Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.. Jane Smith
him either – even seven years is quite a significant age difference when you’re a child. I do have a couple of nice memories of him though, like the time he came to meet me from school one day and gave me a ride home on his push bike, which made me think he cared about me. Sometimes, when Jake was out, Ben used to let me sit on his bed and watch him drawing, and he’d talk to me when he took me into town to get my hair cut, or ask me questions about what I’d been doing at school.
He made a paper bird for me once too. It had wings like fans and he stuck it to the ceiling of my bedroom with a bit of cotton he took out of Mum’s drawer, which she’d have been angry about if she’d found out. I thought it was brilliant. But Mum made him take it down when she saw it, because the Sellotape would damage the paint, she said, although that clearly wasn’t the real reason, because, like the rest of the house, my room was in need of decorating and another bit of peeling paint wouldn’t have made any difference.
I didn’t ever actually play with Ben though, like I did with Michael as he got a bit older. Eventually though, Mum did what she was always did if anything ever looked as though it might turn out well for me – she intervened to change the course of events by trying her best to destroy my relationship with Michael, and by the time he was seven years old he sometimes called me names too, just like Mum and my older brothers had always done. And although I tried to tell myself it wasn’t his fault, it hurt me far more than Jake’s taunting and sneering ever did.
I know that lots of children are bullied by their siblings. Perhaps when kept within reasonable limits it becomes part of the process of learning what’s acceptable behaviour and what isn’t and how to deal with being teased. Maybe some parents don’t allow it at all, and some probably don’t even notice it’s happening, whereas others, like mine – or like my mum, at least – actively encourage it.
It went way beyond ‘just a bit of sibling bullying’ with Jake though. For example, there was one day, a few months after I’d been forced to watch that first horrific film about the clown, when Ben, Jake and I were in the garden and Jake suddenly took a step towards me, sliced the air between us with the long-handled knife he’d been using to cut the tall, weed-infested grass and said, ‘I could chop off your head with this and nobody would care.’ There was no humour in his expression when he said it and his eyes were hard as he turned to Ben and added, ‘I could tell Dad it was an accident. He’d believe me if you backed me up.’
Ben looked really scared when he said, ‘Okay.’ And I was scared too, because I really did think they were going to do it and I knew what Jake had said was true – Dad would believe them and nobody would care.
I never relaxed or enjoyed anything when I was at home. Everything I did was wrong and the only time anyone ever really spoke to me was to tell me off. So it had been a completely new and unimagined experience going to school and discovering that there was a world where I wasn’t an unwanted, unloved outcast, and where sometimes an adult actually praised me for getting something right.
I don’t know if it was the realisation that I wasn’t always wrong, or as stupid as my mum always told me I was, that made me love learning. ‘Zoe soaks up knowledge like a sponge,’ my teacher wrote in one of my early school reports, which made me feel proud of myself for the first time. So then I worked even harder, behaved even better and did everything else I could think of to please my teachers so that they’d say the magic words, ‘Good girl, Zoe.’
Not everything about school was positive, however. Some of the teachers I had during those first few years helped me a lot, but there was one who was horrible. Miss Heston was my form teacher when I was seven and she had some very odd ideas about how to teach and interact with young children. One incident I remember particularly occurred when I pinched the arm of one of my classmates because he said he had sunburn. I don’t know why I did it, but it obviously hurt him quite a lot and when he told the teacher what I’d done, she made everyone in the class sit down, then said, ‘Zoe Patterson, come and stand by my desk.’
I hated being the centre of any kind of attention, but particularly if I was in trouble, and as I stood at the front of the classroom, twisting my fingers nervously and staring at my feet, she told me, ‘I’m going to show you what that feels like.’ And before I realised what she was going to do, she grabbed my arm and started giving me a Chinese burn.
Presumably her intention was to inflict on me a pain similar to the one I’d inflicted on the boy with sunburn when I’d pinched him. In which case, she’d have been pleased to know that the Chinese burn really hurt. But I’d had years of practice holding back tears and I was determined not to humiliate myself in front of all the other kids in my class, and not to give my teacher the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Mum often used to try to reduce me to tears when she was hurting me, and I always knew that she’d hurt me even more if I cried, and would eventually lose interest and give up if I didn’t. For my teacher, however, my stoicism seemed to have the opposite effect, and after watching me closely for a few seconds as she twisted the skin on my scrawny arm, she suddenly swung me across her knee and started slapping the backs of my legs.
I heard some of the children gasp when she did it, and someone gave a single high-pitched bark of laughter. Then the room fell completely silent except for the sound of the teacher’s open hand smacking my bare legs, until eventually she snapped at me, ‘Go and sit down,’ and I struggled to my feet. The skin on my wrist and the backs of my legs was burning as I walked unsteadily back to my seat, but there was a small glow of satisfaction inside me too, because I’d managed not to shed a single one of the tears that had been building up behind my eyes from the moment she’d called me out to the front of the classroom.
It never crossed my mind to tell my parents when something like that happened at school. After all, I had hurt the little boy, so it really was my fault and I’d got what I deserved, just like I so often did at home, although with at least some underlying justification on this occasion. To me, what happened that day at school was simply a variation of ‘normal’ and not worth mentioning to anyone. And I knew my parents wouldn’t have done anything about it if I had told them, except Mum might have beaten me again for getting into trouble with my teacher.
I already knew Miss Heston didn’t like me. She made it clear in lots of ways, such as on the day she put a box of hats on the floor in the middle of the classroom and told us all to pick the one that matched the job we’d like to do when we left school. It’s difficult to imagine yourself as an adult when you’re seven, and perhaps even more difficult to visualise having a job. But in amongst all the hats there was a jockey’s cap, and as I liked the idea of being able to ride a horse, I picked it up and was just about to put it on my head when I noticed a black hat with a chequered band and a silver badge, like a police officer would wear. ‘Maybe that would be even better than being a jockey,’ I thought, reaching for the black hat with one hand while replacing the jockey’s cap with the other, just as Miss Heston slapped my arm and said, ‘No, Zoe Patterson. Leave it. You’ve made your choice.’
So I kept the jockey’s cap and went to stand by the wall where we’d been told to line up to have a photograph taken. Then, just as I was putting it on my head, my hairband slipped down in front of my eyes and when I raised my hand to tug it back into place, Miss Heston snapped at me again saying, ‘Don’t pull it up. It can stay like that,’ and took the photo. I still have that photograph and whenever I look at it, it reminds me of Miss Heston and makes me wonder why she was like that. Because it wasn’t just me she was mean to; there were other kids who regularly got into trouble too, like the boy she pushed into a sort of bookcase one day because he’d been swearing, then slammed the door on him repeatedly, while we all watched with a mixture of sympathy and guilt – or at least I know I did, because I was glad it was him and not me being punished on that occasion.
There was one positive aspect to having Miss Heston as our teacher, however, because my older brothers had had her too, and Ben and I used to swap stories about the things she did. For example, when Ben was in her class she put strands of her hair in the