Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.. Jane Smith
– but I didn’t have any idea why Nan was cross with me. So I just burbled away inanely, hoping to deflect her disapproval and not knowing why I felt so uncomfortable. Then, after a few minutes, she got up, stared at Granddad until he did the same, and we all trooped back down the stairs.
I did sometimes go to my grandparents’ house after that, but I wasn’t ever left there on my own again, until Granddad died when I was ten.
Maybe what I’d wanted to show my granddad that day was a new toy that had been sent to me as a Christmas present by one of Dad’s sisters. Mum and Dad used to give us a few presents too, which we’d open on Christmas morning before my brothers went to Nan and Granddad’s house for their dinner, Dad went to the pub and I stayed at home with Mum. It was the same every year, and it was always horrible. Mum didn’t ever eat very much, so I don’t know if she ate the meal she always cooked on Christmas Day, which I’d eat on my own in the living room, and Dad would have later in the evening when he got back from the pub.
Mum and Dad would both be very drunk by that time, and as soon as Dad got home they’d start to argue and shout at each other. Then that would escalate into a fight, which always resulted in the Christmas tree getting knocked over. There were very few consistencies in my life when I was child; what happened on Christmas Day was one of them.
A few years ago, when I asked my brother Ben what he’d thought at the time about him and Jake – and later Michael – being invited to Nan’s house every Christmas while I stayed at home, he said he’d never really thought about it at all. I suppose he was so used to me being an outsider in the family that it just seemed normal. Based on what I found out later about Mum’s childhood, one explanation might have been that Nan was trying to protect me, although I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the reason, because she didn’t like me and because she only ever did anything that benefited her.
I didn’t watch much television as a child. I was usually banished to my room when the rest of the family were watching the videos my parents regularly rented. And although I hated sitting upstairs in solitary confinement, I don’t think I resented it: it was just another part of the ‘normal’ I’d learned to accept. There were a few exceptions to that particular norm, however, such as the time when I was five and Mum let me watch The Little Mermaid, which I loved, despite the fact that every time she walked past me as I was sitting, transfixed, on the living-room floor, she pulled my hair or pinched me, twisting my skin tightly between her thumb and bony finger, then laughing when I cried out in pain.
I was in the reception class at school at that time and not long after I’d watched The Little Mermaid, I found a small, empty perfume bottle in the bathroom, which I slipped into my school bag because it reminded me of her. At break time that day, I filled the bottle with water and offered my friends a sip of the magic potion that would turn us into mermaids and enable us to live under the sea and have adventures. Before long, a queue of excited children had formed at the water fountain, because although everyone could see that I was just filling an empty bottle with water, it tasted sweet, like fruit and flowers, when they held it to their lips and took a sip.
‘It’s true,’ I heard them telling each other. ‘It really is a magic potion.’ And eventually I got swept up by their enthusiasm and began to believe it myself, perhaps partly because I so desperately wanted there to be a reality somewhere that was different from the one I was living in. So I was almost as disappointed as they were when playtime came to an end and we all trooped back into the classroom, still children rather than the mermaids and mermen we had expected to be. For me though, it was worth the disappointment to have shared all the excitement and been part of something, even if it had only lasted for one break time.
I learned to read quite quickly after I started school, and by the time I was six I had developed a passion for books that remains with me to this day. For some reason, although I had very few toys, Mum didn’t seem to mind me having the books Nan and Granddad gave me, most of which had belonged to her when she was a little girl. So, finally, as my reading skills improved, I had something to do during the hours I spent alone in my bedroom. I still ate supper in my room almost every night, except when Mum didn’t bring me any because she was angry or forgot and I went to bed hungry. But even a rumbling tummy can be ignored for a while when you’re able to step out of the real world into a Grimm’s fairy tale, one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, or any of Roald Dahl’s wonderful books.
It was also when I was six that Mum finally gave me permission to use the toilet in the bathroom. I wasn’t allowed to wipe my own bottom though; I had to shout for her when I’d finished, then stay on the loo for however long it was before she came. Sometimes I’d be sitting there for ages, until my legs were tingling and numb. When she did finally appear, she’d be even more irritable and impatient than she usually was with me and would make me bend over and touch the floor while she scrubbed my bottom with the rough surface of a sponge she kept in a bucket beside the toilet exclusively for my use.
My brothers thought it was really funny, and Mum used to encourage them, and Dad, to laugh at me, while at the same time making a huge deal of the fact that the bucket and sponge were dirty and disgusting and no one else must ever touch them, which made me feel even more embarrassed and ashamed about having to go to the loo at all.
Sometimes, Jake and Ben would come into the bathroom while I was waiting for Mum, but even though Jake was always very aggressive and I was scared of him, not even his demands to ‘Get off the loo, slag. I need to use it’ or the threat he made one day that ‘I’m going to rape you if you don’t get off now’ would persuade me to risk the beating I knew I would get from Mum if I wasn’t sitting there when she eventually came in.
Mum’s humiliating bottom-wiping ‘game’ continued until I was nine years old, by which time I had lost any sense of dignity or self-respect I might otherwise have had and had simply accepted as ‘fact’ that I was somehow less human and certainly less important than any of the other members of my family. She used to play a lot of humiliating games like that with me. What made them even worse was that everyone believed her when she told them I was incapable of doing even the simplest thing myself because there was something wrong with me mentally. I believed it too eventually, despite the fact that I knew I was perfectly capable of doing everything she claimed I couldn’t do.
Not all the videos Mum rented or that we watched on TV were films for children, like The Little Mermaid, or old black-and-white films about men being chased and hiding down the sides of buildings. And one day when I was six, Jake and Ben – who always got a great deal of pleasure from scaring me – forced me to watch the video of a TV mini-series called It about a sadistic clown who terrorises and kills children. I didn’t want to watch it, but just before it started, Jake pushed me down on to the carpet close to the TV, then sat behind me throughout the entire programme with his hands pressing down on my shoulders so I couldn’t get up.
It was a terrifying film that was totally unsuitable for children of any age, let alone an anxious little girl who was already frightened of going to bed at night and who looked, in her mind at least, a lot like one of the children who became the clown’s victim. I kept closing my eyes and trying to turn my head so that I wouldn’t see whatever horrible thing was going to happen next. But every time I looked away from the television, Jake grabbed my hair, pulled my head sharply back and upwards, then punched and slapped me repeatedly in the face until I opened my eyes – and saw what the clown was doing.
The more I whimpered and cried, the more Jake twisted my hair and laughed, refusing to let go even when I started to scream. Mum was in the kitchen and must have heard what was going on, but it was only when the noise I was making began to annoy her that she stormed into the living room, lifted me up off the floor by one arm, dragged me into the kitchen and shouted in my face, ‘There’s something wrong with you. It’s only a man in a mask for fuck’s sake.’ At just six years old, it was a concept I couldn’t grasp, and even if I had been able to, I don’t think it would have done anything to lessen the fear that had been implanted in my