my granddad had cut to size and attached across the doorway, but I wasn’t allowed to touch it, and never tried to again after the first time, when Mum beat me and shouted at me. So when I needed to use the potty, I would stand close to it and cry, while Mum either ignored me or watched me from the kitchen, impassively at first, then with increasing amusement when my discomfort turned to pain as I tried to hold it in. Then, when I soiled myself, as I always inevitably did, she would shout in my face and hit me, which made me believe that it really was my fault, however long she’d made me wait.
Sometimes, when I was a bit older and the baby gate had been removed, she would leave a tin plate in the middle of the kitchen floor for me to use as a toilet, as though I was a dog or a cat rather than a human child. I was probably four when she started doing it, and perfectly able to use the potty or go to the toilet by myself, but it was difficult doing it on a plate, particularly when she was watching me, as she often did, and I knew that if I misjudged it and let even the smallest drop spill over on to the floor, she would hit me.
Dad did shifts in a factory at that time and when he was working at night she’d quite often drink herself into a stupor, then fall asleep on the sofa. My brothers, Jake and Ben, who are nine and seven years older than me respectively, were old enough to put themselves to bed by the time I was born. But between the ages of three and five, I was often left downstairs on those nights and although I suppose I must have got some sleep, I don’t know when or where. I just remember wandering around the house in the dark, then seeing the sun shining in through a window and knowing that it was morning again. Mum would always make me get