Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.. Jane Smith
to occupy me when she made me sit in silence for the rest of day.
I didn’t see my grandparents very often before Granddad died, so I don’t think his death had a particularly significant impact on me. It did seem to affect Mum though, or maybe it was Dad not working and being at home more often that caused her to start beating me even more viciously than she’d done before.
There was one day when she burst into the bathroom while I was on the toilet and hit me so ferociously with the heel of her shoe that she knocked me off the seat and on to the floor. She didn’t say why she was so angry with me, and after she’d stormed out of the bathroom again, I just lay there for a few minutes, wondering what I’d done wrong.
It wasn’t unusual for her not to give a reason for punishing me. In fact, I rarely knew why either of my parents was furious with me, or understood why they blamed me for everything and seemed to dislike me so much – Dad too by that time. And because I usually didn’t know what I’d done wrong, I didn’t know how to do it right.
I was still lying on the bathroom floor trying to work it all out when I noticed a little plastic shaver on the side of the bath. I don’t remember even thinking about what I was doing as I grasped the edge of the bathtub with both hands, pulled myself up into a sitting position, reached across to pick up the razor, and made a couple of quick cuts on my knee. I know I was angry too by that time, and that I’d suddenly felt overwhelmed by an almost physical sense of despair. So maybe, subconsciously, I thought that releasing blood from my own body might release some of the pressure that felt as though it had built up inside me to an almost unbearable level.
Whatever the reason, it did feel like a release, even though the cuts I made on my knee that first time were only superficial and stopped bleeding quite quickly. I must have been a bit frightened by what I’d done though, because when I went to school the next day, I showed the cuts to a friend and told her about Mum hitting me with her shoe. I didn’t normally talk to anyone about anything that happened at home, but by the time I was ten years old I was finding it increasingly difficult to cope. So I think that by telling my friend Fiona and asking her to tell our teacher, I was hoping someone would step in to help me.
‘She didn’t believe me,’ Fiona said when I saw her the next morning. ‘She said I mustn’t talk about things like that.’
We had moved up into the next class by that time, and no longer had the really nice teacher who’d encouraged my interest in science. Our new teacher was okay though, so I was a bit surprised when she didn’t say anything to me about what my friend had told her, and it wasn’t until some time later that it crossed my mind to wonder if Fiona actually did speak to her.
I’d seen several frightening films since Jake forced me to watch the one about the clown – A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, and Child’s Play, which is about a serial killer whose soul gets into a really scary doll called Chucky. I hated them all and never watched any of them willingly, but sometimes Jake insisted and sometimes there’d be one on TV when my mum decided I had to be downstairs. Again, I don’t think I realised that making a young child sit through films like that wasn’t normal, until I was in the corridor at school one day telling a friend about something I’d seen and a teacher who was standing nearby suddenly spun round and said, ‘Zoe Patterson, that’s horrible! Don’t ever let me hear you talking about that sort of thing again.’
Looking back on it now, she probably should have asked me how I knew about stuff like that. If she had, I might have told her, then perhaps it would have all come out. But she didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t either.
It was after that incident I started to off-load some of the horrific scenes that were lodged in my mind by writing horror stories, which I took in to school and showed my teacher. It was all really scary stuff, mostly with plots based on films I’d seen, although sometimes with a twist. For example, there was one about Chucky the doll coming into our school and killing all the teachers, which I think was the one that finally prompted my teacher to say, ‘Enough! If you can’t write about something nice, don’t write anything at all.’
I know it must have seemed odd to anyone else – the sort of thing a little girl in a horror film might do perhaps – but I enjoyed writing those stories; it was an escape for me, like reading. And, somehow, the fact that I was able to make up scary stories made the films seem a bit less frightening, although even today I still sometimes have nightmares about the clown in It. So I was really upset by what my teacher said and I stopped writing altogether after that.
I think I had already started losing confidence at school and becoming more withdrawn by that time. Things at home were getting worse too, because Dad’s behaviour was becoming increasingly odd and he had started insisting he wasn’t well and phoning for an ambulance. I don’t know what he said to make the ambulance come – I think he complained about something to do with his heart. But they always did come, and then always left again after checking him out, saying there wasn’t anything they could do for him.
It got so bad in the end that Dad’s brother and his wife came to our house one day to try to talk to him about what was happening, but he wouldn’t let them do anything to help him. I don’t know if it was Mum who got in touch with them. If it was, it would only have been because he was driving her crazy. She certainly never showed him any sympathy or tried to talk to him about what was wrong. She was just angry with him all the time and would shout things at him like, ‘What the fuck’s up with you, you stupid bastard?’
Mum and Dad were arguing almost constantly by that time, which was another reason why I didn’t mind when Mum started to encourage me to stay in my room again. ‘It’s best this way,’ she would say when she brought my supper up to me, ‘so that you can avoid your dad.’ Which seemed to make sense.
In any case, all I really wanted to do was sleep. My brothers just laughed at me and said I was ‘mental’, while Mum seemed to enjoy watching me slide deeper and deeper into depression. I don’t know whether anyone realised there was actually something wrong with me. Perhaps not, because Mum didn’t ever speak to me except to feed the fear I had of my dad. In fact, she didn’t even say anything when I started to leave the food she brought up to my room, which at any other time would have made her really angry.
I don’t think I realised I was depressed either, although I was certainly aware that I was struggling to cope. Then, one day, I came home from school and Mum told me, ‘Your dad’s not well. He’s had a breakdown.’ She didn’t explain what that meant, although I think I guessed it might be something to do with ‘things not being right in his head’, which is what she always used to say about him, particularly after he was made redundant.
It turned out that he’d been admitted to hospital while I was at school that day, and even after Mum had taken my little brother Michael and me to see him there a few times, I still didn’t understand what was going on. I just remember bursting into tears at school on a couple of occasions, then talking to a teacher about it. What I didn’t ever tell anyone, however, is that one of the things I found really upsetting was waving goodbye to Dad after we’d visited him in the hospital, because it reminded me of waving to him as he left the house to go to work when I was a small child. It still makes me cry when I think about it today, and about how the dad I used to love turned into someone so totally different.
What was also very upsetting about those visits to the hospital was the fact that he didn’t acknowledge us or even seem to know we were there. So, after a while, Mum stopped taking us to see him. I know it sounds horrible to say that it was a relief not having him at home for those three months, but it was, because at least I didn’t have to worry about ‘wandering hands’ in my bed or listen to my parents shouting and fighting with each other.
Dad didn’t ever work again after that. He was quite a bit older than Mum and I think he was only a few years off retirement age when he had what she refers to as ‘his breakdown’. After he came out of hospital, he just sat around the house all day drinking, arguing with Mum, and saying things to me that I began to understand better as I got older and that made me afraid that one day he might stop just talking about it and sexually abuse me.