Cry Silent Tears: The heartbreaking survival story of a small mute boy who overcame unbearable suffering and found his voice again. Joe Peters
around together, fighting in bed and farting on each other, and if they woke Mum up she would shout through the wall.
‘Shut the fuck up!’
‘It’s Joe,’ they would yell back. I would open my mouth to protest my innocence, terrified of the punishment I would inevitably receive, but no sound would come out and Larry and Barry would giggle triumphantly as they waited for the entertainment that would follow.
Furious at being woken and at the thought that I would dare to play up after all she had done to tame me, she would come storming in and give me another beating. The fact that I had no voice with which to plead my innocence was probably irrelevant as I doubt she would have believed me anyway.
Larry and Barry were thick as thieves and they used to order me to do things that they knew would get me into trouble. Being five, brimming with repressed energy and boredom, and eager to please my big brothers to avoid getting a beating from them, I was easily influenced and always ended up being the one who got caught. Whenever there was any trouble Mum would blame me anyway, even if it was obvious it couldn’t have been anything to do with me.
‘None of this ever happened till you came on the scene,’ she’d say about some minor infringement of her rules, and then she’d give me another battering, dragging me around by the hair with my mouth stretched open but the screams refusing to form in my throat.
One dark morning, just a few months after Dad died, Mum had finally had enough of me disturbing her sleep. She pulled me all the way down the stairs by my hair, shouting at the top of her voice.
‘This time you have gone too fucking far, you little bastard. You’ve pushed me too far. I’m finished with being patient with you. I’ve fucking had enough!’
I really believed that she was finally going to kill me. She’d told me often enough that she would do it one day.
There was a door under the stairs, which I had assumed led to a broom cupboard; I had never seen anyone opening it and no one had ever mentioned what lay behind it but I would be finding out soon enough. Dragging me behind her along the hall floor, Mum threw open the under-stairs door. I saw another staircase stretching down into the darkness below and I felt a terrible foreboding of what might be in store. Was this where she took people she was going to kill?
She punched a light switch and I saw for the first time what I would later understand was a basement. This was nothing like the clean, orderly world of the rooms in the rest of the house. There was a smell of mustiness and damp rising up from the shadows thrown by the single light bulb. Thick cobwebs clung to the rough brick walls and bare wood. She hurled me down the stairs, kicking and punching as she followed me down. At the bottom there was another door, a big solid Victorian timber one, which she opened and threw me through with one last mighty slap, as if I was no more than a sack of straw. She turned on another light and I could see the full horror of where she was putting me.
Inside was a cellar containing nothing but a filthy old mattress propped up against the wall. Unable to stand the sight of me for a second longer she slammed the door shut behind me and switched off the light from the outside. I could hear her jamming something under the door handle so I wouldn’t be able to get out. Then she stamped back up the stairs and there was silence as well as blackness.
For a moment it felt as though I was in total darkness, but as my eyes adjusted the few thin rays of light which filtered in through an airbrick high up in the wall once dawn broke gave me just enough vision to grope my way around. Even if she hadn’t jammed the door I knew better than to try to open it without her permission in order to reach the light switch. The cold began to creep into my bones and I just sat shivering in the dark, wearing only my underpants, waiting to see what would happen next. I listened to the trains rumbling past outside the airbrick, wishing I could climb into one of the warm, bright carriages I had seen passing so many times and travel as far as possible from that room.
I had entered a world I hadn’t even known existed a few minutes before; one that was to become my prison cell for the next three years.
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